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DNA data offer evidence of unknown extinct human relative
Traces of long-lost human cousins may be hiding in modern people’s DNA, a new computer analysis suggests.
People from Melanesia, a region in the South Pacific encompassing Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands, may carry genetic evidence of a previously unknown extinct hominid species, Ryan Bohlender reported October 20 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. That species is probably not Neandertal or Denisovan, but a different, related hominid group, said Bohlender, a statistical geneticist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “We’re missing a population or we’re misunderstanding something about the relationships,” he said.
This mysterious relative was probably from a third branch of the hominid family tree that produced Neandertals and Denisovans, an extinct distant cousin of Neandertals. While many Neandertal fossils have been found in Europe and Asia, Denisovans are known only from DNA from a finger bone and a couple of teeth found in a Siberian cave.
Bohlender isn’t the first to suggest that remnants of archaic human relatives may have been preserved in human DNA even though no fossil remains have been found. In 2012, another group of researchers suggested that some people in Africa carry DNA heirlooms from an extinct hominid species.
Less than a decade ago, scientists discovered that human ancestors mixed with Neandertals. People outside of Africa still carry a small amount of Neandertal DNA, some of which may cause health problems. Bohlender and colleagues calculate that Europeans and Chinese people carry a similar amount of Neandertal ancestry: about 2.8 percent. Europeans have no hint of Denisovan ancestry, and people in China have a tiny amount — 0.1 percent, according to Bohlender’s calculations. But 2.74 percent of the DNA in people in Papua New Guinea comes from Neandertals, and another 3 to 6 percent stems from Denisovans, Bohlender calculated.
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A newly found planet, currently named: "Planet 9" may join our solar system family. The planet is 10 times the size of earth.
and gravitational effects of it are predicted to change the axial tilt in all of the constiuents of solar system.
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European Schiaparelli Mars probe's parachute 'jettisoned too early'
Europe's Schiaparelli lander did not behave as expected as it headed down to the surface of Mars on Wednesday.
Telemetry recovered from the probe during its descent indicates that its parachute was jettisoned too early.
The rockets it was supposed to use to bring itself to a standstill just above the ground also appeared to fire for too short a time.
The European Space Agency has not yet conceded that the lander crashed but the mood is not positive.
Landing on Mars is always a daunting prospect.
It is necessarily a high-speed approach that has to be got just right or the spacecraft runs the risk of smashing into the ground.
Schiaparelli had a heatshield, a parachute and rocket thrusters in order to slow its approach to the surface.
If the robot is later confirmed as lost, it will clearly be a major blow to Esa which suffered the disappointment of the Beagle-2 lander's failure at Mars in 2003.
But officials here have underlined the fact that Schiaparelli was always viewed within the agency as a technology demonstrator - a project to give Europe the learning experience and the confidence to go ahead and land a more ambitious six-wheeled rover on Mars in 2021.
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What Happened to Europe's ExoMars Lander? - What We Know | Video
Transmissions from the Entry, descent and landing Demonstrator Module (EDM) "Schiaparelli" ceased during its descent through Mars' atmosphere on Oct. 19, 2016. A few hours later, data analyzed but ExoMars team from ESA's Mars Express orbiter confirmed the loss of signal at the same point. Data analysis will continue through the night.
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ESA's hopes of landing on Mars shattered?
Europe’s dreams of landing on a planet appeared shattered tonight after the ExoMars Schiaparelli space probe lost contact with mission control during its descent to the surface of Mars.
In scenes reminiscent of the ill-fated Beagle 2 mission in 2003, the European Space Agency stopped receiving a signal from its probe shortly before landing.
Mission controllers in Darmstadt, Germany, were expecting the ‘all’s well’ signal at around 4pm yesterday afternoon, and even had cameras raised to capture the moment that the wavy line appeared on monitors to announce Schiaparelli’s safe arrival.
But as the minutes ticked over, it was clear that no signal was coming. Camera arms were lowered and hopeful expressions replaced with furrowed brows as the team started to hunt for signs of life from other spacecraft orbiting Mars.
However while the landing drama was unfolding, the ExoMars spacecraft which delivered the probe successfully managed to settle into orbit around Mars after making a 139 minute engine burn.
Starting next year, the orbiter will sniff the Martian atmosphere for traces of methane and help scientists decide whether it is being made be living creatures.
“Failure to make contact will have important implications for the rover mission – probably the most critical will be the political implications for securing funding for the Rover mission, which will be happening at the Ministerial in December.
“But the positive is that orbiter is safe, and gives us many years of ground-breaking science and discovery ahead.”
The loss of signal led to comparisons with the Beagle 2 mission, spearheaded by Prof Colin Pillinger of the Open University, which set off to look for signs of life on Mars in 2003, but disappeared on its way to the surface.
At 3.42pm, UK time on Wednesday it was due to begin a ‘six minutes of terror’ journey through the Martian atmosphere. During this time the probe was travelling on autopilot and mission controllers on Earth could only sit and wait.
Although it carries some instruments, Schiaparelli's main job is to test out the Russian-designed landing system for a future ExoMars rover which is currently being built by Airbus in Hertfordshire and is due to launch in 2020.
Schiaparelli was due to spend about four days gathering weather data before its batteries ran out.
Britain's David Parker, Director of Human Spaceflight at the ESA said he was confident that the second part of the mission, the rover, will still go ahead in 2020.
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It is confirmed that the Trace Gas Orbiter has completed its Mars insertion with nominal accuracy
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The livestream will be back in 1 hour mins to prepare for the confirmation of Schiaparelli's landing
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We have just recieved data that the Trace Gas Orbiter has completed it's manuver when expected and is now being analysed
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What happens next?
Mission control is currently hunting for a signal from data from the ESA orbiter Mars Express. The craft has already picked up signals of the probe travelling through the atmosphere but it seems to have also lost contact on landing, which does not bode well for the mission.
However, the probe is also designed to make contact with Earth in around one hour, so we might get a direct signal then.
Speaking a few minutes ago Andrea Accomazzo. ESA Spacecraft Operations Manager, said: "Currently we’re not receiving any signal from Mars but this is absolutely normal, the (trace gas orbiter) is flying behind the planet and it is normal.
"It was going extremely well. For the landing part we have been monitoring the signal going down into the atmosphere of mars we lost the signal at the surface stage and we’re still looking at the data."
Britain's David Parker, Director of Human Spaceflight, is also confident that the second part of the mission, a Mars Rover, will still be launched in 2020.
"The next step is the rover mission to explore over the surface of mars and go below the surface for the first time and bring something back," he said.
"We're doing our best to take our science instruments to the planet now but we need full scale laboratories, so bringing materials back and understanding these materials is really important. "
And he is keen to see humans landing on Mars before too long.
"It's got to be on our agenda and we must take one step beyond," he said. "We also need to protect the astronauts, and feed and water and keep them healthy so one of the ideas that space agencies are considering is an idea of space cruiser which can move around and do exploration voyages live and work 1,000 time further out that we are today."
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In about 10 minutes ESA should be recieving information from the lander about the descent course down to mars.
Then in about an hour we will recieve data from the lander on the surface after it lands.
Watch here: livestream.com/ESA/marsarrival
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The Schiaparelli lander will land on Mars using a crushable structure instead of legs. The aluminium structure can withstand a deceleration of 40Gs. Here it is being tested.
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Europe's Mars Landing on Wednesday May Be Visible to NASA Rover
Call it the Schiaparelli sky show — and if you happen to be NASA's Opportunity Mars rover, it's coming to a sky near you.
"We will attempt to image Schiaparelli as it arrives in our neck of the woods on Oct. 19," Rice told Inside Outer Space. "But if the entry and descent of the Schiaparelli EDM is nominal, the Opportunity rover will not see anything because its path will be blocked by the topography of the western rim of Endeavour crater," he said.
"However, there is a remote chance we could see it above the crater rim if the descent trajectory is long toward the east," Rice added. "Bottom line is that we will be giving it our best effort and, hopefully, we get lucky."
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(Pictured Below) Approximate region in box where Schiaparelli lander may be visible above horizon by Opportunity if incoming vehicle goes long.
Scientists Accidentally Discover Efficient Process to Turn CO2 Into Ethanol
Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction to turn CO2 into ethanol, potentially creating a new technology to help avert climate change. Their findings were published in the journal ChemistrySelect.
The researchers were attempting to find a series of chemical reactions that could turn CO2 into a useful fuel, when they realized the first step in their process managed to do it all by itself. The reaction turns CO2 into ethanol, which could in turn be used to power generators and vehicles.
The tech involves a new combination of copper and carbon arranged into nanospikes on a silicon surface. The nanotechnology allows the reactions to be very precise, with very few contaminants.
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Play Video Games, Advance Science
Computer gaming is now a regular part of life for many people. Beyond just being entertaining, though, it can be a very useful tool in education and in science.
If people spent just a fraction of their play time solving real-life scientific puzzles – by playing science-based video games – what new knowledge might we uncover? Many games aim to take academic advantage of the countless hours people spend gaming each day. In the field of biochemistry alone, there are several, including the popular game Foldit.
In Foldit, players attempt to figure out the detailed three-dimensional structure of proteins by manipulating a simulated protein displayed on their computer screen. They must observe various constraints based in the real world, such as the order of amino acids and how close to each other their biochemical properties permit them to get. In academic research, these tasks are typically performed by trained experts.
Thousands of people – with and without scientific training – play Foldit regularly. Sure, they’re having fun, but are they really contributing to science in ways experts don’t already? To answer this question – to find out how much we can learn by having nonexperts play scientific games – we recently set up a Foldit competition between gamers, undergraduate students and professional scientists. The amateur gamers did better than the professional scientists managed using their usual software.
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It gives me immense pleasure to announce that a person with a background in Physics and Electrical engineering is gonna be the next Secretary-General of the United Nations.
António Guterres, will be succeeding Ban-Ki Moon. And his service period will start begin from 1st January 2017.
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Either stars are strange, or there are 234 aliens trying to contact us
We all want there to be aliens. Green ones, pink ones, brown ones, Greys. Or maybe Vulcans, Klingons, even a being of pure energy. Any type will do.
That's why whenever a mysterious signal or energetic fluctuation arrives from somewhere in the cosmos and hits one of our many telescopes, headlines erupt across the media: "Have We Finally Detected An Alien Signal?" or "Have Astronomers Discovered An Alien Megastructure?" But science-minded people know that we're probably getting ahead of ourselves.
Skepticism still rules the day when it comes to these headlines, and the events that spawn them. That's the way it should be, because we've always found a more prosaic reason for whatever signal from space we're talking about. But, being skeptical is a balancing act; it doesn't mean being dismissive.
What we're talking about here is a new study from E.F. Borra and E. Trottier, two astronomers at Laval University in Canada. Their study, titled "Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars" was just published at arXiv.
The two astronomers used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and analyzed the spectra of 2.5 million stars. Of all those stars, they found 234 stars that are producing a puzzling signal. That's only a tiny percentage. And, they say, these signals "have exactly the shape of an ETI signal" that was predicted in a previous study by Borra.
The 234 stars in Borra and Trottier's study aren't random. They're "overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range" according to the abstract. That's significant because this is a small range centred around the spectrum of our own Sun. And our own Sun is the only one we know of that has an intelligent species living near it. If ours does, maybe others do too?
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Strange purple sea creatures found in deep ocean trenches
A stubby "googly-eyed" purple animal looking like a cross between an octopus and a squid
Scores of spectacular and rare under sea species have been found by expeditions this year to some of the deepest trenches in the Pacific Ocean.
They include strange purple orbs, "mud monsters" and a bizarre swimming sea cucumber reminiscent of a flying Mary Poppins.
Another voyage found around 500 new undersea methane vents off the US west coast.
This doubles the number of known seeps, bubbling up a powerful greenhouse gas.
The gas vents were found by an expedition mounted by Dr Robert Ballard, the man who first located the wreck of the Titanic.
A strange floating sea cucumber, said to be reminiscent of Mary Poppins
"At first people thought they were incredibly rare and now, thanks to these expeditions, these seeps may be very widespread, so the (methane) budgets may have to be recalculated, that's why the exploration is important."
One of this year's key expeditions mounted by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was a 59 day exploration of the Marianas Trench, the world's deepest underwater canyons.
As well as discovering three new "black smoker" hydrothermal vents stretching up to 30 metres in height, the voyage also revealed some rarely seen, mysterious creatures.
Rare and mysterious creatures have been discovered on this year's deep voyages include this purple orb
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Europe Lost Contact with Mars Lander 1 Minute Before Touchdown
After a suspenseful night waiting for a signal from the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander, the European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed today that the spacecraft went silent less than a minute before it was set to reach the Martian surface Wednesday (Oct. 19).
ESA mission managers said this morning (Oct. 20) that they need more time to understand what went wrong with Schiaparelli, and to figure out exactly where and in what condition the test lander ended up. But the ExoMars team was optimistic that the capsule had collected enough data during its descent to set the stage for the next phase of the mission: the planned 2020 launch of a life-hunting ExoMars rover.
"The test has yielded a huge amount of data," David Parker, ESA's director of human spaceflight and robotic exploration, said at a news conference early this morning. "It gives us a lot of confidence for the future. We need to understand what happened in the last few seconds before the planned landing, and that is likely to take some time."
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Mars landing: ESA declare success despite Schiaparelli probe's silence
So that’s it for today. ESA will make their next official statements about the Trace Gas Orbiter and the Schiaparelli lander at 9am UK time tomorrow.
For the TGO, everything is peachy. The spacecraft is in the expected orbit and functioning normally. For Schiaparelli things don’t look so good.
The signal was received for a good part of its journey through the Martian atmosphere but was lost before the lander reached the surface. This is confirmed by both the radio telescope tracking from Earth and the Mars Express spacecraft, which was recording the descent from orbit.
Although it would be a disappointment for the landing to fail at the last moment, the most important thing was that it happens now and not in 2020 when ESA send their life-detecting rover to the surface.
So all in all, today was a success. A fantastic new science mission is now in orbit around Mars and the landing test returned invaluable data for the engineers to make the 2020 landing safer.
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The livestream is back!
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The ExoMars orbiter is now in orbit around Mars.
Phew, one part of the mission has worked at least. And Flight Operations Director Michel Denis is smiling for the first time in hours.
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We are awaiting confirmation that Schiaparelli has landed
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The lander's planned descent trajectory
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The live stream has begun!
Watch here: livestream.com/ESA/marsarrival
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The ESA livestream of the Schiaparelli lander touching down on Mars will start in about 45 minutes
You will be able to watch it on: livestream.com/ESA
@EverythingScience will provide updates as the event unfolds.
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ExoMars Lander's Descent Trajectory Visualized by ESA | Video
On October 19, 2016, the Schiaparelli entry, descent, and landing demonstrator will attempt to touch down on Mars' Meridiani Planum. If all goes according to plan, it should take the module about 6 minutes to land from the time it enters the Martian atmosphere.
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European Mars Lander Separates From Mothership, Takes Aim at Red Planet
A European spacecraft destined to land on Mars detached from its mothership on Sunday (Oct. 16), setting the stage for a daring descent to the Red Planet's surface later this week.
The European Space Agency's Mars-bound Schiaparelli module separated from its carrier craft — the Trace Gas Orbiter — at about 10:42 a.m. EDT (1442 GMT) as both spacecraft were in the home stretch of their 308 million-mile trek (496 million kilometers) to Mars. If all goes well, the two probes (which make up the ESA-Russian ExoMars 2016 mission) will arrive at the Red Planet on Wednesday (Oct. 19), with Schiaparelli dropping down to the Martian surface as its mothership enters orbit around Mars.
"We can confirm good separation from the Schiaparelli module," ExoMars flight director Michel Denis said during a live ESA webcast from the agency's mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany. Flight controllers applauded as confirmation of the separation was received at the center.
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