Tag: science

A recently discovered 1.8 million year old skull suggests that the multiple human species theorized by paleontologists were actually just one.

3:39 pm

The uncertainty of science: A recently discovered 1.8 million year old skull suggests that the multiple human species theorized by paleontologists were actually just one. More details here.

It is one of five early human skulls — four of which have jaws — found so far at the site, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the capital Tbilisi, along with stone tools that hint at butchery and the bones of big, saber-toothed cats. Lead researcher David Lordkipanidze, director of the Georgian National Museum, described the group as “the richest and most complete collection of indisputable early Homo remains from any one site.”

The skulls vary so much in appearance that under other circumstances, they might have been considered different species, said co-author Christoph Zollikofer of the University of Zurich. “Yet we know that these individuals came from the same location and the same geological time, so they could, in principle, represent a single population of a single species,” he said. The researchers compared the variation in characteristics of the skulls and found that while their jaw, brow and skull shapes were distinct, their traits were all within the range of what could be expected among members of the same species.

I have always thought that paleontologists were too quick to name each new major find as a new species. Among all species there is always a wide variety of features. One person is tall. Another has a big forehead or head. This discovery reinforces this idea. The five skulls were all found in the same place, from the same group. Yet they were very different from each other.

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A bogus scientific paper, with numerous errors, was accepted for publication by more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific journals.

12:36 pm

A bogus scientific paper, with numerous errors, was accepted for publication by more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The scientist purposely wrote a paper that should have been unacceptable for publication in order to see if peer-review would spot the problems. What he found was that more than half the journals to which he submitted didn’t notice or care, and accepted the paper as is.

The journals in this case were open-access, meaning that they are free to readers but charge authors money for publication. Thus, rejecting papers is against their financial interest. Nonetheless, the number of journals willing to be unethical is quite disturbing, and reveals a rottenness lurking in the heart of the science field that no one wants to talk about.

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Scientists have found a fossil of a mosquito with traces of blood in its engorged abdomen.

8:30 am

Scientists have found a fossil of a mosquito with traces of blood in its engorged abdomen.

Although scientists have found fossils of suspected blood-sucking insects, the creatures’ feeding habits have mostly been inferred from their anatomy or the presence of blood-borne parasites in their guts. But Greenwalt’s fossilized mosquito contains molecules that provide strong evidence of blood-feeding among ancient insects back to 46 million years ago. It is a fortunate find. “The abdomen of a blood-engorged mosquito is like a balloon ready to burst. It is very fragile,” says Greenwalt. “The chances that it wouldn’t have disintegrated prior to fossilization were infinitesimally small.”

Some news reports have implied that the scientists had found actual blood 46 million years old. This is not the case. They found “large traces of iron and the organic molecule porphyrin — both constituents of haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying pigment found in vertebrate blood. These molecules were either rare or absent in the abdomen of a fossilized male mosquito (which does not drink blood) of the same age, found at the same location.” Still, even though this isn’t actual blood, the evidence is good and so the result is quite cool.

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Scientist right now think it is a toss-up whether Comet ISON will survive its dive past the sun on November 28.

10:43 am

Scientist right now think it is a toss-up whether Comet ISON will survive its dive past the sun on November 28.

Essentially, they have no idea what will happen. They know most of the factors effecting the comet, but cannot predict the result. If the comet breaks up, however, it will be very cool, as this will probably be the largest comet ever seen by astronomers to do this.

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Two days after its flyby of Earth, Jupiter probe Juno remains in safe mode.

10:38 am

Two days after its flyby of Earth, Jupiter probe Juno remains in safe mode.

The Juno spacecraft is in a healthy and stable state, with its tractor-trailer-size solar panels pointed toward the sun. The mission team is in communication with Juno and has seen no sign of any failures in the probe’s subsystems or components, said project manager Rick Nybakken of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. So Juno’s handlers plan to take their time and do a thorough investigation before attempting to bring all of the spacecraft’s systems back online.

In other words, there is no rush to take the spacecraft out of safe mode. It is far better to figure out exactly what is going on first.

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One hundred days to wake-up for Europe’s Rosetta comet probe.

8:26 am

One hundred days to wake-up for Europe’s Rosetta comet probe.

Rosetta was launched on 2 March 2004, and through a complex series of flybys – three times past Earth and once past Mars – set course to its destination: comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It also flew by and imaged two asteroids, Steins on 5 September 2008 and Lutetia on 10 July 2010. In July 2011 Rosetta was put into deep-space hibernation for the coldest, most distant leg of the journey as it travelled some 800 million kilometres from the Sun, close to the orbit of Jupiter. The spacecraft was oriented so that its solar wings faced the Sun to receive as much sunlight as possible, and it was placed into a slow spin to maintain stability.

Now, as both the comet and the spacecraft are on the return journey back into the inner Solar System, the Rosetta team is preparing for the spacecraft to wake up.
Rosetta mission milestones 2014-2015 Rosetta’s internal alarm clock is set for 10:00 GMT on 20 January 2014.

The first images are expected back in May 2014.

Posted as we approach the Arkansas-Texas border.

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An eleven year old’s experiment in brewing beer in space will fly to ISS on the next Cygnus cargo flight in December.

6:17 pm

An eleven year old’s experiment in brewing beer in space will fly to ISS on the next Cygnus cargo flight in December.

The tiny brewery is set up inside a 6-inch-long (15 centimeters) tube, filled with separated hops, water, yeast and malted barley — all of the key ingredients used to make beer — and will be delivered to the station by the commercial firm NanoRacks. An astronaut aboard the station will shake up the mixture to see how the yeast interacts with the other ingredients in the beer. “I really didn’t expect this from the start,” Bodzianowski told KDVR, a Fox affiliate in Denver. “I really just designed my experiment to get a good grade in my class.”

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China complains about the ban of its scientists at a NASA Kepler conference.

5:40 am

China complains about the ban of its scientists at a NASA Kepler conference.

The meeting is a key event for scientists searching for planets beyond the solar system. NASA has rejected applications from Chinese nationals, citing a new security law. In Beijing, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying called the move “discriminatory”. The conference is for US and international teams who work on Nasa’s Kepler space telescope program. It will be held at Nasa’s Ames research centre in California next month.

And I say, tough. China does not distinguish between civilian and military research, and in fact has often used its scientists to do espionage, stealing both military and industry secrets in the process.

Posted in Virginia as we pass through Harrisonburg. Note again that Diane, not I, is doing the driving.

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Engineers hope Juno’s Earth flyby yesterday will help solve a mystery seen in previous flybys by unmanned probes.

5:32 am

The uncertainty of science: Engineers hope Juno’s Earth flyby yesterday will help solve a mystery seen in previous flybys by unmanned probes.

Since 1990, mission controllers at ESA and NASA have noticed that their spacecraft sometimes experience a strange variation in the amount of orbital energy they pick up from Earth during flybys, a technique routinely used to fling satellites deep into our Solar System. The unexplained variation is noticed as a tiny difference in the expected speed gained (or lost) during the passage.

The variations are extremely small: NASA’s Jupiter probe ended up just 3.9 mm/s faster than expected when it swung past Earth in December 1990. The largest variation– a boost of 13.0 mm/s – was seen with NASA’s NEAR asteroid craft in January 1998. Conversely, the differences during swingbys of NASA’s Cassini in 1999 and Messenger in 2005 were so small that they could not be confirmed.

The experts are stumped.

It is likely that these small variations are related in some way with simple engineering and not some unknown feature of gravity. Nonetheless, it remains a mystery.

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Is a natural rain of diamonds occurring on Jupiter and Saturn? Two scientists say yes!

5:07 am

Is a natural rain of diamonds occurring on Jupiter and Saturn? Two scientists say yes!

In their scenario, lightning zaps molecules of methane in the upper atmospheres of Saturn and Jupiter, liberating carbon atoms. These atoms then stick onto each other, forming larger particles of carbon soot, which the Cassini spacecraft may have spotted in dark storm clouds on Saturn3. As the soot particles slowly float down through ever-denser layers of gaseous and liquid hydrogen towards the planets’ rocky cores, they experience ever greater pressures and temperatures. The soot is compressed into graphite, and then into solid diamonds before reaching a temperature of about 8,000 °C, when the diamond melts, forming liquid diamond raindrops, they say. Inside Saturn, the conditions are right for diamond ‘hail’ to form, beginning at a depth of about 6,000 kilometres into the atmosphere and extending for another 30,000 km below that, says Baines. He estimates that Saturn may harbour about 10 million tonnes of diamond produced this way, with most of it made up of rocks no bigger than a millimetre and perhaps some chunks spanning 10 centimeters.

But don’t invest your money yet in a diamond gathering expedition. This is only a theory, which many scientists dispute.

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After the unmanned probe Juno zipped past the Earth on its way to Jupiter today, it unexpectedly went into safe mode.

9:28 pm

After the unmanned probe Juno zipped past the Earth on its way to Jupiter today, it unexpectedly went into safe mode.

Engineers continued to diagnose the issue, which occurred after Juno whipped around Earth in a momentum-gathering flyby. Up until Wednesday, Juno had been in excellent health. While in safe mode, it can communicate with ground controllers, but its activities are limited.

It is unclear at the moment why this happened.

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Scientists in Egypt have found what they think is evidence of a comet impact from 28 million years ago.

10:39 am

Scientists in Egypt have found what they think is evidence of a comet impact from 28 million years ago.

The best part however is this:

At the centre of the attention of this team was a mysterious black pebble found years earlier by an Egyptian geologist in the area of the silica glass. After conducting highly sophisticated chemical analyses on this pebble, the authors came to the inescapable conclusion that it represented the very first known hand specimen of a comet nucleus, rather than simply an unusual type of meteorite.

Assuming this claim is confirmed it is a very significant discovery. As far as I know, no other specimens from a comet nucleus have been identified previously.

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Ramping down from solar maximum

6:55 am

Yesterday, despite the government shutdown, NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, and as I do every month, I am posting it here, below the fold, with annotations.

My interpretation of this data tells me that almost certainly the solar maximum has ended. We might see some later fluctuations whereby the sunspot number jumps, but the Sun is clearly beginning its ramp down to solar minimum.
» Read more

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Making Martian clouds — on Earth.

5:20 pm

Making Martian clouds — on Earth.

They’ve recreated Mars-like conditions within a three-story-tall cloud chamber in Germany, adjusting the chamber’s temperature and relative humidity to match conditions on Mars — essentially forming Martian clouds on Earth. While the researchers were able to create clouds at the frigid temperatures typically found on Mars, they discovered that cloud formation in such conditions required adjusting the chamber’s relative humidity to 190 percent — far greater than cloud formation requires on Earth. The finding should help improve conventional models of the Martian atmosphere, many of which assume that Martian clouds require humidity levels similar to those found on Earth.

The required high humidity seems very counter-intuitive, considering Mars’s presently dry environment. I suspect it implies that there are other unknown factors about the Martian atmosphere that the scientists have not yet considered.

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The weather on an exoplanet: Cloudy and clear.

3:09 pm

The weather on an exoplanet: Cloudy and clear.

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have created the first cloud map of a planet beyond our solar system, a sizzling, Jupiter-like world known as Kepler-7b. The planet is marked by high clouds in the west and clear skies in the east. Previous studies from Spitzer have resulted in temperature maps of planets orbiting other stars, but this is the first look at cloud structures on a distant world.

This result is cool, but no one should take it too seriously. They have detected evidence of that to the scientists “suggest” clouds, but no one really knows.

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A good global warming scientists comments on the IPCC report: “The increase from 90-95% means that they are more certain. How they can justify this is beyond me.”

1:56 pm

A good global warming scientists comments on the IPCC report: “The increase from 90-95% means that they are more certain. How they can justify this is beyond me.”

Read the whole post. Curry illustrates in blunt language how broken the IPCC process is, and how little it has to do with real science.

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Curiosity has found that water and other interesting things permeate the soil of Mars.

8:14 pm

Curiosity has found that water and other interesting things permeate the soil of Mars.

When [a soil sample was] heated, the instrument detected the abundance of water [about 2% of the sample] plus significant quantities of carbon dioxide, oxygen and sulfur compounds, according to the researchers. Carbonate materials — compounds that form in the presence of water — were also identified. The experiment confirmed the presence of oxygen- and chlorine-containing compounds — likely chlorates or perchlorates. Originally discovered by NASA’s 2008 Phoenix Mars Lander (and likely detected by NASA’s Viking landers in 1976), perchlorates were found in the soil of high-latitude arctic regions. This indicates that perchlorates occur globally over Mars. Though highly toxic to human biology, some microbes are known to use the oxidizing chemical for energy. This finding intensified the debate over whether hypothetical microbes on Mars could metabolize perchlorates in a similar way.

Perchlorates were proposed as an explanation for the Viking results by scientists who did not believe those results suggested the presence of microbiological life. I find it interesting that now scientists are saying that the perchlorates might actually be evidence of life. Once again, the uncertainty of science rules the day!

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