23 science facts we didn't know at the start of 2016

[SciTechPress]

beautyaboveus:

1. Gravitational waves are real. More than 100 years after Einstein first predicted them, researchers finally detected the elusive ripples in space time this year. We’ve now seen three gravitational wave events in total.

2. Sloths almost die every time they poop, and it looks agonising.

3. It’s possible to live for more than a year without a heart in your body.

4. It’s also possible to live a normal life without 90 percent of your brain.

5. There are strange, metallic sounds coming from the Mariana trench, the deepest point on Earth’s surface. Scientists currently think the noise is a new kind of baleen whale call.

6. A revolutionary new type of nuclear fusion machine being trialled in Germany really works, and could be the key to clean, unlimited energy.

7. There’s an Earth-like planet just 4.2 light-years away in the Alpha Centauri star system - and scientists are already planning a mission to visit it.

8. Earth has a second mini-moon orbiting it, known as a ‘quasi-satellite’. It’s called 2016 HO3.

9. There might be a ninth planet in our Solar System (no, Pluto doesn’t count).

10. The first written record demonstrating the laws of friction has been hiding inside Leonardo da Vinci’s “irrelevant scribbles” for the past 500 years.

11. Zika virus can be spread sexually, and it really does cause microcephaly in babies.

12. Crows have big ears, and they’re kinda terrifying.

13. The largest known prime number is 2^74,207,281– 1, which is a ridiculous 22 million digits in length. It’s 5 million digits longer than the second largest prime.

14. The North Pole is slowly moving towards London, due to the planet’s shifting water content.

15. Earth lost enough sea ice this year to cover the entire land mass of India.

16. Artificial intelligence can beat humans at Go.

17. Tardigrades are so indestructible because they have an in-built toolkit to protect their DNA from damage. These tiny creatures can survive being frozen for decades, can bounce back from total desiccation, and can even handle the harsh radiation of space.

18. There are two liquid states of water.

19. Pear-shaped atomic nuclei exist, and they make time travel seem pretty damn impossible.

20. Dinosaurs had glorious tail feathers, and they were floppy.

21. One third of the planet can no longer see the Milky Way from where they live.

22. There’s a giant, 1.5-billion-cubic-metre (54-billion-cubic-foot) field of precious helium gas in Tanzania.

23. The ‘impossible’ EM Drive is the propulsion system that just won’t quit. NASA says it really does seem to produce thrust - but they still have no idea how. We’ll save that mystery for 2017.

via ScitechPress.org

[Guest]

On 12/28/2016 at 7:06 PM, SciTechPress said:

23. The ‘impossible’ EM Drive is the propulsion system that just won’t quit. NASA says it really does seem to produce thrust - but they still have no idea how. We’ll save that mystery for 2017.

“The ‘thrust’ is not coming from the EmDrive, but from some electromagnetic interaction,” the team reports in a proceeding for a recent conference on space propulsion.

The group, led by Martin Tajmar of the Technische Universität Dresden, tested the drive in a vacuum chamber with a variety of sensors and automated gizmos attached. Researchers could control for vibrations, thermal fluctuations, resonances, and other potential sources of thrust, but they weren’t quite able to shield the device against the effects of Earth’s own magnetic field.

When they turned on the system but dampened the power going to the actual drive so essentially no microwaves were bouncing around, the EmDrive still managed to produce thrust—something it should not have done if it works the way the NASA team claims.

The researchers have tentatively concluded that the effect they measured is the result of Earth’s magnetic field interacting with power cables in the chamber, a result that other experts agree with.

“In the EmDrive case, interactions with the Earth's magnetic field seems to be the leading candidate explanation of the small thrusts seen,” says Jim Woodward of California State University, Fullerton.Woodward has theorized a propulsive device of his own called the Mach Effect Thruster, which the Dresden group also tested.

To determine what’s going on with the EmDrive, though, the group needs to enclose the device in a shield made of something called mu metals, which will insulate it against the planet’s magnetism. Importantly, this kind of shield was not part of Eagleworks’ original testing apparatus either, which suggests the original findings could also be a consequence of leaking magnetic fields.

That sounds like a blow to the concept of the EmDrive, but Woodward is not ready to close the case on the contraption just yet. Aside from the lack of mu metal shielding, the Dresden lab’s tests were run at very low power levels, meaning that “any real signal would likely be swamped by noise from spurious sources,” he says.

So, perhaps an even more powerful test is what the space doctors ordered to help settle the debate.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/05/nasa-emdrive-impossible-physics-independent-tests-magnetic-space-science/?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral

[Guest Nicole]

On 12/28/2016 at 9:06 PM, SciTechPress said:

2. Sloths almost die every time they poop, and it looks agonising.

Thanks, now I won't complain anymore from my Irritable Bowel Syndrome  

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

There is no sound in the Universe more disconcerting than a Spindizzy with a bad bearing ....