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The asteroid, known as 7482 (1994 PC1), is set to fly by the planet at 1:51 p.m. PT, traveling at a speed of about 43,754 mph, according to NASA. “Near-Earth #asteroid 1994 PC1 (~1 km wide) is very well known and has been studied for decades by our #PlanetaryDefense experts,” With a diameter of approximately 3,451 feet, the asteroid is more than twice the size of the Empire State Building. And while there’s no threat that the asteroid will hit our planet, NASA still considers it a “potentially hazardous object” due to a combination of size and distance from Earth....

Image of asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 taken during a flyby of Earth in 1997. (Sormano Astronomical Observatory) ===================================================================== A large, rocky asteroid is going to fly by Earth next week. At 1 kilometer (3,280 feet) long, it's roughly two and a half times the height of the Empire State Building, and it's been classed a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid" due to its size and its regular close visits to our planet. But don't worry, this month's visit is going to have a very safe clearance, with the asteroid zipping by at a distance of 1.93 million kilometers (~1.2 million miles) away...

At 11:30 AM (PST) - 62,500 miles from L2 - 836,000 miles from Earth - Current speed 555 mph - Speed will decline to about 325 mph before it enters L2 orbit in five days - Temperature of "hot" side has been stable since sun shield deployment, 133F and 50F - Cold side shows modest cooling, minus 340F and minus 330F - When operational, the cold side will be minus 388F - Webb actually has heaters to keep temp loss very slow to protect equipment and to avoid ice forming from any Earth moisture - Currently, Webb is retracting pegs...

Places with highest daily reported cases per capita Seven-day average of daily new reported cases per 100,000 residents

Explanation: This is a sky filled with glowing icons. On the far left is the familiar constellation of Orion, divided by its iconic three-aligned belt stars and featuring the famous Orion Nebula, both partly encircled by Barnard's Loop. Just left of center in the featured image is the brightest star in the night: Sirius. Arching across the image center is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. On the far right, near the top, are the two brightest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way: the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Also on the far...

Levels of 14 proteins in the blood of critically ill COVID-19 patients are associated with survival. A single blood sample from a critically ill COVID-19 patient can be analyzed by a machine learning model which uses blood plasma proteins to predict survival, weeks before the outcome, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS Digital Health by Florian Kurth and Markus Ralser of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, and colleagues. Healthcare systems around the world are struggling to accommodate high numbers of severely ill COVID-19 patients who need special medical attention, especially if they...

Genome sequencing can be used to determine whether a patient’s illness is genetic, but it usually takes weeks to get results. A new ultra-rapid technique can sequence a person’s genome and diagnose genetic diseases in just a few hours, earning it a Guinness World Record. All the information that makes up an organism is contained in its genome, including traits like eye color, as well as genetic diseases. By comparing a patient’s genome with a checklist of DNA mutations associated with certain inherited diseases, doctors can diagnose otherwise mysterious illnesses. Currently, this process usually takes a few weeks. But in...

KARACHI, Pakistan, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Pakistani health authorities on Monday announced the completion of a successful clinical trial of Chinese traditional herbal medicine for treating COVID-19, as the South Asian nation enters a fifth wave of the pandemic driven by the Omicron variant. The Chinese medicine, Jinhua Qinggan Granules (JHQG) manufactured by Juxiechang (Beijing) pharmaceutical Co Ltd, is already being used in treatment of COVID-19 patients in China. "Since it was tried on patients with different variants of COVID-19, we expect it to be effective on Omicron as on other variants," Professor Iqbal Chaudhry, director of the International Center...

Trailing-edge noise is the dominant source of sound from aeronautical and turbine engines like those in airplanes, drones, and wind turbines. Suppressing this noise pollution is a major environmental goal for some urban areas. In Physics of Fluids, researchers from Xi'an Jiaotong University used the characteristics of owl wings to inform airfoil design and significantly reduce the trailing-edge noise. "Nocturnal owls produce about 18 decibels less noise than other birds at similar flight speeds due to their unique wing configuration," said author Xiaomin Liu. "Moreover, when the owl catches prey, the shape of the wings is also constantly changing, so...

COVID-19 infection may have a large neurological and psychiatric impact on as many as one-third of its survivors. A study published by Lancet Psychiatry finds that insomnia may be one of the most common neurological and psychiatric outcomes from COVID-19. Researchers evaluated the electronic health records of TriNetX, a global health research network, for approximately 236,000 patients, 10 years of age and older, who tested positive for COVID-19 from January 20, 2020 and were recorded as still alive on December 13, 2020 (see table for baseline characteristics). There was an estimated incidence of 14 neurological and psychiatric outcomes in the...

A visualization of the zero-energy electronic states – also known as a ‘Fermi surface’ – from the kagome material studied by MIT’s Riccardo Comin and colleagues. Credit: Comin Laboratory, MIT ************************************************************************** Work will aid design of other unusual quantum materials with many potential applications. MIT physicists and colleagues have discovered the “secret sauce” behind some of the exotic properties of a new quantum material that has transfixed physicists due to those properties, which include superconductivity. Although theorists had predicted the reason for the unusual properties of the material, known as a kagome metal, this is the first time that the...

The asteroid's orbit gets quite close to our moon's. (NASA/JPL) ************************************************************************** In a slow-moving universe, asteroids give us a rare chance to see things moving in real time. We have such a chance coming right up on the evening of Tuesday, January 18th, when 1.1-kilometer asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 passes 1.23 million miles (1.98 million kilometers) from Earth. This is about five times the distance from Earth to the Moon, and just a shade over the distance to the anti-sunward Earth-Sun Lagrange 2 point, soon to be the home of the James Webb Space Telescope. Fortunately, both Earth and said...

My post on Friday highlighted the work of Ken Gregory, who has attempted to quantify the costs of fully electrifying the U.S. energy system using as sources only wind, solar, and batteries. My post got circulated among my excellent colleagues in the CO2 Coalition, two of whom then provided me with links to their own work on closely-related subjects. The two pieces are: (1) “How Many km2 of Solar Panels in Spain and how much battery backup would it take to power Germany,” by Lars Schernikau and William Smith, posted January 30, 2021 (revised April 23, 2021) at SSRN; and...

And like any other cult, it tramples individual liberties and puts the world at great risk. Merriam-Webster defines a cult as “a small religious group that is not part of a larger and more accepted religion and that has beliefs regarded by many people as extreme or dangerous;” and “a small group of very devoted supporters or fans.” The keyword in these definitions is “small.” Most human beings may have their quirks and their follies, but they are not so open-minded that their brains fall out. Normal people simply do not want to follow individuals, no matter how charismatic, who...

“The bottom line is that the vaccine is excellent against the Alpha and Delta [variants], for Omicron it’s not good enough” said Prof. Gili Regev-Yochay, who led an Israeli experiment of assessing the effectives of the vaccine against Corona’s latest variant. Given the fact that the vaccines do not work against Omicron and that Omicron is now the globally dominant Covid strain, it makes no logical or medical sense to continue with vaccinating and boostering at this time. After all, why would anyone in their right mind needlessly inject people with failed protections that carry a risk of severe adverse...

This is the warning of NASA-funded experts who investigated how telescopes nearly missed a 328-feet-wide asteroid that came within 43,500 miles of Earth back in 2019. The space rock, dubbed '2019 OK', was the first object of its size to get that close to our planet since 1908 — but it was only spotted 24 hours before its closest approach. The reason, the team determined, is because it was moving towards us in such a way that its motion across the night sky was counteracted by the Earth's spin. Thus — to early warning systems like Pan-STARRS1 at Hawaii's Haleakala...

A woman has questioned whether she was wrong to uninvite her stepfather from her upcoming wedding – which he paid for – after her brothers said they would not attend if he was there. SNIP The bride-to-be, 25, said her mother is upset that she chose to uninvite her stepfather from her wedding after receiving an ultimatum from her older brothers. She explained that the siblings went through a “rough time” at the time of their parent’s divorce and that her mother had since remarried. While the OP (original poster) has a “somewhat stable relationship” with her stepfather due to...

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Explanation: Sometimes the dark dust of interstellar space has an angular elegance. Such is the case toward the far-south constellation of Chamaeleon. Normally too faint to see, dark dust is best known for blocking visible light from stars and galaxies behind it. In this four-hour exposure, however, the dust is seen mostly in light of its own, with its strong red and near-infrared colors giving creating a brown hue. Contrastingly blue, the bright star...

The eruption of Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano, which sits on the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire, sent tsunami waves across the Pacific Ocean and was heard some 2,300 kms (1,430 miles) away in New Zealand. [O]n-site instruments were likely destroyed in the eruption and the volcanology community was pooling together the best available data and expertise to review the explosion and predict anticipated future activity. Saturday's eruption was so powerful that space satellites captured not only huge clouds of ash but also an atmospheric shockwave that radiated out from the volcano at close to the speed of sound. Photographs and videos...

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated...