Curiosity Rover Makes Big Water Discovery in Mars Dirt, a 'Wow Moment'

Future Mars explorers may be able to get all the water they need out of the red dirt beneath their boots, a new study suggests.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has found that surface soil on the Red Planet contains about 2 percent water by weight. That means astronaut pioneers could extract roughly 2 pints (1 liter) of water out of every cubic foot (0.03 cubic meters) of Martian dirt they dig up, said study lead author Laurie Leshin, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

 

"For me, that was a big 'wow' moment," Leshin told SPACE.com. "I was really happy when we saw that there's easily accessible water here in the dirt beneath your feet. And it's probably true anywhere you go on Mars."

In Fragmented Forests, Rapid Mammal Extinctions

An isolated forest in the Chiew Larn reservoir. A Thai government project to supply hydroelectric power to the area transformed 150 forested hilltops into islands.

 

In 1987, the government of Thailand launched a huge, unplanned experiment. They built a dam across the Khlong Saeng river, creating a 60-square-mile reservoir. As the Chiew Larn reservoir rose, it drowned the river valley, transforming 150 forested hilltops into islands, each with its own isolated menagerie of wildlife.

 

Conservation biologists have long known that fragmenting wilderness can put species at risk of extinction. But it’s been hard to gauge how long it takes for those species to disappear. Chiew Larn has given biologists the opportunity to measure the speed of mammal extinctions. “It’s a rare thing to come by in ecological studies,” said Luke Gibson, a biologist at the National University of Singapore.

 

Over two decades, Dr. Gibson and his colleagues have tracked the diversity of mammals on the islands. In Friday’s issue of the journal Science, they report that the extinctions have turned out to be distressingly fast.

      

“Our results should be a warning,” said Dr. Gibson. “This is the trend that the world is going in.” Tropical forests are regularly cleared for logging, farming and cities. In most cases, the only original tree cover is reduced to isolated patches. Many of the original species of plants and animals may still survive in those fragments, but they experience new stresses. The edges of the fragments are no longer dim and humid, for example.

Oxygen Generated In Earth’s Atmosphere Much Earlier Than Thought: Study

A new study finds oxygen may have filled the atmosphere of our Earth hundreds of millions of years earlier than what was previously thought. The findings published in the Nature journal on September 26 suggest the sunlight-dependent life akin to modern plants evolved very early in the history of our planet. The authors also suggested more worlds could be inhabited around the universe.

Researcher Sean Crowe said, “The fact oxygen is there requires oxygenic photosynthesis, a very complex metabolic pathway, very early in Earth’s history… That tells us it doesn’t take long for biology to evolve very complex metabolic capabilities.”

 

Crowe is a biogeochemist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He analyzed levels of chromium and other metals with his colleagues. They focused on different levels of chromium isotopes.

 

Crowe said, “It’s exciting that it took a relatively short time for oxygenic photosynthesis to evolve on Earth… It means that it could happen on other planets ..., expanding the number of worlds that could’ve developed oxygenated atmospheres and complex oxygen-breathing life.”

A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics: Immanent Cosmic Platonic Teleology

Artist’s rendering of the amplituhedron, a newly discovered mathematical object resembling a multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated — the probabilities of outcomes of particle interactions.

 

Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.

 

“This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.

 

The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.

 

“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and one of the researchers who developed the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”

 

The new geometric version of quantum field theory could also facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe. Attempts thus far to incorporate gravity into the laws of physics at the quantum scale have run up against nonsensical infinities and deep paradoxes. The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and unitarity.

 

“Both are hard-wired in the usual way we think about things,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the lead author of the new work, which he is presenting in talks and in a forthcoming paper. “Both are suspect.”

 

Locality is the notion that particles can interact only from adjoining positions in space and time. And unitarity holds that the probabilities of all possible outcomes of a quantum mechanical interaction must add up to one. The concepts are the central pillars of quantum field theory in its original form, but in certain situations involving gravity, both break down, suggesting neither is a fundamental aspect of nature.

 

In keeping with this idea, the new geometric approach to particle interactions removes locality and unitarity from its starting assumptions. The amplituhedron is not built out of space-time and probabilities; these properties merely arise as consequences of the jewel’s geometry. The usual picture of space and time, and particles moving around in them, is a construct. “It’s a better formulation that makes you think about everything in a completely different way,” said David Skinner, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University.

 

The amplituhedron itself does not describe gravity. But Arkani-Hamed and his collaborators think there might be a related geometric object that does. Its properties would make it clear why particles appear to exist, and why they appear to move in three dimensions of space and to change over time.

 

Beyond making calculations easier or possibly leading the way to quantum gravity, the discovery of the amplituhedron could cause an even more profound shift, Arkani-Hamed said. That is, giving up space and time as fundamental constituents of nature and figuring out how the Big Bang and cosmological evolution of the universe arose out of pure geometry.

 

“In a sense, we would see that change arises from the structure of the object,” he said. “But it’s not from the object changing. The object is basically timeless.”

While more work is needed, many theoretical physicists are paying close attention to the new ideas. The work is “very unexpected from several points of view,” said Witten, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study. “The field is still developing very fast, and it is difficult to guess what will happen or what the lessons will turn out to be.”

Life’s Beginnings: Studying how life bloomed on Earth—and might emerge elsewhere

Photograph by Stu Rosner; background image NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

“If you think of the two deepest and most challenging questions we could ask about life, I think they’re ‘How did it begin, and are we alone in the universe?’ ” says Andrew Knoll, Fisher professor of natural history. “And what I find remarkable when I think about it is that we are really the first generation in human history to ask those as scientific rather than philosophical questions.”

 

The initiative, launched with seed money from the University in 2005, has brought together scientists from largely disconnected fields—astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, earth and planetary sciences—to tackle these issues. Sasselov says such breadth of expertise is necessary because so many conditions influence life’s emergence. How did the Earth aggregate from cosmic elements in such a way that it could support life? What environmental conditions does life require? How do inorganic molecules begin to behave like living organisms: replicating, organizing into cells, growing, evolving?

 

“In a certain sense our main question is really: what is the nature of life?” Sasselov explains. “That’s why we call it the Origins of Life Initiative. The plural here is very intentional.” If the only goal is to understand life on Earth, he says, it’s a historical question. But if the goal is to understand how life emerges from particular environmental and chemical conditions, then the answer is much more fundamental. It raises the possibility that life could form in different ways on different planets. And ultimately, Sasselov believes, it could help us move beyond simply describing life to uncovering universal principles that govern it, akin to principles of planetary motion.

At racist gathering, Obama vows to disarm White Americans

At Black Caucus Dinner, Obama Vows to ‘March’ on Gun Control

Not a White face to be found

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Obama vowed today that he would “keep marching” on the hot button issues of his presidency in the face of a defiant Republican opposition. ... During his remarks the president also lamented the difficulty he has faced trying to strengthen gun control measures through the legislative process in light of the “unspeakable grief” of recent mass shootings. ... “Just two days ago, in my hometown of Chicago, 13 people were shot during a pickup basketball game, including a 3-year-old girl,” he said. “Tomorrow night I’ll be meeting and mourning with families in this city who now know the same unspeakable grief of families in Newtown, and Aurora, and Tucson, and Chicago, and New Orleans, and all across the country — people whose loved ones were torn from them without headlines sometimes, or public outcry.”

 

The responsible many should be stripped of their rights because of the irresponsible few?

 

As the demographics shift, that's exactly what will happen.

 

Revolution is the only solution

Ultracold Big Bang experiment simulates evolution of early universe

Physicists have reproduced a pattern resembling the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation in a laboratory simulation of the Big Bang, using ultracold cesium atoms in a vacuum chamber at the University of Chicago.

“This is the first time an experiment like this has simulated the evolution of structure in the early universe,” said Cheng Chin, a professor at the University of Chicago.

The CMB is the echo of the Big Bang. Extensive measurements of the CMB came from the orbiting Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) in the 1990s and later from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and various ground-based observatories, including the University-of-Chicago-led South Pole Telescope collaboration. These tools have provided cosmologists with a snapshot of how the universe appeared approximately 380,000 years following the Big Bang, which marked the beginning of the universe.

The sudden expansion of the universe during its inflationary period created ripples in space-time in the echo of the Big Bang. One can think of the Big Bang, in oversimplified terms, as an explosion [sic: seed] that generated sound, Chin said. The sound waves began interfering with each other, creating complicated patterns. “That’s the origin of complexity we see in the universe,” he said.

Scientists find life coming to Earth from space

Professor Wainwright said: “Most people will assume that these biological particles must have just drifted up to the stratosphere from Earth, but it is generally accepted that a particle of the size found cannot be lifted from Earth to heights of, for example, 27km. The only known exception is by a violent volcanic eruption, none of which occurred within three years of the sampling trip.

 

“In the absence of a mechanism by which large particles like these can be transported to the stratosphere we can only conclude that the biological entities originated from space. Our conclusion then is that life is continually arriving to Earth from space, life is not restricted to this planet and it almost certainly did not originate here.”

 

Professor Wainwright said the results could be revolutionary: “If life does continue to arrive from space then we have to completely change our view of biology and evolution,” he added. “New textbooks will have to be written!”

The Prawn Nebula is a stellar nursery about 6,000 light-years from Earth.  ESO/Martin Pugh

 

The Prawn Nebula is full of hot young stars and star clusters, groups of stars bound together by gravity. Collinder 316 is an open star cluster found within the nebula that contains between 50-100 young stars.

 

The Prawn Nebula is a relatively large stellar nursery, covering a distance 250 light-years, which astronomers say is the "equivalent to four times that of the full moon." The nebula is relatively dim, making it a difficult region for astronomers to study but the new image shows off plenty of star formation activity. In the new image, young stars can be seen as well as darker areas surrounding these objects, caused by the intense stellar wind of young stars pushing away nearby matter.

Tropical forests may be making a comeback, and it could be their own doing. Scientists have discovered that trees "turn up" their ability to capture nitrogen from the air and release it into the soil as the forest makes a comeback after being logged or cleared for agriculture. (Photo : Flickr.com/Chugy)

 

Tropical forests may be making a comeback, and it could be their own doing. Scientists have discovered that trees "turn up" their ability to capture nitrogen from the air and release it into the soil as the forest makes a comeback after being logged or cleared for agriculture. The findings have huge implications for forest restoration projects and the ability to mitigate global warming.

Discovery: Where And How Imagination Occurs In Human Brains

Philosophers and scientists have long puzzled over where human imagination comes from - in other words, what makes humans able to create art, invent tools, think scientifically and perform other incredibly diverse behaviors?

The mysteries of creative thinking and imagination have been researched to demonstrate their origins within the human brain

 

The answer, according to a new study, lies in a widespread neural network -- the brain's "mental workspace" -- that consciously manipulates images, symbols, ideas and theories and gives humans the laser-like mental focus needed to solve complex problems and come up with new ideas. Scholars have hypothesized that human imagination requires a widespread neural network in the brain, but evidence for such a "mental workspace" has been difficult to produce with techniques that mainly study brain activity in isolation.

 

The network closely resembles the "mental workspace" that scholars have theorized might be responsible for much of human conscious experience and for the flexible cognitive abilities that humans have evolved. 

-------------------------------

The materialists are trying to reduce consciousness to mere matter in motion. But when conceived in the context of the emerging field of quantum biology, as well as Schrödinger's conscious mental field (CMF), materialism/Darwinism cannot explain imagination; "imagination" is a reflection of free will. 

Scientists find cosmic factory for making building blocks of life

Researchers from the UK’s University of Kent, Imperial College London, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory discovered a “cosmic factory” that produces amino acids – the building blocks of life – when a rocky meteorite impacts a planet with an ice-covered surface, or when an icy comet impacts a rocky planet, according to a September 16 news release.  The research findings appear in the latest issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

 

Colliding comets can produce amino acids, the building blocks of life (Reuters)

 

“This process demonstrates a very simple mechanism whereby we can go from a mix of simple molecules, such as water and carbon-dioxide ice, to a more complicated molecule, such as an amino acid,” said Dr Mark Price, co-author of the paper from the University of Kent.  “This is the first step towards life.  The next step is to work out how to go from an amino acid to even more complex molecules such as proteins.”

 

“Our work shows that the basic building blocks of life can be assembled anywhere in the Solar System and perhaps beyond,” added Dr. Zita Martins, co-author from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London.  “However, the catch is that these building blocks need the right conditions in order for life to flourish.  Excitingly, our study widens the scope for where these important ingredients may be formed in the Solar System and adds another piece to the puzzle of how life on our planet took root.”

Voyager probe 'leaves Solar System'

Voyager will live out its days circling the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy

 

The Voyager-1 spacecraft has become the first manmade object to leave the Solar System.

 

Scientists say the probe's instruments indicate it has moved beyond the bubble of hot gas from our Sun and is now moving in the space between the stars.

 

Launched in 1977, Voyager was sent initially to study the outer planets, but then just kept on going.

 

Today, the veteran Nasa mission is almost 19 billion km (12 billion miles) from home.

 

This distance is so vast that it takes 17 hours now for a radio signal sent from Voyager to reach receivers here on Earth.

 

"Scientifically it's a major milestone, but also historically - this is one of those journeys of exploration like circumnavigating the globe for the first time or having a footprint on the Moon for the first time. This is the first time we've begun to explore the space between the stars," he told BBC News.

 

Sensors on Voyager had been indicating for some time that its local environment had changed.

 

"This is big; it's really impressive - the first human-made object to make it out into interstellar space," said Prof Don Gurnett from the University of Iowa and the principal investigator on the PWS.

 

On 25 August, 2012, Voyager-1 was some 121 Astronomical Units away. That is, 121 times the separation between the Earth and the Sun.

 

Breaching the boundary, known technically as the heliopause, was, said the English Astronomer Royal, Prof Sir Martin Rees, a remarkable achievement: "It's utterly astonishing that this fragile artefact, based on 1970s technology, can signal its presence from this immense distance."

 

Although now embedded in the gas, dust and magnetic fields from other stars, Voyager still feels a gravitational tug from the Sun, just as some comets do that lie even further out in space. But to all intents and purposes, it has left what most people would define as the Solar System. It is now in a completely new domain.

 

"Voyager-1 will be in orbit around the centre of our galaxy with all its stars for billions of years," said Prof Stone.

 

NASA News Conference: Voyager Reaches Interstellar Space

 

"The idea that the spacecraft would then exit the Solar System altogether was so way out, figuratively as well as literally, that we didn't even discuss it then, although I suppose we knew it would happen someday. Forty-three years later, that day has arrived, and Voyager is still finding new frontiers."

Seeds for Life Found In Meteorite

Scientists strike scientific gold with meteorite

An important discovery has been made concerning the possible inventory of molecules available to the early Earth. Scientists led by Sandra Pizzarello, a research professor in Arizona State Univ.'s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, found that the Sutter’s Mill meteorite, which exploded in a blazing fireball over California last year, contains organic molecules not previously found in any meteorites. These findings suggest a far greater availability of extraterrestrial organic molecules than previously thought possible, an inventory that could indeed have been important in molecular evolution and life itself.

 

The work is being published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is titled “Processing of meteoritic organic materials as a possible analog of early molecular evolution in planetary environments,” and is co-authored by Pizzarello, geologist Lynda Williams, NMR specialist Gregory Holland and graduate student Stephen Davidowski, all from ASU.

Coincidentally, Sutter’s Mill is also the gold discovery site that led to the 1849 California Gold Rush. Detection of the falling meteor by Doppler weather radar allowed for rapid recovery so that scientists could study for the first time a primitive meteorite with little exposure to the elements, providing the most pristine look yet at the surface of primitive asteroids.

 

“The analyses of meteorites never cease to surprise you ... and make you wonder,” explains Pizzarello. “This is a meteorite whose organics had been found altered by heat and of little appeal for bio- or prebiotic chemistry, yet the very Solar System processes that lead to its alteration seem also to have brought about novel and complex molecules of definite prebiotic interest such as polyethers.”

 

Pizzarello and her team hydrothermally treated fragments of the meteorite and then detected the compounds released by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. The hydrothermal conditions of the experiments, which also mimic early Earth settings (a proximity to volcanic activity and impact craters), released a complex mixture of oxygen-rich compounds, the probable result of oxidative processes that occurred in the parent body. They include a variety of long chain linear and branched polyethers, whose number is quite bewildering.

 

This addition to the inventory of organic compounds produced in extraterrestrial environments furthers the discourse of whether their delivery to the early Earth by comets and meteorites might have aided the molecular evolution that preceded the origins of life.

 

SIC ITUR AD ASTRA!

Life Found Under Ice-Covered Antarctic Lake

Researchers have found signs of life in mud pulled from the bottom of an ice-covered lake in Antarctica.

 

Studying microbes in such extreme and closed-off environments could help scientists understand how life may thrive in the harshest places on Earth and potentially other planets.

The Sheldon Glacier with Mount Barre in the background, is seen from Ryder Bay near Rothera Research Station, Adelaide Island, Antarctica, in this NASA/British Antarctic Survey handout photo. Sea levels could rise by 2.3 metres for each degree Celsius that global temperatures increase and they will remain high for centuries to come, according to a new study by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, released on July 15, 2013. (Photo : REUTERS/NASA/British Antarctic Survey/Handout via Reuters)

 

"What would actually be surprising would be if we looked in these places and they were completely sterile," Pearce told LiveScience. But the diversity of the life forms in Lake Hodgson was still surprising. Nearly a quarter of the genetic sequences identified in the study did not match with any known sequence, the researchers reported, suggesting a diversity of never-before-seen life forms may lurk beneath Antarctic lakes.

 

Further investigation is needed, but the researchers say many of the species in this isolated ecosystem are likely to be new to science.

 

With continued research, Pearce said, "We can start to build a picture of what limits life in extreme conditions and then start thinking about what might limit life on other planets."

Astronomers Map Galactic Clouds Where Stars are Born

Researchers are mapping out the locations of mysterious galactic clouds. (Photo : NASA)

 

Giant gas clouds swirl in our galaxy, birthing new stars over millions of years. Now, astronomers have begun to map the location of these massive and mysterious objects, revealing a bit more about how they function.

 

In order to examine these clouds, the researchers employed a telescope, called the 22 meter Mopra millimeter wave telescope, at Coonabarabran in Australia. With it, they identified galactic clouds of molecular gas, which can be up to 100 light-years across, from the carbon monoxide that they contained.

 

"On Earth, carbon monoxide is poisonous--a silent killer," said Michael Burton, one of the researchers, in a news release. "But in space, it is the second most abundant molecule and the easiest to see. One of the largest unresolved mysteries in galactic astronomy is how these giant, diffuse clouds form in the interstellar medium. This process plays a key role in the cosmic cycle of birth and death of stars."

A strange interstellar wind blows through our solar system

Interstellar winds appear to have changed direction, and scientists aren't certain why. (NASA/Goddard/Adler/University of Chicago/Wesleyan University / September 6, 2013)

 

"This result is really stunning," said Dave McComas, study coauthor and principal investigator for NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spacecraft.

 

"Previously we thought the very local interstellar medium was very constant, but these results show just how dynamic the solar system's interaction is," McComas said in a statement. Our heliosphere, which is inflated like a balloon by the sun's solar winds, deflects powerful cosmic rays, much the way the earth's magnetic field shields us from much of the sun's radiation. But the heliosphere doesn't block everything. Certain uncharged particles from interstellar space, such helium atoms, can enter and be tracked by spacecraft.

 

The heliosphere is currently moving through a vast interstellar cloud that is formally called the "local interstellar cloud" but has also been dubbed the "local fluff."

new essay - draft: The Empire has no clothes

By Kyle McDermott

The international Judeo-plutocratic reactionaries are resorting to the same old machinations to justify yet another war, this time against Syria. The Judeo-plutocrats weathered the Arab Spring by putting its Egyptian stratocracy into idle. After setting up the Muslim Brotherhood to fail, the Judeo-plutocrats re-instated the Egyptian military, which is once again more of an occupation force than it is a government. The result? Egypt is back in Judeo-plutocratic chains. After Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria is now the next domino to fall in the Zionist plot to dismember and destabilize any potential challengers to Israel's position as regional hegemon. scheme and setting up Mo

Rasputin Machiavelli Obama.

'Highly programmable' DNA cubes could be used for drug delivery

3D cages made from strands of DNA could be used as a nanotechnology solution for drug delivery. Cubes of DNA, with molecular tentacles, or chains, attached on each corner, spontaneously create water-repellant carriages that could be used to carry drugs.

 

In research carried out at McGill University in Canada, lipid-tipped DNA chains attached to DNA cubes folded back inside, creating places for hydrophobic molecules to be carried.

 

 

The research is detailed in a paper published in Nature Chemistry on 1 September.

White Genocide: Can America Fulfill the Demands Made by Those Who Marched on Washington?

Can America Fulfill the Demands Made by Those Who Marched on Washington?

 

It's a tricky racket to run, but fifty years of policies promoting White genocide are finally beginning to bear fruit. And once Whites are sufficiently marginalized, any remaining vestigial White population pockets will be an easy mop-up job for ZOG.  The campaign of genocide being waged against Whites is no easy thing, but fifty years along, its perpetrators are moving quickly now, pressing their advantage. Lies, wars of Empire, exploitation, crimes against humanity, hypocrisy, genocide, militarization, dehumanization, corporatization: "diversity", "multiculturalism" - divide-and-conquer all the way, and the MLK propagandized zombies fall-in line, ready for their marching orders. The demand to ethnically cleanse Whites from the North American continent is indeed a huge one, but the international Judeo-plutocracy is giving it one hell of a run.