Science News in Brief – April 22nd, 2017
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/22
Asteroid hits Earth 11,000BC
The Telegraph has reported on the news that experts at the University of Edinburgh analysed mysterious symbols carved into stone pillars at Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey, to find out if they could be linked to constellations.
The old stone carvings, based on the researchers, confirm a comet striking the Earth at about ~11,000BC. The asteroid is hypothesised to have wiped out the woolly mammoths. Civilisations rose shortly thereafter.
The engravings appear to align with not only the asteroid impact, but also when the mini-ice age took place, which is reported to have changed the “course of human history.”
Physicists experiment and observe “negative mass”
BBC News has reported on the story that scientists have created a fluid with the property of “negative mass.” It accelerates towards the force pushing against it rather than away from the force.
In the everyday world, when an object is pushed, it accelerates in the same direction as the force applied to it; this relationship is described by Isaac Newton’s Second Law of Motion. But in theory, matter can have negative mass in the same sense that an electric charge can be positive or negative.
A professor at Washington State University, Peter Engels, and others reduced the temperature to rubidium to slightly above absolute zero, which is about -273C, and created a Bose-Einstein condensate.
Gates: ‘terrorists could kill 30 million people’
The Telegraph reports that Bill Gates commented on the possibility of current or future terrorism based on engineered deadly biology such as deadly pathogens with the ability to kill as many as 30 million people.
He spoke at the Royal United Services Institute in London (RUSI). The respiratory bioterrorism could be more lethal than a nuclear attack. So the speech was a call for prevention of a potential global tragedy and or monitoring diseases.
“Bioterrorism is a much larger risk than a pandemic,” he said. “All these advances in biology have made it far easier for a terrorist to recreate smallpox, which is a highly fatal pathogen, where there is essentially no immunity remaining at this point.”
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