Science!

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Some sciency stuff!

• "Archaeologists make first-of-its-kind discovery in ancient Egyptian tomb"--Daily Mail. Apparently a family burial chamber: 

    The burial chamber contained the remains of 11 men, women and children, suggesting it was a family cemetery used for generations during the 12th and 13th Dynasty.

    The find marks the first Middle Kingdom tomb that has been discovered in the area [Luxor], which ranged from 1938 BC to 1630 BC. 

• "King Tut’s infamous tomb likely wasn’t his, new research reveals"--New York Post. There are a lot of artifacts from the tomb that suggest they were intended for a woman, the famous golden death mask also has holes for earrings (something limited to women and children) and appears to have been modified. The egyptologists advancing this theory believe that the tomb and artifacts may have been intended for Tut's step-mother, Nefertiti.
  
• "Breakthrough as cloned animal gives birth in Virginia in world-first"--Daily Mail. Apparently the first time a cloned animal--in this case, a black-footed ferret--has successfully given birth. This is particularly good news in the case of saving rare animals as the black-footed ferret is almost extinct.
  
• "Ballistics for Dummies: A Beginner’s Guide to Bullet Flight"--The Truth About Guns. Good ol' Newtonian physics. 
• "Scientists Say They Have Created the First Electromagnetic Vortex Cannon"--Popular Mechanics. It creates a rotating electromagnetic wave structure.
  
• "Voyager 1 Switches to Backup Transmitter to Phone Home"--The Silicon Graybeard. He reports:

    About two weeks ago, October 16, Voyager 1 put itself into a safe mode after receiving a transmission from its mission control via the Deep Space Network commanding the satellite to turn on one of its heaters.  Because it takes just about a full day for radio transmission to get to the satellite and another full day before the response is known, they found out on October 18 that Voyager failed to respond.  

    According to a post from NASA, it took a little while to discover that Voyager had switched off its primary X-band transmitter and switched over to its secondary S-band radio transmitter, which uses less power. 

The amazing part is that the S-band transmitter had not been used since 1981!

•  "Blowing up: Inflatable space habitats could be key to exploring the solar system"--Space.com. The article briefly goes over the background of attempts to build and test workable inflatable space habitats, the current status, and what the future may hold.
• "Asteroid Ceres is a former ocean world that slowly formed into a giant, murky icy orb"--Phys.org. Good. Ice can be cracked for oxygen and fuel, besides offering water to drink.
• "China is taking a keen interest in lava tubes as possible lunar habitats"--Space News. Of course they are--it is the ultimate military high ground.
  
• "Jesus's fish miracle from Bible is explained by scientists for the first time"--Daily Mail. From the article:

    Researchers at Kinneret Limnological Laboratory in Israel have found that there are much lower levels of oxygen deep in Lake Kinneret's water basin.

    This is because of an increase in phytoplankton blooms which block out the oxygen, causing fish to suffocate to death.

    They identified two events in 2012 that saw thousands of dead fish had floated to the surface along 2.4 miles of the the lake shore.

    The researchers wrote: '[Our study] may explain the appearance of large numbers of easy-to-collect fish close to the shore described in the biblical narratives.'

Even if this was the mechanism to explain the large number of fish hauled in by the fisherman, it doesn't explain the perfect timing or how the fish only wound up on just one side of the boat. And it is the "coincidence" of timing and location that is often the miracle.

• "Washington Post Accidentally Admits Earth at Coolest Point in the Last 485 Million Years"--Legal Insurrection. And the lowest CO2 levels on a geological time scale. "This graphic reveals a startling truth: mammals have never faced temperatures as cold as what we’re experiencing now. Yet, we’re being told to fear warming? It's time to rethink the narrative."
  
• "Duke Scientists Uncover Stronger, Ancient Versions of El Niño and La Niña"--Sci Tech Daily.

    A new modeling study from a pair of Duke University researchers and their colleagues shows that the oscillation between El Niño and its cold counterpart, La Niña, was present at least 250 million years in the past, and was often of greater magnitude than the oscillations we see today.

    These temperature swings were more intense in the past, and the oscillation occurred even when the continents were in different places than they are now, according to the study, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• "Micro nuclear reactors are being built that can deliver 5MW of power for up to 100 months, producing a staggering 1.2 petawatt-hours of energy"--Yahoo. 

    Now, details have surfaced about Westinghouse's eVinci microreactor, after the company revealed it had submitted its Preliminary Safety Design Report (PSDR) to the Department of Energy’s National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) and in doing so is the first reactor developer to reach this milestone.

    “The completion of the PSDR for the eVinci test reactor is an important step toward enabling a micro reactor developer to perform a test in our DOME facility,” said Brad Tomer, acting director of NRIC.

    “As a national DOE program and part of INL, the nation’s nuclear energy research laboratory, NRIC is committed to working with private companies such as Westinghouse to perform testing and accelerate the development of advanced nuclear technologies that will provide clean energy solutions for the US.”

    NRIC, a key initiative under the DOE, is dedicated to fast-tracking the development and deployment of advanced nuclear technologies like the eVinci microreactor. Its mission includes establishing four new experimental facilities and two large-scale reactor test beds by 2028, with plans to complete two advanced technology experiments by 2030.