News 9 June, 2022 Scientists have found a huge underwater system under Antarctica. It has been suspected there might be ground water under the continent, but the enormity of the system has surprised many of the scientists. The water is below the sediments and most of the sediments are below sea level. The question is being asked what role does this groundwater play in the overall environment of Antarctica? We just keep getting more breakthroughs in quantum computing. There has been a collaboration between Harvard, QuEra Computing, MIT, the University of Innsbruck and others and it seems to have paid off. The scientists have been successful in speeding up the process in optimization problems. This has already been applied to a real quantum computer and worked incredibly well and revealed the power inherent in quantum computing. What I am about to tell you seems silly on the surface, but it is anything but silly. Scientists have used satellites to measure cow burps from space. See I told you this would seem silly, but what they found out was not. One farm was studied. I do not know how many cows were on it, but I know the result of the experiment. It was found every hour as much as 1473 pounds of methane was released. Methane is said to be one of the harmful gases as far as global warming is concerned. The amount of methane varied from 796 pounds of methane to the 1473 pounds. It is said every cow emits 400 pounds of methane every day. That is over 16 pounds every hour. Electricity is everything to humans, after all we carry an electrical charge. Our static electricity charge is said to be 4,000 to 35,000 volts. A human at rest produces about 100 watts of power, so you can see how important electricity is to us. The brain and other parts of our body use electricity. NASA is going to send up a rocket to measure the weak electrical field of the earth as of the writing of this article. Could it be this current is necessary to support life? Will we find extraterrestrials also need this current? An amateur archaeologist found an amateur’s dream. While digging around in Switzerland he found a hoard of Roman coins. They were from the late Roman period defined as 250 to 450 A.D. There was a story earlier telling about a hoard of coins being dug up by, of all things, a badger in Spain. The Romans were known for burying their money as a means of saving. That is why so many Roman coins have been found buried in the ground. There is one thing which has held back robot chefs and that is they cannot chew and taste what they cook. Well guess what, all this is about to change. A robot has been developed which can imitate this procedure. The food was not actually chewed but blended before being tasted by the robot which was able to detect the saltiness of the food. The scientists developed a taste map for the food. While this test was only a proof of concept, look to the future for robots which will be able to make the perfect dish, the same way human chefs do, by tasting the food as they cook. I think many of us are fascinated by ancient cave art. Some of the pictures we found go back 25,000 years. Could there be more we are unaware of because if has mostly worn off over the years. It seems so. Scientists started using a 3D scanning technology and discovered there were some drawings which could not be seen with the naked eye. Will this technique when used in the really ancient caves prove humans have been drawing on cave walls a lot longer than suspected and what will these drawings show? A NASA simulation has suggested volcanoes are doing something we didn’t expect and that is contributing not only to global warming, but sometimes destroying the ozone layer. This applies to the large eruptions known as flood basalt eruptions. Previously it was thought these eruptions were responsible for cooling down the climate because of the light blocking discharges. An engineer for SpaceX has said NASA has to think bigger about what we can now do. It does feel they are dragging their feet in some areas such as getting back to the moon and sending people to Mars to mention a few areas. For example, SpaceX’s Starship could land 100 tons of people and equipment on the surface of the moon and NASA has recently selected it. But, its minimum requirements for landing on the moon are only a human landing system capable of landing 0.9535 tons and this includes two astronauts. This is one of the reasons why the engineer thinks NASA has to think bigger. I believe they also have to think much faster and put more into increasing the travel speed so we can really do some exploration in a reasonable time. Ever since scientists discovered gravity lenses in space there has been a thought on how to create an artificial one which would allow them to be able to see much further. Scientists believe by using a gravity telescope they could increase the power of magnification by a factor of at least 1,000 times more than the most powerful optical telescope. The idea is to use the sun’s gravity warping effect. It is believed if a telescope, the sun and the planet to be observed were in a straight line the lensing effect would take place. It seem scientists just might have hit upon a way to actually see the surface of an exoplanet. In physics there is something called the standard model. The improvements to the Large Hadron Collider will now allow it to experiment beyond the standard model of physics. The standard model of physics has to do with our understanding of the particles and interactions caused in a collider. What will we discover and could it be something we are not too happy about? One of the things which may be found is the nature of dark matter, if it really exists. Humans can tell the difference between odd and even numbers, but there is one other creature which can also do this and it is the honey bee. Scientists experimenting with honey bees set up stimuli for them and if they landed on an even number of stimuli they received sugar water, but if they landed on an odd number of stimuli, they got quinine. They were able to learn to only land on the even numbered stimuli. A second group of honey bees was taught the opposite and they learned quickly.
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