Tag: comparison (page 1 of 3)

Gluten-Free: “Fad” or Not? Studies Suggest Most Gluten Sensitivity Is Imagined

September 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Makia Freeman, ContributorGluten-free food is now very common and available, whether you are in a restaurant, cafe or grocery store. Although there are definitely people who suffer from celiac disease and other diseases triggered by gluten, the entire gluten-free movement has left many health experts and nutritionalists scratching their heads in bewilderment. Since when did large chunks of populations used to eating bread, pasta and other wheat products suddenly suffer from [...]

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The Aspirin Alternative Your Doctor Never Told You About

July 4, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Sayer Ji,  Green Med InfoMillions use aspirin daily without realizing its true dangers. The good news is that there is a natural alternative which preliminary research indicates is safer and more effective.Aspirin is taken faithfully by millions every day as a preventive measure against heart attack, often without the user having any awareness of the serious health risks associated with it, some potentially fatal. You can view over 60 adverse effects of aspirin on the GreenMedIn [...]

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Photographer Creates Stunning Images of African Orisha Deities You’ve Never Heard of Before

July 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Photographer James C. Lewis went out on a creative limb to re-imagine ancient African Yoruba dieties- the Orisha, using striking models, expert photography, and inventive photo editing techniques.  While the true essence of the Orisha is likely poorly understood by most people in the modern world in comparison to their ancient and rich roots in African culture, Lewis creates a stunning visual world that is sure to spark the imagination.As a culture we are quite use to the a [...]

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These 4 Ingredients in Most Processed Foods are Decimating Your Health

May 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Mae Chan, Prevent DiseaseIt’s not just the high fat, salt or sugar content of processed foods that is driving obesity and diet-related illnesses — the lack of food diversity is killing our gut flora, claims one researcher. If we exclude sugar, approximately 80 percent of all calories in processed foods come from a combination of four ingredients.Drawing upon evidence from multiple studies, Professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and author of&nbsp [...]

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The Science of the Dogon

May 19, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from The Science of The Dogon, by Laird ScrantonThe information presented in the preceding chapters demonstrates a direct relationship between the symbols and themes of the Dogon creation story and known scientific facts relating to the formation of the universe, matter, and biological reproduction. This relationship is a broad and specific one that is couched in clear definitions and supported by priestly interpretations and cosmological drawings. The parallels between Dogon myth [...]

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Air Force to Test Futuristic ‘Hall Thruster’ on X-37B Space Plane

April 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments



Vandenberg Air Force Base
The X-37B before its first trip to space.

Excerpt from nbcnews.com


After years of silence on all but the most prosaic aspects of the secretive X-37B space plane program, the Defense Department has revealed that the mysterious, truck-sized craft's next mission will host an experimental new thrust system that could greatly improve the shelf life of satellites. 

The X-37B program has sent its shuttle-like Orbital Test Vehicle craft into space three times for a total time in orbit of almost four years. What the spacecraft has been doing up there is anybody's guess — its creators have declined to comment except to say that everything is working properly. But a news release this week from the Air Force says in no uncertain terms that the next flight of the X-37B, set to begin next month, will be the platform for testing a Hall thruster.

Hall thrusters combine electricity and a noble gas like xenon to produce a miniscule amount of direct force — weak in comparison with thrusters that use ordinary solid fuel, but at a far lesser cost of fuel. Trading power for fuel efficiency would allow satellites and probes to make course adjustments for much longer, extending their lives and versatility. Spaceflight Now has more details on how the system works. 

Of course, this sheds no light on what the last three X-37B missions were — but in light of this new information it seems more likely that it's a test bed for high-tech space experiments, and not an orbital bomber or elite spy satellite. But you never know.

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VLA photos 18 years apart show dramatic difference in young stellar system

April 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from bulletinstandard.com  A pair of pictures of a young star, produced 18 years apart, has revealed a dramatic distinction that is giving astronomers with a exclusive, "real-time" appear at how enormous stars create in the e...

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Jupiter May Be Behind The Mysterious ‘Gaping Hole’ In Our Solar System

March 30, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comWhen astronomers began studying other solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy back in the 1990s, they noticed something peculiar: most of these systems have big planets that circle their host stars in tight orbits, a fin...

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Mars Had an Ocean, Scientists Say, Pointing to a Treasure Trove of New Data

March 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments





Excerpt from nytimes.com

After six years of planetary observations, scientists at NASA say they have found convincing new evidence that ancient Mars had an ocean.

It was probably the size of the Arctic Ocean, larger than previously estimated, the researchers reported on Thursday. The body of water spread across the low-lying plain of the planet’s northern hemisphere for millions of years, they said.

If confirmed, the findings would add significantly to scientists’ understanding of the planet’s history and lend new weight to the view that ancient Mars had everything needed for life to emerge.
“The existence of a northern ocean has been debated for decades, but this is the first time we have such a strong collection of data from around the globe,” said Michael Mumma, principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Center for Astrobiology and an author of the report, published in the journal Science. “Our results tell us there had to be a northern ocean.”
But other experts said the question was hardly resolved. The ocean remains “a hypothesis,” said Ashwin Vasavada, project scientist of the Curiosity rover mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Dr. Mumma and Geronimo Villanueva, a planetary scientist at NASA, measured two slightly different forms of water in Mars’ atmosphere. One is the familiar H2O, which consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

The other is a slightly “heavier” version of water, HDO, in which the nucleus of one hydrogen atom contains a neutron. The atom is called deuterium.

The two forms exist in predictable ratios on Earth, and both have been found in meteorites from Mars. A high level of heavier water today would indicate that there was once a lot more of the “lighter” water, somehow lost as the planet changed.

The scientists found eight times as much deuterium in the Martian atmosphere than is found in water on Earth. Dr. Villanueva said the findings “provide a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had by determining how much water was lost to space.”

He said the measurements pointed to an ancient Mars that had enough water to cover the planet to a depth of at least 137 meters, or about 450 feet. Except for assessments based on the size of the northern basin, this is the highest estimate of the amount of water on early Mars that scientists have ever made.

The water on Mars mostly would have pooled in the northern hemisphere, which lies one to three kilometers — 0.6 to 1.8 miles — below the bedrock surface of the south, the scientists said.
At one time, the researchers estimated, a northern ocean would have covered about 19 percent of the Martian surface. In comparison, the Atlantic Ocean covers about 17 percent of Earth’s surface.

The new findings come at a time when the possibility of a northern ocean on Mars has gained renewed attention.

The Curiosity rover measured lighter and heavier water molecules in the Gale Crater, and the data also indicated that Mars once had substantial amounts of water, although not as much as Dr. Mumma and Dr. Villanueva suggest.

“The more water was present — and especially if it was a large body of water that lasted for a longer period of time — the better the chances are for life to emerge and to be sustained,” said Paul Mahaffy, chief of the atmospheric experiments laboratory at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

Just last month, the science team running the Curiosity rover held its first formal discussion about the possibility of such an ocean and what it would have meant for the rest of Mars.

Scientists generally agree that lakes must have existed for millions of years in Gale Crater and elsewhere. But it is not clear how they were sustained and replenished.

“For open lakes to remain relatively stable for millions of years — it’s hard to figure how to do that without an ocean,” Dr. Vasavada said. “Unless there was a large body of water supplying humidity to the planet, the water in an open lake would quickly evaporate and be carried to the polar caps or frozen out.”

Yet climate modelers have had difficulty understanding how Mars could have been warm enough in its early days to keep water from freezing. Greenhouse gases could have made the planet much warmer at some point, but byproducts of those gases have yet to be found on the surface.

James Head, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University, said in an email that the new paper had “profound implications for the total volume of water” on ancient Mars.

But, he added, “climate models have great difficulty in reconstructing an early Mars with temperatures high enough to permit surface melting and liquid water.”

Also missing are clear signs of the topographic and geological features associated with large bodies of water on Earth, such as sea cliffs and shorelines.

Based on low-resolution images sent back by the Viking landers, the geologist Timothy Parker and his colleagues at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab reported in 1989 the discovery of ancient shorelines. But later high-resolution images undermined their conclusions.

Still, Dr. Parker and his colleagues have kept looking for — and finding, they say — some visible signs of a northern ocean. The new data “certainly encourages me to do more,” he said in an interview.

Other researchers have also been looking for signs of an ancient ocean.

In 2013, Roman DiBiase, then a postdoctoral student at the California Institute of Technology, and Michael Lamb, an assistant professor of geology there, identified what might have been a system of channels on Mars that originated in the southern hemisphere and emptied steeply into the northern basin — perhaps, they said, water flowing through a delta to an ocean.

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Rare doomed planet with extreme seasons discovered

February 25, 2015 / / 0 Comments


Kepler432b.jpg
Illustration provided by the University of Heidelberg of the orbit of Kepler-432b (inner, red) in comparison to the orbit of Mercury around the Sun (outer, orange). The red dot in the middle indicates the position of the star around which the planet is orbiting. The size of the star is shown to scale, while the size of the planet has been magnified ten times for illustration purposes. (Graphic: Dr. Sabine Reffert)


Excerpt from foxnews.com/science


A rare planet has been discovered, and it doesn’t seem like a stop anyone would want to make on an intergalactic cruise. Found by two research teams independently of each other, Kepler-432b is extreme in its mass, density, and weather. Roughly the same size of Jupiter, the planet is also doomed- in 200 million years it will be consumed by its sun. “Kepler-432b is definitively a rarity among exoplanets around giant stars: it is a close-in gas-giant planet orbiting a star whose radius is 'quickly' increasing,” Davide Gandolfi, from the Landessternwarte Koenigstuhl (part of the Centre for Astronomy of the University of Heidelberg), told FoxNews.com. “The orbit of the planet has a radius of about 45 million kilometers [28 million miles] (as a reference point, the Earth-Sun distance is about 150 million kilometers [93.2 Million miles]), while most of the planets known to orbit giant stars have wider orbits. The stellar radius is already 3 million kilometers [almost 2 million miles] (i.e., about 4 times the Sun radius) and in less than 200 million years it will be large enough for the star to swallow up its planet.”

Gandolfi, a member of one of the research groups who discovered the rare planet, explains that much like Jupiter, Kepler-432b is a gas-giant celestial body composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, and is most likely to have a dense core that accounts for 6 percent or less of the planet’s mass. “The planet has a mass six times that of Jupiter, but is about the same size!” he says. “This means that it is not one of the largest planets yet discovered: it is one of the most massive!” The planet’s orbit brings it extremely close to its host star on some occasions, and very far away at others, which creates extreme seasonal changes. In its year - which lasts 52 Earth days - winters can get a little chilly and summers a bit balmy, to say the least. According to Gandolfi, “The highly eccentric orbit brings Kepler-432b at ‘only’ 24 million kilometers [15 million miles] from its host star, before taking it to about three times as far away. This creates large temperature excursions over the course of the planet year, which is of only 52 Earth days. During the winter season, the temperature on Kepler-432b drops down to 500 degrees Celsius [932 degrees Fahrenheit], whereas in summer it can goes up to nearly 1000 degrees Celsius [1832 degrees Fahrenheit].”

Then again, if you are crazy enough to visit Kepler-432b, you’d better do it fast. As stated before, its host star is set to swallow the planet whole in 200 million years, making the celestial body a rare find. “The paucity of close-in planets around giant stars is likely to be due to the fact that these planets have been already swallowed up by their host stars,” Gandolfi says. “Kepler-432b has been discovered ‘just in time before dinner!” The host star, which is red and possesses 1.35 times the mass of our sun, has partly exhausted the nuclear fuel in its core, and is slowly expanding, eventually growing large enough to swallow Kepler-432b. According to Gandolfi, this is a natural progression for all stars. “Stars first generate nuclear energy in their core via the fusion of Hydrogen into Helium,” he explained. “At this stage, their radii basically do not change much. This is because the outward thermal pressure produced by the nuclear fusion in the core is balanced by the inward pressure of gravitational collapse from the overlying layers. In other words, the nuclear power is the star pillar! Our Sun is currently ‘burning’ hydrogen in its core (please note that I used quotes: ‘burning’ does not mean a chemical reaction- we are talking about nuclear fusion reaction). However, this equilibrium between the two pressures does not last forever. Helium is heavier than hydrogen and tends to sink. The stellar core of the Kepler-432b's host star is currently depleted of hydrogen and it is mainly made of inert helium. The star generates thermal energy in a shell around the core through the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. As a result of this, the star expands and cools down. This is why we call it ‘red giant’- the reddish color comes from the fact that the external layers of the atmosphere of the star are cooling down because they expand.”

Both research teams (the other was from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg) used Calar Alto Observatory’s 7.2- foot telescope in Andalucia, Spain. The planet was also studied by Landessternwarte Koenigstuhl researchers using the 8.5-foot Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma, which is located in Spain’s Canary Islands.

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Monster Black Hole Is the Largest and Brightest Ever Found

February 25, 2015 / / 0 Comments



Largest and Brightest Black Hole
An artist's illustration of a monster supermassive black hole at the heart of a quasar in the distant universe. Scientists say the newfound black hole SDSS J010013.02+280225.8 is the largest and brightest ever found.

Excerpt from space.com

 Astronomers have discovered the largest and most luminous black hole ever seen — an ancient monster with a mass about 12 billion times that of the sun — that dates back to when the universe was less than 1 billion years old.

It remains a mystery how black holes could have grown so huge in such a relatively brief time after the dawn of the universe, researchers say.

Supermassive black holes are thought to lurk in the hearts of most, if not all, large galaxies. The largest black holes found so far in the nearby universe have masses more than 10 billion times that of the sun. In comparison, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is thought to have a mass only 4 million to 5 million times that of the sun. 


Although not even light can escape the powerful gravitational pulls of black holes — hence, their name — black holes are often bright. That's because they're surrounded by features known as accretion disks, which are made up of gas and dust that heat up and give off light as it swirl into the black holes. Astronomers suspect that quasars, the brightest objects in the universe, contain supermassive black holes that release extraordinarily large amounts of light as they rip apart stars.
So far, astronomers have discovered 40 quasars — each with a black hole about 1 billion times the mass of the sun — dating back to when the universe was less than 1 billion years old. Now, scientists report the discovery of a supermassive black hole 12 billion times the mass of the sun about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth that dates back to when the universe was only about 875 million years old.

This black hole — technically known as SDSS J010013.02+280225.8, or J0100+2802 for short — is not only the most massive quasar ever seen in the early universe but also the most luminous. It is about 429 trillion times brighter than the sun and seven times brighter than the most distant quasar known.

The light from very distant quasars can take billions of years to reach Earth. As such, astronomers can see quasars as they were when the universe was young.

This black hole dates back to a little more than 6 percent of the universe's current age of 13.8 billion years.

"This is quite surprising because it presents serious challenges to theories of black hole growth in the early universe," said lead study author Xue-Bing Wu, an astrophysicist at Peking University in Beijing.

Accretion discs limit the speed of modern black holes' growth. First, as gas and dust in the disks get close to black holes, traffic jams slow down any other material that's falling into them. Second, as matter collides in these traffic jams, it heats up, emitting radiation that drives gas and dust away from the black holes.

Newfound Quasar SDSS J0100+2802
The newfound quasar SDSS J0100+2802 has the most massive black hole and the highest luminosity among all known distant quasars, as shown in this comparison chart of the black hole's mass and brightness.


Scientists still do not have a satisfactory theory to explain how these supermassive objects formed in the early universe, Wu said.

"It requires either very special ways to quickly grow the black hole or a huge seed black hole," Wu told Space.com. For instance, a recent study suggested that because the early universe was much smaller than it is today, gas was often denser, obscuring a substantial amount of the radiation given off by accretion disks and thus helping matter fall into black holes.

The researchers noted that the light from this black hole could help provide clues about the dark corners of the distant cosmos. As the quasar's light shines toward Earth, it passes through intergalactic gas that colors the light. By deducing how this intergalactic gas influenced the spectrum of light from the quasar, scientists can deduce which elements make up this gas. This knowledge, in turn, can provide insight into the star-formation processes that were at work shortly after the Big Bang that produced these elements.

"This quasar is the most luminous one in the early universe, which, like a lighthouse, will provide us chances to use it as a unique tool to study the cosmic structure of the dark, distant universe," Wu said.
The scientists detailed their findings in the Feb. 26 issue of the journal Nature.

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Birth of the Nibiru Legend? Astronomers Say Alien Star System Buzzed Our Sun

February 19, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Scholz's star - shown in this artist's impression - is currently 20 light-years away. But it once came much closerExcerpt from bbc.comAn alien star passed through our Solar System just 70,000 years ago, astronomers have discovered.  No othe...

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Study Suggests Baby Chicks Can Count! ~ Video

January 31, 2015 / / 0 Comments





Excerpt from nbcnews.com
By Tia Ghose, LiveScience



It's not just humans who can count: Newly published research suggests chicks seem to have a number sense, too. 

Scientists found that chicks seem to count upward, moving from left to right. They put smaller numbers on the left, and larger numbers on the right — the same mental representation of the number line that humans use. 

"Our results suggest a rethinking of the relationship between numerical abilities and verbal language, providing further evidence that language and culture are not necessary for the development of a mathematical cognition," said study lead author Rosa Rugani, a psychologist at the University of Padova in Italy.

The left-to-right way of thinking about ascending numbers seems to be embedded in people's mental representations of numbers, but it's not clear exactly why. Is it an artifact of some long-lost accident of history, or is it a fundamental aspect of the way the brain processes numbers? 

To help answer those questions, Rugani and her colleagues trained 3-day-old chicks to travel around a screen panel with five dots on it to get to a food treat behind it. This made the five-dot panel an anchor number that the chicks could use for comparison with other numbers. 

After the chicks learned that the five-dot panel meant food, the researchers removed that panel and then placed the chicks in front of two panels, one to the left and the other to the right, that each had two dots. The chicks tended to go to the left panel, suggesting that they mentally represent numbers smaller than five as being to the left of five. 

When the researchers put the chicks in front of two panels that each had eight dots, the chicks walked to the panel on the right. This suggests the chicks mentally represent numbers larger than five as being to the right of five, the researchers said. 

In a second experiment, the researchers repeated the whole process, but started with a panel that had 20 dots instead of five. They then added two other panels that had either eight or 32 dots. Sure enough, the baby chicks tended to go to the left when the screens had just eight dots, and to the right when they had 32 dots, according to the findings published in this week's issue of the journal Science. 

"I would not at all be surprised that the number spatial mapping is also found in other animals, and in newborn infants," Rugani said.



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