NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Beams Back the Sharpest Images of Jupiter—Ever

Juno flew by Jupiter in March of 2017 skimming 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops while traveling about 129,000 mph (208,000 km/h) relative to the planet, NASA officials said.  Hold my coffee, I can’t stop staring at the images. Is that even real?

NASA’s Juno spacecraft is the first solar-powered space probe sent out to study our solar system’s largest planet—Jupiter. Juno’s mission is to orbit the gas giant in polar orbit and study its structure while mapping its gravity and magnetic field. Studying Jupiter will allow experts to better understand large planets discovered across the cosmos.

So far—the US$1 billion spacecraft has managed to take an image of Jupiter’s poles for the first time, it has come across really bizarre cloud formations, heard and recorded mysterious auroras, and scanned deep into the planet’s thick cloud tops, doing what no other spacecraft has done before. We’re proud of you Juno.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/John Landino

And while science is the most important thing on the mission, NASA’s spacecraft are known for being really good photographers.

Just as the Cassini spacecraft recently beamed back unprecedented images of Saturn, Juno also has its fair share of breathtaking images—is it time we should award a  Pulitzer Prize for Photography to one of those spacecraft?

Juno is the ninth probe from Earth sent to Jupiter, and only the second probe to orbit the planet, but it is the first probe to snap unprecedently beautiful images of the gas giant.

Juno flew by Jupiter in March of 2017 skimming 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops while traveling about 129,000 mph (208,000 km/h) relative to the planet, NASA officials said. As it whizzed passed the Gas Giant it captured this image. JunoCam took close-up color photos of the mysterious and massive planet.

Hold my coffee, I can’t stop staring at the images. Is that even real?

NASA/SwRI/MSSS/Roman Tkachenko

Jupiter is so sexy!

The craft’s next flyby will take place on May 19, and it will eventually descend into Jupiter’s atmosphere at some point in 2018 at the end of its mission. According to NASA, the spacecraft is expected to plunge into Jupiter in February of 2018, crash-landing after 20 months in orbit.

(Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstaedt/John Rogers)

NASA’s US$1 billion Juno spacecraft, launched in August 2011 and traveled five years to reach and settle into orbit around the gas giant—located 670 million kilometers from Earth.

I expect that the next batch of images will be even more incredible.
SOURCE: Ancient-code

Tesla May Be Launching a Mysterious Startup For “Materials Recycling”

A recent filing reveals that some of Tesla's executives are involved with a venture startup that will recycle materials for manufacturing. Could the California-based firm Redwood Materials be another Tesla project?
Elon Musk has been hitting the headlines lately because of two companies he recently started up: his Boring Company and his brain-hacking venture Neuralink. The serial entrepreneur has been very busy lately, what with SpaceX’s recent accomplishments and the latest developments in Tesla. And speaking of Tesla, rumor has it that there’s another new venture in the works.

Evidence about this new initiative comes from an SEC filing which revealed a $2 million investment in a recently incorporated firm called Redwood Materials. According to a write-up by CB Insights, this supposed new company doesn’t involve Musk directly, just some of Tesla’s executives: CTO JB Straubel and Special Projects head Andrew Stevenson. Both Straubel and Stevenson are listed as executives of Redwood Materials, with the latter as CFO.

The Califronia-based firm describes itself as focused on “advanced technology and process development for materials recycling, remanufacturing, and reuse.” Could Redwood Materials be Tesla’s entry into the recycling industry, as part of its efforts to make manufacturing greener?

Until Tesla official says anything about it, we can only surmise what connections it has — if any — to Redwood Materials. It’s possible though, especially since Stevenson once mentioned in a speech that “re-thinking the materials supply chain” is an area of innovation for Tesla. Recycling materials could well be useful for Tesla’s vehicle and solar technologies.

SOURCES: Futurism, TechCrunch, CB Insights, Redwood Materials

The Possibility of Silicon-Based Life Grows

Science fiction has long imagined alien worlds inhabited by silicon-based life, such as the rock-eating Horta from the original Star Trek series. Now, scientists have for the first time shown that nature can evolve to incorporate silicon into carbon-based molecules, the building blocks of life on Earth.

An artist rendering of organosilicon-based life. Organosilicon compounds contain carbon-silicon bonds. Recent research from the laboratory of Frances Arnold shows, for the first time, that bacteria can create organosilicon compounds. This does not prove that silicon- or organosilicon-based life is possible, but shows that life could be persuaded to incorporate silicon into its basic components. | Credit: Lei Chen and Yan Liang (BeautyOfScience.com) for Caltech

As for the implications these findings might have for alien chemistry on distant worlds, "my feeling is that if a human being can coax life to build bonds between silicon and carbon, nature can do it too," said the study's senior author Frances Arnold, a chemical engineer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The scientists detailed their findings recently in the journal Science.

Carbon is the backbone of every known biological molecule. Life on Earth is based on carbon, likely because each carbon atom can form bonds with up to four other atoms simultaneously. This quality makes carbon well-suited to form the long chains of molecules that serve as the basis for life as we know it, such as proteins and DNA.

Still, researchers have long speculated that alien life could have a completely different chemical basis than life on Earth. For example, instead of relying on water as the solvent in which biological molecules operate, perhaps aliens might depend on ammonia or methane. And instead of relying on carbon to create the molecules of life, perhaps aliens could use silicon.

Carbon and silicon are chemically very similar in that silicon atoms can also each form bonds with up to four other atoms simultaneously. Moreover, silicon is one of the most common elements in the universe. For example, silicon makes up almost 30 percent of the mass of the Earth's crust, and is roughly 150 times more abundant than carbon in the Earth's crust. 

Scientists have long known that life on Earth is capable of chemically manipulating silicon. For instance, microscopic particles of silicon dioxide called phytoliths can be found in grasses and other plants, and photosynthetic algae known as diatoms incorporate silicon dioxide into their skeletons. However, there are no known natural instances of life on Earth combining silicon and carbon together into molecules.

Still, chemists have artificially synthesized molecules comprised of both silicon and carbon. These organo-silicon compounds are found in a wide range of products, including pharmaceuticals, sealants, caulks, adhesives, paints, herbicides, fungicides, and computer and television screens. Now, scientists have discovered a way to coax biology to chemically bond carbon and silicon together. 

"We wanted to see if we could use what biology already does to expand into whole new areas of chemistry that nature has not yet explored," Arnold said. 

The researchers steered microbes into creating molecules never before seen in nature through a strategy known as 'directed evolution,' which Arnold pioneered in the early 1990s. Just as farmers have long modified crops and livestock by breeding generations of organisms for the traits they want to appear, so too have scientists bred microbes to create the molecules they desire. Scientists have used directed evolutionary strategies for years to create household goods such as detergents, and to develop environmentally-friendly ways to make pharmaceuticals, fuels and other industrial products. (Conventional chemical manufacturing processes can require toxic chemicals; in contrast, directed evolutionary strategies use living organisms to create molecules and generally avoid chemistry that would prove harmful to life.)

Arnold and her team — synthetic organic chemist Jennifer Kan, bioengineer Russell Lewis, and chemist Kai Chen — focused on enzymes, the proteins that catalyze or accelerate chemical reactions. Their aim was to create enzymes that could generate organo-silicon compounds. 

"My laboratory uses evolution to design new enzymes," Arnold said. "No one really knows how to design them — they are tremendously complicated. But we are learning how to use evolution to make new ones, just as nature does."

First, the researchers started with enzymes they suspected could, in principle, chemically manipulate silicon. Next, they mutated the DNA blueprints of these proteins in more or less random ways and tested the resulting enzymes for the desired trait. The enzymes that performed best were mutated again, and the process was repeated until the scientists reached the results they wanted.

Arnold and her colleagues started with enzymes known as heme proteins, which all have iron at their hearts and are capable of catalyzing a wide variety of reactions. The most widely recognized heme protein is likely hemoglobin, the red pigment that helps blood carry oxygen. 
After testing a variety of heme proteins, the scientists concentrated on one from Rhodothermus marinus, a bacterium from hot springs in Iceland. The heme protein in question, known as cytochrome c, normally shuttles electrons to other proteins in the microbe, but Arnold and her colleagues found that it could also generate low levels of organo-silicon compounds. 

After analyzing cytochrome c's structure, the researchers suspected that only a few mutations might greatly enhance the enzyme's catalytic activity. Indeed, only three rounds of mutations were enough to turn this protein into a catalyst that could generate carbon-silicon bonds more than 15 times more efficiently than the best synthetic techniques currently available. The mutant enzyme could generate at least 20 different organo-silicon compounds, 19 of which were new to science, Arnold said. It remains unknown what applications people might be able to find for these new compounds.

"The biggest surprise from this work is how easy it was to get new functions out of biology, new functions perhaps never selected for in the natural world that are still useful to human beings," Arnold said. "The biological world always seems poised to innovate."

In addition to showing that the mutant enzyme could self-generate organo-silicon compounds in a test tube, the scientists also showed that E. coli bacteria, genetically engineered to produce the mutant enzyme within themselves, could also create organo-silicon compounds. This result raises the possibility that microbes somewhere could have naturally evolved the ability to create these molecules.

"In the universe of possibilities that exist for life, we've shown that it is a very easy possibility for life as we know it to include silicon in organic molecules," Arnold said. "And once you can do it somewhere in the universe, it's probably being done."

It remains an open question why life on Earth is based on carbon when silicon is more prevalent in Earth's crust. Previous research suggests that compared to carbon, silicon can form chemical bonds with fewer kinds of atoms, and it often forms less complex kinds of molecular structures with the atoms that it can interact with. By giving life the ability to create organo-silicon compounds, future research can test why life here or elsewhere may or may not have evolved to incorporate silicon into biological molecules.

In addition to the astrobiology implications, the researchers noted that their work suggests biological processes could generate organo-silicon compounds in ways that are more environmentally friendly and potentially much less expensive than existing methods of synthesizing these molecules. For example, current techniques for creating organo-silicon compounds often require precious metals and toxic solvents.

The mutant enzyme also makes fewer unwanted byproducts. In contrast, existing techniques typically require extra steps to remove undesirable byproducts, adding to the cost of making these molecules.

"I'm talking to several chemical companies right now about potential applications for our work," Arnold said. "These compounds are hard to make synthetically, so a clean biological route to produce these compounds is very attractive."

Future research can explore what advantages and disadvantages the ability to create organo-silicon compounds might have for organisms. "By giving this capability to an organism, we might see if there is, or is not, a reason why we don't stumble across it in the natural world," Arnold said.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Caltech Innovation Initiative program, and the Jacobs Institute for Molecular Engineering for Medicine at Caltech.

This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program. Follow Space.com @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Story posted on Space.com.

SOURCE: Livescience

32 Cows Dead After Lightning Strike in Missouri

Ever heard lightning so loud and close, the only choice was to run to the nearest shelter and pray the lightning doesn't strike you? This was what happened in a recent incident in Texas.

A farmer, Jared Blackwelder woke up to a shocking scene that many of us would believe it to be fake, or maybe a scene that came from the scene of a movie.

This day started as usual - in the tiring life of farmers, Farmer Jared Blackwelder started his day dark and early - 4 a.m, when he started with milking his cows first. When he was done just before daylight broke, he went back to his barn and locked the gate. He claimed that out of nowhere, there was a sudden loud lightning strike that boomed and struck loudly, sounding very close. He also added that it was bright that he could hardly see, and then a fire started along the fences because the lighting struck them. 

What other damage can a lightning strike do? One would wonder and logically, one would know and reach the conclusion that when a fire starts, that is about one of the more dangerous consequence of a lightning strike. However, this was the end.

Jared Blackwelder was shocked down to his toes when he went back for his next milking visit in the afternoon, only to find his 32 organic cows dead, all piled up on each other. Even though farmers do not keep cows as pets, they do raise every single one of their cows on their own, so even though they are used for milking, farmers still do feel a degree of emotional attachment to these animals that have been reared from young.

Jared was visibly shaken, and he bought a vet over to ascertain what it was that could kill 32 of his cows. Even the vet was shell-shocked to find 32 cows dead from the lightning strike, claiming the most he has seen in his entire career was 6, even though his career spanned over decades.

Wright County Missouri Farm Bureau posted the pictures on Facebook, which has since gone viral, with many other farmers sending their condolences as they themselves know how terrible it must be to lose your animals in that way. The post has since garnered 14,000 shares and 1,000 comments from strangers sending their condolences. Even though Blackwelder is insured, even he is unsure whether it will cover the costs of the cows he lost, as they were more expensive and their total cost adds up to almost more than $60,000. However, Blackwelder still has 120 cows that are healthy and doing well, and he hopes to be able to replace the ones that were killed.

This brings us to really question what exactly is going on with our weather. Global warming? We as an entire race really need to step up our game and address weird weather issues that have been occurring more and more over the past few decades.

SOURCE: DiscloseTV

By 2035, Atlanta Will Be Using 100 Percent Renewable Energy

IN BRIEF

• Atlanta lawmakers have committed the city to running entirely on renewable energy sources, including wind and solar, by 2035.
• This makes Atlanta the 27th U.S. city to join the effort to fight against climate change at the local level.

100% RENEWABLE ENERGY

On May 1, Atlanta lawmakers approved a resolution committing the city to transitioning toward running entirely on renewable energy sources, including wind and solar, by 2035. The city council unanimously approved the measure, which will first transition all city buildings by 2025.

“We know that moving to clean energy will create good jobs, clean up our air and water, and lower our residents’ utility bills,” city council member Kwanza Hall said in a statement, according to The Huffington Post. “We never thought we’d be away from landline phones or desktop computers, but today we carry our smart phones around and they’re more powerful than anything we used to have. We have to set an ambitious goal or we’re never going to get there.”

Credit: Pixabay

Atlanta’s commitment comes just after a similar promise from the city of South Lake Tahoe, California, in April. This resolution makes Atlanta the 27th American city to commit to a 100 percent renewable energy plan, and the first in Georgia, according to the Sierra Club.

CLIMATE ACTION

Ted Terry, director of the Georgia Chapter of the Sierra Club, issued a statement praising the city of Atlanta’s leadership and commitment to fighting climate change.

“Just days after hundreds of thousands marched for climate action across the globe, city leaders here in Atlanta are answering the call,” Terry said in the statement. “Today’s commitment will inspire bold, ambitious leadership from cities throughout the United States and pave the way for a healthier and stronger Atlanta.”

This move from Atlanta is part of a growing recognition that cities all over the world can take a tremendous bite out of climate change, even without much support from larger government. In fact, in March, a top New York City official called on other officials from city governments across the U.S. to keep fighting climate change with or without the help of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Hopefully enough cities will follow suit to make a global impact.

SOURCE: Futurism

Seals Are Being Left Temporarily DEAF from the Noise of Sea Traffic in Britain's Busiest Shipping Lanes

Seals are being temporarily deafened by underwater noise in the UK's busy shipping lanes, a new study suggests.

Noise in the shipping lanes is causing some seals to suffer from temporary deafness (Photo: Getty)

Researchers compared the experience of the seals to that of people living amidst the din of inner cities.

Ecologist Dr Esther Jones, from the University of St Andrews , said: “Like humans living in busy, noisy cities, some seals live in areas where there is a lot of shipping traffic and associated noise.

“The UK has some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and underwater noise has been increasing over the last 30 years.”

Ships are being blamed for causing a din for seals underwater (Photo: PA)

Her team drew up maps showing the extent to which grey and harbour seals around the UK were affected by shipping traffic.

The scientists then investigated noise levels individual animals were likely to be subjected to in Moray Firth on the north-east coast of Scotland.

For 20 of the 28 seals studied, the predicted noise was loud enough to cause temporary hearing loss.

The maps showed that 11 of 25 Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) may contain seals affected by shipping.

Scientists have compared the racket to like living in an inner city (Photo: Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

Dr Jones added: “Urbanisation of the marine environment is inevitably going to continue, so chronic ocean noise should be incorporated explicitly into marine spatial planning and management plans for existing marine protected areas.

“We now need to begin assessing any behavioural changes of seals as a result of chronic exposure to underwater noise, so that we can understand the implications of those changes on individuals and ultimately on population dynamics.”

The scientists, whose findings appear in the Journal Of Applied Ecology, now plan to tag seals with sound and movement recording devices to investigate how their behaviour is affected by noise.

SOURCE: Mirror.co.uk

Mystery Surrounds Treasure Trove of Gold Coins Hidden in Piano in Shropshire

The coins are 91.7% gold and would have been worth more than the price of a house at the time they were hidden in the instrument.

The hoard of gold coins was found hidden in an upright piano at a school in Shropshire

Investigators have been left scratching their heads as to why a treasure trove of gold coins was hidden in an old piano.

The collection of 913 coins, declared as treasure by a coroner on Thursday, was found hidden beneath the instrument's keyboard at a school in Shropshire as it was being retuned.

It is reported the hoard could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, though it still has to be formally valued.

Experts from the British Museum say the coins range in date from 1847 to 1915 and include 633 full sovereigns and 280 half-sovereigns.

They were found neatly stacked in several hand-stitched bags and would have been worth around £773 at the time they were hidden, well above the average house price of £619.

The collection is yet to be formally valued

The majority of the coins date from the reign of Queen Victoria and were found to be 91.7% pure gold.

At an inquest into the discovery, coroner John Ellery ruled that the gold coins were treasure but said: "We simply do not know how they came to be concealed."

An international media appeal as well as local research failed to shed any light on who put the 6kg hoard into the piano.

The instrument previously belonged to Graham and Meg Hemmings, from Saffron Walden in Essex, but they donated it to Bishop's Castle Community College in Shropshire after moving nearby in 2015.

A gold sovereign from the reign of Queen Victoria, dated 1847, was the oldest coin found

The couple had owned it for 33 years without any knowledge of its secret.

The hoard was discovered by tuning technician Martin Backhouse, 61, who initially thought the "gobsmacking" discovery was "moth repellent" before realising it was too heavy.

After slitting the stitching with his penknife, he realised there was "rather a lot of gold in this".

Both Mr Backhouse and the school could be in line for a windfall from the hoard's sale.

The collection of gold coins was found in this piano

Mr and Mrs Hemmings said they did not regret donating the piano to the school.

Mrs Hemmings said: "The sadness is, it's not a complete story. They've looked and searched for the people and they unfortunately haven't come forward.

"It's an incomplete story - but it's still an exciting story."

During the hearing, Peter Reavill, from the British Museum, said one of the packets contained an old Shredded Wheat advertising card, meaning the hoard was probably "repackaged" sometime during the Great Depression era.

SOURCE: News.sky.com

Surgeons Conduct Head Transplants on Rats, Say Humans Are Next

After 14 head transplants on rats, a pair of surgeons say they will attempt a human head transplant in the next 10 months in China.

Chinese scientists have transplanted the head of a donor rat onto the back of a host body, creating an equally garish and impressive two-headed rat that may offer insights into the viability of an eventual human head transplant.

The process, which was done by way of a rat triad, which included a donor, recipient, and blood supply rat, provided a continuous blood supply to the donor brain throughout the transplant, avoiding brain tissue hypothermia — a condition where the brain suffers in absence of a blood supply. The problem has long been one of the major barriers to carrying out a successful head transplant in animal specimens.

At the end of the experiment, discussed in a paper published in CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics, lead author Li Peng-Wei and colleagues reported that the donor head had “no obvious abnormalities” and “exhibited substantial movement.” While critics of the plan abound, the study lays clear the authors’ belief that “this model will facilitate current efforts toward the first human head transplant.”

Scientists have been trying to perfect the head transplant for decades, though attempts have overwhelmingly been met with problems of hypothermia and immune rejection — the recipient body and new head refusing to work together to ensure one another’s survival. In the 1950s, a Soviet researcher famously made 19 attempts to create a two-headed dog, while a neurosurgeon in Cleveland transplanted a monkey head onto its beheaded peer in the 1970s, keeping the brain alive for seven days.

While these techniques tested techniques for keeping the brain alive in the absence of a blood supply, authors of the study said their goal, in contrast to that of Chinese researchers, was not the long-term viability of the specimen. In this study, scientists believe to have surmounted these issues, though they recognize that long-term immune rejection continues to be a primary risk and will require further study.

Like the Soviet study from the 1950, Chinese researchers cut the donating specimen at the chest, not the neck, in a technique that may offer an alternative to head detachment for a successful head transplant. They employed the use of rat triads, which enabled them to maintain a permanent blood supply to the donor brain until its blood vessels were connected to those of the recipients.   

The study involved 60 rats of varying weights, though the donor and recipient rat maintained a weight ratio of 1-to-6 in order to avoid circulatory overload in the eventual two-headed rat.

After all rats were anesthetized, researchers opened the chest of the donor rat, connecting two of its major veins — the thoracic aorta and superior vena — to the recipient rat by way of two silicon blood vessels. The blood supply rat was connected to the donor brain and an external pump kept blood circulating to the donor brain throughout the transplant, avoiding brain tissue hypothermia. Scientists also used a temperature change device to keep the blood of the donor rat warm.

In the meantime, researchers made an incision on the back of the recipient rat’s neck and cut the vessels that would attach to the new head. The donor head was placed above the cut, its blood vessels then inserted and grafted on to those of the recipient. Researchers then closed the incision with stitches, reporting full cross-circulation between donor and recipient and that neither donor nor recipient had their circulation interrupted in the process.

The silicon blood vessels were removed and, in the end, 14 triads survived for an average of 36 hours. During this time, researchers reported that oxygen levels in the blood remained normal. After the operation, rats exhibited normal pain and corneal reflexes. Aside from accidentally losing one triad during anesthesia, the researchers reported no other anomalies in donors or recipients.

Authors of the paper are optimistic that they have demonstrated a successful head transplant technique that assumes substantially fewer risks than those attempted in the past. “We speculate that the method used in this experiment can provide a new idea for the short-term preservation of central nervous system transplantation,” they wrote. The team is blazing a controversial trail towards the first human head transplant, which may come sooner than expected.

Two of the authors on the paper are Chinese neurosurgeon Xiao-Ping Ren and Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero, who has received criticism in response to his ambitious plans to carry out the first human head transplant later this year. In an interview offered by his public relations agency, OOOM, Canavero said that “the first human head transplantation will already be conducted within the next 10 months in China.”

SOURCE: Seeker