Written by Robert A. Beatty BE (Minerals) FAusIMM(CP)
1 INTRODUCTION: Section Two concluded:
The size of the universe remains an unknown quantity, as does its age which may be due to continuously recycling matter with energy.
Newton’s universal law of gravitation appears to fail at black holes, and regions remote from our solar system.
The Kruskal and Szekeres hyperbola diagram in combination with the Max Plank Constant appears to offer the best description of how matter degrades and converts at black holes.
Written by Katyanna Quach
A SpaceX rocket ripped a humongous hole in Earth’s ionosphere during a launch in California last year and may have impaired GPS satellites.
The Falcon 9 rocket was blasted from Vandenberg Air Force Base on 24 August last year. It was carrying the Formosat-5, an Earth observation satellite, built by the Taiwan’s National Space Organization.
Written by Bianca Nogrady
A compound that may form cell wall-like structures has been detected in the dense atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan.
The discovery, reported today in Science Advances, was made using the highly sensitive Atacama Large Millimeter Array radio telescope in Chile.
Saturn’s largest moon has long been considered an ideal candidate for organic life elsewhere in our galaxy, said the study’s lead author, Maureen Palmer from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
“In some ways Titan is sort of Earth-like,” Ms Palmer said.
The moon’s atmosphere is around 95 per cent nitrogen, and there are lakes and seas on its surface. But unlike Earth, these lakes and seas contain liquid methane rather than water.
Vinyl cyanide (C2H3CN) is an organic molecule used in the manufacture of plastics and synthetic rubbers. While it is toxic to Earth-based life forms, it is ideally suited to form cell-like membranes in the hydrocarbon-rich environment found on Titan.
Cell membranes are thought to be important for the development of life in a liquid environment because they can create a sealed-off chamber where biochemical reactions can take place more easily than in the more dilute open water setting.
Computer simulations have suggested that vinyl cyanide would behave in a similar fashion in Titan’s environment, to the phospholipid molecules that make up cell membranes found in life on Earth.
However, this behaviour is yet to be demonstrated in the laboratory setting.
Earlier research using data from the Cassini spacecraft hinted that vinyl cyanide existed on Titan, but more definitive proof was needed.
Fortunately, the Atacama Large Millimetre Array telescope regularly turns towards Titan and uses the moon to calibrate its energy measurements.
When the research team looked at the frequencies of light being emitted from Titan, they saw a peak that corresponded to the exact frequency of light emitted by the vinyl cyanide molecule.
The molecular signature is actually located high up in Titan’s atmosphere — around 200 kilometres above the moon’s surface — but that doesn’t mean it’s only found there.
“If we wanted to hypothetically form membranes, it would need to reach the surface, which seems like a plausible thing that would happen,” Ms Palmer said.
“Titan has this haze and organic particles are continuously falling out of the atmosphere, and also there’s rain which can bring molecules down in the droplets.”
Because Titan has some things in common with a primitive Earth before our planet’s atmosphere became so oxygen rich, research such as this could also shape scientists’ understanding of how life first developed on Earth.
The next steps are to do even higher resolution studies of Titan’s atmosphere to see how the vinyl cyanide molecules are distributed across the moon’s surface. Ms Palmer also hoped the laboratory experiments might give a real-world demonstration of vinyl cyanide forming membrane structures.
Read more at www.abc.net.au
Written by www.physics-astronomy.com
While exploring the lunar surface, China’s Chang’e 3 lander discovered a new type of moon rock, and managed to snap THOUSANDS of high-resolution images of the moon.
For the first time ever, you can take a peek at the lunar surface like never before thanks to the sophisticated cameras located onboard the Chang’e 3, one of China’s most advanced lunar landers.
Written by Viv Forbes
Earth is a dangerous place. Of all the species that have ever lived, over 95{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} have already been extinguished by natural disasters.
Ice, not global warming, is the big killer, and this recurring calamity often strikes quickly. Thousands of mammoths and other animals were killed by ice storms, and their snap-frozen bodies are still entombed in ice around the Arctic.
Written by Kenneth Richard
Five years ago, the release of the PAGES 2k Consortium (2013) “global” temperature data set was accompanied by a great deal of fanfare.
Advocates deemed the conglomeration of proxy temperature data from 7 land regions as scientific confirmation of the notorious hockey-stick-shaped temperature reconstruction popularized by Michael Mann and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, TAR) in the early 2000s.
Written by Nate Church
A mysterious network of fluid-filled channels may be the key to how cancerous cells spread throughout the body.
Using advanced endoscopy techniques, a team of medical researchers expected to find evidence that the bile duct is protected by a wall of dense external tissue. Instead, what the discovered was a strange series of patterns. When they brought the results to New York University School of Medicine Pathologist Neil Theise, he immediately set to work, trying to explain what they were seeing.
Written by www.moonofalabama.org
A week ago we asked if ‘Novichok’ poisons are real. The answer is now in: It is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Several Russian scientist now say that they once researched and developed lethal poisons but they assert that other countries can and have copied these.
Written by Collective-Evolution.com
It’s well-recognized that the incidence of autoimmune diseases has been rising at an enormous rate. A study indicates that a significant factor in causing them may be the common bakers or brewers yeast, Sacccharomyces cerevisiae[1] used in many vaccinations, including HepB, which is given to nearly all newborn babies in the United States before they’re a day old.
Written by Mary Halton
Image copyright NASA/ESA/P. VAN DOKKUMAn unusually transparent galaxy about the size of the Milky Way is prompting new questions for astrophysicists. The object, with the catchy moniker of NGC1052-DF2, appears to contain no dark matter.
If this turns out to be true, it may be the first galaxy of its kind – made up only of ordinary matter. Currently, dark matter is thought to be essential to the fabric of the Universe as we understand it.
Written by Dr Benny Peiser
A new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) counters media hype over recent warm global temperatures, showing that almost all of the sudden increase in temperatures in the last couple of years was caused by a record strong natural El Nino phenomenon rather than global warming.
Written by John Droz Jr
Trying to pin down the arguments of wind promoters is a bit like trying to grab a greased balloon. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it morphs into a different story and escapes your grasp. Let’s take a quick highlight review of how things have evolved with merchandising industrial wind energy.
Written by Anthony J. Sadar
Perhaps the best challenge to the hysterical claims that humans are causing unusual climate change is the demonstration that “exceptional” weather events can be predicted in advance based on their natural occurrence in history.
Written by James Delingpole
The scare about global warming is overdone, according to more than 40 scientific papers published in just the first three months of 2018.
What their charts clearly show is that “nothing climatically unusual is happening.”
In the chart below from a study by Polovodova et al, we see that 20th-century warming is perfectly normal in a long-term historical context. It was no warmer – indeed, is slightly cooler – than either the Roman Warm Period or the Medieval Warming Period.
Written by Dr Jerry L Krause
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. Einstein
In (https://principia-scientific.com/dr-jerry-l-krause-how-stupid-am-i/, 1/18/2018) I wrote:
However, having grown up in northeastern South Dakota where the precipitation was commonly much less than that of Iowa, the result was that our relative humidity was usually significantly less than that of humid Iowa. So I knew the reason for the warmer nights in Iowa was that dew generally formed on stuff there much earlier in the evening then it did where I grew up. And sure enough this example of the greenhouse effect quietly disappeared. And I forgot about dew.
Written by Martin Marcus
The east coast of the United States just endured a rare spring snowstorm. How could this happen when NASA is constantly announcing that we have record high temperatures?
Advocates of the global warming theory have been predicting rising temperatures since around 1983. Available data indicated no such trend, so these advocates found reasons to adjust past temperatures downward.