Gde bi trebalo lansirati sf ekspedicije

[PTY]

Roll Over Dracula: 'Vampire Cemetery' Found in Poland

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/suspected-cemetery-of-vampires-located-in-poland-a-912363.html

A chilling find has been made in Poland: at least 17 skeletons buried with the skulls severed and placed between the knees or hands. That, say archaeologists, is how vampires used to be interred, to stop them rising from the dead.

[PTY]

July 23, 2013 — Researchers at Brown University have shown that some Martian valleys appear to have been caused by runoff from orographic precipitation -- moisture carried part of the way up a mountain and deposited on the slopes. Valley networks branching across the Martian surface leave little doubt that water once flowed on the Red Planet. But where that ancient water came from -- whether it bubbled up from underground or fell as rain or snow -- is still debated by scientists. A new study by researchers at Brown University puts a new check mark in the precipitation column.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130723155046.htm

[PTY]

http://spacelog.org












Read the stories of early space exploration from the original transcripts. Now open to the public in a searchable, linkable format.

[PTY]

Roadmap to Alpha CentauriTechnology: Pick your favorite travel mode—big, small, light, dark, or twisted.






http://nautil.us/issue/3/in-transit/roadmap-to-alpha-centauri

[PTY]

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/06/world/biggest-volcano/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

An underwater  volcano dubbed Tamu Massif was found some 1,000 miles east of Japan, says William Sager, a professor at the University of Houston, who led a team of scientists in the discovery.

The volcano is about the size of the state of New Mexico and is among the largest in the solar system, Sager says.

Tamu Massif covers an area of about 120,000 square miles. In comparison, the largest active volcano on "Its shape is different from any other sub-marine volcano found on Earth, and it's very possible it can give us some clues about how massive volcanoes can form," Sager says.

Tamu Massif is believed to be about 145 million years old, and became inactive within a few million years after it was formed.

The volcano was partly named in honor of Texas A&M University, where Sager worked for 29 years before moving to the University of Houston. Tamu is the university's abbreviation while massif is the French word for "massive" and a scientific term for a large mountain mass, according to Sager.

[PTY]

Astronomy Picture of the Day


Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

[PTY]

Scientists believe that Voyager 1 has crossed the invisible border around our solar system and become the first human-made object to go, in those famous words, where no one has gone before.
According to CNN, experts at NASA have "strong evidence" that Voyager 1 has crossed through the heliosphere -- the magnetic boundary that separates our solar system from the rest of the Milky Way galaxy -- to enter interstellar space.
Ed Stone, head of the the Voyager mission, said, "In leaving the heliosphere and setting sail on the cosmic seas between the stars, Voyager has joined other historic journeys of exploration: The first circumnavigation of the Earth, the first steps on the Moon ... That's the kind of event this is, as we leave behind our solar bubble."
Although it was reported as far back as last year that Voyager was leaving the solar system, NASA made it official today (Sept. 12). You may have heard other reports that Voyager 1 had made the historic crossing before, but Thursday was the first time NASA announced it.
The space agency said that instrumentation used to measure the density of the medium around the craft could calculate its approximate location and whether it had emerged from the heliosphere (that's the simple way of putting it -- CNN has a lot more technobabble).
With the density of electrons in interstellar space thought to be between 0.05 and 0.22 per cubic centimeter, measurements taken last spring indicated that Voyager 1 was at the time in a region with an electron density of around 0.08.
The specific date of Voyager's exit from local space is still not confirmed, but now that the spacecraft is on its way, it's got a new mandate. Stone said, "We're now on the first mission to explore interstellar space. We will now look and learn in detail how the wind which is outside, that came from these other stars, is deflected around the heliosphere."
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were both launched in 1977. Voyager 1 is now 11.7 billion miles from Earth, while its sister is 9.5 billion miles from home and three or four years away from its own trip out of the heliosphere. Although it took just three and a half decades for the first Voyager to leave the solar system, it won't make it to another star for another 40,000 years.
Unless it collides with an alien space probe along the way and becomes V'Ger ...

http://www.blastr.com/2013-9-12/voyager-1s-now-first-human-made-object-leave-solar-system

[PTY]

To the best of our knowledge, the mechanical gear—evenly-sized teeth cut into two different rotating surfaces to lock them together as they turn—was invented sometime around 300 B.C.E. by Greek mechanics who lived in Alexandria. In the centuries since, the simple concept has become a keystone of modern technology, enabling all sorts of machinery and vehicles, including cars and bicycles.

As it turns out, though, a three-millimeter long hopping insect known as Issus coleoptratus beat us to this invention. Malcolm Burrows and Gregory Sutton, a pair of biologists from the University of Cambridge in the U.K., discovered that juveniles of the species have an intricate gearing system that locks their back legs together, allowing both appendages to rotate at the exact same instant, causing the tiny creatures jump forward.

Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/09/this-insect-has-the-only-mechanical-gears-ever-found-in-nature/#ixzz2ewKMAgPq Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

[PTY]

zanimljiv esej D. Turnbulla o koloniji na Marsu

[PTY]

The moon really does rotate, even though it doesn't look like it from here. Because the moon is 'tidally locked' to the Earth, that means that it always has one face pointed towards us. However, it also means that the time it takes to rotate once is the same as the time it takes to go around the Earth — 27 days.
The only people who have ever seen the far side of the moon for themselves are the various astronauts that flew on the Apollo missions back in the 60s and 70s. This video may not take the place of that kind of experience, but it at least lets us share a bit of the wonder.


http://youtu.be/sNUNB6CMnE8

[PTY]

Lockheed's Skunk Works promises fusion power in four years


Until someone figures out a way to manufacture antimatter, fusion is by far the cleanest and most abundant source of power we can hope to harvest. We've known this for a long time, but fusion is hard, and it's expensive to build the giant lasers or toroidal plasma containment systems that are needed to get it to work. By most estimates, we're something like 40 years away from an operational fusion power plant.
"Most estimates" do not, apparently, include research being done at Lockheed Martin's secretive advanced development center, Skunk Works. At Google's Solve For X, Charles Chase describes what his team has been working on: a trailer-sized fusion power plant that turns cheap and plentiful hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) into helium plus enough energy to power a small city. It's safe, it's clean, and Lockheed is promising an operational unit by 2017 with assembly line production to follow, enabling everything from unlimited fresh water to engines that take spacecraft to Mars in one month instead of six.
Lockheed's fusion power plant uses radio energy to heat deuterium gas inside tightly controlled magnetic fields, creating a very high temperature plasma that's much more stable and well confined than you'd find in something like a tokamak.
Chase didn't give a whole lot more technical detail, but he seemed confident in predicting a 100mW prototype by 2017, with commercial 100mW systems available by 2022, implying that all global energy demands will be able to be met by fusion power by about 2045. No more oil, no more coal, no more nuclear, and not even any solar or wind or hydro will be necessary (unless you're into that sort of thing): fusion has the potential to produce as much affordable clean power as we'll ever need, for the entire world. That's wild, and we may see it happen in less than a decade. That is, if Lockheed Martin's plans come to fruition, which we certainly hope they do.
Watch the Solve For X presentation video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY&feature=player_embedded#t=0

[PTY]

To the best of our knowledge, the mechanical gear—evenly-sized teeth cut into two different rotating surfaces to lock them together as they turn—was invented sometime around 300 B.C.E. by Greek mechanics who lived in Alexandria. In the centuries since, the simple concept has become a keystone of modern technology, enabling all sorts of machinery and vehicles, including cars and bicycles.

As it turns out, though, a three-millimeter long hopping insect known as Issus coleoptratus beat us to this invention. Malcolm Burrows and Gregory Sutton, a pair of biologists from the University of Cambridge in the U.K., discovered that juveniles of the species have an intricate gearing system that locks their back legs together, allowing both appendages to rotate at the exact same instant, causing the tiny creatures jump forward.

The finding, which was published today in Science, is believed to be the first functional gearing system ever discovered in nature. Insects from the Issus genus, which are commonly called "planthoppers," are found throughout Europe and North Africa. Burrows and Sutton used electron microscopes and high-speed video capture to discover the existence of the gearing and figure out its exact function.
The reason for the gearing, they say, is coordination: To jump, both of the insect's hind legs must push forward at the exact same time. Because they both swing laterally, if one were extended a fraction of a second earlier than the other, it'd push the insect off course to the right or left, instead of jumping straight forward.

The gearing is an elegant solution. The researchers' high-speed videos showed that the creatures, who jump at speeds as high as 8.7 miles per hour, cocked their back legs in a jumping position, then pushed forward, with each moving within 30 microseconds (that's 30 millionths of a second) of the other.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/09/this-insect-has-the-only-mechanical-gears-ever-found-in-nature/

[PTY]

There's a deceptively still body of water in Tanzania with a deadly secret—it turns any animal it touches to stone. The rare phenomenon is caused by the chemical makeup of the lake, but the petrified creatures it leaves behind are straight out of a horror film.

Photographed by Nick Brandt in his new book, Across the Ravaged Land, petrified creatures pepper the area around the lake due to its constant pH of 9 to 10.5—an extremely basic alkalinity that preserves these creatures for eternity. According to Brandt:

I unexpectedly found the creatures - all manner of birds and bats - washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania. No-one knows for certain exactly how they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake's surface confuses them, and like birds crashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake. The water has an extremely high soda and salt content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry.
I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in 'living' positions, bringing them back to 'life', as it were. Reanimated, alive again in death.

The rest of the haunting images follow and they feature in Brandt's book, available here. Or, you could go and visit for yourself—but keep a safe distance from the water, please. [New Scientist]

[zakk]

 

[PTY]

 Je, mene je razmera grotesknog, bizarnog i potresnog u tim fotkama toliko dohvatila da skroz ne mogu imidže izbacit iz glave.

nego, uzgredno pitanje pre no zaboravim: skoro redovno mi se ne otvaraju fotke ni linkovi na topicima dok sam ulogovana, pa se ponavljam u postovanju. kako to da sredim?

[Mica Milovanovic]

Sjajne fotke!

[PTY]

FYI: What Would Happen If You Got Zapped By The Large Hadron Collider?

[PTY]

A Strange Lonely Planet  Found without a Star



Multicolor image from the Pan-STARRS1 telescope of the free-floating planet PSO J318.5-22, in the constellation of Capricornus. The planet is extremely cold and faint, about 100 billion times fainter in optical light than the planet Venus. Most of its energy is emitted at infrared wavelengths. The image is 125 arcseconds on a side. Credit: N. Metcalfe & Pan-STARRS 1 Science Consortium.



http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/LonelyPlanet/

[PTY]

The stomach-turning truth about what the Neanderthals ate?






The idea of these early humans being plant-eating, self-medicating sophisticates has been brought into question by the findings of researchers at London's Natural History Museum

[scallop]

Šarmantno, ali zar ne fulaš pomalo topike? I onaj o GMO zaglavi na Hajzenbergu.


Naravno da su nama prethodnici krkali sve što je mogao da savlada njihov želudac. Pa i ono što nije mogao. Ustvari, Meho je na osnovu trvdnje o kamilici i ostalim čajevima da razvije tezu o prednostima vegetarijanstva, a ja o razlozima zašto su Neandertalci izumrli.


U svakom slučaju, jedemo mi životinjske utrobe i danas. Setite se prženih girica na kioscima, ne čiste ih.

[PTY]

Every year, scientists discover tens of thousands of new creatures, most of which are cuddly  and/or wuddly. However, every once in a while we uncover a species so vile and  so contrary to all that we consider precious and good that it makes us seriously  wonder if all this exploration nonsense is worth the hassle. Horrors such as  ... A Wasp With Jaws That Can Wrap Around Its Head 


Read more:  http://www.cracked.com/article_20620_5-creepy-creatures-we-wish-science-hadnt-just-discovered_p2.html#ixzz2iLMB9cap

[PTY]

25 Amazing Things In Space That Actually Exist!

[PTY]

This Is The Stuff Nightmares Are Made Of. And Most Of It's On You Right Now.

[zakk]

>_<

[PTY]

New Star System Similar to Ours --"We Cannot Stress Just How Important This Discovery Is"






A team of European astrophysicists has discovered the most extensive planetary system to date that orbit  star KOI-351 – with seven planets, more than in other known planetary systems arranged in a similar fashion to the eight planets in the Solar System, with small rocky planets close to the parent star and gas giant planets at greater distances. Although the planetary system around KOI-351 is packed together more tightly, "We cannot stress just how important this discovery is. It is a big step in the search for a 'twin' to the Solar System, and thus also in finding a second Earth," said Juan Cabrera, an astrophysicist at the DLR Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin-Adlershof.

[PTY]

Oldest Human DNA Reveals Mysterious Branch of Humanity


The oldest known human DNA found yet reveals human evolution was even more confusing than thought, researchers say.


The DNA, which dates back some 400,000 years, may belong to an unknown human ancestor, say scientists. These new findings could shed light on a mysterious extinct branch of humanity known as Denisovans, who were close relatives of Neanderthals, scientists added.


http://news.yahoo.com/oldest-human-dna-reveals-mysterious-branch-humanity-181139436.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory


i



http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/04/discovery-of-400000-year-old-dna-raises-questions-about-human-evolution/

[scallop]

Zahvaljujem na upozorenju. Zgodan je zaključak da što više informacija imamo to manje znamo. Jedva čekam da saznam šta će sledeći nalaz demantovati.

[PTY]

http://youtu.be/VLouRKHknOU

[PTY]

Mining Asteroids! Has the future finally arrived? Is this B.S. or not B.S.? Scientist and Sci-Fi author David Brin breaks down the idea into its fascinating ideas, taking a look at how Planetary Resources is planning to obtain metals and fuel by mining asteroids.


http://youtu.be/GamjQhgoSJ0

[scallop]

Voleo bih da budem upozoren ako ometam ovaj topik, ali ako može Brin da komentariše, valjda mogu i ja. Dok Lamborghini kukumavči da mu prodaja opada na globalnom nivo, a prosečni Amerikanac razmišlja kako se vozati od Siatla do Njujorka, mi ovde u Srbiji i dalje imamo bar dve narodne mudrosti: "klati vola za kilo mesa" i "sečeš uši krpiš dupe". Imam neko čudno uverenje da su napori svetske nauke pre usmereni na "uteći" nego na "stići". Oni koji ne spadaju u "uteći", teško da će negde "stići".

[PTY]

The shadow of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, looking toward the base of Mount Sharp, which rises more than three miles above the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater floor




About 3.5 billion years ago — around the time life is thought to have first arisen on Earth — Mars had a large freshwater lake that might well have been hospitable to life, scientists reported Monday.

The lake lay in the same crater where NASA's Mars rover Curiosity landed last year and has been exploring ever since. It lasted for hundreds or thousands of years, and possibly much longer.

Whether any life ever appeared on Mars is not yet known, and Curiosity was not designed to answer that question. But the data coming back from the planet indicate that the possibility of life, at least in the ancient past, is at least plausible.

John P. Grotzinger, a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology who is the project scientist for the Curiosity mission, said that if certain microbes like those on present-day Earth had plopped into that ancient Martian lake, they would most likely have found a pleasant place to call home.

"The environment would have existed long enough that they could have been sustained, prospered, grown, multiplied," he said. "All the essential ingredients for life were present.

"Potentially the aqueous stream, lake, groundwater system could have existed for millions to tens of millions of years," he added. "You could easily get a lake with the area of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York."

The interpretation comes from detailed analysis of two mudstones drilled by Curiosity earlier this year. The structure, chemistry and mineralogy of the sedimentary rocks were not alien.

"The whole thing just seems extremely Earthlike," Dr. Grotzinger said.

The scientists presented their latest findings at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco and in a set of six articles published in the journal Science.

The surface of Mars today is frigid and arid, bombarded by sterilizing radiation, but after it formed and cooled with the rest of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago, it was initially a warmer and wetter place during its first billion years. Over the past decade, scientists have identified several sites on Mars that they think were once habitable.

In 2004, after NASA's rover Opportunity discovered evidence that the Martian places it was traversing had once been soaking wet, Steven W. Squyres, the mission's principal investigator, declared, "This is the kind of place that would have been suitable for life."

But that location would have been an extremely challenging environment for life to take hold — very salty and highly acidic. Later, the scientists said the soils had been soaked not so much by water as by sulfuric acid.

NASA chose the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater as Curiosity's landing site because readings from orbit identified the presence of clay minerals, which form in waters with a neutral pH. Curiosity's instruments indeed detected clays in the two mudstones, named John Klein and Cumberland.

The clays appear to have formed at the lake bottom, not swept down from the walls of Gale Crater, strengthening the case that the lake water was not acidic.

Curiosity also measured carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen and phosphorus, elements that are critical for life on Earth, as well as iron and sulfur minerals that could have served as food for microbes.

"If there were microbial organisms around, I think they would have liked that environment," said David T. Vaniman, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson and the lead author of a Science paper examining the mineralogy. On Earth, a class of such microbes known as chemolithoautotrophs live in caves, hydrothermal vents and the deep underground.

An impact, probably by an asteroid, excavated Gale Crater 3.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, and the John Klein and Cumberland mudstones formed out of sediments that subsequently accumulated in the crater. That is roughly the same age as rocks on Earth with the earliest signs of life.

"You can actually begin to line up in time what the Earth was doing and what Mars was doing," Dr. Grotzinger said. "It's kind of cool."

The Gale Crater lake was also of the same era as the sulfuric-acid-soaked rocks that Opportunity found. That suggests that as Mars dried out, conditions in different regions varied widely. "Things have just gotten more complex than we thought," Dr. Grotzinger said.

Curiously, even though the rocks formed in a lake, soluble elements like sodium and calcium had not been washed away. That suggests that the climate even then was cold and arid, just not as cold and arid as it is today — perhaps an ice-covered lake.

"What does it mean about the climate?" Dr. Vaniman said. "It's something we're all thinking about."

What has not been found yet is solid evidence for the carbon molecules known as organics that could serve as the building blocks of life. Such molecules are not always preserved in stone and are destroyed by radiation.

By measuring the abundance of certain elements, a technique that has long been used to date Earth rocks, Kenneth A. Farley, a professor of geochemistry at Caltech, was able to estimate that the sediments eroded from rocks 4.2 billion years old, give or take 350 million years, and that the rocks had been exposed at the surface for about 80 million years.

Previously, planetary scientists estimated ages by counting craters — the older a surface, the greater the number of craters. Dr. Farley's numbers fit with expectations for the Gale Crater rocks — "it's a nice demonstration this method could work," Dr. Farley said — and the dating technique could help locate rocks that have been exposed to radiation recently, raising the odds of finding organics, if they are present.

"That's a big step forward for the exploration of life on Mars," Dr. Grotzinger said. "We're now exploring for that subset of environments can preserve organic carbon."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/science/space/on-mars-an-ancient-lake-and-perhaps-life.html?hp&_r=2&

[PTY]

The sun is set to "flip upside down" within weeks as its magnetic field reverses polarity in an event that will send ripple effects throughout the solar system.





















Although it may sound like a catastrophic occurrence, there's no need to run for cover. The sun switches its polarity, flipping its magnetic north and south, once every eleven years through an internal mechanism about which little is understood.


The swap could however cause intergalactic weather fronts such as geomagnetic storms, which can interfere with satellites and cause radio blackouts.


Nasa said in August that the change would happen in three to four months time, but it is impossible to give a more specific date. Scientist won't know for around another three weeks whether the flip is complete.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/sun-will-flip-upside-down-within-weeks-says-nasa-8942769.html

[PTY]

Crows are among the planet's most intelligent animals, teaching their young to use tools for foraging and banding together to fight off intruders. Now, the first study of how abstract reasoning works in these birds' brains could shed light on how intelligence works in a truly alien, non-mammal brain.

[PTY]

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed water vapor above the frigid south polar region of Jupiter's moon Europa, providing the first strong evidence of water plumes erupting off the moon's surface.

Previous scientific findings from other sources already point to the existence of an ocean located under Europa's icy crust. Researchers are not yet fully certain whether the detected water vapor is generated by erupting water plumes on the surface, but they are confident this is the most likely explanation.

Should further observations support the finding, this would make Europa the second moon in the solar system known to have water vapor plumes. The findings are being published in the Dec. 12 online issue of Science Express, and reported at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

"By far the simplest explanation for this water vapor is that it erupted from plumes on the surface of Europa," said lead author Lorenz Roth of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "If those plumes are connected with the subsurface water ocean we are confident exists under Europa's crust, then this means that future investigations can directly investigate the chemical makeup of Europa's potentially habitable environment without drilling through layers of ice. And that is tremendously exciting."

In 2005, NASA's Cassini orbiter detected jets of water vapor and dust spewing off the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Although ice and dust particles have subsequently been found in the Enceladus plumes, only water vapor gases have been measured at Europa so far.




http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-363

[PTY]

Scientists have discovered a second code hiding within DNA. This second code contains information that changes how scientists read the instructions contained in DNA and interpret mutations to make sense of health and disease.

[PTY]

European space craft to attempt first-ever comet landing



A space craft lurking in the outer solar system will make the first ever attempt to land on a comet next year, with British scientists playing a key role in the project




http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/10502488/European-space-craft-to-attempt-first-ever-comet-landing.html

[scallop]

Sjajno! Sad znamo da smo napola u pravu. Time se potvrđuje izreka "Može da bude, ali ne mora da znači." Ti si moj jedini upotrebljivi izvor informacija. Ko kaže da je SF priča završena? Pisci su jedino sve lenji da potraže i obrade novum.

[PTY]

Carl Sagan inspired a generation of scientists with his work in and out of the classroom. But he didn't always present science with cheer. In this clip, he passionately defends science with a grave warning. It's something we all need to hear.






http://youtu.be/_iyFw8UF85A

[PTY]

Timeline of the far future



http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140105-timeline-of-the-far-future

[scallop]

Al' se ovaj namučio! Ko će ga proverava?

[Mica Milovanovic]

Ja nešto nemam vremena...

[-_-]

Zanimljivo, ali nepregledno.

[PTY]

http://imgur.com/gallery/3ZidINK




ali, što reče čiča Brin, džaba mu to kad ne možemo ni do Marsa bez njih... 

[PTY]

Stopping killer robots


Autonomous weapons are robotic systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator. Advances in computer technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics may lead to a vast expansion in the development and use of such weapons in the near future. Public opinion runs strongly against killer robots. But many of the same claims that propelled the Cold War are being recycled to justify the pursuit of a nascent robotic arms race. Autonomous weapons could be militarily potent and therefore pose a great threat. For this reason, substantial pressure from civil society will be needed before major powers will seriously consider their prohibition. However, demands for human control and responsibility and the protection of human dignity and sovereignty fit naturally into the traditional law of war and imply strict limits on autonomy in weapon systems. Opponents of autonomous weapons should point out the terrible threat they pose to global peace and security, as well as their offensiveness to principles of humanity and to public conscience.


http://bos.sagepub.com/content/70/1/32.full

[PTY]

Astronomers Find What May Be a Star Within a Star



The best candidate yet for an elusive Thorne-Żytkow Object



he universe is a massive place, filled with crazy things like black holes and dark matter and theoretical wormholes and stars that shoot lasers at you. So, as Discover magazine put it back in 1994, "astronomers aren't easily surprised by things astronomical."

In that context, the idea of a star-within-a-star is weird. But it's not so weird as to be unbelievable.

Known as a Thorne-Żytkow Object, the idea of a nesting-doll star was first proposed by two physicists, Kip Thorne and Anna Żytkow, back in the '70s. But no one has ever seen one. Now, though, Alexandra Witze reports at Nature, astronomers have found the best candidate yet:


Theorists have proposed several ways in which a Thorne-Zytkow object could form, but the most likely scenario involves a red giant swallowing an orbiting neutron star.


Although a neutron star is only ten miles or so across, its gravitational pull is so strong that it could draw matter away from its huge but more diffuse companion. In the process, it would slow down, like a ship dragging an anchor. Eventually the neutron star, in an ever-shrinking orbit, would plow into the outer layers of its neighbor. After a few thousand years it would spiral down into the star's center, demolishing the existing stellar core but leaving the rest of the star essentially intact. A red giant that has been violated in this way has come to be called a Thorne-Zytkow object--even though no one has ever seen one.

The scientist are keeping the name of their specific star(s) quiet until their research can be vetted by their peers, since there's always a chance there could be some other explanation for what they're seeing.


Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/starception-astronomers-find-what-may-be-star-within-star-180949308/#ixzz2qGvD3twT

[PTY]

Japan to Test Space Junk Cleanup Tether Soon: Report





Japanese scientists are getting ready to launch a test of a space junk-cleaning tether, according to press reports.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) researchers are developing an electrodynamic tether designed to generate electricity that will slow down space-based debris, according to a report from Agence France Presse.

The slowed-down space junk will fall into lower and lower orbits until burning up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere.

http://www.space.com/24325-japan-space-junk-tether.html

[PTY]

MAUNA KEA, HAWAII – Astronomers have discovered a distant quasar illuminating a vast nebula of diffuse gas, revealing for the first time part of the network of filaments thought to connect galaxies in a cosmic web. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led the study, published January 19 in the journal, Nature.

Using the 10-meter Keck I telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the researchers detected a very large, luminous nebula of gas extending about 2 million light-years across intergalactic space.

"This is a very exceptional object: it's huge, at least twice as large as any nebula detected before, and it extends well beyond the galactic environment of the quasar," said Sebastiano Cantalupo, first author of the paper and a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz.

The standard cosmological model of structure formation in the universe predicts that galaxies are embedded in a cosmic web of matter, most of which (about 84 percent) is invisible dark matter. This web is seen in the results from computer simulations of the evolution of structure in the universe, which show the distribution of dark matter on large scales, including the dark matter halos in which galaxies form and the cosmic web of filaments that connect them. Gravity causes ordinary matter to follow the distribution of dark matter, so filaments of diffuse, ionized gas are expected to trace a pattern similar to that seen in dark matter simulations.

Until now, these filaments have never been seen. Intergalactic gas has been detected by its absorption of light from bright background sources, but those results don't reveal how the gas is distributed. In this study, the researchers detected the fluorescent glow of hydrogen gas resulting from its illumination by intense radiation from the quasar.

"This quasar is illuminating diffuse gas on scales well beyond any we've seen before, giving us the first picture of extended gas between galaxies," said J. Xavier Prochaska, coauthor and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. "It provides a terrific insight into the overall structure of our universe."

The hydrogen gas illuminated by the quasar emits ultraviolet light known as Lyman alpha radiation. The distance to the quasar is so great (about 10 billion light-years) that the emitted light is "stretched" by the expansion of the universe from an invisible ultraviolet wavelength to a visible shade of violet by the time it reaches the Keck telescope and the LRIS (Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) used for this discovery. Knowing the distance to the quasar, the researchers calculated the wavelength for Lyman alpha radiation from that distance and built a special filter for LRIS to get an image at that wavelength.

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ио9 о сф експедицијама у време апропо шајнинг грлс

A chart that explains time travel in Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls

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NASA is planning to make water and oxygen on the Moon and Mars by 2020




NASA is forging ahead with plans to make water, oxygen, and hydrogen on the surface of the Moon and Mars. If we ever want to colonize other planets, it is vital that we find a way of extracting these vital gases and liquids from moons and planets, rather than transporting them from Earth (which is prohibitively expensive, due to Earth's gravity). The current plan is to land a rover on the Moon in 2018 that will try to extract hydrogen, water, and oxygen — and then hopefully, Curiosity's successor will try to convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen in 2020 when it lands on Mars.


In 2018, NASA hopes to put a rover on the Moon that will carry the RESOLVE (Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen & Lunar Volatile Extraction) science payload. RESOLVE will contain the various tools necessary to carry out in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Basically, RESOLVE will sift through the Moon's regolith (loose surface soil) and heat them up, looking for traces of hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be combined to make water. There is also some evidence that there's water ice on the surface of the Moon — RESOLVE will find out for certain by heating the soil and seeing of water vapor emerges.

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Plague DNA Found in Ancient Tooth Suggests Black Death Isn't Dead Yet




You've undoubtedly heard about the Bubonic plague, but the chances of you knowing next to anything about the Justinian plague are significantly slimmer. That's because no one really knew anything about the Justinian plague—until recently, that is. Now, two ancient, plague-ridden teeth are finally teaching us a little more about one of the worst pandemics in history—including the fact that another outbreak could be just around the corner.

The two 1,500-year-old teeth, which belonged to Justinian plague victims buried in Bavaria, Germany between 541 and 543 CE, contained tiny fragments of actual plague DNA, making them the oldest pathogen genomes we've ever accessed (the Black Death having occurred just over 600 years ago). The particularly fascinating bit, though, is that in reconstructing the Justinian genome, scientists have found that both it and the Bubonic plague (which didn't strike until 800 years after it) are two different strains of the very same pathogen. This means that a third version of the rodent-carried plague could very well be in our imminent future.