Collections

View all

When the U.S. football field–size, cigar-shaped object ‘Oumuamua entered our solar system last year, it didn’t just give us our first glimpse of an interstellar piece of rock. It also bolstered the plausibility of space rocks spreading life among the stars by ferrying microbes between distant star systems, according to a new study. “Life could potentially be exchanged over thousands of light-years,” says author Idan Ginsburg, a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The idea, known as panspermia, has been around for centuries. Some astronomers have even speculated that life on Earth was seeded by microbes that hitched a ride on debris ejected from another life-harboring world in the solar system, perhaps on meteorites from Mars. But it seemed improbable that life could have come from interstellar space.
[...]
In the new study, Ginsburg, along with astrophysicists Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, calculated the chances of such objects delivering life to an alien world. A binary star such as Alpha Centauri would ensnare a few thousand rocks of ‘Oumuamua’s size every year, and our solar system might snag one a century, the team estimates in a preprint posted last week on arXiv and in a forthcoming paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

Lingam and Loeb (2018) Implications of Captured Interstellar Objects for Panspermia and Extraterrestrial Life: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.10254

Ginsburg et al. (2018) Galactic Panspermia: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04307

Tuross Falls Wadbilliga NP

A large 200m (600') fall on the wild Tuross River, one of our most inaccessible river-falls.

Image: single shot, lightly toned for depth

More pictures of the fall and the dream-time stories associated with the falls are now published on my website:
http://www.silenttheory.net/

Drops of light
My macros https://www.paolodalprato.com/macro

#MotoGP Rossi admits records in danger from Marquez https://www.motorsport.com/motogp/news/rossi-admits-records-in-danger-from-marquez/3195264/ via @motorsport

Karlu Karlu / Devils Marbles Conservation Reserve is a protected area located 105 km (65 mi) south of Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, Australia and 393 km (244 mi) north of Alice Springs. The nearest settlement is the small town of Wauchope located 9 km (5.6 mi) to the south.

The Devils Marbles are of great cultural and spiritual significance to the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land, and the reserve protects one of the oldest religious sites in the world as well as the natural rock formations found there. Karlu Karlu is the local Aboriginal term for both the rock features and the surrounding area.....

EXCLUSIVE - Eminem performs “Venom” from high atop the Empire State Building! Presented by Google #Pixel3

The sambar (Rusa unicolor) is a large deer native to the Indian subcontinent, southern China, and Southeast Asia that is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List since 2008. Populations have declined substantially due to severe hunting, insurgency, and industrial exploitation of habitat.

The name "sambar" is also sometimes used to refer to the Philippine deer, called the "Philippine sambar" and the Javan rusa, called the "Sunda sambar"....

It is definitely a unique look for the TARDIS

At Least 90,000 Voters Purged From Nevada Voter Rolls, Voting Rights Group Claims https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/at-least-90000-voters-purged-from-nevada-voter-rolls-voting-rights-group-claims/ -via Flynx

Monday Minute
10/15/18

BEING SUCCESSFUL IS A PERSONAL CHOICE

Exactly a year ago, I made this ONE choice that had made a significant change in how productive I was and how much clarity is in my thoughts.

I've had the opportunity this weekend to reflect on my "Anniversary of Existence" from the previous 365 days.

Success is the continual unfolding of the design to our life and pulling it off, one choice at a time. That’s what success is. Being successful in whatever you want to do that makes sense to you, for you and your family.

Take on responsibilities or refuse them, it’s all up to you. We’ve been given the power of choice. When we act on that choice, we don't khow how small or large the impact will carry. The important thing is that you've made the decision to make a change.

Be part of or all of what you have the potential to be. You’ve got the choice. Do a little to make yourself comfortable and forget the rest, or do it all.

Design your own life the way you want it, one decision at a time.

Every BODY deserves to feel Fitastic!

https://youtu.be/P9LvbR44ts8

#Iranian #Author on List of US 2018 National #Book #Awards Finalists

The name of Iranian-French woman author Negar Djavadi is on the list of nominees for the United States’ 2018 National Book Awards.

Do you know what increase your risk of heart disease? Here are 12 surprising, and simple, ways to protect your ticker.

https://medmd.org/12-surprising-things-hurt-heart/

The volcano Erta Ale is the most active volcano in Ethiopia. It is located below sea level in the desert of Danakil. The constant activity of the volcano continues since 1967. In the crater of the volcano, an amazingly beautiful lava lake could be seen. Periodically, lava flows away from it, forming rivers of fire....

"Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, have found the oldest clue yet of animal life, dating back at least 100 million years before the famous Cambrian explosion of animal fossils.

The study, led by Gordon Love, a professor in UCR's Department of Earth Sciences, was published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The first author is Alex Zumberge, a doctoral student working in Love's research group.

Rather than searching for conventional body fossils, the researchers have been tracking molecular signs of animal life, called biomarkers, as far back as 660-635 million years ago during the Neoproterozoic Era. In ancient rocks and oils from Oman, Siberia, and India, they found a steroid compound produced only by sponges, which are among the earliest forms of animal life.

"Molecular fossils are important for tracking early animals since the first sponges were probably very small, did not contain a skeleton, and did not leave a well-preserved or easily recognizable body fossil record," Zumberge said. "We have been looking for distinctive and stable biomarkers that indicate the existence of sponges and other early animals, rather than single-celled organisms that dominated the earth for billions of years before the dawn of complex, multicellular life."

The biomarker they identified, a steroid compound named 26-methylstigmastane (26-mes), has a unique structure that is currently only known to be synthesized by certain species of modern sponges called demosponges.

"This steroid biomarker is the first evidence that demosponges, and hence multicellular animals, were thriving in ancient seas at least as far back as 635 million years ago," Zumberge said.

The work builds from a 2009 study by Love's team, which reported the first compelling biomarker evidence for Neoproterozoic animals from a different steroid biomarker, called 24-isopropylcholestane (24-ipc), from rocks in South Oman. However, the 24-ipc biomarker evidence proved controversial since 24-ipc steroids are not exclusively made by demosponges and can be found in a few modern algae. The finding of the additional and novel 26-mes ancient biomarker, which is unique to demosponges, adds extra confidence that both compounds are fossil biomolecules produced by demosponges on an ancient seafloor".

Gostkowski hit all four extra points and all five field goals in Sunday's win.

https://nesn.com/2018/10/patriots-bill-belichick-raves-about-stephen-gostkowski-after-big-game-vs-chiefs/

Top 7 Best way to Clean Detox your Liver Naturally

#HomeRemedies #Liver #Detox #CleanDetox #HealthTips
There are many natural and safe ways to help detox your liver. Start off slow and let cleansing become part of your everyday routine. See how a cleaner body can change the way you feel and the way you think.
http://trendingupdate.info/top-7-best-way-to-clean-detox-your-liver-naturally/
Follow +Fashion Update News

"The sixth mass extinction is underway, this time caused by humans. A team of researchers have calculated that species are dying out so quickly that nature's built-in defense mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. If current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct during the next five decades that nature will need 3-5 million years to recover to current biodiversity levels. And that's a best-case scenario".

(Posted by +rasha kamel )

Variety to cook... Let's see how edible worm is made!

Watch NOW:
https://battabox.com/how-to-eat-nigerian-worms/

livescience | Science ›sʌɪəns‹ #Science #Physics

Will the universe expand forever or eventually collapse into a tiny speck?

A paper published in June suggested infinite expansion was impossible according to a major physics theory­ — a conjecture that made huge waves in the physics community.

"People get very, kind of, emotional about it because if it's true and [is] discovered, it would be spectacular," said Timm Wrase, a physicist at the Vienna University of Technology.

Now, Wrase and his colleagues have published a separate study that pokes a huge hole in that argument, which means an ever-expanding universe can't be ruled out just yet.

Dark energy and cosmic expansion
Our universe is permeated with a vast, unseen force that seems to oppose gravity. Physicists call this force dark energy, and it is thought to be constantly pushing our universe outward.

But in June, a group of physicists published a paper in the preprint journal arXiv implying that dark energy changes over time. This means that the universe will not expand forever but might eventually collapse into the size it was before the Big Bang.

Almost immediately, however, physicists found problems with the theory: Several independent groups subsequently published papers that suggested revisions to the conjecture. Now, a paper published on Oct. 2 in the journal Physical Review D suggests that, as it stands, the original conjecture can't be true because it can't explain the existence of the Higgs boson — which we know exists, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle collider on the border between France and Switzerland.

Still, with a bit of theoretical tweaking, the collapsing-universe conjecture could still be viable, Wrase, the senior author on the new Physical Review D paper, told Live Science.

How do we explain everything that ever existed?
String theory, sometimes called the theory of everything, is a mathematically elegant but experimentally unproven framework for uniting Einstein's theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics. String theory suggests that all the particles that make up the universe are not really dots but one-dimensional strings that vibrate — and the differences in those vibrations allow us to see one particle as a photon and another as an electron.

In order for string theory to be a viable explanation for the universe, however, it must incorporate dark energy.

Imagine this dark energy as a ball in a landscape of mountains and valleys that represent the amount of potential energy it has, Wrase said. If a ball stands on top of the mountain, it may be still, but it can roll down with the slightest perturbation, thus it is unstable. If the ball is sitting in a valley, it's not changing or moving, has low energy and resides in a stable universe, because even a strong push would have it roll back down into the valley.

String theorists long assumed that dark energy is constant and unchanging in the universe. In other words, it's snuggled up in the valleys between mountains, not rolling from the mountaintops and thus not changing through time, Wrase said.

But the conjecture put forth in June suggests that, for string theory to work, the landscape doesn't have any mountains or valleys above sea level. (In this conception, our universe stands above sea level — which metaphorically marks the point in which dark energy begins to either pull the universe together or push the universe apart.)

Rather, the landscape is a slight slope and the ball of dark energy is rolling ever downward. "While it is rolling downwards the dark energy becomes smaller and smaller," Wrase said. "The height of the ball corresponds to the amount of dark energy in our universe."

In this theory, dark energy might eventually make its way below sea level and start to pull the universe back together to its pre-Big-Bang form.

But there's just one problem, Wrase said.

"We have showed that such unstable mountain tops have to exist," he said. That is because we know the Higgs particle exists. And we have experimentally proved that the Higgs particles can exist upon these mountaintops or "unstable universes," and can be disturbed with the slightest touch, he said.

Difficulty with stability of universes
Cumrun Vafa, a string theorist at Harvard and senior author of the conjecture paper from June, told Live Science in an email that, indeed, the original conjecture has "difficulty with unstable universes." This new paper and a few others show this problem, he added. But there are several papers that proposed slight revisions to the conjecture that would still adhere to the limitations Wrase and his team proposed, he said.

Even in the revised conjecture, "we would not be in a stable universe but rather things would change," Wrase said. The revision says mountaintops can exist, but stable valleys cannot, he said. (Imagine the shape of a horse's saddle). The ball has to eventually start rolling and dark energy has to change in time, he added. But "if the conjecture is [totally] wrong, then the dark energy could be constant, we would sit in a valley between two mountains," and the universe would keep expanding.

Within 10 to 15 years, he hopes that satellites that more precisely measure the expansion of the universe can help us understand whether or not dark energy is constant or changing.

Vafa agreed. "These are exciting times in cosmology and hopefully in the next few years we will see experimental evidence for the change of the dark energy in our universe," he said.

By Yasemin Saplakoglu, Staff Writer | October 15, 2018 01:30pm ET