Off Topic The "That's interesting"/geek thread

Amazing. Did not know this story at all. I would love to visit this “museum”.

 

A technical article on a very current topic.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinandrews/2020/04/28/can-lava-kill-the-coronavirus-an-investigation/

 

An interesting article showing a great synergy between TECHNOLOGY and ECOLOGY.

Antarctic algal blooms: 'Green snow' mapped from space https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52737603

 

Interesting. The commercial future of space travel.

Nasa SpaceX launch: Astronauts complete rehearsal for historic mission https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52788432

 

Technology is great, but it must be used wisely.

Regrettably, this will be the future of warfare.


Combat drone to compete against piloted plane https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52933958

 

An amazing story of how talented some of our surgeons are....

https://www.channel4.com/news/conjoined-twins-doctors-separate-brothers-joined-at-the-head



Surgeons at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital spoke of the “Moses moment” of safely separating the brains of conjoined twins from Turkey in January.

A mini-documentary following the operation of one-year-old twins Derman and Yigit Evrensel at the world renowned children’s hospital was screened on Channel 4 on Thursday evening.

Derman and Yigit, who were born the city of Antalya, were joined at the head and their parents were told that to do nothing would shorten the boys’ lives.

But experts warned that the twins might not survive an operation.

After Turkish doctors contacted orthopaedic surgeons at Great Ormond Street Hospital, the twins were taken to the UK in December last year and underwent three operations.

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Derman and Yigit Evrensel will celebrate their second birthday on June 21. Getty Images
A team of more than 100 medical staff were involved in the separation, which involved more than 40 hours of surgery.

The twins, who will celebrate their second birthday on June 21, were finally separated on January 28.

“After more than 20 hours of surgery, we finally got to a point when the retractor went in and we were lifting one of the brains,” lead surgeon Owase Jeelani told Channel 4.

"It almost parted from the other brain completely.

“It was a bit like a ‘Moses moment’, where the Red Sea parted and you could see a path that was almost like a ray of light.

"When the two brains parted you could see clearly between them.”

After the boy’s heads were reconstructed and they were given some months to recover from the operation, the family were able to fly home from London’s Luton Airport on Wednesday morning.

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Conjoined twins successfully separated at London children's hospital

Fatma Evrensel, the mother of the two boys, described the rollercoaster of emotions she felt when she saw them in the hospital beds after they had been separated.

“It was the most unforgettable moment," Ms Evrensel said. "When I was going there it was like I was on a cloud.”

She said she was grateful her two boys survived the operation and were safe and recovering.

“The future is going to be good," Ms Evrensel said. "Thank God the children have their health back.

"At first, Derman was quite calm and Yigit was more active, but now Yigit is calm and Derman is more active. Their characters have changed.”

After arriving at Esenboga airport in the Turkish capital Ankara, the twins' father Omer Evrensel said: “Our babies have no problems.

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Craniofacial surgeon David Dunaway and paediatric neurosurgeon Noor Ul Owase Jeelani. Great Ormond Street Hospital. GOSH
“There is no problem in their eating and drinking, everything is normal. They'll start life again, they're almost reborn. We'll start everything from scratch.”

 

Einstein was rather good in his assumptions.

https://www.technology.org/2020/06/...ornerstone-of-einsteins-theory-of-relativity/

 

Durrr...durrr. Durr…. durrr.

Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. Diddly dee. Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum….

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world...ter-teenage-siblings-film-really-scary-escape

 

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Milky Way may harbour over six billion Earth-like planets

By E&T editorial staff

Published Wednesday, June 17, 2020


As many as six billion Earth-like planets are estimated to reside in our galaxy, researchers have said, although only a tiny fraction of these may be home to alien life.

To be considered Earth-like, a planet must be rocky, roughly Earth-sized and orbiting Sun-like (G-type) stars.

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/ar...arbour-up-to-six-billion-earth-like-planets/L

 

Yes, I really do need to get out more often

 

Solar Orbiter: Closest ever pictures taken of the Sun
By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent

• 16 July 2020

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Image copyrightSolar Orbiter/EUI Team (ESA & NASA)
Image caption The arrow points to a "camp fire". The circle at bottom-left gives an indication of size

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New pictures of the Sun taken just 77 million km (48 million miles) from its surface are the closest ever acquired by cameras.

They come from the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter (SolO) probe, which was launched earlier this year.

Among the UK-assembled craft's novel insights are views of mini-flares dubbed "camp fires".

These are millionths of the size of the Sun's giant flares that are routinely observed by Earth telescopes.

Whether these miniature versions are driven by the same mechanisms, though, is unclear. But these small flares could be involved in the mysterious heating process that makes the star's outer atmosphere, or corona, far hotter than its surface.


"The Sun has a relatively cool surface of about 5,500 degrees and is surrounded by a super-hot atmosphere of more than a million degrees," explained Esa project scientist Daniel Müller.

"There's a theory put forward by the great US physicist Eugene Parker, who conjectured that if you should have a vast number of tiny flares this might account for an omnipresent heating mechanism that could make the corona hot."

Whatever their role, the camp fires are certainly small - which may explain why they've been missed up to this point, says David Berghmans, from the Royal Observatory of Belgium and the principal investigator on the probe's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI).

"The smallest ones are a couple of our pixels. A pixel corresponds to 400km - that's the spatial resolution. So they're about the size of some European countries," he told reporters. "There may be smaller ones."

• Solar Orbiter: Sun mission blasts off
• Sun's surface seen in remarkable new detail
• BepiColombo Mercury mission bids farewell to Earth

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Image copyrightSolar Orbiter/Metis Team (ESA & NASA)
Image caption The Metis instrument is a coronagraph. It blocks out the dazzling light from the solar surface, allowing the fainter outer atmosphere of the Sun to be seen. Different frequencies show different features

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The European Space Agency (Esa) satellite was despatched on a rocket from Cape Canaveral in the US in February. Its mission is to reveal the secrets of our star's dynamic behaviour.

The Sun's emissions have profound impacts at Earth that go far beyond just providing light and warmth.

Often, they are disruptive; outbursts of charged particles with their entrained magnetic fields will trip electronics on satellites and degrade radio communications.

SolO could help scientists better predict this interference.

"The recent situation with coronavirus has proved how important it is to stay connected, and satellites are part of that connectivity," said Caroline Harper, the head of space science at the UK Space Agency. "So, it really is important that we learn more about the Sun so that we can predict its weather, its space weather, in the same ways we've learned how to do (with weather) here on Earth."

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Image copyrightSolar Orbiter/EUI Team; PHI Team/ESA & NASA
Image caption Solar Orbiter's suite of instruments will allow it to untangle the details of what drives the Sun's dynamic behaviour. Sensors can pick out the different layers of the star's atmosphere and track its twisting magnetic fields

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Solar Orbiter has been set on a series of loops around the Sun that will gradually take it closer still - ultimately to a separation of less than 43 million km.

That will put SolO inside the orbit of the planet Mercury.

The pictures showcased on Thursday come from the most recent near pass, known as perihelion. This occurred in mid-June, inside the orbit of Venus.

For comparison, Earth sits about 149 million km (93 million miles) on average from the Sun.

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Image copyrightSolar Orbiter/EUI Team (ESA & NASA)
Image caption At a particular wavelength of light known as Lyman-alpha, the EUI will pick out the hydrogen in the Sun's lower atmosphere (chromosphere). Temperatures in this region are 10,000 to 100,000 degrees

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To be clear: while the new images have been taken from the closest ever vantage point, they are not the highest resolution ever acquired. The largest solar telescopes on Earth will always beat SolO on that measure.

But the probe's holistic approach, using the combination of six remote sensing instruments and four in-situ instruments, puts it on a different level.

Esa's senior advisor for science & exploration, Mark McCaughrean, told BBC News: "Solar Orbiter isn't going closer to the Sun just to get higher-resolution images: it's going closer to get into a different, less turbulent part of the solar wind, studying the particles and magnetic field in situ at that closer distance, while simultaneously taking remote data on the surface of the Sun and immediately around it for context. No other mission or telescope can do that."

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What is Solar Orbiter and what's it going to do?
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Media captionWhat is Solar Orbiter trying to do?
It will be a couple of years yet before Solar Orbiter makes the first of its very close encounters with the Sun (at a distance of 48 million km).

As the mission progresses, SolO will, with the gravitational assistance of Venus, also lift itself out of the plane of the planets so that it can more easily see the Sun's poles. "Terra incognita", as Sami Solanki, from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and PI on Solo's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager, likes to call these regions.

It's at the poles where we may finally learn the fundamentals of the Sun's magnetism.

"We know that the magnetic field is responsible for all the activity that the Sun produces, but we don't know how the magnetic field itself is produced," Solanki said.

"We think it's a dynamo that is doing that inside the Sun, similar to the dynamo inside the Earth. But we really don't know how it functions. But we do know that the poles play a key role."

Holly Gilbert, the Solar Orbiter project scientist at the US space agency, Esa's major partner on the mission, enthused about the science ahead.

"If we've already made some discoveries with just the 'first light' images, just imagine what we're going to find when we get closer to the Sun, and when we get out of the ecliptic. Very exciting."

 

Space Wars?

UK and US say Russia fired a satellite weapon in space https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53518238

 

Very interesting! I need to follow this more closely.

 

Great details on the status of exploration of Mars, and the next steps.

Nasa Mars rover: How Perseverance will hunt for signs of past life https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53378023

 

A very interesting "genuine" accademic lecture on ......"UFO's".

Well worth a watch!

Plus a link to a newspaper report related to the US Navy release of data refered to in the lecture.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/us/pentagon-ufo-videos.html

 

I missed this post and something similar.

Great minds think alike?

 

Fruitcake?

Egypt tells Elon Musk its pyramids were not built by aliens

• 2 hours ago

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The tombs of the pharaohs were constructed thousands of years ago

Egypt has invited billionaire Elon Musk to visit the country and see for himself that its famous pyramids were not built by aliens.

The SpaceX boss had tweeted what appeared to be support for conspiracy theorists who say aliens were involved in the colossal construction effort.

But Egypt's international co-operation minister does not want them taking any of the credit.

She says seeing the tombs of the pyramid builders would be the proof.

The tombs discovered in the 1990s are definitive evidence, experts say, that the magnificent structures were indeed built by ancient Egyptians.

• Egypt's Bent Pyramid opens to visitors
• The weird and wonderful life of Elon Musk

On Friday, the tech tycoon tweeted: "Aliens built the pyramids obv", which was retweeted more than 84,000 times.

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Image Copyright @elonmusk@ELONMUSK
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Egypt's Minister of International Co-operation Rania al-Mashat responded on Twitter, saying she followed and admired Mr Musk's work.

But she urged him to further explore evidence about the building of the structures built for pharaohs of Egypt.

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Image Copyright @RaniaAlMashat@RANIAALMASHAT
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Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass also responded in a short video in Arabic, posted on social media, saying Mr Musk's argument was a "complete hallucination".

"I found the tombs of the pyramids builders that tell everyone that the builders of the pyramids are Egyptians and they were not slaves," EgyptToday quotes him as saying.

Mr Musk did later tweet a link to a BBC History site about the lives of the pyramid builders, saying: "This BBC article provides a sensible summary for how it was done."

There are more than 100 surviving pyramids but the most famous is the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt - standing at more than 450ft (137m).

Most of them were built as tombs - a final resting places for Egypt's royalty.

Mr Musk is known for his prolific and at times erratic tweeting. He once told CNBC: "Twitter's a war zone. If somebody's gonna jump in the war zone, it's, like, 'Okay, you're in the arena. Let's go!'"

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Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Image captionElon Musk has passion for cars, rockets and space travel