Ongoing important Science news thread

[TheyCallMeBruce]

Most likely another shark. I thought I read somewhere that sharks will cannibalize their own kind.

Either that or Megalodon is back.

[polak]

I'm going to go with Fotze's mom.

[Nehkara]

NASA's real life Enterprise may take us to other star systems one day

Dr. Harold "Sonny" White is still working on a warp drive at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Their work is still in the experimental stages but that doesn't mean they can't imagine already what the real life Enterprise ship should look like according to their math. You're looking at it right now.

[nik-]

Originally Posted by polak

I'm going to go with Fotze's mom.

Negative. They wouldn't have found the tracking device. Fotze's mom swallows everything

[Knut]

Originally Posted by Hesla

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=42751

"Researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration today announced the first direct evidence for this cosmic inflation. Their data also represent the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang." Finally, the data confirm a deep connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity."

Huge News in the field of Astrophysics. Proof that the Universe is Expanding.

http://m.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27935479

Soo. Ummmmmm. Not so fast. Confidence in the result has dropped as cosmic dust may not have been completely neutralized from their data.

[dissentowner]

Originally Posted by nik-

Negative. They wouldn't have found the tracking device. Fotze's mom swallows everything

I have always been curious about how the whole fotze's mom thing got started on CP, is there a first post on the subject someplace?

[Thor]

Originally Posted by TheyCallMeBruce

Most likely another shark. I thought I read somewhere that sharks will cannibalize their own kind.

Either that or Megalodon is back.

Bang on, just a MASSIVE SHARK, yay!

According to the researchers who investigated the puzzling case, it was a "colossal cannibal great white shark."

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/mystery-so...-gr-1587429691

[surferguy]

Current Speed of Light measurement wrong?

http://phys.org/news/2014-06-physici...r-thought.html

(Phys.org) —Physicist James Franson of the University of Maryland has captured the attention of the physics community by posting an article to the peer-reviewed New Journal of Physics in which he claims to have found evidence that suggests the speed of light as described by the theory of general relativity, is actually slower than has been thought.

[Bring_Back_Shantz]

Originally Posted by surferguy

Current Speed of Light measurement wrong?

http://phys.org/news/2014-06-physici...r-thought.html

I think they are overstating the importance of this, when they say that the implications would be stagering.

If the time difference for light to travel 168,000 LY is 4.7 hrs, that means they are off by ~ 3.19 x 10^-7%, or less than 1m/s off of the speed we use now.
I'd say that's probably close enough, when you're measuring cosmic distances.

It does sound intereting though, and if it's true, i'm sure it will have some other cool implications.

[photon]

Even 1m/s off would have huge implications, it would mean space-time and gravity behave fundamentally different than what we understood, invalidating our understanding of tons of things, like the equivalence principle. At a simpler level different colours of light would be effected differently (since they have different energies), so if nothing else this effect would scatter light, which we would probably have noticed by now.

I've been reading around a bit, I haven't seen anything yet from my usual sources, but I still don't understand what he's proposing is actually going on.

If a photon is going along, spontaneously becomes an electron positron pair, that pair would have the same energy and momentum as the photon, so would be affected by gravity identically (since gravity acts on what's there including momentum, not on the rest mass of things). So the paper must be proposing something else.

I looked at the paper, but when it starts involving math with Hamiltonians I'm in way over my head, but the stuff I've read so far seems to suggest he's not using the equations properly.

As always best to take new stuff glommed onto by media with a grain of salt.

[Knut]

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeolo...-ancient-human

that’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that the gene variant came from people known as Denisovans, who went extinct soon after they mated with the ancestors of Europeans and Asians about 40,000 years ago. This is the first time a version of a gene acquired from interbreeding with another type of human has been shown to help modern humans adapt to their environment.

[photon]

A cool documentary about the LHC is now on iTunes

http://particlefever.com/

[troutman]

Spacetime Might Be a Superfluid, and That Could Help Explain Gravity

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ph...plain-gravity/

Physicists have been searching for years for ways to get gravity to agree with quantum mechanics. That search has produced string theory, causal dynamical triangulation, and others which seek to break gravity down into its component parts. Now, Stefano Liberati of the International School for Advanced Studies and Luca Maccione of Ludwig Maximilian University think they have a better approach.

Spacetime, they say, can be understood as a liquid. A superfluid, really, composed of fundamental objects we may not have discovered yet. Spacetime’s properties then emerge, like water, which has emergent properties like fluidity and cohesion when H2O molecules are grouped together at the right temperature and pressure.

Clara Moskowitz, reporting for Scientific American:

In this analogy particles would travel through spacetime like waves in an ocean, and the laws of fluid mechanics—condensed matter physics—would apply. Previously physicists considered how particles of different energies would disperse in spacetime, just as waves of different wavelengths disperse, or travel at different speeds, in water. In the latest study Liberati and Maccione took into account another fluid effect: dissipation. As waves travel through a medium, they lose energy over time. This dampening effect would also happen to photons traveling through spacetime, the researchers found. Although the effect is small, high-energy photons traveling very long distances should lose a noticeable amount of energy, the researchers say.

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by Hesla

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeolo...-ancient-human

I had my DNA analyzed by National Geographic and it was most in common with people from the UK which is reasonable. Interesting though I have 2.0% Neanderthal genes which is average but also 3.6% Denisovan which is more rare.

https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/denisovan/

https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/neanderthal/

[troutman]

[photon]

Aww, I was expecting to see the same GMO image posted in 3 different threads

[troutman]

Two out of three aint bad.

[Regulator75]

Scientists Are Dropping Explosives All Over Mount St. Helens.

What could go wrong with setting off explosives all around an active volcano? As scary as it might sound, this is a carefully planned experiment to peer inside Mount St. Helens' mysterious underground magma chamber. No, we aren't blasting the volcano open, but the induced seismicity will let geologists finally map what the volcano looks like 50 miles below the surface.

For all of Mount St. Helens' infamy, geologists know very little of what goes on underneath. The underground plumbing that feeds magma through the volcano, which isn't the usual spherical chamber, has eluded scientists all these years.

http://gizmodo.com/scientists-are-dr...t-h-1601924945

[troutman]

NASA: Humans Will Prove ‘We Are Not Alone In The Universe’ Within 20 Years

http://connecticut.cbslocal.com/2014...thin-20-years/

“What we didn’t know five years ago is that perhaps 10 to 20 per cent of stars around us have Earth-size planets in the habitable zone,” added Mountain. “It’s within our grasp to pull off a discovery that will change the world forever.”

Describing their own estimates as “conservative,” the NASA planet hunters calculate that 100 million worlds within the Milky Way galaxy are able to sustain complex alien life forms. The estimate accounts for the 17 billion Earth-sized worlds scientists believe to be orbiting the galaxy’s 100 billion stars.

The NASA panel says that ground-based and space-based technology – including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Kepler Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope – will be able to determine the presence of liquid water, an essential sign of potential alien life.

[troutman]

Genetically Engineering Almost Anything

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ev...r-gene-drives/

A new technology just announced today has the potential to wipe out diseases, turn back evolutionary clocks, and reengineer entire ecosystems, for better or worse. Because of how deeply this could affect us all, the scientists behind it want to start a discussion now, before all the pieces come together over the next few months or years. This is a scientific discovery being played out in real time.

Today, researchers aren’t just dropping in new genes, they’re deftly adding, subtracting, and rewriting them using a series of tools that have become ever more versatile and easier to use. In the last few years, our ability to edit genomes has improved at a shockingly rapid clip. So rapid, in fact, that one of the easiest and most popular tools, known as CRISPR-Cas9, is just two years old. Researchers once spent months, even years, attempting to rewrite an organism’s DNA. Now they spend days.

Soon, though, scientists will begin combining gene editing with gene drives, so-called selfish genes that appear more frequently in offspring than normal genes, which have about a 50-50 chance of being passed on. With gene drives—so named because they drive a gene through a population—researchers just have to slip a new gene into a drive system and let nature take care of the rest. Subsequent generations of whatever species we choose to modify—frogs, weeds, mosquitoes—will have more and more individuals with that gene until, eventually, it’s everywhere.