THE COSMOS NEWS

Stephen Hawking, best-known physicist of his time, has died

2018-03-14T16:20:00.000+09:00

Stephen Hawking, best-known physicist of his time, has died

In this March 6, 2017 file photo, Britain's Professor Stephen Hawking delivers a keynote speech as he receives the Honorary Freedom of the City of London during a ceremony at the Guildhall in the City of London. Hawking, whose brilliant …more

Stephen Hawking, whose brilliant mind ranged across time and space though his body was paralyzed by disease, died early Wednesday, a University of Cambridge spokesman said. He was 76 years old.

Hawking died peacefully at his home in Cambridge, England.

The best-known theoretical physicist of his time, Hawking wrote so lucidly of the mysteries of space, time and black holes that his book, "A Brief History of Time," became an international best seller, making him one of science's biggest celebrities since Albert Einstein.

"He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years," his children Lucy, Robert and Tim said in a statement. "He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world. He once said, 'It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love.' We will miss him forever."

Even though his body was attacked by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, when Hawking was 21, he stunned doctors by living with the normally fatal illness for more than 50 years. A severe attack of pneumonia in 1985 left him breathing through a tube, forcing him to communicate through an electronic voice synthesizer that gave him his distinctive robotic monotone.

But he continued his scientific work, appeared on television and married for a second time.

As one of Isaac Newton's successors as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Hawking was involved in the search for the great goal of physics—a "unified theory."

Such a theory would resolve the contradictions between Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which describes the laws of gravity that govern the motion of large objects like planets, and the Theory of Quantum Mechanics, which deals with the world of subatomic particles.

In this March 30, 2015 file photo, Professor Stephen Hawking poses for photographers upon arrival for the Interstellar Live show at the Royal Albert Hall in central London. Hawking, whose brilliant mind ranged across time and space though …more

For Hawking, the search was almost a religious quest—he said finding a "theory of everything" would allow mankind to "know the mind of God."

"A complete, consistent unified theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence," he wrote in "A Brief History of Time."

In later years, though, he suggested a unified theory might not exist.

He followed up "A Brief History of Time" in 2001 with the more accessible sequel "The Universe in a Nutshell," updating readers on concepts like super gravity, naked singularities and the possibility of an 11-dimensional universe.

Hawking said belief in a God who intervenes in the universe "to make sure the good guys win or get rewarded in the next life" was wishful thinking.

"But one can't help asking the question: Why does the universe exist?" he said in 1991. "I don't know an operational way to give the question or the answer, if there is one, a meaning. But it bothers me."

The combination of his best-selling book and his almost total disability—for a while he could use a few fingers, later he could only tighten the muscles on his face—made him one of science's most recognizable faces.

He made cameo television appearances in "The Simpsons" and "Star Trek" and counted among his fans U2 guitarist The Edge, who attended a January 2002 celebration of Hawking's 60th birthday.

NASA’s Juno Orbiter Delivers Spectacular New Photos of Jupiter

2018-01-10T19:52:00.003+09:00

NASA’s Juno Orbiter Delivers Spectacular New Photos of Jupiter

2018-01-10T19:52:00.001+09:00

The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program:Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money

2017-12-18T09:11:00.001+09:00

Pentagon Secret UFO Sightings: The Strangest Discoveries in Search for Aliens

A secretive Pentagon program investigating unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and evidence of alien life has been uncovered, revealing several sightings of peculiar aircraft by members of the U.S. military.

The Pentagon claims that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was terminated in 2012 after five years in order to focus time and resources on other issues.

But despite the Pentagon insisting the program—first reported by The New York Times on Saturday—ended with the termination of its funding, its backers claim it is still in existence. Below are some of the most bizarre sightings laid out in the declassified reports.

Pentagon UFO Sightings: Las Vegas Research Facility

In order to investigate reports of UFO sightings, a building in Las Vegas was modified to house any materials that were suspected to have come from an unidentified flying object.

A sign off route U.S. 285, north of Roswell, New Mexico, points west to the alleged 1947 crash site of a flying saucer on the Corn Ranch. Reuters

This reportedly included metal alloys and plastics, while a section of the facility was also used to study people who claimed to have had contact with the objects that resulted in physical and physiological changes.

The Las Vegas-based facility also described sightings of flying objects that remained airborne despite no visible signs of propulsion or lift.

Pentagon UFO Sightings: ‘Whole fleet’ of Glowing Auras

Among the UFO sightings investigated by the U.S. Department of Defense was a rotating glowing aura that travelled at high speeds. The footage was captured from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet, though officials refused to give more details about the time or date of the sightings.

An audio recording from the Navy pilots who witnessed the peculiar aerial phenomena suggests there was more than one of the UFOs. “There’s a whole fleet of them,” one pilot is heard saying.

Another pilot responds: “My gosh. They are all going against the wind, the wind is 120 miles to the west… look at that thing dude.”

Aerial photo of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virgina on September 26, 2003. (Photo by Andy Dunaway/USAF via Getty Images)

Pentagon UFO Sightings: Oval object in San Diego

Program officials also investigated events that took place prior to the program coming into existence, studying videos captured by cameras aboard military aircraft.

This included a 2004 video of a bright oval-shaped object off the coast of San Diego, which was determined by the pilots of the fighter jets pursuing it to be the size of a commercial aircraft.

Pentagon UFO Sightings: ‘Black Money’ Funding

The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was funded with less than 0.004 percent of the Defense Department’s annual budget, which is partly why it has gone unreported for more than a decade.

The $22 million funding came thanks to Nevada Democrat and UFO enthusiast Harry Reid, who passed the majority of the money to his friend Robert Bigelow’s aerospace research firm Bigelow Aerospace.

If anyone says they have the answers, they’re fooling themselves.

We don’t know the answers but we have plenty of evidence to support asking the questions. This is about science and national security. If America doesn’t take the lead in answering these questions, others will.
— Senator Harry Reid (@SenatorReid) December 16, 2017

Reid referred to these funds as “black money,” as only himself and two other senators—Alaska Republican Ted Stevens and Hawaii Democrat Daniel K. Inouye—knew of the program.

Stephen Hawking:Cigar-shaped asteroid 'Oumuamua' could be an alien space...

2017-12-15T00:58:00.001+09:00

Even Stephen Hawking thinks mysterious cigar-shaped asteroid 'Oumuamua' could be an alien spaceship

It's the first object discovered in the solar system that appears to have originated from another part of the galaxy

A scientific body backed by Stephen Hawking is investigating whether a cigar-shaped object that zipped through our solar system earlier this year could have been an alien spaceship.

Astronomers from the University of Hawaii first spotted the mysterious celestial body known as "Oumuamua" in October, when it passed the Earth at about 85 times the distance to the moon.

It is the first object discovered in the solar system that appears to have originated from another part of the galaxy.

Although thought to be an asteroid, Oumuamua's elongated shape - hundreds of metres in length but only one tenth as wide - is highly unusual for a space rock.

Travelling at up to 196,000 mph, the object's high speed also suggests that it is not gravitationally bound to the sun but is destined to head back out of the solar system.

Artist's impression showing the first interstellar asteroid: Oumuamua (Image: PA)

Now Breakthrough Listen , a $100 million programme backed by British physicist Stephen Hawking, Russian digital tech mogul Yuri Milner, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is investigating whether Oumuamua may have unnatural origins.

The organisation, whose aim is to search for evidence of civilizations beyond Earth, is using the world's largest manoeuvrable radio telescope at Green Bank in West Virginia to track the object.

The giant dish began "listening" to the object across four radio frequency bands on Wednesday, December 13, in an attempt to detect electromagnetic signals that cannot be produced in nature.

The detection of these signals could indicate the object is not an interstellar asteroid, as many believe, but some kind of alien starship .

The Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia, US which is tracking Oumuamua (Image: PA)

"Researchers working on long-distance space transportation have previously suggested that a cigar or needle shape is the most likely architecture for an interstellar spacecraft, since this would minimise friction and damage from interstellar gas and dust," said Breakthrough Listen in a statement.

"While a natural origin is more likely, there is currently no consensus on what that origin might have been, and Breakthrough Listen is well positioned to explore the possibility that Oumuamua could be an artifact."

Meanwhile, Dr Jason Wright, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, claims the motion of the strange object could be key to discovering its origin.

Rather than speeding smoothly through space like a rocket or an aeroplane, astronomers believe that Oumuamua is "tumbling" through our solar system.

According to Dr Wright, this is consistent with the motion of a spaceship whose engines have failed.

"Such derelict craft would, if they are not travelling so fast that they escape the Galaxy, eventually 'thermalize' with the stars and end up drifting around like any other interstellar comet or asteroid," he wrote in a blog post .

"In fact, since they (presumably) no longer have attitude control, one would expect that they would eventually begin to tumble, and if they are very rigid that tumbling might distinguish them from ordinary interstellar asteroids... and in fact, just because their propulsion is broken doesn’t mean that their radio transmitters would be broken..."

The object is currently about two astronomical units (AU) from Earth - or twice the distance between the Earth and sun.

At this distance it would take less than a minute for the Green Bank telescope to detect an omnidirectional transmitter with the power of a mobile phone.

Oumuamua comes from another part of the galaxy (Image: PA)

Even if no evidence of extraterrestrial technology is found, the search could provide important information about gases surrounding Oumuamua or the presence or absence of water, according to the researchers.

"Oumuamua's presence within our solar system affords Breakthrough Listen an opportunity to reach unprecedented sensitivities to possible artificial transmitters," said Listen’s Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley SETI Research Center.

"Whether this object turns out to be artificial or natural, it’s a great target for Listen ."

Breakthrough Listen aims to survey a million nearby stars and 100 nearby galaxies looking for alien signals.

Since the 1960s, there have been more than 98 SETI projects around the world, none of which have turned up any convincing evidence of extraterrestrial civilisations.

TRACES of Noah’s Ark have been found on a mountain according to researchers

2017-12-10T21:46:00.001+09:00

Noah’s Ark FOUND? Researchers believe THIS mountain is biblical ship’s final resting place

TRACES of Noah’s Ark have been found on a mountain according to researchers who believe it is the final resting place of the ship.

Ark investigators believe they have found traces of a wooden structure on Mount Ararat, also known as Agri Mountain, in Agri, Turkey.

American researcher Professor Paul Esprante said he intends finding more evidence to prove the Ark landed there.

He was one of 108 scientists from Turkey and around the world speaking at the three-day International Symposium of Mount Ararat and Noah's Ark in Agri, which looks at evidence put forward for the Ark's final resting place.

He said: “My purpose is to visit the sites around the mountain to find clues about catastrophic events in the past.

“I think that rigorous, serious scientific work is needed in the area, and I would like to collaborate in that.

"We have technical resources and we can work together with local experts.

"The result of my findings will be published in books, publications and journals, but at this point it is too early to know what we are going to find.

“Once the scientific community knows about the existence of Noah’s Ark in Mount Ararat, we can make it available to the general public.”

Istanbul University Prof Dr Oktay Belli said: “Noah’s Ark, the Flood is not a myth but a real incident mentioned in all holy books.”

According to Genesis 8:4 the Ark landed on the “mountains of Ararat” on the 150th day of the great flood.

Dr Andrew Snelling wrote on Answersingenesis.org: "Several teams have continued searching for the real Ark.

"Most of them have focused on Mount Ararat in northeastern Turkey, where eyewitness accounts of a wooden structure have spurred interest for centuries.

"The biblical reference to 'mountains of Ararat' as the landing site of the Ark suggests those mountains formed well before the Flood ended.

"The Flood was a global catastrophe that totally reshaped the earth’s geology, and the earth’s surface has continued to change since then.

"Perhaps the geology of the modern Mount Ararat region sheds light on whether we should be looking for Noah’s Ark on that mountain."

Dr Snelling is not convinced it is the right location.

“My purpose is to visit the sites around the mountain to find clues about catastrophic events in the past.”

Professor Paul Esprante

He added: "The volcano now called Mount Ararat did not grow until well after the ocean (flood) waters had retreated.

"Furthermore, the lavas and ash layers of Mount Ararat date to the time of the post-Flood Ice Age.

"This is consistent with Mount Ararat being built after the Flood on top of a dry plateau.

"Mount Ararat is thus a post-Flood volcano, which continued to erupt, most recently less than 200 years ago.

"Thus, from my perspective as a biblical geologist, I do not expect to find Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat.

"Instead, it must have landed on another high mountain in the region at that time."

There have been claims made in previous years for evidence of the ark being found on the peak.

In April 2010 a team of team of evangelical Christian explorers claimed to find the remains of Noah's ark beneath snow and volcanic debris on Mount Ararat.

Turkish and Chinese explorers from a group called Noah's Ark Ministries International made the claim.

Filmmaker eung Wing-cheung said: "It's not 100 percent that it is Noah's ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it."

However, the claim was not widely accepted or confirmed.

Paul Zimansky, then an archaeologist specialising in the Middle East at Stony Brook University in New York State, said: "I don't know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn't find it."

Slowing Down Earth Rotation will Cause Great Earthquakes in 2018

2017-11-23T11:14:00.001+09:00

Scientists warn of huge earthquakes in 2018 due to Earth’s slowing rotation

Mike Wehner

High-budget Hollywood disaster flicks love to make up weird natural phenomena to vaguely explain why a bunch of crazy catastrophes are about to threaten the very existence of mankind, but they’re almost always complete bunk. Now, a new study featuring actual science suggests that 2018 could see a spike in huge earthquakes around the globe, and it’s thanks to the Earth’s rotation slowing down.

The research, which was presented in a paper by scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Montana at Missoula, focuses on historic earthquake trends and seems to draw a pretty strong link between periods of slower Earth rotation and rashes of major quakes.

It sure sounds like a sci-fi plot point, but the science is based purely in reality. The study’s authors plotted earthquake activity going back over 100 years, and thanks to the wealth of data available they were able to determine that the temporary slowing of Earth’s rotation seems to be linked to the most devastating and frequent earthquake outbreaks.

The Earth’s rotation is usually incredibly consistent, but it does go through brief spells where it rotates a tad slower than normal. The change would never be noticeable to anyone if not for the precise equipment scientists use to measure it, and it only affects the length of the day by milliseconds at most. These temporary dips are a well documented phenomenon, but they never last long before the Earth starts to speed back up again.

During these periods, the researchers say that major earthquakes — that is, quakes that register a magnitude of 7 or greater — happen with much greater frequency. In an average year we expect a little over a dozen of these types of quakes around the world, but in years where the Earth’s rotation slows that number spikes to has high as 30. In 2018 the Earth is expected to reach its slowest rotational speed before picking up the pace once more, and that could spell doom for earthquake-prone regions.

“Next year we should see a significant increase in numbers of severe earthquakes,” study co-author Roger Bilham explains. “We have had it easy this year. So far we have only had about six severe earthquakes. We could easily have 20 a year starting in 2018.”

Cosmic rays reveal mysterious void in Egypt's Great Pyramid

2017-11-03T22:23:00.001+09:00

High above Egypt and everywhere else, cosmic rays bombard the atmosphere.

The rays consist mostly of hydrogen nuclei, but they finish their interstellar journey with a bang, splitting into a shower of smaller elementary particles when they hit the sky. Negatively charged particles called muons wink into existence and out again within millionths of a second, shooting downward at nearly the speed of light. Each minute, muons rocket through your skull by the hundreds. Muons are so small that they're harmless. They're also tough to detect.

But they're not undetectable to physicists, who can use the particles' trajectory to peer through otherwise impenetrable substances, the way an X-ray reveals a fractured bone.

Now, by monitoring the cosmic rain on Egypt's Great Pyramid, an international research team has detected a large void hidden within 4,500-year-old stone structure.

The 455-foot-tall Great Pyramid, or Khufu's Pyramid, is the last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing. The newly discovered void is nearly 100 feet long. The cavity is above and similar in size to the Grand Gallery, a passage through the pyramid's belly that leads to the King's Chamber.

"They really hit pay dirt," said Roy Schwitters, an expert in experimental high-energy physics at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved with this project. "It's a very convincing story they have."

The mission to probe the pyramids of Giza, named ScanPyramids, began in 2015. It is a joint program between Cairo University and the French nonprofit HIP Institute, with guidance from the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. In the new discovery, which the journal Nature published Thursday, scientists from those institutions teamed up with Japanese physicists and brought three types of muon detectors to examine the Great Pyramid.

Stone absorbs muons' energy in ways that pockets of air do not. "When searching for a void in one location, what you look for is a muon excess in that direction," said Arturo Menchaca-Rocha, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Menchaca-Rocha, not a member of this project, has used cosmic radiation to probe an ancient Mesoamerican pyramid. "Muon tracking is what helps locate and image the void's shape."

One type of muon detector, called a nuclear emulsion film, catches muons as lines of little black globules. The film is "developed by the muon, so to speak," Schwitters said; muons create cross-sections the way light creates the photos on your iPhone. (But muons are even better than light, he said, because the particles "tell you where they come from, and they tell you which direction" they came from, too.)

Independent teams were assigned to each of the three muon detectors arrayed around the Great Pyramid. "We came to the conclusion that all of the teams have been able to detect this," Mehdi Tayoubi, president of the HIP Institute, told reporters on Wednesday.

"If you see the same signal with different technologies, it increases your confidence that what you see is real," said Konstantin Borozdin, a physicist who worked on muon detection at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and is vice president at Decision Sciences, a California-based security company that uses muon technology to scan vehicles for hidden radioactive cargo.

Muon detectors have probed volcanic chambers and Fukushima's nuclear disaster zones. The detectors can distinguish rock slabs from a void from water. ScanPyramids is not the first archaeological application of this technology. In the 1960s, a team led by Luis Alvarez, the University of California at Berkeley physicist who predicted the existence of a dinosaur-killer asteroid, used muon technology to look for voids in the Pyramid of Khafre, the second-largest Egyptian pyramid after the Great Pyramid. That pyramid has no secret chambers, Alvarez declared.

But Alvarez and his colleagues did not examine the Great Pyramid, which still had secrets to spill. The likelihood that the newly discovered void was a technical error, the authors of the new study said, was less than 1 in 3.5 million.

Despite their confidence that a void exists, the researchers know little beyond its dimensions. Muon detection, or tomography, can sketch only a rough outline of the void. The chamber may be horizontal, or at an incline parallel to the Grand Gallery. It may be a single structure or smaller rooms in sequence. It may be as stocked with treasures as Al Capone's vault.

The void's discoverers, none of whom were experts in Egyptology, were reluctant to speculate on the nature of the void. Nor did the physicists say whether there were plans to access the chamber.

"This structure is not accessible," Tayoubi said. "This void was hidden, I think, during the construction of the pyramid."

Muon-based technology is still rare in archaeology. It is expensive and time-consuming. An array of detectors can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, a significant departure from typical archaeology budgets. The exposure time for the nuclear emulsion film used around the Great Pyramid was measured in months. Applying particle physics to archaeology requires a certain level of technical sophistication. "Indiana Jones wouldn't be doing muon tomography," Schwitters said.

Yet muons may play an increasing role in future discoveries. Schwitters is in the process of creating detectors that run on solar energy and are rugged enough to survive the jungles of Belize, where he plans to examine Mayan pyramids.

"They're coming from the most energetic cosmic events in the universe. They're a piece of nature," Schwitters said. "You're using elementary particles to do something you can't do any other way."

Magnitude 5.9 earthquake shakes Fukushima Japan

2017-10-07T00:09:00.000+09:00

October 6-2017 23:56

2017年10月6日 23時56分ごろ
Earthquake center	Fukushima 福島県沖
	50km deep
Magnitude	5.9
	No tsunami alert issued..updates coming soon..

Video:Mexico earthquake: Mysterious green flashes light up the sky after tremor

2017-09-08T23:54:00.001+09:00

Friday’s 8.2-magnitude quake in Mexico caused a rare phenomenon known as earthquake lights in skies above the capital city.

The lights could be seen flashing above Mexico City in hues of greens and white. Video uploaded from the scene shows the dramatic display.

Little is known about the phenomenon, which can sometimes be explained by exploding generators or power systems. Another explanation claims that the tectonic movement of rocks including quartz, generates a piezoelectric field which produces flashes of light.

A 2014 study said the stress of the tectonic plates can break apart pairs of negatively-charged oxygen atoms, pushing them towards the Earth’s surface and forming a light-emitting plasma when it combines with air.

A tsunami warning is in place following Friday’s earthquake, the strongest in a century. At least five people are reported dead with the number expected to rise.

French girl mutilated by rats in night attack at home

2017-09-08T21:20:00.001+09:00

French girl mutilated by rats in night attack at home

Rats may have been attracted to rubbish piled up in a nearby car park

A disabled French girl covered in rat bites is critically ill in hospital after a pack swarmed into her bedroom in north-eastern France.

The 14-year-old paraplegic was sleeping on the ground floor when the attack happened, in a rented house in Roubaix.

A medical expert quoted by France Info said the girl had 45 facial lesions, 150 on her hands and 30 on her feet.

The girl's father is suing the landlord for alleged negligence. Reports say rubbish bins nearby were overflowing.

The father, who has two other children, said he found his paraplegic daughter Samantha "drenched in blood" in her bed last Saturday.

He said everything had been fine when the family had gone to bed. He was sleeping upstairs.

"There was blood coming from her ears - I was terrified that she might have had a brain haemorrhage," he said, quoted by the local newspaper Courrier-Picard.

Some of her fingertips were bitten off and surgeons cannot repair them, he said.

The family has now been moved to a different house and police are investigating the attack.

The hospital has run checks on Samantha for possible infections, including rabies. The rabies test was negative.

Such attacks on humans are rare, though hungry rats do sometimes feed on corpses.

Mexico Rocked by Earthquake M.8.6 Called Its Strongest in a Century

2017-09-08T21:01:00.001+09:00

Residents of Mexico City gathered outdoors after an earthquake struck off the Pacific Coast, about 450 miles away, late Thursday. Pedro Pardo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MEXICO CITY — The most powerful earthquake to hit Mexico in 100 years struck off the nation’s Pacific Coast late Thursday, rattling millions of residents in Mexico City with its violent tremors, claiming at least five lives and leveling some areas in the southern part of the country closest to where the quake occurred.
About 50 million people across the country felt the earthquake, which had a magnitude of 8.2, according to the Mexican government. The force sent residents of the megacity fleeing into the streets at midnight, shaken by the alarms blaring over loudspeakers and a full minute of tremors. Windows broke, walls collapsed, and the city seemed to convulse in terrifying waves; the quake even rocked the city’s landmark Angel of Independence monument.

And while the capital seems to have been spared any vast damage to infrastructure in the government’s preliminary assessment, the effects in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca were probably more severe. The tally of damage — and death — will probably be difficult to assess initially, given how remote many areas of the states are.
But at least two women died in the state of Chiapas, and two children died in the state of Tabasco, one when a wall collapsed, the other after a respirator lost power. Local officials in Oaxaca have said residents there remain buried under the rubble of buildings. The effects were also felt in Guatemala, where at least one person died and homes along the border with Mexico were leveled.
Schools in at least 10 Mexican states were ordered closed on Friday as the president ordered an immediate assessment of the damage nationwide. In the hours after the quake, the National Seismological Service registered several aftershocks.
Still, the resounding feeling in the country was one at least initially of relief that the damage was not more widespread, given the nation’s vulnerability to earthquakes and the capital’s extreme density.

Damage to a building in Oaxaca, Mexico, after the earthquake late Thursday. Mario Arturo Martinez/European Pressphoto Agency

“We are assessing the damage, which will probably take hours, if not days,” said President Enrique Peña Nieto, who addressed the nation just two hours after the quake. “But the population is safe over all. There should not be a major sense of panic.”
While Mexico is no stranger to earthquakes, situated as it is near several boundaries where portions of the earth’s crust collide, Thursday’s earthquake was more powerful than even the 1985 one that killed nearly 10,000 people.
But while the quake on Thursday struck nearly 450 miles from the capital, off the coast of Chiapas State, the one in 1985 was much closer to the city — so the shaking, coupled with Mexico City being situated on an ancient lake bed, proved much more deadly back then.
After the 1985 disaster, construction codes were reviewed and stiffened. Today, Mexico’s construction laws are as strict as those in the United States or Japan.
After the quake hit, people in Mexico City streamed out of their homes just before midnight wearing nightclothes, standing amid the apartment buildings, cafes and bars in upscale neighborhoods and the dense warrens of the city’s working-class communities. In the neighborhood of Condesa, neighbors watched in awe as power lines swayed alongside trees and buildings. In several neighborhoods, the power was out, though it was restored within an hour, at least in the wealthier areas of the city.
For a city used to earthquakes, Thursday’s quake left a lasting impression on residents, for both its force and duration.
“The scariest part of it all is that if you are an adult, and you’ve lived in this city your adult life, you remember 1985 very vividly,” said Alberto Briseño, a 58-year-old bar manager in Condesa. “This felt as strong and as bad, but from what I see, we’ve been spared from major tragedy.”
“Now we will do what us Mexicans do so well: Take the bitter taste of this night and move on,” he added.
Thursday’s earthquake occurred near the Middle America Trench, a zone in the eastern Pacific where one slab of the earth’s crust, called the Cocos Plate, is sliding under another, the North American, in a process called subduction.
The movement is very slow — about three inches a year — and over time stresses build because of friction between the slabs. At some point the strain becomes so great that the rock breaks and slips along a fault. This releases vast amounts of energy and, if the slip occurs under the ocean, can move a lot of water suddenly, causing a tsunami.
Subduction zones ring the Pacific Ocean and are found in other regions as well. They are responsible for the world’s largest earthquakes and most devastating tsunamis. The magnitude 9 earthquake off Japan in 2011 that led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the magnitude 9.1 quake in Indonesia in 2004 that spawned tsunamis that killed a quarter of a million people around the Indian Ocean are recent examples.
Those quakes each released about 30 times as much energy as the one in Mexico.
Mexico’s government issued a tsunami warning off the coast of Oaxaca and Chiapas after Thursday’s quake, but neither state appeared to have been adversely affected by waves in the aftermath. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the largest wave recorded on Mexico’s Pacific Coast measured less than four feet.

Patients in a clinic in Puebla, Mexico, were taken outside after the quake. Imelda Medina/Reuters

In his address, Mr. Peña Nieto said that aftershocks were of greater concern than the waves generated by the earthquake, which he said was the strongest to hit the country in a century.
Rudy Gomez, 28, who lives in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City, said that he spoke to relatives in Chiapas by phone after the quake and that they were all fine. They were worried, however, about the aftershocks.
“After the earthquake, there were three more,” he said of the aftershocks in Chiapas. “They are just waiting to see if there is another one to come, but right now they are O.K.”
In the state of Oaxaca, the town of Juchitán appeared particularly hard-hit. In a video posted on the Facebook page of a local TV station, Pamela Terán, who introduced herself as a city councilor, begged the state and federal authorities for help.
“Please, we urgently need as much help as you can send,” she said. “We need hands and manpower to try and dig out the people that we know are buried under the rubble.”
The same TV station, Cortamortaja, reported the collapse of a hospital in Juchitán and showed images of doctors and nurses treating patients in the backyard.
In Guatemala, which shares Mexico’s southern border, the military was out early Friday morning assessing the damage.
The earthquake struck mainly in the west of the country. In the state capital of Huehuetenango, bricks and glass were strewn on the ground as walls collapsed. Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second-largest city, which was beginning to recover from a tremor in June, suffered more damage to its historic center.

Video:Sun unleashes most powerful solar flare since 2006 disrupting radio comm...

2017-09-07T22:12:00.001+09:00

Two powerful solar flares erupted from the surface of the sun on Wednesday, disrupting radio communications on Earth's day side. And we might see some other effects in the coming days, mainly in the form of northern lights.

Solar flares occur in cooler regions of the sun, called sunspots. Like Earth, the sun has a magnetic field, sort of like a looped rubber band: at one end is the south pole, the other the north. And as the sun rotates, magnetic loops become wrapped, becoming tighter and tighter as they twist. If they become too entangled, the stored energy is released in the form of a solar flare.

These flares are measured on a scale from one to nine in C, M and X classes, with X being the most powerful.

On Wednesday, two solar flares erupted from sunspot region 2673: an X9.3 flare followed by a an X2.2 flare. The last such powerful X-class flare was 9.0 on Dec. 5, 2006.

First NASA craft named after living researcher heads for sun

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Heads up! Chance to see northern lights on Wednesday night

The flares were powerful enough to cause radio disruptions on the day side of Earth but will continue to disrupt HAM radio communications into the night, space meteorologist Tamitha Skov said in a Periscope Live video.

Solar flares most often produce a secondary effect called a coronal mass ejection, or CME. This is a huge cloud of magnetized particles that travels along the solar wind at incredible speeds, sometimes hundreds of kilometres a second or as fast as thousands of kilometres per second.

If Earth is in the CME's path, the particles interact with our magnetic field. While we're treated to a fantastic light show in the form of the northern lights (which are expected tonight, due to a CME that left the sun on Tuesday), powerful CMEs can cause power grid disruptions. In March 1989, such an event knocked out power to much of Quebec.

While a CME did erupt in the wake of these two solar flares, NASA is still trying to analyze whether or not Earth is in its path.

Today's X9.33 event was the strongest flare of this solar cycle. STEREO A coronagraph imagery shows the CME.

"Radio emissions suggest a coronal mass ejection (CME) may be associated with the X9.3 flare," they wrote as of Wednesday morning eastern time. "But we await SOHO/LASCO coronagraph imagery for confirmation."

The most powerful event to effect Earth on record is the Carrington Event, named after Richard Carrington, an amateur astronomer who witnessed a solar flare (estimated to be an X10) while sketching sunspots in England in 1859. Less than 12 hours later, northern lights so bright that people were said to have heard birds chirping, were seen; telegraphs failed with some catching fire.

A 2014 study concluded that Earth narrowly missed a powerful CME in July 2012 that would have rivalled the Carrington Event, in terms of its effects felt, though the flare associated with it was not the strongest recorded.

The most most powerful X-class flare was an incredible X28 (which is the limit of the measuring devices) on Nov. 4, 2003.

Video:NASA Filmed UFOs Accidentally While Flew Over the Beautiful Aurora Austr...

2017-09-07T09:30:00.001+09:00

It's pretty easy to be continually in awe of space and new discoveries around it, but every now and then, NASA outdoes itself. This time it comes from a time-lapse video the organization released on June 30, showcasing the aurora australis lights in the southern hemisphere. Captured by the International Space Station (ISS) on June 25, the video of the lights is truly breathtaking.But the camera captures something else...Here is the NASA's original footage link you can check it out:

Video:See 2.8 million stars shine in one stunning image captured by ESAs Satel...

2017-09-07T02:41:00.001+09:00

Stunning 2.8 million stars image near the Galactic center

ESA’s Gaia sky mapper captured this new image of 2.8 million stars just below the Milky Way‘s center.

In this area the stellar density is roughly 4.6 million stars per square degree.

Gaia, ESA’s billion-star surveyor, is detecting stars and measuring their properties in order to build up the most precise 3D map of the Milky Way. By accurately measuring the motion of each star, astronomers will be able to peer back in time to understand the Milky Way’s history, its evolution and its destiny.

In general, as Gaia registers stars, only data covering the object of interest are transmitted to the ground. However, in the densest regions on the sky there are more stars close to each other than the detection and processing system of Gaia can cope with, which could result in a less complete census in these crowded areas. To help mitigate this, a scientific selection of high-density regions is made to cover them in a special imaging mode, as illustrated here. These types of observations are carried out routinely every time Gaia scans over these regions.

The image, taken on 7 February 2017, covers part of the Sagittarius I Window (Sgr-I) located only two degrees below the Galactic Center. Sgr-I has a relatively low amount of interstellar dust along the line of sight from Earth, giving a ‘window’ to stars close to the Galactic Center.

The stellar density here is an incredible 4.6 million stars per square degree. The image covers about 0.6 square degrees, making it conceivable that there are some 2.8 million stars captured in this image sequence alone.

Image credit ESA/Gaia/DPAC

5.7 Million Years Old Unmistakable Human Footprints Found in Greece:Video

2017-09-06T02:38:00.001+09:00

Who Made These Footprints 5.7 Million Years Ago?

A set of ancient footprints has been found on a Greek island. They are extremely old – 5.7 million years – yet they seem to have been made by one of our hominin ancestors.

At that time, hominins are thought to have been confined to Africa. The discovery supports the controversial suggestion that they may also have been living in eastern Europe.

The earliest stages of hominin evolution are still mysterious. Our lineage split from chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, between 7 and 13 million years ago. The oldest undoubted hominin fossils were found in east Africa and date back about 4 million years – but there are a few older, possible hominin fossils from 6 to 7 million years ago. These include Orrorin from Kenya, and Sahelanthropus from Chad – locations that are roughly 2500 kilometres apart.

The ancient footprints discovered by Gerard Gierliński of the Polish Research Institute in Warsaw are a further 2500 kilometres away from Chad – this time to the north-east, on the tiny island of Trachilos near Crete. Gierliński teamed up with colleagues, including Per Ahlberg at Uppsala University, Sweden, to analyse the tracks.

The team found they could recognise two distinct sets of footprints, both apparently left by an animal that walked upright on two legs.

Out for a walk

The shape of the prints suggests similarities with hominin feet. Most obviously, they were clearly left by an animal that walked on the soles of its feet, as hominins do, rather than just on its toes. The prints show the track-maker had five toes, with the big toe particularly well developed – another hominin feature. And there is no evidence of claw marks, consistent with the fact that hominins have toenails rather than claws.

But surprisingly, fossil and geological evidence indicates that the footprints are 5.7 million years old. That means they predate the period during which hominins are conventionally believed to have left Africa by about 4 million years.

“They are almost without doubt actual footprints of a bipedally-walking animal,” says Robin Crompton at the University of Liverpool, UK, who was not involved in the study but who has analysed other hominin footprints.

However, exactly what sort of animal is still unclear.

Mystery feet

The oldest hominin foot fossils we have are from the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus. But Ardipithecus had an opposable big toe that would have left a distinctive pattern in its footprints. The Trachilos track-maker appears to have held all five toes parallel.

“There’s something slightly funny about the big toe,” says Ahlberg. “Its position and shape are very similar to those of a modern human, but it seems to be more mobile,” a bit like the opposable thumb of a chimpanzee.

David Begun at the University of Toronto, Canada, wonders about this point too. “It’s theoretically possible that Ardipithecus could use its muscles to squeeze its big toe in line with the rest of its foot and provide a more modern-looking footprint,” he says.

An alternative is that the prints belong to an ape, unrelated to hominins, that also evolved to walk upright at least some of the time. Both Crompton and Begun point out that modern gorillas produce footprints that are far more similar to human than chimpanzee prints, so perhaps another distantly-related ape evolved similar feet 5.7 million years ago.

Apes from Eurpe

The announcement of the footprint discovery comes just months after Begun and his colleagues presented evidence that Graecopithecus, a poorly known extinct ape found in 7.2-million-year-old rocks in eastern Europe, may in fact have been a homininThe suggestion proved to be highly controversial. Some prominent researchers savaged the idea that early hominins could have lived outside Africa. “There are people who simply dismiss the idea because they think it’s just not possible,” says Begun. “But it’s widely accepted that what became the African savannah fauna – giraffes, antelopes, rhinos – those species lived in the southern Balkans and migrated from there into Africa.”

In principle, Begun says hominins might also have originated in eastern Europe and migrated south with these other species. “It doesn’t mean it’s true – but it’s certainly plausible,” he says.

But even discussing this idea in formal academic papers is difficult, he says. It took months for Begun to find a journal prepared to publish the Graecopithecus research – even though the papers were written by well-regarded researchers. Ahlberg says the paper on the Trachilos footprints proved similarly difficult to publish.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, DOI: 10.1016/j.pgeola.2017.07.006

It rains solid diamonds on Uranus and Neptune Experiments Confirm

2017-09-05T02:43:00.001+09:00

Move over Jupiter and Saturn, a crap load of diamonds could be found in two of the most mysterious places in the Solar System: Uranus and Neptune. Researchers using the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford have demonstrated in the lab— with one of the brightest sources of X-rays on the planet—that the depths of these ice giants are perfect for the formation of diamonds.

The scientists behind this are excited as it’s the first time this effect has been reproduced in a lab environment similar to the lower reaches of the icy giants’ atmospheres. Scientist have long wondered about the effects of having copious amounts of hydrogen, helium, and methane (which give the outer planets their distinctive blue hue), and whether these chemical circumstances are ideal for diamond formation.

“This [condition] will generate diamond precipitation inside such celestial bodies,” Dominik Kraus, a researcher with Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Dresden and author on the paper told Gizmodo in an email. “This means that there is not necessarily a pure diamond core but certainly a large diamond envelope around the rocky cores that are supposed to exist inside Neptune and Uranus.”

On Jupiter and Saturn, the current thinking goes like this: when storms roll through clouds of methane molecules, lightning strikes cause carbon atoms to disassociate from their chemical bonds. When they collect in the air, you get clouds of soot which then sink into the lower atmosphere, being put under more and more pressure. That pressure is what squeezes the carbon into graphite and then again into diamond. It’s also under the effect of gravity, so it would truly fall to the middle of the planet as “diamond rain.”

On Uranus and Neptune there could be a cloud layer where a sea of hot methane forms which then separates in a high pressure environment causing the resulting carbon to squeeze into diamond.

But we’ve never actually recreated those conditions in a lab. Until now.

Using a tool called the Matter in Extreme Condition instrument, the scientists shocked a thin polystyrene sheet with a laser blast which produced pressure of up to 150 gigapascals. That laser heated the material to about 6,000 Kelvin, which is very hot, but not hot enough to melt diamond. Since the polystyrene is a hydrocarbon polymer, it happily breaks up into its constituent hydrogen and carbon atoms which then are compressed. For an incredibly short moment, this causes nanodiamonds to form.

Because scientists are now able to reproduce an environment similar to the one located about 10,000 km in the interior of Neptune and Uranus, further research could show us if there are more stable options beyond diamond precipitation.

“If the temperature is high enough close to the core (some calculations predict that) it could also be ‘oceans of liquid carbon’ with gigantic ‘diamond icebergs, swimming on top of it,” said Kraus. “But most theories suggest that diamond would remain solid, at least inside Neptune and Uranus, but this may be different for some exoplanets.”

It’s pretty hard to actually test what’s being created in real time with the laser pulse, so that’s where the ultrabright X-rays come in. Think of it like an incredibly bright and extremely short—firing only for 50 femtoseconds—camera flash.

“We can only produce this exotic state for about a nanosecond and during this time we need enough X-rays to probe it,” said Kraus. “We then do simple X-ray diffraction (that’s the method how nearly every crystal structure is identified) and we got a surprisingly clear diamond signal.”

Previous experiments either never really provided direct evidence of this process, or results from the method used to normally compress carbon, diamond anvils, was not clear enough. “The problem with diamond anvil cell experiments is that it is very difficult to distinguish tiny pieces of diamond created from hydrocarbons to diamond pieces that might stem from the comparably huge diamond anvils themselves,” said Kraus.

Elon Musk Reveals SpaceX Futuristic Space Suit

2017-09-04T23:14:00.001+09:00

Elon Musk has posted the official first photo of his SpaceX space suit on Instagram, teasing that more details will come in a few days. Musk says the suit actually works, and was tested to double vacuum pressure. The suit itself is very white and very spacey, and Musk acknowledges that it was “incredibly hard” to balance the suit’s look and its function.

Musk didn’t specify, but the SpaceX suits are meant to be worn by astronauts when riding inside the company’s Dragon Capsule. They’re pressure suits, so they’re not meant for spacewalks, but are worn by astronauts during transport in case the capsule depressurizes. The suits will be worn by NASA astronauts for the commercial crew program when SpaceX starts launching people to and from the International Space Station. In January, Boeing revealed its own spacesuit design that astronauts will wear on route to the ISS.

The reveal today is similar to photos of a SpaceX suit that surfaced years ago on reddit. The design is very elegant and feels right at home in a sci-fi flick, while simultaneously paying homage to the old school suits NASA astronauts wore to the Moon. We compiled a list ofscience fiction spacesuits from worst to best, though in my opinion, this real SpaceX suit tops the list of best.

A lengthy stretch of the Yellowstone River is closing after 20,000 ormore fish suddenly died

2016-08-21T21:28:00.001+09:00

The wildlife agency found more than 2,000 mountain whitefish dead. Wikimedia Commons

(Reuters) — Montana wildlife officials have closed a lengthy stretch of the Yellowstone River to all recreational activities at the height of the summer tourist season following the deaths of thousands of fish this week from a rare but virulent microbial parasite.

The drastic move, announced on Friday, was aimed at preventing the parasite's spread to other waters in a state where fly fishing is a cherished pastime for residents and a key draw for visiting anglers who spend millions of dollars in pursuit of elusive trout in pristine waters.

The closure, imposed by the state Fish, Wildlife and Parks agency, covers more than 150 miles (240 km) of the Yellowstone River and its tributaries outside Yellowstone National Park. Fishing, boating and all other recreational activities are prohibited indefinitely.

Fish and Wildlife Director Jeff Hagener said the closure "will have a significant impact on many people," but is necessary "to protect this public resource for present and future generations."

The agency has found more than 2,000 dead mountain whitefish along stretches of the Yellowstone River, with an estimated 20,000 or more whitefish presumed killed in the massive outbreak. Some rainbow trout and Yellowstone cutthroat trout have also been affected.

A microscopic parasite is infecting fish with proliferative kidney disease, a rare but serious condition that has only been found in two isolated spots in Montana over the past two decades. It poses no risk to humans, officials said.

Low stream flows and higher water temperatures this summer have exacerbated the effects of the disease on fish populations in the Yellowstone.

The closed river section runs from the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park, at Gardiner, and continues east and south nearly to Billings, the state's largest city.

The Yellowstone River winds through the Hayden Valley in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming Thomson Reuters

It comes just as Gardiner prepares to host a celebration next week marking the centennial of the National Park Service.

Biologists are monitoring waters inside the park, but there are no current plans to expand the closure upstream inside the park's boundary, park spokeswoman Charissa Reid said. Anglers in Yellowstone are being asked to wash and disinfect their waders, rods and other gear to prevent the spread of the parasite.

Wildlife officials said the closure could last weeks or months, depending on weather, stream flows and other factors.

Walter Wiese, head fishing guide at Park's Fly Shop in Gardiner, said an extended closure would be tough for regional fishing businesses, as well as others along the river, such as whitewater rafting guides.

"If it's a threat to the Yellowstone River trout population, we support it, but I hope it doesn't last too long," Wiese said.

Governor Steve Bullock called the fish kill "a threat to Montana's entire outdoor economy and the tens of thousands of jobs it sustains."

Outdoor recreation supports more than 64,000 Montana jobs and brings in almost $6 billion annually, Bullock said.

(Editing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Video:Strange creature caught on camera in Portugal desert

2016-08-20T23:49:00.001+09:00

The myth of Chupacabara first began in Puerto Rico, when farmer's kept finding their goats being drained of blood.

Could this be the creature that many have been speaking about for years?

In a short clip that was captured on camera, the man-like creature is seen slowly walking towards a bush and then disappears into the bush. The footage was filmed in the Portuguese desert.

Are you convinced? Do you believe that there are creatures like this looming certain parts of the world?

Did physicists discover a previously unknown fifth force of nature?

2016-08-17T23:02:00.001+09:00

A tiny, unseen force could potentially alter our basic understanding of the universe -- if it really exists. Theoretical physicists at UC Irvine say they’ve found evidence for a fifth fundamental force of nature, carried by a particle that until now has gone totally unnoticed.

If supported by the independent work of other teams, the boson described in a paper in Physical Review Letters (and expanded upon in a study posted to arXiv) could move scientists to rewrite the standard model of particle physics.

“If this is true, it would be a really big guide as to what the future would hold as far as the ultimate theory of particle physics,” said study coauthor Timothy Tait, a UC Irvine theoretical particle physicist.

There are four known forces that govern the interactions of matter: gravitation, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. A force like gravitation sculpts the universe at the enormous scale of galaxy clusters; the strong and weak nuclear forces prevail in the tiny interactions between subatomic particles. Together, those four forces govern the interactions between all the matter in the universe.

But researchers at UC Irvine say they’ve found evidence for a fifth force – once carried by a particle that they’re calling “boson X.” This force is a sort of analogue to electromagnetism — except where electromagnetism acts on electrons and protons (and ignores neutrons), this fifth force works between electrons and neutrons (and ignores protons).

The scientists first got the idea from a paper published by Hungarian researchers who were looking for a “dark photon” (a force carrier for dark matter) and found a strange signal in their data. Could it be a new particle? After analyzing the Hungarians’ work and several other teams’ experiments, the UC Irvine researchers ruled out the “dark photon” explanation but did conclude that the signal could have been caused by a heretofore undescribed boson.

The scientists described the particle in their first paper now appearing in Physical Review Letters. In the follow-up, they fleshed out the idea, showing how (with a small entourage of additional new particles) it could be stitched into the standard model.

“If it’s real, it needs to be studied in gory detail,” said David McKeen, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study.

The standard model, often represented as an unassuming 17-square chart, describes the fundamental subatomic particles that are the building blocks of all matter. It describes humdrum particles like electrons and protons, and more exotic fare such as muon neutrinos, gluons and quarks, all in terms of three identifying characteristics: mass, charge and spin.

If scientists were to draft a metaphorical map of the known universe, the standard model would be the color-coded legend in the corner -- the key that allows them to make sense of the physical world, from the smallest to the largest of scales.

And scientists have been doing their best to break it.

That’s because, as neat as it looks, the standard model fails to describe everything in the universe; in fact, it can barely describe a tiny fraction. For example, it can’t explain the existence of dark matter, which doesn’t interact at all with normal matter but can sculpt the cosmic web of galaxy clusters with its massive gravitational influence. It doesn’t explain why dark energy is causing the universe to expand at an increasingly faster rate.

Dark matter makes up nearly 27% of the universe’s mass-energy density; dark energy makes up more than 68%. Normal matter--– which can be described fairly accurately by the standard model -- is less than 5% of that total.

Tait said that their discovery might be a doorway to eventually creating a model that more accurately describes the universe. It could also help demystify mysterious phenomena such as dark matter.

For example, while dark matter responds to gravity over large scales (just as normal matter does), scientists don’t know the extent to which it might interact with itself over smaller scales. This new force-carrying boson could provide the answer.

“This could actually be the dark force,” Tait said.

But McKeen was more cautious, adding that much more work needs to be done by other groups looking for this particle before any major conclusions can be drawn about whether this force exists, and what role it has in explaining such mysterious phenomena as dark matter.

“It’s not obvious that it helps us with any of these other outstanding problems,” he said. “It could have a connection, but it’s not obvious to me. But I think it needs to be studied — and then people will understand whether there is or not.”

3 Human Chimeras That Already Exist

2016-08-10T16:15:00.001+09:00

The news that researchers want to create human-animal chimeras has generated controversy recently and may conjure up ideas about Frankenstein-ish experiments. But chimeras aren't always man-made — and there are a number of examples of human chimeras that already exist.

A chimera is essentially a single organism that's made up of cells from two or more "individuals" — that is, it contains two sets of DNA, with the code to make two separate organisms.

One way chimeras can happen naturally in humans is that a fetus can absorb its twin. This can occur with fraternal twins, if one embryo dies very early in pregnancy and some of its cells are "absorbed" by the other twin. The remaining fetus will have two sets of cells: its own original set, plus the one from its twin. [Seeing Double: 8 Fascinating Facts About Twins]

These individuals often don't know they are chimeras. For example, in 2002, news outlets reported the story of a woman named Karen Keegan, who needed a kidney transplant and underwent genetic testing along with her family, to see if a family member could donate one to her. But the tests suggested that genetically, Keegan could not be the mother of her sons. The mystery was solved when doctors discovered that Keegan was a chimera — the set of DNA in her blood cells was different from that in the other tissues in her body.

A person can also be a chimera if he or she undergoes a bone marrow transplant. During such transplants — which can be used, for example, to treat leukemia — a person will have his or her own bone marrow destroyed and replaced with bone marrow from another person. Bone marrow contains stem cells that develop into red blood cells. This means that, for the rest of his or her life, a person with a bone marrow transplant will have blood cells that are genetically identical to those of the donor, and are not genetically the same as the other cells in the recipient's own body.

In some cases, all of the blood cells in a person who received a bone marrow transplant will match the DNA of the donor. But in other cases, recipients may have a mix of both their own blood cells and donor ones, according to a 2004 review paper in the journal Bone Marrow Transplantation. A blood transfusion will also temporarily give a person cells from someone else, but in a bone marrow transplant, the new blood cells are permanent, according to the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California.

More commonly, people may exhibit so-called microchimerism — when a small fraction of their cells are from someone else. This can happen when a woman becomes pregnant and a small number of cells from the fetus migrate into her blood and travel to different organs.

A 2015 study suggested that this happens in almost all pregnant women, at least temporarily. The researchers tested tissue samples from the kidneys, livers, spleens, lungs, hearts and brains of 26 women who died while pregnant or within one month of giving birth. The study found that the women had fetal cells in all of these tissues. The researchers knew that the cells were from the fetus, and not from the mother, because the cells contained a Y chromosome (found only in males) and all of the women had been carrying sons.

In some cases, fetal cells may stay in a woman's body for years. In a 2012 study, researchers analyzed the brains of 59 women ages 32 to 101, after the women had died. They found that 63 percent of these women had traces of male DNA from fetal cells in their brains. The oldest woman to have fetal cells in her brain was 94 years old, suggesting that these cells can sometimes stay in the body for a lifetime.

Original article on Live Science.

5.1-MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKE STRIKES IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

2016-08-10T13:40:00.001+09:00

KABC

A 5.1-magnitude earthquake struck in Upper Lake, California at 7:57 p.m., according to the USGS.

UPPER LAKE, Calif. (KABC) --

A 5.1-magnitude earthquake struck north of the Bay Area on Tuesday, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The earthquake struck near Upper Lake, California, which is about 130 miles north of the Bay Area, at about 7:57 p.m.

The earthquake was originally reported as 5.0 magnitude by the USGS, but was later upgraded to 5.1-magnitude.

Shortly after the initial earthquake, the USGS reported aftershocks of 3.0 and 2.7 magnitude.

The Lake County Sheriff dispatch reported no damage or injuries and stated firefighters were battling a small wildfire nearby, according to ABC affiliate KGO-TV in San Francisco.

KGO-TV said residents and business owners in the region reported swaying light fixtures and scared pets, but no damage or injuries.

Chinese Researchers just discovered the world's deepest underwatersinkhole

2016-07-28T23:45:00.001+09:00

There she is. Screen grab/Reuters video

Good news: China claims it has discovered the world's largest hole.

On Wednesday, state broadcaster CCTV announced that the newly found "dragon's hole," a 984-foot (300-meter) cavern in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, is now the world's largest hole.

With territorial claims by Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines, Taiwan, and China, the South China Sea — rich in natural resources and crisscrossed by shipping routes — is one of the most militarized areas on the planet.

According to Xinhua, the blue hole is called the "eye" by locals and lies within the disputed Paracel Islands, which is claimed by China and Taiwan and Vietnam.

Reuters/Amanda Macias/Business Insider

This would surpass the Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas, which plunges to a 663-foot depth.

Yang Zuosheng, a professor at the Ocean University of China, said researchers used a variety of methods to ascertain the hole's depth.

"[Determining] the depth has to be done through a series of calibrations — for example, calibrations [based on] tidal water levels, temperature, level of salt, sea water density. But no matter which type of calibration, the depth should be around 300 meters," he said.

Researchers just discovered the world's deepest underwater sinkhole

VIDEO: So blue.

There she is. Screen grab/Reuters video

Good news: China claims it has discovered the world's largest hole.

On Wednesday, state broadcaster CCTV announced that the newly found "dragon's hole," a 984-foot (300-meter) cavern in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, is now the world's largest hole.

According to Xinhua, the blue hole is called the "eye" by locals and lies within the disputed Paracel Islands, which is claimed by China and Taiwan and Vietnam.

Reuters/Amanda Macias/Business Insider

This would surpass the Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas, which plunges to a 663-foot depth.

Yang Zuosheng, a professor at the Ocean University of China, said researchers used a variety of methods to ascertain the hole's depth.

Researchers Just Discovered The World's Deepest Underwater Sinkhole

VIDEO: So blue.

00:2301:11

Blue holes were formed during previous ice ages.

Chinese scientists will continue to study the marine life within the hole, though because of its depth, water beyond a certain level has no oxygen, meaning few creatures are likely to be found in the lowest reaches, scientists said.

Video:Nautilus Explorers spot mysterious purple orb on ocean floor

2016-07-28T00:03:00.001+09:00

The research vessel Nautilus is a floating laboratory equipped with cameras that can peer deep down to the ocean floor. Researchers with the Ocean Exploration Trust posted a video on Monday showing an unusual find. The Nautilus spied a small bright-purple orb underwater in the Channel Islands off the coast of California.

This strange thing was found near the Channel Islands.

Ocean Exploration TrusThe research vessel Nautilus is a floating laboratory equipped with cameras that can peer deep down to the ocean floor. Researchers with the Ocean Exploration Trust posted a video on Monday showing an unusual find. The Nautilus spied a small bright-purple orb underwater in the Channel Islands off the coast of California.

The main focus for the vehicle's Channel Islands mission is to study deep-sea corals, but the odd sphere attracted the scientists' attention. The video includes a soundtrack of the researchers making real-time observations as the camera sweeps along. They call it a "purple blob" and then wonder aloud "What is that?"

The researchers throw out some scientific names as possibilities before deciding to suck it up into a tube for a closer look. They wonder if it might be an egg sac or an embryo of some sort. There's a moment of suspense as a crab closes in on the orb and jars it with its leg, but the Nautilus successfully grabs the sphere using a remote-controlled suction tube.

The Nautilus website offers an update on the oddball discovery: "This unidentified purple orb stumped our scientists onboard. After sampling, it began to unfold to reveal two distinct lobes. This could possibly be a new species of nudibranch."

Nudibranchs are marine mollusks. They have soft bodies and some of them are quite colorful, appearing in bright shades of orange, blue and pink. Some have slug-like shapes, while others have small branch-like protuberances.

If you're looking for answers as to exactly what the purple orb is, you'll probably have to wait for some time. The Nautilus team notes, "It could take several years for scientists to determine if this organism is a new species."