Just like the title says, here is the place to discuss science.
SCIENCE!
- This topic has 111 replies, 24 voices, and was last updated 2 months ago by
.
Viewing 100 replies - 1 through 100 (of 111 total)
Author
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
I’m still not convinced anyone is going to the Moon again soon, but the one-size-fits-all suit is an interesting and practical idea.
.Nasa unveils new spacesuit for next Moon landing
.
–SNIP–
.
The new Moon suit, which is known formally as the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU), is designed to give the wearer a customised fit whatever their size.
.
That would be a significant shift from the current situation. In March, the first all-female spacewalk on the ISS had to be called off because there wasn’t an available suit in the correct size for Nasa astronaut Anne McClain.
.
In an event at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC, the red, white and blue xEMU suit was worn onstage by spacecraft engineer Kristine Davis, from Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston.
.
–SNIP–
.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50070615
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
One of those websites that does a great job of conveying the scale of the natural world;
-
Was going to post this in the Space thread, but figured better here.
.
10 Ways Earth Revealed it’s Weirdness in 2019We live on a strange planet. In a solar system of fiery, poisonous hellscapes, icy slush balls and ballooning orbs of gas, Earth is the only planet teeming with sentient, oxygen-breathing life-forms. It is also the only world in the solar system known to be slowly but steadily turning itself inside out through plate tectonics, as the surface crust of the planet dives deep into the mantle.
But Earth’s strangeness goes way, way deeper than that. From its oddball wobble to its wandering magnetic field, here are 10 ways Earth revealed its weirdness in 2019.
-
-
I am not a biologist, but I think there are quite clear criteria of what a virus is and what a bacterium and what an animal. There’s probably good reason if they call it that. And it’s not like they are that unusual in being small animals; they mention the class of animal in the article.
-
Evidence of 90-million-year-old rainforest uncovered beneath Antarctic ice
The findings suggest that Earth’s southernmost continent was once home to temperate, swampy rainforests teeming with life.
April 2, 2020, 12:40 PM EDT / Source: Reuters
By ReutersAntarctica is now a harsh land of ice and snow, but has not always been that way.
Earth’s southernmost continent long ago was home to temperate, swampy rainforests teeming with life, scientists said on Wednesday based on pristinely preserved forest soil they retrieved by drilling under the seafloor off Antarctica’s coast.
The sediment core obtained by scientists working aboard the research icebreaker RV Polarstern in the Amundsen Sea near the Pine Island Glacier dated to about 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs were the dominant land animals.
The researchers estimated based on the soil content that this location, 560 miles (900 km) from the South Pole, experienced average annual temperatures of about 53-55 degrees Fahrenheit (12-13 Celsius) and average temperatures during the warmest summer months of about 68-77 Fahrenheit (20-25 Celsius).
That is exceptionally warm for a location near the South Pole, where the average annual temperature now is around minus 40 Fahrenheit (minus 40 Celsius).
A modern temperature analogue may be New York City, according to marine geologist Johann Klages of the Alfred Wegener Institute’s Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature.
The dark-brownish gray soil was composed of fine-grained silt and clay bearing remains of fossil roots in a dense network, pollen and spores spanning 65 types of plants, with individual cell structures clearly visible.
“If you would go to a forest near you and drill a hole, it would probably look pretty similar,” Klages said.
Klages said the plants included conifers, ferns and flowering plants. While they did not find any animal remains, Klages said there likely were dinosaurs, flying reptiles called pterosaurs and many insects. Dinosaur fossils from Antarctica have been known for years.
The soil came from nearly 90 feet (27 meters) beneath the seafloor under ocean depths of about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters). It was obtained using a seafloor drill rig.
The research underscores the dramatic climate changes Earth has undergone in the past – and is currently undergoing today.
The soil core sample dated from 93-83 million years ago, Klages said. This dates from the planet’s warmest period of the past 140 million years, with sea levels about 560 feet (170 meters) higher than today.
The rainforest environment is all the more remarkable, the researchers said, considering that the region annually experiences a four-month polar night when there is no sunlight to nurture plant life. Klages said no ice sheets were present at the time though seasonal snow fall was likely.
-
I am not a biologist, but I think there are quite clear criteria of what a virus is and what a bacterium and what an animal. There’s probably good reason if they call it that. And it’s not like they are that unusual in being small animals; they mention the class of animal in the article.
You’d be right.
Bacteria and animals belong to two distinct, quite fundamental categories of living things, specifically prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
Their cellular structures are very, very different, so it makes total sense to talk of something as being a very simple animal as being distinct from a bacterium.
P.S. I’m back.
-
-
-
-
-
-
If you look closely you can see Ozymandius off in the distance.
HE ABANDONED THE SQUID IDEA TO MAKE COVID!
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
If subscribing to conspiracy theories regarding Covid19 was mandatory, Kalmans above is definitely my theory of choice.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
Hit the paywall, but at least I saw this headline:
Weird caterpillar uses its old heads to make an elaborate hat
I mean, wouldn’t you have clicked that?
3 users thanked author for this post.
-
*Sigh*
Why does everyone want to talk about this fucking show-off caterpillar…
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
-
Good. For once can we have a post in this forum which isnt about caterpillars and their stupid-ass hats? Please @christian?
Well, why don’t you make a cool hat out of your old heads and then we’ll talk about you.
-
-
-
-
-
Thought this was pretty interesting:
Unfortunately it’s paywalled though, so full article for subscribers only.
I am obviously the third type – the hot sexy type that doesn’t do much leading at all and likes puppies.
My friend would like to know if there are any articles on how to deal with the second type of leader.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
Everything you need to know about how science works, in 10 minutes:
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
Everything you need to know about how science works, in 10 minutes:
Pft. As if we had ten minutes for that kind of thing when there’s clips of cats and Trump tweets.
-
Okay, I did find the ten minutes and it was awesome. Feynmann is almost like a standup there, must have been awesome to be in his lectures. Love the bit about proving an impossible. Also, this quote is just the best:
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
Also, “We are never right, we can only be wrong.”
It’s also just interesting that even back then, he was talking about the kind of people who just don’t understand science, don’t want to understand science and thus think it’s easy and anybody can do it by just blurting out what’s on their mind at any given moment, like fucking Trump and his disinfectant comment.
-
Everything you need to know about how science works, in 10 minutes:
Pft. As if we had ten minutes for that kind of thing when there’s clips of cats and Trump tweets.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
-
-
-
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
Opted for another thread instead of Space. News? Chose Science.
_______________________________________‘Lost’ tectonic plate called Resurrection hidden under the Pacific
Scientists have reconstructed a long-lost tectonic plate that may have given rise to an arc of volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean 60 million years ago.
The plate, dubbed Resurrection, has long been controversial among geophysicists, as some believe it never existed. But the new reconstruction puts the edge of the rocky plate along a line of known ancient volcanoes, suggesting that it was once part of the crust (Earth’s top layer) in what is today northern Canada.
“Volcanoes form at plate boundaries, and the more plates you have, the more volcanoes you have,” Jonny Wu, a geologist at the University of Houston, said in a statement. “Volcanoes also affect climate change. So, when you are trying to model the Earth and understand how climate has changed … you really want to know how many volcanoes there have been on Earth.”
This image shows plate tectonic reconstruction of western North America 60 million years ago showing subduction of three key tectonic plates, Kula, Farallon and Resurrection.Wu and his co-author, University of Houston geology doctoral candidate Spencer Fuston, used a computer model of Earth’s crust to “unfold” the movement of tectonic plates since the early Cenozoic, the geological era that began 66 million years ago. Geophysicists already knew that there were two plates in the Pacific at that time, the Kula plate and the Farallon plate.
Because lots of magma is present east of the former location of these plates in what is today Alaska and Washington, some geophysicists argued there was a missing piece in the puzzle — a theoretical plate they called Resurrection. This magma would have been left behind by volcanic activity at the plate’s edge.
All of these plates have long since dived beneath Earth’s crust in a process called subduction. Wu and Fuston used the computer reconstruction to undo this subduction, virtually raising the plates back to the surface and rewinding their motion. When they did, they found that Resurrection did indeed fit into the picture. They reported their findings Oct. 19 in the journal GSA Bulletin.
“When ‘raised’ back to the Earth’s surface and reconstructed, the boundaries of this ancient Resurrection tectonic plate match well with the ancient volcanic belts in Washington State and Alaska, providing a much sought-after link between the ancient Pacific Ocean and the North American geologic record,” Wu said.
-
Triassic period ended with ‘lost’ mass extinction and a million-year rain storm, study claims
Long ago, before the dawn of the age of dinosaurs, a heavy rain descended upon the supercontinent of Pangaea — and it kept raining for more than 1 million years.
This epic rainy spell — known now as the Carnian Pluvial Episode (CPE) — occurred roughly 233 million years ago and was a stark shift from the typically arid conditions of the late Triassic period. But stormy skies weren’t the only change Earth was facing. According to a study published Sept. 16 in the journal Science Advances, new fossil evidence suggests that the CPE was in fact a major extinction event — driven by volcanic eruptions and climate change — that resulted in the deaths of one-third of all marine species, plus a significant number of terrestrial plants and animals.
This “lost” extinction event doesn’t quite reach the death toll of the five major mass extinctions typically discussed by the scientific community (the Permian-Triassic extinction, which occurred just 20 million years earlier, may have wiped out 90% of living species, for example). However, the study authors argue, the CPE isn’t just important for what was lost — but also for what was gained. Far from just a period of death, the CPE was a period of “turnover,” the researchers wrote, effectively paving the way for the dominion of the dinosaurs and the evolution of many terrestrial animal groups that still roam the Earth today.
“A key feature of the CPE is that extinction was very rapidly followed by a big radiation [of new species],” lead study author Jacopo Dal Corso, a geology professor at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, told reporter Scott Norris of Eos.org. “A number of groups that have a central role in today’s ecosystems appeared or diversified for the first time in the Carnian [an age within the Triassic that lasted from 237 to 227 million years ago].”
Those groups include modern coral reefs and plankton in the oceans, Dal Corso told Eos, as well as the appearance of land-based fauna such as frogs, lizards, crocodilians, turtles and a diverse new swath of dinosaurs (who would thrive on Earth for the next 150 million years). Conifer trees also made their first appearance during the Carnian, further planting the roots of many modern ecosystems and inviting the “dawn of the modern world,” the authors wrote in their new paper.
So, what brought on the world-changing rain in the first place? It’s hard to say for certain, but the study authors believe the answers may lie in a continent-spanning lava field known as the Wrangellia Province, which runs for thousands of miles across the western coast of modern-day Canada. This massive igneous province was laid down by violent volcanism during the Carnian, and overlaps (at least partially) with the CPE.
Prior studies estimate that those mighty eruptions released at least 5,000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere (that’s hundreds of times more than annual global emissions today), likely kicking off the extreme climate change that followed. The world became significantly more humid, heavy rains became the norm, the oceans acidified and entire species died in droves, paving the way for strange new plants and animals to slowly take over.
That’s the story that the researchers envision in their new study, anyway. However, they acknowledge, much more work is needed to understand the full scope of the CPE and its possible triggers. There may have been other volcanic events at play beyond Wrangellia, the team wrote, but pinpointing them will be a challenge, as vast amounts of volcanic basalts from the Triassic period have already subducted into the Earth. Our ever-changing planet is eating its own history, leaving stones and bones as the only clues.
You can read more about the CPE and its impacts at Eos.org.
3 users thanked author for this post.
-
-
In a case of Study Finds What Everybody Knows…
Study Finds That When Cannabis Is Legalized, Ice Cream And Cookie Sales Go Up
A team from Georgia State University decided to look at the effect of legalization on junk food consumption, publishing their findings in Economics & Human Biology. It may sound a little frivolous, until you consider that some 42 percent of the US population are considered obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The researchers took retail scanner data on purchases of high-calorie food, using differences in timing of the introduction of recreational cannabis use laws across different states in order to measure the effects of legalization on sales. You will likely not be shocked to find that legalization of cannabis was linked to an increase in sales of junk food.
“In [Recreational Marijuana Legalization] RML states monthly sales of junk food increased by 3.2 percent and 4.5 percent when measured by volume,” the team wrote in their study. “Specifically, in counties located in RML states, monthly sales of high-calorie food increased by 3.1 percent for ice cream, 4.1 for cookies, and 5.3 percent for chips.”
Despite stoner stereotypes, the team notes that there is actually very little formal causal evidence to support the link between cannabis and food consumption, though pretty much every weed user will likely anecdotally confirm they have at some point gotten the “munchies”.
“Our research appears to be the first that causally links cannabis consumption to junk food consumption,” the team wrote. “Our findings may be particularly relevant from a policymaking perspective, at a time when more states are considering legalizing marijuana consumption while battling an obesity epidemic and when different countries have already fully legalized or are considering legalizing consumption.”
Though increased junk food consumption is by no means a good thing for health, there are other factors to be weighed up by policymakers, such as the finding by the same authors that legalization of cannabis was associated with a 12.4 percent drop in alcohol sales. Nevertheless, the research highlights that there may be unpredictable consequences for legalization.
“You think marijuana does no harm — that’s pretty much the consensus today,” co-author Alberto Chong told The Academic Times. “But there are unintended consequences, and one of them is the fact that you really get very hungry and you start eating crap.”
The 12.4 percent drop in alcohol sales is interesting, too.
-
-
Reproductive Problems in Both Men and Women Are Rising at an Alarming Rate – Scientific American
What we think of is the fact that the whole spectrum of reproductive problems in males are increasing by about 1 percent per year in Western countries. This “1 percent effect” includes the rates of declining sperm counts, decreasing testosterone levels and increasing rates of testicular cancer, as well as a rise in the prevalence of erectile dysfunction. On the female side of the equation, miscarriage rates are also increasing by about 1 percent per year in the U.S., and so is the rate of gestational surrogacy. Meanwhile, the total fertility rate worldwide has dropped by nearly 1 percent per year from 1960 to 2018.
-
-
The other issue might be a power source for such a drive. Using nuclear power, we can only go through space at 4.5% light speed.
The headache is the light speed limit – a.k.a. C.
The way I understand it – very generally – is that when we are motionless in space, we are always moving at the speed of light – C – through the dimensional line of “time” in spacetime. If you made a graph of spacetime with space represented by the Y axis and time by the X axis, then when you’re standing still in any frame of reference, you’re actually moving through time at the speed of light. So if you are moving at any speed through space, your progress in time slows down relative to every stationary object in your frame of reference. The arc between the X & Y axis is always going to be the same length and that what C represents on that chart. So if you were moving at the speed of light, time would essentially stop. If you tried to exceed the speed of light, then actually you’d be moving backwards or into negative time but at a speed less than C in space.
So, a metaphorical extrapolation of this could be similar to descending through a liquid like water. The water surrounding you represents spacetime, and as you and other people or objects descend you cannot see it. But if something moves in the liquid, it creates ripples and those are visible. The ripples would be the light we see. However, they are part of a stationary ubiquitous substance and the ripples aren’t moving actually. Instead, we – and the other objects – are in motion and it only appears to us that the light is what is actually moving.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
Posting this because Godzilla vs Kong completely unnecessarily reintroduced the stupid “fluoride in the water” conspiracy.
I’m half convinced that “Big Soda Pop” and bottled water marketers are behind all this “tap water is bad for you” bull crap.
I mean, does it seem intelligent that a person buys and drinks bottled water when it’s available right there in the faucet in your kitchen sink? Or pays extra for a filter on the tap that doesn’t do anything because the water is already clean.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
does it seem intelligent that a person buys and drinks bottled water when it’s available right there in the faucet in your kitchen sink?
Why don’t you ask the people of Flint, Michigan that question?
-
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
And another article on the T-Rex:
https://www.livescience.com/amp/t-rex-slow-walker-tail.html
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
I imagine if any alien travel writers had visited Earth back then, this place would be described as “a hellishly beautiful planet with massive monsters covering every square meter. Do not land!”
Imagine if extraterrestrials landed today. First question would be “where did all the giant monsters go?”
All we could do is show them a chicken and say, “they all turned into these.”
-
Aw, crap:
-
-
Tasmanian devils born in the wild on Australian mainland for the first time in 3,000 years
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
Scientists Discover Fossil Of A 4-Legged Whale With A Raptor-Like Eating Style
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/27/1031659020/four-legged-whale-legs-discovered-43-million-years
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
Someone once said: “The world is all that is the case.”
What the fuck? I won’t read past the first sentence if the first sentence quotes Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and doesn’t fucking bother to give Wittgenstein’s name. “Someone” my ass.
3 users thanked author for this post.
-
What the fuck? I won’t read past the first sentence if the first sentence quotes Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and doesn’t fucking bother to give Wittgenstein’s name. “Someone” my ass.
Still, it is an interesting read – it reminds me a bit of the premise of Cixin Liu’s THREE BODY PROBLEM novel. It does feel like something is missing, but at the same time, the “human factor” in quantum observations is also an interesting “problem” as the limitations of human perception and cognition when interpreting results are equally difficult to mathematically quantify. Physicist and computer pioneer Emerson Pugh once said that if the human mind were so simple we could understand it, then we would be too simple to understand it. The same naturally holds true of the nature of reality as well. It has to be beyond comprehension for us to be able to comprehend anything. Any simpler and we simply would not exist.
At the same time, Hindu and Buddhist sages have been saying this for a few thousand years, and they didn’t have to do a single experiment.
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
Ancient Spinosaurus Fossil Sheds Light on the Huge Semi-aquatic Dinosaurs
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
2 billion genetically modified mosquitos are about to be released in the US
https://bgr.com/science/2-billion-genetically-modified-mosquitos-are-about-to-be-released-in-the-us/
-
2 billion genetically modified mosquitos are about to be released in the US
https://bgr.com/science/2-billion-genetically-modified-mosquitos-are-about-to-be-released-in-the-us/
I cannot see how this could possibly go wrong.
-
-
-
Who wants a wart hog?
Forget the quarks and quasars, time for a little naturalism:
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
Viewing 100 replies - 1 through 100 (of 111 total)
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.