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August 24, 2016
massive_crack_threatening_to_cause_an_entire_Antarctic_ continent
An iceberg the size of Delaware is about to break free.
Scientists have been monitoring a fracture in one of the world’s biggest ice shelves, and report that in the last five months alone, it’s grown an extra 22 kilometres (13.67 miles) in length, and now stretches for a total of 130 km (80 miles).
It’s now only a matter of time before a massive chunk of this Antarctic ice shelf - known as Larsen C - breaks free, and then we’ll have the third largest loss of Antarctic ice in recorded history on our hands.
Located on the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Larsen ice shelf is split up into three smaller ice shelves - Larsen A, B, and C. Larsen A and B have already experienced massive declines over the past two decades, and now Larsen C, the biggest of them all, is in a world of trouble itself.
Researchers from Project MIDAS, a British Antarctic Survey that involves teams from several UK universities, report that around 12 percent of the entire Larsen C ice shelf is expected to break off, leaving the exposed ice front at its most retreated position ever.
"Computer modelling suggests that the remaining ice could become unstable, and that Larsen C may follow the example of its neighbour Larsen B, which disintegrated in 2002 following a similar rift-induced calving event," they report in a blog post.
What’s left of the Larsen B ice shelf is widely considered to be on borrowed time, having lost a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island back in 2002. Remember this?
It now covers an area of 1,600 square kilometres (625 square miles), and is expected to disintegrate by the end of the decade. That’s pretty devastating, when you consider that Larsen B has been stable for at least the past 12,000 years.
The Larsen A ice shelf disintegrated in January 1995, and now Larsen C looks like it’s on its way out too.
Just to give you an idea of how much ice we’re talking about here, Larsen C covers around 55,000 square km (21,235 square miles). That’s 10 times the size of Larsen B, and about half the size of Iceland.
Last year, the MIDAS team published a study in the journal Cryosphere describing how Larsen C is currently melting from the surface and the base, and now its gigantic fracture is cracking at a rate no one could have predicted.
Once the outer edge breaks free, researchers are predicting an iceberg measuring about 6,000 square kilometres (2,316 square miles) - close to the size of Delaware - will fall off into the ocean.
"If this will calve off in the next, say two or three years, the calving front will be retreated very far back, further than we’ve seen it since we were able to monitor this," one of the team, Daniela Jansen from the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, told Chris Mooney at The Washington Post.
"And our theory in this paper was basically that the calving front might become unstable. Once the iceberg has calved off completely, there might be a tendency for the ice front to crumble backwards."
Just to add to Larsen C’s woes, a separate study published in Nature Communications in June found that meltponds have been forming on the surface - something that’s just recently been found by the thousands on the Langhovde Glacier in East Antarctica.
This will only serve to accelerate the disintegration process.
If Larsen C did end up losing all its ice, scientists have predicted that this could raise global sea levels by around 10 cm (3.9 inches).
massive_breaks_ice_crack_threatening_to_cause_an_entire_Antarctic_ continent

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. As Mooney points out, a large loss of ice from Larsen C won’t necessarily be a terrible thing for the world’s oceans - not immediately, at least.

"A study earlier this year in Nature Climate Change looked at ice shelves around Antarctica to determine how much area they could lose without ceasing to form their crucial function of buttressing glaciers and holding them back, and found that Larsen C actually has a lot of 'passive' ice that it can lose without major consequences," he says.

The MIDAS team isn’t as optimistic, so unfortunately, we’re left to wait and see when this massive chunk will break off, and what the consequences will be for life on Earth. Watch this space.
sciencealert
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August 22, 2016
Self_Driving_Motorcycle

IT’S TIME TO imagine, design, and develop a new breed of urban vehicle. Something that will minimize the human footprint, that can operate year round in any weather, and run on electricity instead of gasoline.
That’s the thinking behind the Cyclotron, a concept  created, inspired by the Tron Light Cycle and Lit Motors’ self-balancing C1.
Inside this enclosed, autonomous motorcycle, two passengers would sit facing one another, given a rare chance to relax, chat, and get to know one another (or ignore each other and look at their phones).
A gyroscopic system like that on the C1 would keep the vehicle stable at all times, even when fully stopped—no need to put your feet down to keep from tipping over. The electric motor would send power to both wheels for improved traction in winter conditions, or power just one to conserve power. I imagine you’d want to change the tire tread depending on the season, maybe adding studs for icy roads.
Each Cyclotron would recharge with wireless power transfer and would be allowed to buy and sell electricity in real time to other nearby vehicles depending each vehicle’s stores and requirements. The interior of the Cyclotron would feature two adjustable seats. Both butterfly doors would be able open and drop you off on either side of the street since the bike can travel in both directions.
It’s autonomous, so no need to steer—just tell it where to go. Or, let it access your agenda and figure it out for itself.
I’ll let your imagination fill in the rest of the cool features: heated and cooled seats and cup holders, climate-controlled cabin, surround sound or a noise canceling system, and so on.
The Cyclotron would work as a personal vehicle or as a shared transit system like my Gotoo concept. Green Taxi operators like Montreal’s TEO could even buy them and operate them in fleets across North America. They would definitely help reduce road congestion and the energy required to commute compared to existing electric cars due to their smaller size.
Self_Driving_Motorcycle_1445

I developed the Cyclotron concept with Ashish Thulkar, a freelance industrial designer at the Indian Institute of Science.

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August 21, 2016
Apple_ losing_its_ lead_in_smartphones_MARKET
When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone in January 2007, he made a bold claim that the new product was five years ahead of its time.
He was wrong.
It's been over nine years and no one has made a better phone than the iPhone. But after all these years, the iPhone's lead has never been smaller. In fact, it's razor thin.
This week I reviewed the Galaxy Note 7, the new phone from Samsung that beats the iPhone in a lot of key ways. It has a better design than the iPhone. It has better features people will care about like water resistance and wireless charging. It comes with more storage than you could possibly use.
In short, the Note 7 is one of the best phones ever made.
Things don't look so rosy for the iPhone. It's had the same design for the last two years, and all reports indicate the so-called iPhone 7 will look very similar when it launches next month. Wireless charging, waterproofing, and design improvements? Apple has ignored all those features. Besides a faster processor and better camera, it's hard to imagine a compelling reason to get excited about the next iPhone.
Samsung has outdesigned and outperformed the iPhone with the Galaxy Note 7. Meanwhile, Apple is gearing up to launch a phone that'll be very similar to the two models it released over the last two years.
So, why is Apple still slightly ahead?
It's because of the one thing Samsung or anyone else can't replicate: iOS.
Despite Google's best efforts, the Android ecosystem is still a fragmented mess. Devices rarely get consistent updates. Developers tend to make their best apps for it only after the iPhone version. And Samsung's version of Android, called TouchWiz, actually bogs down Android's UI instead of improving it.
iOS is the only smartphone OS that guarantees your device will be supported for several years. You're lucky if you can find an Android phone that's still getting updates a year after you buy it. Meanwhile, Apple tends to keep iPhones updated for up to four years. If you buy a new Samsung phone, good luck getting anything new a year from now.
Security is another issue. If and when a nasty bug is discovered, Apple can push out a software update to the entire iOS ecosystem at once. That's not always possible on Android, as we found out last year with that nasty Stagefright bug.
Apple is in an odd place this year. iOS is the only thing keeping the iPhone ahead, while competitors are beating it everywhere else from design to useful hardware features. Samsung has out-engineered Apple in a lot of significant ways. The iPhone's lead has never been smaller, and it's running out of time before Samsung figures out the rest of the puzzle and cleans up its software issues.
businessinsider
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August 20, 2016
Badminton_Marin_fends_ sindhu_ win_gold
2016 Rio Olympics - Badminton - Women's Singles - Gold Medal Match - Riocentro - Pavilion 4 - Rio deJaneiro, Brazil - 19/08/2016. Carolina Marin (ESP) of Spain talks with P.V. Sindhu (IND) of India after winning their match. © REUTERS/Marcelo del Pozo


Carolina Marin overhauled a brave Pusarla Sindhu in the women's singles final on Friday to win Spain's first badminton title and crush India's hopes of a maiden gold medal at the Rio Olympics.
The top seed, known as the "Rafa Nadal" of badminton in Spain for her tenacity and fierce left-handed game, closed out a 19-21 21-12 21-15 victory over the 21-year-old Sindhu who was majestic in her Olympic debut.
"I'm very excited, I don't know how I'm feeling now but it is amazing that my dream has come true. I just had to believe in myself," Marin told reporters.
"It is more than a medal because of everything behind the medal. I have the best team behind me, they helped me a lot and were amazing."
Letting out a blood-curdling shriek with every winning point, the Spaniard was jeered by spectators at the Riocentro in a nerve-shredding deciding game as she pushed the bounds of good sportsmanship with constant stalling tactics.
But the ruthless 23-year-old got the job done, charging away to set up six match points and sealing it on the second with an imperious smash down the line that her opponent did well to get a racquet to.
Flag-waving Spanish fans jumped up and down as twice world champion Marin pumped her fists and bellowed in triumph, having survived a huge scare.
The flamenco-trained dancer from Andalucia beamed dry-eyed as she accepted the medal on the podium but wept freely as Spain's flag rose in the arena to the sound of the national anthem.
Roared to the finish by Indian fans, Sindhu will bow out with huge acclaim as her nation's first woman ever to win silver and having clinched the country's second medal at these Games.
It was also India's second medal in badminton, coming four years after compatriot Saina Nehwal grabbed a bronze in the same event in London.
Japan's Nozomi Okuhara won the Rio bronze in a walkover after her Chinese opponent, the 2012 singles champion Li Xuerui, pulled out of their playoff with a serious knee injury.

Sindhu, coached by the same man who took Nehwal to her London medal, was under huge pressure from the nation of a billion people to end India's agonizing wait for a Rio champion.
Despite bringing their biggest ever delegation, about 50 percent stronger than London where they won six medals, India had only celebrated a solitary bronze won by freestyle wrestler Sakshi Malik on Wednesday.
"I thought it would be a gold but never mind, I got a silver," the Hyderabadi shuttler said.
"I never thought I would make it to here."
© reuters
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August 18, 2016
The Universe just keeps getting stranger.
spotted-fifth -force- of -nature-012235879542

As far as we know, there are four fundamental forces that hold our Universe together - gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.
But, in April last year, physicists in Hungary saw evidence of a possible fifth force of nature, one that could potentially explain some of the lingering mysteries in our Universe, such as dark matter.
Now an independent team of researchers has re-analysed the results, confirming that the anomaly seen in the data last year really could be a whole new fundamental force.
This idea is still a long way off being confirmed - as we learnt from CERN's latest announcement, sometimes promising blips in the data end up disappearing with further testing - but the study suggests that this possible new force-carrying particle is definitely worth following up on.
"If true, it’s revolutionary," said lead researcher Jonathan Feng from the University of California, Irvine. "If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the Universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter."
So, a quick back story here: the strange result in question was first seen last year, when a team from the Hungarian Academy of Science fired high-energy beams of protons at lithium-7, and in the fall-out spotted the energy signature of a new super-light subatomic particle.
This new subatomic particle, they concluded, was a type of boson that was only 30 times heavier than an electron, and wasn't predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics - the best set of equations we have for understanding the Universe.
According to the Standard Model, each of the four fundamental forces has a corresponding boson - the strong force is carried by 'gluons'; the electromagnetic force is carried by particles of light, or photons; and the W and Z bosons are responsible for weak force.
We haven't yet discovered gravity's boson (that's just one of the gaps in the Standard Model, which also doesn't explain dark matter) but it's predicted to be something called the graviton.
The Hungarian team initially suggested that maybe their blip had been some kind of dark photon - a hypothetical particle responsible for carrying dark matter - but since their initial publication, international researchers have taken their data and run with it.
"The experimentalists weren’t able to claim that it was a new force," said Feng. "They simply saw an excess of events that indicated a new particle, but it was not clear to them whether it was a matter particle or a force-carrying particle."
To clear this up, Feng and his colleagues studied the original data, as well as other experiments in this area, and found theoretical evidence to strongly suggest that the blip in the data wasn't a matter-carrying particle or a dark photon.
Instead, their calculations suggested that it could be the boson for the fifth force of nature - a force that's been predicted to account for dark matter and many other mysterious things in the Universe.
What's strange about this hypothetical boson, which they call the protophobic X boson, is that it only interacts with electrons and neutrons, and at an extremely limited range, making it very hard to detect.
"There’s no other boson that we’ve observed that has this same characteristic,"said one of the researchers, Timothy Tait. "Sometimes we also just call it the 'X boson', where 'X' means unknown."
The team first floated this idea in May, uploading their analysis onto pre-print site arXiv.org, but it's now also been peer-reviewed and published in thejournal Physical Review Letters.
They've since conducted a follow-up analysis since then, uploaded to arXiv last week, which amplifies their original conclusion.
So what we have now is a strange blip that can't be explained by the Standard Model, and theoretical calculations to suggest that this blip would work as the carrier of the fifth force of nature.
But unfortunately, what we don't have are further experimental confirmations - something that researchers around the world are rushing to produce, and expect to be ready within a year.
"Because the new particle is so light, there are many experimental groups working in small labs around the world that can follow up the initial claims, now that they know where to look," said Feng.
So what would it mean if this fifth force was verified? We're still a long way off that, but Feng suggests it could potentially be joined to the electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces to manifest some kind of 'super fundamental force' - one that might interact with a dark sector with its own matter and forces.
"It's possible that these two sectors talk to each other and interact with one another through somewhat veiled but fundamental interactions," he said.
"This dark sector force may manifest itself as this protophobic force we’re seeing as a result of the Hungarian experiment. In a broader sense, it fits in with our original research to understand the nature of dark matter."
(Yes, that really does sound a whole lot like the dark and light side of the Force in Star Wars.)
It's cool to contemplate, but until we have more experimental results, there's not much we can do but wait. Most of us are still smarting from the loss of thediphoton energy excess that never was, so it's too soon to commit to a hypothetical new physics-breaking discovery just yet.

But it sure is an interesting hypothesis that we'll be following closely... Watch this space.
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August 17, 2016
We're closer than ever to proving Stephen Hawking right.
lab-made- black -hole- strongest-Hawking -radiation-9967630063610
Proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking back in 1974, Hawking radiation describes the small amounts of high-energy radiation that could theoretically escape the gravitational pull of a black hole.
The hypothesis goes against conventional wisdom that nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole, and now, for the first time, physicists have finally observed hawking radiation - in a simulated black hole.
Just to be clear, Hawking’s hypothesis will remain just that until we can actually observe hawking radiation near a real-life black hole, but our technology is not nearly advanced enough to do that right now.
Instead, physicists test their hypotheses on black hole simulations created in the lab - based not on light, but on sound.
Proposed in the 1980s, but not actually built till 2009, these acoustic, or 'dumb' black holes are formed by cooling rubidium atoms to within a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
At this point, the atoms enter a quantum state of matter, where they start to behave like clones of each other, clumping up to form a 'super particle’, or wave, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).
Previous research has shown that these acoustic black holes - which also require a bunch of mirrors, lasers, lenses, and magnetic coils - do actually mimic the behaviour of real black holes in some crucial ways, so are considered a pretty good substitute.
Jeff Steinhauer, a physicist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, has been working on his acoustic black hole for seven years now, and has finally perfected it to the point where he could accurately simulate how particles would behave on the edge, or event horizon, of his black hole.
Incredibly, when he ran the experiment 4,600 times, what he saw was exactly what Hawking had predicted: pairs of phonons (packets of sound energy) started to spontaneously appear at the event horizon, before one was propelled away from the black hole and into simulated space, while the other was left to fall inside.
In case you need a bit of a refresher on Hawking radiation, the hypothesis is all wrapped up in an infamous problem in theoretical physics known as the black hole information paradox.
Hawking radiation proposes that the Universe is filled with virtual entangled particles that blink in and out of existence and annihilate each other as soon as they come in contact - except if they happen to appear on either side of a black hole's event horizon.
In this scenario, one particle gets swallowed up, and the other radiates away into space.
Thanks to this escaping radiation stealing energy from the black hole, the black hole loses mass over time, and eventually evaporates out of existence - taking all the information about what it swallowed with it.
So the paradox goes like this: according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, all matter that crosses the event horizon of a black hole is swallowed up forever, and can never be retrieved. But according to our understanding of quantum mechanics, information about that swallowed matter can never be completely destroyed, so which one is correct?
Earlier this year, Hawking published a 'solution' to the information paradox, which hasn’t convinced everyone in the field, but basically suggests that black holes might actually have a halo of 'soft hair' surrounding them, which are capable of storing information, so it’s not lost altogether. You can read more about that here.
So now back to Steinhauer and his team. After running their acoustic black hole experiment for six days straight, the researchers took pictures of the BEC and showed that the phonons escaping were in fact 'entangled' with the ones falling in.
"We saw that high energy pairs were entangled, while low energy pairs were not," he told Sarah Griffths at Wired.
"We observe a thermal distribution of Hawking radiation, stimulated by quantum vacuum fluctuations, emanating from an analogue black hole. This confirms Hawking’s prediction regarding black hole thermodynamics."
Steinhauer added that the particles exciting the event horizon generated so much energy, the simulation also supports the firewall controversy - a separate hypothesis that suggests the breaking of the entanglement between the Hawking particles and their partners generates enough energy to create an actual wall of flames at the edge of a black hole. More on that hypothesis here.
It will take a whole lot more replication and confirmation to prove the results -some doubt that the BEC they've created is actually a true BEC - and only direct observations from real black holes will put Hawking in the running for a Nobel Prize. But Steinhauer and his team could really be on to something here.
"You’re probing this feature of gravity that is very hard to probe experimentally with real black holes," Stephen Fairhurst, a professor at Cardiff University’s school of physics and astronomy, who was not involved in the study, told Tom Chivers at Buzzfeed.
"Quite how these things can teach us about quantum gravity I’m not sure, but that’s surely the next goal - seeing how we can translate this into relativity."

The results have been published in Nature Physics.

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