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14 Apr 2017 06:57

Two-thirds of Great Barrier Reef hit by back-to-back mass coral bleaching
For the second time in just 12 months, scientists have recorded severe coral bleaching across huge tracts of the Great Barrier Reef after completing aerial surveys along its entire length. In 2016, bleaching was most severe in the northern third of the Reef, while one year on, the middle third has experienced the most intense coral bleaching.

“The combined impact of this back-to-back bleaching stretches for 1,500 km (900 miles), leaving only the southern third unscathed,” says Prof. Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, who undertook the aerial surveys in both 2016 and 2017.

“The bleaching is caused by record-breaking temperatures driven by global warming. This year, 2017, we are seeing mass bleaching, even without the assistance of El Niño conditions.”
Rest of article
https://www.coralcoe.org.au/media-relea ... -bleaching
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14 Apr 2017 11:40

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"man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore"
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19 Apr 2017 15:01

Two-thirds of Great Barrier Reef hit by back-to-back mass coral bleaching
For the second time in just 12 months, scientists have recorded severe coral bleaching across huge tracts of the Great Barrier Reef after completing aerial surveys along its entire length. In 2016, bleaching was most severe in the northern third of the Reef, while one year on, the middle third has experienced the most intense coral bleaching.

“The combined impact of this back-to-back bleaching stretches for 1,500 km (900 miles), leaving only the southern third unscathed,” says Prof. Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, who undertook the aerial surveys in both 2016 and 2017.

“The bleaching is caused by record-breaking temperatures driven by global warming. This year, 2017, we are seeing mass bleaching, even without the assistance of El Niño conditions.”
Rest of article
https://www.coralcoe.org.au/media-relea ... -bleaching
Saw this, and you know with the way our ecosystems work eventually it will come back to bite us bigtime.
 
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20 Apr 2017 18:21

Newly discovered super-Earth LHS 1140b orbits in the habitable zone around a faint red dwarf star, named LHS 1140, in the constellation of Cetus, 40 light years away. LHS 1140b is definitely going to be an easier target for atmospheric characterization than other nearby exoplanets discovered.

It was discovered by the transit method, so the nice thing is that will make it an easy target to study if it has an atmosphere. With an orbital period of only 25 days, it still only receives half as much light from it's host star as the Earth does from our sun. The host star LHS 1140 spins more slowly and emits less high-energy radiation than other similar low-mass Red Dwarf stars, and it is theorized the super-earth exoplanet migrated inwards 40 million years after the the star formed and went through it's most violent stages of throwing off radiation.

The astronomers estimate the age of the planet to be at least five billion years. They also deduced that it has a diameter 1.4 times larger than the Earth, almost 18,000km. A mass around 7 times greater than the Earth, and a much higher density, implies that the exoplanet is probably made of rock with a dense iron core. It's gravity is around 3.5 times that of Earth.

The LHS 1140 system might prove to be an even more important target for the future characterization of planets in the habitable zone than Proxima b or TRAPPIST-1. Observations coming up soon with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope will be able to assess exactly how much high-energy radiation is showered upon LHS 1140b, so that its capacity to support life can be further constrained. Even though multi-planet systems are thought to be common around red dwarfs, no other exoplanets around LHS 1140 have been found yet.

TRAPPIST-1 fluxes
V: 18.798±0.082 (Costa E, 2006)
J: 11.354±0.022 (2MASS Survey, 2003)
H: 10.718±0.021 (2MASS Survey, 2003)
K: 10.296±0.023 (2MASS Survey, 2003)

LHS 1140 fluxes:
V: 14.150±0.06 (UCAC4 Survey, 2013)
J: 9.612±0.023 (2MASS Survey, 2003)
H: 9.092±0.026 (2MASS Survey, 2003)
K: 8.821±0.024 (2MASS Survey, 2003)

A temperate rocky super-Earth transiting a nearby cool star 
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22 Apr 2017 00:06

Sometimes, pre-main-sequence stars experience sudden brightness jumps caused by an abrupt mass transfer from the surrounding protoplanetary disk into the star. In 1937, the star FU Ori was observed jumping from a visual magnitude of 16.5 all the way up to 9.6, where it has been roughly ever since (and other pre-MS stars exhibiting these variations have been designated FU Ori type stars). The star has accreted about 18 Jupiter-masses worth of material in the past 80 years, and the duration of these extreme brightness events are expected to be on the order of decades, perhaps a couple centuries.

FU Ori type events can raise the equilibrium temperature of a planet at Earth's distance up to about 1350 K (or 1000 K for Mars's orbit), and would push the water ice condensation line out to 40 AU.

The Solar System does not resemble the types of planetary systems uncovered in recent years, first by HARPS, then dramatically by Kepler, where sun-like stars often have a half dozen or so super-Earths in orbits less than 100 days. Where we have mass and radius measurements for these planets, it is clear that they are commonly volatile-rich, with significant water and/or gas envelopes, comprising in some cases the majority of their masses. This suggests that the inner planets in a system form from volatile-rich, "wet" planetesimals, but this strongly contradicts what we see in the Solar system, where we have only four small dry planets within 5 AU -- to put it mildly, the inner part of our solar system is sparse and dry compared to what appears to be normal.

A new paper by Alexander Hubbard suggests that pre-MS stars which undergo FU Ori type events, by boosting the ice line far from the star and "cooking" everything in the inner planetary system, may produce planets that look much more like ours, as opposed to the standard "hand-full of mini-Neptunes close to the star" architecture that seems so prevalent in the Galaxy. If this is the case, the sun might have been what we today call an FU Ori type star in its youth, and this may have been crucial in securing a chance at hosting the habitable planet we live on today.

Making Terrestrial Planets: High Temperatures, FU Orionis Outbursts, Earth, and Planetary System Architectures
456076main_hst-2010-15.jpg
 
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22 Apr 2017 08:27

I guess super earth LHS 1140b will be the next planet to make it into SE ;-)  Hopefully soon!
 
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22 Apr 2017 08:29

Two-thirds of Great Barrier Reef hit by back-to-back mass coral bleaching
For the second time in just 12 months, scientists have recorded severe coral bleaching across huge tracts of the Great Barrier Reef after completing aerial surveys along its entire length. In 2016, bleaching was most severe in the northern third of the Reef, while one year on, the middle third has experienced the most intense coral bleaching.

“The combined impact of this back-to-back bleaching stretches for 1,500 km (900 miles), leaving only the southern third unscathed,” says Prof. Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, who undertook the aerial surveys in both 2016 and 2017.

“The bleaching is caused by record-breaking temperatures driven by global warming. This year, 2017, we are seeing mass bleaching, even without the assistance of El Niño conditions.”
Rest of article
https://www.coralcoe.org.au/media-relea ... -bleaching
PS I wrote to you in the other thread about artificial sweeteners and diet soda leading to 3x the rate of strokes over a ten year period and an increase in dementia over sugary "normal" soda- although neither of course is good.
 
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22 Apr 2017 09:06

Ancient ‘observatory’ may hold secret to ‘comet collision’ & sudden climate change
Published time: 21 Apr, 2017 21:48

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Stone carvings from an ancient mountain “observatory” in Turkey may confirm the date of a devastating comet which is thought to have smashed into earth nearly 13,000 years ago, archaeologists believe.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh studying etchings of animals at the Gobekli Tepe stone structure in southern Turkey say they correspond with star patterns during the 10,950 BC summer solstice.

According to their study, the images on a pillar known as the “Vulture Stone” provide compelling evidence that the ancient rock tells an astrological story, and is a “date stamp” of a “cometary encounter” that is rumored to have changed the planet’s climate thousands of years ago. 

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The “Younger Dryas” event is a historical moment when the temperature in the northern hemisphere took a sudden nose dive. Theories for why the climate suddenly changed include a comet, meteor strike or a large volcanic eruption. 

Published in the Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry journal, the latest study on the phenomenon appears to give further credence to the idea that an object falling from space triggered the so called “mini Ice Age.”

The study stops short of confirming the event. It suggests, however, that the constellation-like carvings – and one depicting a headless man – are an ancient recording of a significant and catastrophic event.

“It appears Gobekli Tepe was, among other things, an observatory for monitoring the night sky,” said lead researcher Dr Martin Sweatman. “One of its pillars seems to have served as a memorial to this devastating event – probably the worst day in history since the end of the Ice Age.”

The theory raises the question of whether earth could ever be hit again, something the study states is “likely.”
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22 Apr 2017 09:08

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sup ... us_science

Another Potentially Habitable ‘Super-Earth’ Is Discovered

New planetary revelation brings us one step closer to finding extraterrestrial life.

By Lee Speigel

M Weiss / CfA
In an artist’s impression, the possible “super-Earth” planet LHS1140b begins to cross the star LHS 1140. The planet shows early indications of habitability.
590




It seems like only yesterday when scientists announced the discovery of yet another “super-Earth.” Last year, a half-lava, half-rock world, dubbed 55 Cancri e, was found around 40 light-years from Earth and was determined to be twice the size of our home planet. 

And now it has happened again.

Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have announced the discovery of a new super-Earth, designated LHS 1140b, orbiting the habitable zone of a small red dwarf star, LHS 1140, about 39 light-years away. (It’s 4.2 light-years from our sun to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.)

“This is the most exciting exoplanet I’ve seen in the past decade,” Jason Dittmann, a postdoctoral fellow, said in a CfA statement. “We could hardly hope for a better target to perform one of the biggest quests in science ― searching for evidence of life beyond Earth.”


Dittmann is the lead author of a paper appearing in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, which states:

Here we report observations of LHS 1140b. ... We measure the mass of the planet to be 6.6 times that of Earth, consistent with a rocky bulk composition, placing it within the liquid-water, habitable zone. Because LHS 1140 is nearby, telescopes currently under construction might be able to search for specific atmospheric gases in the future.

LHS 1140b was found by the transit method, in which a star’s light dims when a planet crosses, or transits, in front of it as seen by Earth-bound instruments. The research team estimates the planet is about 11,000 miles in diameter.

The MEarth-South telescope array in Chile detected LHS 1140b. The eight-telescope lineup studies faint red dwarf stars to detect orbiting planets as they transit their stars.


Jonathan Irwin
The MEarth-South telescope array in Chile, which discovered the super-Earth LHS 1140b.


“Right now, we’re just making educated guesses about the content of this planet’s atmosphere,” said Dittmann. “Future observations might enable us to detect the atmosphere of a potentially habitable planet for the first time. We plan to search for water and, ultimately, molecular oxygen.”

With thousands of planets now confirmed, each day we get a little closer to that futuristic “Star Trek” mission credo “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.” 

ALSO ON HUFFPOST

Artists’ Conceptions Of Extrasolar Planets
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Lee Speigel Writer, Editor, The Huffington Post
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22 Apr 2017 09:09

Origins of Indonesian hobbits finally revealed

April 21, 2017 in Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils 


Origins of Indonesian hobbits finally revealed Artist's impression of Homo floresiensis. Credit: Katrina Kenny, SA Museum

The most comprehensive study on the bones of Homo floresiensis, a species of tiny human discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, has found that they most likely evolved from an ancestor in Africa and not from Homo erectus as has been widely believed.

The study by The Australian National University (ANU) found Homo floresiensis, dubbed "the hobbits" due to their small stature, were most likely a sister species of Homo habilis—one of the earliest known species of human found in Africa 1.75 million years ago.

Data from the study concluded there was no evidence for the popular theory that Homo floresiensis evolved from the much larger Homo erectus, the only other early hominid known to have lived in the region with fossils discovered on the Indonesian mainland of Java.

Study leader Dr Debbie Argue of the ANU School of Archaeology & Anthropology, said the results should help put to rest a debate that has been hotly contested ever since Homo floresiensis was discovered.

"The analyses show that on the family tree, Homo floresiensis was likely a sister species of Homo habilis. It means these two shared a common ancestor," Dr Argue said.

"It's possible that Homo floresiensis evolved in Africa and migrated, or the common ancestor moved from Africa then evolved into Homo floresiensis somewhere."

Origins of Indonesian hobbits finally revealed A reconstructed skull of Homo floresiensis. Credit: Stuart Hay, ANU.

Homo floresiensis is known to have lived on Flores until as recently as 54,000 years ago.

The study was the result of an Australian Research Council grant in 2010 that enabled the researchers to explore where the newly-found species fits in the human evolutionary tree.

Where previous research had focused mostly on the skull and lower jaw, this study used 133 data points ranging across the skull, jaws, teeth, arms, legs and shoulders.

Dr Argue said none of the data supported the theory that Homo floresiensis evolved from Homo erectus.

"We looked at whether Homo floresiensis could be descended from Homo erectus," she said.

"We found that if you try and link them on the family tree, you get a very unsupported result. All the tests say it doesn't fit—it's just not a viable theory."

Dr Argue said this was supported by the fact that in many features, such as the structure of the jaw, Homo floresiensis was more primitive than Homo erectus.

"Logically, it would be hard to understand how you could have that regression—why would the jaw of Homo erectus evolve back to the primitive condition we see in Homo floresiensis?"

Dr Argue said the analyses could also support the theory that Homo floresiensis could have branched off earlier in the timeline, more than 1.75 million years ago.

"If this was the case Homo floresiensis would have evolved before the earliest Homo habilis, which would make it very archaic indeed," she said.

Origins of Indonesian hobbits finally revealed Credit: Australian National University

Professor Mike Lee of Flinders University and the South Australian Museum, used statistical modeling to analyse the data.

"When we did the analysis there was really clear support for the relationship with Homo habilis. Homo floresiensis occupied a very primitive position on the human evolutionary tree," Professor Lee said.

"We can be 99 per cent sure it's not related to Homo erectus and nearly 100 per cent chance it isn't a malformed Homo sapiens," Professor Lee said.

Provided by Australian National University

"Origins of Indonesian hobbits finally revealed" April 21, 2017 https://phys.org/news/2017-04-indonesia ... ealed.html
 
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22 Apr 2017 15:49

Physicists demonstrate new way to violate local causality
(Phys.org)—For the first time, physicists have experimentally demonstrated the violation of "bilocal causality"—a concept that is related to the more standard local causality, except that it accounts for the precise way in which physical systems are initially generated. The results show that it's possible to violate local causality in an entirely new and more general way, which could lead to a potential new resource for quantum technologies.

The physicists, Gonzalo Carvacho et al., from institutions in Italy, Brazil, and Germany, have published a paper on the demonstration of the violation of bilocal causality in a recent issue of Nature Communications.

In general, the idea of local causality is usually taken for granted: objects can influence other objects only when they are physically close together, and any correlations between distant objects must have originated in the past when they were closer together. But in the quantum world, distant particles can be correlated in ways that are impossible for classical objects, unless these distant particles can somehow influence each other.

To determine whether local causality has been violated, physicists perform Bell tests, which attempt to violate Bell inequalities. If a Bell inequality is violated, then either locality or realism (or simply "local realism") has also been violated.

There are dozens of different versions of Bell inequalities, but currently they all make the same assumption: that the correlations between particles all originate from a single common source. In real experiments, however, particles and their correlations can come from many different sources.
Rest of article
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-physicist ... ality.html


Don't get your hopes up about an FTL telephone system
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22 Apr 2017 21:11

Physicists demonstrate new way to violate local causality
(Phys.org)—For the first time, physicists have experimentally demonstrated the violation of "bilocal causality"—a concept that is related to the more standard local causality, except that it accounts for the precise way in which physical systems are initially generated. The results show that it's possible to violate local causality in an entirely new and more general way, which could lead to a potential new resource for quantum technologies.

The physicists, Gonzalo Carvacho et al., from institutions in Italy, Brazil, and Germany, have published a paper on the demonstration of the violation of bilocal causality in a recent issue of Nature Communications.

In general, the idea of local causality is usually taken for granted: objects can influence other objects only when they are physically close together, and any correlations between distant objects must have originated in the past when they were closer together. But in the quantum world, distant particles can be correlated in ways that are impossible for classical objects, unless these distant particles can somehow influence each other.

To determine whether local causality has been violated, physicists perform Bell tests, which attempt to violate Bell inequalities. If a Bell inequality is violated, then either locality or realism (or simply "local realism") has also been violated.

There are dozens of different versions of Bell inequalities, but currently they all make the same assumption: that the correlations between particles all originate from a single common source. In real experiments, however, particles and their correlations can come from many different sources.
Rest of article
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-physicist ... ality.html


Don't get your hopes up about an FTL telephone system
I don't think so either- though how do you feel about teleportation?  We've done it with large molecules so far across a distance of about 20 miles.  I've read so many articles lately, I'm just going to post them all in one snippet in one post below.
 
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22 Apr 2017 21:19

http://www.livescience.com/58171-time-c ... e-lab.html

 

By Tia Ghose, Senior Writer |

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Editor's Note: This article was updated on March 9 at 11:20 a.m. E.T.

A bizarre new state of matter known as a time crystal seems to suspend the laws of thermodynamics almost indefinitely, two new experiments suggest.

The time crystal is essentially a collection of atoms or ions that are far apart but still interacting with each other. This form of matter keeps "ticking" indefinitely at a certain frequency, without heating up or creating entropy, the natural state of disorder that always increases in the universe. Time crystals work because of quantum effects, or the bizarre rules describing the menagerie of tiny subatomic particles.

The newly created matter joins a host of other exotic states of matter, such as superconductors, quantum-spin liquids and superfluids.

"We have found a new phase of matter," said study co-author Soonwon Choi, a theoretical physics graduate student at Harvard University. "It's something moving in time while still stable." [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]

https://astronomynow.com/2017/03/14/sta ... lack-hole/

https://astronomynow.com/2017/03/09/hub ... -big-meal/

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-capture-i ... axies.html

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-singulari ... verse.html

A team of scientists at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, India, have found new ways to detect a bare or naked singularity, the most extreme object in the universe.

When the fuel of a very massive star is spent, it collapses due to its own gravitational pull and eventually becomes a very small region of arbitrarily high matter density, that is a 'Singularity', where the usual laws of physics may breakdown. If this singularity is hidden within an event horizon, which is an invisible closed surface from which nothing, not even light, can escape, then we call this object a black hole. In such a case, we cannot see the singularity and we do not need to bother about its effects. But what if the event horizon does not form? In fact, Einstein's theory of general relativity does predict such a possibility when massive stars collapse at the end of their life-cycles. In this case, we are left with the tantalizing option of observing a naked singularity.

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-naked-mol ... xygen.html

Deprived of oxygen, naked mole-rats can survive by metabolizing fructose just as plants do, researchers report this week in the journal Science.

Understanding how the animals do this could lead to treatments for patients suffering crises of oxygen deprivation, as in heart attacks and strokes.

"This is just the latest remarkable discovery about the naked mole-rat—a cold-blooded mammal that lives decades longer than other rodents, rarely gets cancer, and doesn't feel many types of pain," says Thomas Park, professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who led an international team of researchers from UIC, the Max Delbrück Institute in Berlin and the University of Pretoria in South Africa on the study.

In humans, laboratory mice, and all other known mammals, when brain cells are starved of oxygen they run out of energy and begin to die.

But naked mole-rats have a backup: their brain cells start burning fructose, which produces energy anaerobically through a metabolic pathway that is only used by plants - or so scientists thought.

In the new study, the researchers exposed naked mole-rats to low oxygen conditions in the laboratory and found that they released large amounts of fructose into the bloodstream. The fructose, the scientists found, was transported into brain cells by molecular fructose pumps that in all other mammals are found only on cells of the intestine.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-04-naked-mol ... n.html#jCp

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170418 ... -389607397

nor point of interest regarding the Spitler Burst.” The email subject line popped up on Shami Chatterjee’s computer screen just after 3 in the afternoon on Nov. 5, 2015.

When Chatterjee read the email, he first gasped in shock — and then sprinted out of his Cornell University office and down the corridor to tell a colleague. Twenty-eight minutes later, when he started to draft a reply, his inbox was already buzzing. The email thread grew and grew, with 56 messages from colleagues by midnight.

For nearly a decade, Chatterjee and other astrophysicists on the thread had been trying to understand the nature of short, superenergetic flashes of radio waves in space. These “fast radio bursts,” or FRBs, last just a few milliseconds, but they are the most luminous radio signals in the universe, powered by as much energy as 500 million suns. The first one was spotted in 2007 by the astronomer Duncan Lorimer, who together with one of his students stumbled upon the signal accidentally in old telescope data; at the time, few believed it. Skeptics suspected interference from mobile phones or microwave ovens. But more and more FRBs kept showing up — 26 have been counted so far, including the Spitler burst, detected by the astronomer Laura Spitler in data from 2012 — and scientists had to agree they were real.

The question was, what causes them? Researchers sketched dozens of models, employing the gamut of astrophysical mysteries — from flare stars in our own galaxy to exploding stars,mergers of charged black holes, white holes, evaporating black holes, oscillating primordial cosmic strings, and evenaliens sailing through the cosmos using extragalactic light sails. For scientists, the FRBs were as blinding as flash grenades in a dark forest; their power, brevity and unpredictability simply made it impossible to see the source of the light.

The email alerting Chatterjee and colleagues to a “minor point of interest” changed all that. Its sender was Paul Scholz, a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal and a collaborator of Chatterjee’s. He was performing astrophysical “due diligence,” sifting with the help of a supercomputer through all the telescope data that had been collected from the part of the sky where the Spitler burst originated, to see whether the source might send a second signal. According to Chatterjee, after two years of doing this and seeing nothing, expectations had dimmed, but “it was just part of a regular rotation; you put in a few minutes to look for it anyway just in case.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150514 ... eed-limit/

the night of October 15, 1991, the “Oh-My-God” particle streaked across the Utah sky.

A cosmic ray from space, it possessed 320 exa-electron volts (EeV) of energy, millions of times more than particles attain at the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built by humans. The particle was going so fast that in a yearlong race with light, it would have lost by mere thousandths of a hair. Its energy equaled that of a bowling ball dropped on a toe. But bowling balls contain as many atoms as there are stars. “Nobody ever thought you could concentrate so much energy into a single particle before,” saidDavid Kieda, an astrophysicist at the University of Utah.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150310 ... lden-mean/

What struck John Learned about the blinking of KIC 5520878, a bluish-white star 16,000 light-years away, was how artificial it seemed.

Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii, Mānoa, has a pet theory that super-advanced alien civilizations might send messages by tickling stars with neutrino beams, eliciting Morse code-like pulses. “It’s the sort of thing tenured senior professors can get away with,” he said. The pulsations of KIC 5520878, recorded recently by NASA’s Kepler telescope, suggested that the star might be so employed.

A “variable” star, KIC 5520878 brightens and dims in a six-hour cycle, seesawing between cool-and-clear and hot-and-opaque. Overlaying this rhythm is a second, subtler variation of unknown origin; this frequency interplays with the first to make some of the star’s pulses brighter than others. In the fluctuations, Learned had identified interesting and, he thought, possibly intelligent sequences, such as prime numbers (which have been floated as a conceivable basis of extraterrestrial communication). He then found hints that the star’s pulses were chaotic.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160927 ... gonfly-44/

Among the thousand-plus galaxies in the Coma cluster, a massive clump of matter some 300 million light-years away, is at least one — and maybe a few hundred — that shouldn’t exist.

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Dragonfly 44 is a dim galaxy, with one star for every hundred in our Milky Way. But it spans roughly as much space as the Milky Way. In addition, it’s heavy enough to rival our own galaxy in mass, according to results published in the Astrophysical Journal Lettersat the end of August. That odd combination is crucial: Dragonfly 44 is so dark, so fluffy, and so heavy that some astronomers believe it will either force a revision of our theories of galaxy formation or help us understand the properties of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that interacts with normal matter via gravity and not much else. Or both.

https://astronomynow.com/2017/03/09/anc ... rst-stars/

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170411 ... nes-proof/

Imagine a set of many lines as in a dream. The lines intersect at a point and radiate outward. There’s something perfect about the way they’re spaced that you can’t quite put your finger on. You start counting them, but before you can finish you wake up with a question hanging on the fringe of your mind: Just how many were there?

For at least 70 years, mathematicians have been trying to answer a question like that one. The sets of lines they’re interested in share a basic feature: Any two lines from the set intersect to form the same angle. Such sets of lines are called “equiangular.” Mathematicians want to know just how big those sets can get as you move past the 3-D space of our everyday experience and into higher dimensions.

there's an intriguing connection between the gaps in different energy levels in atoms and the seemingly random gaps in prime numbers.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170404 ... ypothesis/

It's imperfect but still an intriguing connection- sort of like Bode's "law" for the gaps between the orbits of planetary bodies in the solar system.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170302 ... of-groups/

The patterns of class numbers is also intriguing as is Fermat's last theorem.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170303 ... t-theorem/

Everything in mathematics- and the rest of science- is connected.
 
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DoctorOfSpace
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26 Apr 2017 02:01

Remain super skeptical to this but if true this is pretty big stuff
[hr] [youtube]cdTuwe2SruA[/youtube]

Scientist invents way to trigger artificial photosynthesis to clean air
A chemistry professor in Florida has just found a way to trigger the process of photosynthesis in a synthetic material, turning greenhouse gases into clean air and producing energy all at the same time. The process has great potential for creating a technology that could significantly reduce greenhouse gases linked to climate change, while also creating a clean way to produce energy
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https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases ... 042517.php
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27 Apr 2017 19:46

I've seen contact binary stars in Space Engine, but not really any contact binary asteroids. Yet.
Arecibo radar observations of the near-Earth asteroid 2014 JO25 reveal a contact binary shape with boulders on both components. The morphology reminds me a bit of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, or ... another Rubber Ducky.
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