After Soyuz Failure, Space Is Now Weirdly Inaccessible to Astronauts
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Category: Science and Stuff,
How Did These Other Individuals End Up Buried With Elite Germanic Warriors?
A 7th century burial site in Niederstotzingen, Germany. It was clear that the individuals were high status, and that at least some of the adults were warriors because their graves were stuffed with weapons, armor, jewelry and equestrian gear.
…The Niederstotzingen bodies belonged to the Alemanni, a confederacy of ancient Germanic tribes that were sprinkled across modern-day Germany, France, Switzerland and Austria. The Alemanni …were ultimately brought down by the Franks, another Germanic group, in 497 A.D. To reflect integration with the Franks, the Alemanni started to inter their dead in elaborate graves known as Adelsgrablege.
…Six of the individuals appeared to be from northern and eastern European populations, and five of these individuals were directly related to one another. Seven bodies, reports Michael Price of Science, were completely unrelated. Two seemed to come from southern Europe, possibly the Mediterranean.
…“Folklore from the time has tales of tribes exchanging hostage children that are raised as their own,” he says.
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New archeological research forces historians to reconsider the story of Iceland’s settlement
Written sources suggest the first settler to arrive in Iceland was Ingólfur Arnarson who settled in Reykjavík in the year 874. New research suggests the first people arrived as much as 100 years earlier.
…Bjarni Einarsson, the archeologist in charge of the dig told the local TV station Stöð 2 that the younger of the two houses was built on the ruins of the older structure, which measures as much as 40 meters (130 ft). Both structures are located beneath the “settlement layer”, a layer of volcanic tephra that fell sometime in the years 869-73, making both older than the “official” time of settlement which began in 874, according to the Icelandic Sagas and the Book of Settlement, medieval sources on the Viking Age and the settlement of Iceland.
…The very name of the farm Stöð and the fjord Stöðvarfjörður seem to support this theory: Stöð translates as camp, station or base.
Such seasonal camps could have been used for decades before permanent settlement began. Bjarni believes they played a key role in the settlement of Iceland:
“People would have come here to work part of the year, producing goods during summer to take home in the fall. They would have taken these goods home, as well as information about this new land. Based on this information people would then have been able to make an informed decision to settle here permanently.”
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‘You Just Don’t Touch That Tap Water Unless Absolutely Necessary’
Americans across the country, from Maynard’s home in rural Appalachia to urban areas like Flint, Mich., or Compton, Calif., are facing a lack of clean, reliable drinking water. At the heart of the problem is a water system in crisis: aging, crumbling infrastructure and a lack of funds to pay for upgrading it.
On top of that, about 50 percent of water utilities — serving about 12 percent of the population — are privately owned. This complicated mix of public and private ownership often confounds efforts to mandate improvements or levy penalties, even if customers complain of poor water quality or mismanagement.
Drinking water is delivered nationally via 1 million miles of pipes, many of which were laid in the early to mid-20th century, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Those pipes are now nearing the end of their life spans.
A 2017 report by the group gave America’s water systems a near-failing grade, citing an estimated 240,000 water line breaks a year nationwide.
…Leaks in the pipes that carry water throughout the county result in substantial losses of treated water — nearly 65 percent in 2016. And those leaks create a vacuum, sucking in untreated water from the ground that’s subsequently delivered to people’s homes.
That’s especially worrisome given the region’s history of mining and industrial activities. In October 2000, a giant coal sludge spill dumped more than 300 million gallons of toxic waste — including heavy metals like arsenic and mercury — into Martin County’s river system, which is also its main source for drinking water. Thick black sludge ran downstream for dozens of miles, spilling over onto lawns and roads.
‘You Just Don’t Touch That Tap Water Unless Absolutely Necessary’ : NPR
Sigh…
Weed killer, honey bee deaths linked in glyphosate study
Weed killer, honey bee deaths linked in glyphosate study
this doesn’t seem like new information
Merrimack River Will Run Red With Dye Tuesday
The state is now overseeing long-term response to chemical pollution around Saint Gobain, two years after the factory allegedly contaminated local wells with PFAS toxins in air emissions.
Merrimack River Will Run Red With Dye Tuesday | New Hampshire Public Radio
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Discovery of Galileo’s long-lost letter shows he edited his heretical ideas to manipulate the Inquisition
Galileo wrote the 1613 letter to Benedetto Castelli, a mathematician at the University of Pisa in Italy. In it, Galileo set out for the first time his arguments that scientific research should be free from theological doctrine (see ‘The Galileo affair’).
He argued that the scant references in the Bible to astronomical events should not be taken literally, because scribes had simplified these descriptions so that they could be understood by common people. Religious authorities who argued otherwise, he wrote, didn’t have the competence to judge. Most crucially, he reasoned that the heliocentric model of Earth orbiting the Sun, proposed by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus 70 years earlier, is not actually incompatible with the Bible.
…The changes are telling. In one case, Galileo referred to certain propositions in the Bible as “false if one goes by the literal meaning of the words”. He crossed through the word “false”, and replaced it with “look different from the truth”. In another section, he changed his reference to the Scriptures “concealing” its most basic dogmas, to the weaker “veiling”.
This suggests that Galileo moderated his own text, says Giudice.
…For now, the researchers are stunned by their find. “Galileo’s letter to Castelli is one of the first secular manifestos about the freedom of science — it’s the first time in my life I have been involved in such a thrilling discovery,” says Giudice.
Discovery of Galileo’s long-lost letter shows he edited his heretical ideas to fool the Inquisition
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We thought the Incas couldn’t write. These knots change everything
The Incas left no doubt that theirs was a sophisticated, technologically savvy civilization. At its height in the 15th century, it was the largest empire in the Americas, extending almost 5000 kilometers from modern-day Ecuador to Chile. These were the people who built Machu Picchu, a royal estate perched in the clouds, and an extensive network of paved roads complete with suspension bridges crafted from woven grass.
…The Incas may not have bequeathed any written records, but they did have colorful knotted cords. Each of these devices was called a khipu (pronounced key-poo). We know these intricate cords to be an abacus-like system for recording numbers. However, there have also been teasing hints that they might encode long-lost stories, myths and songs too.
…Recent breakthroughs have begun to unpick this tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the first signs of phonetic symbolism within the strands. Now two anthropologists are closing in on the Inca equivalent of the Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the code and transform our understanding of a civilization whose history has so far been told only through the eyes of the Europeans who sought to eviscerate it.
We thought the Incas couldn’t write. These knots change everything | New Scientist
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The Earth is wobbling more than it should, and humans are likely the cause
All that ice loss has happened in the 20th century, and greenhouse gas production has been cited as the primary culprit. Losing all that mass has caused a significant shift on the planet and has contributed to the wobble as well.
The Earth is wobbling more than it should, and humans are likely the cause – BGR
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REPORT: Trump Administration Will Shift $260 Million From Cancer Research and HIV Prevention to Pay to House Immigrant Minors
Aaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Mood Drug MDMA Makes Antisocial Octopuses Almost Cuddly
“After MDMA, they were essentially hugging,” says Dolen, who explains that the octopuses were “really just much more relaxed in posture, and using a lot more of their body to interact with the other octopus.”
To her, the results published in the journal Current Biology show that “serotonin has been encoding social functions for a very, very long time. At least 500 million years ago, it started doing this function.”
Zachary Mainen, a neuroscientist at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Portugal, points out that some research done decades ago showed that giving extra serotonin to lobsters can alter their social behavior.
“Specifically,” Mainen explains, “if you give them more serotonin, they become more dominant. A small lobster given serotonin will become a more aggressive, socially dominant lobster.”
He says MDMA, which affects the serotonin system, clearly effects the octopuses’ social behavior, but it’s not clear to him if it’s really inducing greater love for another creature.
Mood Drug MDMA Makes Antisocial Octopuses Almost Cuddly : Shots – Health News : NPR
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Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong
Lesley Williams, a family medicine doctor in Phoenix, tells me she gets an alert from her electronic health records software every time she’s about to see a patient who is above the “overweight” threshold. The reason for this is that physicians are often required, in writing, to prove to hospital administrators and insurance providers that they have brought up their patient’s weight and formulated a plan to bring it down—regardless of whether that patient came in with arthritis or a broken arm or a bad sunburn. Failing to do that could result in poor performance reviews, low ratings from insurance companies or being denied reimbursement if they refer patients to specialized care.
…Diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight.
…Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.
..And, in a cruel twist, one effect of weight bias is that it actually makes you eat more. The stress hormone cortisol—the one evolution designed to kick in when you’re being chased by a tiger or, it turns out, rejected for your looks—increases appetite, reduces the will to exercise and even improves the taste of food.
…Diet is the leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for more than five times the fatalities of gun violence and car accidents combined. But it’s not how much we’re eating—Americans actually consume fewer calories now than we did in 2003. It’s what we’re eating.
For more than a decade now, researchers have found that the quality of our food affects disease risk independently of its effect on weight. Fructose, for example, appears to damage insulin sensitivity and liver function more than other sweeteners with the same number of calories. People who eat nuts four times a week have 12 percent lower diabetes incidence and a 13 percent lower mortality rate regardless of their weight. All of our biological systems for regulating energy, hunger and satiety get thrown off by eating foods that are high in sugar, low in fiber and injected with additives. And which now, shockingly, make up 60 percent of the calories we eat.
Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong – The Huffington Post
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Apple’s bigger iPhone XS is getting slammed for being ‘sexist’
Apple’s bigger iPhone XS is getting slammed for being ‘sexist’
Oh, come on! Why would anyone assume apple or any other tech company would take women’s preferences or needs into account. Tech bros hate chicks and they’re not gonna give a shit if the phone is to big for the pockets in women’s clothing or anything else.
This hardly qualifies as news.
Study Suggests BPA-Free Plastics Are Just as Harmful to Health
BPA, is a chemical commonly used to create polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins. These clear white plastics are themselves used in food and drink packaging, as well as consumer products and medical devices, while resins are used to coat metal products like canned foods. When these products degrade or are otherwise damaged (from being repeatedly heated in a microwave, for example), they can leach out BPA, exposing us to it.
…BPA in particular has been implicated as a possible cause of genital deformities in men, early puberty in women, and developmental problems in the very young; it might also contribute to metabolic disorders like obesity as well as certain cancers.
…If that’s not bad enough, other studies have suggested that the effects of BPA could be inherited.
…“And yet the FDA doesn’t want to believe there’s a low-dose effect, even though there’s …evidence of that in their data.”
…And because BPA tends to linger in the environment, it might very well take decades before its impact disappeared completely.
The chemicals used to replace BPA in these plastics can still leak out and affect the sperm and eggs of both male and female mice, it found. And these same effects could be happening in people.
Study Suggests BPA-Free Plastics Are Just as Harmful to Health
Here’s a thought… Packaging every single bit of fodd we eat in plastic is a bad idea.
Ocean Cleanup steams out to sea in plastic pollution quest
The hope is that the vessel, the first of a planned fleet or 60 or more, can strain out the millions of pounds of plastic trash that collects in slow-moving ocean whirlpools called gyres, which can be hundreds of miles across.
…Currents and waves push trash into the machine’s center to collect it. Floating particles are captured by the net while the push of water against the net propels fish and other marine life under and beyond.
…The system is fitted with solar-powered lights and anti-collision systems to keep any stray ships from running into it, along with cameras, sensors and satellites that allow it to communicate with its creators.
…If all goes well, it will be towed out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch nearly 1,400 miles off the West Coast, about halfway between California and Hawaii. A support vessel will fish out the collected plastic every few weeks, according to the Associated Press. The waste will then be transported to dry land for recycling.
Ocean Cleanup steams out to sea in plastic pollution quest
Yes, we need to reduce the plastic we use but unless that mythical day, this seems like a logical step in the right direction.
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