by tyler | May 12, 2023 | CNN, world
Turkey’s main opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu has accused Russia of interfering in the country’s ongoing presidential election campaign.
“Dear Russian friends, you are behind the montages, conspiracies, deep fake content and tapes that were exposed in this country yesterday,” he said in a tweet posted Thursday.
“If you want the continuation of our friendship after May 15, get your hands off the Turkish state,” Kilicdaroglu said. Voters go to the polls Sunday in Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary election.
Kilicdaroglu, who is the head of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), and is incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s main rival, addressed Russia in the tweet, saying “we are still in favor of cooperation and friendship.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the accusation in a Friday briefing, calling those who spread such rumors “liars.”
“Russia does not interfere in the internal affairs and electoral processes of other countries,” Peskov said.
Polls suggest a tight race between Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu, but give Kilicdaroglu a slight lead.
If no candidate wins a majority in the first round of elections on May 14, the country will hold a second round on May 28.
Turkey, a NATO member which has the alliance’s second-largest army, has strengthened its ties with Russia and in 2019 even bought weapons from it in defiance of the United States.
While many NATO members and other Western nations sought to reduce their reliance on Russian energy after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, Turkey instead extended its dependence on Russia.
The strengthening ties between Erdogan and Putin have caused jitters in the West, with some watching the upcoming elections with anticipation of a possible Erdogan exit.
“We place great value on our bilateral relations with the Turkish side, because the Republic of Turkey has so far taken a very responsible sovereign and well-thought-out position on a whole range of regional and global problems that we are facing. And this position is very appealing to us,” Peskov said.
When US Ambassador to Ankara Jeff Flake paid a visit in March to Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan lashed out against him, calling the US diplomat’s visit a “shame,” and warning that Turkey needs to “teach the US a lesson in this election.”
On Thursday, one of the main four presidential candidates dropped out in a surprise move, citing “a campaign of slander.” Muharrem Ince, the candidate who withdrew, had faced weeks of lurid allegations on social media in Turkey.
by tyler | May 12, 2023 | CNN, world
Very large things often have small beginnings. That certainly was true for brontotheres, the enormous, rhino-like herbivorous mammals that lumbered across North America and Asia during the Eocene Epoch. Brontotheres started out as dog-size animals, but then most species evolved to become nearly as large as elephants, and they did so relatively quickly because smaller species were outcompeted into extinction, researchers recently discovered.
In fact, brontotheres likely hadn’t reached the limits of how big they could get. They might have produced species that were even more massive, had they not all gone extinct due to environmental changes, scientists reported Thursday in the journal Science.
Brontotheres are relatives of modern rhinos, horses and tapirs. Most brontothere species weighed over 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms), and the biggest lived in the South Dakota Badlands, measuring about 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall and 16 feet (4.9 meters) long, with giant Y-shaped horns on their noses, according to the National Park Service.
The name Brontotherium — “thunder beast,” coined in the 19th century by paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh — was inspired by Lakota oral histories about violent thunderstorms accompanied by giants, the park service says.
The earliest known brontotheres appeared about 53 million years ago; they were hornless and about the size of a coyote, weighing around 40 pounds (18 kilograms), the scientists reported. That modest size wasn’t unusual for mammals at the time. Previously, during the Mesozoic era (252 million to 66 million years ago), mammals living in the shadow of dinosaurs were typically no bigger than a badger. The dinosaurs’ reign ended when an asteroid impact triggered a mass extinction that wiped out 75% of life on Earth, and mammals that survived the carnage were rat-size on average.
But that would soon change. Once large dinosaurs were out of the picture, mammals began to fill those ecological niches, and brontotheres were especially successful at quickly evolving to be enormous. Just 16 million years after the first brontotheres appeared, “the last members of this group were multi-ton behemoths with extravagant bony protrusions over the head,” lead study author Oscar Sanisidro said in an email.
“What makes this group even more interesting is that it is the first in mammalian history to be consistently big,” said Sanisidro, who conducted the research while at the University of Alcalá in Spain and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Valencia.
The fossil record shows that other extinct animal groups also steadily gained size over time, an evolutionary phenomenon called “Cope’s Rule” after the 19th century paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. Many early scientists argued that brontotheres got bigger as a result of “an inner motor pushing evolution towards attaining the largest and most specialized forms,” said Pasquale Raia, a paleontologist and a professor at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. In other words: Give animals enough time, and evolution toward large size is inevitable, regardless of environmental factors.
Other scientists later proposed that size increases were instead shaped as species adapted to environmental pressures such as food availability, competition for resources and presence of predators, but they struggled to define what might lead to rapid and extreme growth, said Raia, who was not involved in the research.
For their investigation into brontothere size evolution, the authors examined evidence from the group’s rich fossil record, which represents most of its evolutionary history. The researchers also generated computer models to track details of how genetic traits in brontothere species changed as the group evolved. Through phylogenetic analysis — evaluating the evolutionary pathways of how new species take shape — the scientists could then determine how such changes might be linked to increases in body size.
They found an important clue in extinction patterns across species. Their data showed that body size evolved in both directions in brontotheres — sometimes new species would be smaller, and sometimes they would be bigger. But smaller species were more prone to extinction than their larger cousins, and a trend emerged in which increasingly larger species persisted longer than smaller species did.
“By the late Eocene, all the remaining species were giants,” Sanisidro said. This pattern hinted that megaherbivory — becoming large herbivores — benefited brontotheres; perhaps smaller brontothere species were more vulnerable to competition from fellow plant-eaters and predation from carnivores, the authors reported.
“We can, for the first time, explain brontothere size evolution from an evolutionary perspective and propose a ‘pathway’ to reach megaherbivory that needs to be tested in other mammalian groups,” Sanisidro said.
The study provides “a fresh new look to an old and incredibly attractive question: what drives the evolution of body size,” and it “makes an exceptional move” toward identifying the external conditions that drove brontotheres to be huge, Raia said in an email.
However, these herbivorous titans lost their survival edge when the Eocene’s humid greenhouse conditions started winding down. As the climate became progressively drier, previously lush ecosystems became less favorable for the thunder beasts, eventually causing their extinction.
Further research modeling ecological factors, such as the rate of ancient climate shifts and how that affected abundance of edible vegetation, “would clarify how environmental change led to the demise of the brontotheres,” the scientists said.
by tyler | May 9, 2023 | CNN, world
When the crewed Artemis II mission makes its lunar flyby in late 2024, we’ll be able to see video of the moon like never before — and it’s all thanks to lasers.
The Orion spacecraft will launch atop the Space Launch System rocket in November 2024 to carry NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency on a roughly 10-day journey beyond the moon and back.
Along for the historic journey to the moon will be the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System, or O2O — making Artemis II the first crewed lunar flight to demonstrate laser communications technology.
The O2O system will be capable of returning high-resolution images and video of the lunar surface back to Earth with a downlink rate of up to 260 megabits per second. The high bandwidth, a far cry from the grainy footage captured during the Apollo missions 50 years ago, could enable high-definition views of the moon in real time.
The laser system will also be able to send and receive procedures, flight plans, voice messages and other communications between the Orion spacecraft and mission control on Earth.
“By infusing new laser communications technologies into the Artemis missions, we’re empowering our astronauts with more access to data than ever before,” said O2O Project Manager Steve Horowitz in a statement. “The higher the data rates, the more information our instruments can send home to Earth, and the more science our lunar explorers can perform.”
Traditionally, NASA has relied on radio waves to communicate with spacecraft and return data to Earth.
Antennae located across the world receive communications from satellites that transmit radio frequencies carrying data to and from various missions, like returning scientific data or sending commands from mission control.
Lasers, traveling as invisible beams, can send terabytes of data in a single transmission. The laser communication systems, which are also more lightweight, secure and flexible, can supplement the radio waves used by most NASA missions.
It all started in December 2021 with the launch of NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration, or LCRD, which went into orbit about 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometers) from Earth as the first test of two-way laser communication.
The experiment, which lasts for two years, will reveal the impacts of Earth’s atmosphere on the laser signals as NASA and other agencies and institutions test its capabilities.
Then, there was the launch of the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery satellite, or TBIRD, in May 2022. The tissue box-size satellite provides 200-gigabit-per-second data downlinks, which is the highest optical rate yet achieved by NASA.
“In the past, we’ve designed our instruments and spacecraft around the constraint of how much data we can get down or back from space to Earth,” said TBIRD Project Manager Beth Keer in a statement. “With optical communications, we’re blowing that out of the water as far as the amount of data we can bring back. It is truly a game-changing capability.”
This year, NASA will launch the Integrated LCRD Low-Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal, or ILLUMA-T, on a SpaceX resupply mission to the International Space Station.
The terminal will bring laser communication capabilities to the space station, gathering data from the hundreds of experiments that take place on the orbiting laboratory and relaying it to LCRD at 1.2 gigabits per second.
The transfer rate is so fast, it’s like downloading a feature-length film in under a minute. Then, LCRD can transmit the data to ground stations in Hawaii or California.
“ILLUMA-T and LCRD will work together to become the first laser system to demonstrate low-Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit to ground communications links,” said Chetan Sayal, project manager for ILLUMA-T at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.
Testing laser communications in low-Earth orbit and between the moon and Earth during Artemis II could lead to future technology that could travel across extreme distances in space, like preparing for future crewed missions to Mars. One day astronauts could send back ultra HD video from the Martian surface.
“We are thrilled by the promise laser communications will offer in the coming years,” says Badri Younes, deputy associate administrator and program manager for space communications and navigation at NASA headquarters in a statement.
“These missions and demonstrations usher in NASA’s new Decade of Light in which NASA will work with other government agencies and the commercial sector to dramatically expand future communications capabilities for space exploration and enable vibrant and robust economic opportunities.”
by tyler | May 9, 2023 | CNN, world
What could be a meteorite struck a home in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, authorities said Monday. The metallic object crashed through the roof of a house and ricocheted around a bedroom. No one was in the bedroom at the time of the incident, and no injuries were reported.
Police are still working to determine the precise nature of the object, though officials suspect it is related to the current meteor shower, called the Eta Aquariids, according to a statement from the Hopewell Township Police Department in New Jersey.
The Eta Aquariid meteor shower is an annual phenomenon in which debris from the famous Halley’s Comet rains down into Earth’s atmosphere. The celestial event was expected to peak this past Saturday, according to American Meteor Society predictions, though it will last through May 27.
“I did touch the thing because I just thought it was a random rock,” Suzy Kop, a local resident who said the rock fell through the roof of her father’s bedroom, told CNN affiliate KYW-TV in Philadelphia. “And it was warm.”
“I just thank God that my father was not here. No one was here,” she added. “You know, we weren’t hurt or anything.”
The outermost part of meteorites can reach scorching temperatures because of the incredible friction and pressure involved with plunging into the Earth’s thick atmosphere at high speeds, though they typically cool off significantly as they reach the ground.
Space rocks strike all the time, distributed evenly across the Earth’s surface. But striking a home or populated area is rare because the majority of our planet is covered in oceans or undeveloped areas.
A meteorite strike is not, however, unheard of.
In November, for example, an object believed to be a meteorite from the Taurid meteor shower struck a house in Northern California, according to CNN affiliate KCRA in Sacramento. A fire broke out soon after. The Nevada County resident, Dustin Procita, was at home with his two dogs at the time of the incident. One of the dogs died in the fire.
Authorities in New Jersey said the possible meteorite that struck on Monday measured about 4 inches by 6 inches.
“It penetrated the roof, the ceiling and then impacted the hardwood floor before coming to a rest,” police said.
The police department “has contacted several other agencies for assistance in positively identifying the object and safeguarding the residents and the object.”
Meteorites can be difficult to distinguish from other types of metallic rocks. Researchers who hunt for meteorites typically look for fusion crust, a glassy coating that forms on the cosmic object’s exterior surface, which melts while the rock plummets through the Earth’s atmosphere.
Another distinguishing characteristic is the potential specimen’s weight. A meteorite will be much heavier for its size than a typical Earth rock because it’s packed with dense metals.
by tyler | May 8, 2023 | CNN, world
Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the first asteroid belt seen outside of our solar system and unveiled some cosmic surprises along the way.
The space observatory focused on the warm dust that encircles Fomalhaut, a young, bright star located 25 light-years from Earth in the Piscis Austrinus constellation.
The dusty disk around Fomalhaut was initially discovered in 1983 using NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite. But the Webb researchers weren’t expecting to see three nested rings of dust extending out 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star — or 150 times the distance of Earth from the sun.
Webb’s new view revealed Fomalhaut’s two inner belts for the first time, which didn’t appear in previous images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope or other observatories.
The detailed image of the dust belts, captured in infrared light that is invisible to the human eye, showed that the structures are more complex than the main asteroid belt and Kuiper Belt in our solar system.
The main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter, is where leftovers from the formation of our solar system orbit the sun. More icy leftovers can be found in the Kuiper Belt on the edge of our solar system, a doughnut-shaped ring of small celestial bodies and dust beyond Neptune.
The revelation of the Fomalhaut’s two inner rings has suggested that planets hidden deeper within the star system may be affecting the dust belt’s shape. Fomalhaut’s outer belt alone is about twice the scale of the Kuiper Belt. The new image and a study detailing the findings was published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Fomalhaut’s massive dust belts were likely created from the debris left behind as larger bodies such as asteroids and comets collided.
Then, the dust was shaped into belts by the gravitational influence of what the researchers believe are unseen planets that orbit the star, the same way Jupiter and Neptune shape our asteroid belt and the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt.
“I would describe Fomalhaut as the archetype of debris discs found elsewhere in our galaxy, because it has components similar to those we have in our own planetary system,” said lead study author András Gáspár, assistant research professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a statement.
“By looking at the patterns in these rings, we can actually start to make a little sketch of what a planetary system ought to look like — if we could actually take a deep enough picture to see the suspected planets.”
Combining Webb’s new observation along with images taken previously by Hubble, the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes can provide scientists with a more detailed view of how belts of debris form around stars.
Webb also observed a feature Gáspár calls “the great dust cloud,” where two celestial bodies might have collided in the outer ring. The cloud is separate from another feature spied by Hubble in 2008 that might have been a planet — but further observations showed the object disappeared by 2014, implying another collision that left only dust in its wake.
Stars form from gas and dust, and then a ring of leftover material called a protoplanetary disk orbits the star, where planets are born. The idea of the disk originated from astronomers Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace in the late 18th century. Once the planets form around a star, debris belts form and become shaped by the gravity of the planets. Inside the belts, objects like asteroids crash into one another and create more debris and dust.
Studying the dust belts can help unlock more of the secrets behind how planetary systems form.
“The belts around Fomalhaut are kind of a mystery novel: Where are the planets?” said study coauthor George Rieke, regents professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson and science team lead for Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument used in the observations, in a statement. “I think it’s not a very big leap to say there’s probably a really interesting planetary system around the star.”
by tyler | May 5, 2023 | CNN, world
Translucent, fragile marine creatures that drift through the sea are riding the motion of the ocean to a destination that’s infamous as a home for trash: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Ocean surface currents have shaped the enormous garbage pile for decades, funneling human-made debris into a region that extends for hundreds of thousands of square miles in the North Pacific, spanning waters between Hawaii and California.
But that’s not all the currents are transporting. A surprising number of delicate, floating invertebrates, called neustons, are making the Great Pacific Garbage Patch home, according to data from a new study.
In particular, there are violet sea snails in the Janthina genus and bright-blue jellyfish relatives known as sea rafts (Velella genus) and blue sea buttons (Porpita genus).
They’re part of a community of creatures thriving in the 620,000 square miles (1.6 million square kilometers) of plastic debris — an area roughly the size of Alaska — that’s hosting a floating ecosystem.
At the heart of the garbage patch, the abundance of these drifters was comparable to that of neustons in the Sargasso Sea, a region of the Atlantic Ocean named for the quantities of Sargassum seaweed on its surface. The Sargasso was previously the only ocean spot known to host neustons in such high densities, researchers reported Thursday in the journal PLOS Biology.
With neustons so plentiful in the Sargasso, the scientists wondered if there might also be a neuston presence in an ocean region shaped by similar surface current activity: the garbage patch, said marine biologist Rebecca Helm, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of environmental science at Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute in Washington, DC.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the Sargasso Sea are both oceanic gyres — marine zones where multiple ocean currents converge to form a vortex (though the Sargasso Sea is known for its floating algae rather than drifting garbage). There are five main oceanic gyres, and the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is where the best-known garbage patch lies.
Unlike all other seas, the Sargasso has no land boundaries. It’s defined by ocean currents of the North Atlantic Gyre, which flood the Sargasso with multitudes of floating organisms. Perhaps, Helm told CNN, the whirling currents of the North Pacific Gyre were doing the same thing, carrying marine creatures into the garbage patch along with all the plastic trash. It’s not clear if neustons were collecting there before the garbage patch existed, and other researchers who visited the region in recent years focused on plastic rather than on sea snails and jellies, she added.
“No one was looking for and documenting the surface life that they found,” she said.
But when long-distance swimmer and environmental activist Benoît Lecomte swam through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2019, he and his crew gathered data on floating life as well as drifting litter.
In just one day alone, they counted more than 3,000 pieces of plastic, along with a large plastic drum, tangles of rope and multiple “ghost nets” (abandoned fishing nets). Lecomte later told CNN that swimming through the microplastic-filled water was like “looking up at the skies on a snowy day — but in reverse.”
Over the course of the 80-day expedition, Lecomte swam through the plastic-littered water for up to eight hours each day. Meanwhile, the crew was busy collecting samples from the water. In addition to gathering plastic, they towed a small-mesh “neuston net” behind their boat to capture the tiny, fragile specimens, which they identified, counted, photographed and then returned to the ocean. Once the journey was over, their data was handed off to the study authors for analysis.
Some of the crew’s trawls captured “a couple buckets worth” of wee floaters, “more than I’ve seen anywhere I’ve ever been,” said Helm, who didn’t take part in the swim. “The fact that we found so many out in the middle of the ocean was really exciting.”
Helm and her coauthors used computer models to estimate neuston densities in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, relative to plastic bits and other types of ocean life based on the samples collected by Lecomte and his crew. The study team found that the number of sea snails, sea rafts and blue buttons was even higher in the center of the patch, where there was more plastic in the water, than it was around the edges.
“The sheer abundance was so surprising,” Helm said.
And yet the abundance of these animals in the garbage patch is rivaled by the abundance of plastic — at least 87,000 tons (79,000 metric tons) by some estimates, with microplastics distributed throughout the water column. It’s not yet clear how garbage patch neustons are affected by living amid so much litter, though other marine organisms, such as some types of barnacles, have adapted to live on ocean plastic, so answering that question may not be simple, Helm said.
And because jellies such as Velella and Porpita are a favorite meal for sea turtles and seabirds, those animals might also be encountering and swallowing more plastic if they’re following their food deep into the garbage patch, she added.
In other words, finding lots of neustons in the garbage patch is just the first step; further research will be needed to understand their distribution across the region and how their interactions and ecology are shaped by living in a trash-filled marine neighborhood, the study authors reported.
“We’re at the very beginning,” Helm said. “This is like discovering life on Mars.”
