The Enlightening Science Thread

I believe this is a different type of wave:

When the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a press conference for a "Major Discovery" (capital letters in the original e-mail) involving an unspecified experiment, rumors began to fly immediately. By Friday afternoon, the rumors had coalesced around one particular observatory: the BICEP microwave telescope located at the South Pole. Over the weekend, the chatter focused on a specific issue: polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. With the start of the press conference, it's now clear that we've detected the first direct evidence of the inflationary phase of the Big Bang, in which the Universe expanded rapidly in size.

Source: Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced (Updated) | Ars Technica

And.......

Cambridge, MA -
Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of our best telescopes. All this, of course, was just theory.
Researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration today announced the first direct evidence for this cosmic inflation. Their data also represent the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang." Finally, the data confirm a deep connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Source: First Direct Evidence of Cosmic Inflation

NASA: Earth JUST dodged comms-killing SOLAR BLAST in 2012

A new analysis of data from NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) by Chinese and Berkeley helioboffins shows that a July 2012 solar storm of unprecedented size would have wiped out global electronic systems if it had occurred just nine days earlier.

"Had it hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous," said UC Berkeley research physicist Janet Luhmann.

Source

A Guy

Woolly Mammoths Could Be Cloned Someday, Scientist Says

Woolly mammoths — shaggy, long-extinct relatives of modern elephants — could be easier to clone than one might think, researchers say.

Still, even if any such efforts succeed, they might take decades to accomplish, not the five years in which scientists from Russia and Japan reportedly have said they can achieve it.

Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) wandered the planet for roughly 250,000 years, ranging from Europe to Asia to North America. Nearly all of these giants vanished from Siberia by about 10,000 years ago, although dwarf mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until 3,700 years ago.



Scientists regularly conduct research on the DNA of these shaggy giants, extracting it from tusks, bone and teeth. With all this genetic material on hand, there lies the distinct possibility mammoths might be cloned one day.

"Recreating extinct organisms is definitely within reason," researcher Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, told LiveScience. "It will be possible."

Still, it may take closer to 20 to 50 years, if at all, Poinar noted.

Source

A Guy

I'm waiting for a velociraptor clone, not a HDD.

Mind-reading breakthrough can recreate the faces you see in your brain

A team of Yale researchers, led by a then-undergraduate student, have made an astonishing step forward in brain science. The (perhaps unsettling) breakthrough allows scientists to use a medical imaging machine and a well-trained algorithm to visually reconstruct faces seen by test subjects. As seen below, their technique returns some results with a truly astonishing level of accuracy. Oddly, their results seem to have been possible specifically because the brain processes faces in such a unique and distributed way. This study takes the field’s greatest and most intractable problem and leverages it to truly impressive effect.

Faces have historically been very difficult to see via the brain. Ever since brain scientists first found our visual processor (the occipital lobe, at the back of the head), they have tried to read and interpret its activity to reconstruct visual data. They reasoned that a detailed-enough model for how each “pixel” we see appears in the visual cortex would allow a one-to-one reconstruction — but that’s only true some of the time. When viewing images like buildings or furniture, simple and inherently unemotional objects, we see mostly with our eyes. When we view a human face, on the other hand, we “see” it in both the visual and emotional brains, evaluate it on a visual and a personal level, and look at it through rotating lenses of trust, safety, sex, and more.

Source

A Guy

March 27, 2014:
For people in the United States, an extraordinary series of lunar eclipses is about to begin. The action starts on April 15th when the full Moon passes through the amber shadow of Earth, producing a midnight eclipse visible across North America. So begins a lunar eclipse tetrad—a series of 4 consecutive total eclipses occurring at approximately six month intervals. The total eclipse of April 15, 2014, will be followed by another on Oct. 8, 2014, and another on April 4, 2015, and another on Sept. 28 2015.
"The most unique thing about the 2014-2015 tetrad is that all of them are visible for all or parts of the USA," says longtime NASA eclipse expert Fred Espenak.

Source: A Tetrad of Lunar Eclipses - NASA Science

Good info again Steve, thanks. I don't recall if I have witnessed a total Lunar eclipse.

BBC News - Comet lander checks in with Earth

Thanks Gary,

For the Eastern USA there's been a few, over a dozen since 1957. The ones I remember were from '93 and 2000.

Appreciate the heads up John, but durn it, I still missed the live test of Morpheus, here's the "Official Video":




Full YouTube page: Project Morpheus Tether Test 34 https://www.youtube.com