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Researchers have called for a more considered approach when embedding ethical principles in the development and governance of AI for children.

A powerful new tool in artificial intelligence is able to predict whether someone is willing to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Twin stars that were born together should have the same composition, and the fact that many don’t suggests they have changed their chemistry by devouring planets

Evidence from an archaeological site in Ethiopia suggests ancient humans adapted their diet during a dry spell after the Toba volcano eruption 74,000 years ago

From the many worlds interpretation to panpsychism, theories of reality often sound absurd. Here’s how you can figure out which ones to take seriously

by Greg Mayer

It’s World Frog Day! Give some love to our slimy green friends! World Frog Day celebrates all anurans, so toads are included. Here’s a nice big American Toad (Bufo americanus) from Will County, Illinois.

American Toad (Bufo americanus), front, Will County, IL, July 13, 2023.

 

American Toad (Bufo americanus), back, Will County, IL, July 13, 2023.

 

American Toad (Bufo americanus), habitat, Will County, IL, July 13, 2023.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (aka the Bronx Zoo) is celebrating with fascinating frogs and a fine gallery of frog photos; you can also contribute to frog conservation. And don’t forget to celebrate Coyne’s Harlequin Toad (Atelopus coynei) here and here!

JAC: and HERE!. What a beaut!

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “hard2”, is  “a resurrection today, from way back in 2006.”  Eighteen years old: it’s been going a long time!  The boys are listing the many reasons they hate atheists, but of course Mo just proves the atheists’ claims.

Researchers claim to have combined the benefits of rolling robots with those of flying drones by creating a device that rotates along the ground but hops over obstacles

Today we have a batch of cool astronomy photos from reader Chris Taylor. Chris’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.  His captions are very good, and I highly recommend enlarging the photos to see things like nascent comet tails and the moons of Jupiter, which are very clear in the enlarged photo but harder to see on this post itself.

Not exactly wildlife, but I hope these might be of interest. All of these photos were taken by me from my own property, apart from the first one.

Starting off with our own galaxy, which we see as the Milky Way. Having lived in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, I have to say that the part visible from the south is much more impressive than the north, so I will show some of the highlights.

The first photo is looking south across the water of the Coorong, a long coastal lagoon on the east of the Great Australian Bight. The Milky Way is visible right down to the horizon. The brightest star in the middle of the photo is Alpha Centauri. This, together with its near neighbour Beta Centauri, form the pointers to the Southern Cross, Crux.  The long axis of the cross points towards the southern celestial pole, which is out of the frame of this picture.

Taken from my own backyard, the next photo is a closer look at the Milky Way in Centaurus and Crux. Alpha and Beta Centauri are at the bottom right of the frame, with the Southern Cross to the right of centre.  Easily visible in this shot is the Coalsack, a dark nebula where dust is obscuring the light from more distant stars. In indigenous culture, the dark areas of the sky formed constellations as well as the bright stars. In some groups, the Coalsack was the head of an Emu in the sky, but in others it was the head of a hunter. Also visible as a bright fuzzy star at the bottom left of centre is the globular cluster Omega Centauri.

Focusing more closely on the constellation Crux, the Southern Cross now, this photo shows the constellation in more detail. The Coalsack is at the bottom, with the brightest star Acrux at the edge of the dark area. There are another four bright stars that make up the kite shape of the cross, and which are represented on the Australian flag.  At the bottom of the photo is what appears to be another bright star. To the naked eye this seems rather dimmer, and it was given the designation kappa Crucis. But it is in fact a cluster of about 100 young hot giant stars.  When its true nature was realised, it was given a new name, the Jewel Box cluster. It is a beautiful sight in a telescope.

Seen from my home latitude, the centre of our galaxy passes straight overhead at times.  This next photo shows the Milky Way in the constellations of Scorpius and part of Sagittarius. Once again, alpha Centauri is visible as the bright star just over the roof of the house. Below and right of centre is the bright red star Antares. The Milky Way is very wide and bright in this direction and is crossed and split by many dark lanes of dust, but there are also many bright clusters of stars.

A closer look into this region of the sky shows some of the clusters and nebulae. On the left side of the frame are the bright stars of the “tail” of Scorpius, and left of centre are two open clusters named Messier 6 and 7 (M6 and M7).  These were catalogued by the french astronomer Charles Messier in 1780s who was searching for comets, but made a catalogue of objects that could be mistaken for a comet. M6 is the brighter spot left of centre. It is a cluster of about 150 hot blue stars, plus one red one.  The colours of the stars can just be made out. M7 is smaller and fainter below centre. On the right are two areas of nebulosity.  The brightest one can be seen as a fuzzy spot surrounding a number of blue stars.  This is the Lagoon Nebula, M8, a giant cloud of interstellar gas and dust shining by reflected light from the stars embedded within the nebula.  It is in the region of 5000 light years from earth. Close by is M20, the Trifid nebula.  These nebulae are areas where stars are forming from the hydrogen gas making up the clouds.

The last picture of the Milky Way is centred on the eta Carina nebula, as it rises over the corner of my house. Eta Carinae is a binary system of two (possibly more) stars. The primary is one of the most massive and most luminous stars known; it has a mass of over 100 times that of the sun, while its luminosity is as much as 4 million times the Sun’s.

Our galaxy is accompanied by a number of smaller, satellite objects.  This includes the two Magellanic Clouds. These are named for the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who referenced them in his writings, although he was not even the first European to describe them. From my home, the clouds are easily visible, looking like spots of the milky way that have become detached. In fact, they are dwarf galaxies in their own right. The Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of all the satellites, and it is now classed as a Barred Spiral; the bar and at least one spiral arm can be seen in this photo. It is about 160,000 light years from Earth. The bright spot at the centre is the Tarantula Nebula, an enormous area of active star formation.

Also satellites of our galaxy are the Globular Clusters. Globular clusters are collections of anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of stars that are packed into a dense spherical agglomeration due to their mutual gravity. These clusters are then able to orbit the centre of the galaxy as a single unit. Omega Centauri, which we saw in a previous photo, is the brightest one visible from earth. Messier 15 is another of the clusters catalogued by Charles Messier in the 1740s. This one is in the constellation of Pegasus and being away from the plane of our galaxy has many fewer stars close by. In my photograph the individual stars that make up the cluster – there are well over 100,000 – are not individually, but form a fuzzy halo around the central condensation of the cluster.

Moving closer to home, here are some photographs of objects in our own Solar System. The first ones were taken on 01 May 2022. Before dawn on that day, I got up to record the close conjunction of the two brightest planets in the sky, Jupiter and Venus as they appeared only 0.2 degrees apart – half the diameter of the Moon. The pair made an incredible sight, far outshining anything else in the sky as they rose over the hills to the east of my place.

But also on this day was another event – five of the planets were visible in a line in the eastern sky. At the bottom are Jupiter and Venus, higher up towards the centre is Saturn and the red planet Mars in at the top of the frame. The fifth one was Neptune, halfway between the bright planets and Saturn. But it is just visible on the photo as a couple of blue pixels, you have to look really hard to find it!

The last photo is zoomed in to Jupiter and Venus.  Three of the Jovian moons are visible, at the top is Callisto, closer to the planet is Io, and on the other side is Europa.

I also managed to photograph two of the wandering comets. First is Comet C/2021 A1 aka Comet Leonard. This photograph was taken in January 2022 when the comet had already passed the closest to the Sun in its orbit, and a long though quite dim tail had developed. This comet was found to have had a hyperbolic orbit, which meant that the orbit was open and the comet would never return to the inner solar system. As it happened, it never got that far out from the Sun. As it rushed through past the inner planets, the nucleus of the comet broke up, and with the heat from the Sun evaporating more of the ice and other volatile material, the comet vanished from view in March 2022.

Another reasonably bright was Comet C/2022 E3 or Comet ZTF. On the morning of 11 Feb 2023, it passed between the Earth and Mars, when I was able to record the event.  Mars is the reddish blob at the top of the frame, very overexposed, while the comet is bottom centre. There is a small tail forming around the core of the comet which appears green in this photo. That green colour was the result of Carbon C2 molecules evaporating off the surface of the nucleus. As the sunlight energises the molecules, they emit light at this frequency, which gives the characteristic colour.

The world is experiencing increasing outbreaks of a completely preventable disease. What's going wrong?

The post Measles Outbreaks on the Rise first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Michel Talagrand has won the 2024 Abel prize for his work researching probability theory and the extremes of randomness

An analysis of work posted on a popular art-sharing website finds that users who adopted generative artificial intelligence tools increased their output, but saw a drop in novelty

Intact human brains 12,000 years old or more have been found in unexpected places such as shipwrecks and waterlogged graves, but it is unclear what preserved them

A settlement in the east of England burned down in a fire 3000 years ago, falling into a muddy waterway that preserved everything inside the houses including tools, fabric, cooking pots and more

The gene-editing strategy could be a way to disable HIV that lies dormant in immune cells, meaning people would no longer need to take daily medication

Nature often defies our simple explanations. Take comets and asteroids, for example. Comets are icy and have tails; asteroids are rocky and don’t have tails. But it might not be quite so simple, according to new research.

That nice, clean definition took a hit in 1996 when a pair of astronomers discovered that what was thought to be a main-belt comet was actually an asteroid. The object is named 7968 Elst–Pizarro after the two scientists. It displayed a comet-like dust tail at perihelion.

These images from the La Silla Observatory show the active asteroid 7968 Elst–Pizarro. Its tail is clearly visible. Image Credit: By ESO – https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso9637a/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26500568

7968 Elst-Pizarro was classified as a main-belt comet (MBC) because it orbits within the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It’s still called an MBC sometimes. However, its icy component that sublimates into a vapour trail likely comes from a small surface crater with volatiles in it rather than from a homogenous ice component. That’s why it’s called an active asteroid.

Active asteroids are unusual and rare objects. To understand them and their place in the Solar System’s history, scientists want to find more of them. That led to the creation of NASA’s Active Asteroids Project.

Now, the Active Asteroids Project has announced the discovery of 15 new active asteroids. These findings are in a new paper published in The Astronomical Journal. It’s titled “The Active Asteroids Citizen Science Program: Overview and First Results,” and the lead author is Colin Chandler from the Dept. of Astronomy & the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle. Among the co-authors are nine volunteer citizen scientists.

“For an amateur astronomer like me, it’s a dream come true,” said volunteer Virgilio Gonano from Udine, Italy. “Congratulations to all the staff and the friends that also check the images!”

“Active objects are rare in large part because they are difficult to identify, so we ask volunteers to assist us in searching for active bodies in our collection of millions of images of known minor planets,” the authors of the paper write. Active asteroids aren’t the only objects they’re trying to find. There are several other types.

Centaurs are small Solar System bodies that orbit between Neptune and Jupiter. Centaurs have crossed the orbits of one or more giant planets, making their orbits unstable. They have traits in common with both comets and asteroids, and about 30 of them have dust-like comas. These are the active ones.

The Active Asteroid Project is also trying to identify active quasi-Hilda asteroids (QHAs). QHAs are beyond the asteroid belt but within Jupiter’s orbit. Astronomers have discovered about 3000 of them, and about 15 of them have tails of gas and dust.

Active asteroids have asteroid-like orbits but have tails or comae like comets do. Image Credit: Mark Garlick/SPL

The Project also hopes to identify Jupiter family comets (JFCs.) JFCs are comets with very short orbital periods of less than 20 years. They’re contained within Jupiter’s orbit but may be captured Kuiper Belt Objects. They likely originated from collisions between objects in the Kuiper Belt and then were captured by Jupiter.

All of these objects have something to tell us about how the Solar System formed. Beyond that, they can help unravel the mystery of Earth’s water. There’s another, more forward-thinking reason for wanting to find these active objects. Their water can be split into hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen for respiration in future missions, though that’s so far in the future it’s esoteric.

This image shows one of the active asteroids found by citizen scientists involved with the Active Asteroid project. It’s named 2015 VA108, and the green arrow highlights the asteroid and its tail. Image Credit: Colin Orion Chandler (University of Washington)

The commitment of the citizens taking part is admirable. Since the effort launched on August 31st, 2021, about 8300 volunteers have taken part. Collectively, they’ve examined about 430,000 images.

“I have been a member of the Active Asteroids team since its first batch of data,” said volunteer Tiffany Shaw-Diaz from Dayton, Ohio. “And to say that this project has become a significant part of my life is an understatement. I look forward to classifying subjects each day, as long as time or health permits, and I am beyond honoured to work with such esteemed scientists on a regular basis.”

The images in the project all come from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam.) DECam is a high-performance camera with a wide field of view that’s mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.

The images are filtered by query across multiple databases and image archives before they’re placed in front of the eyes of the citizen scientists. This includes the Minor Planet Center (MPC), the JPL Small-Body Database, the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, and the National Optical and Infrared Laboratory (NOIRLab) AstroArchive. They also consider the observing telescope’s field-of-view, the objects’ coordinates and semi-major access, and multiple other factors.

The Project then uses scripts to download the desired data from astronomical archives. Then, they generate uniform DECam thumbnail images of each object. This results in millions of images of potential active asteroids or similar objects. There’s no possible way there are enough professional astronomers to handle this much work. So, the images are grouped up into “subject sets” and sent to the citizen scientists who put the effort in and make the project feasible.

Before the volunteers work with any real images, they’re trained on a set of images of objects that display some activity, like a tail or a coma. Then, the participants give them a score from zero (unidentifiable/missing;) to 9 (definitely active, overwhelming activity indicators.) “All training images in Active Asteroids are derived from those images to which we applied a score of ?5; our minimum threshold, for which we consider the activity to be highly likely,” the authors explain.

In each image, a green reticle identifies the object of interest. The citizen scientists are asked a fairly straightforward question: do they see activity (i.e., a tail or coma) coming from the central object?

This is one of the DECam thumbnail images in the project. It shows the active asteroid (62412) 2000 SY178. In the project’s analysis system, this object received a score of 0.35, below the threshold of 0.473 needed to classify it as an active object. Image Credit: Chandler et al. 2024/Active Asteroid Project.

Over time, most citizen scientists became more productive. But not always.

This figure from the study shows the number of images classified through time by 10 randomly selected participants, numbered from 0 to 9. Most got better over time, though number 7 seemed to buck that trend. Image Credit: Chandler et al. 2024/Active Asteroid Project.

Each subject set requires a certain amount of preparation by the professional astronomers. That has to be balanced by the work and time it takes a citizen scientist to go through it. After some experimenting, the project settled on sets of about 22,000 images, which took a citizen participant about four to eight weeks to go through.

The project takes place on the Zooniverse platform, home to many other citizen science projects. One of the benefits of that platform is that the citizen participants and the professional astronomers can talk with one another on the “Talk” discussion boards on Zooniverse. “Surprisingly, we have made discoveries that first come to light on the Talk pages, well before the subject set was fully retired,” the authors of the paper write.

This is just the first data release from the project. Finding 15 active asteroids and one Centaur is just the beginning. In fact, the project has produced more than 20 discoveries, resulting in multiple publications. And they’re not done.

They intend to continue working and improving their methods. The Project is also looking ahead to the Vera Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will produce an enormous number of images for evaluation.

If you’re interested in participating, visit the project website.

“The Active Asteroids project is ongoing and can be accessed through the project website,” the authors write. “Participation is easy and intuitive and can take as little as a few minutes to contribute.”

The post Citizen Scientists Find Fifteen “Active Asteroids” appeared first on Universe Today.

The Earth’s place in space is a fairly familiar one with it orbiting an average star. The star – our Sun – orbits the centre of our Galaxy the Milky Way. From here onwards, the story is less well known. The Milky Way is part of a large structure called the Laniakea Supercluster which is 250 million light years across! That really is a whacking great area of space and it contains at least 100,000 galaxies. There are larger superclusters though like the newly discovered Einasto Supercluster which measures an incredible 360 million light years across and is home to 26 quadrillion stars!

When I give public lectures, I always get a strange satisfaction out of telling the audience that galaxies don’t exist! I go on to explain that, like a city which is a collection of stuff, galaxies are collections of things bound together under the force of gravity. A typical galaxy is simply a collection of stars, nebulae, clusters, planets, comets and so on, take them away and a galaxy won’t exist! Superclusters are largely the same, just a collection of galaxies bound together (well, not completely) under the force of gravity. 

Hot stars burn brightly in this image from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, showing the ultraviolet side of a familiar face. At approximately 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda galaxy, or M31, is our Milky Way’s largest galactic neighbor. The entire galaxy spans 260,000 light-years across — a distance so large, it took 11 different image segments stitched together to produce this view of the galaxy next door. The bands of blue-white making up the galaxy’s striking rings are neighborhoods that harbor hot, young, massive stars. Dark blue-grey lanes of cooler dust show up starkly against these bright rings, tracing the regions where star formation is currently taking place in dense cloudy cocoons. Eventually, these dusty lanes will be blown away by strong stellar winds, as the forming stars ignite nuclear fusion in their cores. Meanwhile, the central orange-white ball reveals a congregation of cooler, old stars that formed long ago. When observed in visible light, Andromeda’s rings look more like spiral arms. The ultraviolet view shows that these arms more closely resemble the ring-like structure previously observed in infrared wavelengths with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Astronomers using Spitzer interpreted these rings as evidence that the galaxy was involved in a direct collision with its neighbor, M32, more than 200 million years ago. Andromeda is so bright and close to us that it is one of only ten galaxies that can be spotted from Earth with the naked eye. This view is two-color composite, where blue represents far-ultraviolet light, and orange is near-ultraviolet light.

Superclusters like Laniakea and Einasto (which is 3 billion light years away) are among the largest structures in the Universe. The discovery of this latest supercluster has been named after Professor Jaan Einasto who was a pioneer in the field of superclusters and celebrated his 95th birthday on 23 February 2024. 

When it comes to visualising the sheer size of these structures imagine an average coin (I really don’t think it matters too much which coin you imagine) on a football pitch. This coin represents the Milky Way Galaxy and the length of the pitch would be the extremities of the supercluster! You might also imagine the Sun as a golf ball and the entire collective mass of the supercluster as Mount Everest in comparison!

A study by MIT physicists suggest the Milky Way’s gravitational core may be lighter in mass, and contain less dark matter, than previously thought. Credits:Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Edited by MIT News

The announcement came from a group of international astronomers from the Tartu Observatory who also surveyed 662 other superclusters. Their work (which was published in the Astrophysical Journal) also revealed some interesting dynamics inside superclusters for example, they found that the galaxies within a supercluster are receding from each other slower than the general expansion of the universe. This is due to the gravitational pull of the supercluster acting as a brake on the expansion. Whilst it is slowing the expansion of the area it is not slowing it enough to stop the galaxies from drifting apart given enough time. Superclusters should be considered temporary, changing phenomena.

They also found that there was a relationship between the density and size of a supercluster. The relationship was an inverse square relationship meaning that the density of a supercluster decreases with the square of its size. 

Source : Einasto Supercluster: the new heavyweight contender in the universe

The post Astronomers Find the Most Massive Supercluster to Date appeared first on Universe Today.

There are plenty of craters on Mars, especially when compared to Earth. That is primarily thanks to the lack of weathering forces and strong plate tectonics that disrupt the formations of such impacts on our home planet. However, not all impact craters on Mars are directly caused by asteroid impacts. Many of them are caused by the ejecta from an asteroid impact falling back to the planet. One recent study showed how impactful this can be – it concludes that a single large impact crater on Mars created over two billion other smaller craters up to almost 2000 km away.

The study, released at the 55th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, focuses on a crater called Corinto. It’s located in Elysium Planitia, only about 17 degrees north of the Red Planet’s equator. It’s a relatively young crater by Martian standards, with the scientists’ best estimate of its age being around 2.34 million years ago. It’s pretty massive for being that young, though, as the average time between impacts of its size is around 3 million years. As such, the scientists think it might be the most recent crater of its size on Mars.

That’s not why it’s interesting, though. It has an extensive “ray system”. That means that a significant amount of ejecta was cast out from the impact site and landed elsewhere on the planet, creating “rays” from the central impact point that can be seen on a map of the planet’s surface even today.

A video from JHU APL shows the details of how we understand how impact craters are made.
Credit – JHU APl YouTube Channel

Corinto crater is about 14 km in diameter and 1 km deep. Its interior bowl is pock-marked with other, smaller craters that happened its impact. Indications suggest it was full of water ice when it was hit, as there appeared to be some degassing of the superheated ice after the impact. Calculations point to a relatively steep impact angle of about 30-45 degrees from straight on – and the impactor appeared to be coming from the north.

As a result, much of the ejecta impact field lies to the south, especially the southwest, of the crater. While some secondary ejecta craters are sitting to the north of the main one, it appears clear that the impactor’s angle was significant enough to push most ejecta to the south. 

Tracking the path of this ejecta a few million years later isn’t easy. Scientists used data collected by HiRISE and the Context Camera (CTX) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and analyzed characteristics of smaller craters surrounding the main Corinto crater. In particular, they looked for craters that looked like they would be caused by ejecta rather than by an interplanetary impactor.

Graphical Depiction of the Facies of Maritan craters around Corinto.
Credit – Golombek et al.

They grouped the different types of ejecta craters they found into five different “facies,” primarily focused on how far away they were from the main crater. Each facies has its distinct characteristics. For example, Facies 0, the one closest to the main crater, are semi-circular, don’t appear to have any ejecta, or have very distinct rims. On the other hand, Facies 3 craters are long and narrow rather than semi-circular (hinting that something rolled through to create them) and have shown up as very bright in the MRO images. 

Two main findings from the paper will probably turn the most heads. The scientists found that there are close to 2 billion secondary impact craters larger than 10 meters caused by the ejecta from Corinto. And those secondary craters appear up to 1850 km away. That would make it, by far, the most impactful (pun intended) of the recent Martian craters in terms of the sheer number and distance of its ejecta. 

The paper didn’t go into what that might mean for our larger understanding of these processes on the red planet, nor what future work might be completed – the version reviewed for this article was only two pages. But, as with most things in science, a new record for something – in this case, distance and amount of secondary impact craters, attracts additional research, so we’ll have to see what if any, future discoveries can be made regarding this interesting Martian crater.

Learn More:
Golombek et al. – CORINTO: A YOUNG, EXTENSIVELY RAYED CRATER THAT PRODUCED A BILLION
SECONDARIES ON MARS
UT – Here’s Something Rare: a Martian Crater That isn’t a Circle. What Happened?
UT – This Crater on Mars is Just a Couple of Years Old
UT – It’s Been Constantly Raining Meteors on Mars for 600 Million Years. Earth too.

Lead Image:
Corinto Crater
Credit – NASA

The post One Impact on Mars Produced More than Two Billion Secondary Craters appeared first on Universe Today.

We are all too familiar of the Moon’s effect on our planet. It’s relentless tug causes our tides but even Mars, which is always at least 55 million kilometres away, can have a subtle effect too. A study has revealed a 2.4 million year cycle in the geological records that show the gentle warming and cooling of our oceans. The records match the interactions between the orbits of Earth and Mars over the longest timescales. These are known as the ‘astronomical grand cycles’ but to date, not much evidence has been found. 

The rhythmical rising and falling of the oceans has been well documented. Even the Sun at an average distance of 150 million kilometres exerts enough of a pull to enhance the effect from the Moon, giving us the spring and neap tides. The Moon’s influence is easy to understand due to its proximity, the Sun’s too due to its enormous mass but Mars is a different story. After all, it’s about half the size of Earth and even at its closest is about 55 million kilometres away. 

It takes two to tango. The moon’s gravity raises a pair of watery bulges in the Earth’s oceans creating the tides, while Earth’s gravity stretches and compresses the moon to warm its interior. Illustration: Bob King

As Earth and Mars orbit around the Sun, their interactions, or rather the gravitational pull from each upon each other are cyclical. These are the astronomical grand cycles and for Earth and Mars they cycle every 2.4 million years.

A paper recently published in Nature Communications reports upon the work of scientists from the University of Sydney and Sorbonne University in France. The team used geological records from the deep sea and to their surprise found a connection between the astronomical grand cycles, global warming patterns and deep ocean circulation. They found a 2.4 million year waxing and waning of deep ocean currents and that seemed to link to increased climate. 

Satellites Detect Deep-Ocean Whirlpools

A definite link emerged but it should be noted that ocean currents are not the only cause of global temperature changes. The current temperature increases have a much stronger link to the human emission of greenhouse gasses.  The paper was authored by Dr Adriana Dutkiewicz and Professor Dietmar Muller from the University of Sydney and Associate Professor Slah Boulila from the Sorbonne University. They reached their conclusion following analysis of the deep-sea sediment records acquired from over half a century of drilling data from hundreds of sites worldwide. The 2.4 million year cycle they found can only have been caused by the interactions between Earth and Mars. 

The interaction of the gravitational field of the two planets means periods of higher incoming solar radiation every 2.4 million years and with it, an increase in global temperatures. Their analysis of the sediments showed breaks in the sedimentary deposits which related to periods of warmer temperatures and more vigorous deep ocean circulation.

The result helps us to understand how deep ocean eddies are key to warming ocean temperatures. Understanding these can help us to understand and model future periods of warming. It may even go some way to mitigate a temporary cessation in ocean currents due to a change in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.  This drives the Gulf Stream that helps to keep Europe and other temperature countries the nice warm climate it has become accustomed to. 

 Source : Mars attracts: how Earth’s planetary interactions drive deep-sea circulation

The post Gravity From Mars has an Effect on Earth’s Oceans appeared first on Universe Today.

I’ve been waiting years for this version of “Without a Song“, by Billy Eckstine, to be put on YouTube. And today I found it!

The song was written by  Vincent Youmans  in 1929, with lyrics added later by Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu. It’s been covered by many people, including my sweetheart Karen Carpenter (and her brother Richard), but to my mind this is by far the best version.

Eckstine led the first big band to be considered “bebop”, and its graduates included, among others, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie. Sarah Vaughan and Miles Davis.  Besides leading the band, arranging, and playing trumpet, Eckstine sang with a full, rich, and warm voice, one that reminds me of another forgotten jazz great: Johnny Hartman. (Listen here to one of my favorite songs, in which Hartman sings with John Coltrane’s sax. Their entire album, which is fantastic, is here.)

This recording is from 1960, and was recorded live in Las Vegas for Eckstine’s album “No Cover No Minimum“. The arrangement and vocals are top notch, not to mention the modulation in the last verse.