Articles by "SCIENCE"
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est SCIENCE. Afficher tous les articles

- 0

Two Stars Slammed Into Each Other And Solved Half Of Astronomy’s Problems. What Comes Next?


Two Stars Slammed Into Each Other And Solved Half Of Astronomy’s Problems. What Comes Next?
Two neutron stars collide in this visualization, which shows the two bodies merging as the matter that made up each star spirals toward the center.
CHRISTOPHER W. EVANS / CALTECH


Progress, as they say, is slow. In science, this is often true even for major breakthroughs; rarely is an entire field of research remade in a single swoop. The Human Genome Project took a decade. Finding the first gravitational waves took multiple decades. So it’s hard to overstate the enormous leap forward that astronomy took on Aug. 17, 2017.

On that day, astronomers bore witness to the titanic collision of two neutron stars, the densest things in the universe besides black holes. In the collision’s wake, astronomers answered multiple major questions that have dominated their field for a generation. They solved the origin of gamma-ray bursts, mysterious jets of hardcore radiation that could potentially roast Earth. They glimpsed the forging of heavy metals, like gold and platinum. They measured the rate at which the expansion of the universe is accelerating. They caught light at the same time as gravitational waves, confirmation that waves move at the speed of light. And there was more, and there is much more yet to come from this discovery. It all happened so quickly and revealed so much that astronomers are already facing a different type of question: Now what?
“Even people like me, who have been waiting for this for a long time and preparing for this, I don’t think we’re ready,” said Edo Berger, an astronomer at Harvard who studies explosive cosmic events. “Now it’s a question of, do we have the right instrumentation for doing all the follow-up work? Do we have the right telescopes? What’s going to happen when we have not just one event, but one a month, or one a week — how do we deal with that flood?”
From Copernicus and Kepler to Hubble and Einstein, astronomy has experienced plenty of tectonic shifts. The discovery of GW170817, as the August event is known, will be another of these. Astronomers often describe the detection of gravitational waves — which happened for the first time just last year, and was awarded a Nobel prize in October — as a new form of perception, as though we can now hear as well as see. The neutron-star merger event was like seeing and hearing at the same time, and with a dictionary to make sense of it all.
The Aug. 17 gravitational wave gave astronomers a glimpse at an entirely different universe. For most of history, they’ve studied stars and galaxies, which seem static and unchanging from the vantage point of human timescales. “You can look at them today and look at them 10 years from now, and they will be the same,” Berger said. But GW170817 revealed a universe alive, pulsating with creation and destruction on human timescales. Think about that: GW170817 was a relatively close 130 million light years from Earth, meaning its gravitational waves and light were emitted while the first flowering plants were busy evolving on Earth, around the time stegosauruses roamed the plains. But the event itself unfolded in less than three human-designated weeks. This faster timescale is “pushing the way astronomy is done,” Berger said.
When the wave crashed through Earth, it caused a tiny shift in the path of laser beams traveling down long corridors in observatories called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), in the U.S., and the Virgo interferometer, in Italy.1 On Aug. 17, LIGO’s twin detectors and Virgo each felt the wave, which allowed astronomers to roughly triangulate from which direction it rolled in. They swung every bit of glass they had, both on Earth and in the heavens, in that general direction. In space, the Fermi space telescope glimpsed a burst of gamma radiation. Within an hour, astronomers made six independent discoveries of a bright, fast-fading flash: A new phenomenon called a kilonova. Astronomers saw the telltale sign of gold being forged, a major discovery by itself. Nine days later, X-rays streamed in, and after 16 days, radio waves arrived, too. Each type of information tells astronomers something different. Richard O’Shaughnessy, an astronomer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, describes the discovery as a “Rosetta stone for astronomy.” “What this has done is provide one event that unites all these different threads of astronomy at once,” he said. “Like, all our dreams have come true, and they came true now.”
As O’Shaughnessy put it, every discovery eventually becomes a tool. Astronomers hope to use neutron-star mergers to test general relativity, the mind-bending conceit that what we perceive as gravity is actually a curving of space and time.2 Binary neutron stars and black holes may deviate from the gravitational fields predicted by general relativity, which could put Einstein — and alternative theories for gravity in extreme systems — to the test, said Jacqueline Hewitt, a physicist who directs MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
Gravitational waves aren’t blocked by dark matter, dust or other space objects, so they can serve as messengers from the insides of stars, Hewitt said. When LIGO upgrades are finished next year, astronomers will be able to investigate how the waves form and reconstruct the violent smashups.
Eleonora Troja, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who studies X-rays, had hoped for years to detect the light from a neutron-star merger, but many people thought she was dreaming. “I had a lot of proposals rejected because they were considered too visionary, too advanced,” she said. But even Troja never imagined witnessing what happened this summer. “Sometimes, I am still like, ‘Did that really happen?’”
Troja says that the information gathered in August could eventually serve as a template for finding other neutron-star collisions and gamma-ray jets. We may have already unwittingly captured evidence of many such events, but the record is likely buried in a decade’s worth of data from the Fermi and Swift gamma-ray space telescopes, waiting to be uncovered. Those observatories, and new ones under construction now, will allow humanity to see even more violent, rapidly changing astronomical phenomena. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, for example, is currently under construction and will eventually photograph the whole sky every three nights. “In the future, when we digest all this information, it will be a drastic change in the way we study these cosmic objects,” Troja said.
This event that unfolded across a couple of weeks will also inform our deepest experience of time, the beginning and the end of our cosmology. Combinations of light and gravitational waves, like those detected after the neutron-star merger, can be used to measure the rate at which the expansion of the universe is accelerating.3
“It’s totally new,” Troja said. “Comparing the two independent measurements, the one from light and the one from gravitational waves, you can measure the rate of the expansion of the universe.” All our futures are wrapped up in this question.
Thanks to the Aug. 17 event, astronomers now know what to look for. Soon, they will be able to sift through an embarrassment of neutron-star mergers and other phenomena. And as with any disruption, there will be a period of adjustment. Huge telescopes in space and on Earth are few and far between, and on Earth, most of them can only work when it’s dark and the skies are clear. That means thousands of people vie for limited time at the proverbial eyepiece. Telescope committees are set up to review proposals and grant that time, and assignments are often allotted months in advance. That will have to change as astronomers chase events in real time.
“In our case, for the telescopes we were using in Chile, people traveled to Chile to use the telescopes, and we asked them to give up their time [to track the Aug. 17 event]. And everybody did it with so much enthusiasm,” Berger said, adding that anyone who sacrificed hard-won telescope time was credited in the scientific literature. “But we need better mechanisms. You can’t call up every individual person and negotiate and explain, especially when these objects are fading away so quickly, while you’re on the phone with them.”
Hewitt is chair of a committee that develops 10-year plans for astronomy, known as the decadal surveys, and said the detection of gravitational waves — and neutron-star mergers — were listed as goals for the next several years in the most recent report in 2010 and in the mid-point report in 2015. We got there early, and now astronomers are talking about how to prioritize their time, where to focus, and how to pivot to the next big thing, she said. Many are now hoping that the U.S. rejoins a space-based gravitational wave experiment called LISA. And they are talking about how to turn their eyes to the sky, at a moment’s notice, the next time the universe throws something big their way.
“It’s a wonderful time, it’s a terrifying time,” O’Shaughnessy said. “I can’t really capture the wonder and the horror and glee and happiness.”

SRC : fivethirtyeight.com
Continue reading

- 0

Astronomers Are Finally Mapping the “Dark Side” of the Milky Way

  Half of our home galaxy is terra incognita. That will soon change

Astronomers directly measured the distance to a star-forming region on the far side of
our Milky Way galaxy, past the galactic center. Further measurements could, at last, bring long-hidden regions of the Milky Way to light. Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; Robert Hurt, NASA


Think of the Milky Way—or search for pictures of it online—and you’ll see images of a standard spiral galaxy viewed face-on, a sprawling pinwheel of starlight and dust containing hundreds of billions of stars. These images, however, are mostly make-believe.


We know the Milky Way is a star-filled spiral galaxy in excess of 100,000 light-years wide, and we know our solar system drifts between two spiral arms at its outskirts, some 27,000 light-years from its center. But much beyond that, our knowledge fades. No space probe or telescope built by humans has ever escaped the Milky Way to turn back and take a portrait; because we are embedded in our galaxy’s disk, we can only see it as a bright band of stars across the sky. For astronomers trying to map it, the effort is a bit like learning the anatomy of a human body from the perspective of a single skin cell somewhere on a forearm. How many spiral arms does the Milky Way have, and how do those spiral arms branch and curl around the galaxy? How many stars does the Milky Way really contain? How much does it weigh? What does our cosmic home actually look like, viewed from another nearby galaxy? Ask an astronomer—and if he or she is being perfectly honest, you will learn that we do not fully know.

Among the biggest obstacles to our knowledge is the disk of the galaxy itself, particularly its center, which is thick with starlight-absorbing dust and rife with energetic astrophysical outbursts that can ruin delicate observations. This means we know very little about the other side of the galaxy. “Optically, it’s like trying to look through a velvet cloth—black as black can be,” says Thomas Dame, an astronomer at Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). “In terms of tracing and understanding the spiral structure, essentially half of the Milky Way is terra incognita.” Now, however, new record-breaking measurements are allowing astronomers to pierce the veil of the galactic center as never before, and to construct the best-ever maps of our galaxy’s structure.

Instead of using visible light, Dame and others map the Milky Way by looking for radio emissions from molecular gas clouds and massive, young stars, both of which typically reside in spiral arms. The challenge lies in measuring, in the absence of convenient intergalactic road signs or distance markers, how far off these objects are. Without knowing these distances, astronomers cannot precisely situate any given radio source within the galaxy to accurately reconstruct the Milky Way’s morphology. Since the 1950s astronomers have solved this problem using “kinematic distances,” calculations that treat objects in the Milky Way a bit like pieces of flotsam spiraling into a whirlpool; because things tend to move faster as they approach the center, measuring how fast an object is moving toward or away from us yields an estimate of its distance from the galactic center—and thus from our solar system. Kinematic distances have helped Dame and others discover previously unknown spiral arms and spiral-arm substructures on our solar system’s side of the Milky Way. But the technique breaks down for peering directly across the galaxy, where objects do not move toward or away from us at all but rather purely perpendicularly to our line of sight. To map the Milky Way’s hidden half requires a more direct method.

In a study published October 12 in Science, Dame and an international team of colleagues have demonstrated just that. Using the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), an interlinked system of 10 radio telescopes stretching across Hawaii, North America and the Caribbean, the astronomers have directly measured the distance to an object called G007.47+00.05, a star-forming region located on the opposite side of the galaxy from our solar system. The measurement showed the region to be some 66,000 light-years away—nearly 40,000 light-years beyond the galactic center, and roughly double the distance of the previous record-holding direct measurement of distance in the Milky Way.

The team relied on a timeworn technique called parallax, which measures the apparent shift in an object’s celestial position when seen from opposing sides of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. You can see parallax on smaller scales simply by holding a finger in front of your face and winking one eye then the other. Your finger will seem to jump from side to side; calculating its distance from your face is as simple as measuring the angle of its apparent shift. The smaller the angle, the greater the distance. And the wider the distance between your two detectors, be they eyes or radio dishes, the more acute your measurement can be.

The VLBA’s parallax observations took place in 2014, when Earth was on one side of its orbit, and then six months later in 2015, when our planet was on the opposite side of the sun. This maximized the sensitivity of the technique, allowing it to measure the minuscule shift in the apparent position of the distant star-forming region. According to lead author Alberto Sanna, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, the VLBA’s measurement is “equivalent to seeing a baseball on the surface of the moon.” The feat, Sanna says, shows “we can measure the whole extent of our galaxy, to accurately number and map the Milky Way’s spiral arms and know their true shapes, so that we can learn what the Milky Way really looks like.”

“It really is excellent work—I believe this is the smallest parallax ever obtained, and it is certainly a milestone in modern observational astronomy,” says Mareki Honma, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Honma led a separate team that independently measured the distance to G007.47+00.05 in 2016, finding a similar value. Those measurements, however, were not accurate enough to obtain parallax, and relied instead on tracking the star-forming region’s so-called “proper” across the plane of the sky. The similarity between the two teams’ results, Honma says, suggests proper motion alone can be a useful tool for determining distances to objects on the other side of the galaxy.

Already, the confirmed distance for this particular star-forming region is redrawing galactic maps. In 2011 Dame and colleagues used radio measurements to tentatively trace the path of one spiral arm, called Scutum–Centaurus. Their fragmentary measurements suggested this arm might wrap around almost the entirety of the Milky Way, but they lost its trail—and crucial evidence for its galaxy-encircling breadth—in the vicinity of the dark, roiling galactic center. This star-forming arm “runs right through one of the features we identified in 2011, and adds evidence that the Scutum–Centaurus arm is really a major structure in our galaxy,” Dame says. “In 2011 we wrote that we may never sort this out, because proving its distance through the galactic center would be so difficult—but we were being shortsighted, because here it is, six years later!”

The VLBA’s painstaking, Earth-orbit-spanning measurement occurred as part of a larger project, the Bar and Spiral Structure Legacy Survey (BeSSeL) led by Mark Reid, who like Dame is a radio astronomer at the CfA and a co-author on the Science study. Now in its concluding stages, BeSSeL used 3,500 hours on the VLBA to obtain more than 200 distance measurements for star-forming regions scattered throughout the Milky Way. Many of these readings are now tracing out new details in the galaxy’s filigree of spiral arms.

Which is a good start—but being in the Northern Hemisphere, the VLBA and BeSSeL cannot survey most of star-forming regions visible from the southern sky. And even if they could, parallax alone will not fill in the galactic map. Because each parallax measurement for far-distant star-forming regions on the other side of the galaxy is so difficult and time-consuming to obtain, astronomers widely agree they will chiefly serve as important calibration points to augment existing kinematic distance measurements. Further progress will come from a combination of parallax, proper motion and kinematic distance data via surveys using Southern Hemisphere–based radio telescopes as well as from space-based data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. The latter is using visible-light parallax measurements to pin down the precise positions for a billion of the Milky Way’s stars. Taken together, the resulting map will help astronomers pin down many still-unknown fundamental aspects of our galaxy such as how fast and uniformly it rotates. This will let them finally determine just how massive the Milky Way really is, potentially yielding new insights into our galaxy’s inventory of stars, dark matter and small satellites that lurk at its edges. All of this will help scientists understand how the Milky Way first came to be, and much that has happened to it since.

“How important is it, really, for us to be able to see clear across to the other side of our own galaxy?” asks Tom Bania, a radio astronomer at Boston University involved in some of the southern surveys. “It is the most important thing in all of astrophysics. It took humankind thousands of years to map the Earth accurately; a map of the galaxy will constrain about a dozen or so models of the structure and evolution of the Milky Way. To me, perhaps the ‘Holy Grail’ of astronomy is to provide a clear perspective of our relationship to the physical universe. The map of our galaxy is a part of that, and that map is still incomplete.”

Soon, that could change. Thanks to BeSSeL and its ilk, Reid notes, “in only a few more years we should have a map that shows us what the Milky Way really looks like.”


SRC : www.scientificamerican.com
Continue reading

- 0

Experimental Drug That Mutes Defective Genes Raises New Hopes


RNA interference systems would target genetic sources and shut down protein production


Computer illustration of cytotoxic T-lymphocytes attacking a cancer cell. Credit: Juan GaertnerGetty Images





The experimental drug has startling powers: It can turn down a mutant gene in a patient’s body, stopping the production of proteins that cause a terribly painful rare disease.

A crucial, late-stage clinical trial showed that the drug works—and that it’s safe. And now the biotech company behind it, Alnylam, is poised to bring this first-of-its-kind therapy to market.


The news has thrilled both patients and scientists, who have been working for decades on the technology to mute misbehaving genes, known as RNA interference, or RNAi. They’ve understood for two decades how the biology works. But it’s been a long, slow slog to figure out how to deliver RNAi therapies to the right cells safely and effectively. Alnylam alone has spent 15 years, and more than $1 billion, on the effort.

 So does the company’s recent success herald an explosion of new drugs that can shut down troublesome genes?

 Maybe.

 The RNAi delivery systems remain highly complex—and the most effective technologies are still protected by patents that make it difficult for startups to get into the field. Safety concerns persist with other RNAi drugs in development: Last year, for instance, Alnylam had to scrap revusiran, one of its most advanced drugs. Rather than alleviating it, the drug exacerbated pain in a rare nerve disease called transthyretin amyloidosis. And several patients died in the clinical trial, though it’s still not clear exactly why. Alnylam’s stock plummeted by half on that news.


The issue of safety has haunted the RNAi field for many years now: Although it’s possible to silence the impact of genes, early work has resulted in several off-target effects that create unforeseen toxicities. So the major focus of RNAi research in recent years has been drug delivery: how to safely deposit the RNAi load to the right tissues, minimizing the impact on other bodily functions. And that’s proven challenging. While it’s working, for now, in diseases of the liver, the field still needs to validate whether RNAi can work in other organs.

Alnylam is testing seven RNAi drugs in the clinic, for conditions ranging from hepatitis B to high cholesterol. A handful of other companies are also in the field, working on therapies that treat diseases of the central nervous system or enhance cancer immunotherapy. But we’re unlikely to see a flood of startups suddenly raising tens of millions to pursue RNAi.

“I don’t think you’ll see new companies popping up in RNA interference. The intellectual property around the field is too constraining,” said Doug Fambrough, CEO of RNAi competitor Dicerna Pharmaceuticals.

Still, the field does have enormous promise —and market potential.

Most drugs work by targeting ill-formed or malfunctioning proteins and trying to excise them from the body. RNAi, by contrast, goes after the genetic source of the faulty protein production and shuts that system down.

When it works, it can ease symptoms in patients with no other options.

Alnylam’s lead RNAi drug patisiran, aimed at treating a rare nerve disorder called familial amyloid polyneuropathy, is projected to ultimately exceed $1 billion in worldwide sales at its peak, which is expected in 2023. The drug, which is being developed in conjunction with Sanofi, should be up for review by the Food and Drug Administration in a couple months, and will be up for European regulatory approval next year.

Alnylam’s stock shot up so much on the news, its market capitalization now exceeds $11 billion. “Alnylam’s results came out with a bang, not a whimper,” said Alnylam CEO John Maraganore. “It highlights the fact that these medicines can really be transformative, turning off production of genetic disease.”


A BIG WIN IN WORMS PROVES TOUGH TO TRANSLATE TO HUMANS




The phenomenon of RNA interference was first observed in the 1990s in nematodes, and in 1998 scientists Andrew Fire and Craig Mello published a seminal paper in Nature that demonstrated these roundworm genes could be silenced. The duo won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for their work. By that point, several companies had already launched to try to develop new RNAi-based therapeutics—including Alnylam.

Expectations were high — and so was the pressure to create a groundbreaking medicine.

Then came the roadblocks. Scientists hit hurdle after hurdle. And many companies began to crumble: While gene silencing was simple in worms, mammals proved to be far more complex—and safe drug delivery emerged as a major problem. When RNAi therapies weren’t delivered to the right tissues, dangerous side effects showed up in humans that weren’t predicted through animal models. The drugs just weren’t working.

The most dogged RNAi companies—Alnylam among them—began to study better methods to deliver these therapeutics to the right tissues. And a few different techniques have since emerged to improve drug delivery, and, by extension, safety—such as Alnylam’s approach of binding the RNAi therapeutic to a lipid nanoparticle, or fat, to help it settle in the liver. Another method used broadly by RNAi companies is “GalNAc”—a sugar derivative that’s attached to RNAi drugs to help it safely work in the liver.

Both have shown preclinical promise, and the lipid nanoparticle approach was used with patisiran to great effect in Alnylam’s positive trial. So the initial hurdles of safe RNAi delivery finally seem surmountable.

“Nobody will put [RNAi therapies] back in the box, therapeutically,” said Phil Sharp, a scientific co-founder of Alnylam and winner of his own RNA-related Nobel Prize. “They are now alive and out there, and more and more people will see them as answers to their problems.”

Still, Sharp cautioned: “It took 15 years to get here, and the next 10 years will be exponentially more impactful. But we won’t see this matured as a pharmaceutical approach for decades.”

A HANDFUL OF BIOTECHS CHASE A REVOLUTION



The closest approximation to another RNAi success comes from Ionis Pharmaceuticals and Biogen, which last year received approval for Spinraza, a drug aimed at spinal muscular atrophy. Children with the disease don’t produce enough of a protein called SMN, and the drug works by amplifying the gene that produces the protein—allowing the body to create more of it. It is, in a sense, the opposite of gene silencing, but it’s another proof point that validates the general concept of creating drugs that mute or amplify defective genes.

It’s also proof of concept that a successful RNAi therapy can be quite lucrative.

Spinraza is priced at $750,000 for the first year of treatment and $375,000 for each subsequent year. (Alnylam has not yet indicated how it will price patisiran if it wins FDA approval.)

Meanwhile, other biotechs working on RNAi continue to churn along. Arbutus Therapeutics just landed a $116 million investment from Roivant Sciences to speed development of its RNAi tech as well as other therapeutic platforms in development. RXi Pharmaceuticals is pursuing RNAi therapeutics in a broad array of diseases, from warts to cancer. Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals and Wave Life Sciences have a number of preclinical programs in play, though none have advanced nearly as far as Alnylam.

Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, meanwhile, is preparing to enter the clinic with an RNAi drug that treats primary hyperoxaluria—a rare genetic disease that causes the overproduction and buildup of substances called oxalates in the urine. The company’s therapeutic aims to turn off the enzyme that creates all the excess oxalate.

Alynlam’s success boosted the stock of many of these biotechs; Dicerna’s share price jumped 21 percent immediately after Alynlam released its data on Sept. 20 and has increased steadily ever since.

A SURGE OF INTEREST IN BACK-TO-BASICS RESEARCH



The bull case for RNAi draws from biotech history. As many in the industry point out, monoclonal antibodies have become a hugely lucrative and important therapeutic class—but their development was just as fraught, with just as many hurdles, as RNAi. Scientists finally solved the biggest problems, and by 2024, the market is expected to top $130 billion globally.

RNAi could hit great heights, too, if it can be made to work outside the liver.

“If we can expand the role of RNAi to other organ systems beyond the liver, the likelihood that RNAi could overtake antibodies in terms of importance for diseases of man, animals, and even plants, is certainly there,” said Dr. Geert Cauwenbergh, president and CEO of RXi Pharmaceuticals. “It’ll just take work, like anything else.”

Gene Yeo, an RNA researcher at University of California, San Diego, thinks he can break that liver barrier. He’s building on the ideas of RNAi to form his own startup, Locana Therapeutics. The company aims to use CRISPR gene-editing to craft RNA therapeutics that can be delivered into the central nervous system—clearly a daunting task for most drug makers.

By editing the RNA, the company hopes to find therapies for neurodegenerative diseases like Huntington’s and ALS

“I think the lessons we extract from Alnylam’s successes have a little more to do with the idea of delivery,” Yeo said. “The field was mired by the delivery problem—that is, getting the compounds to the right tissues, and right cell types—and get a durable response. But now we see that we can do that.”

Madhu Lal-Nag, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health who coordinates RNAi research, said she’s starting to see a surge of interest in the field among academics who want to unravel more of the basic science, especially as it becomes clear that other hot fields of research, such as CRISPR gene-editing, face their own series of hurdles.

“Everyone jumped on the CRISPR-Cas9 bandwagon, but there are a host of things that we don’t know about genome-editing that we’re now beginning to see,” Lal-Nag said. “I think that’s been responsible for people going back and taking a look at RNAi. Better the devil you know.”


SRC : www.scientificamerican.com
Continue reading

- 0

Yellowstone Supervolcano Could Erupt Quickly, Scientists Say



The supervolcano lurking beneath Yellowstone National Park might be getting ready to explode, an eruption that could be devastating to life on Earth.
Scientists reported during a volcanology conference that it could take as little as a human lifetime for a dormant volcano to wake up and prepare itself for a massive eruption, the New York Times says. For Yellowstone, that type of supereruption last happened more than 600,000 years ago, after magma filled the empty chambers below the Earth’s surface some decades before it blew.
It was previously believed that this build up took thousands of years, but the new research suggests the timeframe was much tighter.
The New York Times reports that the Yellowstone supervolcano is capable of unleashing enough ash and rock — hundreds of cubic miles at one time — into an eruption radius large enough to cover most of the country in a fog and affect the environment of the entire planet.

But it’s not the only supervolcano there is. Campi Flegrei in Italy is another example of one of these natural monsters that could be devastating if it were to erupt. It is just west of Naples, close to the legendary Mount Vesuvius that destroyed the ancient city Pompeii with an eruption in the first century. Experts studying the Italian supervolcano note that Campi Flegrei, which last blew in 1538, has experienced earthquakes and ground uplifting that has made room for magma to build up beneath it.
Supervolcanoes earn that title if they have let loose an eruption of a magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index — a scale that runs from 0 to 8. The top level indicates that an eruption released 250 cubic miles of magma.
Predicting volcanic eruptions is difficult, however, and volcanologists are trying to crack the code. In the case of this new research, the scientists found during an analysis of material that after magma filled up the area beneath Yellowstone all those thousands of years ago, temperatures and other conditions changed quickly, over the course of just decades, leading to an eruption.



“It’s shocking how little time is required to take a volcanic system from being quiet and sitting there to the edge of an eruption,” scientist Hannah Shamloo told the New York Times.
In recent years, Yellowstone has experienced ground uplifting, a sign of activity that could possibly warn of an eruption because of the magma buildup that takes place beneath the swelling surface.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the last eruption at Yellowstone was 640,000 years ago. There was another eruption 660,000 years before that.
Yellowstone National Park doesn’t contain a classic image of a volcano, with a mountain looming high in the sky, but it is still home to a massive volcano structure. Much of the park is within the Yellowstone caldera, the crater created when the magma from the supervolcano erupted and the Earth’s crust collapsed into the empty space it left behind. Some of its biggest attractions, including the geyser Old Faithful and the Grand Prismatic Spring are signs of the site’s volcanic activity.

                  SRC :  http://www.ibtimes.com
Continue reading

- 0

A new understanding of today, time and space.








I am old, 56 and I have read, studied and written philosophy for

over 40 years. I have read the posts written around here lately with some interest, not for their direct content, but what they mean in general. The first point to understand  is this, everything is connected. Problems that look totally separate and isolated, aren't,

they have a connection and sometimes a deeper connection than we think. Everything is  connected, I cannot emphasize this enough. 


We have Majs complain about a social media "debate" "encounter" that was weird  and we have gamer bring up a debate between Harris and Chomsky, that collapsed. 

I suggest that the two are connected and the connection is communication and how communication is perceived. 

I work with a bunch of young kids and they lack communication skills.  But the issues runs deeper than just communication skills.
It is about (in part) with an overall failure to expand one's vision 
beyond yourself.

 Kids nowdays have no historical sense. 

I look at something like, immigration and I see not just the immigration issues of today, but I see an America that has immigration issues since the beginning. 

I am aware of the outright discrimination of the Irish for example from the 1820's  to the 1880's. Signs in shops that said, NO IRISH ALLOWED IN. That was common for  decades in stores nationwide. You include the Italians, Chinese, the Jews, and you
have decades of immigration woes and issues. It is not a new event and has been happening in the U.S since the beginning, since 1619, when the first ship arrived carrying slaves from Africa. 

We don't exist isolated in time and space from events that have occurred in the past. Watching the news and listening to politicians, you would not know that America even  has a past and where events occurred in that past. 9/11 didn't occurred in a vacuum, 
but exists within a context that takes up time and space that last decades and continents. 

so you have a generation that lacks communication skills and no understanding of where they exists in time and space in relation to prior generations.  Almost like dogs, whose understanding of events is basically that moment of the event and nothing before or after that event. A dog gets into the garbage and for the dog,
the only thing is that event, but for humans, we see that the dog has gone into the garbage  before, we see the event in time and space and we react to this event in time and space.

or said another way, we see this event within a context that makes sense. I submit  that we have a generation of kids that cannot communicate and cannot place events into the proper context of time and space. Our understand of events is not different or better
than a dogs. We see 9/11 as an isolated event and react to it as an single, isolated event whereas 9/11 has context that spans decades and space.

As I have noted, these two aspects are related in some fashion, the lack of communication and the  failure to have context. The United States Supreme Court has a bunch of partisans hacks (right wing) 
who decide law based on personal and paid for opinions that not only lack any legal justification, but are seriously bad for America, (citizens united for one).They write opinions that don't even pretend to offer any legal justifications for their absurd rulings anymore. The court exhibits another  aspect that is pertinent to this, the court has made its personal opinion far more important
than what is good for America. They don't offer any overarching principle that might be a justification for their actions. Citizens united for example, only says that limits on campaign contributions  limits one's free speech. This ruling means that money is free speech and those with money have more free speech that than those without money. There is no pretension that this ruling is nothing other than the legal justification for the wealthy to buy elections. The ruling voids the idea of one man, one vote,
because politicians now just listen to the money, not the voters. Now place citizens united into context  of American history and you see how truly bad a ruling this is. Run the ruling into the past and into the  future and you see how bad this ruling sits with the past history of America and into the future, how this ruling becomes America for the rich, by the rich. 

This ruling destroys democracy and so we have something else now. You see this only by placing the ruling into context of the past and future. 

We lack an understanding of time, space and communication. I would like to say that  America has a bright future but that would require people to understand context of where we are and that context is lacking. An understanding that everything has context 
and is related. Citizens united didn't come out of isolation, it had context of time and space, where everything is connected. Everything is connected in time and space. 



src : http://www.ilovephilosophy.com
Continue reading

- 0

Researchers reveal how snow falling on Neptune might look like








By combining computer models and data provided by the Phoenix Mars Lander, a team of researchers has tried to show Neptune’s diamond rain or how snow falling on the rust-colored surface of Mars might look like.


The Phoenix Mars Lander captured snowfall on Mars in 2009 with the help of its laser instrument. A team of researchers led by Aymeric Spiga of the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique in Paris took those observations and applied its expertise in numerical modeling of planetary atmospheres to reveal what a phenomenon that we can not see.
Computer models allowed Spiga and his colleagues to discover that a strange nighttime phenomenon that results in “microbursts” of lengthy snowstorms occur on planets like Mars and Neptune.
Sharing their study, Spiga said, “Those storms happen because water-ice particles within clouds are very efficient at emitting infrared light at night. So clouds strongly cool the atmosphere nearby. This creates a very cold layer of air on top of a warmer layer of air. This causes convection and strong winds and mixing ensue.”


During the day on Mars, cloud particles absorb light and warm up the atmosphere. At nights in certain areas, water-ice clouds form, leading to icy precipitation.
Spiga and colleagues reported their study in the latest issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.



 src : http://gearsofbiz.com
Continue reading

- 0


The Scientific Method: Home Schooling Parents Can Teach It Correctly



Generally the logical strategy is educated as a grouping of ventures to be finished so as to answer an inquiry. Is this an inadequate depiction as well as, when shown along these lines, understudies don't encounter the energy of science and lose a chance to create basic deduction abilities. Self-teaching guardians are in a perfect position to instruct their kids how researchers truly think and how they put the logical strategy to utilize.
Understudies taking in the means of the logical technique are advised to mention objective facts, pose an inquiry, accumulate foundation data, shape a theory, direct examinations to test the speculation, dissect the information gathered and make a determination. Having them retain this rundown, nonetheless, does not enable understudies to figure out how to think deductively.
One case of where numerous science educational program miss the mark in showing this subject is in advising understudies to watch and make inquiries without helping them figure out how to do those things. Numerous teenagers are gotten up to speed in their own universes and don't generally watch what is happening outside of their prompt intrigue zone. In spite of the fact that this is typical conduct for their age, without showing them how to watch and consider their perceptions, understudies will lose a chance to build up this exceptionally helpful expertise.
As a self-teach parent, you have the chance to give your kids hone in watching what is happening around them and having them make inquiries about it. For instance, on an outing to the grocery store or retail establishment, have your tyke see where diverse stock is shown (on a high retire, or a low retire, for instance, or close to the money enlist, or not) and after that have him or her concocted a couple of inquiries regarding why things may be put where they are. Despite the fact that this is not science, it is a similar procedure of perception and scrutinizing that researchers perform. In addition, relating material learned in science class to non science circumstances may enable your kid to comprehend the significance of the train regardless of the possibility that he or she has no expectation of seeking after science any further.
Another case of how the logical strategy ought to be educated can be discovered when advising understudies to figure a speculation in the wake of social affair foundation information. Imagine a scenario in which there are no pertinent foundation information. Consider the possibility that there is no conspicuous approach to expect one result over another. Since theories are not wild suppositions, but rather depend on foundation data, does that imply that the understudy can't continue with an examination since he or she can't frame a speculation? At the point when anti-infection agents were first found, nobody knew what amount was expected to eliminate microbes. That did not prevent researchers from doing examinations to figure out how concentrated penicillin should have been to murder generally microorganisms. They continued without a speculation, and that was splendidly adequate. A speculation is not generally required in a logical examination. This is a point that ought to be clarified to understudies.
One final case of what number of understudies don't get the genuine photo of the Scientific Method by and by is the point at which they are left with the feeling that the work is finished once a conclusion is come to. Truly, researchers are simply beginning with their examinations once the aftereffects of their investigations point to a conclusion. Much of the time, follow-up questions are the most energizing piece of the procedure. A genuine logical personality will get results and consider numerous new inquiries that he or she would not have thought of without having seen the aftereffects of the first analysis
Backpedaling to the penicillin case, once it was found out that penicillin and different anti-microbials can eliminate microscopic organisms, researchers couldn't quit thinking of new inquiries. Perceive how the accompanying would make great things to ask in the wake of finding that something in bread form eliminated microscopic organisms in a Petri dish.
Will this green material execute different things other than microorganisms?
Does it execute all microorganisms, or just certain sorts?
Are there substances, other than this bread shape, that will do a similar employment?
Will this newfound material eliminate microorganisms just under certain temperature or potentially dampness conditions?
Would we be able to apply this stuff to people and have it execute recently the microorganisms and not hurt the human?
You can have your kid hone this method by having him or her consider 2 or 3 new inquiries that can be requested each "disclosure" he or she catches wind of in the media.
To researchers, the Scientific Method is not only a rundown of steps: It is a whole perspective that drives all that they do in their expert lives. Understudies who simply retain the means of the strategy without figuring out how to really apply them hazard failing to be ready to comprehend the energy of science. Far and away more terrible, they miss a chance to figure out how to think in a way that is vital for achievement in any field the understudies choose to seek after.
Self-teaching gives the adaptability to beat the impediments of how the Scientific Method is generally instructed. Your self-taught kid can figure out how to adopt the thought process of a researcher!
Continue reading

- 0

Importance Of Scientific Equipments





Practically ordinary, developments, disclosures of new illnesses or space items, planet or star included the news. How would they do it? It is using logical types of gear that made these wonders conceivable. Logical types of gear are those instruments or gadgets, regularly intended for particular task(s), which are utilized as a part of our every day life for logical research, creation and for instructive purposes. Logical types of gear can be anything from types of gear utilized as a part of PCs to lab logical instruments utilized as a part of schools, medicinal and logical research focuses, creation distribution centers, and so on.

There were times when science was considered by perception alone and no handy investigation was honed because of the inaccessibility of logical instruments. Researchers of those circumstances were for the most part unaccepted and their discoveries and perceptions unapproved by their social orders. This is a direct result of the reason that their perceptions need proofs using logical instruments.

We can't envision existence without innovation from the contemporary perspective. Science brought forth innovation. Our present quick progression is because of the commitment of science to human culture. What's more, science without logical types of gear would resemble a body without any hands. Logical instruments are vital for logical research. Science as, only a hypothesis, would have been incapable and utilitarian if there were no confirmations with tests through logical types of gear. Using logical instruments, getting learning about the fossils found under the world's outside layer, propel information about human body, space or the universe framework have all been made conceivable. It helps logical research in watching and measuring specific kind of common event by upgrading observational or test abilities.

In our present instructive framework, instructive logical instrument has turned into a fundamental need. Showing science in schools requires a particular approach. Understudies are to be instructed with giving the chance to watch and analysis each procedure of activity and response. Schools, which instruct with giving the office of instructive logical research centers, enable understudies to create logical learning and enthusiasm for the territory. Science as a particular subject from different orders, to get a handle on the ideas, formal lessons and books are insufficient, test is essential. For researchers as well, keeping in mind the end goal to viably plan and do explore and to break down it, requires logical instruments. Creation organizations utilize logical supplies for the generation of their completed items.

There are numerous logical devices producing organizations at introduce. These logical supplies producers assume a crucial part in managing human improvement through mechanical development. With this pattern of development, there is perpetually expanding interest of logical devices for schools, universities, look into labs and creation enterprises.
Continue reading
Inscription à : Articles (Atom)