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Today we have the fifth batch of bird photos from Bhutan taken by Ephraim Heller (the others are here). Ephriam’s notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here is installment #5 of photos from my April 2024 birding tour of Bhutan.

Today I post my photos of hornbills (Bucerotidae) and Kingfishers (Alcedinidae). Descriptions of the species below are taken from Wikipedia.

The great hornbill (Buceros bicornis) occurs in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. It is predominantly frugivorous, but also preys on small mammals, reptiles and birds. It is known to have lived for nearly 50 years in captivity.

The most prominent feature of the hornbill is the bright yellow and black casque on top of its massive bill. The casque is hollow and serves no known purpose, although it is thought to be the result of sexual selection.

The female hornbill builds a nest in the hollow of a large tree trunk, sealing the opening with a plaster made up mainly of feces. She remains imprisoned there, relying on the male to bring her food, until the chicks are half developed. During this period the female undergoes a complete moult. The mother is fed by her mate through a slit in the seal.

I was surprised to discover that great hornbills have eyelashes:

During courtship the male hornbill picks fruit with and then gifts it to the female hornbill. The female hornbill then tosses the fruit up in the air and eats it:

Great hornbill in flight:

Blyth’s kingfisher (Alcedo hercules) is the largest kingfisher in the genus Alcedo. A shy bird, it frequents small waterways, feeding on fish and insects caught by diving from a shrub close to the water. It is found along streams in evergreen forest and adjacent open country between 200 and 1,200 m (660 and 3,900 ft). The species ranges from Nepal through India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. Even within its preferred habitat the density of the species is low, and the population, though not thoroughly surveyed, is believed to be small, and declining further:

The white-throated kingfisher (Halcyon smyrnensis) is a tree kingfisher, widely distributed in Asia from the Sinai east through the Indian subcontinent to China and Indonesia. It can often be found well away from water where it feeds on a wide range of prey that includes small reptiles, amphibians, crabs, small rodents and even birds:

I normally don’t like to photograph birds on wires, but this fellow posed so nicely:

 

Equipment: All animal photos were shot using a Nikon Z9 camera and Nikkor Z 400mm f/2.8 TC VR S lens. Landscape and architectural photos were shot either with a Nikon Z9 and Nikkor Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S lens or with an iPhone 11.

You can see more of my photos here.

A new species of dinosaur discovered in Montana and related to Triceratops had one of the strangest, most asymmetrical skulls that scientists have ever studied

Amazon has implemented new quality standards for some dietary supplements.

The post Amazon goes where the FDA does not first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover has left Mount Washburn behind and arrived at its next destination, Bright Angel. It found an unusual type of rock there that scientists are calling ‘popcorn rock.’ The odd rock is more evidence that water was once present in Jezero Crater.

Perseverance’s mission is centred on life on ancient Mars. Along with searching for fossilized evidence of ancient life, it’s searching for and trying to understand environments that could’ve supported life. That’s why it’s in Jezero Crater, an ancient paleolake with a delta of sediments and other intriguing geological features.

On Sol 1175 of its mission, Perseverance arrived at Bright Angel, a scientifically interesting region that’s part of the river channel that fed into Jezero Crater. Bright Angel is noted for light-toned rocky outcrops that are either ancient sediments that filled the channel or much older rock exposed by the river.

The image below shows the rover’s path leading to Bright Angel. The white portion shows where Perseverance paralleled the Neretva Vallis river channel, and the blue portion shows where it travelled through the channel. The light-toned rocks of Bright Angel are clearly visible.

This Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image was captured by the orbiter’s HiRISE camera, and it shows the Neretva Vallis river channel with Perseverance’s route overlain. It has left Mount Washburn behind and has reached Bright Angel. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

As Perseverance worked its way toward Bright Angel, mission personnel could see the light rocks in the distance. But the route to the new destination wasn’t easy. The rover encountered a boulder field that proved so arduous that operators changed course.

“We started paralleling the channel in late January and were making pretty good progress, but then the boulders became bigger and more numerous,” said Evan Graser, Perseverance’s deputy strategic route planner lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “What had been drives averaging over a hundred meters per Martian day went down to only tens of meters. It was frustrating.”

Perseverance has two modes of travel. In rougher terrain, the route planning team uses images to plan the rover’s route about 30 meters at a time. To travel further than that in a single sol, the team relies on Perseverance’s autopilot mode, called AutoNav. But as the route through the boulder field became more difficult, AutoNav struggled. It sometimes just stopped, which is the safest option. But that means the drive to Bright Angel was taking far longer than anticipated.

“We had been eyeing the river channel just to the north as we went, hoping to find a section where the dunes were small and far enough apart for a rover to pass between — because dunes have been known to eat Mars rovers,” said Graser. “Perseverance also needed an entrance ramp we could safely travel down. When the imagery showed both, we made a beeline for it.”

The rover was rerouted through the dune field and across the river channel, reducing its drive by several weeks.

Perseverance captured this image of Bright Angel with one of its Navcams on June 6th, 2024. Bright Angel is the light-toned area in the distance on the right. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Perseverance is nearing the end of its fourth science phase. It’s been searching for carbonate rocks and olivine in the Margin Unit, which is along the inside of Jezero Crater’s rim. But at Bright Angel, it hoped to find different rocks.

That’s exactly what’s happened.

According to a NASA press release, geologists were mesmerized by what they saw. Some of the rocks are densely packed with spheres, which earned them the name ‘popcorn rocks.’ The rocks are also full of ridges that look like mineral veins. Mineral veins occur when water transports minerals through rock and deposits them.

These rocks in Bright Angel have unusual popcorn-like textures and abundant mineral veins. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Mineral veins are common on wet, watery Earth, and rovers have spotted them elsewhere on Mars.

The MSL Curiosity rover captured this image of mineral veins in Martian rocks in 2015. The area is called Garden City, and it’s on lower Mt. Sharp in Gale Crater. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The popcorn features could also be evidence of water. Like the mineral veins, they indicate that water flowed through these rocks.

The next step is to determine what minerals are present in these popcorn rocks. Perseverance will work its way up Bright Angel, taking measurements as it goes. On the weekend, it’ll use its abrasion tool and other instruments to take an even closer look. It’ll vaporize some of the rock and use its SuperCam suite of instruments to examine the rocks’ chemistry. The decision to take a sample for eventual return to Earth (hopefully) will rest on those results.

Once Perseverance is finished at Bright Angel, the rover will make its way south again, across Neretva Vallis, to its next destination: Serpentine Rapids.

The post Perseverance Found Some Strange Rocks. What Will They Tell Us? appeared first on Universe Today.

People who regularly have lower back pain go longer without the discomfort if they incorporate walks into their weekly routines

Earth is a seismically active planet, and scientists have figured out how to use seismic waves from Earthquakes to probe its interior. We even use artificially created seismic waves to identify underground petroleum-bearing formations. When the InSIGHT (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander was sent to Mars, it sensed Marsquakes to learn more bout the planet’s interior.

Researchers think they can use Marsquakes to answer one of Mars’ most pressing questions: Does the planet hold water trapped in its subsurface?

Ground-penetrating radar can tell us what’s underground on Earth. However, it has limitations. It can reach about 30 meters underground in low-conductivity materials and as shallow as one meter in conductive materials. Scientists are developing other methods, including seismological interferometers, to use seismology to detect deeper aquifers, but those methods are not fully developed. There’s also so much water inside Earth that it creates noisy signals.

These methods are not applicable to Mars, where equipment is limited.

However, researchers from Penn State University think they can use a different type of seismology to detect Mars’ subsurface water. It’s called the seismoelectric method, and it combines seismology and electromagnetism. It senses the electromagnetic signals that come from the propagation of seismic waves in a planet’s interior.

Their new research, “Characterizing Liquid Water in Deep Martian Aquifers: A Seismo-Electric Approach,” has been published in JGR Planets. Nolan Roth, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State, is the lead author.

“The scientific community has theories that Mars used to have oceans and that, over the course of its history, all that water went away,” Roth said. “But there is evidence that some water is trapped somewhere in the subsurface. We just haven’t been able to find it. The idea is, if we can find these electromagnetic signals, then we find water on Mars.”

This artist’s impression shows how Mars may have looked about four billion years ago. The young planet Mars would have had enough water to cover its entire surface in a liquid layer about 140 metres deep, but it is more likely that the liquid would have pooled to form an ocean occupying almost half of Mars’s northern hemisphere and in some regions reaching depths greater than 1.6 kilometres. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Seismology works by detecting elastic waves that propagate through the Earth. These waves are divided into subtypes, especially P-waves, or primary waves, and S-waves, or secondary waves. Each type of wave travels differently depending on the material it’s moving through. In broad terms, P-waves travel faster than S-waves, so they arrive at seismographic sensors at different times. The differences in those times and other factors reveal the characteristics and densities of the material the waves are travelling through.

The seismoelectric method detects the electromagnetic signals created by seismic waves rather than the waves themselves. As the waves travel through a planet, materials like rock or water move differently in response. Those differences create magnetic fields that surface sensors can detect.

“If we listen to the marsquakes that are moving through the subsurface, if they pass through water, they’ll create these wonderful, unique signals of electromagnetic fields,” Roth said. “These signals would be diagnostic of current, modern-day water on Mars.”

This method is especially suited to Mars. On Earth, water is mixed throughout the subsurface, not just in aquifers, making detection difficult. But Mars is extremely dry, other than potential subsurface aquifers. If we detect buried water on Mars with the seismoelectric method, it’s almost certainly a subsurface aquifer.

Artist’s impression of water under the Martian surface. Credit: ESA/Medialab

“In contrast to how seismoelectric signals often appear on Earth, Mars’ surface naturally removes the noise and exposes useful data that allows us to characterize several aquifer properties,” said co-author Tieyuan Zhu, associate professor of geosciences at Penn State and Roth’s adviser.

The seismoelectric method involves two types of electromagnetic fields: co-seismic waves and interface responses (IR). There are two types of interface responses: radiating interface responses (RIRs) and evanescent interface responses (EIRs.)

“Interface responses (IRs) are generated when a seismic wave creates a charge imbalance across a saturated interface,” the authors explain. RIRs radiate from the interface independently at electromagnetic velocities, regardless of how much fluid is in the medium. EIRs are generated when a seismic wave impinges on a saturated interface at a particular angle. Both types of IRs are generated in the presence of mobile fluids, but they don’t require a saturated layer to propagate further. RIRs, in particular, can travel through kilometres of rock. The two types of interface responses can be separated and analyzed independently.

It all adds up to a new method of “seeing” inside Mars and finding saturated layers.

Roth and his co-researchers started by creating a model of subsurface Mars. Then, they added aquifers to simulate how the seismoelectric method could work. The results showed they could use the seismoelectric technique to uncover details about the aquifers, including their dimensions and chemical properties, like salinity.

“Aquifer depth, thickness, and quantity affect interface response arrival times and shape,” the authors write in their research. “Aquifer water saturation fraction, chemistry, and salinity strongly impact the interface response strength but have little to no affect on the waveform shape.”

“Seismo-electric signals can be used to constrain estimates of aquifer depth, volume, location, and bulk chemical composition,” they added.

This illustration from the research shows how the seismoelectric method could detect subsurface water on Mars. It shows three different cases: a dry Mars, a Mars with a deep aquifer, and an Earth-analog model. There’s a lot of complexity, but the main takeaway is that the different interface responses behave differently and arrive at sensors at different times. See the published research for more details. Image Credit: Roth et al. 2024.

“SE measurements give us a way to detect and image Martian groundwater kilometres below the surface,” the authors write in their conclusion. “As SE exploration becomes more widespread on Earth, this study represents the first foray of the method to other worlds.”

“If we can understand the signals, we can go back and characterize the aquifers themselves,” Roth said in a press release. “And that would give us more constraints than we’ve ever had before for understanding water on Mars today and how it has changed over the last 4 billion years. And that would be a big step ahead.”

The most exciting part about using the seismoelectric method on Mars is that it doesn’t require a new mission. NASA’s InSIGHT lander acquired ample seismic data during its mission. It also had a magnetometer, and future work will combine the signals from both to open a new window into subsurface Mars.

If the method proves fruitful, seismometers and magnetometers could be included in future missions, not only to Mars but also to other worlds. Frozen ocean moons like Europa and Enceladus are prime exploration targets in the search for life, and the technique could work there.

“This shouldn’t be limited to Mars — the technique has potential, for example, to measure the thickness of icy oceans on a moon of Jupiter,” Zhu said. “The message we want to give the community is there is this promising physical phenomena — which received less attention in the past — that may have great potential for planetary geophysics.”

The post Marsquakes Can Help Us Find Water on the Red Planet appeared first on Universe Today.

Saturn’s moon Titan has coastlines matching ones on Earth that have been carved by waves, hinting that Titan’s hydrocarbon seas and lakes also has them

Geologists studied Titan's shorelines and showed through simulations that coastlines of the moon's methane- and ethane-filled seas have likely been shaped by waves. Until now, scientists have found indirect and conflicting signs of wave activity, based on Cassini images of Titan's surface.

The international collaboration presented their first results with new data in four years, featuring a new low-energy sample of electron neutrinos and a dataset doubled in size.

Jupiter's iconic Great Red Spot has persisted for at least 190 years and is likely a different spot from the one observed by the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1665, a new study reports. The Great Red Spot we see today likely formed because of an instability in the planet's intense atmospheric winds, producing a long, persistent atmospheric cell, the study also finds.

The severity of anxiety and depressive symptoms in the planetary science community is greater than in the general U.S. population, according to a new study.

Gravitational changes experienced by astronauts during space travel can cause fluids within the body to shift. This can cause changes to the cardiovascular system, including vessels in and around the eyes. These fluid shifts may be related to a phenomenon known as Spaceflight Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome (SANS), which can cause astronauts to experience changes in eye shape and other ocular symptoms.

An innovative synthesis strategy opened up the way to 2D/3D fused frameworks using inexpensive quinolines as feedstock, report scientists. By leveraging a light-sensitive borate intermediate, the scientists could transform quinoline derivatives into a great variety of 2D/3D fused frameworks in a straightforward and cost-effective manner. Their findings are expected to enable the synthesis of highly customizable drug candidates.

Looking under the microscope, a group of cells slowly moves forward in a line, like a train on the tracks. The cells navigate through complex environments. A new approach now shows how they do this and how they interact with each other.

Looking under the microscope, a group of cells slowly moves forward in a line, like a train on the tracks. The cells navigate through complex environments. A new approach now shows how they do this and how they interact with each other.

Much of the methane released into the southern Baltic Sea from the Nord Stream gas pipeline has remained in the water. This is shown by measurements taken by researchers from the University of Gothenburg.

A team has invented a technique to study electrochemical processes at the atomic level with unprecedented resolution. They have already used it to discover a surprising phenomena in a popular catalyst material and plan to apply their technology to studying a wide variety of electrochemical systems including batteries, fuel cells, and solar fuel generators. The insights could lead to more efficient and durable devices.

Researchers have created a new class of materials called 'glassy gels' that are very hard and difficult to break despite containing more than 50% liquid. Coupled with the fact that glassy gels are simple to produce, the material holds promise for a variety of applications.

In his evidence-based advice column, David Robson has some ideas for a reader worried about his daughters’ social anxiety. Self-compassion is key, he says

Bertrand Bonello's twist on a Henry James novella from 1903 may be the most indirect critique of technology ever made. This film is memorable and absolutely terrifying, says Simon Ings