So This Is A New One.

Prometheus and Pandora shepherd Saturn’s F ring into shape

Image credit: Morphics Zero

sauropod emojis, as rated by a palaeontology student

apple:

not a bad start here overall! this is recognisably intended as a brachiosaurid, and the skull shape and overall profile are pretty good (though they look a bit juvenile-ish). points off, though, for the inaccurate hands - rather than elephantine columns, they were more shaped like lima beans in cross-section. yes, really. they also only had one claw per hand (it was on the thumb). also points off for having the external fleshy nostril located on the dome of the skull; while this is the position of the bony external nostril, there is evidence that the fleshy nostril was probably located at the tip of the snout. its dead eye haunts me

score: 7/10 solid attempt

google:

google clearly went for a cartoonier approach, and to my view it served them well. still recognisably a brachiosaur - the shape of the skull and overall proportions make it resemble Europasaurus, a type of dwarf sauropod that lived on an island in what is now eastern europe. which immediately ups its score in my book. however, it falls victim to the same issues with elephantine hands as did the apple one, and as such i can’t give it a perfect score.

score: 9/10 friendly!

microsoft:

this emoji cleverly avoids any scientific inaccuracies by being extremely cartoony. i like the use of single colours rather than gradients. a little too simple for my tastes though. i can’t tell what find of sauropod, if any, it was intended to be - a brachiosaur, because of the upright neck? a mamenchisaur, maybe? i have little to work with.

score: 6/10 just too vague

samsung:

i don’t like her at all. clearly a brachiosaur - sensing a common theme - but something about it is just unpleasant to me. the body seems too fat, the limbs too short, the tail too noodly, the head too pointy. also messes up the hands again.

score: 3/10. please leave.

whatsapp:

at last, an emoji that bucks the brachiosaur trend!! this is clearly not a brachiosaur. in fact, it looks like a possible Cetiosaurus-type deal. whatever it is, it’s charming. the nostrils are at the end of the snout as they should be and - is it? - can it be? - it is! the hands are anatomically correct! each clearly has one claw, located on the thumb, and though we can’t see well, they don’t appear to be elephantine. i love them a lot.

score: 10/10 only shooting stars break the mold - oh god im so sorry i shouldve phrased that differently–

twitter:

a classic. what it lacks in detail it makes up in simplicity. it has pleasant lines and an appealing silhouette. it’s extremely vague and not based off of any real genus, and the tail is far too short, but for some reason this doesn’t bother me too much. 

score: 8/10. exquisite

facebook:

hm. hmm. a lot of anatomical though was clearly put into this; overall the body form looks like a plausible sauropod. the proportions look a little weird, sure, but that seems to be perspective - after all, most sauropods were gigantic beings. beefy boys, if you will. its nostrils, upon close inspection, are correctly placed; however, its hands and feet are all messed up. i guess the real conundrum for me is that it seems to be a mish-mash of sauropods - remove the braciosaur-like domed skull, and it would be a great fit for an Apatosaurus. 

score: 8/10 i’m conflicted

joypixels

what in the hell is joypixels? and what in the hell is this? i just…the hands and feet are plantigrade, meaning that the ankles touch the ground, when actual sauropods were digitigrade - walking on their toes. the shoulder and hip muscles aren’t there, and instead the limbs are just awkwardly connected to the body. it reminds me of a turtle, and not in a good way.

score: 4/10. uninspired and dull

openmoji:

they didnt try. nor will i.

score: 0/10 make an effort

emojidex

every emojidex emoji i have ever seen has just been awful. this is no different. this looks like a stereotypical loser from a meme, but as a dinosaur. the contrast between the decently moderate level of artistic detail put in and the blatant disinterest towards making it look like an animal is staggering. just awful.

score: -3/10 i just cant care enough about it to rate it lower

emojipedia:

excuse me? what the fuck? what the fuck is this? this is the main character from the low-budget ripoff of the good dinosaur. the head looks like a Corythosaurus  and the body looks like barney in leapfrog stance. the gradients just make me feel a little sick. it’s awful. look at the hindlimbs and tell me that any love was put into drawing this. it’s like how a dinosaur would be drawn on tom and jerry but like, the bad charmless ones made in the 90s that were trying hard to emulate the originals. the hands look like green snowboots.

score: -500/10 i hate you i hate you i hate you i hate you i hate you i hate you 

A Giving Hand, vdB9 // DocRx

M42 by NASA Hubble

A ten billion-year stellar dance by europeanspaceagency

Ultra-Close Orbits of Saturn = Ultra-Cool Science

On Sept. 15, 2017, our Cassini spacecraft ended its epic exploration of Saturn with a planned dive into the planet’s atmosphere–sending back new science to the very last second. The spacecraft is gone, but the science continues!

New research emerging from the final orbits represents a huge leap forward in our understanding of the Saturn system – especially the mysterious, never-before-explored region between the planet and its rings. Some preconceived ideas are turning out to be wrong while new questions are being raised. How did they form? What holds them in place? What are they made of?

Six teams of researchers are publishing their work Oct. 5 in the journal Science, based on findings from Cassini’s Grand Finale. That’s when, as the spacecraft was running out of fuel, the mission team steered Cassini spectacularly close to Saturn in 22 orbits before deliberately vaporizing it in a final plunge into the atmosphere in September 2017.

Knowing Cassini’s days were numbered, its mission team went for gold. The spacecraft flew where it was never designed to fly. For the first time, it probed Saturn’s magnetized environment, flew through icy, rocky ring particles and sniffed the atmosphere in the 1,200-mile-wide (2,000-kilometer-wide) gap between the rings and the cloud tops. Not only did the engineering push the spacecraft to its limits, the new findings illustrate how powerful and agile the instruments were.

Many more Grand Finale science results are to come, but today’s highlights include:

Complex organic compounds embedded in water nanograins rain down from Saturn’s rings into its upper atmosphere. Scientists saw water and silicates, but they were surprised to see also methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The composition of organics is different from that found on moon Enceladus – and also different from those on moon Titan, meaning there are at least three distinct reservoirs of organic molecules in the Saturn system.

For the first time, Cassini saw up close how rings interact with the planet and observed inner-ring particles and gases falling directly into the atmosphere. Some particles take on electric charges and spiral along magnetic-field lines, falling into Saturn at higher latitudes – a phenomenon known as “ring rain.” But scientists were surprised to see that others are dragged quickly into Saturn at the equator. And it’s all falling out of the rings faster than scientists thought – as much as 10,000 kg of material per second.

Scientists were surprised to see what the material looks like in the gap between the rings and Saturn’s atmosphere. They knew that the particles throughout the rings ranged from large to small. They thought material in the gap would look the same. But the sampling showed mostly tiny, nanograin- and micron-sized particles, like smoke, telling us that some yet-unknown process is grinding up particles. What could it be? Future research into the final bits of data sent by Cassini may hold the answer.

Saturn and its rings are even more interconnected than scientists thought. Cassini revealed a previously unknown electric current system that connects the rings to the top of Saturn’s atmosphere.

Scientists discovered a new radiation belt around Saturn, close to the planet and composed of energetic particles. They found that while the belt actually intersects with the innermost ring, the ring is so tenuous that it doesn’t block the belt from forming.

Unlike every other planet with a magnetic field in our Solar System, Saturn’s magnetic field is almost completely aligned with its spin axis. Think of the planet and the magnetic field as completely separate things that are both spinning. Both have the same center point, but they each have their own axis about which they spin. But for Saturn the two axes are essentially the same – no other planet does that, and we did not think it was even possible for this to happen. This new data shows a magnetic-field tilt of less than 0.0095 degrees. (Earth’s magnetic field is tilted 11 degrees from its spin axis.) According to everything scientists know about how planetary magnetic fields are generated, Saturn should not have one. It’s a mystery physicists will be working to solve.

Cassini flew above Saturn’s magnetic poles, directly sampling regions where radio emissions are generated. The findings more than doubled the number of reported crossings of radio sources from the planet, one of the few non-terrestrial locations where scientists have been able to study a mechanism believed to operate throughout the universe. How are these signals generated? That’s still a mystery researchers are looking to uncover.

For the Cassini mission, the science rolling out from Grand Finale orbits confirms that the calculated risk of diving into the gap – skimming the upper atmosphere and skirting the edge of the inner rings – was worthwhile.

Almost everything going on in that region turned out to be a surprise, which was the importance of going there, to explore a place we’d never been before. And the expedition really paid off!

Analysis of Cassini data from the spacecraft’s instruments will be ongoing for years to come, helping to paint a clearer picture of Saturn.

To read the papers published in Science, visit: URL to papers

To learn more about the ground-breaking Cassini mission and its 13 years at Saturn, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html

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Jupiter and Moons, January 24, 2014 by Hubble Heritage

Scientists Stunned By a Neanderthal Hybrid Discovered in a Siberian Cave

Okay, the title of The Atlantic’s article might be a little click-bait-y. But the discovery is truly remarkable. A new bone has been analyzed from the already-famous cave in Russia, and it belonged to, per DNA analysis, the daughter of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.  

Erupcion Cordon Caulle, Region de Los Rios, Chile. by Francisco Negroni

From the invention of wireless to Radio Broadcast to Space

The word radio was coined in 1907 after a decade of furious activity to discover the mechanism for wireless transmission.  A decade earlier, French physicist Édouard Branly coined the term radioconductor to describe a means of wireless transmission.  He based his term on the verb radiate which ultimately came from the Latin word radius meaning the spoke of a wheel, a ray or beam of light.  The word radio was first used by itself in a 1907 article by Lee De Forest. It was used five years later by the Navy to distinguish it from other wireless technologies and entered common usage in the next decade.  Radio technology advanced so quickly that a little over 50 years later on November 16, 1974, scientists broadcast the first interstellar radio message out to the stars, a program that later became known as METI, the Message to Extra-terrestrial Intelligence. To date, only 9 messages have been transmitted by a variety of organizations:

{The Morse Message (1962)}

Arecibo message (1974)

Cosmic Call 1 (1999)

Teen Age Message (2001)

Cosmic Call 2 (2003)

Across the Universe (2008)

A Message From Earth (2008)

Hello From Earth (2009)

RuBisCo Stars (2009)

Wow! Reply (2012) 

The first radio message, known as the Morse Message, does not technically belong on this list as the Russians directed the message to Venus, and thus the primary mission was not Interstellar.  The message targets vary in distance from the very short (the majority of targets are under 100 light years away) to the very far, including the Arecibo Message, which targets the M13 globular cluster 24,000 light years away.  

While there have been some dissenting voices who argue that ‘revealing’ our location to enemy or hostile alien civilizations is ill-advised at best, most scientific consensus agrees that due to the physical restrictions on speed and travel (as currently understood) we are in no danger of imminent attack.  While the Arecibo Message won’t reach its target for another 25,000 years or so, the first of the other messages should arrive by 2029.  Other scientist point out that our current terrestrial radio and television broadcasts represent their own METI signal and thus we have no need to fund additional broad- or narrow-cast messages.  

Image of the Arecibo Radio Telescope courtesy Marius Strom under a Creative Commons 3.0 share alike license.  

Image of the Arecibo Message of 1679 bits in the public domain.