Full Size Dinosaur Model from Recycled Materials at The Potteries Museum and Gallery,...

Full Size Dinosaur Model from Recycled Materials at The Potteries Museum and Gallery, Stoke on Trent, 5.10.19.

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Staffordshire Hoard Decorated Panels, The Potteries Museum and Gallery, Stoke on Trent,...

Staffordshire Hoard Decorated Panels, The Potteries Museum and Gallery, Stoke on Trent, 5.10.19.

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Staffordshire Hoard, The Potteries Museum and Gallery, Stoke on Trent, 5.10.19.

Staffordshire Hoard, The Potteries Museum and Gallery, Stoke on Trent, 5.10.19.

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Worm Turns On To survive its first few days of life, the P….

Worm Turns On

To survive its first few days of life, the P. hirtus railroad worm must switch on natural lights. In tiny spots along its back an enzyme called luciferase sets to work on a chemical called luciferin, producing bright yellow-green luminescence to scare predators. But that’s not all – the worm carries a different form of luciferase which produces red ‘head lights’, helping the worm to see in the dark. Finding differences in the molecular structures producing these different colours, researchers seized an opportunity – combining natural luciferases with artificially altered luciferin molecules, produces a bright red light in the lab. Shining at the far-red end of the visible spectrum, this ‘new’ colour can be adapted to shine inside human cells – in tissues where yellow-green luminescence is too readily absorbed and lost – potentially revealing details about our circulatory system and muscles.

Written by John Ankers

• Image by Léo Ramos Chaves/Revista Pesquisa FAPESP


• Graduate Program of Biotechnology and Environmental Monitoring, Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), Rodovia João Leme dos Santos, Sorocaba, SP, Brazil


• Image copyright held by the photographer


• Research published in Scientific Reports, June 2019

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2019 October 15 The Galaxy Above Image Credit & Copyright:…

2019 October 15

The Galaxy Above
Image Credit & Copyright: Rodrigo Guerra

Explanation: Have you contemplated your home galaxy lately? If your sky looked like this, perhaps you’d contemplate it more often! The featured picture is actually a composite of two images taken last month from the same location in south Brazil and with the same camera – but a few hours apart. The person in the image – also the astrophotographer – has much to see in the Milky Way Galaxy above. The central band of our home Galaxy stretches diagonally up from the lower left. This band is dotted with spectacular sights including dark nebular filaments, bright blue stars, and red nebulas. Millions of fainter and redder stars fill in the deep Galactic background. To the lower right of the Milky Way are the colorful gas and dust clouds of Rho Ophiuchus, featuring the bright orange star Antares. On this night, just above and to the right of Antares was a bright planet Jupiter. The sky is so old and so familiar that humanity has formulated many stories about it, some of which inspired this very picture.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191015.html

Feeding a Baby Star Through a Whirlpool in Space

(Top) Optical image of the jet in the HH 111 protostellar system taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (Reipurth et al. 1999). (Bottom left) Accretion disk detected with ALMA in dust continuum emission at 850 micron. (Bottom middle) The disk turned (de-projected) to be face-on, showing a pair of faint spirals. (Bottom right) Annularly averaged continuum emission is subtracted to highlight the faint spirals in the disk. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Lee et al. Scientific Paper

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) detected a pair of spiral arms in an accretion disk around a baby star. Interestingly, these spiral density enhancements make the disk appear like a “space whirlpool.” The finding supports current theories of accretion disk feeding process, and potentially brings critical insights into the processes of grain growth and settling that are important to planet formation. These results appear in an article in Nature Astronomy led by Chin-Fei Lee at Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA, Taiwan).

“Thanks to the resolving power of ALMA, we finally detected a pair of spirals in a young accretion disk around a baby star. These spirals, long predicted in theory, play a crucial role in the transport of angular momentum. Which allows disk material to swirl towards the baby star”, says Lee with excitement. “Our detection of the spirals is an important milestone in understanding the feeding process of baby stars.”

Spirals detected in protoplanetary disks around somewhat older stars seem to be produced by interaction with unseen baby planets. Unlike those, the spirals here are induced by accretion of material from the surrounding molecular cloud onto the disk.

The protostar with its disk lies at the center of HH 111, a pair of supersonic jets emerging from a molecular cloud core located 1300 lightyears away in the constellation Orion. The protostar is about half a million years old, just one ten-thousandth the age of our Sun, and has a mass 50% greater than our Sun. A portion of the flow through the disk onto the budding star is diverted to form the spectacular jets. Previous observations with a resolution of 120 AU (An astronomical unit – AU – is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun) detected the accretion disk orbiting the protostar out to a radius of 160 AU. The new observations with ALMA have a resolution of 16 AU, almost eight times better. With this outstanding capability, astronomers were able to resolve the disk spatially. They detected a pair of spiral arms by the glow of thermal emission from dust particles concentrated there (Figure 1).

The team’s observations open up the exciting possibility of detecting spiral structures in the accretion disks around protostars through high-resolution and high-sensitivity imaging with ALMA, which allows studying accretion disk feeding processes in depth. Such observations also provide insight into accretion disks around other kinds of astrophysical objects, including the supermassive black holes found at the center of active galaxies. 

Source: National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)/Press Release

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Additional information

This research was presented in a paper “Spiral Structures in an Embedded Protostellar Disk Driven by Envelope Accretion,” by Lee et al. to appear in Nature Astronomy.

The team is composed of Chin-Fei Lee (ASIAA, Taiwan; National Taiwan University, Taiwan), Zhi-Yun Li (University of Virginia, USA), and Neal J. Turner (JPL/Caltech, USA).

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of ESO, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded by ESO on behalf of its Member States, by NSF in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and by NINS in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI).

ALMA construction and operations are led by ESO on behalf of its Member States; by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), on behalf of North America; and by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) on behalf of East Asia. The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified

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Contact

Nicolás Lira
Education and Public Outreach Coordinator
Joint ALMA Observatory, Santiago — Chile
Phone: +56 2 2467 6519
Cell phone: +56 9 9445 7726
Email: nicolas.lira@alma.cl

Masaaki Hiramatsu
Education and Public Outreach Officer, NAOJ Chile
Observatory
, Tokyo — Japan
Phone: +81 422 34 3630
Email: hiramatsu.masaaki@nao.ac.jp

Iris Nijman
Public Information Officer
National Radio Astronomy Observatory Charlottesville, Virginia — USA
Cell phone: +1 (434) 249 3423
Email: alma-pr@nrao.edu

Mariya Lyubenova
ESO Outreach Astronomer
Garching bei München, Germany
Phone: +49 89 32 00 61 88
Email: mlyubeno@eso.org

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Meet the ‘mold pigs’ a new group of invertebrates from 30…

Meet the ‘mold pigs’ a new group of invertebrates from 30 million years ago http://www.geologypage.com/2019/10/meet-the-mold-pigs-a-new-group-of-invertebrates-from-30-million-years-ago.html

Meet Siamraptor suwati, a new species of giant predatory…

Meet Siamraptor suwati, a new species of giant predatory dinosaur from Thailand http://www.geologypage.com/2019/10/meet-siamraptor-suwati-a-new-species-of-giant-predatory-dinosaur-from-thailand.html

Ice core source discovery adds to study of volcanic activity,…

Ice core source discovery adds to study of volcanic activity, climate system interactions http://www.geologypage.com/2019/10/ice-core-source-discovery-adds-to-study-of-volcanic-activity-climate-system-interactions.html

Prospecting for gold just got a lot easier…

Prospecting for gold just got a lot easier http://www.geologypage.com/2019/10/prospecting-for-gold-just-got-a-lot-easier.html

Liddicoatite | #Geology #GeologyPage #Minerals Locality:…

Liddicoatite | #Geology #GeologyPage #Minerals

Locality: Malkhan, Krasnyi Chikoy, Zabaykalsky Krai, Russian Federation

Size: 7.8 × 7.6 × 0.4 cm

Photo Copyright © Viamineralia /e-rocks. com

Geology Page

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Opal | #Geology #GeologyPage #Minerals Locality: Saricakaya,…

Opal | #Geology #GeologyPage #Minerals

Locality: Saricakaya, Eskişehir Province, Central Anatolia, Turkey

Size: 11.1 × 9.2 × 4.2 cm

Photo Copyright © Viamineralia /e-rocks. com

Geology Page

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Staffordshire Hoard Helmet Reconstruction, The Potteries Museum and Gallery, Stoke on...

Staffordshire Hoard Helmet Reconstruction, The Potteries Museum and Gallery, Stoke on Trent, 5.10.19.

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Fluorite | #Geology #GeologyPage #Minerals Locality: Okorusu…

Fluorite | #Geology #GeologyPage #Minerals

Locality: Okorusu Mine, Otjiwarongo, Otjozondjupa Region, Namibia

Size: 5.1 × 5.7 × 4.7 cm

Photo Copyright © Viamineralia /e-rocks. com

Geology Page

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Distinguishing earthquake foreshocks and aftershocks…

Distinguishing earthquake foreshocks and aftershocks http://www.geologypage.com/2019/10/distinguishing-earthquake-foreshocks-and-aftershocks.html

Tourmaline Var Indicolite & Quartz | #Geology #GeologyPage…

Tourmaline Var Indicolite & Quartz | #Geology #GeologyPage #Minerals

Locality: Kanakana Village, Darra-I-Pech Pegmatite Field, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan

Size: 6.3 × 5.3 × 3.5 cm

Photo Copyright © Viamineralia /e-rocks. com

Geology Page

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Tight Fit During birth, a human baby has to twist around and…

Tight Fit

During birth, a human baby has to twist around and squeeze its relatively large head and shoulders through mum’s pelvis on its journey to the outside world, often needing assistance from a helper such as a midwife along the way. For our primate relatives, whose babies have smaller heads, the process of birth is much shorter and less arduous. So, when did things change, and why? One new clue comes from these computer reconstructions of the fossilised pelvis of our human ancestor, Australopithecus sediba, who lived nearly two million years ago. Although an ancient Australopithecus baby’s head entered the pelvis in the same way as a human infant, there’s more space. This means there’s no need for the complex twisting manoeuvres of modern childbirth. By comparing this reconstruction with older fossils and modern mothers, researchers are starting to build up a picture of how the mechanics of childbirth have evolved.

Written by Kat Arney

• Image from work by Natalie M. Laudicina, Frankee Rodriguez and Jeremy M. DeSilva


• Department of Anthropology, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA


• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)


• Published in PLOS ONE, September 2019

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