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The Cool Science Stuff Thread

Rare Sight: Mars, Earth and Sun Will Align Next Week

Mars will be exactly opposite the sun in the sky in a rare cosmic alignment set to take place Tuesday (April 8).

Called an opposition, this happens with Mars from Earth's perspective every 778 days, or 2 years, 1 month and 18 days. Think of Earth and Mars as two cars racing on circular tracks. Because Earth is closer to the sun, it travels faster, completing a circuit in 365 days. Mars is farther from the sun and takes longer, 687 days. By the time Mars has completed one circuit, Earth has a lot of catching up to do to get to a point between the Red Planet and the sun.

This is complicated by the fact that the two racetracks are not exact circles. As Johannes Kepler discovered in the 16th century, the planets follow slightly elliptical paths around the sun, sometimes closer to the Sun (perihelion), sometimes farther away (aphelion). [Best Night Sky Events of April 2014: Stargazing Sky Maps (Gallery)]
 


LunarEclipse_15April2014.jpg



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islandman said:
Rare Sight: Mars, Earth and Sun Will Align Next Week

Mars will be exactly opposite the sun in the sky in a rare cosmic alignment set to take place Tuesday (April 8).

Called an opposition, this happens with Mars from Earth's perspective every 778 days, or 2 years, 1 month and 18 days. Think of Earth and Mars as two cars racing on circular tracks. Because Earth is closer to the sun, it travels faster, completing a circuit in 365 days. Mars is farther from the sun and takes longer, 687 days. By the time Mars has completed one circuit, Earth has a lot of catching up to do to get to a point between the Red Planet and the sun.

This is complicated by the fact that the two racetracks are not exact circles. As Johannes Kepler discovered in the 16th century, the planets follow slightly elliptical paths around the sun, sometimes closer to the Sun (perihelion), sometimes farther away (aphelion). [Best Night Sky Events of April 2014: Stargazing Sky Maps (Gallery)]
Click to expand...




...At every opposition - roughly every 26 months - Mars gets to be a star. This April is such a time. This is when Mars is at its closest and brightest, and draws the most attention. On April 8, the planet is directly opposite to the Sun in our sky, so it rises as the Sun is setting, is highest around midnight, and sets as the Sun is rising. If Mars' orbit around the Sun were more circular, opposition would also be the time the planet is closest to Earth. However, the Red Planet's orbit around the Sun is rather elliptical, so the two events do not necessarily coincide. This year, for instance, opposition occurs on April 8, but Mars' closest approach to Earth is on April 14. And just how far apart are the two planets? Their separation is about 57.4 million miles; even though relatively close as Solar System objects go, it still takes 5 minutes for its light to reach us. At its closest distance, Mars shines at magnitude -1.5, brighter than Sirius. In a telescope, it subtends an angle of 15.2" - large enough to show considerable detail to skilled observers under good conditions. It is important to note that not all oppositions of Mars are created equal. During the next several oppositions, Mars will be closer and larger; during the opposition in 2016, we'll get to see it as large as 18.4" across. Better yet, during the 2018 opposition the planet will swell to 24.1" across. This year, Mars' Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward us, so features such as the North Polar Cap will be well displayed. In spite of the fact that it is now early summer in the Martian north, and the carbon dioxide frost covering it is sublimating away, the water ice cap underneath never completely disappears. Some of the larger dark albedo features, particularly the more northerly ones such as Syrtis Major and Mare Acidalium, will be the ones most easily visible. And keep an eye out for clouds and possible dust storms...​

 
Genome Of Ancient Skeleton Shows Native Americans Came From Asia

Asian Scientist (Feb. 14, 2014) – The first genome sequencing of the Ice Age skeletal remains of a one-year-old boy has given scientists definitive proof that the first human settlers in North America were from Asia and not Europe.

The first wave of settlers were also the direct ancestors of modern Native Americans, according to an international team of researchers whose findings were published in the journal Nature.

In 1968, the skeletal remains of a Clovis child were found near a rock cliff in central Montana, along with more than 100 burial artifacts found with the boy such as spear points and antler tools. The remains are 12,600 years old, the oldest such remains fully sequenced.
 
http://www.newscientist.com/article...man-hints-at-limits-of-life.html#.U156ab-9Kc0
Blood of world's oldest woman hints at limits of life

Death is the one certainty in life – a pioneering analysis of blood from one of the world's oldest and healthiest women has given clues to why it happens.

Born in 1890, Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper was at one point the oldest woman in the world. She was also remarkable for her health, with crystal-clear cognition until she was close to death, and a blood circulatory system free of disease. When she died in 2005, she bequeathed her body to science, with the full support of her living relatives that any outcomes of scientific analysis – as well as her name – be made public.

Researchers have now examined her blood and other tissues to see how they were affected by age.

What they found suggests, as we could perhaps expect, that our lifespan might ultimately be limited by the capacity for stem cells to keep replenishing tissues day in day out. Once the stem cells reach a state of exhaustion that imposes a limit on their own lifespan, they themselves gradually die out and steadily diminish the body's capacity to keep regenerating vital tissues and cells, such as blood.
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Lab Rats May Be Stressed By Men, Which May Skew Experiments

by Eyder Peralta
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way...be-stressed-by-men-which-may-skew-experiments
April 29, 2014


During the course of an experiment, students at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, noticed something odd: Rodents didn't seem to be showing signs of pain if they were handled by male students.

The observation led to an experiment, which led to a finding that when mice are left alone with a man, they had an increase in the hormone corticosterone, which acts like a pain reliever.

The scientists tested the mice with women and men and women wearing T-shirts that had been worn overnight by men. What they found is that mice were reacting the presence of certain pheromones produced by men.

"It's a primordial response," Jeffrey Mogil, one of the authors of the story told Science magazine. "If you smell a solitary male nearby, chances are he's hunting or defending his territory." Pain means weakness and you wouldn't want to show that.

The findings may have implications for other experiments that use rodents.

The New York Times explains:

"The amount of stress felt by the rodents was 'massive,' said Jeffrey Mogil, a psychologist at McGill University and an author of the study, comparable with being 'in a very small tube so the mouse can't move for 15 minutes.'

"The findings, published in Nature Methods, could have far-reaching repercussions for research. Rodents account for more than 95 percent of all lab animals, according to the National Association of Biomedical Research. If a researcher's sex might affect results, it should be considered a confounding factor, Dr. Mogil said.


"And the effects may not be limited to living animals. 'Consider a study on liver physiology,' Dr. Mogil said. 'What if those liver cells came from a rat who, at the moment of sacrifice, had really high stress levels because it was killed by a man, or low because it was killed by a woman?'"​
 
And if you can make rocks, you can make life.


The "Godzilla of Earths!" is in the foreground. Behind it is the smaller 'lava world'. Their sun, in the back, appears to have been created only 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

Based on what we know about how solar systems form, researchers thought that a giant rocky planet could not exist. But they just found one that's 17 times Earth's mass. They're calling it the Mega-Earth.

Scientists_Have_Discovered_A_Planet-b3daa1b1b7f942d02d655f3db0f2c3bc
 
Google’s quantum computer just flunked its first big test

When the D-Wave 2 was first released last year, it was accompanied by a tidal wave of hype. The machine was a self-proclaimed quantum computer, commercially available to anyone with $15 million to spend, and attracting the attention of everyone from NASA to the NSA. One of the computer’s buyers was Google, which launched a new lab to test the device's powers more rigorously than they’d ever been tested before. This October, the lab announced a major discovery, providing stronger evidence for quantum effects within the D-Wave 2 than anyone had previously found. As D-Wave had claimed, its device really was quantum-powered — and Google’s big research bet seemed to be paying off.

But today, the D-Wave 2 is facing its first big stumble. A study in Science found that the quantum device is no faster than conventional computing, calling into question the entire premise of Google's lab and D-Wave's machines. Led by scientists at ETH Zurich, the research team matched up the quantum machine against conventional computers on a set of problems intended to suit the quantum machine's strengths. (The project also got a crucial assist from Microsoft Research, which tested out the classical simulations on its high-powered computer clusters.) Once the results were in, the team found no clear advantage on either side. The D-Wave machine might be quantum-powered, but it didn't run any faster because of it.
 
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