General Science Thread

[DZ]

Damn... feel like I am chasing the purple dragon on that one Dixie. Thanks. And I mean that in the most sarcastic of senses.

One would think it would be easier with a smaller one, so your eyes don't have to dart around at all. It's actually more difficult because you have to look harder to see one at all.

Apparently, basically no one can.

I didn't post a link (forgot), it's on discovermag.com

[DZ]

WOW WOW: I want to talk to Dolphins. Ask one to come to my daughter's birthday party. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...c7d0?section=&






Just WOW

A study claims to have recorded a previously unknown language between dolphins it describes as akin to human speech ― but not everyone’s convinced.

Researchers say they made an audio recording of two black sea bottlenose dolphins named Tasha and Yana emitting unique pulses and whistles that “most likely” formed words and sentences

[DZ]

About time. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...8c30?section=&

Now, California is hammering the nail into the coffin. Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation this week that will outlaw orca breeding and captivity programs in the state.

The new law, which Assemblyman Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica) authored, will also ban California parks from featuring orcas in performances for entertainment purposes. Starting in June 2017, killer whales in captivity can only be used for “educational presentations,” the Los Angeles Times reports. The legislation makes other exceptions for scientific and educational institutions that have orcas in their care.

[DZ]

Star mapping shows Milky Way is bigger than they thought. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/...larger-thought

The Milky Way has been mapped in greater detail than ever before. And a first quick look indicates that our home galaxy is larger in extent than scientists had thought before, says Gisella Clementini, an astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory of Bologna in Italy.

The new information is of particular interest to astronomers studying stellar evolution and the formation history of the Milky Way, including the role and distribution of dark matter. In the future, Gaia is also expected to discover new asteroids in our solar system and thousands of Jupiter-like planets orbiting other stars

[Bogozags]

This is freakin' amazing.

I spent several minutes but could only see four dots at one time...I gazed at the very middle of each line having dots and then could see the four dots on that one line...

I am not sure what this is called but I have seen books where pictures are "layered" and after staring at the middle of the picture, my depth perception comes in and I can see the several layers of objects in that picture...

It's incredible how people can think of let alone design these types of diagrams/pictures...there are some pretty brilliant people out there!

[DZ]

I couldn't either, Bogo.

Noticed page views and 20-30 stop by with each post. I appreciate it. Science gets underreported, imo.

Things like this. Enceladus just surpassed Europa as the leading candidate for life in the solar system outside earth. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ture14262.html

Astrophysicists working with NASA's Saturn sweeping Cassini spacecraft have just announced that Enceladus has a warm ocean at its southern pole with ongoing hydrothermal activity—the first ever discovered outside of Earth. This new research, published in the journal Nature, builds upon last year's discovery of the moon's 6-mile-deep ocean, which is also believed to contain many of the chemicals commonly associated with life.

"We've known from quite early on that Enceladus was the source of the material in Saturn's [outermost] ring… based on the ring's composition" Hsu says, "although we didn't know the exact mechanism for the material transfer." But the 2005 discovery of 125-mile-high icy geysers shouted out to scientists how Enceladus flung material skyward.

The heat - all the way out near Saturn- comes from tidal pressure on the rock. http://www.esquire.com/news-politics...rn-moon-ocean/

With temperate, vent-warmed waters that contain nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, and various other chemicals required for Earth-like life, Enceladus could very much look like the Lost City hydrothermal field under the Atlantic Ocean—an environment where many scientists believe life first originated on Earth. That's a far cry from the scientific state of affairs 15 years ago, when scientists were sure Enceladus was a lump of boring, uneventful rock. This idea would have been laughable.

But while Hsu says Enceladus looks tantalizingly habitable, it's not clear whether life could (or does) exist on the moon. "An important consideration is the timescale of the Enceladus's ocean's hydrothermal activities," Hsu says. That is, we just don't know how long Enceladus's hydrothermal activity has gone on. Unlike thermal activity on Earth, which is powered by our hot, churning core, Enceladus's heat is created by gravitational friction from the pull of Saturn and its other moons.

[bullzag23]

"Science"

[DZ]

Well, that would definitely be underreported. I'd never have guessed.

[DZ]

Too cool to not post. Radiotelescope picture of a black hole releasing energy. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...19e6?section=&

According to NASA, when black holes swallow stars, they release a burst of energy, a flare containing high-energy radiation, including ultraviolet and X-ray light. Now, astronomers have been able to observe the flares for the first time.

Two studies examined these galactic burps, which destroy the space dust closest to the black hole. A little further out, the heat isn’t as intense and the dust can survive.

Using data from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the astronomers were able to measure the radiation this “hot dust” gives off. The dust, which can’t be seen with the naked eye, forms a shell that extends a few trillion miles from the black hole, or about half a light year away, NASA stated.

“The black hole has destroyed everything between itself and this dust shell,” Sjoert van Velzen, postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of one of the studies, said in a NASA news release. “It’s as though the black hole has cleaned its room by throwing flames

[TexasZagFan]

Too cool to not post. Radiotelescope picture of a black hole releasing energy. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...19e6?section=&

IOW, the black hole burped.

[LongIslandZagFan]

IOW, the black hole burped.

How do we know it is a burp and not a fart?

[DZ]

How do we know it is a burp and not a fart?

it went out the same way it came in?

Perhaps - if some scientists are correct in theorizing that black holes release bubbles of new universes on the other side, the new universe could be considered a fart. Actually, that pretty well implies that our universe is a fart, which makes perfect sense.

[DZ]

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/...ience-projects

The tribe of some 400 neuroscientists, computational biologists, physicists, physicians, ethicists, government science counselors, and private funders convened at The Rockefeller University on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in New York City. The Coordinating Global Brain Projects gathering was mandated by the U.S. Congress in a 2015 law funding the U.S. Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative

At the Rockefeller meeting, an important impetus behind the big ambitions—the quest to decipher the gamut of human brain diseases that are still incredibly poorly understood—was evident in the room. “It’s purely getting at the [brain] circuits that’s going to tell us about schizophrenia, autism, multiple psychiatric disorders,” Walter Koroshetz, the director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, told the assembled scientists. Yet our current neuroscience tools are so rudimentary, he noted, that watching the brain function in real time is like “trying to understand what Gone with the Wind is [about] by watching it one pixel at a time over and over again.”

[bullzag23]

Making space look small:

[DZ]

Predicting earthquakes through satellite. http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...d-earthquakes/

Scientists have a new tool that could help them predict earthquakes induced by the effects of pumping wastewater from oil and gas operations deep underground—and it’s in orbit. A team of geophysicists analyzed more than three years of radar data from the Japanese Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) and found they could see the land deform above wastewater disposal wells near Timpson, Texas. Two years later, in 2012, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake rocked the area.