2012 - Science News: Space, Evolution, Archaeology & Cataclysms

2012 : Tags : Radiation

2012, Thursday, 22. March 2007, 18:19
Storm Warning for 2012
The next solar maximum could be 50% higher than the last! Although this is unlikely to harm us much, if combined with a reduction of strength or reversal of the magnetic poles, it could cause some major problems.

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2012, Tuesday, 21. November 2006, 08:16
Radix: Prophecy in Fiction?

I've only just heard of this book, and have ordered it - Radix by A.A. Attansio. It sounds uncannily similar to my own ideas, ideas based on science and history:

"The story takes place in a future earth after it becomes transformed from a beam of energy/radiation that washes over the earth from a super-massive black hole in the galaxies core."

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2012, Tuesday, 14. November 2006, 09:57
Space elevators: killer radiation!

Space elevators are touted as a novel and cheap way to get cargo, and possibly people, into space one day. So far, they have barely left the drawing board, but ultimately robots could climb a cable stretching 100,000 kilometres from Earth's surface into space.

But there is a hitch: humans might not survive thanks to the whopping dose of ionising radiation they would receive travelling through the core of the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth.

Solutions include moving the elevator away from the equator, which will only reduce the radiation slightly, and shielding, but "a shield would weigh down the whole apparatus, disrupting the natural motion of the cable."

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2012, Saturday, 21. October 2006, 06:22
Radiation Shielding in Space

he Earth's protective atomsphere protects us from cosmic radiation - but in space the options are to provide shielding or take a gamble. Experts are unsure of how much radiation is safe, but at least this article mentions the possible shielding materials (handy for those who want to cover all cataclysmic possibilities on Earth):

The best option is where the shielding material also adds to the structural integrity of a ship as a whole. "When any material used as a radiation shield can serve a dual purpose, mission costs can usually be reduced," says Rapp. "For space radiation shields, materials with high hydrogen content generally have greater shielding effectiveness, but often do not possess qualities that lend themselves to the required structural integrity of the space vehicle or habitat." Rapp adds that graphite nano-fiber materials heavily impregnated with hydrogen may one day form the basis of future spacecraft shielding. But for now, radiation tests are predominantly conducted using aluminum or regolith shielding (virtually all of the lunar surface is comprised of regolith).

..."A 400-day round trip transit to and from Mars, and about 560 days on the surface... with 15 g/cm2 of aluminum shielding [would equal] about double the allowable annual dose for each leg of the trip to and from Mars." At the very least, Rapp says that at this time: "radiation effects and the effectiveness of shielding remain uncertain."

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2012, Saturday, 14. October 2006, 14:18
Supernova - Twice As Bright!

A supernova more than twice as bright as others of its type has been observed, suggesting it arose from a star that managed to grow more massive than theoretically predicted.

Why is this big news? Well, whatever the safe distance (in light years) from a supernova used to be, you can now half it. Or more. If they have found one that is twice as bright, you can guarantee that one 10x as bright will occur somewhere in the Universe

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lunch, Friday, 13. October 2006, 22:01
Gigantic Ultraviolet Pulse Beam

A Cosmic Trigger Event will occur on the 17th of October 2006.

This is the beginning, one of many trigger events to come between now and 2013. An ultraviolet (UV) pulse beam radiating from higher dimensions in universe-2 will cross paths with the Earth on this day. Earth will remain approximately within this UV beam for 17 hours of your time.
This beam resonates with the heart chakra, it is radiant fluorescent in nature, blue/magenta in color. Although it resonates in this frequency band, it is above the color frequency spectrum of your universe-1 which you, Earth articulate in. However due to the nature of your soul and soul groups operating from Universe-2 frequency bands it will have an effect.
The effect is every thought and emotion will be amplified intensely one million-fold. Yes, we will repeat, all will be amplified one millions time and more.
Every thought, every emotion, every intent, every will, no matter if it is good, bad, ill, positive, negative, will be amplified one million times in strength.

Don't think bad thoughts, kids! Or the big blacklight from space will getcha!

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2012, Wednesday, 21. June 2006, 00:39
Could a GRB do us harm?

At the tale end of an article explaining why we are safe from GRBs:

"It seems that the very nature of the Milky Way precludes these dangerous explosions from going off in our galaxy, let alone anywhere near enough to obliterate us."

Comes the names of some scientists who believe we should be fearful of gamma-ray bursts:

Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas in Lawrence and Brian Thomas of Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas - who warned of the dangers of GRBs - are not convinced that our galaxy is safe. Thomas points out that the Milky Way could merge with or swallow smaller, metal-poor galaxies suitable for GRBs.

Also, a study by Armen Atoyan of the University of Montreal in Canada and his colleagues, due to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, claims that a source of gamma rays in our galaxy, about 40,000 light years away, is a remnant of a GRB that went off about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. Luckily it wasn't pointed at us, says Atoyan. "If he is right, it provides a counter argument," says Melott.

Stanek, however, argues that the source seen by Atoyan is more likely the leftovers of an unusually energetic supernova.

Merging with another galaxy, that might take a few years... but if a GRB (or unusually energetic supernova for that matter) has happened in our backyard, it can certainly happen again... at a moment's notice

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2012, Tuesday, 6. June 2006, 10:07
Elderly Astronomers Agree on Cosmic Rays = Evolution
I no longer feel like an idiot...

...after decades of focusing their attentions skyward, the Meinels – now in their 80s – are grappling with a question that seems, at first light, to be far, far away from astronomy. Namely: Why did modern humans and other species emerge some 40,000 years ago?

Their answer: Cosmic radiation, which the Meinels will elaborate on June 20 in a noon public lecture at the University of San Diego, part of the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Coming from almost anyone else, the suggestion that a burst of cosmic radiation profoundly mutated life on Earth and altered the course of human evolution would probably be dismissed as outrageous science fiction.

But Aden and Marjorie Meinel have been both serious and significant players in astronomy for a good chunk of the last century. ...Marjorie's interest was inherited: Her father, Edison Pettit, was one of the founding astronomers of the 102-year-old Mount Wilson Observatory, east of Los Angeles. Aden's interest evolved over time. It began as an apprentice in Mount Wilson's optics shop, through a stint in the Navy as a rocket engineer and at the California Institute of Technology, where his doctoral dissertation eventually resulted in the world's first solid Schmidt spectrograph – a device for measuring and charting wavelengths of light in space.

With Marjorie serving as adviser, editor and muse (and mother to their seven children), Aden launched a career designing, developing and directing observatories around the world. He helped establish the first national observatory at Kitt Peak, southwest of Tucson, Ariz., in the 1960s, then moved to Steward Observatory and taught at the University of Arizona. At various times, he helped build telescopes in India and China. In the 1980s, he and Marjorie moved to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena where they helped launch space-based telescopes like the Hubble. Aden retired in 1993, Marjorie in 2000.

While reading a story about ice-core research, Aden wondered whether the core samples also contained information about cosmic radiation levels over the Earth's history. To his and Marjorie's surprise, an examination of existing ice core data showed a significant surge in radiation roughly 40,000 years ago – about the same time, they noted, that modern humans emerged in Eurasia, and numerous other species in the northern hemisphere were either undergoing significant change or disappearing altogether.

“That's when we first became tempted to put two and two together,” said Aden. “If there was a large surge of cosmic rays, and there's good evidence that these rays can (cause mutations), the question becomes, did they help create new species of life?

“Our findings indicate that two very rare occurrences happened at roughly the same time, which suggests that how we've evolved might not be just slow, random mutation and natural selection. Maybe we are partly the product of cosmic radiation.”

The Meinels even have a likely source for the radiation: the gaseous remains of a dying star called the Cat's Eye nebula discovered by William Herschel in 1786.

According to their hypothesis, the nebula began emitting a burst of radiation roughly 200,000 years ago. “Around the time that Neanderthals began to appear,” said Aden.

Approximately 40,000 years ago, the frequency and intensity of the radiation surged, spawning in the Meinels' view, a host of evolutionary changes. “Then, about 10,000 years ago, the Earth passed out of the nebula's jet of cosmic rays, ending the accelerated mutations,” said Aden.

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2012, Tuesday, 23. May 2006, 19:19
Solar Flares increase stroke risk

A Slovakia doctor claims to have linked peak solar flare activity to an increase in strokes and brain haemorrhages, Reuters reports.

Dr Michal Kovac started probing incidence of strokes in southern Slovakia's Nove Zamky back in the 1980s "after observing unexplained increases in stroke patients on certain days, weeks, months and years". He subsequently discovered a correlation between 11 year peaks in coronal mass ejections and strokes.

Kovac also found that fewer people suffered strokes when the moon was at its apogee. His findings, published in the Bratislava Medical Journal further the idea that people are physically affected by "fluctuations in the earth's geomagnetic field".

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2012, Monday, 13. March 2006, 10:37
2012: Super SunSpot Cycle Peak
According to physicist Mausimi Dikpati, the next sunspot cycle will be 30-50 percent stronger than the current cycle, and it will peak in 2012.

Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, have used a new model of the sun's interior to refine predictions of future sunspot activity. By using data going back over a century, the scientists were able to determine that the sun's magnetic field has a memory of around 20 years. This model was able to predict the past six cycles with around 97 percent accuracy, and has led to revised predictions about the next cycle, number 24.

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2012, Wednesday, 8. March 2006, 20:19
Males can inherit the vices of their father - via DNA

Still more evidence accumulating, showing that DNA mutations can be inherited, which gives us the possibility of cosmic radiation causing rapid evolution. The study shows that men who smoked prior to puberty have fatter children than those who don't. Not a big deal, but who knows what else is being inherited besides a tendency to put on weight...

THE sins of the fathers are, indeed, visited on subsequent generations. Nutrition and smoking in early life may influence the health of men's sons and grandsons, a new study has revealed.

These striking inherited effects are thought to be due to subtle chemical changes to DNA known as "epigenetic" modifications (see "Mapping the epigenome"). And they could have big implications for public health: the behaviour of today's children, for example, may be stacking up problems for future generations.

Marcus Pembrey, a clinical geneticist at University College London, and colleagues at Umeå University in Sweden, have two lines of evidence for health effects being passed down the male line.

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2012, Friday, 3. February 2006, 17:38
Cosmic rays can create cloudy days

"The odds of a cloudy day increase by around 20 per cent when the cosmic ray flux is high," says Harrison, amounting to a few extra days of cloudiness per year.

When cosmic rays hit the atmosphere they produce charged particles which seem encourage the growth of cloud droplets. Compared with greenhouse gases the effect of cosmic rays on climate is small. But it could help explain some of the more mysterious changes in climate Earth has experienced in the past.

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2012, Friday, 26. August 2005, 05:53
Solar storms damage ozone levels

For me the key point is that the power of the sun can let in harmful radiation...

Ozone in Earth's stratosphere protects the planet against harmful ultraviolet radiation. Most of the gas lies in the lower- and mid-stratosphere, where observations have shown a thinning above the poles caused mainly by man-made chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Electron funnel

The domino-like effect began in October and November 2003, when the Sun unleashed a record barrage of radiation and charged particles toward Earth.

The planet's magnetic field funnelled some of the storm's electrons into the upper atmosphere above the poles. The electrons hit nitrogen molecules there, breaking some of them into nitrogen ions. Those reactive atoms then combined with nearby oxygen molecules to form molecules of nitrogen oxide - levels of which rose in November and December 2003, according to the satellite data.

Finally, downward-blowing winds in a polar vortex above the Arctic pushed these molecules into the stratosphere. There, each nitrogen oxide molecule could rip apart hundreds of ozone molecules, just as CFCs do. The effect remained even into July 2004, according to Randall's observations.

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2012, Monday, 15. August 2005, 16:57
Astronomers find source of short GRBs
Well, they haven't determined anything more than, the two they observed, came from a long way away.

If they all come from so far away, they believe that magnetars cannot be causing them.

The breakthrough came when, for the first time, astronomers were able to accurately pinpoint the locations of two recent short GRBs. They traced the bursts to relatively distant galaxies, bolstering the prevailing theory that the GRBs arise from collisions involving dense stellar corpses, called neutron stars.

...GRBs are volleys of very high energy photons that can originate from any direction in the sky and come in two classes. "Long" bursts last from seconds to minutes and have been found to coincide with powerful supernovae, suggesting they form when massive stars explode and their cores collapse into black holes.

But until recently "short" bursts - lasting just a split-second - have proved frustratingly elusive, disappearing without a trace before researchers could pinpoint or study them.

...Astronomers had suggested flare-ups in highly magnetised neutron stars, called magnetars, might produce short bursts. But these flare-ups can only get so strong before they destroy the stars, putting an upper limit on how far away a magnetar-based GRB can be observed. These bursts occurred about 10 times farther away than this limit, ruling out a magnetar source.

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2012, Thursday, 24. March 2005, 09:52
Superflares could kill astronauts
Which makes me wonder... what if the recent superflare was tiny compared to one that may come soon?

A study of the most powerful solar flare of the past 500 years suggests that another like it would carry enough punch to kill astronauts in a poorly shielded spacecraft. The crew of a future mission to Mars might be at risk unless their craft is made of the right materials.

Solar flares send high-energy protons streaming through the solar system, and the radiation is sometimes intense enough to endanger the health of astronauts. In January, the two men on the International Space Station had to shelter in the bulkier Russian side of the station during a particularly powerful series of flares.

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