Ancient DNA from bubonic plague victims buried in cemeteries on the old Silk Road trade route in Central Asia has helped solve an enduring mystery, pinpointing an area in northern Kyrgyzstan as the launching point for the Black Death that killed tens of millions of people in the mid-14th century.
Researchers said on Wednesday they retrieved ancient DNA traces of the Yersinia pestis plague bacterium from the teeth of three women buried in a medieval Nestorian Christian community in the Chu Valley near Lake Issyk Kul in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains who perished in 1338-1339. The earliest deaths documented elsewhere in the pandemic were in 1346.
Reconstructing the pathogen’s genome showed that this strain not only gave rise to the one that caused the Black Death that mauled Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa but also to most plague strains existing today.
“Our finding that the Black Death originated in Central Asia in the 1330s puts centuries-old debates to rest,” said historian Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling in Scotland, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
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So that would mean Mars supported life in the past? Would it then be suitable for terraforming? Seems like Musk's Mars plan may not be crazy.
It is crazy, Mars is now a "dead" planet, with no magnetic field left to protect itself from radiation it's a ridiculous concept that will never happen.
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It's funny hearing people discuss terraforming Mars like it is just around the corner, when we clearly can't even handle controlling gases in our own atmosphere. Not even a little tweak. That's, like, toddler play compared to building an actual human compatible atmosphere. But ya, terraforming Mars? Totally next week.
Does Musk even have a "plan"? It's not like it is his original idea. It's just another thing he thinks would be "cool".
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Elon Musk explained that we could terraform Mars by exploding nuclear bombs over its polar caps. He had said that the radiation wouldn’t be an issue since the explosion would be in space over the poles, but the heat release would vaporize the frozen carbon dioxide to greenhouse warm the planet and melt the water ice. In the follow-up comments to explain his stance, he added other things he had in mind. Musk said his idea was to create two tiny pulsing “suns" over the regions. “They’re really above the planet, they’re not on the planet," Musk said at an event for Solar City in New York City’s Times Square this morning. Every few moments, he wants to send a large fusion bomb over the poles, to create small blinking suns. “A lot of people don’t appreciate that our Sun is a large fusion explosion," he had said, reported The Verge in 2015.
A large section of the destroyed space shuttle Challenger has been found buried in sand at the bottom of the Atlantic, more than three decades after the tragedy that killed a schoolteacher and six others.
NASA's Kennedy Space Center announced the discovery Thursday.
"Upon first hearing about it, it brings you right back to 1986," said Michael Ciannilli, a NASA manager in charge of the remains of both lost shuttles, Challenger and Columbia.
The remnant is more than 15 feet by 15 feet (4.5 metres by 4.5 metres); it's likely bigger because part of it is covered with sand. Because of the presence of square thermal tiles, it's believed to be from the shuttle's belly, officials said.
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CAPSTONE makes it to the moon and into its orbit. Lots of neat stuff here, including first deep space mission for Rocket Lab and smallest rocket to launch a moon mission.
After a journey of nearly five months, taking it far beyond the Moon and back, the little CAPSTONE spacecraft has successfully entered into lunar orbit.
"We received confirmation that CAPSTONE arrived in near-rectilinear halo orbit, and that is a huge, huge step for the agency," said NASA's chief of exploration systems development, Jim Free, on Sunday evening. "It just completed its first insertion burn a few minutes ago. And over the next few days they'll continue to refine its orbit, and be the first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon."
This is an important orbit for NASA, and a special one, because it is really stable, requiring just a tiny amount of propellant to hold position. At its closest point to the Moon, this roughly week-long orbit passes within 3,000 km of the lunar surface, and at other points it is 70,000 km away. NASA plans to build a small space station, called the Lunar Gateway, here later this decade.
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
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Earth’s inner core has recently stopped spinning, and may now be reversing the direction of its rotation, according to a surprising new study that probed the deepest reaches of our planet with seismic waves from earthquakes.
The mind-boggling results suggest that Earth’s center pauses and reverses direction on a periodic cycle lasting about 60 to 70 years, a discovery that might solve longstanding mysteries about climate and geological phenomena that occur on a similar timeframe, and that affect life on our planet.
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Of course, it must be noted this is more or less the plot of the 2003 disaster film The Core, but there’s no need to worry about averting an impending apocalypse by nuking the center of Earth. While the core’s rotation influences Earth’s surface environment, scientists think this periodic spin switch is a normal part of its behavior that does not pose risks for life on our planet.
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Now, Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, a pair of researchers at Peking University’s SinoProbe Lab at School of Earth and Space Sciences, have captured “surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back in a multidecadal oscillation, with another turning point in the early 1970s,” according to a study published on Monday in Nature Geoscience.
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<-----Check the Badge bitches. You want some Awesome, you come to me!
