Science & Technology news & discussion

Measurements of pulsar acceleration reveal Milky Way's dark side



It is well known that the expansion of the universe is accelerating due to a mysterious dark energy. Within galaxies, stars also experience an acceleration, though this is due to some combination of dark matter and the stellar density.

In a new study to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters researchers have now obtained the first direct measurement of the average acceleration taking place within our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Led by Sukanya Chakrabarti at the Institute for Advanced Study with collaborators from Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Rochester, and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the team used pulsar data to clock the radial and vertical accelerations of stars within and outside of the galactic plane.

Based on these new high-precision measurements and the known amount of visible matter in the galaxy, researchers were then able to calculate the Milky Way's dark matter density without making the usual assumption that the galaxy is in a steady-state.

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-pulsar-reveal-milky-dark-side.html

 

Researchers find Mars has a Chandler wobble



A combined team of researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and the Royal Observatory of Belgium, has found evidence that Mars has a Chandler wobble.

Approximately a century ago, astronomer Seth Carlo Chandler discovered that imperfectly round objects (such as planets) sometimes spin off their axis for periods of time. The phenomenon has come to be known as the Chandler wobble, and has been documented for planet Earth, which veers from its axis for distances up to 30 feet in a pattern that repeats approximately every 433 days. Researchers have suggested that other planets likely have a Chandler wobble, but until now, it has never been observed because measuring it on the planet scale requires precise measurements over many years.

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-mars-chandler.html

 

Australian man arrested in Germany over 'world's largest' darknet marketplace



Police arrest 34-year-old suspected of operating site selling drugs, credit card data and malware

A German-led police sting has taken down the “world’s largest” darknet marketplace, whose Australian alleged operator used it to facilitate the sale of drugs, stolen credit card data and malware, prosecutors said Tuesday.

At the time of its closure, DarkMarket had nearly 500,000 users and more than 2,400 vendors worldwide, as the coronavirus pandemic leads much of the street trade in narcotics to go online.

A total of at least 320,000 transactions were carried out via the marketplace, with more than 4,650 bitcoin and 12,800 monero – two of the most common cryptocurrencies – changing hands, prosecutors said.

At current exchange rates, that represented turnover valued at €140m (A$220m).

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...rmany-over-worlds-largest-darknet-marketplace

 

Programmer has two guesses left to access £175m bitcoin wallet

Stefan Thomas is not the first person to forget a password, but memory lapses are rarely so potentially costly

Stefan Thomas has just two chances left to get his hands on his $240m (£175m) fortune.

Thomas is a San Francisco-based computer programmer, and a decade ago he was given 7,002 bitcoins as a reward for making a video explaining how the cryptocurrency works.

At the time he was paid, they were worth $2-$6 each. He stashed them away in his “digital wallet” and forgot about them.

Now each bitcoin is worth $34,000, and the contents of his wallet are valued at $240m. But Thomas has forgotten the password that will unlock his fortune.

German-born Thomas has already entered the wrong password eight times, and if he guesses wrong two more times his hard drive, which contains his private keys to the bitcoin, will be encrypted – and he’ll never see the money.

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...rammer-locked-out-of-his-130m-bitcoin-account

 

World Solar Challenge charges ahead amid fear COVID could reroute overseas teams



About 40 teams from around the world, including from the COVID-19 hotspots of the US and Europe, are still planning to be on the start line of the World Solar Challenge in October.

Organisers of the Darwin-to-Adelaide race have set dates and devised several contingency plans, which may include not crossing the SA-NT border, running a national race for only the six Australian teams, quarantining overseas teams, or holding a virtual-only version of the event.

Some teams are already considering organising their own local race if they cannot enter Australia.

The biennial 3,000-kilometre race has run 15 times since 1987 and has attracted teams from all over the world.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01...enge-in-doubt-as-covid-hampers-teams/13048612

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World Solar Challenge: innovation has outstripped what event founder dreamed possible 30 years ago


The Quiet Achiever solar car -1982

October 2017:

Three decades ago, Hans Tholstrup was told it would be impossible to cross Australia using only solar power.

Now, he says, the simple fact is: "We can take a human being across a continent on just sunshine, and that is pure magic."

Mr Tholstrup, the founder of the World Solar Challenge, says he never imagined it would become such an innovative and internationally renowned event.

In 1982, in partnership with brothers Garry and Larry Perkins, he became the first person to drive across Australia in a solar-powered car.

It took him under 20 days to travel 4,000 kilometres from Perth to Sydney in The Quiet Achiever, a solar car that by today's standards seems old.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10...nnovation-technology-outstrips-dreams/9019908

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The first trans-australian solar crossing 1982-83


Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_Achiever

As a kid in December 1982, I'd read the local paper and watch the evening news for the latest progress of the BP Solar Trek - the 'bathtub-on-wheels' made of bike-tubing - that traveled across the desert during the height of an Australian summer. The heat must have been excruciating on the tarmacked road!

The journey started from Scarborough Beach, West Australia, where a bottle of water from the Indian Ocean was to be carried across the continent to Sydney, where it was to be ceremoniously poured into the Pacific Ocean. It was meant as a symbolic gesture joining two great oceans by solar power.

Here's an old archived website documenting that first trans-australian solar crossing:

https://web.archive.org/web/2012032...lartrek/Solar_Trek/Solar_Trek_The_Journey.htm



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More information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Solar_Challenge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_car_racing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prototype_solar-powered_cars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_Achiever

 

How Can Slumbering Squirrels Inform Astronauts on Long-term Journeys?

Researchers show the animals have uniquely adapted to their extreme habitat by converting bodily waste products into nutrients

Researchers peered into the deepest of slumbers – the barely-breathing sleep of arctic ground squirrels – to better understand how the small mammals can emerge from an eight-month hibernation with a minimal loss of muscle mass.

Using metabolite profiles in the squirrels’ blood, a recently developed technology, the researchers showed that the animals have uniquely adapted to their extreme habitats by converting bodily waste products into essential nutrients. Despite spending the long winter curled into a ball and breathing only once per minute, the hardy rodents awaken in spring unscathed.

The findings may have implications for improved treatments for the elderly and patients bedridden with long-term illness – and even astronauts on a nine-month journey to Mars.

https://news.cuanschutz.edu/news-st...rels-inform-astronauts-on-long-term-missions?

 

Fungi kingdom delights unlocked by Queensland's wet summer weather



Heavy rain in parts of Queensland has awoken a hidden kingdom of fungi, and with it a passionate community of amateur mycologists.

In 2018 a State of the World's Fungi report found that just 150,000 of an estimated 3 million species of fungi had been identified globally.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-13/queensland-rain-unlocks-fungi-kingdom-delights/13048282

 

NASA Deep Space Food Challenge Offers Prizes for Sprouting Astronaut Food Systems

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency have coordinated to open the Deep Space Food Challenge, targeted at developing novel food system technologies for long-duration deep space missions.

 

Father of the Web Tim Berners-Lee prepares 'do-over'

With a new startup called Inrupt, Berners-Lee aims to fix some of the problems that have handicapped the so-called open web in an age of huge, closed platforms such as Facebook.



Building on ideas developed by an open-source software project called Solid, Inrupt promises a web where people can use a single sign-on for any service and personal data is stored in “pods,” or personal online data stores, controlled by the user.

“People are fed up with the lack of controls, the silos,” said Berners-Lee, co-founder and chief technology officer of Inrupt, in an interview at the Reuters Next conference. This new, updated web, Berners-Lee said, will enable the kind of person-to-person sharing and collaboration that has helped make the big social media services so successful while leaving the user in control.

 

Social networks are why independent cultures see the world similarly

How can cultures that developed on opposite sides of the world come to similar understandings about colors, shapes, familial relationships and other categorical systems?

The traditional explanation for this cross-cultural continuity is that humans are born with categories wired into their brains.

Researchers with the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, however, have an alternative explanation.

It's not the human brain, exactly, that yields categorical consensus across disparate groups, researchers contend in a new paper, published in the journal Nature Communications, but the dynamics of consensus building among large groups of people.

The phenomenon of "category convergence" has long been recognized by archaeologists in the artistic and cultural preferences of ancient societies, and it continues to manifest itself throughout modernity.

"If a European speaks to someone from Asia, they naturally expect their conversation partner to describe the sky as 'blue' and a plant as 'green,' despite the fact that there is no 'natural' categorical division in the color spectrum that distinguishes between blue things and green things," Damon Centola, researcher with Network Dynamics Group at the Annenberg School, told UPI in an email.

 

Ultra Deep Field: Looking Out into Space, Looking Back into Time from Hubble Space Telescope.

This six-minute visual exploration of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field showcases the characteristics and contents of this landmark observation, as well as its three-dimensional nature across both space and time. In particular, galaxies are seen to more than 12 billion light-years away / 12 billion years ago, allowing astronomers to trace the development of galaxies across cosmic time.

A deep field is a long exposure on a small field of view to observe the faintest objects possible. The Ultra Deep Field (UDF) represents the deepest visible light observation of the universe (deeper views are extensions / subsets of this 2004 image). Containing about 10,000 sources, the UDF provides a statistical sample of galaxies across the universe.

In this sequence, the three-dimensional model of the UDF data set uses NASA and other images and source catalogs. More than 5000 galaxies with cross-matched image cutout and distance measure are placed in their correct relative position throughout the long thin pyramid of the observation. To keep the fly-throughs succinct, the depth of the pyramid is shortened by a factor of a few hundred.

 

NASA spacecraft discovers the universe is less crowded than we thought

While we might think of space as a vast sea of blackness, all we have to do is look up at night to see that it's punctuated by countless stars, galaxies and even a few planets visible to the naked eye.

Scientists recently used data from NASA's New Horizons mission out beyond Pluto to measure just how dark the cosmic background really is. What they found has implications for what we thought we knew about the makeup of the entire universe.

In short, space is so dark there can't be as many galaxies out there, adding their faint glow to the backdrop, as astronomers have previously estimated.

"It's an important number to know -- how many galaxies are there?" Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement Tuesday. "We simply don't see the light from 2 trillion galaxies."

 

One year on from the Black Summer fires, it's hoped drones will help save the koalas


New research suggests drones are a cheaper and more effective way of counting koalas in the wild — and could ultimately help save the vulnerable species.

Last year, QUT researchers flew AI-enabled drones over forests burnt in the Black Summer fires to estimate the number of koalas that had survived.

By teaching the AI to distinguish possum from koala, researchers are building the foundations of a "dataset for biodiversity," Dr Witt said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science...-koalas-drones-monitoring-population/13035820

 

Expert prognosis for the planet—we're on track for a ghastly future




A loss of biodiversity and accelerating climate change in the coming decades coupled with ignorance and inaction is threatening the survival of all species, including our very own, according to the experts from institutions including Stanford University, UCLA, and Flinders University.

The researchers state that world leaders need a 'cold shower' regarding the state of our environment, both to plan and act to avoid a ghastly future.

Lead author Professor Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University in Australia says he and his colleagues have summarised the state of the natural world in stark form to help clarify the gravity of the human predicament.

"Humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth's ability to support complex life. But the mainstream is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization" Professor Bradshaw says.

 

Why are flies so hard to swat?




A fly buzzes past your head and lands nearby; you snatch a flyswatter or roll up a magazine and approach cautiously — and you strike!

But no matter how quick you are, the fly is almost always faster, and it usually manages to evade your wallop and escape unharmed. (Is it trying to annoy you?!)

Flies have many adaptations that lend them heightened speed, maneuverability and perception, making them very, very good at detecting and evading even the swiftest swats. And new evidence shows that flies' modified hind wings play an important part in launching them into a speedy takeoff — often just in the nick of time.

Halteres aren't the only secret weapon in a fly's evasive arsenal; once a fly is airborne, it can execute maneuvers that would be the envy of a fighter jet pilot. Fruit flies can change course in under 1/100th of a second — about 50 times faster than an eye can blink, Live Science previously reported. In experiments, perfectly timed wing flaps generated enough force to rapidly propel the flies away from a predator while in mid-air.

 

Building a Giant 2D Map of the Universe to Prepare for the Largest 3D Map

Nearly 200 researchers pitched in to gather, process, and stitch together images for half of the sky to prepare for the start of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument’s observations

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2021/01/...e-universe-to-prepare-for-the-largest-3d-map/

 

Fleet of robots successfully tracks, monitors marine microbes



After years of development and testing, researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have successfully demonstrated that a fleet of autonomous robots can track and study a moving microbial community in an open-ocean eddy. The results of this research effort were recently published in Science Robotics.

https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2021/01/13/robots-monitor-marine-microbes/

 

These Adorable Fish Robots Form Schools Like the Real Thing



SEVEN LITTLE BLUEBOTS gently swim around a darkened tank in a Harvard University lab, spying on one another with great big eyes made of cameras. They’re on the lookout for the two glowing blue LEDs fixed to the backs and bellies of their comrades, allowing the machines to lock on to one another and form schools, a complex emergent behavior arising from surprisingly simple algorithms. With very little prodding from their human engineers, the seven robots eventually arrange themselves in a swirling tornado, a common defensive maneuver among real-life fish called milling.

https://www.wired.com/story/these-adorable-fish-robots-form-schools-like-the-real-thing/

 

CIA releases entire collection of UFO-related documents to truth-seeking website

The massive data dump includes more than 2,700 pages of UFO-related documents declassified by the CIA since the 1980s. (The U.S. government also calls them "unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP). According to The Black Vault — an online repository of UFO-related documents operated by author John Greenwald Jr. — the documents were obtained through a long string of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed over the last quarter century .

The documents cover dozens of incidents, including the 1976 account of the government’s then-Assistant Deputy Director for Science & Technology being hand-delivered a mysterious piece of intelligence on a UFO, to the description of a mysterious midnight explosion in a small Russian town.


LInk : www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ufos-the-central-intelligence-agency-cia-collection/

 

THE perfect distraction to the current real problems we are facing

I doubt there is - or has ever been - any solid evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence behind UFO sightings.

I will however be more than happy to be proved wrong...

 

NASA: You're about to get a rare chance to spot elusive planet



Jokes aside, Uranus isn't known as one of the most glamorous planets, but it's an underappreciated gem. The ice giant has a lovely blue color and sneaky rings. While our eyes are often drawn to brighter planets like Mars and Jupiter in the night sky, Jan. 20 will give us a decent shot at spotting elusive Uranus.

 

Uranus is the but of jokes for good reason.
I wonder if the Greeks saw it the same way?

 

£4.3m for Nottingham quantum projects to solve universe’s mysteries



Scientists will use cutting-edge quantum technologies to transform our understanding of the universe and answer key questions about the nature of black holes.

New research at the University of Nottingham is one of seven projects to have secured funding as part of £31 million investment from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The new projects will demonstrate how quantum technologies could solve some of the greatest mysteries in fundamental physics.

"The Quantum Technology for Fundamental Physics program is a fantastic initiative, paving the way for the formation of a new community at the interface between two exciting fields. We have an amazing consortium, with excellent scientists from both camps, and over the next three years will turn a range of abstract concepts related to the early universe and black holes into reality."

- Professor Silke Weinfurtner​

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/43m-for-nottingham-quantum-projects-to-solve-universes-mysteries?

 

Apollo landers, Neil Armstrong’s bootprint and other human artifacts on Moon officially protected by new US law

Michelle L.D. Hanlon; Professor of Air and Space Law, University of Mississippi.

I am a lawyer who focuses on space issues that seek to ensure the peaceful and sustainable exploration and use of space.



It’s hard to care about bootprints sunk in soil 238,900 miles away as humanity suffers the combined burden of an unforgiving virus and a political unease. But how humans treat those bootprints and the historic lunar landing sites upon which they are found will speak volumes about who we humans are and who we seek to become.

On Dec. 31, the One Small Step to Protect Human Heritage in Space Act became law. As far as laws go, it’s pretty benign. It requires companies that are working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on lunar missions to agree to be bound by otherwise unenforceable guidelines intended to protect American landing sites on the Moon. That’s a pretty small pool of affected entities. However, it is also the first law enacted by any nation that recognizes the existence of human heritage in outer space. That’s important because it reaffirms our human commitment to protecting our history – as we do on Earth with sites like the Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu, which is protected through instruments like the World Heritage Convention – while also acknowledging that the human species is expanding into space.

https://theconversation.com/apollo-...oon-officially-protected-by-new-us-law-152661

 

The SpaceX Lunar Starship: Built Different

Let's take a look at the three moon lander designs NASA is currently funding, starting with the SpaceX Lunar Starship!