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https://steemit.com/politics/@gungasnake/the-coming-green-dark-age

The appearance of a massive white cap on Uranus may seem alarming, but as planetary scientists are learning, this is what a prolonged summer looks like on the remote ice giant. Ice giants Uranus and Neptune have water-rich interiors coated with hydrogen, helium, and a pinch of methane, the latter of which gives these outer planets their distinctive cyan complexion. Unlike Earth, where seasons last just a few months, Neptune and Uranus experience seasons that last for decades, resulting in strange and intense atmospheric phenomena. New images released by the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program highlight a evolving atmospheric...

Two astronomical observatories in Mexico have scaled back access and operations because of security threats, Mexico’s National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE) in San Andrés Cholula announced on 5 February. The Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) and the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-Ray Observatory (HAWC) are both located on the Sierra Negra volcano in the Mexican state of Puebla. The highway leading to the mountain has become a target for carjackings and robberies in recent weeks, as a fight intensifies between the Mexican government and fuel thieves. Scientists and technical staff have stopped visits to the HAWC, canceling a planned...

Quantum physics sets the laws that dominate the universe at a small scale. The ability to harness quantum phenomena could lead to machines like quantum computers, which are predicted to perform certain calculations much faster than conventional computers. One major problem with building quantum processors is that the tracking and controlling quantum systems in real time is a difficult task because quantum systems are overwhelmingly fragile: Manipulating these systems carelessly introduces significant errors in the final result. New work by a team at Aalto could lead to precise quantum computers. The researchers report controlling quantum phenomena in a custom-designed electrical...

British billionaire Richard Branson plans to travel to space within the next four or five months aboard his own Virgin Galactic spaceship, he told AFP Thursday. "My wish is to go up on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, that's what we're working on," the head of the Virgin group said on the sidelines of an event to honor Virgin Galactic at the Air and Space Museum in Washington. The American Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon July 20, 1969.Virgin Galactic is one of two companies, along with Blue Origin, on its way to sending passengers into space—though...

At some point during human evolution, a handful of genetic changes triggered a dramatic threefold expansion of the brain's neocortex, the wrinkly outermost layer of brain tissue responsible for everything from language to self-awareness to abstract thought. Identifying what drove this evolutionary shift is fundamental to understanding what makes us human, but has been particularly challenging for scientists because of ethical prohibitions against studying the developing brains of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, in the lab. "By birth, the human cortex is already twice as large as in the chimpanzee, so we need to go back much earlier into...

A 52-million-year fossil of a "perching bird" has been found in Wyoming with its feathers still attached, a discovery that "no one's ever seen before." Also known as passerines, the perching bird was discovered in Fossil Lake, WY. Passerines are well-known for eating seeds, as most modern-day birds do and account for approximately 65 percent of the 10,000 different species of birds alive today. "This is one of the earliest known perching birds. It's fascinating because passerines today make up most of all bird species, but they were extremely rare back then. This particular piece is just exquisite," said Field...

HELLO, Race Fans and Welcome to the FR Home for NASCAR Racing 2019. I'm going to try this Season running one Thread and breaking in for each Week adding to this one Thread. We may change that after We get rolling that plan doesn't work so well but I want to try it for a while.

McCandless was wearing a type of jetpack known as the Manned Maneuvering Unit, or MMU. The MMU fit over a regular EMU spacesuit and included gas thrusters that allowed astronauts to venture much farther away from the space shuttle. McCandless was able to venture 320 feet away from the space shuttle Challenger. The MMU was used during three space shuttle missions in 1984, and astronauts used it to retrieve two faulty communications satellites.

More than 21 million people worldwide suffer from schizophrenia, a profound mental illness that interrupts thinking, language and perception. Quite a few schizophrenic people experience delusions and hear voices. Many of the disease’s symptoms stem from faulty communication between brain cells. And, for decades, scientists have searched for a cure in the brain.Now researchers say they’ve discovered that the way to heal schizophrenia might be through the gut. There’s an ecosystem of bacteria and microbes that live in our digestive tracts, known as the gut microbiome. And these may lead to some features of schizophrenia, an international team of scientists...

The first two tiny satellites to ever go interplanetary have fallen silent in deep space for some unknown reason, and it’s likely we may never hear from them again. But for NASA, which launched the probes last year, this loss of communication isn’t considered a failure. Before the pair went quiet, these vehicles demonstrated that tiny satellites could become critical tools for exploring other worlds deep within our Solar System. The silent satellites are the two MarCO probes — nicknamed EVE and WALL-E from Pixar’s sci-fi movie — which flew to Mars along with NASA’s InSight lander last year. Both...

Now we tackle, using newly available data, what may have caused the fictitious temperature trend in the latter decades of the 20th century. We first look at ocean data. There was a great shift, after 1980, in the way Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) were measured (see Goretzki and Kennedy et al. JGR 2011, Fig. 2), "Sources of SST data." Note the drastic changes between 1980 and 2000 as global floating drifter buoys geographic changes increasingly replaced opportunities for sampling SST with buckets. Data taken from floating drifter buoys increased from zero to 60% between 1980 and 2000. But such buoys...

Last year was Earth's 4th-warmest year on record, coming in behind 2016, the planet's warmest recorded year, as well as 2015 and 2017, according to information released Wednesday by NOAA, NASA and the U.K. Met Office. Why it matters: The yearly rankings don't tell the whole story of long-term climate change, since natural variability can still push or pull an individual year up or down the rankings. However, the overall picture is growing starker with each passing year. Nine of the 10 warmest years on record since reliable data began in 1880 have occurred since 2005. At the same time,...

On Feb. 6, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Al Shepard became the first person to hit a golf ball on the moon. Though he was there doing scientific research, the impromptu one-man game of golf was really just for fun -- and it was on live television. Shepard made a makeshift golf club with a six-iron head that he smuggled from Earth, and he attached it to the handle of a lunar excavation tool. Shepard brought two golf balls to hit. Because his spacesuit wasn't very flexible, he could only swing with one hand.One of the balls went into a nearby crater, and...

For decades, scientists have sought to give computers common sense—a basic understanding of the world that lets humans navigate everything from conversation to city traffic. Now, researchers have come up with a new approach: They’ve designed an artificial intelligence (AI) that can abstract knowledge and generalize it to play the surprisingly subtle drawing game Pictionary. “This is a first step toward exploiting common sense,” says Aniruddha Kembhavi, a computer scientist on the project at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), a nonprofit lab in Seattle, Washington. Angeliki Lazaridou, a computer scientist at DeepMind in London who tried the game, agrees....

If math is the language of the universe, bees may have just uttered their first words. New research suggests these busybodies of the insect world are capable of addition and subtraction—using colors in the place of plus and minus symbols. In the animal kingdom, the ability to count—or at least distinguish between differing quantities—isn’t unusual: It has been seen in frogs, spiders, and even fish. But solving equations using symbols is rare air, so far only achieved by famously brainy animals such as chimpanzees and African grey parrots. Enter the honey bee (Apis mellifera). Building on prior research that says...

A team of researchers with the Swedish Natural History Museum and Uppsala University has found evidence of hopping by a 20-million-year-old kangaroo relative. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes their study of fossils unearthed in northwest Queensland, Australia, and what they found. Scientists have been puzzling over the history of kangaroo hopping for many years—because of the lack of kangaroo fossils older than 2 million years, though, it has been difficult to pinpoint when they evolved from walking or climbing creatures to animals that stand upright and get around by hopping. Prior...

A new dinosaur species, notable for a row of two-foot spines protruding from its neck, has been discovered by scientists in Argentina. Scientists have dubbed the new dinosaur, “Bajadasaurus,” an herbivore that lived 140 million years ago, according to the scientific journal Nature, which first revealed the findings. Its name is an amalgam of Spanish, Greek, and Latin, meaning “lizard from Bajada with forward-bending spines.” The dinosaur's unusual "spines" have fueled a wave of speculation about what purpose they may have served. Pablo Gallina, a paleontologist who first came across a set of its teeth in 2010, said the “long and sharp...

Trump is handing the Magnetic North Pole without even a whimper. I'm shocked at this development.

“I don’t like that full feeling when I’m running, so I don’t drink that much.” For Judy Williams, a 56-year-old single mom from Riverview, Florida, this statement doesn’t hold true anymore, at least not after a life altering hospital visit in 2015 after she ran the Gasparilla Distance Classic. Williams has been racing in the Classic since 1989, and she loves doing all four challenges: the 5K, 8K, 15K, and half marathon over the course of two days. She even ran while pregnant with her two daughters, Kelly, 19, and Abby, 18. The Classic is the race Williams looks forward...