'Utterly bizarre' chimera crab fossil discovered: 'Makes you wonder 'what else is out there' - Fox News

Even Dr. Frankenstein and his monster would be jealous of this creature.

Paleontologists have unearthed the fossil of an ancient crab that lived between 90 and 95 million years ago and is so "utterly bizarre" it literally perplexed the researchers.

Known as Callichimaera perplexa, which means "perplexing beautiful chimera," the crab had an assortment of body parts that would make Mr. Potato Head green with envy.

'GIANT LION' FOSSILS DISCOVERED IN MUSEUM DRAWER

“We started looking at these fossils and we found they had what looked like the eyes of a larva, the mouth of a shrimp, claws of a frog crab, and the carapace of a lobster,“ said Javier Luque, lead author and postdoctoral paleontologist in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta and at Yale University, in a statement.

Luque continued: “We have an idea of what a typical crab looks like—and these new fossils break all those rules."

An artistic reconstruction of Callichimaera perplexa: the "strangest crab that has ever lived." (Credit: Oksana Vernygora, UAlberta)

In Greek mythology, a chimera had the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a snake.

The researchers wrote that the discovery and C. perplexa's body type challenges the conventional view of what earlier crabs looked like. "Our phylogenetic analyses, including representatives of all major lineages of fossil and extant crabs, challenge conventional views of their evolution by revealing multiple convergent losses of a typical 'crab-like' body plan since the Early Cretaceous," the study's abstract reads.

The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

The crab's giant eyes likely helped it to hunt smaller crustaceans while swimming in the ancient Cretaceous period oceans. "We don't think they were filter feeders," Luque told Live Science. "We think they were actually active predators."

C. perplexa was first discovered in 2005 in the Andes Mountains, along with other ancient crustaceans such as lobsters and shrimp. Since then, Luque and a team of researchers have analyzed the fossil (no bigger than a quarter) in great detail and suggested that it spent its life swimming, in stark contrast to modern-day crabs, who spend their lives crawling.

FOSSILIZED REMAINS OF 430 MILLION-YEAR-OLD SEA MONSTER FOUND

“We found dozens of animals, from tiny baby specimens to mature individuals in which we found reproductive organs—a smoking gun that proves these were adult organisms and not larvae. We can even see individual facets on the large compound eyes of these creatures,” Luque added in the statement. “It’s an incredible amount of detail, and we’ve been able to reconstruct them like they were living yesterday."

Callichimaera perplexa: the oldest swimming crab from the dinosaur era. (Credit: Daniel Ocampo R., Vencejo Films)

Luque said that it's not unusual to find different body types in older rocks, as life was still expanding into new forms.

“This discovery, from the mid-Cretaceous, illustrates that there are still surprising discoveries of more recent, weird organisms waiting to be found, especially in the tropics," he concluded. "It makes you wonder ‘what else is out there for us to discover?’“

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2019-04-25 14:16:49Z
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One of Stephen Hawking's Most Famous Theories About Black Holes Just Suffered a Huge Blow - Live Science

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One of Stephen Hawking's Most Famous Theories About Black Holes Just Suffered a Huge Blow  Live Science

A search through the Andromeda galaxy for tiny, ancient black holes finds none, striking a stinging blow to Stephen Hawking's theory of dark matter.

https://www.livescience.com/65300-hawking-black-hole-theory-unlikely.html

2019-04-25 11:15:00Z
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Holy Pleistocene Batman, the answer's in the cave - Phys.org

Bats flying out of an Indonesian cave for their nightly meal. Credit: Chris Wurster

Let's say you wanted to solve a 20,000-year-old mystery, where would you start? Perhaps archaeology and geology come to mind. Or, you could sift through a 3-metre pile of bat faeces.

Researchers from James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, chose the bat poo in their quest to answer to a long-standing question: why is there some much biodiversity on the islands of Sumatra, Borneo and Java, when not so long ago (geologically speaking) they were all part of one vast continent?

One theory has been that the former continent (Sundaland) was dissected by a savanna corridor. "That might explain why Sumatra and Borneo each have their own species of orang-utan, even though they were linked by land for millions of years," Dr. Chris Wurster said. "The corridor would have divided the two separate rainforest refuges, as the sea does now."

The corridor theory has been boosted by millions of insect-eating bats, which have gathered evidence about the landscape over millennia and deposited it in layers in their caves.

"Bat poo is highly informative, and especially so in the tropics, where the climate can make some of the more traditional modes of investigation less available," Dr. Wurster said.

A three-metre pile of bat faeces at Salah Cave in Borneo gave the researchers a 40,000-year-old record composed of insect skeletons.

"We can't tell what insects the bats were eating throughout that time, because they're in tiny fragments, but we can read the chemistry," Dr. Wurster said.

Bats clustering together on the wall of an Indonesian cave. Credit: Chris Wurster

"Eating insects that have been feeding on tropical grasses results in faeces with a characteristic chemical imprint. It's quite different from the result you'd get from eating insects that fed on tropical trees."

According to the bat record the landscape around Saleh Cave (now featuring lush rainforest) was once dominated by tropical grasses.

"Combined with other cave studies in the region, this leads us to support the corridor theory, and also gives us some confidence as to the extent of the corridor," Dr. Wurster said.

The corridor could also shed light on human pre-history.

"A savanna corridor, which would be much more easily traversed than rainforest, might help to explain how people moved relatively quickly through this region and on to Australia and New Guinea."

'Savanna in equatorial Borneo during the late Pleistocene' is published in the latest edition of Scientific Reports.

Dr. Chris Wurster is a Senior Research Associate at James Cook University, specialising in stable isotope geochemistry.

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2019-04-25 09:00:01Z
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Observation of two-neutrino double electron capture in 124Xe with XENON1T - Nature.com

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Coello Pérez, E. A., Menéndez, J. & Schwenk, A. Two-neutrino double electron capture on 124Xe based on an effective theory and the nuclear shell model. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04443 (2018).

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2019-04-24 17:03:45Z
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Dark matter detector observes rarest event ever recorded - Phys.org

The XENON1T dark matter collaboration has observed the radioactive decay of xenon-124, which has a half-life of 1.8 X 1022 years Credit: XENON1T

How do you observe a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe? The XENON Collaboration research team did it with an instrument built to find the most elusive particle in the universe—dark matter. In a paper to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature, researchers announce that they have observed the radioactive decay of xenon-124, which has a half-life of 1.8 X 10²² years.

"We actually saw this decay happen. It's the longest, slowest process that has ever been directly observed, and our dark matter detector was sensitive enough to measure it," said Ethan Brown, an assistant professor of physics at Rensselaer, and co-author of the study. "It's an amazing to have witnessed this process, and it says that our detector can measure the rarest thing ever recorded."

The XENON Collaboration runs XENON1T, a 1,300-kilogram vat of super-pure liquid xenon shielded from cosmic rays in a cryostat submerged in water deep 1,500 meters beneath the Gran Sasso mountains of Italy. The researchers search for dark matter (which is five times more abundant than ordinary matter, but seldom interacts with ordinary matter) by recording tiny flashes of light created when particles interact with xenon inside the detector. And while XENON1T was built to capture the interaction between a dark matter particle and the nucleus of a xenon atom, the detector actually picks up signals from any interactions with the xenon.

The evidence for xenon decay was produced as a proton inside the nucleus of a xenon atom converted into a neutron. In most elements subject to decay, that happens when one electron is pulled into the nucleus. But a proton in a xenon atom must absorb two electrons to convert into a neutron, an event called "double-electron capture."

Double-electron capture only happens when two of the electrons are right next to the nucleus at just the right time, Brown said, which is "a rare thing multiplied by another rare thing, making it ultra-rare."

When the ultra-rare happened, and a double-electron capture occurred inside the detector, instruments picked up the signal of electrons in the atom re-arranging to fill in for the two that were absorbed into the nucleus.

"Electrons in double-capture are removed from the innermost shell around the nucleus, and that creates room in that shell," said Brown. "The remaining electrons collapse to the ground state, and we saw this collapse process in our detector."

The achievement is the first time scientists have measured the half-life of this xenon isotope based on a direct observation of its radioactive decay.

"This is a fascinating finding that advances the frontiers of knowledge about the most fundamental characteristics of matter," said Curt Breneman, dean of the School of Science. "Dr. Brown's work in calibrating the detector and ensuring that the xenon is scrubbed to the highest possible standard of purity was critical to making this important observation."

The XENON Collaboration includes more than 160 scientists from Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, and, since 2002, has operated three successively more sensitive liquid xenon detectors in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. XENON1T, the largest detector of its type ever built, acquired data from 2016 until December 2018, when it was switched off. Scientists are currently upgrading the experiment for the new XENONnT phase, which will feature an active detector mass three times larger than XENON1T. Together with a reduced background level, this will boost the detector's sensitivity by an order of magnitude.

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More information: Observation of two-neutrino double electron capture in 124Xe with XENON1T, Nature (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1124-4 , https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1124-4

Provided by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Citation: Dark matter detector observes rarest event ever recorded (2019, April 24) retrieved 24 April 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-04-dark-detector-rarest-event.html

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2019-04-24 17:00:12Z
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Dark Matter Detector Makes Incredible Neutrino Observation - Gizmodo

Part of the XENON experiment.

Photo: The XENON collaboration

A detector designed to hunt for dark matter has made a particle physics observation that will hopefully help physicists establish important truths about our Universe. No, it didn’t spot dark matter, but the new result proves that these ultra-sensitive detectors are valuable to scientists for multiple reasons.

Gravity-wise, the Universe behaves as if it contains way more matter than astronomers have actually identified, so physicists have built experiments to hunt for candidates for this so-called dark matter. The hunt for the most popular dark matter candidate has so far turned up empty. But one of these dark matter experiments, called XENON1T, has now observed a process that has avoided multiple detection attempts, one that will hopefully help scientists better understand the shadowy particle called the neutrino.

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“It proves that this XENON detector technology we use for dark matter is much more versatile,” graduate student Christian Wittweg, Ph.D student at the University of Münster in Germany, told Gizmodo. “We get all these cool analyses... for free after having built an experiment sensitive enough to hunt for dark matter.”

Scientists are pretty sure that the second most abundant particle in the Universe (after photons, particles of light) is the neutrino. But neutrinos are very hard to detect and measure. We know they have mass, but don’t know how much. We know that they have an antiparticle, a sort of evil twin that causes both particles to annihilate if they meet, but don’t know the nature of that antiparticle. There are a ton of neutrino mysteries to solve. The new measurement, called “two-neutrino double electron capture,” is an important stepping stone to providing those answers.

Two-neutrino double electron capture is an exceedingly rare particle interaction that was first theorized in 1955 and “has escaped detection for decades,” according to the paper published in Nature. In the process, two protons in the atomic nucleus spontaneously and simultaneously absorb a pair of electrons orbiting the nucleus, releasing a pair of neutrinos. The experimental signature of the event is a barrage of x-rays and electrons resulting from other electrons orbiting the atom replacing the two absorbed by the nucleus. And when I say rare, I mean rare. The average amount of time it would take half of the xenon atoms in a sample to undergo this reaction is 1.8 × 10²² years, according to the paper. That’s roughly a trillion times the age of the Universe.

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XENON1T is an experiment perfectly equipped to measure this rare event. Firstly, it contains a crapload of xenon atoms—3.2 tons worth of liquid xenon (though, as a note, the xenon isotope used for this measurement makes up only a small fraction of the total xenon atoms). Secondly, the whole setup is buried deep within an Italian mountain, shielding it from pretty much any particle that could cause a false signal. And finally, scientists understand pretty much every bit of noise that could produce a signal in the experiment, increasing their confidence that they’ve actually found something important when an anomalous signal appears.

After 214 days of observing (177 days of usable data), the researchers’ analysis revealed approximately 126 two-neutrino double electron capture events.

This is an incredible scientific accomplishment. “It’s the longest half-life ever measured directly,” Ph.D student Chiara Capelli from the University of Zurich who works on XENON told Gizmodo

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Researchers aren’t calling their results a “discovery,” because their statistics didn’t hit the five-standard deviation threshold particle physicists require in order to use that word. Instead, they’re calling it an “observation,” as the result carried a significance of 4.4 sigma. That means there’s only a one in a few hundred thousand chance that they’d see this result had the reaction not existed—but it will take a bit more observing to get to the one-in-3.5 million odds required by physicists to announce a discovery.

Next, scientists will hunt for a no-neutrino, or neutrinoless double electron capture, an even rarer event in which, after the double neutrino electron capture event, the two neutrinos collide and emit a gamma ray. This would demonstrate that neutrinos are their own antiparticles, and would allow scientists to put a number to the neutrinos’s mass. It’s also a complimentary search to a reaction called neutrinoless double beta decay—sort of like the opposite of neutrinoless double electron capture, where two neutrons spontaneously and simultaneously turn into protons, emitting electrons and a pair of neutrinos that annihilate one another.

We don’t know if these “neutrinoless” reactions would really happen, but it’s an important question to particle physicists. If neutrinos really are their own antiparticle, it would help explain why neutrinos are so low-mass and maybe why there’s so much more matter than antimatter in the Universe.

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Ultimately, scientists need more observing time. XENON will soon upgrade to XENONnT with even more liquid xenon, which will allow scientists to observe these events more frequently, and to observe neutrinoless events that have even longer half-lives, explained Laura Baudis, professor of physics at the University of Zurich.

But most importantly, it’s proof that these experiments are sensitive enough that they can perform other important measurements beyond just hunting for dark matter.

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2019-04-24 17:00:00Z
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Why a 'Faint Rumble' on Mars Is 'So Exciting' - Newser

(Newser) – It was a "faint rumble" but it meant something big—the first seismic signal detected on the surface of a planetary body other than our home planet and moon. We have NASA's Martian InSight lander to thank. The lander has been listening for quakes that could shed light on Mars' guts since its robotic arm deposited a shielded seismometer on the western side of Elysium Planitia last December, a few weeks after the lander touched down. The key moment—hear it here—came April 6, 128 days into the mission. "This particular Marsquake—the first one we've seen—is a very, very small one," says the mission's chief scientist, Bruce Banerdt. "You wouldn't even notice this one in your day-to-life." Adds researcher Tom Pike, per the BBC: "There are a lot of uncertainties" but "it's probably only a Magnitude 1 to 2 event, perhaps within [62 miles] or so."

The tremor—which lasted 10 minutes, per National Geographic—could indicate movement inside the planet or a meteorite impact. "Interestingly, InSight's scientists say the character of the rumble reminds them very much of the type of data the Apollo sensors gathered on the lunar surface," per the BBC. The team is also investigating lesser signals detected March 14, April 10, and April 11 but can't yet confirm they were seismic events. "When you've got one, you don't know whether you were just lucky, but when we see two or three we will have a better idea" about the activity within the planet, Pike tells the BBC. Yet one confirmed "Marsquake" seems enough for InSight's seismometer boss Philippe Lognonné. "It's so exciting to finally have proof that Mars is still seismically active," he says, per Space.com. "We've been waiting [for] months." (Read more Mars stories.)

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2019-04-24 14:08:00Z
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NASA's InSight lander records first-ever 'Mars quake' - Fox News

NASA may have recorded the first-ever "marsquake," thanks to its InSight lander.

According to a statement from the government space agency, the lander recorded the signal on Martian soil on April 6, InSight's 128th day on Mars. It is also the first recorded trembling "that appears to have come from inside the planet, as opposed to being caused by forces above the surface, such as wind."

NASA added that scientists are still looking at the data to determine exactly what caused the signal.

NASA'S INSIGHT MARS LANDER REVEALS STUNNINGLY CLEAR PICTURES OF THE RED PLANET

"The Martian Sol 128 event is exciting because its size and longer duration fit the profile of moonquakes detected on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions," Lori Glaze, Planetary Science Division director at NASA headquarters, said in the statement.

Although there is much buzz about the so-called "marsquake," the tremor would not even be noticed on Earth. "An event of this size in Southern California would be lost among dozens of tiny crackles that occur every day," NASA wrote in the statement.

This image of InSight's seismometer was taken on the 110th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The seismometer is called Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or SEIS. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

InSight, which landed safely on the Red Planet in November after "seven minutes of terror" due to the agency's inability to control the landing of the spacecraft, is continuing the scientific legacy of NASA's Apollo missions, (which detected quakes on the Moon) said InSight Principal Investigator, Bruce Banerd. "We've been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology!" he exclaimed.

Costing $828 million, the InSight lander is the space agency’s first probe to reach the Red Planet in six years, following the August 2012 landing of the Curiosity Rover. The unmanned probe, which is built by Lockheed Martin, will dig deeper into the planet than anything that's come before.

MARS MAY HAVE SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF WATER UNDERNEATH THE SURFACE

The InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission, which is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will provide scientists with a wealth of data. “The landing will kick off a two-year mission in which InSight will become the first spacecraft to study Mars' deep interior,” explained NASA, on its website. “Its data also will help scientists understand the formation of all rocky worlds, including our own.”

The lander had originally been scheduled to blast off in March 2016, but NASA suspended its launch preparations when a vacuum leak was found in the craft’s prime science instrument.

In February, NASA encountered a problem with InSight after it stopped digging, likely due to hitting a rock or gravel, an issue which has since been resolved.

Fox News’ James Rogers and The Associated Press contributed to this article.

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2019-04-24 13:18:36Z
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NASA's Robotic Probe InSight Detects Likely 'Marsquake' - HuffPost

April 23 (Reuters) - NASA’s robotic probe InSight has detected and measured what scientists believe to be a “marsquake,” marking the first time a likely seismological tremor has been recorded on another planet, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California reported on Tuesday.

The breakthrough came nearly five months after InSight, the first spacecraft designed specifically to study the deep interior of a distant world, touched down on the surface of Mars to begin its two-year seismological mission on the red planet.

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The tremor was detected by InSight’s French-built seismometer, an instrument sensitive enough to measure a seismic wave just one-half the radius of a hydrogen atom.

The faint rumble characterized by JPL scientists as a likely marsquake, roughly equal to a 2.5 magnitude earthquake, was recorded on April 6 - the lander’s 128th Martian day, or sol.

It was detected by InSight’s French-built seismometer, an instrument sensitive enough to measure a seismic wave just one-half the radius of a hydrogen atom.

“We’ve been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology,” InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt said in a news release.

Scientists are still examining the data to conclusively determine the precise cause of the signal, but the trembling appeared to have originated from inside the planet, as opposed to being caused by forces above the surface, such as wind.

“The high frequency level and broad band is very similar to what we get from a rupture process. So we are very confident that this is a marsquake,” Philippe Lognonné, a geophysics and planetary science professor at University Paris Diderot in France and lead researcher for InSight’s seismometer, said in an email.

Still, a tremor so faint in Southern California would be virtually lost among the dozens of small seismic crackles that occur there every day.

“Our informed guesswork is that this a very small event that’s relatively close, maybe from 50 to 100 kilometers away” from the lander, Banerdt told Reuters by telephone.

A more distant quake would yield greater information about Mars’ interior because seismic waves would “penetrate deeper into the planet before they come back up to the seismometer,” he said.

NO TECTONIC PLATES

The size and duration of the marsquake also fit the profile of some of the thousands of moonquakes detected on the lunar surface between 1969 and 1977 by seismometers installed there by NASA’s Apollo missions, said Lori Glaze, planetary science division director at NASA headquarters in Washington.

The lunar and Martian surfaces are extremely quiet compared with Earth, which experiences constant low-level seismic noise from oceans and weather as well as quakes that occur along subterranean fault lines created by shifting tectonic plates in the planet’s crust.

Mars and the moon lack tectonic plates. Their seismic activity is instead driven by a cooling and contracting process that causes stress to build up and become strong enough to rupture the crust.

Three other apparent seismic signals were picked up by InSight on March 14, April 10 and April 11 but were even smaller and more ambiguous in origin, leaving scientists less certain they were actual marsquakes.

Lognonné said he expected InSight to eventually detect quakes 50 to 100 times larger than the April 6 tremor. (Reporting by Joey Roulette in Orlando, Florida, and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Peter Cooney)

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2019-04-24 09:29:00Z
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Can we solve the riddle of the coral reef halos? - Phys.org

Halos in the Red Sea. Credit: CNES/Airbus; DigitalGlobe. 

Coral reefs worldwide are threatened by a variety of human impacts. Fishing is among the most pressing threats to reefs, because it occurs on most reef systems and fundamentally alters food webs. Meanwhile, observing coral reefs, particularly remote, hard-to-access locations such as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI), remains notoriously difficult and expensive. But a University of Hawai'i (UH) at Mānoa researcher and her collaborators may have found a mysterious natural phenomenon that can help us observe coral reef health from space.

Patches of coral reef are often surrounded by very large 'halos' of bare sand that are hundreds to thousands of square meters. Beyond these halos lie lush meadows of seagrass or algae. Two recently published studies and a third feature story led by Elizabeth Madin, assistant research professor at the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) in the UH at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, shed light on these enigmatic features that are visible from space.

Scientists have observed reef halos for decades and explained their presence as the result of fish and invertebrates, who typically hide in a patch of coral, venturing out to eat algae and seagrass that cover the surrounding seabed. But the fear of predators keeping these smaller animals close to safety has long been thought to explain why the cleared area is circular. Madin's recent work reveals there is more to the story, and further that these features may be useful in observing aspects of reef ecosystem health from space.

In one of Madin's new studies, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, her team of scientists found that no-take marine reserves, where fishing is prohibited, dramatically shape these seascape-scale vegetation patterns in coral reef ecosystems, influencing the occurrence of the prominent 'halo' pattern. This means that marine reserves may have even greater impacts on coral reef seascapes than previously known.

Heron Island (dark green oval in upper left corner) and lagoon, Australia. Credit: DigitalGlobe.

The team hypothesized that if the "formation of the halos was driven by small fish's fear of being eaten, so the number of predators around should be linked to whether these bare patches appear and how big they are," Madin explained in an article published recently in New Scientist. "With fewer predators, you would expect the grazing fish to be less fearful and so venture further from the reef, resulting in wider halos."

But to Madin and her team's great surprise, using freely-available satellite imagery they saw no difference in size of the halos inside versus outside of no-fishing marine reserves. However, they did find that the halos are significantly more likely to occur in no-take marine reserves, demonstrating novel landscape-scale effects of marine reserves.

In the second study, published in Frontiers, Madin and colleagues found that a more complex set of species interactions than previously assumed likely influence these halos. Using a combination of very high definition remote underwater video camera traps and traditional ecological studies on coral reefs within Australia's Great Barrier Reef, Madin observed that in addition to the plant-eating fishes known to play a role in halo formation, invertebrate-eating fishes that dig in the sand for prey were disrupting the algae out to the halos' edges and making them bigger. Another piece of the puzzle had been revealed.

Collectively, Madin's work shows that the presence of halos may serve as an indicator of aspects of reef ecosystem health, because halos are suspected to be the indirect result of healthy predator and herbivore populations. Madin's ongoing studies of halos have shown that they can appear and disappear over time and change significantly in size, a phenomenon that suggests environmental factors also influence halos.

"We urgently need more cost- and time-efficient ways of monitoring such reefs," said Madin. "Our work couples freely-available satellite imagery, with traditional field-based experiments and observations, to start to unravel the mystery of what the globally-widespread patterns of 'halos' around coral reefs can tell us about how reef ecosystems may be changing over space and/or time due to fisheries or marine reserves. This will therefore pave the way for the development of a novel, technology-based solution to the challenge of monitoring large areas of coral reef and enable management of healthy reef ecosystems and sustainable fisheries."

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Explore further

Ocean currents bring good news for reef fish

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More information: Marine reserves shape seascapes on scales visible from space, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, rspb.royalsocietypublishing.or … .1098/rspb.2019.0053

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Citation: Can we solve the riddle of the coral reef halos? (2019, April 24) retrieved 24 April 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-04-riddle-coral-reef-halos.html

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2019-04-24 04:00:01Z
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SpaceX Won't Admit That Its Crew Capsule Exploded - Futurism

Explosive Situation

Sometimes, when you fill a small metal capsule with rocket fuel, it will explode.

That’s what appears to have happened this past weekend when SpaceX attempted a static test of its Dragon 2 capsule. “Crew Dragon capsule explodes,” wrote Scientific American. Business Insider called it a “large explosion.” Quartz said that it “blew up.” There’s even a grainy video of the test that seems to show a fireball.

But SpaceX? The company called it an “anomaly.”

Glossy Language

You’d never know what happened if you only read SpaceX’s prepared statement, which downplayed the apparent explosion as much as possible.

“Earlier today, SpaceX conducted a series of engine tests on a Crew Dragon test vehicle on our test stand at Landing Zone 1 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The initial tests completed successfully but the final test resulted in an anomaly on the test stand. Ensuring that our systems meet rigorous safety standards and detecting anomalies like this prior to flight are the main reason why we test. Our teams are investigating and working closely with our NASA partners.”

SpaceX isn’t the only space agency to use “anomaly” to describe a spacecraft glitch. There are several instances where NASA has used the word to characterize launch problems or spacecraft communication issues. But we haven’t found an instance where NASA said “anomaly” when it meant “explosion” — in that regard, SpaceX stands alone. When something blows up, NASA says so.

Perhaps the problem that led to an explosion was an “anomaly”; it would be confusing if it was expected. But the explosion itself? Calling it anything but is a disservice.

Keep It Vague

Hey, we get it. Spacecraft explosions conjure images of tragedy: death, wasted money, canceled research.

It makes sense for a leader in space technology to avoid that connotation. But if SpaceX insists on calling an explosion — one that was seemingly documented on video — an “anomaly,” then who’s to say when the company will clear the air, on this test or any future endeavor?

READ MORE: Smoke seen for miles as SpaceX Crew Dragon suffers ‘anomaly’ at Cape Canaveral during engine test fire [Florida Today]

More on the explosion: Update: Vid Appears to Show SpaceX Capsule Exploding During Test

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2019-04-24 01:13:21Z
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New Study Finds Greenland Ice Sheet Losing Ice at Alarming Rate - Interesting Engineering

Since 1972, the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost the equivalent of trillions of tons of fresh water from its ice stores, raising global sea levels by a quarter of an inch in just eight years, and the rate of its ice loss is accelerating.

Trillions of Tons of Ice Lost from Threatened Greenland Ice Sheet

According to research published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the rate of ice sheet loss from Greenland’s main ice sheet is even worse and more terrifying than previously understood.

RELATED: GLOBAL REPORT WARNS THERE IS LESS THAN 12 YEARS TO ACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Using data going back an additional 20 years than is included in our current models, the amount of fresh water ice lost by the Greenland Ice Sheet since 1972 amounts to trillions of tons of ice melt added to the ocean.

Specifically, it has lost 4,976 gigatons of water since 1972. A gigaton equals 1 billion metric tons, which means that on average enough water has melted out of the Greenland Ice Sheet every year that it could supply the current water needs of New York City or Los Angeles for a century.

Unfortunately, the ice loss has not been spread evenly over this period. Instead, the rate of loss has been accelerating, with half of its ice loss occurring in just the last decade. The speed at which glaciers are moving the mass of the ice sheet out into the oceans is almost twice what it was in the 2000s.

Size of the Greenland Ice Sheet Shows the Severity of the Crisis We Face

Robinson Meyer’s recent report in The Atlantic about the newly released research gives an appropriate understanding of the size of the Greenland Ice Sheet and what we risk unleashing if we do not reverse the rate of ice loss.

If the Greenland Ice Sheet’s southernmost tip covered the southernmost city in the state of Texas, Brownsville, the ice sheet’s northern tenth would reach all the way into the province of Manitoba, Canada, with its easternmost reach extending to St. Louis, Missouri, and its northwestern extent reaching into Montana.

The center point would be near Des Moines, Iowa and would be nearly two miles thick. 65 million people would be crushed underneath, about a fifth of the US population, though that is largely a function of the inner regions of the state being less populated than the coastal cities, where large population centers reside.

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With enough fresh water to fill the North American Great Lakes more than 100 times, the entire melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet would add 24 feet to the global sea level. Even ten feet of sea level rise directly threatens New York City, much of Florida, and hundreds of other cities in the US alone.

Miami Provides a Preview of Our Climate Future

Here in the US, there is a growing awareness that the city of Miami might have to be abandoned within the century. Sitting on a bedrock of limestone, efforts to build sea walls around threatened areas will do nothing to stop the water, which will simply soak through the limestone underneath like a sponge and come up on the other side.

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Right now, Miami is already experiencing flooding any time it experiences a heavy rain and the city is racing to lift the roads at least two feet above the high tide line, as well as require new construction to rest at least a foot above this line. Existing construction will need to connect to a pump network to control the flooding that crests over these higher bulwarks against the seas. All of this is coming at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars for the city of Miami Beach alone.

"There’s only 3 percent of Miami-Dade County that’s greater than 12 feet above sea level," said Harold Wanless, director of the University of Miami’s geological sciences department and an expert in rising sea levels and its implications. “With sea levels rising at over a foot per decade, it’s over.” By the end of the century, the entire county encompassing the city of Miami will be functionally uninhabitable, and they are not alone.

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Of the 40 large cities where more than half of its area is at ten feet above sea level or less, 27 of them are in Florida alone. In New York City, 700,000 current residents will be underwater at a ten foot sea level rise. Hundreds of cities in the US alone will be directly impacted by a rise in sea level of ten feet, which is now guaranteed because of the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The only question now is how quickly will we experience that rise.

With the acceleration found in Greenland, the same is likely happening in the Antarctic, which together holds about 200 feet of sea level rise between them. As the rate of melting in these two threatened stores of water ice accelerates, it ensures that the consequences of human caused climate change will no longer be a crisis for the distant future but places that crisis squarely within the lifetimes of those who are currently living. That makes it a problem only the current generation can solve.

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2019-04-24 03:03:32Z
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Verge Science just won a Webby Award - The Verge

The jury is in, and we’re pleased to announce that Verge Science has won a Webby Award and a People’s Voice Award in the Science & Education (Channels & Networks) category. We started the Verge Science series on YouTube less than a year ago, and we have been stunned to see how quickly it amassed an audience of more than 750,000 subscribers.

We’re incredibly proud to see that our series has earned a seat at the table with some of the best science video journalism out there. Alongside today’s award, we thought we’d look back at some of our favorite work and consider a few things that make for a good Verge Science video.

88,000 tons of radioactive waste – and nowhere to put it.

First, we have the distinct joy of working with some of the very best science reporters in the biz. The video above was a collaboration with reporter Rachel Becker, who wrote both the video script and an in-depth report, which chronicled the nerve-wracking quantity of radioactive waste stranded at a decommissioned power plant near San Diego. Every video we’ve put out has been informed and improved by our team: our reporters, Rachel Becker, Angela Chen, and Loren Grush, and our directors, Alex Parkin and Cory Zapatka.

Tiny meteorites are everywhere. Here’s how to find them.

Second, wherever possible, we try to break off a small chunk of an experiment we’re exploring and attempt to do it ourselves. It makes the videos more active and adventurous; there’s no better time to report on and explain an experiment than while you’re carrying it out. We built a whole miniseries around this philosophy called “Trial & Error,” and the video above is our first episode. It’s about hunting for tiny meteorites on the roofs of Brooklyn. The experiments never go quite as planned, but they never bore us either.

We met the world’s first domesticated foxes.

Third, our general rule is to follow the science as far into the future as it will allow. This video about domesticated foxes is our take on a famous science story that began in the Soviet Union nearly 60 years ago. We gave it our own gonzo-esque spin (that’s me locked in a cage with said foxes), but we also focused on what a celebrated, historic science experiment can still offer today. The result is a deep dive into fox genetics and the future of domestication, and it’s one of our most popular videos to date.

Test-firing a new rocket engine (and watching it explode).

Finally, we’re all about how messy science can be. The space industry, for example, often feels like one massive “Trial & Error” series, and we try to get as close to the action as we can, because it’s never totally clear what we might see (or not see, in the case of an infamous NASA launch). Above is a favorite story of ours from the early days of Verge Science. It captures the madcap fun of trying to keep up when your story’s subject really won’t cooperate.

It’s been a wild ride, and we’re looking forward to another year of ambitious and experimental video journalism. Thanks to everyone who has watched, subscribed, and made Verge Science the go-to destination for science storytelling that it is today.

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2019-04-23 13:49:31Z
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SpaceX Crew Dragon Accident Another Bump in the Road for Commercial Crew - Space.com

The United States' circuitous road to human spaceflight self-sufficiency just took another turn.

On Saturday (April 20), a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule experienced an anomaly during a test of its SuperDraco escape engines, which are designed to get astronauts out of harm's way in the event of a launch emergency. 

Nobody was injured, but the capsule — which flew a successful uncrewed demonstration mission to the International Space Station (ISS) just last month — may have incurred serious damage. 

Related: SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-1 Test Flight in Pictures

This particular spacecraft was scheduled to perform an in-flight abort trial this summer, an uncrewed test of those SuperDracos that will help pave the way for SpaceX's first crewed journey to the ISS for NASA. So, if this Crew Dragon cannot go, those key milestones could be pushed back significantly.

A delay would hardly be unprecedented; the timeline for launching American astronauts from American soil has shifted to the right repeatedly over the past few years.

Filling the shuttle's shoes

The United States has been unable to get people to and from orbit without help since July 2011, when NASA's space shuttle fleet retired after 30 years of service. Ever since then, NASA has bought seats aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, for more than $80 million apiece at current prices. (Virgin Galactic has performed two crewed spaceflights since December 2018, but that company's SpaceShipTwo is a suborbital vehicle.)

This dependence was always going to be temporary. NASA began funding commercial-crew activities in 2010, in an attempt to spur the development of private astronaut taxis that will fill the shuttle's shoes. The next year, NASA awarded a total of nearly $270 million to four companies for such work — SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada.

In those early days, the stated goal was to get at least one private American crew-carrying vehicle up and running by the end of 2016.

In 2014, Boeing and SpaceX emerged from the pack with multibillion-dollar awards from NASA's Commercial Crew Program. Boeing got $4.2 billion to develop its CST-100 Starliner capsule, and SpaceX snagged $2.6 billion for Crew Dragon. At the time, NASA said the goal was to have at least one of those capsules operational by the end of 2017.

The early schedule slips occurred primarily because Congress did not allocate enough funding for commercial crew, NASA officials have said. And both Boeing and SpaceX have experienced technical issues recently, adding to the delays.

Related: Crew Dragon and Starliner: A Look at the Upcoming Astronaut Taxis

Problems on the test stand

Boeing, for example, had planned to fly an uncrewed test mission to the ISS — that company's equivalent of SpaceX's recently completed Demo-1 flight — in August 2018. 

But in June of last year, a problem cropped up during a test of Starliner's launch-abort engines. Shortly thereafter, Boeing representatives announced that the company was pushing back the test mission, known as Orbital Flight Test (OFT), to late 2018 or early 2019. 

OFT was soon retargeted for March 2019, then April, May and finally August. Boeing representatives attributed this latest slip to potential conflicts with another mission launching out of Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station this spring; Starliner would have had just a two-day window in May to get up and out, and that was too tight for comfort.  

OFT will occur after a full-on test of Starliner's launch-abort system. That "pad abort test" is scheduled to take place sometime this summer. 

Boeing still aims to fly its first crewed test flight to the ISS before the end of the year, company representatives have said. Indeed, NASA's commercial-crew schedule lists "late 2019" as the current target date.

SpaceX had been aiming to launch its in-flight abort test this June. If that had gone well, a crewed demonstration mission to the ISS, known as Demo-2, could have lifted off as early as July. Those target dates will almost certainly change as a result of Saturday's anomaly, but it's too soon to speculate by how much.

"There are bound to be delays, because apparently both the capsule and the test stand were lost," said space policy expert John Logsdon, a professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington, D.C.

"But I think it's prudent to wait until we get a bit more information before we start talking about whether it's weeks or months or years," he told Space.com.

Part of the business

Logsdon also stressed that such setbacks aren't terribly surprising; they come with the territory of developing a new crewed spacecraft. 

"We've been down this road before," he said. "You have to remind people that we had engines blowing up during shuttle development, and, clearly, we had the Apollo 1 fire."

(That fire, which took place during a launch-rehearsal test on Jan. 27, 1967, is one of NASA's biggest tragedies. It claimed the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee.)

NASA officials made the same point, stressing that Saturday's unfortunate event offers a chance to make Crew Dragon a better, safer vehicle.

"This is why we test," NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said in a statement. "We will learn, make the necessary adjustments and safely move forward with our Commercial Crew Program." 

There's another lesson here as well — one that the Apollo 1 fire, the losses of the shuttles Challenger and Columbia and other spaceflight disasters have drilled into us. 

"It's evidence that sending people into space is hard," Logsdon said. "I think it's important to take a deep breath, assess what actually happened and fix it, because we need to regain the ability to launch people."  

Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

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2019-04-23 11:07:00Z
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