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A Single Migration From Africa Populated the World, Studies Find - The New York Times ![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F236x%2Fd2%2F29%2Fb6%2Fd229b64671d133a97a9c8d96a8507fa4.jpg&width=540&mix=9aae6-pin-gaia")
Potter wasp (Ancistrocerus albophaleratus) collected in Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada, and photographed at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (sample ID: BIOUG09406-B10; specimen record: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_RecordView?processid=SSJAF7636-13; BIN: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BarcodeCluster?clusteruri=BOLD:AAB7283)
Two weeks after Channel 4's £75m grab of Great British Bake Off from the BBC, the broadcaster has a big marquee but no filling.…
Norway's recent decision to destroy 70% of its tiny endangered population of wolves shocked conservationists worldwide and saw 35,000 sign a local petition. But in a region dominated by sheep farming support for the cull runs deep
Conservation groups worldwide were astonished to hear of the recent, unprecedented decision to destroy 70% of the Norway's tiny and endangered population of 68 wolves, the biggest cull for almost a century.
But not everyone in Norway is behind the plan. The wildlife protection group Predator Alliance Norway, for example, has campaign posters that talk of wolves as essential for nature, and a tourist attraction for Norway.
Continue reading...The iron law of the market is that you do not stifle demand by trying to stifle supply. It applies to drugs. It applies to alcohol. It applies to sex. It applies to ivory. For a generation, an international bureaucracy of UN officials and NGOs has been trying to stamp out ivory supply in Africa, much as it has been trying to stamp out cocaine supply in Latin America. All this does is increase price.
Related: Conservationists and MPs call for a total UK ban on ivory sales
Related: Why the EU is right to oppose a global ivory ban | Colman O'Criodain
Continue reading...Scientists have confirmed that the universe is very likely the same in every direction, showing that the assumption of the universe being isotropic can be safely used in cosmology.…
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British universities are looking to deepen links with their continental counterparts or even open offshore campuses in order to maintain their EU ties.…
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Volcanic slopes in Pinnacles National Park, California (© Don Smith/Getty Images) 2016-09-23 [www.bing.com/search] ![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F236x%2F43%2F59%2Fdd%2F4359dd5d6ceac2b296f5f19d8415a27e.jpg&width=540&mix=9f897-pin-images")
Autumn colors in Cheshire, England (© 2015 Light and Time Productions/Nimia) 2016-09-22 [www.bing.com/search] ![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F236x%2F49%2F9f%2Fa4%2F499fa4327359f0be660532e747dafc90.jpg&width=540&mix=9f897-pin-images")
surf life. In the past 50 years, better medical care and healthier habits have greatly reduced the risk of dying young from heart disease. But the obesity epidemic threatens to reverse that happy trend.
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europeanspaceagency posted a photo:
!["Alakol]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm9.staticflickr.com%2F8254%2F29870465535_2448b1df9d_m.jpg&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy")
Large chunks of broken ice float in east-central Kazakhstan's Alakol Lake in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image from 5 April 2016.
This salt lake usually freezes for about two months at the end of winter, and breaks up in early spring as we can see happening here. The lake's mineral-rich water and mud is considered to be therapeutic, and tourists often visit the lake's northern shores to remedy skin ailments.
Alakol means ‘multicoloured lake' and we can clearly see varying shades of green and blue depending on the depth, sediments flowing in from rivers and streams and phytoplankton. The two smaller, shallower lakes to the northwest are Kosharkol and Sasykkol.
The AlakolSasykkol lake system is both a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. It is an important migratory stop and nesting area for a variety of water birds, including the Dalmatian Pelican and Greater Flamingo.
In the lower-left corner of the image we can see agricultural structures in an alluvial fan. The triangular fan is formed when water runoff from the Dzungarian Alatau mountains (not pictured) hits the plain and spreads out, leaving behind fertile soil.
This image is featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2016), processed by ESA
“Whatever we find out, that is what nature chose,” Kyle Cranmer, a physics professor at New York University, told Brian Resnick at VOX. "It's a good attitude to have when your field yields great disappointments."
For most of 2015, evidence was suggesting that CERN's Large Hadron Collider had found a new subatomic particle, which would be a discovery surpassing even the LHC's discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, and perhaps the most significant advance since Einstein's theory of relativity. The Large Hadron Collider's 750 GeV diphoton bump registered at least one unambiguous conclusion the LHC physicists believed: they'd found something new. In the showers of proton collision byproducts that occurred during the 2015 run of CERN's ATLAS and CMS experiments, it seemed there was a new particle.
But, nature had other plans, in August, CERN reported that the evidence for the new particle, what at first looked like a promising “bump” in the data, indicating the presence of a particle with a unique mass, was just noise, that the 2016 data failed to replicate the bump, indicating that the earlier observations were just statistical fluctuations. This has resulted in a general let down shared by many researchers in high-energy physics: The LHC managed to bag the Higgs boson, but as for bagging supersymmetry, a New Physics, the presence of a particle or interaction so-far unknown it appears nature wasn't co-operating.
“It would be a profound discovery to find that we're not going to see anything else,” Cranmer says, suggesting that supersymmetry isn't the answer, and theoretical physicists will have to go back to the drawing board to figure out how to solve the mysteries left open by the standard model.
“If we're all coming up empty, we would have to question our fundamental assumptions,” Sarah Demers, a Yale physicist, tells me. “Which is something we're trying to do all the time, but that would really force us.”
An alternative possibility is that the the answers do exist, but they exist in a different universe. If the LHC can't find answers to questions like “why is the Higgs so light?” scientists might grow to accept a more speculative out-of-the-box idea where there are tons of universes all existing parallel to one another. It could be that “in most of [the universes], the Higgs boson is really heavy, and in only in very unusual universes [like our own] is the Higgs boson so light that life can form,” Cranmer says.
Basically: On the scale of our single universe, it might not make sense for the Higgs to be light. But if you put it together with all the other possible universes, the math might check out.
The problem with this theory is that if heavier Higgs bosons exist in different universes, there's no possible way to observe them. “Which is why a lot of people hate it, because they consider it to be anti-science,” Cranmer says. “It might be impossible to test.”
Way back in 2012, scientists hailed the doscovery of the Higgs, speculating that it could one day make light speed travel possible by "un-massing" objects or allow huge items to be launched into space by "switching off" the Higgs. CERN physicist Albert de Roeck likened it to the discovery of electricity, when he said humanity could never have imagined its future applications.
"What's really important for the Higgs is that it explains how the world could be the way that it is in the first millionth of a second in the Big Bang," de Roeck told AFP. "Can we apply it to something? At this moment my imagination is too small to do that."
Physicist Ray Volkas said "almost everybody" was hoping that, rather than fitting the so-called Standard Model of physics -- a theory explaining how particles fit together in the Universe -- the Higgs boson would prove to be "something a bit different".
"If that was the case that would point to all sorts of new physics, physics that might have something to do with dark matter," he said, referring to the hypothetical invisible matter thought to make up much of the universe.
Maybe the secret is hiding in Nature, awaiting its discovery.
The image at the top of the page shows γ-rays emitted from the Galactic Center, giving the LHC a firm target in its hunt for dark matter. (A. Mellinger, CMU; T. Linden, Univ. of Chicago/NASA Goddard)
The Daily Galaxy via Motherboard and Vox --read more of Brian Resnick's post here.
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NASA Goddard Photo and Video posted a photo:
!["Hubble]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm9.staticflickr.com%2F8540%2F29229186663_1da33b5753_m.jpg&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy")
Two's company, but three might not always be a crowd — at least in space.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and a trick of nature, have confirmed the existence of a planet orbiting two stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8,000 light-years away towards the center of our galaxy.
The planet orbits roughly 300 million miles from the stellar duo, about the distance from the asteroid belt to our sun. It completes an orbit around both stars roughly every seven years. The two red dwarf stars are a mere 7 million miles apart, or 14 times the diameter of the moon's orbit around Earth.
The Hubble observations represent the first time such a three-body system has been confirmed using the gravitational microlensing technique. Gravitational microlensing occurs when the gravity of a foreground star bends and amplifies the light of a background star that momentarily aligns with it. The particular character of the light magnification can reveal clues to the nature of the foreground star and any associated planets.
The three objects were discovered in 2007 by an international collaboration of five different groups: Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA), the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), the Microlensing Follow-up Network (MicroFUN), the Probing Lensing Anomalies Network (PLANET), and the Robonet Collaboration. These ground-based observations uncovered a star and a planet, but a detailed analysis also revealed a third body that astronomers could not definitively identify.
Image caption: This artist's illustration shows a gas giant planet circling a pair of red dwarf stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8,000 light-years away. The Saturn-mass planet orbits roughly 300 million miles from the stellar duo. The two red dwarf stars are 7 million miles apart.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
Read more: go.nasa.gov/2dcfMns
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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA's mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA's accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency's mission.
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Looking out into the night sky, we see a clumpy universe: planets orbit stars in solar systems and stars are grouped into galaxies, which in turn form enormous galaxy clusters. But cosmologists assume this effect is only local: that if we look on sufficiently large scales, the universe is actually uniform.
The vast majority of calculations made about our universe start with this assumption: that the universe is broadly the same, whatever your position and in whichever direction you look. "We find overwhelming evidence that the universe is the same in all direction," says physicist Stephen Feeney at London'd Imperial College, who worked with a team led by Daniela Saadeh at University College London to search for patterns in the observed CMB. The results, published today in the journal Physical Review Letters, show that none were a match, and that the universe is most likely directionless.If, however, the universe was stretching preferentially in one direction, or spinning about an axis in a similar way to the Earth rotating, this fundamental assumption, and all the calculations that hinge on it, would be wrong.
Now, scientists from University College London and Imperial College London have put this assumption through its most stringent test yet and found only a 1 in 121,000 chance that the universe is not the same in all directions.
To do this, they used maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation: the oldest light in the universe created shortly after the Big Bang. The maps were produced using measurements of the CMB taken between 2009 and 2013 by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, providing a picture of the intensity and, for the first time, polarisation (in essence, the orientation) of the CMB across the whole sky.
Previously, scientists had looked for patterns in the CMB map that might hint at a rotating universe. The new study considered the widest possible range of universes with preferred directions or spins and determined what patterns these would create in the CMB.
A universe spinning about an axis, for example, would create spiral patterns, whereas a universe expanding at different speeds along different axes would create elongated hot and cold spots
Four parts of a map of the universe, each showing a different pattern:
Dr Feeney said: “This work is important because it tests one of the fundamental assumptions on which almost all cosmological calculations are based: that the universe is the same in every direction. If this assumption is wrong, and our universe spins or stretches in one direction more than another, we'd have to rethink our basic picture of the universe.
“We have put this assumption to its most exacting examination yet, testing for a huge variety of spinning and stretching universes that have never been considered before. When we compare these predictions to the Planck satellite's latest measurements, we find overwhelming evidence that the universe is the same in all directions.”
Lead author Daniela Saadeh from University College London added: “You can never rule it out completely, but we now calculate the odds that the universe prefers one direction over another at just 1 in 121,000. We're very glad that our work vindicates what most cosmologists assume. For now, cosmology is safe.”
The work was kindly supported by the Perren Fund, IMPACT fund, Royal Astronomical Society, Science and Technology Facilities Council, Royal Society, European Research Council, and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
‘How isotropic is the Universe?' by D. Saadeh, S. M. Feeney, A. Pontzen, H. V. Peiris and J. D. McEwen, is published in Physical Review Letters
The Daily Galaxy via Imperial College London
Image credit top of page static.srcdn.com
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!["Lhc"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b7c89605a2970b-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"Lhc\"")
!["The-Enterprise-from-Star-Trek-Into-Darkness"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01bb0939663e970d-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"The-Enterprise-from-Star-Trek-Into-Darkness\"")
!["Bubblecollis"]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailygalaxy.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341bf7f753ef01bb093966b7970d-800wi&width=540&mix=d4e49-astronomy" "\"Bubblecollis\"")