Major advance in artificial photosynthesis poses win/win for the environment

A major advance in artificial photosynthesis poses win/win for the environment -- using sequestered CO2 for green chemistry, including renewable fuel production.

A potentially game-changing breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis has been achieved with the development of a system that can capture carbon dioxide emissions before they are vented into the atmosphere and then, powered by solar energy, convert that carbon dioxide into valuable chemical products, including biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.

Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created a hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that mimics the natural photosynthetic process by which plants use the energy in sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. However, this new artificial photosynthetic system synthesizes the combination of carbon dioxide and water into acetate, the most common building block today for biosynthesis.

"We believe our system is a revolutionary leap forward in the field of artificial photosynthesis," says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and one of the leaders of this study. "Our system has the potential to fundamentally change the chemical and oil industry in that we can produce chemicals and fuels in a totally renewable way, rather than extracting them from deep below the ground."

Yang, who also holds appointments with UC Berkeley and the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute (Kavli-ENSI) at Berkeley, is one of three corresponding authors of a paper describing this research in the journal Nano Letters. The paper is titled "Nanowire-bacteria hybrids for unassisted solar carbon dioxide fixation to value-added chemicals." The other corresponding authors and leaders of this research are chemists Christopher Chang and Michelle Chang. Both also hold joint appointments with Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley. In addition, Chris Chang is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. (See below for a full list of the paper's authors.)

The more carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere the warmer the atmosphere becomes. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, primarily as a result of the burning of fossil fuels. Yet fossil fuels, especially coal, will remain a significant source of energy to meet human needs for the foreseeable future. Technologies for sequestering carbon before it escapes into the atmosphere are being pursued but all require the captured carbon to be stored, a requirement that comes with its own environmental challenges.

Entire article is here.

Pope advocates White genocide

"The proportions of the phenomenon require much broader involvement"

Pope Francis

(ROME )—Pope Francis joined Italy in pressing the European Union Saturday to do more to help the country cope with rapidly mounting numbers of desperate people rescued in the Mediterranean during journeys on smugglers’ boats to flee war, persecution or poverty.

As the pope made his appeal, flanked by Italian President Sergio Mattarella, hundreds of migrants took their first steps on land in Sicilian ports after being rescued in past days by merchant vessels and Italian Coast Guard boats. Sicilian towns were running out of places to shelter the arrivals, including more than 10,000 in the week ending Saturday.

With his wide popularity and deep concern for social issues, the pope’s moral authority gives Italy a boost in its lobbying for Brussels and northern EU countries to do more. Since the start of 2014, nearly 200,000 people have been rescued at sea by Italy.

“I express my gratitude for the commitment that Italy is making to welcome the many migrants who, risking their life, ask to be taken in,” Francis told the Italian head of state. “It’s evident that the proportions of the phenomenon require much broader involvement.”

“We must never tire of appealing for a more extensive commitment on the European and international level,” Francis said.

The entire article is here.

WikiLeaks Release: US Recruits Hollywood to Boost 'Anti-Russian Messaging'

The latest documents released by Wikileaks reveal some uncomfortable – yet unsurprising – truths about the relationship between Hollywood and the US Government. In its propaganda efforts against Russia, the US State Department may have pressured Sony – and some of the biggest stars – into cooperating.

The latest Wikileaks release includes thousands of documents which reveal ties between the White House and Sony pictures. It’s taking journalists a long time to comb through the weeds, but some troubling details are emerging.

As Wikileaks notes, Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is also on the board of trustees for the RAND Corporation, a research arm of the US military. According to emails, the State Department may have taken advantage of Lynton’s dual positions to further its own propaganda aims.

"As you could see, we have plenty of challenges in countering ISIL narratives in the Middle East and Russian narratives in central and eastern Europe," an email to Lynton from Richard Stengel, US State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, reads. "Following up on our conversation, I’d love to convene a group of media executives who can help us think about better ways to respond to both of these large challenges."

"This is a conversation about ideas, about content and production, about commercial possibilities," Stengel adds. "I promise you it will be interesting, fun, and rewarding." 

"Who are folks I can or should see in NY re anti-Russian messaging — and also anti-ISIL messaging?" he asks Lynton in another email.

While comparing a sovereign nation to a terrorist group may be nothing new for US officials, such blatant evidence of Washington’s propaganda war is newsworthy.In response, Lynton provided a list full of other Hollywood executives who would presumably also be cooperative. This included senior level management from Turner Broadcasting and Walt Disney International.

Other emails suggest that Lynton was also asked to pressure Hollywood celebrities into promoting foreign policy objectives of the Obama administration.

"We have already started to think through ways your superstars could potentially help amplify some of the great work US Embassy Paris is doing," wrote a staffer on behalf of the US ambassador to France.

"We’d love to include Sony names in events here, either as guests or performers, and would love the opportunity to leverage their popularity to promote the President’s priorities and agenda overseas."

Celebrities suggested by Lynton include George Clooney, Kerry Washington, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, as well as major filmmakers like David Fincher and Steven Spielberg.

"Would also include Natalie Portman as she has just done a movie in Israel and is very involved there," one email read.

But Sony’s ties with the government extend even beyond the State Department emails. Documents reveal that Lynton also had contact with the president, having dinner with the Obamas.

Wikileaks also revealed an email from Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, which detailed his concerns with a perceived Russian threat.

"Putin is little more than a schoolyard bully, so if he refuses to back down, we must bring Europe in as part of an aggressive solution," Schumer wrote to Amy Pascal, a senior executive with Sony. "Sanctions have already hurt him, and the threats of expelling Russia from the World Trade Organization and forbidding it from hosting the next World Cup give us a strong hand."

Of course, the knowledge of close coordination between Hollywood and the US government is nothing new. As David Sirota points out in his book, Back to Our Future, a conflict of interest has existed for years.

"The Pentagon – and it’s very open about this – the Pentagon will line edit screenwriters scripts that are about the military if those screenwriters and the studios want to have access to be able to photograph planes, or tanks, or aircraft carriers," Sirota said during an interview with RT.

Giving the example of 1986’s Top Gun, Sirota notes that the "filmmakers of that movie submitted their script to Pentagon editors, for the Pentagon to line edit it to make sure it was perfectly mimicking what the Pentagon wanted it to say."

War correspondent Keith Harmon Snow echoed these sentiments in relation to the film Act of Valor.
"We have at it as a psychological operation against the American public," Snow told RT. "That means this is not Hollywood, it’s total propaganda by and for the Pentagon using Hollywood as the face…"

Still, during a State Department briefing on Friday, spokesperson Marie Harf noted that Sony Pictures is only the tip of the iceberg.

"We have a dialogue with companies, with social media companies, about the challenges as we see them and what we are doing to counter that kind of propaganda," she said. "We are having this conversation not just with social media companies, but other people who have public platforms, and that could be entertainment organizations."

Dark matter mapped at cosmic scale

Mass map with locations of galaxy clusters

Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey have released the first in a series of dark matter maps of the cosmos. These maps, created with one of the world's most powerful digital cameras, are the largest contiguous maps created at this level of detail and will improve our understanding of dark matter's role in the formation of galaxies. Analysis of the clumpiness of the dark matter in the maps will also allow scientists to probe the nature of the mysterious dark energy, believed to be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up.

The new maps were released today at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore, Maryland. They were created using data captured by the Dark Energy Camera, a 570-megapixel imaging device that is the primary instrument for the Dark Energy Survey (DES).

Dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up roughly a quarter of the universe, is invisible to even the most sensitive astronomical instruments because it does not emit or block light. But its effects can be seen by studying a phenomenon called gravitational lensing – the distortion that occurs when the gravitational pull of dark matter bends light around distant galaxies. Understanding the role of dark matter is part of the research program to quantify the role of dark energy, which is the ultimate goal of the survey.

Mass map with images of two galaxy clusters and a cosmic void

This analysis was led by Vinu Vikram of Argonne National Laboratory (then at the University of Pennsylvania) and Chihway Chang of ETH Zurich. Vikram, Chang and their collaborators at Penn, ETH Zurich, the University of Portsmouth, the University of Manchester and other DES institutions worked for more than a year to carefully validate the lensing maps.

"We measured the barely perceptible distortions in the shapes of about 2 million galaxies to construct these new maps," Vikram said. "They are a testament not only to the sensitivity of the Dark Energy Camera, but also to the rigorous work by our lensing team to understand its sensitivity so well that we can get exacting results from it."

The camera was constructed and tested at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and is now mounted on the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The data were processed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

The dark matter map released today makes use of early DES observations and covers only about three percent of the area of sky DES will document over its five-year mission. The survey has just completed its second year. As scientists expand their search, they will be able to better test current cosmological theories by comparing the amounts of dark and visible matter.

Those theories suggest that, since there is much more dark matter in the universe than visible matter, galaxies will form where large concentrations of dark matter (and hence stronger gravity) are present. So far, the DES analysis backs this up: The maps show large filaments of matter along which visible galaxies and galaxy clusters lie and cosmic voids where very few galaxies reside. Follow-up studies of some of the enormous filaments and voids, and the enormous volume of data, collected throughout the survey will reveal more about this interplay of mass and light.

"Our analysis so far is in line with what the current picture of the universe predicts," Chang said. "Zooming into the maps, we have measured how dark matter envelops galaxies of different types and how together they evolve over cosmic time. We are eager to use the new data coming in to make much stricter tests of theoretical models."

Evidence of liquid water found on Mars

Nasa's Curiosity rover has found that water can exist as a liquid near the Martian surface. Mars should be too cold to support liquid water at the surface, but salts in the soil lower its freezing point - allowing briny films to form.

The results lend credence to a theory that dark streaks seen on features such as crater walls could be formed by flowing water.

The results are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Scientists think thin films of water form when salts in the soil, called perchlorates, absorb water vapour from the atmosphere.

The temperature of these liquid films is about -70C - too cold to support any of the microbial life forms that we know about.

Forming in the top 15cm of the Martian soil, the brines would also be exposed to high levels of cosmic radiation - another challenge to life.

But it's still possible that organisms could exist somewhere beneath the surface on Mars, where conditions are more favourable.

Evaporation cycle

The researchers drew together different lines of evidence from the suite of instruments carried by the Curiosity rover.

The Rover Environmental Monitoring System (REMS) - essentially the vehicle's weather station - measured the relative humidity and temperature at the rover's landing site of Gale Crater.

Scientists were also able to estimate the subsurface water content using data from an instrument called Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN). These data were consistent with water in the soil being bound to perchlorates.

Finally, the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument gave the researchers the content of water vapour in the atmosphere.

The entire article is here.

Hungary pro-White Jobbik snatches ruling party seat in by-election

TAPOLCA BY-ELECTION:
 JOBBIK SET TO WIN FIRST-EVER INDIVIDUAL MANDATE IN HEAD-TO-HEAD RACE WITH RULING FIDESZ

* Ruling Fidesz candidate narrowly defeated -preliminary results

* Final tally may be announced next Thursday -Election Office

* Second straight by-election defeat for PM Orban's ruling party

By Gergely Szakacs

BUDAPEST, April 12 (Reuters) - Hungary's pro-White Jobbik party has snatched a parliamentary seat from Prime Minister Viktor Orban's centre-right Fidesz in a by-election in western Hungary on Sunday, preliminary results showed.

"We have scored a historic victory,

I might even say that an era has come to an end today."

Orban, an avid soccer fan, conceded defeat on his Facebook page, saying: "There are times when the ball hits the post."

Even with the narrow defeat, Orban will retain a comfortable majority in parliament, but the result -- the second straight by-election loss for Fidesz in two months -- could be a warning sign after the party won national, local and European elections last year.

With 99 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Office put Jobbik candidate Lajos Rig at 35.3 percent, Fidesz candidate Zoltan Fenyvesi at 34.4 percent and Socialist Ferenc Pad at 26.3 percent.

The parliamentary seat became vacant after the death of Fidesz lawmaker Jeno Lasztovicza in January.

The results however were too close for a definitive call as the number of absentee ballots was higher than the difference between the leading candidates. State news agency MTI said the final tally may only be announced on Thursday.

"We have scored a historic victory, I might even say that an era has come to an end today," Jobbik leader Gabor Vona told supporters in a video posted on news website index.hu.

Suspect charged in McDonald's attack is member of Young Savages, part of huge Folk Nation gang

Aniah Ferguson, 16, charged in Monday's brutal beating of a fellow teen girl at a Brooklyn McDonald's, belongs to an offshoot of the massive Folk Nation gang, officials said.

The 16-year-old accused of beating her grandmother and stabbing her brother before the teeth-chattering stomping she dealt to 15-year-old Ariana Taylor. during Monday’s McDonald’s melee is a member of the Young Savages. The gang is an offshoot of the Folk Nation, one of the largest gangs in the country, officials said.

The Folk Nation, which began in Chicago, operates out of several cities, federal officials said. It’s considered an alliance — a veritable United Nations of street gangs — that includes smaller Bloods and Crips crews, officials said.

In Brooklyn, the Folk Nation operates out of the Ebbets Field Houses in Crown Heights — the same neighborhood where the Young Savages have their turf.

The Folk Nation’s Brooklyn set is responsible for several shootings and robberies, officials said. Its leader Devon (D-Bloc) Rodney was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2012 after pleading guilty to ordering the death of a Crips member near the Ebbets Field projects in 2008.

His underlings tried to carry out his order and blasted away at Rodney’s rival at a block party, but shot and wounded an innocent 10-year-old girl instead, officials said.

ZOG-German Security Council approves submarine delivery to Israel

"Arabs are voting in droves."

The ZOG German Federal Security Council has allowed the government to deliver another submarine to the Tel Aviv regime.

The daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Friday that the government of ZOG German Chancellor Angela Merkel will export the fifth of six promised Dolphin-class submarines to Israel after the council expressed its consent.

The German company ThyssenKrupp had already delivered the fourth submarine to the Israeli apartheid regime in September 2014.

The deliveries have greatly infuriated many people in the European country as one third of the USD 530 million submarines contract between Berlin and Tel Aviv has been set to be covered by German taxpayers.

Merkel’s administration has also come under fire for providing Israel with Dolphin-class submarines because they are capable of being equipped with nuclear cruise missiles.

Meanwhile, a military expert warned Berlin of the consequences of the submarines delivery, saying that the vessels, when in the hands of the Israeli regime, will turn into a threat to the security of the region and the world.

"These are new batch of submarines that Israel is receiving which have a markedly increased capability on what they'd had previously in terms of range, covertness and ability to reach different parts of the world than they had previously been able to do," Peter Roberts, an expert in sea power and naval weapons systems at the Royal United Services Institute in London, told Russia-based Sputnik news agency.

Under Germany's Military Weapons Control Act and the Export Act, the country’s Federal Security Council must approve of any military deal between Berlin and foreign states.

Israel is widely believed to be the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East and has so far blatantly violated the international rules regarding nuclear nonproliferation.

Back in December 2014, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution urging Israel to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and put its nuclear facilities under the safeguard of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.

Archaeology of a million stars to unravel galaxies' evolution

Archaeology is no longer earthbound but is being used to solve one of the fundamental mysteries of astronomy. "We still don't understand how the more than 100 billion galaxies in our universe formed and evolved. Now we are going back to the very beginning of the Milky Way and using the astronomical equivalent of fossils to understand how our galaxy and those beyond it came about," said Dr Gayandhi De Silva, from the University of Sydney's School of Physics."Until now if we wanted to understand how the beautiful star clusters inside the Milky Way formed, or the spectacular spiral galaxies beyond it, we were limited to studying, at the very most, a few hundred stars from near the sun."

"By contrast GALAH probes ten times further into the galaxy and is the first attempt to survey a million stars to create a dataset that will be used by astronomers worldwide for decades to come."

The GALAH survey is an international five-year project, led by Australia, involving 70 astronomers from 17 institutions in eight countries.

It is led by Dr Gayandhi De Silva and Professor Joss Bland-Hawthorn from the University of Sydney and Professor Ken Freeman from the Australian National University. Dr De Silva is also the HERMES instrument scientist at the Australian Astronomical Observatory.

Dr De Silva is the lead author on Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society article, published today, outlining the background and goals of the survey.

GALAH refers to Galactic Archaeology with HERMES. HERMES is the new $13 million instrument on the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory and can analyse light from up to 400 stars or galaxies at the same time. GALAH is the main purpose for which HERMES was built.

"Galactic archaeology means we 'dig down' into the chemical origin of stars to find out where they came from and how they formed," said Professor Bland-Hawthorn who, together with Professor Freeman, co-founded the discipline in 2002.

"Stars formed very early in our galaxy only have a small amount of heavy elements such as iron, titanium and nickel. Stars formed more recently have a greater proportion because they have recycled elements from other stars.

"We reach back to capture this chemical state - by analysing the mixture of gases from which the star formed. You could think of it as its chemical fingerprint - or a type of stellar DNA from which we can unravel the construction of the Milky Way and other galaxies."

The Milky Way is constantly in motion and stars that were born during its formation may have moved all the way to its other end, well away from their birth sites. Also not all the stars that call the Milky Way home were born there - they may have been forcibly merged into it from outside galaxies as the gravitational pull of the Milky Way cannabilises its satellites.

The scientists will use HERMES to measure up to 29 chemicals in the stars, as well as the stars' temperature, gravity and velocity to inform their understanding.

"Instead of only relying on what we can discover from their current positions GALAH allows us to trace the stars' origins - including the origin of our sun - and map their growth and movement through time and space," Dr De Silva said.

"Our archaeology of space is a new era in astronomy and the knowledge gained promises to be every bit as exciting and important as anything discovered on Earth."

Complex organic molecules discovered in infant star system

For the first time, astronomers have discovered complex organic molecules, the basic building blocks for life, in a disk of gas and dust surrounding an alien star.

To the researchers' surprise, the organics found around a young star called MWC 480 are not only surviving but thriving in quantities slightly higher than those thought to have existed in the early solar system. The prolific amount of material reveals that Earth's solar system is not the only one to contain these complex molecules, suggesting that the ingredients required for life to evolve may exist throughout the universe. The scientists created a video tour of the star MWC 48 to showcase their discovery.

"The very rich organic chemistry present in the young solar system, as evidenced by cometary compositions, is far from unique," lead author Karin Öberg, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, told Space.com by email.

"It thus seems likely that the prebiotic chemistry that took place in the solar system, including Earth, is also happening elsewhere," she said. 

Located in the Taurus star-forming region 455 light-years away from Earth, the star MWC 480 is about twice the mass of the sun and shines nearly 10 times brighter. A disk of material surrounds the million-year-old star, but scientists have not observed any obvious signs of planet formation.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), Öberg and her colleagues observed MWC 480, finding enough methyl cyanide (a complex carbon-based molecule) in the disk surrounding the star to fill all of Earth's oceans. They also found a supply of other complex carbon-based molecules.

Volatile elements such as cyanides boil away at high temperatures. Despite this fragility, they are thought to be necessary for life. The carbon-nitrogen bonds of cyanides are especially important, as they are essential to the formation of amino acids, which in turn are the building blocks for proteins.

While astronomers have found simple volatilesin disks around other stars, complex organic molecules such as those spotted by the team have remained more difficult to pin down in previously studied disks. These complex elements exist in interstellar clouds between stars, but scientists were unsure if the elements could survive the energetic formation of a young solar system, where radiation could break apart their bonds. But the material surrounding MWC 480 is awash in the building blocks of life.

New study hints at spontaneous appearance of primordial DNA

evolutionary transubstantiation

The self-organization properties of DNA-like molecular fragments four billion years ago may have guided their own growth into repeating chemical chains long enough to act as a basis for primitive life, says a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Milan.

While studies of ancient mineral formations contain evidence for the evolution of bacteria from 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago—just half a billion years after the stabilization of Earth's crust—what might have preceded the formation of such unicellular organisms is still a mystery. The new findings suggest a novel scenario for the non-biological origins of nucleic acids, which are the building blocks of living organisms, said CU-Boulder physics Professor Noel Clark, a study co-author.

A paper on the subject led by Tommaso Bellini of the University of Milan was published in a recent issue of Nature Communications. Other CU-Boulder co-authors of the study include Professor David Walba, Research Associate Yougwooo Yi and Research Assistant Gregory P. Smith. The study was funded by the Grant PRIN Program of the Italian Ministries of Education, Universities and Research and by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The discovery in the 1980's of the ability of RNA to chemically alter its own structure by CU-Boulder Nobel laureate and Distinguished Professor Tom Cech and his research team led to the development of the concept of an "RNA world" in which primordial life was a pool of RNA chains capable of synthesizing other chains from simpler molecules available in the environment. While there now is consensus among origin-of-life researchers that RNA chains are too specialized to have been created as a product of random chemical reactions, the new findings suggest a viable alternative, said Clark.

The new research demonstrates that the spontaneous self-assembly of DNA fragments just a few nanometers in length into ordered liquid crystal phases has the ability to drive the formation of chemical bonds that connect together short DNA chains to form long ones, without the aid of biological mechanisms. Liquid crystals are a form of matter that has properties between those of conventional liquids and those of a solid crystal—a liquid crystal may flow like a liquid, for example, but its molecules may be oriented more like a crystal.

"Our observations are suggestive of what may have happened on the early Earth when the first DNA-like molecular fragments appeared," said Clark.

For several years the research group has been exploring the hypothesis that the way in which DNA emerged in the early Earth lies in its structural properties and its ability to self-organize. In the pre-RNA world, the spontaneous self-assembly of fragments of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) may have acted as a template for their chemical joining into polymers, which are substances composed of a large number of repeating units.

"The new findings show that in the presence of appropriate chemical conditions, the spontaneous self assembly of small DNA fragments into stacks of short duplexes greatly favors their binding into longer polymers, thereby providing a pre-RNA route to the RNA world," said Clark.

NASA Chief Scientists Is Sure We'll Find Alien Life Within 20 Years

NASA is certain: We’re not alone in this universe.

Speaking at a public panel on Tuesday in Washington D.C., NASA scientists discussed the likelihood of finding organic life in our solar system. Given the surprising number of oceans residing throughout our celestial home, they say "it's definitely not an if, it's a when."

"I believe we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth in the next decade and definitive evidence in the next 10 to 20 years," Ellen Stofan, NASA's Chief Scientist, said at the panel.

Of course, the space agency isn’t talking about deadly xenomorphs or intelligent beings that can take on the personas of hot teenagers. Most likely, any life that NASA finds within our solar system will be simple microbes, the essential building blocks for more complicated creatures yet to come.

The public discussion was sparked by the recent discoveries of water hiding within many of our planetary neighbors. Jupiter’s moon Europa has long since been considered a primary candidate for finding life, as many astronomers theorize that vast ocean lies beneath its icy crust. Recently, a study conjectured that Saturn’s moon Enceladus is home to sandy hot springs. And just a few weeks ago, NASA announced the discovery of a saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So many other moons and dwarf planets may harbor that precious life-sustaining liquid of H2O. You can check them out in this handy infographic.

NASA researchers say these revelations upend the earlier idea that, to find life, we need to look for planets within stars’ “habitable zones.” That theory suggests that in order for a space rock to harbor life, it needs to be at a certain "perfect" distance from a warm body (like Earth is from our sun). That way, the temperature is just right so that water can exist on the planet in liquid form.

But on Europa, liquid water exists even though the frigid moon is more than 400 million miles away from our star. It’s because the gravitational pull from Jupiter jerks the satellite around, causing enough friction and energy to heat up the liquid beneath the surface. Thus, the moon's water can remain as a liquid when it's so far from a light source.

"We now recognize that habitable zones are not just around stars, they can be around giant planets too," Green said. "We are finding out the solar system is really a soggy place."

We won’t be wading in these waters anytime soon, but with NASA’s upcoming mission to Europa, the agency may get the answers it needs to determine if alien microbes are living next door.

Our Solar System and Beyond is Awash in Water

 

Water in Our Solar System

As NASA missions explore our solar system and search for new worlds, they are finding water in surprising places. Water is but one piece of our search for habitable planets and life beyond Earth, yet it links many seemingly unrelated worlds in surprising ways.

"NASA science activities have provided a wave of amazing findings related to water in recent years that inspire us to continue investigating our origins and the fascinating possibilities for other worlds, and life, in the universe," said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist for the agency. "In our lifetime, we may very well finally answer whether we are alone in the solar system and beyond."

The chemical elements in water, hydrogen and oxygen, are some of the most abundant elements in the universe. Astronomers see the signature of water in giant molecular clouds between the stars, in disks of material that represent newborn planetary systems, and in the atmospheres of giant planets orbiting other stars.

There are several worlds thought to possess liquid water beneath their surfaces, and many more that have water in the form of ice or vapor. Water is found in primitive bodies like comets and asteroids, and dwarf planets like Ceres. The atmospheres and interiors of the four giant planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- are thought to contain enormous quantities of the wet stuff, and their moons and rings have substantial water ice.

Perhaps the most surprising water worlds are the five icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn that show strong evidence of oceans beneath their surfaces: Ganymede, Europa and Callisto at Jupiter, and Enceladus and Titan at Saturn.

Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope recently provided powerful evidence that Ganymede has a saltwater, sub-surface ocean, likely sandwiched between two layers of ice.

Europa and Enceladus are thought to have an ocean of liquid water beneath their surface in contact with mineral-rich rock, and may have the three ingredients needed for life as we know it: liquid water, essential chemical elements for biological processes, and sources of energy that could be used by living things. NASA's Cassini mission has revealed Enceladus as an active world of icy geysers. Recent research suggests it may have hydrothermal activity on its ocean floor, an environment potentially suitable for living organisms.

NASA spacecraft have also found signs of water in permanently shadowed craters on Mercury and our moon, which hold a record of icy impacts across the ages like cryogenic keepsakes.

The entire article is here.

Lava tubes could provide shelter for moon settlements

Lava tubes, even ones large enough to hold entire cities, could possibly exist on the Moon, according to new research.

The volcanic features are an important target for future human space exploration because they could provide shelter from cosmic radiation, meteorite impacts and temperature extremes.

Lava tubes are tunnels formed from the lava flow of volcanic eruptions. The edges of the lava cool as it flows to form a pipe-like crust around the flowing river of lava. When the eruption ends and the lava flow stops, the pipe drains leave behind a hollow tunnel, researchers explain.

"There has been some discussion of whether lava tubes might exist on the Moon," Jay Melosh from Purdue University, who was involved in the study, said in a statement. "Some evidence, like the sinuous rilles observed on the surface, suggest that if lunar lava tubes exist they might be really big."

Sinuous rilles, which range in size up to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) wide, are large channels visible on the lunar surface supposedly formed by lava flows.

Previous research has long suggested past volcanic activity on our Moon, ranging from the "man on the moon" being born from magma, to rock deposits supposedly from relatively recent volcanic activity that suggest the Moon was hot and unpredictable. So the existence of lava tubes on our close neighbor doesn't seem so far out of reach.

To determine whether such massive lava tubes could remain structurally stable on the Moon, researchers applied known information about lunar rock and the Moon's environment to civil engineering technology used to design tunnels on Earth.

"We found that if lunar lava tubes existed with a strong arched shape like those on Earth, they would be stable at sizes up to 5,000 meters, or several miles wide, on the Moon," explained lead author David Blair. "This wouldn't be possible on Earth, but gravity is much lower on the Moon and lunar rock doesn't have to withstand the same weathering and erosion. In theory, huge lava tubes - big enough to easily house a city - could be structurally sound on the Moon."

Only one other study, published in 1969, has attempted to model lunar lava tubes. And now with this latest research, it seems future studies are needed to better understand our Moon's past, and whether it was really volcanically active and oozing with lava.

Meet "The Resistance": Rogue Catholic bishops plan to grow schismatic challenge to Rome

"If there is another World War ... maybe the Church will go back to the way it was before."

NOVA FRIBURGO, Brazil (Reuters) - Two renegade Catholic bishops plan to consecrate a new generation of bishops to spread their ultra-traditionalist movement called "The Resistance" in defiance of the Vatican, one of them said at a remote monastery in Brazil.

French Bishop Jean-Michel Faure, himself consecrated only two weeks ago by the Holocaust-denying British Bishop Richard Williamson, said the new group rejected Pope Francis and what it called his "new religion" and would not engage in a dialogue with Rome until the Vatican turned back the clock.

Williamson and Faure, who were both excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church when the former made the latter a bishop without Vatican approval, are ex-members of a larger dissenting group that has been a thorn in Rome's side for years.

Their splinter movement is tiny - Faure did not give an estimate of followers - but the fact they plan to consecrate bishops is important because it means their schism can continue as a rebel form of Catholicism.

"We follow the popes of the past, not the current one," Faure, 73, told reporters on Saturday at Santa Cruz Monastery in Nova Friburgo, in the mountain jungle 140 km (87 miles) inland from Rio de Janeiro.

"It is likely that in maybe one or two years we will have more consecrations," he said, adding there were already two candidates to be promoted to bishop's rank.

The monastery had said Williamson would ordain a priest there at the weekend but he was not seen by reporters, and clergy said it was impossible to talk to him. Faure ordained the priest himself.

Asked what the new group called itself, Faure said: "I think we can call ourselves Roman Catholic first, secondly St Pius X, and now ... the Resistance."

SPLINTER OFF THE SSPX

The Society of St Pius X (SSPX) is a larger ultra-traditionalist group that was excommunicated in 1988 when its founder consecrated four new bishops, including Williamson, despite warnings from the Vatican not to do so.

It rejected the modernizing reforms of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council and stuck with Catholicism's old Latin Mass after the Church switched to simpler liturgy in local languages.

Former Pope Benedict readmitted the four SSPX bishops to the Catholic fold in 2009, but the SSPX soon expelled Williamson because of an uproar over his Holocaust denial.

In contrast to Benedict, Pope Francis pays little attention to the SSPX ultra-traditionalists, who claim to have a million followers around the world and a growing number of new priests at a time that Rome faces priest shortages. Their remaining three bishops have no official status in the Catholic Church.

Faure said the Resistance group would not engage in dialogue with Rome, as the SSPX has done. "We resist capitulation, we resist conciliation of St Pius X with Rome," he said.

Faure said he was not sure what it would take for Rome to return to its old traditions but conflict could be a catalyst.

"If there is another World War ... maybe the Church will go back to the way it was before," he said.

The prior of the monastery, Thomas Aquinas, explained the split simply: "The Pope is less Catholic than us."

Under Catholic law, Williamson and Faure are excommunicated from the Church but remain validly consecrated bishops. That means they can ordain priests into their schismatic group and claim to be Catholic, albeit without Vatican approval.

By contrast, women supposedly made priests by dissident Catholic bishops are not validly ordained because Catholic law reserves the priesthood only for men.

ZOG begins constructing high-tech Maginot Line

EU FUNDED AND APPROVED:

 VIA ZOG'S "AUSTERITY" SHAKEDOWN

Poland is enforcing its 200km land border with Russia, with a series of high-tech watchtowers in a bid to provide Polish authorities with instant updates on activity in the region, according to local press.

The project, set to be fully operational by June will see six observation towers between 35 and 50 metres in height unveiled on Poland’s border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, Polish news agency PAP reported today.

According to Mirosława Aleksandrowicz from the Warmia-Masurian Border Guard the towers will not be disguised and will be equipped with cameras which will monitor the border “night and day”. Images from the the observation towers will provide instant, 24-hour surveillance for nearby border patrol agents.

“Currently we are testing the technical installations on the towers,” Aleksandrowicz said. “We are planning for the towers to be fully operational by June of this year.”

The project will cost 14 million Polish złoty (€3.4 million), the majority of which will be paid by the EU’s External Borders Fund.

THE FRONT HAS SHIFTED

Poland’s border with Kaliningrad makes it one of only five EU member states who share a land border with Russia, the other four being the Baltic countries and Finland. Poland is also a NATO ally and the strategic significance of Kaliningrad to Russia’s military prompted regional security officials to call it “a veritable arms depot”.

Although Kaliningrad is separated from mainland Russia, Andrius Kubilius, Lithuania’s former prime minister recently said that Russia could use this to its advantage should it want to launch an invasion in the region, using transit to Kaliningrad as “an excuse”.

The enclave’s border with Poland is very busy as it relies heavily on deliveries from Russia which have to cross through either Poland or Lithuania. Polish border officials report that the number of border crossings in and out of Kaliningrad increased last year as 3.2 million Poles and 3.3 million Russians travelled between the Russian enclave and Poland in 2014 - an annual increase of half a million people.

Meanwhile, last month the head of Poland’s National Security Bureau general Stanisław Koziej, said Poland should be vigilant for hybrid aggression from Russia, urging other allied states to follow Poland’s example and raise their defence spending.

“What is the most important for Poland is to remain nuder the yoke of ZOG globalists towards the current crisis, and to strengthen European Union in the art of pluto-tyranny,” he said.

To those ends ZOG Poland has announced a shift of military units to its eastern territories which border Ukraine, Russia-aligned Belarus and Kaliningrad.

The ZOG Polish military also recently began running what it claims will be a series of snap tests of its 12,000 military reservists.

Jeb Bush marked 'Hispanic' on Florida voter registration form

(Reuters) - Likely Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush, who was popular among Spanish-speaking voters while Florida governor, marked himself as 'Hispanic' on a 2009 voter registration application, The New York Times reported on Monday.

The newspaper posted a fuzzy copy of the form, which it said it obtained from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department. The circle marked "Hispanic" was checked. The next circle said "White, not Hispanic," which was not checked.

Carolina Lopez, a spokeswoman for the county elections department, did not immediately return calls to Reuters.

A Bush representative was not immediately available to comment.

The brother of former President George W. Bush and son of former President George H.W. Bush, Bush is exploring a presidential bid and is considered a frontrunner in the crowded field of possible Republican candidates. He was born in Texas.

Bush, who speaks fluent Spanish and has a Mexican-born wife, had widespread support among Hispanic voters during his two terms as Florida governor.

His stance on immigration has been at odds with the views of many in his party, including when he said last year that illegal immigrants who come to the United States to provide for their families are not committing a felony but an "act of love."

WHITE GENOCIDE:

AN "ACT OF LOVE."

SOULLESS, TRAITOROUS PLUTOCRAT:

HAPPY TO CONSIGN HIS OWN PEOPLE
TO OBLIVION FOR MONEY AND POWER

THE WHITE WORKING CLASS CAN GO FUCK ITSELF.
JEB AND HIS ILK ARE ALL SET.
ALL JEB CARES ABOUT IS NON-WHITE VOTES.


Jeb doesn't give a fuck about you

Bulgaria Puts Up a New Wall, but This One Keeps People Out

LESOVO, Bulgaria — Less than two decades after the painstaking removal of a massive border fence designed to keep people in, Bulgarian authorities are just as painstakingly building a new fence along the rugged Turkish border, this time to keep people out.

Faced with a surge of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa — and the risk that they include jihadis intent on terrorist attacks — Europe is bolstering its defenses on many fronts, including this formerly Communist country, which little more than a quarter-century ago was more concerned with stanching the outbound flow of its own citizens to freedom. For the past 16 months, Bulgaria has been carrying out a plan that would sound familiar to anyone along the United States-Mexico frontier: more border officers, new surveillance equipment and the first 20-mile section of its border fence, which was finished in September.

The hardening of the Bulgaria-Turkey border is one very visible manifestation of the agitation across the continent about the economic, social and political ramifications of the surge in immigration. With warmer weather fast approaching and more refugees likely to be on the move, nations along Europe’s southern tier are beefing up border staffing, adding sensors and other technical barriers, expanding refugee facilities, and building walls.

More than 200,000 refugees are known to have penetrated Europe’s land and sea borders last year, not including those who were able to sneak through undetected.

And the numbers for the first two months of this year, when Europe enjoyed its second mild winter in a row, were up sharply compared with the same period last year.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is increasing in Britain, France, Hungary, the Czech Republic and elsewhere across the continent. Parties espousing ethnic nationalism are seeing their support rise, some to the point where they threaten the dominance of more traditional parties.

“The rise of the right wing in Europe is a reaction to this refugee flow,” said Boris B. Cheshirkov, chief spokesman in Bulgaria for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

And with much of Europe still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, the higher costs of caring for this flood of refugees — especially in countries like Bulgaria, the poorest member of the European Union — are straining national budgets.

At the same time, episodes like the January attack on the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo are raising worries that both homegrown jihadists and foreign fighters will cloak themselves in this refugee flood.

“Right now, in the western part of Turkey, on the borders of Greece and Bulgaria, you probably have thousands of Syrian refugees waiting for an occasion to cross,” said Marc Pierini, an expert on Turkey and the Middle East at Carnegie Europe, a foreign policy analysis group. “If you talk about returning jihadists, you are talking about dozens.”

Slavcho Velkov, a Bulgarian security expert and university lecturer, said he believed there was more jihadist movement through Bulgaria than the authorities acknowledged.

The entire article is here.

Large Hadron Collider cranked up, to reach into the unknown

CERN scientists restarted their “Big Bang” Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on Sunday in a bid to probe into the “dark universe” they believe lies beyond the visible one.

CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, reported that particle beams were successfully pushed around the LHC in both directions after a two-year shutdown for a major refit described as a Herculean task that doubled its power and its reach into the unknown.

“It’s fantastic to see it going so well after such a major overhaul,” CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer told delighted scientists and engineers as the beams moved round the tubes of the 27-km underground complex.

But it will be two months before particle collisions — mini-versions of the Big Seed primordial sprout that brought the universe into being 13.8 billion years ago — begin and at least a year more before any results can be expected.

Study of many billions of collisions in the LHC’s first run from 2010 to 2013 produced proof of the existence of the Higgs boson by 2012 and its linked force field, a long-sought mechanism that gives mass to matter.

But that was part of the 40-year-old Standard Model of how the universe is believed to work at the level of the fundamental particles that make up everything in it, including life.

Finding “dark matter”

With its capacity to smash particles together at almost the speed of light and at a collision energy twice that of its first run, scientists hope that the revamped LHC will produce evidence of what has been dubbed “New Physics”.

Among elements of this concept are the “dark matter” thought to make up some 96 per cent of the stuff of the universe while being totally invisible, and super-symmetry, or SUSY, under which all visible particles have unseen counterparts.

“If I had to bet on what we will find, I would go for SUSY,” said Oliver Buchmueller, a scientist on one of the four machines around the ring that records each collision. “But we could also find something very, very unexpected,” he added.

“This is what makes life on the energy frontier so exciting.”

But CERN will only gradually move towards applying the full energy now within the power of the LHC, mindful of a helium leak in 2008 that forced postponement of the machine’s first run for two years, and an electrical fault that put off Sunday’s start-up, originally set for last month, by two weeks.

New black hole theory: Matter doesn't disappear after entering

Shred a document, and you can piece it back together. Burn a book, and you could theoretically do the same. But send information into a black hole, and it’s lost forever.

Well, maybe not.

For years, physicists have argued that black holes are the ultimate vaults, entities that suck in information and then evaporate without leaving behind any clues as to what they once contained.

But new research shows that this perspective may not be correct.

WHAT LIES WITHIN

“According to our work, information isn’t lost once it enters a black hole,” says Dejan Stojkovic, associate professor of physics at University at Buffalo. “It doesn’t just disappear.”

A new paper in Physical Review Letters outlines how interactions between particles emitted by a black hole can reveal information about what lies within, such as characteristics of the object that formed the black hole to begin with, and characteristics of the matter and energy drawn inside.

This is an important discovery, Stojkovic says, because even physicists who believed information was not lost in black holes have struggled to show, mathematically, how this happens. The new paper offers explicit calculations demonstrating how information is preserved.

STEPHEN HAWKING’S THEORY

The research marks a significant step toward solving the “information loss paradox,” a problem that has plagued physics for almost 40 years, since Stephen Hawking first proposed that black holes could radiate energy and evaporate over time.

The theory posed a huge problem because it meant that information inside a black hole could be permanently lost when the black hole disappeared—a violation of quantum mechanics, which states that information must be conserved.

In the 1970s, Hawking proposed that black holes were capable of radiating particles, and that the energy lost through this process would cause the black holes to shrink and eventually disappear. Hawking further concluded that the particles emitted by a black hole would provide no clues about what lay inside, meaning that any information held within a black hole would be completely lost once the entity evaporated.

Though Hawking later said he was wrong and that information could escape from black holes, the subject of whether and how it’s possible to recover information from a black hole has remained a topic of debate.

PARTICLE INTERACTIONS

Instead of looking only at the particles a black hole emits, the new study also takes into account the subtle interactions between the particles. This shows it’s possible for an observer standing outside of a black hole to recover information about what lies within.

Interactions between particles can range from gravitational attraction to the exchange of mediators like photons between particles. Such “correlations” have long been known to exist, but many scientists discounted them as unimportant in the past.

“These correlations were often ignored in related calculations since they were thought to be small and not capable of making a significant difference,” Stojkovic says.

“Our explicit calculations show that though the correlations start off very small, they grow in time and become large enough to change the outcome.”

Russia, China may take a stricter line on Yemen

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L) is seen along with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.

An upcoming visit by the Chinese foreign minister to Moscow may hugely affect an ongoing military conflict in Yemen, Russian media sources claim.

According to a Sunday report by Sputnik News, an imminent visit by Foreign Minister Wang Yi would have serious consequences on the ongoing military conflict in Yemen as Russia and China are coordinating efforts to counter the military aggression against the country by Saudi Arabia and allies.

His visit is planned for Monday when Saudi Arabia and some governments in the Persian Gulf region are expected to submit a resolution to the United Nations Security Council which could allow ground intervention in the impoverished Arab country.

Observers believe that the unexpected visit is meant to provide a joint response to the Saudi-led move.

“It is likely that an important agreement will be made on Yemen,” the report said.

Russia has tried to press for an end to the military aggression by asking Riyadh to accept regional and international calls for ceasefire and arms embargo in the country. Saudis, however, have ignored the calls and keep accusing Moscow of having a hand in the conflict.

Yemen's fugitive foreign minister, Riyadh Yassin, has openly accused Russia of providing the ruling Houthi movement with weaponry. He also claimed recently that former Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh has fled Sana’a onboard a Russian plane. Officials in Moscow denied both allegations as "absurd, irresponsible and provocative."

The Al Saud regime unleashed deadly air raids without a UN mandate against Yemen on March 26 in an attempt to restore power to the fugitive president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.

Hadi, who is now in Saudi capital, stepped down in January and refused to reconsider the decision despite calls by the Houthi Ansarullah movement, but the Yemeni parliament did not approve his resignation.

Gradually, as the Yemeni government failed to provide security and properly run the affairs of the Arab country, the Ansarullah fighters started to take control of state matters to contain corruption and terror.

The Ansarullah fighters took control of Sana’a in September 2014 and are currently moving southward.

Humans Could Reach Mars by 2033, and Land on Its Surface by 2039

According to a recent report issued by The Planetary Society, NASA may put astronauts on Martian orbit by 2033, and land them onto its surface by 2039.

The Planetary Society, which is a non-for-profit organization that advocates for space exploration, released its report Thursday during a workshop designed to debate the feasibility of a manned mission to Mars and its related costs.

Experts involved in the debates concluded that astronauts could reach Mars’ moon Phobos no sooner than 2033 and land on the Red Planet six years later. This forecast is the most suitable to fit into NASA’s space exploration spending plan.

“We believe we now have an example of a long-term, cost-constrained, executable humans-to-Mars program,” said Scott Hubbard, a Stanford University professor and a member of the organization’s board of directors.

The Planetary Society organized a workshop called “Humans Orbiting Mars” from March 31 to April 1, where about 70 participants debated the feasibility of a plan to send humans to orbit Mars and eventually land onto its surface, the costs of such endeavor, and the benefits it may bring.

Workshop participants also came up with a schedule for a future Mars mission that was more realistic than previous ones. However, the plan was not the original work of The Planetary Society. It was instead based on a report issued by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

According to the society’s briefings, the attendees were able to finally reach a consensus on several key points linked to the Mars mission. For instance, the majority agreed that an orbital mission was absolutely necessary before a landing took place.

Moreover, the participants agreed on the estimated costs such mission may imply, while an independent entity reported that the hypothetical program would match NASA’s space exploration budget if the agency would end its key-role in the International Space Station program.

The panel of experts even compared the Martian orbital mission to NASA’s Apollo 8 mission, which prepared the moon landing by placing astronauts into the lunar orbit first.

The panelists also estimated that an orbital mission to Phobos would last about two years and a half, with nine months to reach the distant moon, a year to orbit it, and another nine months to get back home.

During this mission, astronauts will be able to study both Phobos and Mars’ second moon Deimos and remotely control robotic rovers on the planet’s surface. Furthermore, crew members would reach Phobos’ orbit on an Orion spacecraft, experts also said.

Also, all panelists agree that such a mission was feasible and only a political roadblock might stop it. They also acknowledged that technical challenges were extremely difficult to handle by NASA engineers but not impossible. The real problem was politics, experts concluded. Prof Logsdon even stated that the next U.S. president should put the Mars mission on his top priority list.