Another Cable Just Broke at The Iconic Arecibo Telescope, And Scientists Are Worried

 For the second time in barely a matter of months, a cable accident has occurred at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, causing yet more damage to 1 of the world's largest and most powerful radio telescopes.

In August, astronomers and science-lovers alike were aghast to work out an enormous hole ripped through the facility's massive reflector dish, resulting from a broken auxiliary cable that fell and smashed into the structure, leaving an unpleasant gash measuring 30 metres (100 feet) long.

In the months since, engineers and workers at the observatory are making preparations for a posh repair job, with work initially scheduled to start in the week. Unfortunately, a second cable failure happening on Friday evening standard time has now complicated true further.

"This is under no circumstances what we wanted to determine, but the important thing is that nobody got hurt," says director of the observatory Francisco Cordova.

"We are thoughtful in our evaluation and prioritised safety in planning for repairs that were speculated to begin Tuesday. Now, this."

The Arecibo Observatory in 2019, before this year's accidents. (UCF)

According to the University of Central Florida (UCF), which operates the Arecibo Observatory on behalf of the National Science Foundation, the second cable incident appears up-to-date some regard to the primary.

Both cables were connected to the identical support tower, and it's possible the second break was triggered by additional strain after the primary failure.

Observers at the power had been monitoring all the cables since the accident in August and had noted wires breaking on the cable that snapped last week, presumably because of fraying from the additional load. Unfortunately, before any remedial stop-guards may well be put in situ, the second cable also gave way, falling onto the dish, causing additional damage thereto, and also damaging nearby cables.

Working in conjunction with engineers brought in to assess matters, UCF is expediting the repair plan underway, with a view to reducing the stress on remaining cables as quickly as possible. Two new cables are already on their thanks to the observatory, and therefore the team will continue evaluating the structure while they expect the parts to arrive.

"There is way uncertainty until we will stabilise the structure," Cordova says. "It has our full attention. We are evaluating true with our experts and hope to possess more to share soon."

What makes the full repair and fortification project even tougher is Arecibo's age: the historic facility was inbuilt the 1960s, and held the title of the world's largest single-aperture astronomical telescope for over a half-century – until it absolutely was superseded by China's even more humongous Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), which began its testing introduces 2016 and achieved full operational status in January.

During its long-running service, the Arecibo facility has notched up dozens of astronomical milestones, observing and recording new scientific measurements of distant exoplanets, asteroids, pulsars, radio emissions, and molecules in far-flung galaxies.

The observatory has also been at the forefront of the seek for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and was the transmitter of the Arecibo message, a pioneering attempt in 1974 to broadcast an interstellar radio emission.

It may are eclipsed by FAST in terms of its size, but the Arecibo Observatory nonetheless is anticipated to own decades of discoveries left in it, but providing its serious and seemingly mounting structural issues are often fixed.

"This isn't good, but we remain committed to getting the ability back online," Cordova says. "It's just too important of a tool for the advancement of science."

That's certainly true, except for an ageing facility that's been operational since before humanity visited the Moon, it's hard to grasp evidently just how serious the damage is, and the way fortifiable or repairable the structure will ultimately be, in addition to if other accidents happen within the short term.

Here's hoping for a positive outcome, which emergency measures can stabilise this pillar of 20th-century astronomy. But even before these recent cable breakages, the observatory was still receiving repairs for damage caused by Hurricane Maria, which slammed into Puerto Rico in 2017.

"It's not a reasonably picture," radio astronomer Joanna Rankin from the University of Vermont told Science. "This is damn serious."

'Gorgeous' Spider Presumed Extinct Found Alive And Kicking at UK Military Base

 A 2-inch-long (5 centimeters) spider thought to be extinct in Great Britain is truly alive and thriving on a British military base. 

A program manager at the Surrey Wildlife Trust rediscovered the nice fox-spider (Alopecosa fabrilis) on an undeveloped portion of a facility in Surrey, England, after a two-year search. The last time the spider was seen before this in Britain was in 1993, or 27 years ago. 

"It's a beautiful spider if you're into that sort of thing," the program manager Mike Waite told The Guardian.

Nocturnal hunter

The great fox-spider maybe a spider, a family of arachnids that hunts down its prey instead of building webs. The spider is nocturnal, which makes it an elusive quarry for spider enthusiasts.

According to The Guardian, Waite used aerial photography of the facility to search out bare patches where the spiders wish to hunt. His search in these sandy spots paid off after many fruitless nights. 

"As soon as my torch fell on that I knew what it absolutely was. I used to be elated," Waite said. "With coronavirus, there are plenty of ups and downs this year, and that I also turned 60, so it had been an honest celebration of that."

Waite found several male spiders, one female, and possibly some immature spiderlings, though the latter were difficult to spot conclusively.

The adult spiders have gray-and-brown furry bodies. they'll spin silk, but rather than making webs, they use that silk to line the burrows that they dig so as to hibernate over the winter. Great fox-spiders are critically endangered, but they're also found on the ECU mainland, particularly on coastal sand dunes in Holland and Denmark, consistent with The Guardian.

Waite wonders whether the spiders also are quietly surviving on Britain's coastlines. 

"It makes me think how hard have we sought for it on our coasts? Have we been looking hard enough?" he told The Guardian.

Alopecosa fabrilis female. (Michael Hohner/Wiki/CC By 3.0)

Conserving space for wildlife

The Surrey Wildlife Trust manages thousands of acres of undeveloped land within the Surrey area to guard wildlife. Ministry of Defence sites also are prime realty for animals, because they're left relatively undisturbed aside from the grooming exercises that occur there.

For security reasons, the researchers are keeping confidential the identity of the positioning where they found the good fox-spiders, but it consists of the scrubby heartland that also provides a home for native birds, snakes, lizards, and butterflies.

"Many people are unaware of the scale and variety of the Defence estate and its tremendous wildlife richness," Rich Lowey, the top of technical services at the Defense Infrastructure Organization, said during a statement.

"It has generally been shielded from agricultural intensification and concrete development, so it now provides a significant sanctuary for several of the country's most rare and species and habitats."

Waite now plans to continue his survey for the spiders so as to estimate the dimensions of their population.

Some Zoo Monkeys Prefer Traffic Sounds to The Natural Noise of a Jungle

 They may be naturally suited to swinging in rainforests, but monkeys in a very Finnish zoo have demonstrated a "significant" preference for traffic sounds rather than the noises of the jungle, researchers have found.​

As a part of an experiment to determine how technology could improve the well-being of captive animals, researchers installed a tunnel fitted with sensors within the enclosure of the monkeys at Helsinki's Korkeasaari Zoo, giving the primates the prospect to decide on to pay attention to the sounds of rain, traffic, zen sounds or popular music genre.

"We thought they'd enjoy more calming sounds, like zen music, but actually they triggered the traffic sounds more," Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, a researcher at Finland's Aalto University, told AFP.

The soundtrack of vehicles rumbling past proved overwhelmingly the foremost popular choice for the animals, who sometimes slept or groomed themselves and every other inside the sound tunnel – something they failed to do for any of the opposite sounds, Hirskyj-Douglas said.​

The zoo's research coordinator, Kirsi Pynnonen, said she believes the road sounds of course mimic a number of the monkeys' natural means of communication.

"In the wild, these monkeys use high-pitched hissing, squeaking, and croaking to remain in grips," she said, noises which the animals may hear within the traffic noises.

Sound experiments are performed on animals in captivity hitherto, but the scientists say this was the primary try to try to give the creatures full control over what they need to pay attention to.​

In the future, it could enable zoos to produce animals with extra stimuli in their enclosures.

"Animals could, for example, control their lighting, heat or the temperature," or maybe play games, Hirskyj-Douglas said.​

"The technology is incredibly much open, and we're just setting out to bridge into this area."

Other zoos around Europe have shown interest in the research findings, Pynnonen said, and therefore the team will look next at installing screens inside the tunnel for the monkeys to look at if they choose.​

White-faced saki monkeys are mid-sized primates native to the northern countries of South America, where they're "relatively numerous" but threatened by the destruction of the rainforest, Pynnonen said.

"Despite what many folks think, they do not eat bananas in the least, but seeds, insects, and a few fruits," she added.​

This Weird Rock Naturally Glows in The Dark, And Now Scientists Have Figured Out How

 The afterglow of the mineral hackmanite (or tenebrescent sodalite) may be a fascinating phenomenon that has long been a mystery to scientists – whether or not we're now ready to engineer synthetic materials that glow within the dark more effectively than anything in nature.

Geologists first described the mineral within the 1800s, who were intrigued by its tendency to softly glow a bright pink hue when broken or placed within the dark and act within the light. Later research would cut down the chemistry behind this characteristic, but the precise nature of the reaction has proven elusive.

Now a replacement study outlines exactly how certain sorts of hackmanite retain a number of their glow as they move from bright to dark settings. The secret is the fragile interplay between the mineral's natural impurities, determined by how it absolutely was formed.

Getting a more robust understanding of how hackmanite can emit white luminescence in dark conditions will further help scientists develop our own synthetic materials ready to glow within the dark with none source of power, as on a stair sign, for instance.

"We have conducted lots of research with synthetic hackmanites and are able to develop a cloth with an afterglow distinctly longer than that of natural hackmanite," says materials chemist Isabella Norrbo from the University of Turku in Finland.

"However, the conditions affecting the luminescence are unclear to date."

A combination of both experimental and computational data was studied to see that the concentrations and balance of sulfur, potassium, titanium, and iron were most significant when it came to the afterglow given off by hackmanite.

In particular, titanium was found to be the element actually glowing, with the glow itself powered by electron transfer.

However, titanium concentrations alone don't seem to be enough to form luminescence, with the correct mixture of other elements also required.

The researchers say that synthetic materials are often improved and made more efficient and reliable through these forms of studies – whether or not nature isn't ready to match the strength of the glows which will be engineered within the lab.

"The materials used at the instant are all synthetic, and, as an example, the fabric with the familiar green afterglow obtains its glow from a part called europium," says materials chemist Mika Lastusaari, from the University of Turku.

"The difficulty with this sort of fabric is that while the specified element that emits luminescence is added to them, their afterglow properties can't be predicted."

Samples of hackmanite from Greenland, Canada, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were employed in the study, with a global team of chemists, mineralogists, geologists, physicists, statisticians, and other scientists involved in figuring out exactly what was happening with the hackmanite glow.

Part of the mystery was why some hackmanites show a glow et al. don't, but through a careful comparison of the various samples, the team was ready to spot the desired mixture of orange photoluminescence (turning absorbed photons into light), blue persistent luminescence (emitting light without heating), and purple photochromism (a kind of chemical transformation caused by electromagnetic radiation).

It's a complex mixture of natural elements and chemical reactions, but the result should be better synthetic materials which will match these styles of glows. In terms of fabric science, it is important not just how bright the luminescence is but also how long it lasts.

"With these results, we obtained valuable information of the conditions affecting the afterglow of hackmanites," says Lastusaari.

"Even though nature has not, during this case, been ready to form a fabric with a glow as effective as in synthetic materials, nature has helped significantly within the development of increasingly simpler glowing materials."

70 International Studies Show That a Warming World Increases Risks to Pregnancies

 Climate change poses an on the spot threat to human health, and growing evidence suggests pregnant people are especially at risk of hotter-than-normal summers.

A new analysis of 70 studies from around the world has found higher temperatures during pregnancy are linked to a little increase in preterm births and stillbirths, especially in low- and middle-income countries. 

While the danger appears relatively minimal, scientists are worried it could have a significant impact on public health within the future, especially with global climate change driving more intense and frequent heatwaves. 

Just as young children, the elderly, and people with pre-existing conditions are warned about the risks of maximum heat events, we must always also warn people who are pregnant, they advise.

Carrying a toddler places many new demands on the anatomy, forcing the guts to figure harder, raising internal temperatures, and leaving the body at risk of heat stress, exhaustion, and dehydration.

"Pregnant women merit an area alongside the groups typically considered as a high risk for warmth related conditions," the international team concludes.

This field of research continues to be relatively new, but from what we all know thus far, there's reason to fret both for the mother and therefore the baby.

None of the studies included within the current review are perfect or able to provide a transparent cause or effect. Yet within the larger literature, the pattern is both consistent and concerning.

An observational study published last year supported an assessment of 56 million births within the US also identified a link between rising temperatures and shrinking gestation periods.

"When more and more studies start to gather and coalesce round the same conclusion, we've to listen, especially when there's biological plausibility behind the result," explains obstetrician-gynecologist Nathaniel DeNicola in a very separate 2019 paper on the topic.

Analyzing more studies on the topic than ever before, the present meta-analysis examines how heat sensitivity impacts three outcomes in pregnancy: stillbirths, premature births, and low birth weight. 

The research came from 24 countries, most of which were based in North America, the EU Union, Australia, and New Zealand, although seven came from low- and middle-income countries. 

For each 1°C increase in temperature, researchers found the danger of early birth and stillbirth increased by roughly 5 percent on average. in an exceedingly prolonged wave, the chance of early birth rose by 16 percent.

To put that in perspective, the world average rate of preterm births is about 10 percent, therefore the impact of maximum heat, if there's one, is comparatively small compared to any or all the opposite factors that may influence the outcomes of pregnancy.

The analysis showed low birth weight, for instance, occurred in exactly 3 percent of the infants born during a heatwave, and also the relationship was found much less often.

While only 18 out of 28 studies found a link between birth weight and warmth exposure, 40 out of 47 studies found a link between preterm births and warmth exposure.

"The evidence was strongest and most consistent for heatwaves," the authors write, "although the most important effect sizes were from measures of the cumulative dose of warmth over the entire pregnancy."

This means heat exposure could fine add up throughout pregnancy, although outcomes appear to fluctuate between certain socioeconomic groups.

For instance, while a number of studies suggest low- and middle-income pregnancies are prone to heat exposure for the total nine months, other studies in high-income countries suggest the last weeks of pregnancy are where exposure is most risky.

The different methodologies used and therefore the various different subpopulations examined make it hard to generalize.

What's more, nearly a 3rd of the studies included were deemed of caliber, which implies the conclusions we will draw are limited.

Several studies, for example, found preterm birth rates escalated only if temperatures exceeded 25°C (77°F), and this might explain why other research, which only included temperatures below this threshold, failed to show similar results.

There are with great care many factors to contemplate and control when it involves pregnancy outcomes, including education, access to health care, food security, and availability of air con. Even the sex of the fetus might play a job.

A study in Japan, as an example, found spontaneous abortions were higher among male fetuses after a period of warmth exposure. viewing all 70 studies, the new review found an identical pattern.

What's driving these results is unclear. Some animal studies have found heat exposure during pregnancy can interfere with the synthesis of warmth shock proteins, resulting in fetal cell damage, oxidative stress, or inflammation. Whether this is up in humans remains to be seen.

Further research should be a high priority, especially since the pregnancy risks of heatwaves appear much higher in areas where far fewer protections exist.

"Exposure to high temperatures in agricultural and other outdoor work could occur before the pregnancy is recognized, and, even late in pregnancy, poorer women might work beyond their heat tolerance limits to avoid losing pay," the authors worry.  

From what we all know to date, that's cause for concern, yet up to now, many emergency heat plans around the world, including those within us and Europe, fail to incorporate pregnant people as a vulnerable group.

"Pregnant women as an at-risk group to temperature change are largely ignored," Skye Wheeler, an emergencies researcher for the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, told BuzzFeed News earlier this year.

That clearly must change.

Simulation Gives a Peek Into The Cosmic 'Dark Age' of Star Formation

 For astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists, the power to identify the primary stars that formed in our Universe has always been just beyond reach. On the one hand, there are the bounds of our current telescopes and observatories, which might only see thus far.

The farthest object ever observed was MACS 1149-JD, a galaxy located 13.2 billion light-years from Earth that was spotted within the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) image.

On the opposite, up until about 1 billion years after the large Bang, the Universe was experiencing what cosmologists check with because the "Dark Ages" when the Universe was stuffed with gas clouds that obscured visible and infrared radiation.

Luckily, a team of researchers from Georgia Tech's Center for Relativistic Astrophysics recently conducted simulations that show what the formation of the primary stars appeared like.

The study that describes their findings, published within the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, was led by Gen Chiaki and John Wise – a post-doctoral researcher and professor from the CfRA (respectively).

They were joined by researchers from the Sapienza Università di Roma, the Astronomical Observatory of Rome, the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), and also the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN).

Based on the life and death cycles of stars, astrophysicists theorize that the primary stars within the Universe were very metal-poor. Having formed about 100 million years after the large bang, these stars formed from a primordial soup of hydrogen gas, helium, and trace amounts of sunshine metals.

These gases would collapse to make stars that were up to 1,000 times more massive than our Sun.

Because of their size, these stars were short-lived and possibly only existed for some million years. in this time, the new and heavier elements in their nuclear furnaces, which were then dispersed once the celebrities collapsed and exploded in supernovae.

As a result, the subsequent generation of stars with heavier elements would contain carbon, resulting in the designation of Carbon-Enhanced Metal-Poor (CEMP) stars.

The composition of those stars, which can be visible to astronomers today, is that the results of the nucleosynthesis (fusion) of heavier elements from the primary generation of stars.

By studying the mechanism behind the formation of those metal-poor stars, scientists can infer what was happening during the cosmic 'Dark Ages' when the primary stars formed. As Wise said in an exceedingly Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) press release:

"We can't see the very first generations of stars. Therefore, it is important to really study these living fossils from the first universe, because they need the fingerprints of the primary stars everywhere them through the chemicals that were produced within the supernova from the primary stars."

"That's where our simulations get to play to determine this happening. After you run the simulation, you'll watch a brief movie of it to determine where the metals come from and the way the primary stars and their supernovae actually affect these fossils that live until this day."

Density, temperature, and carbon abundance (top) and the formation cycle of Pop III stars (bottom). (Chiaki, et al.)

For the sake of their simulations, the team relied predominantly on the Georgia Tech PACE cluster. extra time was allocated by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the Stampede2 supercomputer at TACC and NSF-funded Frontera system (the fastest academic supercomputer within the world), and also the Comet cluster at the urban center Supercomputer Center (SDSC).

With the huge amounts of processing power and data storage these clusters provided, the team was ready to model the faint supernova of the primary stars within the Universe.

What this revealed was that the metal-poor stars that formed after the primary stars within the Universe became carbon-enhanced through the blending and fallback of bits ejected from the primary supernovae.

Their simulations also showed the gas clouds produced by the primary supernovae were seeding with carbonaceous grains, resulting in the formation of low-mass 'giga-metal-poor' stars that likely still exist today (and may well be studied by future surveys). Said Chiaki of those stars:

"We find that these stars have very low iron content compared to the observed carbon-enhanced stars with billionths of the solar abundance of iron. However, we are able to see the fragmentation of the clouds of gas. this means that the Mass stars form during a low iron abundance regime. Such stars haven't been observed yet. Our study gives us theoretical insight into the formation of first stars."

A new study looked at 52 submillimeter galaxies to help us understand the early ages of our Universe. (University of Nottingham/Omar Almaini)

These investigations are a part of a growing field referred to as "galactic archaeology."

Much like how archaeologists depend upon fossilized remains and artifacts to find out more about societies that disappeared centuries or millennia ago, astronomers rummage around for ancient stars to review so as to find out more about those who have lang syne died.

According to Chiaki, the following step is to vary beyond the carbon features of ancient stars and incorporate other heavier elements into larger simulations. In so doing, galactic archaeologists hope to be told more about the origins and distribution of life in our Universe. Said Chiaki:

"The aim of this study is to grasp the origin of elements, like carbon, oxygen, and calcium. These elements are concentrated through the repetitive matter cycles between the interstellar space and stars. Our bodies and our planet are made from carbon and oxygen, nitrogen, and calcium. Our study is incredibly important to assist understand the origin of those elements that we mortals are fabricated from."

Bizarre molten planet discovered with lava ocean, supersonic winds

 Scientists say they’ve probably recognized a lava world so dramatic that it might boast a thin regional environment of vaporized rock the place it’s closest to its star.

That exoplanet is understood as K2-141b and was initially discovered in 2017. the globe is about half over again as large as Earth however orbits so near its star, which is one class smaller than our personal, that it completes a variety of loops every Earth-day with the identical floor completely inquiring the star. Now, scientists predict these components imply that two-thirds of the ground of K2-141b is totally sunlit — plenty so as that not solely could be a part of the globe coated in a very lava ocean, however, some of that rock could even evaporate away into the environment.

An artist’s rendering of K2-141b.Julie Roussy / McGill Graphic Design and Getty Images

“All rocky planets­, including Earth, started off as molten worlds on the other hand rapidly cooled and solidified,” Nicolas Cowan, a planetary scientist at McGill University in Canada and a co-author on the fresh paper, said in an exceeding statement. “Lava planets give us a rare glimpse at this stage of planetary evolution.”

The scientists behind the latest researchers wished to understand what reasonable environment such a scorching world may have and therefore the way terrestrial instruments would see it. K2-141b was a tempting goal as a result of it's been studied by each the K2 mission of NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and by the company’s Spitzer Space Telescope. and therefore the environment is very intriguing as the results of scientists consider that NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, as a result of launch late subsequent 12 months, will have the power to research the weather of distant planetary atmospheres.

The researchers began with what earlier research has decided about K2-141b up to now — for example, that the planet’s density is this of Earth’s, therefore the crust can be modeled as pure silica as a reasonably simplified illustration. Then, the scientists revealed what the ground may appear to be. that employment took into consideration problems just like the truth that the world is so near its star that greater than half the world’s floor could also be sunlit, maybe as plenty as two-thirds, the researchers calculated.

Such fixed gentle and heat imply that the globe seemingly sports activities a magma ocean tens of miles or kilometers deep, in response to the staff’s calculations. Then, the researchers modeled what an environment right here would seem to be based on three potential predominant elements, all of that are frequent within the crusts of rocky planets.

All three circumstances can help an environment, the scientists calculated, with wind speeds above 1.1 miles (1.75 kilometers) per second, far earlier than the rate of sound correct here on Earth.

At the edges of the environment, the place temperatures drop, the gaseous rock would cool sufficient to fall again to the ground as precipitation, the researchers calculated. If the environment is dominated by silica or silicon monoxide, that precipitation would principally represent the magma ocean, but when the environment is predominantly sodium, the world would look even weirder, with stable sodium oozing again towards the oceans like glaciers here on Earth, the researchers wrote.

But all this modeling wasn’t simply to test what a really weird world might appear to be; that's science, in spite of everything. The researchers wished to test their fashions with the current and predicted observing capacities of enormous area telescopes. Here, the scientists are upbeat: they name K2-141b “an especially good target for atmospheric observations.”

And the researchers even have an answer to maneuver their time prior to the James Webb Space Telescope launches, the scientists stated within the assertion: they’ve acquired Spitzer Space Telescope observations that should assist pin down the temperatures of the planet’s day and evening sides, clarifying how the fashions could match actuality.

The analysis is described in an exceedingly paper revealed Nov. three within the journal the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.