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Scientists Have 'Woken Up' Microbes Trapped Under The Seafloor For 100 Million Years
29 JULY 2020

https://www.sciencealert.com/scient...pped-under-the-seafloor-for-100-million-years
Researchers have successfully revived tiny microbes trapped dormant in a seemingly lifeless zone of the seabed for more than 100 million years.

A team of scientists from Japan and America were looking to see whether microscopic life survives in the less-than-hospitable conditions beneath the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean.

"We wanted to know how long the microbes could sustain their life in a near-absence of food," said microbiologist Yuki Morono from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, who led the study.

They got their answer: microbes that had been trapped in seabed sediments deposited 100 million years ago could be revived with the right food and a bit of added oxygen.They took samples from ancient pelagic clay, which accumulates in the deepest and most remote parts of the ocean, and much younger and chalky nannofossil oozes, between 4.3 and 13 million years old.

They found oxygen-consuming microbes (and dissolved oxygen) right through every layer of the cores, from top to bottom, and at every site they sampled in the South Pacific Gyre. But the microbes were hiding out in very low numbers.

On board the ship, samples were taken out of the sediment cores to see if the energy-starved microbes had retained their "metabolic potential" and could feast and multiply.

The ancient microbes were given a boost of oxygen and fed traceable substrates containing carbon and nitrogen, their food of choice, before the glass vials were sealed, incubated and only opened after 21 days, 6 weeks or 18 months.

Even in the oldest sediments sampled, the researchers were able to revive up to 99 percent of the original microbial community.

"At first I was sceptical, but we found that up to 99.1 percent of the microbes in sediment deposited 101.5 million years ago were still alive and were ready to eat," Morono said.

The soil the microbes were trapped in was taken from a 2010 expedition to the South Pacific Gyre, a seemingly lifeless zone in the centre of swirling ocean currents to the east of Australia, known as one of the most food-limited and life-deficient parts of the ocean (and a trash vortex, with all the plastic pollution it gathers at the surface).

As part of a 2010 expedition onboard the JOIDES Resolution drillship, the team extracted sediment cores going as deep as 75 meters (250 feet) below the seafloor, which rests nearly 6 kilometres (almost 20,000 feet) below the ocean's surface.
 
Best RC Space Shuttle

Text below video:

"Trawling through my video archives and stumbled across this old (and rather low resolution by modern standards) video of a 90mm EDF powered Space Shuttle from an electric only event that I filmed at back in 2008 at Basingstoke Model Flying Club. For it's time it was amazing and a credit to the owner and pilot whose name I can't remember. He had obviously decided that the power system did not have sufficient power for a conventional take off so opted for a bungee launch using a dolly. If anything it made the flight more spectacular.

The combination of fast passes and high alpha flight as if the shuttle was on re-entry through the atmosphere was amazing and concluded with a good landing on retractable landing gear.

Re-discovering this footage has definitely inspired us at 'Essential RC' to create our own Space Shuttle using pyrotechnics and a big EDF power system. Why not? [pending]

Filmed by Dom Mitchell using a potato back in 2008! Again, apologies for the low resolution but this was about as good as it got for the amateur videographer back in 2008.

EDIT: Just remembered that the owner, builder and pilot was retired RAF pilot Captain Cyril Carr. He built several outstanding models including a Vulcan Bomber that was featured in the (UK) Daily Mail back in 2016."

 
05 Aug 2020 | 21:00 GMT
Spacecraft of the Future Could Be Powered By Lattice Confinement Fusion
NASA researchers demonstrate the ability to fuse atoms inside room-temperature metals

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/nuclear-fusiontokamak-not-included
Nuclear fusion is hard to do. It requires extremely high densities and pressures to force the nuclei of elements like hydrogen and helium to overcome their natural inclination to repel each other. On Earth, fusion experiments typically require large, expensive equipment to pull off.

But researchers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center have now demonstrated a method of inducing nuclear fusion without building a massive stellarator or tokamak. In fact, all they needed was a bit of metal, some hydrogen, and an electron accelerator.

The team believes that their method, called lattice confinement fusion, could be a potential new power source for deep space missions. They have published their results in two papers in Physical Review C.

“Lattice confinement” refers to the lattice structure formed by the atoms making up a piece of solid metal. The NASA group used samples of erbium and titanium for their experiments. Under high pressure, a sample was “loaded” with deuterium gas, an isotope of hydrogen with one proton and one neutron. The metal confines the deuterium nuclei, called deuterons, until it’s time for fusion.

“During the loading process, the metal lattice starts breaking apart in order to hold the deuterium gas,” says Theresa Benyo, an analytical physicist and nuclear diagnostics lead on the project. “The result is more like a powder.” At that point, the metal is ready for the next step: overcoming the mutual electrostatic repulsion between the positively-charged deuteron nuclei, the so-called Coulomb barrier.

To overcome that barrier requires a sequence of particle collisions. First, an electron accelerator speeds up and slams electrons into a nearby target made of tungsten. The collision between beam and target creates high-energy photons, just like in a conventional X-ray machine. The photons are focused and directed into the deuteron-loaded erbium or titanium sample. When a photon hits a deuteron within the metal, it splits it apart into an energetic proton and neutron. Then the neutron collides with another deuteron, accelerating it.

At the end of this process of collisions and interactions, you’re left with a deuteron that’s moving with enough energy to overcome the Coulomb barrier and fuse with another deuteron in the lattice.

Key to this process is an effect called electron screening, or the shielding effect. Even with very energetic deuterons hurtling around, the Coulomb barrier can still be enough to prevent fusion. But the lattice helps again. “The electrons in the metal lattice form a screen around the stationary deuteron,” says Benyo. The electrons’ negative charge shields the energetic deuteron from the repulsive effects of the target deuteron’s positive charge until the nuclei are very close, maximizing the amount of energy that can be used to fuse.

Aside from deuteron-deuteron fusion, the NASA group found evidence of what are known as Oppenheimer-Phillips stripping reactions. Sometimes, rather than fusing with another deuteron, the energetic deuteron would collide with one of lattice’s metal atoms, either creating an isotope or converting the atom to a new element. The team found that both fusion and stripping reactions produced useable energy.

“What we did was not cold fusion,” says Lawrence Forsley, a senior lead experimental physicist for the project. Cold fusion, the idea that fusion can occur at relatively low energies in room-temperature materials, is viewed with skepticism by the vast majority of physicists. Forsley stresses this is hot fusion, but “We’ve come up with a new way of driving it.”

“Lattice confinement fusion initially has lower temperatures and pressures” than something like a tokamak, says Benyo. But “where the actual deuteron-deuteron fusion takes place is in these very hot, energetic locations.” Benyo says that when she would handle samples after an experiment, they were very warm. That warmth is partially from the fusion, but the energetic photons initiating the process also contribute heat.

https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.101.044610
https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.101.044609
 
Heavy atom spills its guts in decade-long experiment
Astatine gobbles and spits out electrons. Two numbers tell us how.
6 Aug 2020

https://www.livescience.com/astatine-proton-beam-mystery-solved.html
Wielding proton beams and lasers, physicists have for the first time unlocked one of the key secrets of the rarest naturally occurring element on Earth: astatine.

Astatine is a "halogen," meaning it shares chemical properties with fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine (all elements that typically bind with metals to form salts). But with 85 protons, it's heavier than lead and is extraordinarily rare on Earth — the rarest of the elements that occur naturally in Earth's crust, according to chemist John Emsley's 2011 book "Nature's Building Blocks" (Oxford University Press). It forms from decaying uranium and thorium, and its most stable version, or isotope, (called astatine-210) has a half life of just 8.1 hours — so if you found a stash of it in the morning, half of it would be gone by the evening.

It's so rare that until recently, researchers had never managed to gather enough of it to test how it interacts with electrons. That's a problem, in part because one of its radioactive isotopes, astatine-211 has the potential to be useful in cancer therapies. But researchers weren't sure how likely it is to attract electrons and form negative ions, which could be harmful to healthy cells. A new paper changes that.

4uAivR66KHM4qizVi3t2Pm-970-80.jpg
 
High Performance Ornithopter Drone Is Quiet, Efficient, and Safe
Flapping wings instead of propellers help this bird-inspired drone hold its own against quadrotors
3 Aug 2020

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/high-performance-ornithopter-drone
One reason that making a flapping-wing robot is difficult is because the wings have to move back and forth at high speed while electric motors spin around and around at high speed. This requires a relatively complex transmission system, which (if you don’t do it carefully), leads to weight penalties and a significant loss of efficiency. One particular challenge is that the reciprocating mass of the wings tends to cause the entire robot to flex back and forth, which alternately binds and disengages elements in the transmission system.

The researchers’ new ornithopter design mitigates the flexing problem using hinges and bearings in pairs. Elastic elements also help improve efficiency, and the ornithopter is in fact more efficient with its flapping wings than it would be with a rotary propeller-based propulsion system. Its thrust exceeds its 26-gram mass by 40 percent, which is where much of the aerobatic capability comes from. And one of the most surprising findings of this paper was that flapping-wing robots can actually be more efficient than propeller-based aircraft.

It’s not just thrust that’s a challenge for ornithopters: Control is much more complex as well. Like birds, ornithopters have tails, but unlike birds, they have to rely almost entirely on tail control authority, not having that bird-level of control over fine wing movements. To make an acrobatic level of control possible, the tail control surfaces on this ornithopter are huge—the tail plane area is 35 percent of the wing area. The wings can also provide some assistance in specific circumstances, as by combining tail control inputs with a deliberate stall of the things to allow the ornithopter to execute rapid flips.

With the ability to take off, hover, glide, land softly, maneuver acrobatically, fly quietly, and interact with its environment in a way that’s not (immediately) catastrophic, flapping-wing drones easily offer enough advantages to keep them interesting. Now that ornithopters been shown to be even more efficient than rotorcraft, the researchers plan to focus on autonomy with the goal of moving their robot toward real-world usefulness.

 
Very cool 2nd to last reaction - the citrate pyrolosis reaction which just happens to involve the recently infamous ammonium nitrate.

Making superconductors

 
First rocket launched from Cape Canaveral.

Project Bumper, Long Range Proving Ground, July 1950

This silent film is a compilation of clips from an archive showing Cape Canaveral in the earliest days of its Space Age. In July 1950, the two test flights of Project Bumper at the Cape launched from Pad 3. The interim name for the site was the Long Range Proving Ground (LRPG), part of an Air Force base south of Cocoa Beach. On August 1, 1950, that became Patrick Air Force Base (PAFB), and the Cape was Operating Sub-Division #1.

The clips show storage, processing, and transportation of the Bumper V-2s from PAFB along a dirt road past the Cape Canaveral Lighthouse to Pad 3. Erection and launch activities are shown. The film also shows the LRPG in its early days, with overhead shots of the first facilities and the dirt roads that serviced them.

 
BY FAR the best web page ever was a telemetry page for the Mars Global Surveyor. It displayed system status updated at one minute intervals of things like voltages, temperatures, primary/backup system health and status (on/offline), travelling wave tubes A/B (transmitter final amplifier) online/offline, etc. It was formatted and displayed as I imagine the mission control screen might have been. For me, the following is simply flashy and substance free because it tells me virtually nothing about spacecraft status.

AUGUST 23, 2020
Follow NASA's Perseverance rover in real time on its way to Mars

Dozens of controls on pop-up menus allow you to customize not just what you see—from faraway to right "on board" a spacecraft—but also how you see it: Choose the 3-D mode, and all you need is a pair of red-cyan anaglyph glasses for a more immersive experience.

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/orrery/#/sc_perseverance
 
Why Don’t ["Didn't" would be a better word - W] Light And Gravitational Waves Arrive Simultaneously?
21 Aug 2020

https://www.forbes.com/sites/starts...and-gravitational-waves-arrive-simultaneously
Whenever masses accelerate through curved space, they emit tiny amounts of invisible radiation that’s invisible to all telescopes: gravitational, rather than electromagnetic, radiation. These gravitational waves behave as ripples in the fabric of spacetime, carrying energy away from the system and causing their mutual orbit to decay. At a critical moment in time, these two stellar remnants spiraled so close to one another that they touched, and what followed was one of the most spectacular scientific discoveries of all-time.

As soon as these two stars collided, the gravitational wave signal came to an abrupt end. Everything that the LIGO and Virgo detectors saw was from the inspiral phase up until that moment, followed by total gravitational wave silence. According to our best theoretical models, this was two neutron stars inspiraling and merging together, likely resulting in a remarkable end result: the formation of a black hole.

But then it happened. 1.7 seconds later, after the gravitational wave signal ceased, the first electromagnetic (light) signal arrived: gamma rays, which came in one enormous burst. From the combination of gravitational wave and electromagnetic data, we were able to pin down the location of this event better than any gravitational wave event ever: to the specific host galaxy in which it occurred, NGC 4993.

We had an event occur some 130 million light-years away: far enough away that light took 130 million years to travel from the galaxy where it occurred to our eyes. Back when the merger took place, planet Earth was a vastly different place. Feathered birds had been around for only 20 million years; placental mammals for 10 million. The first flowering plants were just beginning to emerge, and the largest dinosaurs were still 30 million years in Earth's future.

For all that time, from then until the present, both the light and the gravitational waves from this event were journeying through the Universe, traveling at the only speed they could — the speed of light and the speed of gravity, respectively — until they arrived at Earth after a journey of 130 million years. First the gravitational waves from the inspiral phase arrived, moving the mirrors on our gravitational wave detectors by an incredibly small amount: less than a ten-thousandth of the size of an individual proton. And then, just 1.7 seconds after the gravitational wave signal ended, the first light from the event arrived as well.

Immediately, this gave us the most impressive physical measurement of the speed of gravity ever: it was equal to the speed of light to better than 1 part in a quadrillion (1015), as it takes around four quadrillion seconds to make up 130 million years, and they arrived less than two seconds apart from one another. Prior to that, we had excellent theoretical reasons for knowing that the speed of gravity ought to equal the speed of light, but only had indirect constraints that the two were equivalent to within 0.2% or so.

Does this mean that the speed of gravity and the speed of light aren’t quite equal, then? That perhaps either gravity moves slightly faster than c, the speed of light in a vacuum, or that light itself might actually move a tiny bit slower than c, as though it had a tiny but non-zero rest mass to it? That would be an extraordinary revelation, but one that’s highly unlikely. If that were true, light of different energies (and wavelengths) would travel at different speeds, and the level at which that would need to be true is much too large to be consistent with observations.

[article then goes on to provide theories about the possible reasons for the 1.7 second delay... after travelling for 130 MILLION YEARS.]
 
WHY IS THERE A NORMAL GALAXY SITTING AT THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE?
7 Sep 2020

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/why-is-there-a-normal-galaxy-sitting-at-the-edge-of-the-universe
Aided by a trick of gravity, astronomers have found a normal galaxy. Big deal, right? The thing is, where they found it is not normal: The light we see from it left the galaxy 12.4 billion years ago, meaning we’re seeing it as it was when the Universe itself was only 1.4 billion years old!

That’s what makes this so weird. A normal galaxy has no business being there when the cosmos was so young. But yet, there it sits.

The galaxy looks … normal. Like a disk-shaped galaxy you’d see nearby in the Universe, even like the Milky Way (though only about a quarter the mass of our galaxy). It has a flat disk of stars, gas, and dust, and even a central bulge of stars like our galaxy does, too.

Interestingly, it’s not alone. Earlier in 2020 astronomers announced they found a disk galaxy at about the same distance, called the Wolfe Galaxy. Like this one, it’s not understood how it can exist. Clearly, the theoretical models are wrong, or at least (and more likely) incomplete. Obviously, there’s more to learn about galaxies that exist at the edge of the observable Universe.

So finding a weirdly normal galaxy in a normally weird place is, oddly, weirdly normal!

The job now is to find out why.
 
Shooting a Nerf Gun Backwards While Driving At The Bullet's Speed Forward

 
The most exciting telescope that no-one is talking about

 
Winston said:
WHY IS THERE A NORMAL GALAXY SITTING AT THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE?
7 Sep 2020

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/why-is-there-a-normal-galaxy-sitting-at-the-edge-of-the-universe
Aided by a trick of gravity, astronomers have found a normal galaxy. Big deal, right? The thing is, where they found it is not normal: The light we see from it left the galaxy 12.4 billion years ago, meaning we’re seeing it as it was when the Universe itself was only 1.4 billion years old!

That’s what makes this so weird. A normal galaxy has no business being there when the cosmos was so young. But yet, there it sits.

The galaxy looks … normal. Like a disk-shaped galaxy you’d see nearby in the Universe, even like the Milky Way (though only about a quarter the mass of our galaxy). It has a flat disk of stars, gas, and dust, and even a central bulge of stars like our galaxy does, too.

Interestingly, it’s not alone. Earlier in 2020 astronomers announced they found a disk galaxy at about the same distance, called the Wolfe Galaxy. Like this one, it’s not understood how it can exist. Clearly, the theoretical models are wrong, or at least (and more likely) incomplete. Obviously, there’s more to learn about galaxies that exist at the edge of the observable Universe.

So finding a weirdly normal galaxy in a normally weird place is, oddly, weirdly normal!

The job now is to find out why.
Click to expand...
Why not?
 
John Kemker said:
Why not?
Click to expand...
The too soon after the big bang configuration of the galaxy which we now see as the light that left it way back then. It was too young, according to currently accepted formation mechanisms, to look the way it does and too soon after the big bang for same. The farther away we see, the further back in time we see thanks to the speed of light limit.
 
Winston said:
The too soon after the big bang configuration of the galaxy which we now see as the light that left it way back then. It was too young, according to currently accepted formation mechanisms, to look the way it does and too soon after the big bang for same. The farther away we see, the further back in time we see thanks to the speed of light limit.
Click to expand...
While my original "Why not?" was posted tongue-in-cheek, thank you for teaching me something I didn't think about! Definitely food for thought.
 
IMO, no way in hell is this or any of them going to be ready by 2024.

On April 30, NASA named Dynetics one of three prime contractors to champion the Human Landing System contract. The Dynetics HLS (DHLS) test article, located in Huntsville, Ala., is built to-scale and allows for test and evaluation across the engineering lifecycle. The DHLS team will use the test article for human-in-the-loop (HITL) task identification and analysis, assessing net habitable volume, crew module accommodations, placement and orientation of various components and overall habitability.

Dynetics Human Landing System

 
SEPTEMBER 15, 2020
Elements of surprise: Neutron stars contribute little, but something's making gold, research finds

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-elements-neutron-stars-contribute-gold.html
Neutron star collisions do not create the quantity of chemical elements previously assumed, a new analysis of galaxy evolution finds. The research also reveals that current models can't explain the amount of gold in the cosmos—creating an astronomical mystery. The work has produced a new-look Periodic Table showing the stellar origins of naturally occurring elements from carbon to uranium.

elementsofsu.jpg
 
NASA Built Two Versions of the Apollo Command Module

Anyone know if the models shown starting at 18:42 are preserved and displayed somewhere? I sure hope so.

 
The reactor is designed by NuScale and produced by Doosan:

Doosan, NuScale sign agreements for SMR cooperation
24 July 2019

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Doosan,-NuScale-sign-agreements-for-SMR-cooperatio
See NuScale wikipedia link and image below. I can find no specific reference to this as a Generation III reactor design, although improved safety which this reactor provides is a characteristic of that generation.

Mini nuclear reactors with key South Korean parts cleared by US
Doosan Heavy has struggled as atomic power is phased out

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/En...ors-with-key-South-Korean-parts-cleared-by-US
TOKYO -- Miniature nuclear reactors that use key components from South Korea's Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction have won first-of-its-kind certification for use in the U.S.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in late August approved the use of small reactor modules, or SMRs, for a project being undertaken by the American company NuScale Power in the state of Utah. Doosan agreed to provide NuScale with enough reactor and turbine parts to build a 12-module plant under a $1.3 billion contract.

The project, commissioned by Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, is due to break ground in 2023 with the plant slated to start up in 2029.

Each SMR unit is capable of producing 50 megawatts of power, or about 5% that of a conventional reactor. An SMR is considered a safer alternative since it can be cooled in a water tank, cutting out the risk of an accident due to problems with water pumps or the electrical source.

Doosan's SMRs are designed to be placed in underground water tanks. There is only a minor risk of reactors losing cooling capabilities due to earthquakes or other external factors.

Current Status of Small & Modular Reactor R&D in Republic of Korea (2019)

https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/INPRO/df17/VI.5-Republic of Korea_Ji Hyun Kim.pdf
Nuclear Reactors: Generation to Generation (2011)

https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/academy/pdfs/nuclearReactors.pdf
NuScale Power

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power
1000px-Diagram_of_a_NuScale_reactor.png
 
Nuclear Fusion Reactions in Deuterated Metals
NASA Glenn Research and Technology
Jul 23, 2020

 
SEPTEMBER 29, 2020
Validating the physics behind the new MIT-designed fusion experiment

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-validating-physics-mit-designed-fusion.html
The analysis done so far shows that the planned fusion energy output of the SPARC reactor should be able to meet the design specifications with a comfortable margin to spare. It is designed to achieve a Q factor—a key parameter denoting the efficiency of a fusion plasma—of at least 2, essentially meaning that twice as much fusion energy is produced as the amount of energy pumped in to generate the reaction. That would be the first time a fusion plasma of any kind has produced more energy than it consumed.

The calculations at this point show that SPARC could actually achieve a Q ratio of 10 or more, according to the new papers. While Greenwald cautions that the team wants to be careful not to overpromise, and much work remains, the results so far indicate that the project will at least achieve its goals, and specifically will meet its key objective of producing a burning plasma, wherein the self-heating dominates the energy balance.

5f730db20f83d.jpg
 
A laser on a future Mars orbiter would use it. Nowhere is there a mention of how they keep it clean.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2020
New Mars rover is ready for space lasers

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-new-mars-rover-is-ready-for-space-lasers
NASA's Perseverance rover—scheduled to land on the Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021—carries the palm-size Laser Retroreflector Array (LaRA). There's also small one aboard the agency's InSight lander, called Laser Retroreflector for InSight (LaRRI). And a retroreflector will be aboard the ESA (European Space Agency) ExoMars rover that launches in 2022.

While there is currently no laser in the works for this sort of Mars research, the devices are geared toward the future: Reflectors like these could one day enable scientists conducting what is called laser-ranging research to measure the position of a rover on the Martian surface, test Einstein's theory of general relativity, and help make future landings on the Red Planet more precise.

Visible near the center of NASA's Perseverance Mars rover in this illustration is the palm-size dome called the Laser Retroreflector Array (LaRA). In the distant future, laser-equipped Mars orbiters could use such a reflector for scientific studies. Perseverance was built and is operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California. The retroreflector was provided by Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics, which built the instrument on behalf of the Italian Space Agency. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

newmarsrover.jpg
 

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