Новости за 13.09.2017

Amy Klinkhammer, Discover
After more than a century, a mysterious shorthand message exhumed from the archives is confounding scientists and historical societies alike.In the winter of 1903, upon returning from his very first Antarctic expedition, Sir Ernest Shackleton found himself in need of a job. He applied for a secretary position within the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS), an organization responsible for introducing the latest and most innovative technologies. Among them at the time: the telephone.

Andrew Masterson, Cosmos Magazine
Even if it were possible to reach the planet known as WASP-19b which it isn't, being 800 light years away it would be most unpleasant place to visit.Some of the reasons for this are obvious. WASP-19b is a hot Jupiter, large and so close to its parent star that a single orbit takes just 19 hours. Measurements taken by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Germany have established its atmospheric temperature at 2000 degrees Celsius.

Chelsea Wald, Nature News
On the outskirts of Kigali, Rwanda, septic trucks full of human excrement bump and slosh their way up orange dirt roads to their final destination: the Nduba landfill. Until recently, the trucks would spill their contents into giant open pits. But since 2015, workers in green jumpsuits have greeted them outside a row of sheds and plastic-roofed greenhouses, ready to process the faecal sludge into a dry, powdery fuel.

Robert Service, Science News
The first day of Mary Schweitzer's 2017 dinosaur hunt isn't going well. The team has been searching under the high summer sun without success for the fossil-rich strata that braid through the arid rangeland here. Then, toward sundown, the aging Chevy Suburban in which she and four colleagues are riding erupts in a brief, poltergeist-like spectaclewith door locks jumping up and down and multiple dashboard warning lights flashing simultaneously. Finally, the car gives up the ghost and stops completely.

Daniel Whiteson, Aeon Magazine
If you could fast-forward some 1,000 years and peek into a college science textbook from the year 3000, what would you see? I doubt you'd find many of our current theories still in there. Today, the Standard Model of particle physics and Albert Einstein's general relativity seem like twin pinnacles of human intellectual achievement. Tomorrow, they might be cast into history's dustbin, relegated to mere footnotes alongside old ideas about the Earth-centred solar system and the deterministic Universe. Читать дальше...

Mika McKinnon, NewScientist
After an 8.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the southern coast of Mexico on 7 September, videos of fuzzy green smears in the night sky went viral online.Earthquake lights are a phenomenon so unusual that they border on myth. The first known reports of them are from 89 BC, with spotty descriptions over the centuries.

Alison Klesman, Astronomy
Discovered in 1781, Uranus is an ice giant orbiting our Sun once every 84 Earth years. This mysterious world, which appears as just a tiny dot in most amateur telescopes, not only possesses a system of thin, faint rings, but also 27 moons (by our current count). However, at least one of those things is destined to change: new measurements indicate at least two likely collisions between four of the planet's moons millions of years in the future.

Laura Geggel, Live Sci
In a case worthy of Sherlock Holmes, researchers are trying to figure out exactly when and where in the world a long-fingered lizard got trapped in the sticky sap of a tree.Over time, that sap, or tree resin turned into amber, preserving the lizard's remains, including its textured skin. This unique lizard-amber block somehow came into the possession of a man who donated it to the Miller Museum of Geology at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, in the 1980s, but the man didn't report the artifact's age or provenance.

Paul Sutter, Space.com

I think it's time for everyone to admit that black holes are annoying. Out there, drifting around the galaxy with their much bigger cousins lurking in the centers of those galaxies black holes are the ultimate paradoxes of nature, silently mocking our feeble attempts to understand them.By all accounts, black holes should not exist, and for a long time, they were shrugged off as mere mathematical artifacts an annoying bug in the otherwise elegant machinery of general relativity.

The Economist
MODERN artificial intelligence is much feted. But its talents boil down to a superhuman ability to spot patterns in large volumes of data. Facebook has used this ability to produce maps of poor regions in unprecedented detail, with an AI system that has learned what human settlements look like from satellite pictures. Medical researchers have trained AI in smartphones to detect cancerous lesions; a Google system can make precise guesses about the year a photograph was taken, simply... Читать дальше...

Matt Williams, UT

On February 11th, 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the first detection of gravitational waves. This development, which confirmed a prediction made by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity a century ago, has opened up new avenues of research for cosmologists and astrophysicists. Since that time, more detections have been made, all of which were said to be the result of black holes merging.

Alex Berezow, ACSH
Unlike animals, bacteria can readily share genetic information with other bacteria, even those of entirely different species. Because of this, one clever microbiologist likened bacteria to smartphones and genes to apps. When bacteria share "apps" that encode antibiotic resistance, it poses trouble for humanity.As individual bacterial strains are exposed to antibiotics, natural selection favors the survival of those that have mutated to become resistant. That hard-earned resistance can then be given to other bacteria. Читать дальше...

Kendra Redmond, PC
If you're in need of some charming news and a break from weather-related disaster coverage, this is your story. Today, in the American Physical Society's journal Physical Review Letters, a several-hundred-member team of CERN researchers announced the first unambiguous sighting of a baryon with two heavy quarks.So what exactly does that mean?Matter, all the visible stuff around us, is made of atoms. Atoms are made of three subatomic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Читать дальше...