Water Found in Atmosphere of Nearby Alien Planet:


http://news.yahoo.com/water-found-at...104812288.html

From above link:

Water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of one of the first alien planets ever identified by astronomers.

Advances in the technique used to scan the atmosphere of this "hot Jupiter" could help scientists determine how many of the billions of planets in the Milky Way contain water like Earth, researchers said.

The exoplanet Tau Boötis b was discovered in 1996, when the search for worlds outside our solar system was just kicking off. At about 51 light-years away, Tau Boötis b is one of the nearest known exoplanets to Earth. The planet is considered a "hot Jupiter" because it is a massive gas giant that orbits close to its parent star.

To analyze the atmosphere surrounding Tau Boötis b, scientists looked at its faint glow. Different types of molecules emit different wavelengths of light, resulting in signatures known as spectra that reveal their chemical identify.

"The information we get from the spectrograph is like listening to an orchestra performance; you hear all of the music together, but if you listen carefully, you can pick out a trumpet or a violin or a cello, and you know that those instruments are present," study researcher Alexandra Lockwood, a graduate student at Caltech, explained in a statement.

"With the telescope, you see all of the light together, but the spectrograph allows you to pick out different pieces; like this wavelength of light means that there is sodium, or this one means that there’s water," Lockwood added.

Scientists have used spectrographic analyses to find water signatures on other alien planets before, but only when those worlds passed in front of their parent stars. Tau Boötis b does not transit in front of its parent star from our viewpoint on Earth, but Lockwood and colleagues were able to tease out the weak light emitted by the planet using the Near Infrared Echelle Spectrograph (NIRSPEC) at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Researchers had previously used a similar technique to find carbon monoxide around Tau Boötis b. That compound is thought to be the second-most common gas in the atmospheres of hot Jupiters, after hydrogen.

The new analysis showed that the glow of the planet's atmosphere matches the distinct molecular signature of water, the researchers say.

The spectrographic technique is presently limited to big planets orbiting closely to bright stars, like hot Jupiters, but it could eventually be used to study super-Earths (planets slightly larger than Earth) and worlds in the "habitable zone" around their parent stars, where liquid water and perhaps life as we know it could exist.

"While the current state of the technique cannot detect Earth-like planets around stars like the sun, with Keck it should soon be possible to study the atmospheres of the so-called 'super-Earth' planets being discovered around nearby low-mass stars, many of which do not transit," Caltech professor Geoffrey Blake said in a statement.

"Future telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will enable us to examine much cooler planets that are more distant from their host stars and where liquid water is more likely to exist," Blake added.

Astronomers found the first evidence of an exoplanet in 1992. Since then, more than 1,000 worlds have been discovered outside of our solar system, and many more await confirmation.

The new findings were detailed in the Feb. 24 online version of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The results are also freely available on the preprint service Arxiv.

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http://www.universetoday.com/110353/...been-detected/

Big news tomorrow, speculation commencing

http://www.businessinsider.com/harva...scovery-2014-3

So the article you linked a day before this news came out was correct i'd say. Any idea how much (by a percentage) this new information expands / adds to our current aggregate of knowledge in the filed of physics?

Shovel face - A new fossil reptile is unlike anything previously found

http://timeli.info/item/1316094/The_..._The_Economist

From above link:

YUNNAN province, in China, is home to the Luoping formation, a trove of spectacularly preserved fossils of creatures that roamed the seas 240m years ago, during the Triassic period. The latest—and arguably most spectacular yet—is Atopodentatus unicus, described this week in Naturwissenschaften by Long Cheng, of the Wuhan Institute of Geology and Mineral Resources, and his team.

People have been digging up and classifying prehistoric reptiles for more than two centuries, so it might be reasonable to suppose that all the main groups would by now have been identified. Atopodentatus unicus suggests this is not true, for it resembles no other known fossil. Its limbs seem to have evolved into paddles, suggesting it was indeed aquatic, but its toe bones look adapted for walking, as they resemble those in hoofed animals. Also, its pelvis is unusually solid and well-structured for a creature which could rely on the water’s buoyancy to counterbalance the force of gravity. Then there is its head, which is tiny, shovel-shaped and armed with more than 175 teeth, outwardly needlelike and inwardly bladelike, arranged in a way reminiscent of a comb.

And a comb is just what Dr Long thinks they were. But not a comb for grooming. He believes Atopodentatus unicus combed the seabed, and probably also beaches and mudflats exposed at low tide, for buried creatures such as worms. It would have taken in mouthfuls of sand or mud and squeezed them back out through its teeth, trapping its prey in the comb as it did so in the way that a baleen whale traps krill.

The creature’s shovel-shaped head supports this idea, for it would have been easy to push through the sediment. Its need to walk along the bottom while doing so explains the toe bones. And emergence from the water for a bit of beachcombing explains the strong pelvis. Where Atopodentatus unicus fits into the tree of life, then, is a mystery—and a reminder of how little-understood the history of life still is.
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http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2014/may/young-blood.html

Cliffs: blood from young humans may fix issues in old humans, let the vampire games begin

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5352530

NSA proof free email service has already been maxed out on user requests, they are building more servers but you can reserve your username in the mean time.

From the recent Economist comes this very interesting article:

http://www.economist.com/news/scienc...anism-computer

Copied in full below; because the article touches on many concepts and recent thread discussions/debate in SMP. I have bolded three paragraphs that are particularly telling and are worthy of attention and scrutiny: And Implications for discussion.

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ANY scientist will tell you that most of the work which gets done at the conferences they attend happens not in the lecture halls but around the coffee machines outside them (not to mention in the bars that delegates repair to after the lectures are finished). That is where ideas are swapped, phone numbers exchanged and collaborations begun.

One of the undersold boons of the internet is that it functions a bit like a permanent, rolling global coffee break. A good example of the result is OpenWorm, an informal collaboration of biologists and computer scientists from America, Britain, Russia and elsewhere. On May 19th this group managed to raise $121,076 on Kickstarter, a crowd-funding website. The money will be put towards the creation of the world’s most detailed virtual life form—an accurate, open-source, digital clone of a critter called Caenorhabditis elegans, a 1mm-long nematode that lives in the soils of the world’s temperate regions.

C. elegans is a scientific stalwart. It is simple, transparent, easy to feed and easy to breed. As a result it is one of the best-understood organisms in biology. Hermaphrodite individuals (which is most of them) have exactly 959 cells, of which 302 are neurons. The location and the function of every one of these cells is known. Thanks to work begun in the 1970s, scientists even have a complete map—a “connectome”—of how the neurons link up with each other to form the worm’s nervous system. Despite 40 years of technological progress, C. elegans remains the only animal for which such a diagram is available.

It is detailed information like this that makes OpenWorm possible. There are two ways to build a model: from the top down or from the bottom up. The top-down method is easier. Instead of worrying about how the thing being modelled works, you need only find some equations that reproduce its behaviour; economic models often work this way. It would be possible, for example, to model the snakelike locomotion of C. elegans using high-school mathematics. But that would not be very illuminating.

OpenWorm therefore proceeds in the other direction. The idea, says Stephen Larson, a neuro- and computer scientist, who is the project’s co-ordinator, is to model the biochemical behaviour of every one of the worm’s cells, and how they interact with each other. If that can be done, then movement—and all the beast’s other behaviour patterns—should emerge by themselves from that mass of interactions.

Building a complete electronic organism in this way, one that aims to be functionally indistinguishable from its fleshy counterpart, would be quite an achievement. It would also be useful. The human brain, for instance, differs from the worm’s tiny nervous system only in the number and interconnectedness of its neurons. But although plenty of cash and brow-sweat have been thrown at the problem over the years, nobody really knows how the brain works. Having a detailed, proddable model of a far simpler nervous system would be a good first step. And C. elegans is already used to probe everything from basic biochemistry to the actions of drugs in laboratories. The ability to run those tests electronically, with no need for actual worms, and to be reasonably sure that the results will nonetheless be the same as in the real world, would be a boon to biological and medical research.

Details, details

For now, no one is quite clear what a faithful simulation would look like. The point of a model is to remove unnecessary, cluttering details, while preserving the essence of whatever it is the model-maker wants to study. But even for an organism as well-researched as C. elegans, no one is sure which details are crucial and which extraneous. A living cell is a complicated mess of enzymes, ion channels, messenger molecules and voltages. Attempting to simulate everything faithfully would bring even a supercomputer to its knees.

For the moment, the team is planning systems that will simulate how the worm’s muscle cells work, how its neurons behave and how electrical impulses move from one to the other. There will be physics algorithms that give the worm a realistic simulation of a Petri dish to move through. They will also make sure its virtual muscles can deform its virtual body by the correct amount when they receive a virtual jolt from a virtual neuron.

The results will be compared with reality, in the form of a database of about 12,000 videos of how C. elegans behaves in the real world. The more kinds of behaviour the electronic worm can accurately reproduce, the better it will be. Crucially, says Matteo Cantarelli, another of the project’s founders, the system is designed to be flexible and easy to tweak. That lets the team improve it on the fly, either through subtle changes to what is already there, or by adding completely new chunks of code. For instance, proteins can diffuse through the worm, and change aspects of its behaviour when they do so. OpenWorm cannot model that at present, but the team has plans to make it do so.

This flexibility also allows the researchers to modify their model as science advances. On May 18th a group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Vienna published in Nature Methods a way to scan the nervous system of a live C. elegans in real time. That adds crucial data. If a connectome is like a road map, the ability to watch its neurons firing is like getting satellite video that shows how traffic is flowing along the map’s roads: which are busy (and when), and which are rarely travelled. The OpenWorm team is already keen to integrate these data into its model.

As its name suggests, OpenWorm is available to anyone to play with. And its success on Kickstarter may help raise interest—and cash—from elsewhere. “We’ve thought about applying for traditional grants,” says Dr Larson. “And the success of this crowd-funding proves that there’s public interest in this, which ought to help our case.” If he and his collaborators succeed in their ambitions, then doing biological research may one day become a simple matter of downloading some animals onto your computer, and getting started.

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lol