Tag: rapidly (page 1 of 7)

The Case of the Incredible Disappearing Cancer Patients

December 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Tracy Kolenchuk, ContributorIt’s been almost 20 years since I met my first disappearing patient — a nurse in her early 40s, let’s call her Kate. Kate was diagnosed with breast cancer. As a nurse, she had seen the results of breast cancer treatments. She was terrified, and determined. She was not heading for surgery, nor chemotherapy, nor radiation.But Kate worked in a hospital. She worked with the doctors who diagnosed her cancer, and she worked with [...]

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Celebrating Genocide – The Real Story of Thanksgiving

November 26, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Irwin Ozborne, ContributorThanksgiving: Celebrating all that we have, and the genocide it took to get it.Thanksgiving is one of the most paradoxical times of the year. We gather together with friends and family in celebration of all that we are thankful for and express our gratitude, at the same time we are encouraged to eat in excess. But the irony really starts the next day on Black Friday. On Thursday we appreciate all the simple things in life, such as having a meal, a roof over [...]

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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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5 Signs the California Drought Could Get Worse

May 19, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Anastasia Pantsios, EcoWatchCalifornia is entering its fourth year of drought, with high temperatures, water shortages and increased wildfires. The state has taken some steps to address the impacts of that, including addressing greenhouse gas emissions and rationing its diminishing water supply. But there are signs that the impacts of drought on the state could get even worse.1. A new study shows that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to ris [...]

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Desperately Seeking ET: Fermi’s Paradox Turns 65 ~ Part 2

May 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comIntroductionWhy is it so hard to find ET? After 50 years of searching, the SETI project has so far found nothing. In the latest development, on April 14, 2015 Penn State researchers announced that after searching through...

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Astronomers Measure Distance to Farthest Galaxy Yet

May 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments



The farthest confirmed galaxy observed to date was identified in this Hubble image of a field of galaxies.  The inset image of the galaxy has been colored blue as suggestive of its young stars. Credit NASA/European Space Agency/Yale/University of California, Santa Cruz


Excerpt from nytimes.com

Leapfrogging backward in time to when the universe was apparently feeling its oats, a group of astronomers reported Tuesday that they had measured a bona fide distance to one of the farthest and thus earliest galaxies known.

The galaxy, more than a few billion light-years on the other side of the northern constellation Boötes, is one of the most massive and brightest in the early universe and goes by the name of EGS-zs8-1. 
It flowered into stardom only 670 million years after the Big Bang.
The light from that galaxy has taken 13 billion years to reach telescopes on Earth. By now, however, since the universe has continued to expand during that time, the galaxy is about 30 billion light-years away, according to standard cosmological calculations.
The new measurements allow astronomers to see the galaxy in its infancy. Despite its relative youth, however, it is already about one-sixth as massive as the Milky Way, which is 10 billion years old. And it is getting bigger, making stars 80 times faster than the Milky Way is making them today. The discovery was reported in The Astrophysical Journal by Pascal Oesch of Yale University and his colleagues.

By the rules of the expanding universe, the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is retreating from us, measured by the “redshift” of its light being broadened to longer wavelengths, the way an ambulance siren seems to lower its pitch as it goes by.

In the past few years, as astronomers have raced one another into the past with instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, galaxies have been found that appear even more distant. Those measurements, however, were estimates based on the colors of the objects — so-called photometric redshifts.

The new galaxy stuck out in a survey of distant galaxies by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes known as Candels, for Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey. Its redshift was precisely measured with a powerful spectrograph known as Mosfire — Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infrared Exploration — on Keck 1, one of a pair of 10-meter-diameter telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. That makes it the highest redshift confirmed in this way, said Garth Illingworth, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the astronomers in the study.

How galaxies were able to form and grow so rapidly after the lights came on in the universe is a mystery that will be addressed by a coming generation of instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope, a goliath planned for Mauna Kea, already home to a dozen telescopes.

Recently, however, construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, a $1.4 billion project, has been halted by protests by Hawaii residents who feel their mountain has been abused. An echo of that controversy appears in the new paper, in which Dr. Oesch and his colleagues write: “The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.”

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Desperately Seeking Extraterrestrials ~ Fermi’s Paradox Turns 65 ~ Part 1

May 4, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comIntroduction 65 years ago, in 1950, while having lunch with colleagues Edward Teller and Herbert York, Nobel physicist Enrico Fermi suddenly blurted out, "Where is everybody?" His question is now known as Fermi's p...

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Explosive Culprit? Russian Fireball’s Origins Found

April 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments


A photograph of the Annama meteorite fireball over Russia's Kola Peninsula.



Excerpt from space.com

 A crackling fireball that exploded over Russia last year appears to share an orbit with a huge asteroid discovered in October 2014, a new study reports.

The Kola fireball was spotted on April 19, 2014, as it lit up the night sky above the Kola Peninsula near the Finnish-Russian border. Its orbit is "disturbingly similar" to the asteroid 2014 UR116, slated to pass by the moon in 2017, the study authors said.
Camera observations by the Finnish Fireball Network, which monitors the sky for meteors and fireballs, and video from eyewitnesses helped scientists recreate the meteoroid's trajectory and hunt down meteorite fragments on the ground. 


Josep Maria Trigo-Rodríguez, a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, led the international team of scientists who analyzed the meteorite's orbit. They calculated the fireball's size and path through Earth's atmosphere by examining its flight and the meteorite's final impact site. A computer model based on these figures was used to estimate the space rock's orbital path. 

The 1,100-pound (500 kilogram) meteorite is an ordinary H5 chondrite, a type of stony meteorite responsible for 31 percent of Earth's impacts. The fragments are called the "Annama meteorite" because the meteorite fell near the Annama River in Russia.

Annama meteorite

The precise detective works suggests the fireball escaped from the innermost region of the asteroid belt, the study researchers reported. The rock has an elliptical orbit that is typical of the Apollo family of near-Earth orbiting asteroids, and it likely came from the same broad source region as the Lost City, Peekskill and Buzzard Coulee meteorites, the researchers said.

The researchers compared the Annama meteorite's orbit with known near-Earth asteroids (there are more than 1,500). Of 12 potential matches, by far the closest match was with the asteroid 2014 UR116, they said.

The findings were published April 7 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The new report does not suggest that asteroid 2014 UR116 flung the Annama meteorite directly at Earth. However, the two bodies could be related. Scientists think that streams of asteroid fragments — such as the remnants of interstellar collisions — can sail on nearly identical orbits. Tidal forces may stretch out these rocky debris patches over time. Asteroids may also fragment from the stress of passing near the planets, the researchers noted.

"The tidal effect on an asteroid, which rapidly rotates under the gravitational field of a planet, can fragment these objects or release large rocks from its surface, which could then become dangerous projectiles at a local scale, such as the one that fell in Chelyabinsk, Russia," Trigo-Rodríguez said in a statement.

Asteroid 2014 UR116, discovered by Russian scientists on Oct. 27, 2014, measures 1,312 feet (400 meters) across, but does not pose an impact danger to Earth, according to NASA.

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When did humans first begin to wear clothes?

March 12, 2015 / / 0 Comments



Excerpt from todayifoundout.com

Determining exactly when humans began wearing clothes is a challenge, largely because early clothes would have been things like animal hides, which degrade rapidly. Therefore, there’s very little archaeological evidence that can be used to determine the date that clothing started being worn. 

There have been several different theories based on what archaeologists have been able to find. For instance, based on genetic skin-coloration research, humans lost body hair around one million years ago—an ideal time to start wearing clothes for warmth. The first tools used to scrape hides date back to 780,000 years ago, but animal hides served other uses, such as providing shelter, and it’s thought that those tools were used to prepare hides for that, rather than clothing. Eyed needles started appearing around 40,000 years ago, but those tools point to more complex clothing, meaning clothes had probably already been around for a while.
All that being said, scientists have started gathering alternative data that might help solve the mystery of when we humans started covering our bits.

A recent University of Florida study concluded that humans started wearing clothes some 170,000 years ago, lining up with the end of the second-to-last ice age. How did they figure that date out? By studying the evolution of lice.

Scientists observed that clothing lice are, well, extremely well-adapted to clothing. They hypothesized that body lice must have evolved to live in clothing, which meant that they weren’t around before humans started wearing clothes. The study used DNA sequencing of lice to calculate when clothing lice started to genetically split from head lice.

The findings of the study are significant because they show that clothes appeared some 70,000 years before humans started to migrate north from Africa into cooler climates. The invention of clothing was probably one factor that made migration possible.
This timing also makes sense due to known climate factors in that era.  As Ian Gilligan, a lecturer at the Australian National University, said that the study gave “an unexpectedly early date for clothing, much earlier than the earliest solid archaeological evidence, but it makes sense. It means modern humans probably started wearing clothes on a regular basis to keep warm when they were first exposed to Ice Age conditions.”

As to when humans moved on from animal hides and into textiles, the first fabric is thought to have been an early ancestor of felt. From there, early humans took up weaving some 27,000 years ago, based on impressions of baskets and textiles on clay. Around 25,000 years ago, the first Venus figurines—little statues of women—appeared wearing a variety of different clothes that pointed to weaving technology being in place by this time.
From there, more recent ancient civilizations discovered many materials they could fashion into clothing. For instance, Ancient Egyptians produced linen around 5500 BC, while the Chinese likely started producing silk around 4000 B.C.

As for clothing for fashion, instead of just keeping warm, it is thought that this occurred relatively early on. The first example of dyed flax fibers were found in a cave in the Republic of Georgia and date back to 36,000 years ago. That being said, while they may have added colour, early clothes seem to have been much simpler than the clothing we wear today—mostly cloth draped over the shoulder and pinned at the waist.

Around the mid-1300s in certain regions of the world, with some technological advances in previous century, clothing fashion began to change drastically from what it was before. For instance, clothing started to be made to form fit the human body, with curved seams, laces, and buttons. Contrasting colours and fabrics also became popular in England. From this time, fashion in the West began to change at an alarming rate, largely based on aesthetics, whereas in other cultures fashion typically changed only with great political upheaval, meaning changes came more slowly in most other cultures.

The Industrial Revolution, of course, had a huge impact on the clothing industry. Clothes could now be made en mass in factories rather than just in the home and could be transported from factory to market in record time. As a result, clothes became drastically cheaper, leading to people having significantly larger wardrobes and contributing to the constant change in fashion that we still see today.

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Milky Way Galaxy May Be 50 Percent Bigger Than We Thought

March 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments

 Excerpt from cbsnews.com Rings of stars thought to surround the Milky Way are actually part of it, according to new research, meaning the galaxy is bigger than previously believed.The findings extend the known width of the Milk...

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‘God Particle’ analogue spotted outside a supercollider: Scientists find Higgs mode in a superconductor

February 25, 2015 / / 0 Comments


The God Particle, which is believed to be responsible for all the mass in the universe, was discovered in 2012 using a Cern's supercollider. In this image two high-energy photons collide. The yellow lines are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision, which helped lead to the discovery of the God particle
The God Particle, which is believed to be responsible for all the mass in the universe, was discovered in 2012 using a Cern's supercollider. In this image two high-energy photons collide. The yellow lines are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision, which helped lead to the discovery of the God particle.


Excerpt from dailymail.co.uk
  • God Particle is believed to be responsible for all the mass in the universe
  • Particle was discovered in 2012 using a Cern's supercollider in Geneva
  • uperconductor experiment suggests the particle could be detected without the huge amounts of energy used at by the Large Hadron Collider
  • LHC is due to come back online next month after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy

Scientists have discovered a simulated version of the elusive 'God particle' using superconductors.

The God Particle, which is believed to be responsible for all the mass in the universe, was discovered in 2012 using a Cern's supercollider.

The superconductor experiment suggests that the Higgs particle could be detected without the huge amounts of energy used at by the Large Hadron Collider. 
The results could help scientists better understand how this mysterious particle – also known as the Higgs boson – behaves in different conditions.

'Just as the Cern experiments revealed the existence of the Higgs boson in a high-energy accelerator environment, we have now revealed a Higgs boson analogue in superconductors,' said researcher Aviad Frydman from Bar-Ilan University.

Superconductors are a type of metal that, when cooled to low temperatures, allow electrons to pass through freely.

'The Higgs mode was never actually observed in superconductors because of technical difficulties - difficulties that we've managed to overcome,' Professor Frydman said.

The superconductor experiment suggests that the Higgs particle could be detected without the huge amounts of energy used at by the Large Hadron Collider (pictured)
The superconductor experiment suggests that the Higgs particle could be detected without the huge amounts of energy used at by the Large Hadron Collider (pictured)

WHAT IS THE GOD PARTICLE? 

The 'God Particle', also known as the Higgs boson, was a missing piece in the jigsaw for physicists in trying to understand how the universe works.

Scientists believe that a fraction of a second after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe, an invisible energy field, called the Higgs field, formed.

This has been described as a kind of 'cosmic treacle' across the universe. 

As particles passed through it, they picked up mass, giving them size and shape and allowing them to form the atoms that make up you, everything around you and everything in the universe.

This was the theory proposed in 1964 by former grammar school boy Professor Higgs that has now been confirmed.

Without the Higgs field particles would simply whizz around space in the same way as light does.

A boson is a type of sub-atomic particle. Every energy field has a specific particle that governs its interaction with what's around it. 

To try to pin it down, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva smashed together beams of protons – the 'hearts of atoms' – at close to the speed of light, recreating conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

Although they would rapidly decay, they should have left a recognisable footprint. This footprint was found in 2012.

The main difficulty was that the superconducting material would decay into something known as particle-hole pairs.

Large amounts of energy – which are usually needed to excite the Higgs mode - tend to break apart the electron pairs that act as the material's charge.

Professor Frydman and his colleagues solved this problem by using ultra-thin superconducting films of Niobium Nitrite (NbN) and Indium Oxide (InO) as something known as the 'superconductor-insulator critical point.'

This is a state in which recent theory predicted the decay of the Higgs would no longer occur.

In this way, they could still excite a Higgs mode even at relatively low energies.

'The parallel phenomenon in superconductors occurs on a different energy scale entirely - just one-thousandth of a single electronvolt,' Professor Frydman added.

'What's exciting is to see how, even in these highly disparate systems, the same fundamental physics is at work.'

The different approach help solve one of the longstanding mysteries of fundamental physics.

The discovery of the Higgs boson verified the Standard Model, which predicted that particles gain mass by passing through a field that slows down their movement through the vacuum of space.

To try to pin it down, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva smashed together beams of protons – the 'hearts of atoms' – at close to the speed of light, recreating conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

Although they would rapidly decay, the also left a recognisable footprint.

Professor Higgs, 83, has been waiting since 1964 for science to catch up with his ideas about the Higgs boson
Professor Higgs, 83, has been waiting since 1964 for science to catch up with his ideas about the Higgs boson

According to Professor Frydman, observation of the Higgs mechanism in superconductors is significant because it reveals how a single type of physical process behaves under different energy conditions.

'Exciting the Higgs mode in a particle accelerator requires enormous energy levels - measured in giga-electronvolts, or 109 eV,' Professor Frydman says.

'The parallel phenomenon in superconductors occurs on a different energy scale entirely - just one-thousandth of a single electronvolt.

'What's exciting is to see how, even in these highly disparate systems, the same fundamental physics is at work.'

The LHC is due to come back online in March after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy.

'With this new energy level, the (collider) will open new horizons for physics and for future discoveries,' CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said in a statement.
'I'm looking forward to seeing what nature has in store for us.'

Cern's collider is buried in a 27-km (17-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border at the foot of the Jura mountains.

The LHC in Geneva will come back online in March after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy
The LHC in Geneva will come back online in March after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy

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Mysterious plumes in Mars’ atmosphere baffle astronomers

February 17, 2015 / / 0 Comments




Excerpt from thespacereporter.com

Astronomers are baffled by images of plumes rising from Mars’ atmosphere in images taken by amateur astronomers in March and April 2012.

The plumes were present for about 10 days though their shapes and sizes changed rapidly during that time, from finger-like tendrils to spherical blobs.

Researchers have proposed several possible explanations for the plumes, which are discussed in an article just published in the journal Nature.

Each of the theories being considered poses problems. One theory, for instaqnce, proposes the plumes are caused by the same magnetic influence that causes the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, on Earth. The movement of electrically charged particles from the Sun, driven by the solar wind towards Earth’s poles, results in these particles colliding with molecules of gas. These collisions produce the strange lights known as aurorae.

In the study, the researchers admit, “Mars aurorae have been observed near where the plume occurs, a region with a large anomaly in the crustal magnetic field that can drive the precipitation of solar wind particles into the atmosphere.”
The problem with this theory is this would only happen if the Sun released an exceptional amount of energetic particles during the time the plumes were seen. Yet the level of solar output in 2012 was nowhere near sufficient to release such a powerful stream of particles, the authors of the paper acknowledge.

They move on to consider another option, namely that the plumes might be clouds high in the Martian atmosphere.

A highly reflective cloud of either water ice, carbon dioxide ice, or dust particles could explain the plumes. But according to computer models, the presence of these clouds “would require exceptional deviations from standard atmospheric circulation models to explain cloud formations at such high altitudes,” explained the paper’s lead author, Agustin Sanchez-Lavega of the Universidad del Pais Vasco in Spain.

The plumes were seen approximately 120 miles (200 km) from Mars’ surface, which is problematic because the highest Martian clouds are seen is 60 miles (100 km) above the planet’s surface. The only way water can condense so far up is if the temperature in that part of Mars’ atmosphere drops 370 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 degrees Kelvin, below its norm.

Condensation of carbon dioxide would require twice this temperature drop.

A third theory posits the flumes are caused by atmospheric dust. A wind powerful enough to transport dust 111 miles (180 km) above Mars’ surface could occur only around noon, when the Sun’s heat would be strong enough to create such wind currents.

However, the plumes were seen not at noon but in the mornings along the terminator that separates the planet’s day and night sides.
Recently, data from the Hubble Space Telescope was found showing the plumes back in 1997.

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ALMA uncovers stellar nurseries in the Sculptor Galaxy, 11.5 million light years from home

February 17, 2015 / / 0 Comments



ALMA uncovers stellar nurseries in the Sculptor Galaxy, 11.5 million light years from home
The Sculptor Galaxy


Excerpt from sciencerecorder.com

Starburst galaxies are named for their ability to convert gasses rapidly into new stars, at an accelerated speed that can sometimes be 1,000 times more rapid than your average spiral galaxy, such as the Milky Way. Why the disparity? In order to further investigate the reason that some galaxies seem to “burst” into being, whereas others take the better part of a few billion years, an international team of astronomers analyzed a cluster of star-forming gas clouds in the heart of NGC 253 – the Sculptor Galaxy, with the aid of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The Sculptor Galaxy is among starburst galaxies closest to the Milky Way.

“All stars form in dense clouds of dust and gas,” said Adam Leroy, in an interview with Astronomy magazine. Leroy is an astronomer at Ohio State University in Columbus. “Until now, however, scientists struggled to see exactly what was going on inside starburst galaxies that distinguished them from other star-forming regions.”

Therefore, Leroy and his colleagues turn to the ALMA which is capable of examining star changing structures even in systems as distant as Sculptor. Already, they have successfully charted distribution and movement of various molecules within several clouds located at the Sculptor Galaxy’s core.

Because NGC 253, which is disk-shaped, is in the stages of a very intense starburst and located approximately 11.5 million light-years from home, it is the perfect target for study. ALMA picks it up with remarkable precision and resolution, so much so that the team was able to isolate and identify ten different stellar ‘nurseries,’ in which stars were in the process of forming. To appreciate the magnitude of this feat, it would have been impossible with previous telescopes, which blurred the regions together into one glow. 

“There is a class of galaxies and parts of galaxies, we call them starbursts, where we know that gas is just plain better at forming stars,” said Leroy. “To understand why, we took one of the nearest such regions and pulled it apart — layer by layer — to see what makes the gas in these places so much more efficient at star formation.”

More importantly, they recognized the distribution of several 40 millimeter-wavelength “signatures,” that given off by various molecules at the center of Sculptor Galaxy, signaling that a number of conditions were responsible for the development of these stars. This accounts for the diversity of the states of different stars corresponding to where they are found in star-forming clouds. One important compound, all too familiar and unwelcome on Earth, carbon monoxide (CO), correlates with massive envelopes of gases that are less dense within the stellar nurseries. Others, such as hydrogen cyanide (HCN), were present in the more dense reaches of active star formation. The rarer the molecules, for example, H13CN and H13CO+, suggest regions that are even denser.

Indeed, when the data was compared, researchers found that the gas clouds of the Sculptor Galaxy were ten times denser than those found in spiral galaxies, suggesting that because the clouds are so tightly packed, they can form star clusters much more rapidly than the Milky Way. At the same time, they give us further insight as to how stars are born, showing us the physical changes along the way, allowing astronomers a working model to compare with our own galaxy. 

“These differences have wide-ranging implications for how galaxies grow and evolve,” concluded Leroy. “What we would ultimately like to know is whether a starburst like Sculptor produces not just more stars, but different types of stars than a galaxy like the Milky Way. ALMA is bringing us much closer to that goal.”

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