Hippos might fly: UK research discovers animal can get airborne - The Guardian

It takes a scientific mind to see the grunting hulk of a hippopotamus and wonder whether, given sufficient motivation, such an improbable beast might ever become airborne.

And so to researchers at the Royal Veterinary College in North Mymms, Hertfordshire, whose painstaking examination of footage of the creatures revealed that when the hefty herbivores reach top speed they do indeed take off.

Video showed hippos got all four feet off the ground at once up to 15% of the time when thundering along at full pelt, often to chase off hippo rivals.

The finding plugs a gap in scientific knowledge and places hippos somewhere between elephants and rhinos in terms of the athletic prowess displayed by some of the heaviest land animals when they need to get a move on.

“I’ve struggled to get any work done on hippos before because they’re so hard to access,” said John Hutchinson, a professor of evolutionary biomechanics who led the research. “They’re incredibly dangerous, they tend to be most active at night, and they spend a lot of their time in the water.”

After finding no satisfying answer to the question in the scientific literature, Hutchinson dispatched a student, Emily Pringle, to Flamingo Land resort in North Yorkshire, where resident hippos have room to run. She videoed the animals as they moved between their stable and watering hole and brought back the footage for analysis.

The researchers went through it, and more gathered from YouTube, frame by frame to see whether hippos ever managed to get all four feet off the ground at once. Writing in PeerJ, they conclude that, unlike other large mammals, hippos typically stick to a trotting movement whatever speed they are moving at, but can become airborne in a rush.

Other large land animals move differently. Elephants have a standard walking gait even at high speed and never fully leave the ground. Rhinos, meanwhile, can walk, trot and even break into a gallop. The hippo footage showed the animals, which can reach more than 2,000kg, typically trot, a movement that involves diagonally opposite legs moving in synchrony.

“It’s important for our understanding of what it means to be a big animal and move on land,” said Hutchinson. The work also helps researchers piece together the evolution of locomotion in large land animals, all the way back to the giant dinosaurs.

Hutchinson said the study was “as simple as biomechanics research can get”, but had its challenges: clicking through stacks of videos frame-by-frame was not for everyone. “It’s mind-numbing,” he said. “It’s one of the things in my work that I hate the most. It’s really boring. Agonising.”

And yet, further research beckons. Word has reached Hutchinson that pygmy hippos, a different species to the animals he studied, can gallop. It raises the question of whether baby hippos can do the same, suggesting a return trip to Flamingo Land may be in order.

“I’m wondering if baby hippos can do something that adult hippos can’t,” he said. “That would be pretty neat.”

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2024-07-03 11:40:00Z
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USask researchers help identify three extinct walnuts in Arctic - CJWW

An international research project has discovered three extinct walnut species in the Canadian Arctic.
Two University of Saskatchewan scientists were part of the team that found the mummified walnut remains in an area covered by rainforest 45 million years ago. The walnuts were identified by using CT technology.
Dr. James Basinger is a professor emeritus of geological sciences at the University of Saskatchewan. He says the remains were still rooted in the soil —more than 3,000 kilometres away from the closest living tree.

More details can be found here

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2024-07-03 00:14:59Z
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Associated Press: Melting of Alaska's Juneau icefield accelerates, losing snow nearly 5 times faster than in the 1980s - UM Today

July 2, 2024 — 

“It is worrisome because in the future the Arctic is going to be transformed beyond contemporary recognition,” said Julienne Stroeve, a University of Manitoba ice scientist who wasn’t part of the study. “It’s just another sign of a large transformation in all the ice components (permafrost, sea ice, land ice) that communities depend on.”

Davies said the team was able to get such a long-term picture of the icefield’s melting from satellite images, airplane overflights, pictures stored away in drums in a warehouse and historical local measurements, stitching them all together like a giant jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces being nearly all white.

To read the full story, please visit the Associated Press. 

 

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2024-07-02 20:27:24Z
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Alpha Centauri Could Have a Super Jupiter in Orbit - Universe Today

The three-body problem is one of Nature’s thorniest problems. The gravitational interactions and resulting movements of three bodies are notoriously difficult to predict because of instability. A planet orbiting two stars is an example of the three-body problem, but it’s sometimes called a “restricted three-body problem.” In that case, there are some potential stable orbits for a planet.

A new study shows that the nearby Alpha Centauri AB pair could host a Super Jupiter in a stable orbit.

The research is “Stability of the Potential Super Jupiter in Alpha Centauri System.” It’s available on the preprint site arxiv.org. The sole author is Tinglong Feng, an undergraduate at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China.

“The three-body problem, which seeks stable orbit configurations among gravitating bodies, is a longstanding challenge in celestial mechanics,” Feng writes. Feng examines ? Centauri AB, our nearest binary neighbour, to understand if the system could host a super Jupiter and what orbit the giant planet could follow.

Feng isn’t the first astronomer to tackle the problem. “As the closest triple stellar system to Earth, Alpha Centauri system has attracted diverse studies in astronomy, including exoplanet stability,” Feng writes. Though the entire Alpha Centauri system is a triple star system, ? Centauri AB are far enough from the third star that they comprise a binary system.

Size comparisons for the Alpha Centauri A and B, Proxima Centauri, and the Sun. Image Credit: Planetary Habitability Lab/UPR Arecibo

There are some solutions to the three-body problem if one of the bodies has a negligible mass compared to the other two. ? Centauri AB is a pair of Sun-like stars. ? Centauri A is a class G star a little more massive than the Sun, and ? Centauri B is a class K star a little less massive than the Sun.

The study compares the ? Centauri AB system with a similar star system named GJ65AB (Gliese 65). It’s a binary pair known to host a Neptune-mass exoplanet. Though Gliese 65 is a pair of M-dwarfs, the comparison is still valuable because it “shares similar mass ratios and orbital eccentricities,” Feng writes. Gliese 65 is also close at only about 8.8 light-years from Earth. Feng also performed simulations of the ? Centauri AB system to test the idea of it hosting an exoplanet.

“The similarities between GJ65AB and Alpha Centauri AB, together with the newly detected stable super Neptune in the GJ65 system, suggest the stability of the corresponding potential super Jupiter in Alpha Centauri AB,” Feng writes. The Gliese 65 and the Alpha Centauri AB systems have nearly identical mass ratios and eccentricities. If GJ65 can host a planet in a stable orbit, can ? Centauri AB also host one?

Feng used the Mean Exponential Growth factor of Nearby Orbits (MEGNO) method to test the potential stability of a super Jupiter at ? Centauri AB. First, he used it to simulate the GJ65AB system and the newly discovered planet to verify the planet’s orbital stability. Then, he did the same with ? Centauri AB. “For this simulation, we restricted the semimajor axis of the planet to range from 0.1 to 5.0 au, and eccentricities less than 0.5,” Feng writes.

The MEGNO simulations for Gliese 65 showed that the newly discovered Neptune mass planet should be stable.

This figure from the research shows MEGNO results for Gliese 65. Dynamically stable regions of e (orbital eccentricity) and a (astronomical units) are shown in green, and the results show that the planet discovered around GJ65 should be stable. We identified the stable zone spanning from 0.1 to ~ 0.35
au, which contains all the stable orbits for ? ranging from 0 to 0.5 to ~0.35 au, which contains all the stable orbits for ? ranging from 0 to 0.5,” Feng explains. Image Credit: Feng 2024.

The next step was to find stable orbits for a planet orbiting ? Centauri AB. To do that, Feng used ? Centauri A as the primary star and injected a 350 Earth-mass planet at a distance of 23.336 AU. All of the other parameters were similar to GJ65 but scaled to ? Centauri AB. “We figured out the stable zone with ?
spanning from 0.1 to ~ 2.2 au, and ? ranges from 0 to 0.5,” Feng writes.

Feng says that the “potentially stable planet” should have ? about equal to 1.189 and ? about equal to 0.33. Those numbers place the planet in the stable zone in MEGNO results.

This figure from the study is a stability map based on MEGNO values for a Jupiter-mass planet in Alpha Centauri AB. Dynamically stable regions are coloured in green. For a stable planet around ? Centauri AB to “mimic” the stability of the newly discovered Neptune planet around GJ65, the planet would have ? about equal to 1.189 and ? about equal to 0.33, which places it right in the green stability zone. Image Credit: Feng 2024.

Of course, none of this means there is a planet there. It just shows that a potential stable orbit is available.

Feng’s work proposes that exoplanets in binary systems with nearly identical mass ratios and eccentricities can exhibit similar stability properties. “From this hypothesis, together with the newly detected Neptune-mass planet in the GJ65 system, which is similar to Alpha Centauri AB, we assume the existence of a potential Jupiter-mass planet with corresponding orbital parameters in Alpha Centauri AB should also be possible,” Feng writes.

No planets have been detected around ? Centauri AB, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one there. Our planet-hunting methods are far from absolute, and there are bound to be many planets in nearby systems that we haven’t been able to detect yet.

There are many proposals for missions to the region or for telescopes designed to probe the system more deeply. Their neighbour, Proxima Centauri, has two confirmed exoplanets. And there’ve been tantalizing hints that Alpha Centauri A hosts a planet, but it remains only a candidate.

A true detection or emphatic non-detection may be years or decades away. Who knows? But at least Feng’s work shows that there could be a stable orbital home for a super Jupiter in the system.

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2024-07-02 19:51:25Z
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Lunar Soil Samples Unveiled at Hefei Science Island for the First Time - Anhui News

Recently, a reporter learned from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences (hereinafter referred to as "HIPS, CAS") that in late June, the institute received the seventh lunar research sample, 500 milligrams of lunar soil from the Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center (LESEC) of the China National Space Administration (CNSA). This marks the first public appearance of lunar soil samples on Hefei Science Island.

What is the purpose of acquiring lunar soil samples? How can one successfully obtain them? According to an associate researcher at the institute, in April this year, he successfully passed the review process for the seventh lunar scientific sample loan application organized by the LESEC and was allocated 500 milligrams of lunar soil.

Lunar soil, as a substance from outside Earth, has long captivated the interest of scientists. The successful implementation of the Chang'e 5 mission not only marked China's first extraterrestrial body sampling but also provided invaluable lunar soil samples that hold immense scientific value for understanding the origin and evolution of the Moon as well as the history of the solar system.

After successfully obtaining the precious lunar soil samples from the Chang'e 5 mission, the team will conduct in-depth research on the samples' physical properties, material sources, and chemical composition. This research will provide critical data for determining key technical indicators for payloads and support experiments related to lunar soil water content and isotope detection.

The HIPS, CAS, as the lead unit, is currently responsible for developing the payload for the Chang'e 7 mission. Once this payload lands on the Moon, it will become the first human probe to land in the permanently shadowed region of the lunar South Pole under harsh conditions. The mission will conduct in-situ detection of water and ice in the permanently shadowed region, addressing key scientific questions such as the existence of water on the Moon, its content, and its sources.

Source: Hefei Evening News

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2024-07-02 09:14:13Z
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No return date yet for NASA astronauts who launched to space station aboard Boeing's capsule - 9NEWS

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2024-07-02 02:39:50Z
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China's Latest Lunar Lander Gathers Samples From South Pole Basin, Planting National Flag On The Far Side Of The Moon - Twisted Sifter

China’s space program has been putting a lot of effort into studying the Moon in recent years, with a lot of success.

Their most recent endeavor from their Chang’e-6 lunar lander involved gathering up soil and rock samples from the South Pole-Aitken basin of the moon, an area that has had little contact with probes in the past.

In addition to successfully gathering the samples and taking off for a return flight to Earth, the Chang’e-6 has completed one more significant mission.

The probe was able to plant China’s flag in the ground. This is the first national flag that has been placed on the far-side of the Moon, which is always facing away from the Earth and has had far fewer visits from probes.

The space agency has released photos of the lunar lander’s robotic arm taking the flag and planting it into the ground.

This is especially significant since China only had its first mission to the moon just 17 years ago. It illustrates the importance and focus that they are placing on our closest neighbor in space.

Interestingly, the flag is made from crushed volcanic rock basalt. This basalt is then made into filaments, which are about a third the diameter of a human hair.

There are two reasons for using basalt rather than other materials.

First, this material will stand up much better to the harsh temperatures and other environmental hazards on the moon than more common materials.

Second, the moon has a lot of basalt on its surface. China reports that using this material is helping them to prepare for future missions to the moon, including setting up a more permanent presence there.

Zhou Changyi, an engineer for the Chang’e-6 lunar lander, commented on this through the state-own CCTV.

 “The lunar surface is rich in basalt. Since we’re building a lunar base in the future, we will most likely have to make basalt into fibers and use it as building materials.”

This is just the latest in a series of missions to the Moon from China, and they have made it clear that they are going to continue to make this a priority.

As NASA is still talking about making a return to the lunar surface, China is pushing ahead and making real accomplishments with exploring our Moon.

I hope they continue to make lunar exploration a priority.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.

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2024-07-01 18:39:31Z
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Boeing Starliner astronauts ‘are not stranded’ in orbit, NASA insists - Digital Trends

Boeing Space’s Starliner docked at the International Space Station in June 2024. NASA

NASA has insisted that its two Starliner astronauts are not stranded in orbit as it continues to investigate issues with the thrusters on the spacecraft. which is currently docked at the International Space Station (ISS).

The Starliner brought NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the ISS on June 6 in what was the first crewed trip for the vehicle. But on the final approach to the orbital outpost, it became apparent that five of the Starliner’s thrusters were not functioning in the correct way.

The thrusters serve to maintain the appropriate orientation of the crew capsule and will be vital for guiding the Starliner toward its reentry into Earth’s atmosphere when the vehicle finally returns home. The agency has also been investigating five helium leaks that occurred on the Starliner during its journey to the ISS.

In a media conference streamed online on Friday, Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said: “I want to make it very clear that Butch and Suni are not stranded in space.”

Stich said the plan is to bring the two astronauts back to Earth on the Starliner and that there was no rush to get the pair home.

The original mission would’ve seen Williams and Wilmore spend about a week aboard the station, but their time in orbit is now approaching the four-week mark with no target date announced for their return.

In a worst-case scenario, if engineers deem the condition of the Starliner too risky for the astronauts to travel in, it’s possible Williams and Wilmore could hitch a ride home on a docked Crew Dragon spacecraft operated by SpaceX. Alternatively, they could wait for a SpaceX Crew Dragon to be prepped and sent for them in a similar way to how a NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and two cosmonauts waited for a Russian Soyuz spacecraft after the one they traveled in suffered damage while docked at the station.

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2024-07-01 02:55:21Z
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New Moon, Planets And Earth Farthest From Sun: The Night Sky This Week - Forbes

Each Monday, I pick out North America’s celestial highlights for the week ahead (which also apply to mid-northern latitudes in the northern hemisphere. Be sure to check my main feed for more in-depth articles on stargazing, astronomy, eclipses and more.

The Night Sky This Week: July 1-7, 2024

The first week of July isn't exactly the best of the year for sky-watchers in the northern hemisphere—the extremely long nights make sure of that. This week, however, is as good as it gets because, with a new moon mid-week, it’s the darkest the post-sunset skies will get in July. Early risers will see a waning crescent moon and meet some of the prettiest sights of the winter night sky while our planet reaches a significant milestone in its annual journey around the sun.

Here’s everything you need to know about stargazing and astronomy this week:

Monday, July 1: Crescent Moon And Mars

SkySafari (skysafariastronomy.com)

Monday, July 1: Crescent Moon And Mars

If you can get yourself up an hour before sunrise where you are, look east for the pretty sight of a 23%-lit waning crescent moon four degrees above Mars. Closer to the horizon will be bright Jupiter, sandwiched between the beautiful Pleiades open cluster of stars (above) and Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus. Capella, the “goat star,” will be to the left, above the northeast.

Tuesday, July 2: Crescent Moon And The Pleiades

SkySafari (skysafariastronomy.com)

Tuesday, July 2: Crescent Moon And The Pleiades

Another early start will get you another beautiful view of the Pleiades, with a now 14%-lit waning crescent moon just a few degrees away. Mars is to the right, Jupiter and Aldebaran are beneath, and Capella is to the left.

Wednesday, July 3: Crescent Moon And Jupiter

SkySafari (skysafariastronomy.com)

Wednesday, July 3: Crescent Moon And Jupiter

By now, the waning crescent moon will have shrunk to just 8% illumination, giving it a slender look that’s hard to beat—if you can find it. Look low to the east-northeast horizon, and you’ll find our slim-looking satellite close to bright Jupiter. Capella, the Pleiades and Mars will form the backdrop above the pair.

Friday, July 5: Earth At Aphelion And A New ‘Buck Moon’

Earth orbits the sun in a slightly elliptical path, which causes the distance between the two to vary throughout the year. Today marks the farthest point in Earth's orbit from the sun, known as “Aphelion Day.” At its closest point, or perihelion, on January 2, 2024, Earth was 91.4 million miles (147 million kilometers) from the sun, while today it’s 94.5 million miles (152 million kilometers) distant, according to timeanddate.com.

Today, we also see the new “Buck Moon,” which ensures dark moonless skies and, from Sunday, the emergence in the twilight of a slender crescent moon. The New Moon phase puts our natural satellite roughly between Earth and the sun, so it’s completely invisible to us—the exception being when it causes a solar eclipse, as it did in April (a total solar eclipse) and will again in October (an annular solar eclipse, this one observable only from the Pacific Ocean and South America).

Saturday, July 6: Young Moon

SkySafari (skysafariastronomy.com)

Saturday, July 6: Young Moon

The sky-watching week ends with a couple of post-sunset moon-planet conjunctions. Be looking west-northwest after the sun has set and you’ll have a chance to see a 1.3%-lit waxing crescent moon, it having emerged from the sun’s glare. Just below the moon will be bright Venus, though it will be very hard to see.

Sunday, July 7: Crescent Moon And Mercury

SkySafari (skysafariastronomy.com)

Sunday, July 7: Crescent Moon And Mercury

Tonight, you’ll have a chance to see a 5%-lit waxing crescent moon just above Mercury, which may require binoculars. Venus is to the lower right above northwest, but again, you'll struggle to see it.

The Lagoon Nebula is a bright, diffuse nebula in the southern constellation Sagittarius; cataloged ... [+] as M8 or NGC 6526. It contains a number of Bok globules, dark, collapsing clouds of protostellar material as well as a structure at its center known as the Hourglass Nebula.

getty

Binocular Target Of The Week: Lagoon Nebula (M8)

Nothing beats the sight of the Orion Nebula (M42) in winter, but the Lagoon Nebula (M8) comes closest. Covering a region of the night sky about three times the size of the moon, this bright emission nebula in the constellation Sagittarius will be visible above the south. It’s just to the right of the tip of the lid of the famous “teapot” asterism. You’ll need binoculars.

Binocular Target Of The Week: Lagoon Nebula (M8)

SkySafari (skysafariastronomy.com)

The Lagoon Nebula is about 5,200 light-years from the solar system and, like M42, is where stars are being born. The light you see is the ultraviolet radiation from its young stars, ionizing its dust and gas. This is what the Hubble Space Telescope sees.

The times and dates given apply to mid-northern latitudes. For the most accurate location-specific information, consult online planetariums like SkySafari Pro, Stellarium and The Sky Live. Check planet-rise/planet-set, sunrise/sunset, and moonrise/moonset times to see where you are.

Follow me on Twitter/X and Instagram.

Pick up my books Stargazing in 2024, A Stargazing Program For Beginners and When Is The Next Eclipse?

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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2024-07-01 10:00:00Z
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