Tag: white (page 2 of 10)

Is an Abundance of Arsenic Found in Rice Increasing Risk of Cancer?

May 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Brett Wilbanks, Staff WriterArsenic is a common element found in nature. It occurs naturally in a variety of sources, from soil and water, to foods that we eat on a regular basis. There are several forms of arsenic, and some, particularly certain inorganic forms, are more harmful than others.According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, two compounds found in inorganic arsenic are known carcinogenic substances and are associated with a number of devastating health eff [...]

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Sea Salt Discovered on Jupiter’s Moon Europa

May 17, 2015 / / 0 Comments

This image shows a view of the trailing hemisphere of Jupiter's ice-covered satellite, Europa, in approximate natural color. Long, dark lines are fractures in the crust, some of which are more than 3,000 kilometers (1,850 miles) long. Image via Galileo spacecraft in 1996.

Europa is thought to have a subsurface ocean. Salt from this hidden sea might be emerging in long fractures visible in the moon’s crust.



Excerpt earthsky.org


Laboratory experiments have lead to new information about the chemical composition of the mysterious dark material in the long, dark fractures on the surface of Europa, a large moon of Jupiter. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) mimicked conditions on Europa’s surface. They now say that the dark material is discolored salt, likely sea salt from below the moon’s icy crust. The journal Geological Research Letters published their study on May 15, 2015.

The scientists say this new insight is important in considering whether this icy moon might be hospitable for extraterrestrial life. The life question is a key one for Europa, since this world is believed to have a liquid ocean beneath its crust. The presence of sea salt on Europa’s surface suggests the ocean is interacting with its rocky seafloor.

Scientists have been intensely curious about Europa since Galileo discovered it in 1610. In recent years, they’ve puzzled over the dark material coating the long, linear fractures on Europa’s observable surface. The material was associated with young terrain on this moon of Jupiter, suggesting that it had erupted from within Europa.
However, the chemical composition of the dark material remained elusive, until now.
Planetary scientist Kevin Hand at JPL led the new study. He said in a statement:
If it’s just salt from the ocean below, that would be a simple and elegant solution for what the dark, mysterious material is.
Europa is immersed radiation from Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field, causing high-powered electrons to slam into the moon’s surface. Hand and his team created a laboratory test that mimicked the conditions of Europa’s temperature, pressure, and radiation exposure. They tested a variety of samples including common salt – sodium chloride – and salt water in a vacuum chamber at Europa’s chilly surface temperature of minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 173 Celsius). They also bombarded the samples with an electron beam to imitate Jupiter’s influence. 

After several hours – a time period corresponding to over a century on Europa, the researchers said – the salt samples were observed to go from white to a yellowish brown, the color similar to the features on the icy moon. Hand said:
This work tells us the chemical signature of radiation-baked sodium chloride is a compelling match to spacecraft data for Europa’s mystery material.
A
A “Europa-in-a-can” laboratory setup at NASA-JPL mimics conditions of temperature, near vacuum and heavy radiation on the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech


A close-up of salt grains discolored by radiation following exposure in a
Close-up of salt grains discolored by radiation following exposure in a “Europa-in-a-can” test setup at JPL. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech


Until now, telescopic observations have only shown glimpses of irradiated salts. No telescope on Earth can observe Europa’s surface with enough resolution to identify them with certainty. Researchers suggest additional spacecraft observation to gather more evidence.
A visit to this icy world would help answer the most tantalizing questions about Europa. Long believed to have a liquid ocean of salt water below its icy surface, this moon continues to display promising conditions for extraterrestrial life. 

As Europa orbits Jupiter, it experiences strong tidal forces similar to Earth and the Moon. These forces from Jupiter and the other Jovian moons cause Europa to flex and stretch, which creates heat, and results in Europa having a warm internal temperature than it would with just the heat from the Sun alone. 

Recent observable geological activity also creates strong evidence that the subsurface ocean interacts directly with Europa’s rocky interior, making geothermal vents, like those in Earth’s oceans, a strong possibility as well. 

These hydrothermal vent ecosystems on Earth thrive with no energy from the sun. Bacteria, shrimp and crustaceans have all been observed in these extreme environments, surviving on what researchers have deemed chemosythesis.

With Europa’s enormous amount of liquid salt water, essential chemical elements and geological activity, this long discovered icy moon appears to be one of the solar systems most promising locations for habitable requirements for life. 

However, until a devoted spacecraft visit’s, nothing beyond hopeful speculation can be proven, the researchers say.

Bottom line: Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory created laboratory conditions that mimicked those on Jupiter’s large moon Europa, to learn the chemical compositions of the material in long, dark fractures in the moon’s surface. They now believe this material is sea salt, which has emerged to Europa’s surface from its liquid ocean below.

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Report: No endangered animals in 200 zoos across the US!

May 17, 2015 / / 0 Comments




Excerpt from thenextdigit.com

On May 15, the 10th anniversary of Endangered Species Day has been kicked off across the United States, which sees a series of wildlife awareness events with the participation of over 200 zoos. These zoos across the country restricted access to a few of their endangered animals and birds to make visitors feel the non existence of such species.
Ohio’s Akron Zoo also participated in the awareness event, where it shrouded Sumatran tigers from visitors, with only limited access to visitors to capture a glimpse of the endangered tiger species. In Dallas Zoo, authorities kept the African penguins were kept away from visitors’ sight, while allowing those visitors who commit to eat sustainable seafood, switching off lights when not in use and such kind of conservation efforts.

Ohio’s Akron Zoo’s director of marketing and guest services David Barnhardt revealed that the zoo will be using this event to launch their own program SAFE (Saving Animals from Extinction) where the zoo will create awareness of saving endangered animals. SAFE is sponsored by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. He also said,
“Through SAFE we will pull all of these resources we have available to us and develop action plans, raise awareness and engage the public to help these endangered species.”
Endangered Species Day is an opportunity for every humans to learn about the importance of animals, especially endangered species, and day to day actions they can take to protect these species, according to the Endangered Species Coalition. The Endangered Coalition not only sponsors events in the states, but also provides toolkits for zoos which interested in its own endangered species awareness programs such as SAFE.
Dallas Zoo has initiated a program in February 2015, named as the Wild Earth Academy, which educates people about endangered species. Ben Jones, Wild Earth Academy’s Senior Director and Dean, said in a statement:
“There’s a balance in nature and it’s very evident that that balance is becoming imbalanced, it’s shifting. We have to do our part to use the resources that we have, but not use them up.”
The Coalition also produces the yearly report “Vanishing: Ten American Species Our Children May Never See” – listing the top 10 most endangered species during the time of reporting. 2014’s ‘Vanishing’ report listed endangered animals like the Monarch butterfly, Mountain yellow-legged frog (extinct from southern Sierra Nevada), North Pacific right whale, great white shark (California/Mexico), little brown bat (extinct due to white-nose syndrome, an illness caused by a deadly fungus from Europe), whitebark pine, rusty patched bumblebee, greater sage-grouse, polar bear and snake river sockeye salmon.

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7 Reasons You Need More Magnesium

May 16, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Margie King, GuestMagnesium is the fourth most abundant mineral in your body.  But few people fully appreciate this miraculous mineral. The human genome project reveals that 3,751 human proteins have binding sites for magnesium.[i]  And so far we know this one essential mineral activates over 350 biochemical processes in the body to keep things flowing.Here are just seven good reasons to get more magnesium today. 1. Prevent Migraines. According to University of Vermo [...]

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Rare Quartet of Quasars Found in the Early Universe

May 14, 2015 / / 0 Comments


This image shows a rare view of four quasars, indicated by white arrows, found together by astronomers using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The bright galactic nuclei are embedded in a giant nebula of cool, dense gas visible in the image as a blue haze. Hennawi & Arrigoni-Battaia, MPIA


Excerpt from smithsonian.com

The odds of success would make a Vegas bookie sit up and take notice. But in a one-in-10 million chance, astronomers surveying the sky have found a group of four tightly packed quasars in one of the most distant parts of the universe. The rare grouping may be a nascent galaxy cluster, and its unusually cold cradle of gas could prompt a re-think of how we model the early universe.

Quasars are among the brightest objects known—according to NASA, each one gives off more energy than 100 mature galaxies combined. But quasars are found only in the far reaches of the universe and can't be seen with the naked eye. Because of the time it takes light to travel that far, detecting such distant objects is akin to seeing back in time, so astronomers think quasars are the seeds of young galaxies, powered by gases falling into the supermassive black holes at their cores. As matter falls inward and gets close to the speed of light, it emits radiation that we can pick up with telescopes.

The quasar phase doesn't last long, only about a thousandth of a galaxy's lifetime. After that, the brightness dies down as the inflow of matter slows, says study leader Joseph Hennawi, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Seeing any two quasars close together while they are still bright is a chancy business, so his team wasn't sure what they'd find when they set out to survey quasars using the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. To their surprise, they quickly pinpointed four of them in close proximity, cosmically speaking. The quartet is huddled up in an area of sky less than 600,000 light-years across that sits about 10 billion light-years from Earth.

"The authors found it by investigating the environment of just 29 bright quasars," says Michele Trenti, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne's School of Physics. "So at face value it seems like winning the lottery with a handful of tickets."
That's not all that was strange about this quasar quartet. The foursome was found inside a cloud of cold, dark gas, and the team's observations suggest that similar clouds surround about 10 percent of the tens of thousands of known quasars. That's odd, because according to current theories, quasars in groups like this should be surrounded by hot plasma, or ionized gas, at a temperature of about 10 million degrees.

“What this means is that there is some physical process that the models aren’t capturing,” says Hennawi, whose team reports the discovery this week in Science.



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The Class-Domination Theory of Power

May 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

by G. William DomhoffNOTE: WhoRulesAmerica.net is largely based on my book,Who Rules America?, first published in 1967 and now in its7th edition. This on-line document is presented as a summary of some of the main ideas in that book.Who has predominant power in the United States? The short answer, from 1776 to the present, is: Those who have the money -- or more specifically, who own income-producing land and businesses -- have the power. George Washington was one of the biggest landowner [...]

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The sun unleashes its biggest flare of the year

May 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments




Excerpt from dailytimes.com.pk

The sun has unleashed its most powerful flare of the year causing radio blackouts throughout the Pacific region.

The enormous X-class solar flare peaked at 6:11pm ET yesterday from a sunspot called Active Region 2339 (AR2339).

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation that, when intense enough, can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel - and scientists say they could get more powerful in the future.

This latest flare is classified as an X2.7. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength.

Despite the recent radio blackouts, scientists say the flare is unlikely to cause any further major issues here on Earth.

‘Given the impulsive nature of this event, as well as the source location on the eastern limb of the sun, we are not expecting a radiation storm at Earth,’ scientists with the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colorado.

‘We will be on the lookout for new imagery from the Nasa Soho [Solar and Heliospheric Observatory] mission to determine if there was an associated coronal mass ejection (CME) with this event,’ they added.

‘Given the same logic above, however, we do not expect there to be one that would impact Earth.’

Yesterday Kazunari Shibata, an astrophysicist from Kyoto University in Japan, said the sun has the potential to unleash a flare of such a magnitude that it would be larger than anything humans have ever seen.

At the Space Weather Workshop in Colorado, Shibata said ‘superflares,’ that contain energy 1,000 times larger than what we have seen could be on their way.

He said there is evidence of this happening every 800 to 5,000 years on Earth,

Scientists say such a solar ‘super-storm’ would pose a ‘catastrophic’ and ‘long-lasting’ threat to life on Earth.

A superflare would induce huge surges of electrical currents in the ground and in overhead transmission lines, causing widespread power outages and severely damaging critical electrical components.

The largest ever solar super-storm on record occurred in 1859 and is known as the Carrington Event, named after the English astronomer Richard Carrington who spotted the preceding solar flare.

This massive CME released about 1022 kJ of energy - the equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima bombs exploding at the same time - and hurled around a trillion kilos of charged particles towards the Earth at speeds of up to 3000 km/s.

However, its impact on the human population was relatively benign as our electronic infrastructure at the time amounted to no more than about 124,000 miles (200,000 km) of telegraph lines.

Nasa has also released incredible footage showing the sun unleashing a huge lick of plasma that increased the star’s visible hemisphere by almost half.

The solar filament, which exploded on April 28 and 29, was suspended above the sun due to strong magnetic fields that pushed outwards.

Solar astronomers around the world had their eyes on this unusually large filament and kept track as it erupted.

Nasa’s animation involves images taken from the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory using its Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph.

The diameter of the animation is about 30 million miles (45 million km) at the distance of the sun, or half of the diameter of the orbit of Mercury.

The white circle in the centre of the round disk represents the size of the sun, which is being blocked by the telescope in order to see the fainter material around it.

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8 Health Benefits of Dandelions

May 6, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Meme - To many, dandelions are weeds with lovely yellow flowers that turn into white fluffy balls that will spread seeds and overtake your yard and garden. But dandelions are more than weeds; they are a gift from nature loaded with fiber, vitamins and minerals essential for the body.Dandelion root can be purchased as a supplement or tea; its leaves make a great salad when young; and dandelion milk is especially good for treating skin diseases while the jui [...]

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Mysterious Glow Detected At Center Of Milky Way Galaxy

May 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments

In this image, the magenta color indicates the mysterious glow detected by NASA's NuSTAR space telescope.Excerpt from huffingtonpost.com A mysterious glow has been observed at the center of the Milky Way, and scientists are struggling to figure o...

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Nuclear Experimentation Year 70 – Playing With Madness

May 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Ethan Indigo Smith, ContributorThe recent “news” on the nuclear situation in Iran brings to light the madhouse of cards on which the postmodern world is built. Or rather, it would bring the madness to light if the major media outlets of the world were not bought up and sold out to the military industrial complex, and therefore completely misinformed on the actions and dangers of the nuclear experimentation industry.The story is not just about [...]

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High School students spots relic of ancient sun with super wide orbit

May 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments



Pulsars are types of neutron stars; the dead relics of massive stars. What sets pulsars apart from regular neutron stars is that they’re highly magnetized, and rotating at enormous speeds.

Excerpt from uncovercalifornia.com

A Pulsar with the widest orbit around a neutron star has been discovered by a team of high school students and the discovery has been confirmed by astronomers. High School students from many states who participated in NSF-funded educational outreach program have found the pulsar after analyzing data from Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT).

In a research paper accepted by the Astrophysical Journal, lead author Joe Swiggum, a graduate student in physics and astronomy at West Virginia University in Morgantown, said, “Pulsars are some of the most extreme objects in the universe. The students' discovery shows one of these objects in a really unique set of circumstances.”

The object has been codenamed PSR J1930-1852 by astronomers. It was discovered in 2012 by Cecilia McGough from Strasburg High School in Virginia and De'Shang Ray from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore, Maryland.

The discovery of a pulsar with extra wide orbit could help in understanding the concepts behind binary neutron star systems. Nearly 10 percent of known pulsars are in binary systems with most of them orbiting white dwarf companion stars. The Pulsar has been found with the widest separation from the other star in the binary neutron system.

During Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) workshop in summer, students who are interested in analyzing survey data collected by Green Bank Telescope (GBT), spend weeks in checking data plots and searching for unique signatures of pulsars.

The Pulsar Search Collaboratory is a joint venture between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and West Virginia University which offers real research opportunity to students.

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Pluto images reveal intriguing bright spot near pole

April 30, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from  latimes.comCheck out the best images yet of the dwarf planet Pluto.The moving images of Pluto and its Texas-sized moon Charon you see below were taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which has spent nine years on a high-speed j...

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New research shows Universe expansion pace isn’t as fast as assumed earlier

April 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments



universe


Excerpt from thewestsidestory.net

The Universe is expanding and any student of astronomy will vouch to this fact. However according to a team of astronomers the acceleration of the universe may not be as quick as it was assumed earlier.

A team of astronomers have discovered that certain types of supernova are more varied than earlier thought of and in the process have led to the biggest mystery of the universe-how fast is the universe expanding after the big bang?

Peter A. Milne of the University of Arizona said, “We found that the differences are not random, but lead to separating Ia supernovae into two groups, where the group that is in the minority near us are in the majority at large distances — and thus when the universe was younger, there are different populations out there, and they have not been recognized. The big assumption has been that as you go from near to far, type Ia supernovae are the same. That doesn’t appear to be the case.”
The discovery throws new light on the currently accepted view of the universe expanding at a faster and faster rate pulled apart by an unknown force called dark energy this observation resulted in 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Milne said, “The idea behind this reasoning, is that type Ia supernovae happen to be the same brightness — they all end up pretty similar when they explode. Once people knew why, they started using them as mileposts for the far side of the universe.The faraway supernovae should be like the ones nearby because they look like them, but because they’re fainter than expected, it led people to conclude they’re farther away than expected, and this in turn has led to the conclusion that the universe is expanding faster than it did in the past.”
The researchers felt that the accelerating universe can be explained on the basis of color difference in between two groups of supernova leaving less acceleration than earlier assumed and in the process will require lesser dark energy.

Milne said, “We’re proposing that our data suggest there might be less dark energy than textbook knowledge, but we can’t put a number on it, until our paper, the two populations of supernovae were treated as the same population. To get that final answer, you need to do all that work again, separately for the red and for the blue population.

Type la supernovae are considered as a benchmark for far away sources of light they do have a fraction of variability which has limited our knowledge of the size of the universe.
The distance of objects with the aid of our binocular vision and the best space-based telescopes and most sophisticated techniques works out in the range of ten or twenty thousand light years. 
However as compared to the vastness of space, this is just pea nuts.
For Distances greater than that it is imperative to compare the absolute and observed brightness of well understood objects and to use the difference to determine the object’s distance.

In astronomy it is difficult to find an object of known brightness since there are examples of both bright and dim stars and galaxies. However there is one event which can be used to work out its absolute brightness. Supernovas are the final stages of a dying star and it explodes with such violence, the flash can be seen across the vast universe.

Type la Supernovae occurs in a binary star system when a white dwarf scoops off mass from its fellow star. This reproducible mechanism gives a well determined brightness and therefore scientists term such Type la supernovae as ‘standard candles’.

Astronomers found that the Type la supernovae is so uniform that it has been designated as cosmic beacons and used to assess the depths of the universe. It is now revealed that they fall into different populations and are not very uniform as previously thought. .

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