NASA Releases Spooky SPACE SOUNDS of Planets and Stars

Jupiter's Massive Beats

NASA's Juno spacecraft went into Jupiter's massive magnetic field on June 24, 2016 and recorded the experience. Scientists converted the radio waves into sound waves. Listen to NASA's "Sounds of Space" with lightning on Jupiter and starlight percussion heard on a galactic journey through space. The plasma waves sound similar to ocean waves crashing on our planet's shores. Other particles hitting the instruments sound like strange crackles, whorls and snarls.

Sounds of Saturn

Saturn seems to produce the most sound of any planet in our solar system, most likely caused by its massive rings and many moons. As these planetary objects float in their repeating pattern, their gravitational pulls create rhythmes that can then be converted into musical harmony.

'Wherever there is resonance there is music, and no other place in the solar system is more packed with resonances than Saturn,' said astrophysicist Matt Russo, a postdoctoral researcher at the CITA in the Faculty of Arts and Science at U of T.

NASA's SoundCloud playlist also includes sounds of Saturn's moons and rings that astrophysicists converted into music. Before the Cassini probe observing Saturn crashed into the gaseous planet, completing it's 7-year mission, it also discovered some new faint rings of Saturn that added to the unusual sounds emanating from the planet. For some reason, NASA was expecting the gap between the rings and the planet would have lots of dust and debris but, to their surprise, Cassini only encountered a few particles as it crossed the gap and nothing larger than what we find in smoke (about 1 micron across).

In honor to the historic Cassini mission, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) researchers composed two pieces of music based on Saturn's moons and rings.

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Sources:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5025911/NASA-releases-compilation-spooky-sounds-space.html#ixzz4yLOryIw3 

World's MOST EXPENSIVE Substance: Super Explosive Anti-Matter Particles

Most people may think the most expensive substance on Earth is diamond, but it turns out the most expensive matter is... anti-matter. 

What is Anti-Matter?

Anti-matter is basically a particle's opposite, having the same mass but opposite electrical charge. When matter and anti-matter meet, they cancel each other out and produce intense photons, neutrinos, and sometimes less-massive particle-antiparticle pairs.

Why So Expensive?

Anti-matter occurs naturally, like when cosmic rays hit our Earth's atmosphere, in thunderstorms, and by radioactive radiation but it's impractical to capture because they basically explode when you touch them.

The Hydron Collider at CERN can artificially produce the simplest anti-particle, anti-hydrogen, but costs about $62.5 trillion per gram. Some scientists think we can figure out how to produce it for just $5 billion per gram, yet other anti-elements would be even more expensive. 

CERN concentrates enormous energy into super small space to create antiparticles that are separated magnetically. After producing them, they must be kept in special vacuum storage with electromagnetic fields to suspend them away from touching the container otherwise, they'll explode instantly. 

Anti-Matter Applications

Only mad scientists would go through the trouble of making such an insanely expensive material if it didn't have at least some potential practical use. 

Well, anti-matter is the most energy dense fuel than any other because it's entire mass becomes energy. Since it costs so much more energy to produce than to make, it's not the answer to clean sustainable energy. Instead, scientists have been considering it as a rocket fuel to boost ships closer to the speed of light, but this still seems highly... anti-likely. 

But if you dropped a raisin-sized amount of antimatter on the ground, it would create an explosion bigger than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Also, if you made an antimatter bullet with 1 billionth fo a gram of positrons attached to its tip, when fired, the bullet would be able to destroy an entire house or something that is of similar size.

Expensive Runner-Ups

Some nuclear isomers can cost up to $1 billion per gram. Their atomic nucleus has more than its minimum amount of energy. Most nuclei in their “excited” state revert to their minimum state in a split second, releasing gamma-ray energies that are used in weapons, etc. These are also super expensive because they can only be made in tiny amounts in expensive particle colliders. 

Former NASA Astronaut: UFO's Are Real!

Apollo 14 Astronauts, (F–R) Alan B. Shepard, Jr., Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell stand on a lunar module mock-up in 1970. Edgar Mitchell told a UK radio that UFOs are real and that governments have been keeping it a secret. (NASA/Getty Images)

By James Burke

A veteran of the Apollo 14 mission has said that UFOs visit earth and have made contact with mankind. 

Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who in 1971 became the sixth man to walk on the moon, told British radio station Kerrang! on Thursday, July 24 that, “We have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real, though it has been covered up by our governments for a very long time.”

“There’s more nonsense out there about [UFO's] than there is real knowledge, but it is a real phenomenon—it has been well covered up by all of our governments for the last 60 years or so but slowly it has leaked out—and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.” 

In the interview, Dr. Mitchell referred to the infamous Roswell incident of 1947 where it is believed by some that the U.S. Government covered up the crash and subsequent salvage of an alien craft.

“I have been deeply involved in certain committees and certain research programmes with very credible scientists and intelligence people that do know the real inside story and I am not hesitant to talk about it,” he said.  

“There is quite a bit of contact going on—I can’t tell you because I don’t know all the extent of it, I don’t know all the inside details because that isn’t really my main interest—but we do know we have been visited, that the Roswell crash was real, and a number of other contacts have been real and ongoing…” 

The main incidents, he said, have been taking place since World War Two. 

Dr Mitchell said that public awareness of it is increasing and that there are fewer efforts by governments to cover up incidents or create misinformation.

“I think we are heading towards a major disclosure on this and serious organisations are heading in that direction,” he said.

He stated that well over 70 percent of the U.S. public believed as fact the visitation to earth by UFOs and that people on the inside who know of this information now feel less threatened in speaking out about what they know.  

And what do these extraterrestrials look like?

“You have seen some of the pictures—well, the pictures that I know of, some of them are these little people that look strange to us … from what I know from my contacts who have had contact that is pretty accurate,” he said.

Dr Mitchell is not the only former astronaut to come forward about UFOs.

Colonel Gordon Cooper, an astronaut in Project Mercury—the first U.S. manned-space effort, is on record saying he witnessed a formation of metallic saucer-shaped UFOs at high altitude over central Europe in 1951.

Seven years later Colonel Cooper had another experience when he oversaw the processing of film footage taken of a UFO saucer which landed on a dry lake bed in California. He said footage was sent to Washington and nothing of it was heard of again.

According to The Independent, Colonel Cooper gave testimony at a U.N. hearing on UFOs in 1978.

Russia named as likely source of Europe radioactivity spike

By ANGELA CHARLTON, Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — An apparent accident at a Russian facility is suspected of causing a recent spike in radioactivity in the air over much of Europe, according to a report by France's nuclear safety agency.

The Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety says the release of the isotope Ruthenium-106 posed no health or environmental risks to European countries. It said the "plausible zone of release" was between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains, and suggested random checks on food imports from the region as a precaution.

In a report released Thursday based on monitoring in multiple European countries, IRSN said the Ruthenium appeared to come from an accident in late September involving nuclear fuel or the production of radioactive material. The French agency said the Ruthenium didn't appear to come from an accident in a nuclear reactor because that would have released other elements.

Germany's Federal Office for Radiation Protection said last week that elevated levels of Ruthenium were reported in Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and France since Sept. 29, but posed no threat to public health.

After reports of a Ruthenium-106 leak from a plant in the southern Urals first appeared, Russia's state-controlled Rosatom corporation said in a statement last month that it hadn't come from its facilities.

"The claim that the contamination had a Russian origin is unfounded," it said.

The French report says the radioactivity peaked in late September and early October and affected a "majority of European countries" but is no longer detected in the atmosphere over Europe. However it said if such an accident had happened in France, authorities would set up a perimeter around the accident site to monitor health, safety and food quality.

Ruthenium-106 is used for radiation therapy to treat eye tumors, and sometimes as a source of energy to power satellites.

The French agency also said Ruthenium releases could come from the re-entry of a satellite into the Earth's atmosphere, but that the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that no satellites powered by Ruthenium re-entered the atmosphere during the time period.

France, which has an extensive nuclear energy industry, has reported a series of low-level

nuclear incidents recently but none involving Ruthenium or threats to public health.

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Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed.
 

Stellar encore: Dying star keeps coming back big time

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Death definitely becomes this star.

Astronomers reported Wednesday on a massive, distant star that exploded in 2014 — and also, apparently back in 1954. This is one supernova that refuses to bite the cosmic dust, confounding scientists who thought they knew how dying stars ticked.

The oft-erupting star is 500 million light-years away — one light-year is equal to 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers) — in the direction of the Big Bear constellation. It was discovered in 2014 and, at the time, resembled your basic supernova that was getting fainter.

But a few months later, astronomers at the California-based Las Cumbres Observatory saw it getting brighter. They've seen it grow faint, then bright, then faint again five times. They've even found past evidence of an explosion 60 years earlier at the same spot.

Supernovas typically fade over 100 days. This one is still going strong after 1,000 days, although it's gradually fading.

The finding was published Wednesday in the journal Nature .
 

"It's very surprising and very exciting," said astrophysicist Iair Arcavi of the University of California, Santa Barbara who led the study. "We thought we've seen everything there is to see in supernovae after seeing so many of them, but you always get surprised by the universe. This one just really blew away everything we thought we understood about them."

The supernova — officially known as iPTF14hls — is believed to have once been a star up to 100 times more massive than our sun. It could well be the biggest stellar explosion ever observed, which might explain its death-defying peculiarity.

It could be multiple explosions occurring so frequently that they run into one another or perhaps a single explosion that repeatedly gets brighter and fainter, though scientists don't know exactly how this happens.

One possibility is that this star was so massive, and its core so hot, that an explosion blew away the outer layers and left the center intact enough to repeat the entire process. But this pulsating star theory still doesn't explain everything about this supernova, Arcavi said.

Harvard University's astronomy chairman, Avi Loeb, who was not involved in the study, speculates a black hole or magnetar — a neutron star with a strong magnetic field — might be at the center of this never-before-seen behavior. Further monitoring may better explain what's going on, he said.

Las Cumbres , a global network of robotic telescopes, continues to keep watch.

Scientists do not know whether this particular supernova is unique; it appears rare since no others have been detected.

"We could actually have missed plenty of them because it kind of masquerades as a normal supernova if you only look at it once," Arcavi said.

Nothing lasts forever — not even this super supernova.

"Eventually, this star will go out at some point," Arcavi said. "I mean, energy has to run out eventually."

IBM says it's reached milestone in quantum computing

By The Associated Press

IBM has announced a milestone in its race against Google and other big tech firms to build a powerful quantum computer.

Dario Gil, who leads IBM's quantum computing and artificial intelligence research division, said Friday that the company's scientists have successfully built and measured a processor prototype with 50 quantum bits, known as qubits.

Gil says it's the first time any company has built a quantum computer at this scale.

Quantum computing, a technology that's still in its early phases, uses the quirks of quantum physics to perform calculations at far higher speeds than current computers.

Seth Lloyd, an MIT mechanical engineering professor not involved in IBM's research, says it's likely that IBM still has glitches to work out but the 50-qubit announcement is a sign of significant progress.

New Self-Driving Train Bus Hits the Road in China

It's like a bus-train without a driver or tracks.

CRRC made it for public transportation as it can carry up to 300 passengers along complex city routes without the need to lay expensive tracks. The company revealed their design in June and started road tests 2 weeks ago in Zhuzhou, China.

It scans painted driving marks on the road to guide it instead of tracks. It made stops at 4 stations along a 2-mile city route. This all-electric vehicle is a major competitor for trains, buses, and even taxis because it's like a mixture of each of them. 

A 10-minute charge equals 15.5 miles of travel with a max speed is 43 miles per hour. This vehicle was designed to last for 25 years, so the city is investing in a self-driving mass transit future.

With more of these kinds of self-driving vehicles becoming popular because of their powerful, efficient, zero-emission electric turbines, and artificially intelligent computers, we may see a rapid change in not just transportation but in the entire civic engineering of modern cities. 

Other cities may adopt such a solution to their growing population density where limited footprint and congested roads cannot fit a railway system. Just paint some new lines and hop on this "Rail-Bus" to beat the traffic. 

The first Rail-Bus network system will open in China early next year. 

SOURCES:

https://qz.com/1124664/ibm-plex-with-its-first-ever-custom-corporate-font-ibm-is-freeing-itself-from-the-tyranny-of-helvetica/

https://www.dezeen.com/2017/11/06/worlds-first-driverless-trackless-train-launches-china-zhuzhou-transport-design/

'Real-life Iron Man,' Harlem Globetrotter set Guinness marks

Richard Browning poses for the media after setting the Guinness World Record for 'the fastest speed in a body-controlled jet engine power suit', at Lagoona Park in Reading, England, Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017. A British inventor billed as a real-life version of the superhero Iron Man has hit the fastest speed in a body-controlled jet engine power suit at 32 mph (51 kph) to set a new Guinness world record. The record keeper announced Tuesday’s feat on Thursday as part of its annual Guinness World Records day. (Matt Alexander/PA via AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — A British inventor billed as a real-life version of the superhero Iron Man has hit the fastest speed in a body-controlled jet engine power suit at 32 mph (51 kph), a Guinness world record.

The record keeper announced Tuesday's feat on Thursday as part of its annual Guinness World Records day.

Other marks announced included a Swedish baker's record for the world's largest vegan cake, which weighs in at more than 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms).  Harlem Globetrotter Thunder Law successfully made a basket Sunday on a 50-foot high hoop for a new mark. It's the 17th mark accomplished by the Globetrotters, and Law's fourth individual record.

Guinness says more than 600,000 people are attempting to set records as part of the event.
 

Richard Browning sets the Guinness World Record for 'the fastest speed in a body-controlled jet engine power suit', at Lagoona Park in Reading, England, Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017. A British inventor billed as a real-life version of the superhero Iron Man has hit the fastest speed in a body-controlled jet engine power suit at 32 mph (51 kph) to set a new Guinness world record. The record keeper announced Tuesday’s feat on Thursday as part of its annual Guinness World Records day. (Tim Ireland/PA via AP)

Uber reaches for the skies with plan for sleek flying taxi

By BARRY HATTON, Associated Press

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — Commuters of the future could get some relief from congested roads if Uber's plans for flying taxis work out.

The ride-hailing service unveiled Wednesday an artist's impression of the sleek, futuristic machine it hopes to start using for demonstration flights in 2020. The company aims to have its first paying passengers in various cities around the world by 2023, though the plan still faces major hurdles.

The battery-powered aircraft looks like a cross between a small plane and a helicopter, with fixed wings and rotors. It was presented at an international technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

The vehicle is intended to soar over traffic congestion, sharply reducing city travel times. Uber hopes it will eventually become a form of mass transport and cost commuters less than using their own car, though initially it will be more expensive than that, Uber's Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden said.

The scheme still faces plenty of challenges, including certification of the new vehicle by authorities, pilot training and conceiving urban air traffic management systems that prevent collisions.

Holden said that Uber is joining NASA's project to expand air traffic systems, which scores of other companies already belong to.

He told The Associated Press in an interview that he has no dollar figure for the total investment. He said Uber is putting some of its own money into the project, developing software, while other investors are also involved, such as aircraft manufacturers that are developing the vehicle and real estate companies that are providing so-called 'skyports' where people will catch their airborne taxi.

Uber is keen to move on from a troubled period in which its image has been damaged by investigations that found rampant sexual harassment of employees and multiple reports of drivers assaulting passengers. Holden said those episodes did not slow development of the flying taxi project.
 

Boy with rare disease gets brand new skin with gene therapy

By MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer

LONDON (AP) — Doctors treating a critically ill boy with a devastating skin disease used experimental gene therapy to create an entirely new skin for most of his body in a desperate attempt to save his life.

Two years later, the doctors report the boy is doing so well that he doesn't need any medication, is back in school and even playing soccer.

"We were forced to do something dramatic because this kid was dying," said Dr. Michele De Luca of the University of Modena in Italy, who got a call for help from the German doctors treating the boy.

The boy, then 7, was hospitalized in June 2015 with blisters on his limbs, back and elsewhere. He quickly lost about 60 percent of the outer layer of his skin and was put into an induced coma to spare him further suffering. Doctors at Children's Hospital at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, tried skin grafts from his father and donor skin, but all failed.

"He was in severe pain and asking a lot of questions," the boy's father said in a video provided by the hospital "'Why do I suffer from this disease? Why do I have to live this life? All children can run around and play, why am I not allowed to play soccer?' I couldn't answer these questions."

The boy's parents asked about experimental treatments, and De Luca and his colleagues were contacted. They had previously used gene therapy to produce a small piece of skin in a similar case. They told the family that the boy's precarious state meant that he might not survive the complicated surgeries needed to save him.

"It was a tough decision for us, but we wanted to try for (our son)," the boy's father said. The family asked that their names not be used to protect the boy's privacy.

The boy had a rare, incurable skin disease called junctional epidermolysis bullosa, caused by genetic mutations. People with the disease lack critical proteins that attach the outer layer of the skin to the inner layer, resulting in fragile skin with almost constant blisters and open sores.

To fix that, the doctors took a small piece of the boy's skin from an area that was OK. In the lab, they added a normal version of his bad gene to his skin cells. They grew sheets of the boy's skin, in much the same way skin grafts are grown for burn victims.

In total, they grew close to a square meter of skin (3 square feet.) The lab-grown skin was then transplanted onto the boy in three operations, ultimately covering 80 percent of his body. Ten days later, the new skin was already beginning to grow, De Luca said. After eight months, the doctors said that nearly all of the boy's skin had been generated by the modified stem cells.

So far, no problems have been detected. De Luca said the boy will be monitored closely for skin cancer and other potential issues.

"This kid is back to his normal life again," one of the German doctors, Dr. Tobias Rothoeft, said Wednesday. "That's what we dreamed of doing and it was possible."

Details of the case were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"This takes us a huge step forward," said Dr. Peter Marinkovich of Stanford University School of Medicine, who has done related work. He said it was impressive that De Luca and colleagues were able to make such large amounts of viable skin after correcting the genetic defect.

But he noted the approach might not help in more serious cases, which often have tricky complications, like skin blistering in the lungs. Marinkovich said many patients don't survive beyond age 2 and that using the treatment for babies could be even riskier.

Dr. Holm Schneider warned that some severely ill patients might have an extreme reaction to skin transplants with an added gene.

"The immune system might recognize this new gene as something foreign to be attacked and destroyed," said Schneider, of the University Hospital Erlangen in Germany. Still, he said the approach was worth trying in dying patients.

The boy and his family later visited De Luca and the other Italian doctors involved in his treatment.

"The parents are very grateful and say their life has completely changed," De Luca said, recalling how the boy spontaneously began taking off his clothes. "The boy was so happy with his new skin that he wanted to show off."

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This Associated Press series was produced in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.