News in Science

[Siggie]

Re: News in Science

Haykakan, I know you do it more often than not, but can you please try to link (or at least cite) a source for every post? Thank you, sir!

[Haykakan]

Re: News in Science

ARMENIAN ASTROPHYSICISTS DETECT A BRIGHT STAR

http://asbarez.com/110713/armenian-astrophysicists-detect-a-bright-star/

Monday, June 17th, 2013

The star's flare (Photo by Casey Reed/NASA)

Astrophysicists at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
and the Byurakan Observatory (Armenia) have detected a star of low
luminosity which within a matter of moments gave off a flare so strong
that it became almost 15 times brighter. The star in question is the
flare star WX UMa, phys.org reported.

"We recorded a strong flare of the star WX UMa, which became almost 15
times brighter in a matter of 160 seconds," explains astrophysicist
Vakhtang Tamazian, professor at the University of Santiago de
Compostela. The finding has been published in the 'Astrophysics'
journal.

This star is in the Ursa Major constellation, around 15.6 light
years from the Earth, and it forms part of a binary system. Its
companion shines almost 100 times brighter, except at times such as
that observed, in which the WX UMa gives off its flares. This can
happen several times a year, but not as strongly as that which was
recorded in this instance.

Dr Tamazian and other researchers detected this exceptional brightness
from the Byurakan Observatory in Armenia. "Furthermore, during this
period of less than three minutes the star underwent an abrupt change
from spectral type M to B; in other words, it went from a temperature
of 2,800 kelvin (K) to six or seven times more than that."

Based on their spectral absorption lines, stars are classified using
letters. Type M stars have a surface temperature of between 2,000
and 3,700 K; Type B between 10,000 and 33,000 K.

WX UMa belongs to the limited group of "flare stars", a class of
variable stars which exhibit increases in brightness of up to 100
factors or more within a matter of seconds or minutes. These increases
are sudden and irregular - practically random, in fact. They then
return to their normal state within tens of minutes.

Scientists do not know how this flaring arises, but they know how it
develops: "For some reason a small focus of instability arises within
the plasma of the star, which causes turbulence in its magnetic
field," explains Tamazian. "A magnetic reconnection then occurs,
a conversion of energy from the magnetic field into kinetic energy,
in order to recover the stability of the flow, much like what happens
in an electric discharge."

Next, kinetic energy in the plasma transforms into thermal energy
in the upper layers of the atmosphere and the star's corona. This
significant rise in the temperature and brightness of the star enables
astronomers to detect changes in the radiation spectrum.

"Photometric and spectroscopic monitoring of this kind of flare stars
is very relevant because it provides us with information about the
changing states and physical processes, which are in turn key to
studying the formation and evolution of stars," Tamazian explains.

To carry out this study, in which flares in other binary systems (HU
Del, CM Dra and VW Com) have also been analysed, the SCORPIO camera of
the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory was used. This camera enables
both the spectrum and the brightness of these objects to be detected.

Flare stars are intrinsically weak, and can therefore only be observed
at relatively short distances in astronomic terms, specifically in the
vicinity of the Sun, up to a distance of a few tens of light years,
according to phys.org.

[Haykakan]

Re: News in Science

WASHINGTON (AP) — New fossil evidence of the earliest complete skeleton of an ancient primate suggests it was a hyperactive, wide-eyed creature so small you could hold a couple of them in your hand — if only they would stay still long enough.

The 55-million-year-old fossil dug up in central China is one of our first primate relatives and it gives scientists a better understanding of the complex evolution that eventually led to us. This tiny monkey-like creature weighed an ounce or less and wasn't a direct ancestor. Because it's so far back on the family tree it offers the best clues yet of what our earliest direct relatives would have been like at that time, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"It's a close cousin in fact," said study author Christopher Beard, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. He said it is "the closest thing we have to an ancestor of humans" so long ago.

Primate is the order of life that includes humans along with apes, monkeys, and lemurs. Humans and other primates are set apart from other mammals because of our grasping five fingers and toes, nails, and forward-facing eyes. And this new species called Archicebus achilles fits right in, Beard said.

Among primates there are three suborders: anthropoids, which include apes, monkeys and us; and two other suborders that include lemurs and the lesser known tarsiers. This new species is in the same grouping as tarsiers, but close to the offshoot branch in the family tree where humans come from. The fossil includes anthropoid-like features.

"It's a cute little thing; it's ridiculously little," Beard said. "That's one of the more important scientific aspects of the whole story."

With a trunk only 2.8 inches long, the furry creature was about as small as you can get and still be a mammal, Beard said. Just like elephants and horses, the farther back in time you get for some of today's bigger mammals, the smaller they get, Beard said.

Because it was so small and warm-blooded, it had to eat bugs and move constantly to keep from losing internal heat, Beard said.

That means, Beard said, our earliest primate relatives were "very frenetic creatures, anxious, highly caffeinated animals running around looking for their next meal." They lived in a tree-lined area near a Chinese lake, swinging around trees in a hotter climate, Beard said.

Outside experts praised the study as significant, confirming what some thought about our primate ancestors. Rick Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution, said this fossil's mix of different features illustrate the fascinating and crucial changes that occur around major evolutionary branch points in our family tree.

The study also bolstered another theory that early primates first developed in Asia, even though humans evolved nearly 50 million years later in Africa, Beard said.

[Haykakan]

Re: News in Science

Russians Propose Space Billiards for Planetary Defense

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20130531/181439126/Russians-Propose-Space-Billiards-for-Planetary-Defense.html

MOSCOW, May 31 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) - The meteorite that
blew up over Russia's Urals in mid-February, leaving 1,500 injured,
came as a striking reminder of how vulnerable we are on our small,
blue planet. It was suddenly palpably clear that we have no way of
preventing celestial bodies from slamming into Earth.

The way out just might be to hit dangerous asteroids with other
asteroids, Russian scientists say.

Several near-Earth asteroids can be towed into the vicinity of the
planet to serve as a cache of celestial projectiles against incoming
space threats, said Natan Eismont of the Space Research Institute of
Russian Academy of Sciences.

`I was skeptical about it myself, until we actually tried to do
computer modeling of the situation,' Eismont, one of the project's
authors, told RIA Novosti in a recent interview.

The orbiting asteroids can be `lined up' so that one passes 100,000 to
200,000 kilometers from Earth every few weeks or months, ready to be
used against non-catalogued and hazardous asteroids, recent research
by the Space Research Institute and the Higher School of Economics in
Moscow suggests.

There are currently more than 9,000 near-Earth asteroids, or asteroids
whose orbits bring them within 1 astronomical unit (149 million km or
92 million miles) of the Sun, and thus relatively close to the Earth
as well. But this figure could be as little as 1 or 2 percent of their
total number, Eismont said. New asteroids are discovered every day.

© RIA Novosti.

Asteroids That Buzz Planet Earth

Most suitable asteroids have elliptical orbits that bring them close
to Earth at certain points, while the rest of the time they are
several astronomical units away.

It is currently possible to send an unmannedProton rocket - a staple
of the Russian space program -to land on an asteroid, carrying with it
up to 2 tons of rocket fuel, Eismont said. Properly anchored, the
rocket fuel would then ignite at a designated time, tweaking the
asteroid's orbit.

Space rocks best suited for planetary defense weigh 1,500-2,000 tons
and are 10 to 15 meters in diameter - smaller than the meteorite that
blew up over the Urals, which measured 17 meters across and weighed
over 9,000 tons. The 99942 Apophis - which was considered a potential
hazard until updated calculations rolled in earlier this year - is
estimated to be 325 meters in diameter and weigh 40 megatons.

Asteroids the size of Apophis hit Earth about once every 63,000 years,
experts say, but the casualties from this kind of event could reach 10
million, and that warrants some caution.

Meteorites such as the one that blew up over the Urals hit once every
50 to 80 years, Eismont said.

The asteroid 1998 QE2, which is 2.7 kilometers (1.7 miles) in
diameter, will zip past Earth at a distance of 5.8 million km (3.6
million miles) - or 15 lunar distances - at 20:59 universal time
Friday (0:59 Saturday, Moscow time.)

The program costs about $1 billion per Proton launch, and the
equipment needed to maneuver an asteroid into position can be
developed within 10 to 12 years, Eismont said.

This whopping price tag may suggest that the plan is doomed to the
realm of sci-fi. But in fact, NASA is already doing something similar
with its Asteroid Retrieval and Utilization project, which proposes to
rope in a 500-ton asteroid and bring it into lunar orbit, where it can
be studied by manned missions starting in 2025. The White House has
supported a plan to allot $105 million in 2014 for the first stage of
the NASA project, which has a total price tag of $2.6 billion.

The Russian project saw money from a state `megagrant' of 150 million
rubles ($4.8 million) plowed into it, but so far remains purely on
paper.

Commenting shortly after the meteorite incident in the Urals last
winter, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said that
planetary defense is a priority for Russia's space industry. But the
Russian government has so far not expressed any interest in the
asteroid-ramming project.

The approach may counter some classes of celestial hazard, said Donald
Yeomans, who heads the search for near-Earth objects at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena - a job that landed him on Time
magazine's 2013 list of 100 most influential people in the world.

`If the asteroid that was predicted to strike Earth was fairly large
and massive, its deflection as a result of a controlled impact by a
small asteroid might make some sense,' Yeomans told RIA Novosti.

However, smaller asteroids, though still dangerous, are better
intercepted by ramming them with more maneuverable spacecraft, not
other asteroids, he told RIA Novosti.

The Russian project raises a lot of technical problems, such as
developing the asteroid-maneuvering equipment and anchoring it to the
asteroid, said Vladimir Surdin of Moscow State University's Sternberg
Astronomical Institute.

`There are other problems too, but nothing fatal. The method needs
work, [but] it should be in the planetary defense arsenal,' Surdin
said.

And mankind needs just such an arsenal, given that, at least in
Eismont's view, some kind of `attack' from space is inevitable.

`Nobody can tell you when the next asteroid will come, but everyone
would tell you that come it will,' Eismont said.

(Updated with correct date, May 31 instead of June 31, correct size of
the asteroid 1998 QE2, and a revised definition of near-Earth
asteroids.)



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Haykakan]

Re: News in Science

IRAN PLACES PIONEER EXPLORER SATELLITE INTO SPACE

Tehran, Jan 28, IRNA - Iran launched Pioneer Explorer Satellite
and placed it into space, taking a giant stride in the field of
space bio-research, Public Relations Department at Iran Aerospace
Organization said on Monday.

The Explorer Satellite was launched concurrent with the auspicious
birth anniversary of Holy Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him).

The explorer was put in the orbit as per schedule and altitude.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has sent a monkey into space aboard an
indigenous bio-capsule as a prelude to sending humans into space.

Iran launched its first indigenous satellite, Omid (Hope), in 2009.

The country also sent its first bio-capsule containing living creatures
into the space in February 2010, using the indigenous Kavoshgar-3
(Explorer-3) carrier.

In June 2011, Iran put the 15.3-kilogram Rasad (Observation) orbiter
in space. Rasad's mission was to take images of the Earth and transmit
them along with telemetry information to the ground stations.

Iran launched Navid-e Elm-o Sanat (Harbinger of Science and Industry),
another indigenous satellite, into the orbit on February 3, 2012.

The satellite was a telecom, measurement and scientific one, whose
records were reportedly used in a wide range of fields.

Iran is one of the 24 founding members of the UN Committee on the
Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which was set up in 1959.

1420**1416

Islamic Republic News Agency/IRNA NewsCode: 1055739

[Haykakan]

Re: News in Science

'SUGAR' FOR DIABETICS INVENTED IN ARMENIA

news.am
September 29, 2012 | 18:00

YEREVAN. - The experts of the Institute of Hydroponics Problems at
the Armenian National Academy of Sciences have invented a technology
of making sweet dust (sweetener) out of stevia (Stevia rebaudiana -
SrB) without calories. The plant is being cultivated in Southern
and Central America, one of the co-authors of the invention Mikhael
Babakhanyan said.

In addition, the dust also removes toxic substances and heavy metal
salts from the body. To note, the plant was cultivated in Armenia and
later it will grow in Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh] as well. Researches
were conducted with support of budget and institute's own expenses.

[gegev]

Re: News in Science

This man needs to learn history then type ,turk have Armenian gene's cause of the rapings , kid stealing's and making them turks and Janissaries very common practice made into centuries hence there European features , they are bastard child all of them.One single turk may have ancestors from pakistan to albania all between them included.

"Turks have Armenian gene's cause of the rapings , kid stealing's and making them turks"

Your point is very much interesting; UrMistake!
The post you refer just means that most of people in Turkey don't know their true nationality ... yet. And we need to help them to learn that.

It would be interesting to investigate what percentage of people in Turkey have tipical Armenian gene and Turkish one.

I assume that people with typical Turkish gene, in Turkey, will be minority there.

Therefore most of people that are raised and "educated" as "Turks" are of Armenian and other nationalities; they just don't know their roots/origin.

Does someone encounter statistics on that?

[UrMistake]

Re: News in Science

This man needs to learn history then type ,turk have Armenian gene's cause of the rapings , kid stealing's and making them turks and Janissaries very common practice made into centuries hence there European features , they are bastard child all of them.One single turk may have ancestors from pakistan to albania all between them included.

[Mher]

Re: News in Science

Are Turks acculturated Armenians?

To the left you see a zoom in of a PCA which Dienekes produced for a post, Structure in West Asian Indo-European groups. The focus of the post is the peculiar genetic relationship of Kurds, an Iranian-speaking people, with Iranians proper, as well as Armenians (Indo-European) and Turks (not Indo-European). As you can see in some ways the Kurds seem to be the outgroup population, and the correspondence between linguistic and genetic affinity is difficult to interpret. For those of you interested in historical population genetics this shouldn’t be that surprising. West Asia is characterized by of endogamy, language shift, and a great deal of sub and supra-national communal identity (in fact, national identity is often perceived to be weak here). A paper from the mid-2000s already suggested that western and eastern Iran were genetically very distinctive, perhaps due to the simple fact of geography: central Iran is extremely arid and relatively unpopulated in relation to the peripheries.

But this post isn’t about Kurds, rather, observe the very close relationship between Turks and Armenians on the PCA. The _D denotes Dodecad samples, those which Dienekes himself as collected. This affinity could easily be predicted by the basic parameters of physical geography. Armenians and Anatolian Turks were neighbors for nearly 1,000 years. Below is a map which shows the expanse of the ancient kingdom of Armenia:

Historic Armenia was centered around lake Van in what is today eastern Turkey. The modern Republic of Armenia is very much a rump, and an artifact of the historic expansion of the Russian Empire in the Caucasus at the expense of the Ottomans and Persians. Were it not for the Armenian genocide there may today have been more Armenians resident in Turkey than in the modern nation-state of Armenia,* just as there are more Azeri Turks in Iran than in Azerbaijan. Many areas once occupied by Armenians are now occupied by Kurds and Turks. But a bigger question is the ethnogenesis of the Anatolian Turkish population over the past 1,000 years.

Dienekes has already shed light on this topic earlier, adding the Greek and Cypriot populations to the mix as well as Turks and Armenians. The disjunction between Kurds and the Armenian-Turk clade suggests to us that Turks did not emerge out of the milieu of Iranian tribes in the uplands of southeast Anatolia and western Persia. Like the Armenians the Kurds are an antique population, claiming descent from the Medes, and referred to as Isaurians during the Roman and Byzantine period.

Below is a reformatted K = 15 run of ADMIXTURE with Eurasian population. I’ve removed the labels for the ancestral components, but included in populations which have a high fraction of a given ancestral component. The geographical labels are for obscure populations. I’ve underlined the four populations of interest:

First, let’s get out of the way the fact that Turkish samples have non-trivial, though minor, northeast Asian ancestry. The Yakut themselves are a Turkic group situated to the north of Mongolia. The more southerly and central Asian affinities the nomadic ancestors of the Anatolia Turks may have picked up in their sojourns over the centuries between their original homeland in east-central Siberia and Mongolia and West Asia. The rest of ancestry is rather typical of northern West Asian groups. In particular, Armenians! Here is the ancestral breakdown for the four groups I want to focus on using Dienekes’ labels:
Population Greek Cypriots Turks Armenians
West Asian 37.6 54.1 47.2 56.3
Central-South Asian 5.3 8.6 18.2 18.4
North European 25.1 5.6 12 12.3
South European 27.4 20.8 9.4 8.4
Arabian 3.4 8 4.3 3.4
Altaic 0.3 0 2.6 0.1
East Asian 0.3 0.2 2.2 0
Central Siberian 0.1 0.2 1.4 0.2
Chukchi 0 0 1.1 0.2
South Indian 0 0.1 0.8 0.3
Nganasan 0.1 0 0.4 0.2
Koryak 0.1 0 0.2 0.1
East African 0 0.4 0.1 0
West African 0 0 0.1 0
Northwest African 0.3 1.9 0.1 0

And now the correlations between the populations by ancestral components:

Greek Cypriots Turks Armenians
Greek * 0.863 0.823 0.813
Cypriots * * 0.941 0.946
Turks * * * 0.997
Armenians * * * *

Let’s remove the East Eurasian and African components, and recalculate the proportions by taking what remains as the denominator:
Population Greek Cypriots Turks Armenians
West Asian 38.1 55.7 51.8 57.0
Central-South Asian 5.4 8.9 20.0 18.6
North European 25.4 5.8 13.2 12.4
South European 27.7 21.4 10.3 8.5
Arabian 3.4 8.2 4.7 3.4

And the recomputed correlations:

Greek Cypriots Turks Armenians
Greek * 0.747 0.640 0.647
Cypriots * * 0.901 0.908
Turks * * * 0.999
Armenians * * * *

With all the ~0 ancestral components which were common across these four populations removed the correlations have gone down. Except in the case of the Armenian-Turk pair, because I’ve removed the ancestries which differentiate them.

So what’s a plausible interpretation? A straightforward one would be that the Muslim Turk population of Anatolia has a strong bias toward having been assimilated Armenians, rather than Greeks. The cultural plasticity of Armenians in late antiquity and the early medieval period was clear: individuals of ethnic Armenian to origin rose the pinnacles of the status hierarchy of the Orthodox Christian Greek Byzantine Empire. The Macedonian dynasty of the Byzantines under which the civilization reached its mature peak were descended from Armenians who had resettled in Macedonia. Just as plausible to me is that eastern Anatolia as a whole exhibited little genetic difference between Greeks and Armenians, and the former were wholly assimilated or migrated, while the Armenians remained. One way to test this thesis would be type the descendants of Greeks who left eastern Anatolia during the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s. But the difference between Greeks and Cypriots also points us to another possibility: perhaps the Greeks of Greece proper (as opposed to Anatolia) were much more strongly impacted by the arrival of Slavs? One need not necessarily rely solely on the Scalveni migrations either, water tends to be a major dampener to conventional isolation-by-distance gene flow, so the Greek mainland may always have been subject to more influence from the lands to the north.

Whatever the details of ethnogenesis may be, it will be interesting to see how things shake out as we increase sample sizes and get better population coverage. These results may be due to regional selection bias. One might expect that the descendants of Rumelian Turks be more “European” than Anatolian Turks. But, these data do seem to suggest on face value that Armenians are the population which Anatolian Turks have the most genetic affinity with.

* My main hesitation would be that Armenians are a very mobile population, and their numbers within a modern Turkey may have declined simply through emigration, just as those of Christian Arabs have over the 20th century.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/are-turks-acculturated-armenians/

[Haykakan]

Re: News in Science

Armenians help build the latest mars explorer.

http://groong.usc.edu/news/msg433164.html