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Scientists Take Baby Steps Toward Extraterrestrial Babies | WIRED
In February, the Spanish pilot Daniel González climbed into a small aerobatic plane at the Sabadell Airport outside Barcelona and fired up its single prop engine. Once he was in the air, González began a steep climb for about six seconds before entering a nosedive . The plane's rapid descent created a microgravity environment in the cockpit and for a few seconds, González felt what it was like to be an astronaut. Then he pulled on the yoke to bring the plane out of its dive and did it all over again.
This sort of parabolic flight isn't remarkable for an experienced aerobatic pilot like González. But the cargo on his flight was a little unusual: In the passenger seat of the plane sat a small box, loaded with tubes of frozen human sperm .
This was the third and final flight of a yearlong study undertaken by a group of Spanish researchers to understand the effects of microgravity on human reproduction . This seminal study, which is currently under peer review, marks the first experimental results published on the effects of a zero-gravity environment on frozen sperm. The study was limited—the sperm was in microgravity for less than 9 seconds, for example—but it suggested that reduced gravity has negligible effects on the health of frozen sperm.
NASA teams up with major alien hunting group as they up the search for extraterrestrials |
By analysing data from TESS scientists will be able to determine which distant planets they should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
The space telescope uses an array of wide-field cameras to perform a survey of 85 percent of the sky.
TESS is capable of studying the mass, size, density and orbit of a large cohort of small planets, including a sample of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their host stars.
The satellite works by searching for telltale brightness dips potentially indicating planetary “transits” — the passages of orbiting worlds across their parent stars’ faces.
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Dr Pete Worden, Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, said: “It’s exciting that the world’s most powerful SETI search, with our partner facilities across the globe, will be collaborating with the TESS team and our most capable planet-hunting machine.
Did an extraterrestrial impact trigger the extinction of ice-age animals?
A controversial theory that suggests an extraterrestrial body crashing to Earth almost 13,000 years ago caused the extinction of many large animals and a probable population decline in early humans is gaining traction from research sites around the world.
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, controversial from the time it was presented in 2007, proposes that an asteroid or comet hit the Earth about 12,800 years ago causing a period of extreme cooling that contributed to extinctions of more than 35 species of megafauna including giant sloths, sabre-tooth cats, mastodons and mammoths. It also coincides with a serious decline in early human populations such as the Clovis culture and is believed to have caused massive wildfires that could have blocked sunlight, causing an "impact winter" near the end of the Pleistocene Epoch.
In a new study published this week in Scientific Reports , a publication of Nature, UofSC archaeologist Christopher Moore and 16 colleagues present further evidence of a cosmic impact based on research done at White Pond near Elgin, South Carolina. The study builds on similar findings of platinum spikes -- an element associated with cosmic objects like asteroids or comets -- in North America, Europe, western Asia and recently in Chile and South Africa.
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Asteroid wiped out giant sloths, woolly mammoths 12,800 years ago
A shocking new study claims the “smoking gun” behind the extinction of a number of animals and plants has been found: a massive asteroid that hit the Earth nearly 13,000 years ago.
The research, published in Scientific Reports , suggests that a brief ice age period occurred roughly 12,800 years ago and was caused by an asteroid impact, after looking at high levels of iridium and platinum in White Pond near Elgin, SC.
"We continue to find evidence and expand geographically,” University of South Carolina archaeologist Christopher Moore said in a statement. “There have been numerous papers that have come out in the past couple of years with similar data from other sites that almost universally support the notion that there was an extraterrestrial impact or comet airburst that caused the Younger Dryas climate event."
Study supports hypothesis extraterrestrial mass hit Earth 13,000 years ago, led to extinction of
Around 13,000 years ago, giant animals such as mastodons, mammoths, saber-toothed cats and ground sloths disappeared from the Earth. Scientists have found evidence in sediment cores to support a controversial theory that an asteroid or a comet slammed into Earth and helped lead to this extinction of ice age animals and cooling of the globe.
It’s called the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and was first suggested in 2007. The hypothesis included the idea that an extraterrestrial body impacted Earth 12,800 years ago. This led to an extreme cooling of the environment, which in turn helped cause more than 35 species of large animals to go extinct.
At the same time, human populations declined. The impact also has been suggested as the cause of large, raging wildfires that created enough smoke to block the sun and created an “impact winter,” in which cold weather lasts longer than expected after Earth is impacted.
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