The Sci Tech World

Aliens, black hole, and quick radio bursts? Space is filled with a lot of wonders and unanswered questions. Just scientists have been working towards the reply of what causes fast radio bursts, and with the finding of FRB 150418 they thought they were getting close. Now a year removed from that finding, it seems scientists are back to square one. Fast radio bursts or FRB, are high-energy radio flashes that occur outside of the Milky Way. They occur randomly and only in a short bursts, so scientists never recognize when and where they will find them. Most FRBs are exposed after they occur while scientists are reviewing radio telescope archives. Once discovered an FRB is named after its date of finding. There are many things scientists still don’t know about FRBs. The main question being what causes them. There’s not a great deal evidence to go off so at this point aliens may be a valid guess. On April 18, 2015, the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia picked-up on an FRB as it was happen...

A 15-year-old boy, from Seaford, East Sussex, has succeeded in capturing an awesome picture of Saturn using a telescope in his back garden that several experienced astronomers would be proud of. Marcus Reed managed to take this clear image of the gas giant, including its entire rings, using a 102mm diameter reflector telescope. According to Marcus Reed, he stayed up until 4am, using an iPhone app called Sky Guide to locate the gas giant planet in the sky. He said: “I took the picture at about four in the morning. I had turned on the app and saw that Saturn was visible, so straight away I put my slippers on and ran downstairs, setting up my telescope on the back lawn in my pyjamas. I was pleasantly surprised when I looked back and saw I had such a clear picture - Saturn is my favourite planet. 'I have been interested in astronomy and photography for a long time, and I really enjoy it - I use my telescope every night when it's clear.” The Gas Giant Saturn, is the sixth planet fro...

Study Finds Being Lonely Is Worse Than Smoking 15 Cigarettes A Day Brandon Marji, Staff Writer May 9, 2018 The Science Knowledge, Contributor Providr not only provides thorough, well written content, but also creates passionate and meaningful stories. From beginning to end, their content is refreshing and informative. Keep publishing and I'll keep reading. Loneliness and social isolation may pose a greater public hazard than people may realize. The American Psychological Association states that about 42.6 million adults who are over the age of 45 in the United States are estimated to be suffering from chronic loneliness after they conducted a loneliness study. In addition, another study has surfaced that suggests that being lonely is worse than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The study was conducted by researchers at Brigham Young University in 2015. In order to prove their hypothesis that being lonely is just as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, the researchers analyzed data from d...

Did you know that there is a satellite that circle our planet & is set to crash-land on Earth in 8 million years? Its duty may surprise you. NASA has complete a satellites called LAGEOS or Laser Geodynamics Satellites, which are mainly scientific satellites that learn our planet. The LAGEOS satellite circles our planet so that it can be communicated from several earth stations around the world. LAGEOS design is beautiful. The spacecraft is complete of aluminum-covered brass spheres with a diameter of 60 cm, the satellite is enclosed in 426 cube-corner retroreflectors which make the Satellite look exactly like a giant golf ball. LAGEOS does not have any slat sensors or electronics, and are not attitude-controlled. Its main mission is not that of carrying a message to the prospect populations of our planet, but rather studying and monitoring its advance. But who will live on our planet in 8 million years? Humans? Aliens? Or will life end to exist on planet Earth? Picture that life “r...

Scientists have exposed a 'bizarre' star they say could be fenced by an enormous alien mega structure. KIC 8462852, situated 1,480 light-years away, was observed by the Kepler Space Telescope for near more than four years, starting in 2009. Currently scientists say they cannot clarify bizarre fluctuations in the light it releases - leading a few astronomers to claim it could have a gigantic alien mega structure right in front of it. Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctoral applicant at Yale, told The Atlantic “We'd never seen anything like this star. It was in truth weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out. Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, periodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level,” She lately published a study paper in the online journal arxiv charting the possible reasons - and omitting many of them. Boyajian and her study group at the crowdsourced Astro...

In a world full of diseases and conditions, researchers and scientists are constantly searching for cures. But the easiest way to deal with a disease and condition is trying to prevent it before it occurs. Granted, a lot of diseases and conditions are genetic, so it’s almost impossible to prevent those. But something like a heart attack can be prevented. Heart attack signals are constantly present and by not acknowledging them, you increase the risk of them occurring. More than 90 million Americans suffer from some form of heart disease, according to the American Heart Association. Without a properly functioning heart, the rest of the body will fail. No heartbeat means no life, and the more damage you cause to your heart, the higher the risk of it stopping completely. With that said, there are heart attack signals that will surface a month before it will happen. It’s our job to acknowledge them and not ignore them. It could save our lives. Below are top heart attack signals that will o...

Huge plumes of water have been spurting out of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons – and it might be the best place in our solar system to find aliens. The shock finding comes from a new look at old data, and has led scientists to confirm that the moon is a leading candidate in our search for alien life. Europa has long been seen as a possible candidate to have extraterrestrial life in our own solar system. But getting to it seemed almost impossible: the planet is thought to be covered in a thick crust of ice that would stop us from reaching the ocean beneath. The new discovery makes it much easier to actually find: the plume means that scientists can “taste” the water on the moon, helping them understand what might be found there. The plume was discovered when scientists realised that a bend in Europa’s magnetic field observed by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft during a 1997 flyby appeared to have been caused by a geyser gushing through its frozen crust from a subsurface ocean, researchers who r...

According to new calculations, we may have a little less time to prepare for a star on course to kiss the edges of our Solar System. Yep. Dwarf star Gliese 710, which we've known about for some time, could now arrive in 1.29 million years, instead of the previously calculated 1.36 million years. Gliese 710 is what is classified as a rogue star - one that has gone roaming across the galaxy, free of the gravitational chains that normally hold stars in position. At a speed of 51,499 kilometres per hour (32,000 miles per hour), it's not quite fast enough to be considered a runaway star, but it's still travelling at a hefty clip. We've known Gliese 710 was on a trajectory that would bring it close to the Solar System since at least 1996, but it wasn't until late 2016 that we had a decent ballpark on the timeframe. Based on the first release of data from the ESA's Gaia mission, astronomers Filip Berski and Piotr A. Dybczyński calculated that Gliese 710, then around 63...

A chemistry professor has found a way to trigger the process of photosynthesis in a synthetic material, turning greenhouse gases into clean air and producing energy all at the same time. The process has great potential for creating a technology that could significantly reduce greenhouse gases linked to climate change, while also creating a clean way to produce energy. The findings of his research are published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A . “This work is a breakthrough,” said UCF AssistantProfessor Fernando Uribe-Romo. “Tailoring materials that will absorb a specific color of light is very difficult from the scientific point of view, but from the societal point of view we are contributing to the development of a technology that can help reduce greenhouse gases.” Uribe-Romo and his team of students created a way to trigger a chemical reaction in a synthetic material called metal–organic frameworks (MOF) that breaks down carbon dioxide into harmless organic materials. Think of...

We humans like to create a big deal of things - climate alters, new viruses, the death of our favorite TV characters (guilty). But this magnificent video is here to be reminiscent you that the Universe is actually a pretty simple place, and can be explain in its entirety in less than 4 minutes. And all that bullsh*t you're feeling bad about today doesn't even get a talk about, so presently chill out, okay? Sure, this efficient breakdown of all that exists, ever, by You Tuber exurb1a might be completely apathetic and even a little bit bigot at times (dude, get over your ex girlfriend by now), but it's also hilarious and surprisingly perceptive. Who would have thought that the Universe and all the physics that govern it in fact kind of create sense? The whole thing start with the "Tyrion Lannister of physics", also recognized as the Planck Length, which is the negligible thing you can sensibly talk about (as far as we know). Then we get together the subatomic partic...

An asteroid the size of the Statue of Liberty will zoom past Earth on Tuesday. The asteroid, dubbed 2010 WC9, is about the size of a football field and will fly past Earth at about 28,655 miles per hour, according to EarthSky. To put things in perspective, this asteroid is bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza too. It will come within 126,419 miles of Earth — the closest it has come to our planet in 300 years — though it is still considered a safe passing distance. The asteroid is expected to whiz past Earth at 6:05 p.m. E.T. on Tuesday, May 15. Despite its seemingly large size, the asteroid will not be visible to the naked eye from Earth. For those hoping to catch a glimpse of the asteroid, it will be visible with a telescope for some people. But even if you don’t have a telescope, you can still see the asteroid Tuesday night thanks to a livestream from Northholt Branch Observatories in London. The observatory will stream it live on Facebook beginning Monday, May 14 at midnight local ...

Physicists have presently discovered a new form of light that doesn't follow our existing rules of lanky momentum, and it could shake up our understanding of the electromagnetic emission and lead to faster, additional secure optical communication. Because of how well-studied and, well, all over, light is, you might assume that we've pretty much learnt all there is to know about it. But presently last year, researchers identified a fundamental new property of light, and now a side of Irish scientists has shown that light can take on unexpected new forms. One of the ways we measure a beam of light is from side to side its angular momentum - a constant quantity that measures how a great deal light is rotating. And until now, it was thought that for all forms of light, the angular momentum would be a whole number (known as an integer) multiple of Planck's constant - a physical constant that sets the scale of quantum belongings. But researchers led by Trinity College Dublin have...

We're not wired to feel safe all the time, but maybe one day we could be. A recent study investigating the neurological basis of anxiety in the brain has identified 'anxiety cells' located in the hippocampus – which not only regulate anxious behaviour but can be controlled by a beam of light. The findings, so far demonstrated in experiments with lab mice, could offer a ray of hope for the millions of people worldwide who experience anxiety disorders (including almost one in five adults in the US), by leading to new drugs that silence these anxiety-controlling neurons. "We wanted to understand where the emotional information that goes into the feeling of anxiety is encoded within the brain," says one of the researchers, neuroscientist Mazen Kheirbek from the University of California, San Francisco. To find out, the team used a technique called calcium imaging, inserting miniature microscopes into the brains of lab mice to record the activity of cells in the hippoca...

Scientists working with telescopes at the European Southern Observatory and NASA announced a remarkable new discovery: An entire system of Earth-sized planets. If that’s not enough, the team asserts that the density measurements of the planets indicates that the six innermost are Earth-like rocky worlds. And that’s just the beginning. Three of the planets lie in the star’s habitable zone. If you aren’t familiar with the term, the habitable zone (also known as the “goldilocks zone”) is the region surrounding a star in which liquid water could theoretically exist. This means that all three of these alien worlds may have entire oceans of water, dramatically increasing the possibility of life. The other planets are less likely to host oceans of water, but the team states that liquid water is still a possibility on each of these worlds. Summing the work, lead author Michaël Gillon notes that this solar system has the largest number of Earth-sized planets yet found and the largest number of ...

Of the 4,000 Americans waiting for heart transplants, only 2,500 will receive new hearts in the next year. Even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, the biggest risk is that their bodies will reject the new heart and launch a massive immune reaction against the foreign cells To combat the problems of organ shortage and decrease the chance that a patient’s body will reject it, researchers have been working to create synthetic organs from patients’ own cells. Now a team of scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School has gotten one step closer, using adult skin cells to regenerate functional human heart tissue, according to a study published recently in the journal Circulation Research. Ideally, scientists would be able to grow working hearts from patients’ own tissues, but they’re not quite there yet. That’s because organs have a particular architecture. It's easier to grow them in the lab if they have a scaffolding on which the cells can build, l...

Science is not quite sure why, but newly calculations show the Universe is increasing faster than expected, possibly the result of something we only suspect exists – dark radiation. The most recent research on star movements found the Universe is increasing between 5 percent and 9 percent faster than early in its life. One consequence of this could be that the universe ends up ripping itself apart. "A funny cosmos just got funnier," says lead Australian researcher and ANU astrophysicist Brad Tucker. "It could be a new force similar to dark energy, or a fresh particle, or it could be that dark energy itself has changed over time," he added. "We thought we were close to understanding dark energy, but now we know we don't know the answer at all. There's a lot of work to do." Stars, planets, and gas make up only 5 percent of the Universe. The rest is Twenty five percent dark matters and 70 percent dark energy, both of which are invisible and have never...

It is a well-known fact among Earth scientists that our planet periodically undergoes major changes in its climate. Over the course of the past 200 million years, our planet has experienced four major geological periods (the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous and Cenozoic) and one major ice age (the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation), all of which had a drastic impact on plant and animal life, as well as effecting the course of species evolution. For decades, geologists have also understood that these changes are due in part to gradual shifts in the Earth’s orbit, which are caused by Venus and Jupiter, and repeat regularly every 405,000 years. But it was not until recently that a team of geologists and Earth scientists unearthed the first evidence of these changes – sediments and rock core samples that provide a geological record of how and when these changes took place. The study which describes their findings, titled “Empirical evidence for stability of the 405-kiloyear Jupiter–Venus ecc...

There’s a supermassive black hole at the center of almost every galaxy in the Universe. How did they get there? What’s the relationship between these monster black holes and the galaxies that surround them? Every time astronomers look farther out in the Universe, they discover new mysteries. These mysteries require all new tools and techniques to understand. These mysteries lead to more mysteries. What I’m saying is that it’s mystery turtles all the way down. One of the most fascinating is the discovery of quasars, understanding what they are, and the unveiling of an even deeper mystery, where do they come from? As always, I’m getting ahead of myself, so first, let’s go back and talk about the discovery of quasars. Back in the 1950s, astronomers scanned the skies using radio telescopes, and found a class of bizarre objects in the distant Universe. They were very bright, and incredibly far away; hundreds of millions or even billion of light-years away. The first ones were discovered in ...

Though close to home, the space immediately around Earth is full of hidden secrets and invisible processes. In a new discovery reported in the journal Nature, scientists working with NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft — MMS — have uncovered a new type of magnetic event in our near-Earth environment by using an innovative technique to squeeze extra information out of the data. Magnetic reconnection is one of the most important processes in the space — filled with charged particles known as plasma — around Earth. This fundamental process dissipates magnetic energy and propels charged particles, both of which contribute to a dynamic space weather system that scientists want to better understand, and even someday predict, as we do terrestrial weather. Reconnection occurs when crossed magnetic field lines snap, explosively flinging away nearby particles at high speeds. The new discovery found reconnection where it has never been seen before — in turbulent plasma. “In the plasma uni...

If you have eye and use the internet, you've probably seen more than your fair share of stories about UFO sightings. Whether its strange clouds that look like spaceships, ominous looking blurs filmed from the global Space Station, or rogue meteors, the world wide web loves a good alien conspiracy. But former NASA engineer James Oberg has taken it upon himself to trawl through all the sightings and stories out there and politely debunk them, using science. The conclusion? Most of your "insane UFO sightings" are little more than 'space dandruff', or your brain misunderstanding of what space travel actually looks like, says Oberg. As Cara Giaimo from Atlas Obscura reports, after working at NASA mission control in the late '90s, Oberg went on to become a space journalist and historian. It wasn't until a a small number of years ago that he started to take UFO sightings seriously. His goal isn't to simply crap all over true believers - he calls that "st...

You can't manage what you don't measure. The adage is especially relevant for climate-warming greenhouse gases, which are crucial to manage—and challenging to measure. In recent years, though, satellite and aircraft instruments have begun monitoring carbon dioxide and methane remotely, and NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), a $10-million-a-year research line, has helped stitch together observations of sources and sinks into high-resolution models of the planet's flows of carbon. Now, President Donald Trump's administration has quietly killed the CMS, Science has learned. The move jeopardizes plans to verify the national emission cuts agreed to in the Paris climate accords, says Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of Tufts University's Center for International Environment and Resource Policy in Medford, Massachusetts. "If you cannot measure emissions reductions, you cannot be confident that countries are adhering to the agreement," she says. Canceling th...

Even before Einstein theorized that time is relative and flexible, humanity had already been imagining the possibility of time travel. In fact, science fiction is filled with time travelers. Some use metahuman abilities to do so, but most rely on a device generally known as a time machine. Now, two physicists think that it’s time to bring the time machine into the real world — sort of. “People think of time travel as something as fiction. And we tend to think it’s not possible because we don’t actually do it,” Ben Tippett, a theoretical physicist and mathematician from the University of British Columbia, said in a UBC news release. “But, mathematically, it is possible.” Essentially, what Tippet and University of Maryland astrophysicist David Tsang developed is a mathematical formula that uses Einstein’s General Relativity theory to prove that time travel is possible, in theory. That is, time travel fitting a layperson’s understanding of the concept as moving “backwards and forwards thr...

“Not hypothesis driven.” With those words and a fatal grade of “Very Good,” a fellow reviewer on a funding agency panel consigned the proposal we were discussing to the wastebasket. I listened in dismay. Certainly the proposal had hypotheses, though it didn’t have boldface sentences beginning “We hypothesize . . .” as signposts for inattentive readers. Then I remembered the famous words from Isaac Newton’s Principia: Hypotheses non fingo. “I do not frame hypotheses.” If that approach worked for Newton, why do we have such a mania for hypothesis-driven research today? The emphasis on hypothesis-driven research in proposals is strangely embedded in the scientific community, with no obvious origin in funding agencies. The word hypothesis appears nowhere in the NSF guide to writing and reviewing proposals, and only once in the National Institutes of Health proposal guide. Yet grant-writing experts universally stress that proposals should be built around hypotheses and warn that those not w...

For centuries, astronomers and scientists have sought to understand how our Solar System came to be. Since that time, two theories have become commonly-accepted that explain how it formed and evolved over time. These are the Nebular Hypothesis and the Nice Model, respectively. Whereas the former contends that the Sun and planets formed from a large cloud of dust and gas, the latter maintains the giant planets have migrated since their formation. This is what has led to the Solar System as we know it today. However, an enduring mystery about these theories is how Mars came to be the way it is. Why, for example, is it significantly smaller than Earth and inhospitable to life as we know it when all indications show that it should be comparable in size? According to a new study by an international team of scientists, the migration of the giant planets could have been what made the difference. For over a decade, astronomers have been operating under the assumption that shortly after the for...

NASA recently delivered $10 million in funding to Ad Astra Rocket Company of Texas for further development of its Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), an electromagnetic thruster proficient of propelling a spaceship to Mars in just 39 days. NASA’s funding was part of the “12 Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnership.” Ad Astra’s rocket will travel ten times quicker than today’s chemical rockets while using one-tenth the amount of fuel. The VASIMR system would cut the trip to Mars by months according to Franklin Chang Diaz, a former MIT student, NASA astronaut, and now CEO of Ad Astra. According to Diaz, “this is like no other rocket that you may have seen in the past. It is a plasma rocket. The VASIMR Rocket is not used for launching things; it is used for things already in orbit. This is called “in-space propulsion.” VASIMR heats plasma, an electrically charged gas, to exceptionally high temperatures using radio waves. The system then offers thrust by fun...

Forget about today’s modest incremental advances in artificial intelligence, such as the increasing abilities of cars to drive themselves. Waiting in the wings might be a groundbreaking development: a machine that is aware of itself and its surroundings, and that could take in and process massive amounts of data in real time. It could be sent on dangerous missions, into space or combat. In addition to driving people around, it might be able to cook, clean, do laundry – and even keep humans company when other people aren’t nearby. A particularly advanced set of machines could replace humans at literally all jobs. That would save humanity from workaday drudgery, but it would also shake many societal foundations. A life of no work and only play may turn out to be a dystopia. Conscious machines would also raise troubling legal and ethical problems. Would a conscious machine be a “person” under law and be liable if its actions hurt someone, or if something goes wrong? To think of a more fri...

Engineers from the Voyager team dug up decades-old data to send a message to the intrepid spacecraft 13 BILLION MILES AWAY asking it to repurpose thrusters that have not been fired since November 1980. Astonishingly, even travelling at the speed of light, the signal took more than 17 hours to travel from NASA to Voyager 1 out in interstellar space. Jet propulsion engineer Todd Barber said:“The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all.” Voyager 1 uses thrusters to orientate itself so it can send messages to earth as it ventures deeper into unexplored space. After information sent to earth revealed that the thrusters designed to allow the craft to communicate with earth were losing power and having to work harder ingenious NASA engineers were able to figure out a fix from billions of miles away. The thruster test was designed to see if the “trajectory correction manoeuvre” (TCM) thrusters co...

Physicists at the world’s leading atom smasher are calling for help. In the next decade, they plan to produce up to 20 times more particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) than they do now, but current detector systems aren’t fit for the coming deluge. So this week, a group of LHC physicists has teamed up with computer scientists to launch a competition to spur the development of artificial-intelligence techniques that can quickly sort through the debris of these collisions. Researchers hope these will help the experiment’s ultimate goal of revealing fundamental insights into the laws of nature. At the LHC at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, two bunches of protons collide head-on inside each of the machine’s detectors 40 million times a second. Every proton collision can produce thousands of new particles, which radiate from a collision point at the centre of each cathedral-sized detector. Millions of silicon sensors are arranged in onion-like layers...