[Lidija]

Say hello to 2015 RR245, a 440-mile-wide dwarf planet located approximately 7.5 billion miles from the sun. It takes 700 years to make a complete orbit, making it one of the most remote known objects in the entire solar system of significant size.

The newly discovered dwarf planet was discovered by an international team of astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Maunakea, Hawaii, as part of the ongoing Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS). Astronomer J.J. Kavelaars from Canada’s National Research Council was the first to spot the minor planet in February 2016 while pouring through OSSOS images taken back in September 2015.





There's a New Dwarf Planet Far Beyond Pluto's Orbit

[Lidija]

Using pneumatic pistons and servos to power robots makes them fast and strong, but also bulky and extremely heavy. No one is going to mistake ATLAS for a real human being. To eventually create humanoid-looking robots like the Terminator we need to mechanically replicate every part of the human anatomy—starting with the muscles.





The Freaky Artificial Muscles on this Human Skeleton Are the Future of Robotics

[Lidija]

It Looks Like Pluto Has a Liquid Water Ocean

[Lidija]

Rosetta describes the exciting discoveries she made during her second year at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, after the comet made its closest approach to the Sun along its orbit. She also tells us about her efforts to contact Philae, and starts counting down to her own mission finale.

[Lidija]

MeerKAT joins the ranks of the world's great scientific instruments through its First Light image



The MeerKAT First Light image of the sky, released today by Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor, shows unambiguously that MeerKAT is already the best radio telescope of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. Array Release 1 (AR1) being celebrated today provides 16 of an eventual 64 dishes integrated into a working telescope array. It is the first significant scientific milestone achieved by MeerKAT, the radio telescope under construction in the Karoo that will eventually be integrated into the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
In a small patch of sky covering less than 0.01 percent of the entire celestial sphere, the MeerKAT First Light image shows more than 1300 galaxies in the distant Universe, compared to 70 known in this location prior to MeerKAT. "Based on the results being shown today, we are confident that after all 64 dishes are in place, MeerKAT will be the world's leading telescope of its kind until the advent of SKA," according to Professor Justin Jonas, SKA South Africa Chief Technologist.

MeerKAT will consist of 64 receptors, each comprising a 13.5-metre diametre dish antenna, cryogenic coolers, receivers, digitiser, and other electronics. The commissioning of MeerKAT is done in phases to allow for verification of the system, early resolution of any technical issues, and initial science exploitation. Early science can be done with parts of the array as they are commissioned, even as construction continues. AR1 consists of 16 receptors, AR2 of 32 and AR3 of 64, expected to be in place by late 2017.

Dr Rob Adam, Project Director of SKA South Africa, says: "The launch of MeerKAT AR1 and its first results is a significant milestone for South Africa. Through MeerKAT, South Africa is playing a key role in the design and development of technology for the SKA. The South African team of more than 200 young scientists, engineers and technicians, in collaboration with industry, local and foreign universities and institutions, has developed the technologies and systems for MeerKAT. These include cutting edge telescope antennas and receivers, signal processing, timing, telescope management, computing and data storage systems, and algorithms for data processing."

In May 2016, more than 150 researchers and students, two-thirds from South Africa, met in Stellenbosch to discuss and update the MeerKAT science programme. This will consist of already approved "large survey projects", plus "open time" available for new projects. An engineering test image, produced with only 4 dishes, was made available just before that meeting.

"The scientists gathered at the May meeting were impressed to see what 4 MeerKAT dishes could do," says Dr Fernando Camilo, SKA South Africa Chief Scientist. "They will be astonished at today's exceptionally beautiful images, which demonstrate that MeerKAT has joined the big leagues of world radio astronomy".

Pandor today released the MeerKAT First Light image from the telescope site in the Northern Cape. She was accompanied by Ministers and Deputy Ministers from the Presidential Infrastructure Coordination Committee (PICC), as well as other senior officials.

Minister Pandor says: "South Africa has already demonstrated its excellent science and engineering skills by designing and building MeerKAT. This telescope, which is predominantly a locally designed and built instrument, shows the world that South Africa can compete in international research, engineering, technology and science. Government is proud of our scientists and engineers for pioneering a radio telescope that will lead to groundbreaking research."

[lilit]

[Lidija]

Ojha! Evo ga Trisolaris sistem iz The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu), samo što su u Trisolarisu putanje malko eratičnije, pa se sa sirotom planetom igra kosmički ping-pong…

(S druge strane, sad strepim da će ovo biti još jedan prilog u korist nečije teze kako je SF mrtav…  )

[Lidija]

In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking made an audacious prediction that black holes aren’t totally black; they evaporate over time, emitting tiny amounts of radiation in the process. Now Israeli physicists have reported the strongest evidence to date that Hawking was right in a new paper in Nature Physics.

Black holes got their name because their gravitational force is so strong, not even light can escape once it passes beyond the event horizon—a theoretical point of no return. But then Hawking discovered that it’s theoretically possible for black holes to evaporate over time via a quantum mechanical process known as “Hawking radiation.”

According to quantum mechanics, even the vacuum of space isn’t truly empty. So-called “virtual particles” can pop in and out of existence over such short time frames that they don’t violate established laws of physics. But if a virtual particle pair appears at the event horizon of a black hole, and one of the pair falls in, the black hole would appear to be emitting photons (particles of light), losing a bit of its mass in the process. The bigger the black hole, the longer it takes to evaporate. So-called “mini-black holes, which physicists hope to create at the Large Hadron Collider, would wink out of existence within fractions of a second.

Hawing’s idea has enormous implications for theoretical physics, most notably for the black hole information paradox. But how do you test such an audacious hypothesis? In 1981, Bill Unruh , a physicist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, proposed a thought experiment involving a sonic analogue of a black hole he nicknamed a “dumb hole”—except in this case it is sound, not light, that becomes trapped in a kind of event horizon.

Unruh drew an analogy with a waterfall where the water flows faster and faster as it falls over the edge. Eventually the water will be flowing faster than sound can travel through water, so any phonons (particles of sound) trying to escape will just get sucked back in. Dumb holes don’t actually exist in nature, although Unruh loves to tell people that we create rotating black hole analogues every time we take a bath. Surface waves form in the tub as water swirls down the drain, and when it’s shallow enough, the water flowing down the drain moves faster than those surface waves.

But physicists thought it should be possible to create analogue black holes in the lab, not out of sound, but with Bose-Einstein condensates—exotic forms of ultra-cold quantum states matter where a bunch of atoms behave like a single atom. In 2009, Jeff Steinhauer’s lab at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) did just that: they briefly produced a supersonic flow for about eight milliseconds in a soup of 100,000 chilled rubidium atoms.

This was exciting stuff, because it offered the potential to test Hawking’s prediction. Black hole analogues should emit the equivalent of Hawking radiation, complete with entangled phonons. In 2014, Steinhauer reported the first hints of the phenomenon in one of his acoustic black hole experiments, after figuring out how to create the sonic equivalent of a laser’s beam-generating cavity to boost the signal.

It wasn’t a slam dunk, however. There was still the possibility that the signal was really just noise in the system, since the observed radiation had to be triggered. But now Steinhauer says his lab has improved its experimental setup sufficiently that it’s observed entangled phonons being emitted by an acoustic black hole. And that radiation arises from the Bose-Einstein Condensate itself, with no need for a trigger.

If the result holds up, this would be a very big deal for theoretical physics, since it’s a key factor in resolving the black hole information paradox, and one day devising a unified theory that merges quantum mechanics with general relativity. It could also snag Hawking a coveted Nobel Prize, some 40 years after he made that first prediction.

http://gizmodo.com/were-one-step-closer-to-proving-black-holes-evaporate-1785308312

[Lidija]

​It's 2.4 Miles Across, 8,650 Years Old, and It Lives in Oregon



No, it's not hipster Cthulhu. Known as "honey fungus," this huge underground organism is the world's biggest living thing. And its life cycle is incredible.

Photo of honey fungus by Stu's Images

The fungus lives largely underground, but it grows fruiting bodies above the soil that look like creamy yellow mushrooms. If you were picking one to sautée with your favorite pasta dish, you'd never guess that they were attached to a huge, ancient life form that occasionally preys on the Blue Mountain forest where it has lived for millennia.

Over at the BBC, Nic Fleming tells the story of how the world's biggest honey fungus was first discovered in Oregon:

In 1998 a team from the US Forest Service set out to investigate the cause of large tree die-offs in the Malheur National Forest in east Oregon.

They identified affected areas in aerial photographs and collected root samples from 112 dead and dying trees, mostly firs. Tests showed all but four of the trees had been infected with the honey fungus Armillaria solidipes (previously known as Armillaria ostoyae).

When mycelia from genetically identical A. solidipes meet, they can fuse to form one individual. The researchers harnessed this ability, growing fungi samples in pairs in petri dishes. By observing which ones fused and which ones rejected each other, they found that 61 of the trees had been struck down by the same clonal colony – individuals with identical genetic make-up that all originated from one organism.

The most widely-spaced were 2.4 miles (3.8 km) apart. The team calculated that the A. solidipes covered an area of 3.7 sq miles (9.6 sq km), and was somewhere between 1,900 and 8,650 years old.

The web-like network lives below ground, occasionally sprouting the fruiting bodies that look like mushrooms. What's so extraordinary about the honey fungus is that when two identical funguses meet, they can fuse to form a bigger organism.

Yes, it's just as amazing and terrifying as it sounds.

[Ygg]

​It's 2.4 Miles Across, 8,650 Years Old, and It Lives in Oregon

Ovo me asociralo na jednu odličnu The X Files epizodu:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_Trip_(The_X-Files)

[Lidija]

The Amazing Place the Rosetta Spacecraft Is Going To Die



In two weeks, the European Space Agency will crash-land its prized Rosetta spacecraft, marking a dramatic end to the whirlwind two-year science mission that saw humanity’s first-ever comet landing. It’ll be 48 action-packed hours as Rosetta descends to its ultimate resting place on Comet 67P—and to get you properly excited for that event, we wanted to share the fascinating reason this site was chosen.

[Lidija]

At the heart of the Stingray Nebula some 2,700 light years from Earth lies a small, aging star known as SAO 244567. Astronomers have been observing it on and off for decades, and they can now confirm they’ve witnessed something amazing: a never-before-seen stellar rebirth.

From 1971 to 2002, the surface temperature of SAO 244567 skyrocketed, from 20,000 to nearly 60,000 degrees Celsius. At the same time, the star contracted, shrinking from about four times the size of our Sun to just a third of its diameter. Now, observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the star has begun to cool off and expand again, its surface temperature waning to a tepid 50,000 degrees Celsius in recent years.





Astronomers Just Witnessed a Rare Stellar Rebirth For the First Time

[Lidija]

For the first time ever, scientists have produced live mice without a fertilized egg cell. The potentially revolutionary technique could one day allow gay men to produce biological offspring, or—even more radically—allow both men and women to self-fertilize.

Researchers from the University of Bath injected sperm directly into a modified, inactive mouse embryo. The resulting mice appeared to be normal, and were even able to reproduce. The new study, published in Nature Communications, challenges nearly two centuries of conventional wisdom, showing that it’s possible to produce healthy mammalian offspring without first having to fertilize an egg.


Scientists Have Bred Live Mice with No Need for Fertilized Eggs

[Lidija]

Deep-sea volcano a hotspot for mysterious life

he three-man submarine went down, down, down into the abyss and drew within sight of something no human had ever laid eyes on: Cook seamount, a 13,000-foot extinct volcano at the bottom of the sea.

Scientists aboard the vessel Pisces V visited the volcano earlier this month to examine its geological features and its rich variety of marine life, and an Associated Press reporter was given exclusive access to the dive. It was the first-ever expedition to the Cook seamount by a manned submersible.

Among other things, the researchers from the University of Hawaii and the nonprofit group Conservation International spotted such wonders as a rare type of octopus with big fins that look like Dumbo's ears, and a potentially new species of violet-hued coral they dubbed Purple Haze.

[Lidija]

Hubble Directly Images Possible Plumes on Europa

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a012300/a012375/Hubble_Europa_H264_60fps.mp4