Science Megathread

[Frodo]

https://twitter.com/NYTScience/status/1512595610918039553
And just to orient ourselves:



This is how the shoreline would have looked at the time of the impact.  The asteroid hit what was a shallow sea.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Fascinating video about cardboard.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

https://scitechdaily-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/scitechdaily.com/nasa-makes-first-of-its-kind-detection-of-reduced-human-co2-emissions/amp/

NASA Makes First-of-Its-Kind Detection of Reduced Human CO2 Emissions
By Jessica Merzdorf Evans, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center on Apr 02, 2022

For the first time, researchers have spotted short-term, regional fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) across the globe due to emissions from human activities.

Using a combination of NASA satellites and atmospheric modeling, the scientists performed a first-of-its-kind detection of human CO2 emissions changes. The new study uses data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) to measure drops in CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 pandemic from space. With daily and monthly data products now available to the public, this opens new possibilities for tracking the collective effects of human activities on CO2 concentrations in near real-time.

Previous studies investigated the effects of lockdowns early in the pandemic and found that global CO2 levels dropped slightly in 2020. However, by combining OCO-2’s high-resolution data with modeling and data analysis tools from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS), the team was able to narrow down which monthly changes were due to human activity and which were due to natural causes at a regional scale. This confirms previous estimates based on economic and human activity data.

[Frodo]

Early human habitats linked to past climate shifts


Preferred habitats of Homo sapiens (purple shading, left), Homo heidelbergensis (red shading, middle), Homo neanderthalensis (blue shading, right) calculated from a new paleoclimate model simulation conducted at the IBS Center for Climate Physics and a compilation of fossil and archeological data. Lighter values indicate higher habitat suitability. The dates (1 ka = 1000 years before present) refer to the estimated ages of the youngest and oldest fossils used in the study. Credit: Institute for Basic Science

A study published in Nature by an international team of scientists provides clear evidence for a link between astronomically-driven climate change and human evolution.

By combining the most extensive database of well-dated fossil remains and archeological artifacts with an unprecedented new supercomputer model simulating earth's climate history of the past 2 million years, the team of experts in climate modeling, anthropology and ecology was able to determine under which environmental conditions archaic humans likely lived.

The impact of climate change on human evolution has long been suspected, but has been difficult to demonstrate due to the paucity of climate records near human fossil-bearing sites. To bypass this problem, the team instead investigated what the climate in their computer simulation was like at the times and places humans lived, according to the archeological record. This revealed the preferred environmental conditions of different groups of hominins. This study considers the following hominin species: Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis (including African and Eurasian populations), Homo erectus and early African Homo (including Homo ergaster and Homo habilis). From there, the team looked for all the places and times those conditions occurred in the model, creating time-evolving maps of potential hominin habitats.

"Even though different groups of archaic humans preferred different climatic environments, their habitats all responded to climate shifts caused by astronomical changes in earth's axis wobble, tilt, and orbital eccentricity with timescales ranging from 21 to 400 thousand years," said Axel Timmermann, lead author of the study and Director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

We already know this Blks we're the original Hebrews, Jews were the original Cavemen, Albinos nice to Europe and started resembling Celts and started to move throughout the Globe and became Asians and Native Americans and Latinos developed from the Asians and Celtics were the last to developed and Pharoahs and Hebrews became Ancient Egypt many of the descendants of Sudanese Pharoahs light skinned blacks and Hebrew Queens had Arab children it's in the Bible that Abraham has an Egyptian slave and had Arab children, so we just moved to different continents and speak different languages but we either as Africans evolved from Pharoah and black Pharoahs or Abraham a Hebrew, Blks aren't Jews they speak the Arab language so there you go

Father Abraham belong to every race except African, that's why the song says Father Abraham had seven sons and seven sons had father Abraham

You don't have to keep posting on your knowledge about humans it's nice but I said it many times on the Forum our Ancestors are the Hebrew Queens and the Sudanese Blk PHAROAHS

Hebrews and CELTS the Cavemen of the White, Arab and Asian races development of caves in Europe, Asia, Africans and Dinosaurs are homogeneous to Africa only

[Frodo]

This is our first-ever image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.  Not as sexy as the computer animations we are accustomed to seeing admittedly:

Here's our first real image of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole


This long-exposure image of our galaxy's supermassive black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. Credit: EHT Collaboration

https://twitter.com/BBCEarth/status/1524757183577083904

[emailking]

And to think, many galaxies have a black hole 1000 times bigger than that.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

My guess is that the hottest it can get on Earth because of Global Warming is 8*C/14.4*F hotter than it is today. The average temperature over the whole world was 55*F in 1850 and now is around 57*F. So in a worst case scenario, I think we could see an average global temperature of 20*C/69*F. That's about what Jacksonville is today. So no. The world isn't suddenly going to be like Venus or something like that. What it could mean is that our society can't adapt and collapses us into a Dark Age or something like that. I think the typical bad ending will be something out of the documentary Earth2100.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gcb.15871

Climate change research and action must look beyond 2100

Anthropogenic activity is changing Earth's climate and ecosystems in ways that are potentially dangerous and disruptive to humans. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise, ensuring that these changes will be felt for centuries beyond 2100, the current benchmark for projection. Estimating the effects of past, current, and potential future emissions to only 2100 is therefore short-sighted. Critical problems for food production and climate-forced human migration are projected to arise well before 2100, raising questions regarding the habitability of some regions of the Earth after the turn of the century. To highlight the need for more distant horizon scanning, we model climate change to 2500 under a suite of emission scenarios and quantify associated projections of crop viability and heat stress. Together, our projections show global climate impacts increase significantly after 2100 without rapid mitigation. As a result, we argue that projections of climate and its effects on human well-being and associated governance and policy must be framed beyond 2100

Wow, sounds like my NationStates worldbuilding written as a scholarly article

[Frodo]

Central Asia (the crossroads of the Silk Road, as it happens) is the most likely source of the bacterium that caused the Black Death pandemic that devastated medieval Europe:

Where Did the Black Death Start? Thanks to Ancient DNA, Scientists May Have Answers
The devastating disease possibly began in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan


A map of the area where researchers believe the plague began -Nature

[NYDem]

A bit old now, but I haven't seen it posted in the thread yet: New data suggests that the W Boson is heavier than predicted than the standard model. This measurement is 7 standard deviations beyond what the standard model predicts, the most contradictory experimental result yet. The standard model has held up well in almost all experiments, so this is quite significant.

https://astronomy.com/news/2022/04/trillions-of-collisions-show-the-w-boson-is-more-massive-than-expected#:~:text=The%20W%20boson's%20mass%20came,times%20the%20margin%20of%20error.

To avoid any bias creeping into the analysis, nobody could see any results until the full calculation was complete.

When the physics world finally saw the result on April 7, 2022, we were all surprised. Physicists measure elementary particle masses in units of millions of electron volts – shortened to MeV. The W boson’s mass came out to be 80,433 MeV – 70 MeV higher than what the Standard Model predicts it should be. This may seem like a tiny excess, but the measurement is accurate to within 9 MeV. This is a deviation of nearly eight times the margin of error. When my colleagues and I saw the result, our reaction was a resounding “wow!”

[Frodo]

Built on backs of slaves: New mapping shows clearer picture of SC’s historic rice fields

More than 236,000 acres of rice fields spanning 160 miles once covered coastal South Carolina, according to a recent mapping project that used modern tools to document the massive footprint of the Lowcountry’s antebellum rice culture.

Building the ponds and dikes and maintaining them with slaves could be deadly work, with disease such as malaria, extreme heat and even alligators constant threats.

“Imagine the labor it took two centuries ago to convert our woodland swamps and coastal marshes into agricultural fields and how these workers learned to use the river tides to water and drain these fields,” said Ernie Wiggers. “It is an uncomfortable story to tell because enslaved people provided the labor.”

Wiggers, a wildlife biologist who led the project, said the revised acreage — which is more than double previous estimates — contextualizes the human and ecological toll of “forced conversion” of land for agriculture.

South Carolina, at one point, was the country’s No. 1 rice producer. But turning swamps into rice fields and managing the labor-intensive crop, Wiggers said, came at a “huge cost” in the lives of slaves for hundreds of years before the system collapsed following the Civil War.

[Frodo]

Artificial intelligence has officially made its debut in the world of science and medicine:

https://twitter.com/hstump/status/1553211909750415360
And here is the original source.

[Frodo]

The James Webb Space Telescope may have taken much of the glory, but it is worth noting it is not the only telescope that is coming online:

https://twitter.com/MikeOtley/status/1557619908162322432

[Frodo]

It seems we were bipedal long before Lucy started walking through the African savannah:

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1563009595877953537

[Frodo]

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1563745690089656321

[Frodo]

We weren't just scavengers 2 million years ago:
 
Ancient Humans Were Apex Predators For 2 Million Years, Study Finds

[Frodo]

Another theory posits that Neanderthals were essentially screwed out of existence by Homo Sapiens, as opposed to being simply hunted down and killed.  Or being out-competed because we were more innovative than they were, and we had more expansive social networks that enabled us to find more mates and have more children.  I suspect the truth is a mix of all of the above:

Sex, not violence, could’ve sealed the fate of the Neanderthals
More evidence emerges that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens made love and not war thousands of years ago.

 

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Of course the Ancient humans were Sudanese , Arabs, and Hebrews whom dined on meat but no Pork then we started eating pork later

[Liminal Trans Girl]

Does anyone know what the Great Attractor is?

[Meclazine for Israel]

A guy testing a small piece of a neutron star.

Neutron Star

https://fb.watch/h8T4tryQsM/

Very interesting guy.

[Torrain]

Does anyone know what the Great Attractor is?

It's either:

• The massive gravitational anomaly at the centre of our multi-galactic supercluster, a scientific uncertainty, due to its apparent mass, far greater than what it should be.
• A pick-up artist's Youtube username.

[Frodo]

Study reveals how ancient fish colonized the deep sea

The deep sea contains more than 90% of the water in our oceans, but only about a third of all fish species. Scientists have long thought the explanation for this was intuitive — shallow ocean waters are warm and full of resources, making them a prime location for new species to evolve and thrive. But a new University of Washington study led by Elizabeth Miller reports that throughout Earth’s ancient history, there were several periods of time when many fish actually favored the cold, dark, barren waters of the deep sea.

In some ways, this discovery raised more questions than it answered. What was causing fish to prefer one habitat over another? What made some fish able to move into the deep sea more easily than others? And how did these ancient shifts help create the diversity of species we have today?

When Miller mapped these flip-flopping speciation rates onto a timeline of Earth’s history, she was able to identify three major events that likely played a role.

[Frodo]

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1612490704118288396

[Meclazine for Israel]

Antimatter

Does it exist? How much does it cost to make? Should the Universe exist?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-19/antimatter-factory-physics-most-expensive-explosive-substance/101948092

[Frodo]

These new spacesuits are coming out later this decade: