Told by an idiot ...

Out, Out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. Macbeth Act V, Scene V

Well, the worst debate in history is now history with Biden looking pale and weak and Trump looking robust and insane. To yours truly, Shakespeare's quote sums it up because America is nearing its end if nothing of consequence is done. It's that bad and people know it. A complete reset is needed, beginning with term limits for all three branches and a complete redo of the tax code as endless years of the corruption of Mitch McConnell and significant others, combined with the ever increasing impact of inequality ginned up by the tax code, is killing this nation 24/7.

What does the worst debate in American history look like? It looks like the debate that took place on Tuesday night between President Donald Trump and the former Vice-President Joe Biden. It was a joke, a mess, a disaster. A “shit show,” a “dumpster fire,” a national humiliation. No matter how bad you thought the debate would be, it was worse. Way worse. Trump shouted, he bullied, he hectored, he lied, and he interrupted, over and over again.

But it's not just Trump, it's the system. As George Carlin in The Real Owners said, The real owners own this fucking place. Politicians don't matter, the MIC, banks and the big corporations do and they want this disastrous state of affairs to run forever because in the end, it's all about their money. Always has been, always will be. A revolution is needed, let's hope it's peaceful but they never really are, just ask the French about this.

To be continued.

Universality

 Machine learning doesn't actually have a face. 

But if it ever does, we'd like that face to look something like this.

The Arstechina quote says it all regarding AI, the open ended tech evolving faster than thought possible due to the rise of neural nets, the analog front end of AI but to make the code work on all platforms, an abstraction layer accepted by all must be created and now it's happening as we speak.

URZ will focus its research and programming efforts on a fundamental high-performance computing (HPC) challenge where modern computers utilize different types of hardware for different calculations. Accelerators, including graphics processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), are used in combination with general compute processors (CPUs). Using different types of hardware make computers very powerful and provide versatility for a wide range of situations and workloads. Hardware heterogeneity, however, complicates software development for these computers, especially when specialized components from a variety of vendors are used in tandem.

One major reason for this complication is that many accelerated compute architectures require their own programming models. Therefore, software developers need to learn and use a different—and sometimes proprietary—language for each processing unit in a heterogeneous system, which increases complexity and limits flexibility.

oneAP's cross-architecture language Data Parallel C++ (DPC++), based on Khronos Groups' SYCL standard for heterogeneous programming in C++, overcomes these challenges with its single, unified open development model for performant and productive heterogeneous programming and cross-vendor support.

Why this is important.

URZ's collaboration on the oneAPI standard looks like it will be a good start toward fulfilling Intel's promises that oneAPI will be about all hardware, not just Intel's. The development efforts will be led by Aksel Alpay, who is specifically trying to bring AMD (Radeon) GPU support to oneAPI.

To fully understand this, we need to dive a little deeper into oneAPI's underlying technologies. OneAPI is built on top of Intel's Data Parallel C++ (DPC++), which is itself built atop C++ and Khronos SYCL code abstraction layer standards. Alpay is himself the founding developer of the hipSYCL implementation of the SYCL standard, and his work already explicitly supports multiple CPUs, Nvidia GPUs via CUDA, and AMD GPUs via ROCm. creating his exquisite paintings.

hipSYCL is a part of the wider SYCL hardware-abstraction ecosystem, and it targets vendor-neutral, near-native performance on CPUs and GPUs alike.

AI ... will be everywhere. The question to ask is, what kind of AI will it be.

Early Fall 2020

Copacetic

Mirror Smooth

Stay Puff CU

Purple Flower

Surface Tension

Reflection 2Step

WASP 189

Getting broiled is an understatement for the Wasp 189 system.

WASP-189b, the target of the CHEOPS observations, is an exoplanet orbiting the star HD 133112, one of the hottest stars known to have a planetary system. "The WASP-189 system is 322 light years away and located in the constellation Libra (the weighing scales)," explains Monika Lendl, lead author of the study from the University of Geneva, and member of the National Center of Competence in Research PlanetS.

"WASP-189b is especially interesting because it is a gas giant that orbits very close to its host star. It takes less than three days for it to circle its star, and it is 20 times closer to the star than Earth is to the Sun," Monika Lendl says. The planet is more than 1.5 times as large as Jupiter, the largest planet of the solar system.

Which means ...

Monika Lendl further explains that planetary objects like WASP-189b are very exotic: "They have a permanent day side, which is always exposed to the light of the star, and, accordingly, a permanent night side." This means that its climate is completely different from that of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system. "Based on the observations using CHEOPS, we estimate the temperature of WASP-189b to be 3,200 degrees Celsius. Planets like WASP-189b are called "ultra-hot Jupiters. Iron melts at such a high temperature, and even becomes gaseous. This object is one of the most extreme planets we know so far," says Lendl.

How CHEOPS finds these outliers.

When a planet passes in front of its star as seen from Earth, the star seems fainter for a short time. This phenomenon is called a transit. When the planet passes behind the star, the light emitted and/or reflected by the planet is obscured by the star for a short time. This phenomenon is called occultation. Credit: © ESA

We know so little but at least we're trying. :)

 

Variation 2Step

As suspected, Black Holes wobble a bit. :)

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration delivered the first image of a black hole, revealing M87*–the supermassive object in the center of the M87 galaxy. The EHT team has now used the lessons learned last year to analyze the archival data sets from 2009-2013, some of them not published before. The analysis reveals the behavior of the black hole image across multiple years, indicating persistence of the crescent-like shadow feature, but also variation of its orientation–the crescent appears to be wobbling. The full results appeared today in The Astrophysical Journal.

Snapshots of the M87* black hole appearance, obtained through imaging / geometric modeling, and the EHT array of telescopes in 2009-2017. The diameter of all rings is similar, but the location of the bright side varies. Credit: M. Wielgus, D. Pesce & the EHT Collaboration

But while the crescent diameter remained consistent, the EHT team found that the data were hiding a surprise: the ring wobbles, and that means big news for scientists. For the first time, they can get a glimpse of the dynamical structure of the accretion flow so close to the black hole’s event horizon, in extreme gravity conditions. Studying this region holds the key to understanding phenomena such as relativistic jet launching, and will allow scientists to formulate new tests of the theory of General Relativity.

And the beat goes on ...

Nature at it's finest :)

Nature at it's finest, courtesy the Hubbell.

This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643 in the constellation of Lupus (The Wolf). Looking this good isn’t easy; thirty different exposures, for a total of 9 hours observation time, together with the high resolution and clarity of Hubble, were needed to produce an image of such high level of detail and of beauty.

Yes indeed.

It's all about the teams

It's all about the teams. Something I see 24./7 with my 2 SEAL brothers who I love dearly. :)

Put a fork in it, it's done ...

Flames consumes both sides of a segment of Lake Berryessa during the Hennessey fire 

in the Spanish Flat area of Napa, California on August 18, 2020. JOSH EDELSON/AFP

This surreal image from hell is just the beginning of a hells scape destined to change the world for the worst for hundreds of years as global warming is already baked in no matter what we do in the near term. With this in mind, the notion of an Elysium comes to mind here as the acceleration of this existential nightmare reminds us that we did it to ourselves.

The Age of Megafires: The World Hits a Climate Tipping Point

From Siberia to Australia to the western U.S., massive fires have consumed millions of acres this year and spawned fire-generated tornados and other phenomena rarely seen before. Scientists say the world has entered a perilous new era that will demand better ways of fighting wildfires.

Like so many aspects of the burgeoning number of wildfires, the increase in lightning is connected to climate change. Lighting increases by about 12 percent for every 1 degree Celsius temperature increase. Simple mathematics, and many studies, suggest that there will be much more lightning in some places as temperatures rise by another 2 or 3 degrees C this century in wildlands that are already severely stressed by drought, disease, and insects such as the mountain pine beetle.

Thunderstorms created by the energy of intense fires, known as pyroCbs, have occurred in the past. But they were once rare and few people suspected that they could shoot out lightning that would trigger blazes 20 miles from the fire’s front, as one did in the Alberta tar sands region in 2016. Five pyroCbs erupted in 2017 in the forests of British Columbia and Washington within the space of just five hours — the mother of all pyroCb events, according to David Peterson a meteorologist with the U.S. Naval Defense Lab. No one expected anything to rival that until this year’s fires in Australia generated at least 18 pyroCbs.

Many experts no longer think that Scandinavia and the east coast of North America will be spared because it is expected to be wetter there in the future. Sweden needed outside help to deal with record fires in 2018. The Pinelands of New Jersey may get a lot rain, but 10 days of blue skies, high temperatures, and gusty winds can nevertheless create prime fire conditions. People who live in the Pinelands know this all too well based on the region’s prolific fire history.

Last but not least ... the cost factor as it's only to go up.

Graphs showing wildfire frequency, severity, and firefighting costs in the United States from 1985 to 2017. COURTESY OF THE UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS

A pyroCbs portrait.

A pyrocumulonimbus cloud towers over thick smoke from fires burning near Canberra, Australia, in 2003. The cloud's strong winds caused the fires to explode into the Australian city. Credit: New South Wales Rural Fire Service

Pyrocumulonimbus is the fire-breathing dragon of clouds.

A pyrocumulonimbus storm combines smoke and fire with the features of a violent thunderstorm. Pollutants from these storms are funneled into the stratosphere. 

A cumulonimbus without the "pyre" part is imposing enough -- a massive, anvil-shaped tower of power reaching five miles (8 km) high, hurling thunderbolts, wind and rain.

Add smoke and fire to the mix and you have pyrocumulonimbus, an explosive storm cloud actually created by the smoke and heat from fire, and which can ravage tens of thousands of acres. And in the process, "pyroCb" storms funnel their smoke like a chimney into Earth's stratosphere, with lingering ill effects. 

Disclaimer: This material is being kept online for historical purposes. Though accurate at the time of publication, it is no longer being updated. The page may contain broken links or outdated information, and parts may not function in current web browsers. 

Visit NASA.gov for current information

Said disclaimer is the action of the Trump administration whereby any information pertaining to climate change is prohibited. Said page exists only because of some brave scientists taking action to preserve critical information we the public should know about. For yours truly, this is why Trump must go.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star ... :)

 53 closest stars to us and nearly all have planets. 25 reside in 2 or 3 star systems. Awesome.

The nearest stars to Earth are in the Alpha Centauri triple-star system, about 4.37 light-years away. One of these stars, Proxima Centauri, is slightly closer, at 4.24 light-years.

Of all the stars closer than 15 light-years, only two are spectral type G, similar to our sun: Alpha Centauri A and Tau Ceti. The majority are M-type red dwarf stars.

Quite a cozy neighborhood is it not? :)

Autocracy: Rules for Survival

A wakeup call by Masha Gessen ...

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. Instead, she said, resignedly,

We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.

The 6 rules guys like Trump and Bolsonaro live by. Ignore them at your peril.

1. Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. 
2. Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.
3. Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. 
4. Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. 
5. Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. 
6. Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past.  

Truer words never spoken.

Time Frames ...

The Washington Post waxes large on the Supreme Court nomination process. Worth a read for sure.

Since 1975, it has taken about 68 days for a nominee to be confirmed in a vote on the Senate floor. In 2016, President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland, whom the Republican Senate refused to vote on. For Ginsberg's replacement,

Additionally ...

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death creates a vacancy just 46 days before the election, the closest high court opening to a presidential election in more than 150 years.

Something to think about without question.

All you need to know ...

All you need to know regarding GW and its impact on Antarctica. 

The upper panel shows the ice sheet's surface elevation change (in meters; grey shading), the ocean-induced melting at the base of the floating ice shelves (in meters per year; purple–orange shading), as well as the topography of the bed underneath the ice sheet and the surrounding ocean (in meters above the present-day sea level; blue–brown shading).

In other words ...

More than half of Earth’s freshwater resources are held by the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which thus represents by far the largest potential source for global sea-level rise under future warming conditions1. Its long-term stability determines the fate of our coastal cities and cultural heritage. Feedbacks between ice, atmosphere, ocean, and the solid Earth give rise to potential nonlinearities in its response to temperature changes. So far, we are lacking a comprehensive stability analysis of the Antarctic Ice Sheet for different amounts of global warming. Here we show that the Antarctic Ice Sheet exhibits a multitude of temperature thresholds beyond which ice loss is irreversible.

Any questions?

3:42!!!

 Cuvier's beaked whale (Ziphius cavirostris) with a tag on the dorsal fin. 

Credit: Andrew Read and Duke University. 

Deep diving as art form is the Cuvier's beaked whale's stock in trade as these amazing mammals can go as deep as 9000 feet and stay down there for as long as 3:42 hours. 

The blue whale might be one of the most enigmatic creatures on the planet, but the true megastars of the diving world are Cuvier's beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris). They are capable of reaching depths of almost 3000 m, and calculations suggest that these relatively diminutive whales should only remain submerged for about 33 minutes before their oxygen is depleted and they resort to anaerobic respiration. 

Deploying 23 tags over a five-year period, the team recorded more than 3600 foraging dives, ranging from 33 minutes to two hours 13 min, all of which were well in excess of the point when diving Cuvier's beaked whales were thought to run out of oxygen. Knowing that approximately 95% of the dives performed by other mammals are complete before their oxygen supplies dwindle, the team rechecked their plot and realized that if the same proportion of Cuvier's beaked whale dives are completed before their oxygen stores expire, then they could remain submerged for an incredible 77.7 minutes before resorting to anaerobic respiration. "It really did surprise us that these animals are able to go so far beyond what predictions suggest their diving limits should be," says Quick.

It gets better.

In addition, the team picked up two extraordinary dives in 2017, which exceeded even their wildest dreams. One was almost three hours long, while the other lasted three hours 42 minutes. "We didn't believe it at first; these are mammals after all, and any mammal spending that long under water just seemed incredible," says Quick, publishing the discovery in Journal of Experimental Biology.

3.42, astounding says it all. :)

Inspiration ...

Yours truly lacks the ability to do math like trig and calculus, which frustrates this rube to no end. Being an aspie, abilities beyond the kin of Robert E will remain so for the rest of my life but at least the web enables me to see how other smart people can do higher math nevertheless. :)

The 61st International Mathematical Olympiad, or IMO, begins today. It may go down in history for at least two reasons: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic it’s the first time the event has been held remotely, and it may also be the last time that artificial intelligence doesn’t compete.

Indeed, researchers view the IMO as the ideal proving ground for machines designed to think like humans. If an AI system can excel here, it will have matched an important dimension of human cognition.

One gives pause here without question as this bespeaks of inspiration aka, the act of creation.

Solving IMO problems often requires a flash of insight, a transcendent first step that today’s AI finds hard — if not impossible.

For example, one of the oldest results in math is Euclid’s proof from 300 BCE that there are infinitely many prime numbers. It begins with the recognition that you can always find a new prime by multiplying all known primes and adding 1. The proof that follows is simple, but coming up with the opening idea was an act of art.

It always is.

Capital

Capital, the movie, educational to the max, explains, in eloquent fashion, why inequality becomes the death knell of nations if allowed to continue indefinitely, something happening in the US 24/7. We are in trouble but we already know that, right? 

Based on the international bestseller by rock-star economist Thomas Piketty (which sold over three million copies worldwide and landed Piketty on Time's list of most influential people), this captivating documentary is an eye-opening journey through wealth and power, a film that breaks the popular assumption that the accumulation of capital runs hand in hand with social progress, and shines a new light on today’s growing inequalities. Traveling through time, the film assembles accessible pop-culture references coupled with interviews of some of the world’s most influential experts delivering an insightful and empowering journey through the past and into our future.

The book's central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability. Piketty proposes a global system of progressive wealth taxes to help reduce inequality and avoid the vast majority of wealth coming under the control of a tiny minority.

However, at the end of 2014, Piketty released a paper where he stated that he does not consider the relationship between the rate of return on capital and the rate of economic growth as the only or primary tool for considering changes in income and wealth inequality. He also noted that r > g is not a useful tool for the discussion of rising inequality of labor income.[2]

Am reading the book as we speak. :)

The end of the beginning

The end of the beginning of climate change is here as GW gathers steam to impact the future of mankind in manifest ways, thus kicking off the start of forced migration of a most pernicious kind.

August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air-conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth — 130 degrees in Death Valley — and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.

Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the state’s 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people from their homes. Three of the largest fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. I watched as towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. Like many Californians, I spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house, rehearsing in my mind what my family would do to escape.

But I also had a longer-term question, about what would happen once this unprecedented fire season ended. Was it finally time to leave for good?

I had an unusual perspective on the matter. For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet — changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions — the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. 

The end of the beginning is here.

Two for the price of one :)

Hubble strikes again with two views of Jove, one in actual color, the other in ultraviolet/near infrared. 

[Left] This latest visible-light image of Jupiter was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on 25 August 2020 and was captured when the planet was 653 million kilometres from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of the Great Red Spot changing colour — again. The new image also features Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

[Right] This multiwavelength observation in ultraviolet/visible/near-infrared light of Jupiter was obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope on 25 August 2020 and is giving researchers an entirely new view of the giant planet. Hubble’s near-infrared imaging, combined with ultraviolet views, provides a unique panchromatic look that offers insights into the altitude and distribution of the planet’s haze and particles. This complements Hubble’s visible-light pictures that show the ever-changing cloud patterns.

11/3/2020 ...

 

Soldiers guarding Lincoln Memorial on June 2, 2020. (Photo by Martha Raddatz / Twitter)

Heather Cox Richardson's wakeup call regarding Trump and his push for cobbling together a coup if he loses the election on 11/3/2020 is a must-read without question.

Today’s big story is the growing threat of violence on the part of Trump loyalists in the administration, including the president himself.

On September 10, Trump’s friend and adviser Roger Stone appeared on Infowars, the show run by the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Convicted of lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses before they testified concerning the ties of the 2016 Trump campaign to Russia, Stone publicly asked Trump to commute his sentence and, in exchange, promised to campaign for him.

A Stone backgrounder ...

Stone was a political operative for Richard Nixon—he famously has a picture of Nixon tattooed on his back—and was a business partner of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, now also a convicted felon. Stone calls himself a “rat-f**ker” — a term used by Nixon insiders to describe electoral fraud and dirty tricks — and was an instigator of the “Brooks Brothers Riot” that shut down the recount of ballots in Florida in 2000.

In July, Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month prison sentence, and now, apparently, Stone is holding up his end of the deal.

On Jones’s show, Stone said, without evidence, that widespread voter fraud meant that the only legitimate result of the election would be a Trump victory. (Remember: voter fraud is a myth.) He claimed that the ballots in Nevada were already “completely corrupted” and that they “should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state,” especially the ones in Clark County, which leans Democratic. He suggested that former Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) should be arrested.

Stone said that Trump should form “an Election Day operation using the FBI, federal marshals, and Republican state officials across the country to be prepared to file legal objections and if necessary to physically stand in the way of criminal activity.” Trump should also, he said, consider declaring martial law and then using that power to arrest Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, “the Clintons” and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity.”

A possible shit show for the ages looms.

GW yet again ...

Global Warming, a fact Agent Orange seems to deny with ever greater passion, is real, no matter what The Donald has to say about the matter.

Heat alone, however, won’t determine Americans’ fate. A new climate analysis — presented for the first time here — projects how humidity and heat will collide to form “wet bulb” temperatures that will disrupt the norms of daily existence.

Today, the combination of truly dangerous heat and humidity is rare. But by 2050, parts of the Midwest and Louisiana could see conditions that make it difficult for the human body to cool itself for nearly one out of every 20 days in the year. New projections for farm productivity also suggest that growing food will become difficult across large parts of the country, including the heart of the High Plains’ $35 billion agriculture industry. All the while, sea level rise will transform the coasts.

Taken together, some parts of the U.S. will see a number of issues stack on top of one another — heat and humidity may make it harder to work outside, while the ocean continues to claim more coastal land. The table above ranks the most at-risk counties in the U.S. if all of the perils were combined. You can also sort by individual climate risk to see how each one stacks up, with higher numbers being worse in all categories. The projections are for 2040-2060 under RCP 8.5.

Exactly.

Out of the blue

An image of Venus, made with data recorded by Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft in 2016. So close, so similar and very mysterious, the planet is surprising scientists with a chemical signature spotted in its clouds.Credit...PLANET-C Project Team/JAXA

Out of the blue says it all regarding Venus, our hellish twin, equipped with 800+ degree temperatures and a toxic atmosphere comprising of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid 90 times denser than earth's, may harbor life as we know it, residing in her upper atmosphere if recent research finding's ring true.

High in the toxic atmosphere of the planet Venus, astronomers on Earth have discovered signs of what might be life.

If the discovery is confirmed by additional telescope observations and future space missions, it could turn the gaze of scientists toward one of the brightest objects in the night sky. Venus, named after the Roman goddess of beauty, roasts at temperatures of hundreds of degrees and is cloaked by clouds that contain droplets of corrosive sulfuric acid. Few have focused on the rocky planet as a habitat for something living.

The astronomers, who reported the finding on Monday in a pair of papers, have not collected specimens of Venusian microbes, nor have they snapped any pictures of them. But with powerful telescopes, they have detected a chemical — phosphine — in the thick Venus atmosphere. After much analysis, the scientists assert that something now alive is the only explanation for the chemical’s source.

Something's afoot - Sherlock Holmes

Addendum - choice info about Phosphine :)

At first glance, phosphine might seem like a funny molecule to associate with life, given that it's a "highly flammable, extremely toxic, outrageously foul-smelling molecule," says Sousa-Silva. "It's an extremely dangerous molecule that kills in a variety of imaginative ways, all of which are very final and macabre."

"It's used widely as a fumigant and it was used as a chemical warfare agent in the first world war," she says, noting that the colorless gas can burn with a green and blue light.

As for its odor, well, "apparently it smells basically like death," says Sousa-Silva. "It just smells horrific. We once, I think, found a report of someone saying it smelled like the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan."

Because phosphine interferes with oxygen metabolism, it's toxic for the majority of life on Earth. Still, says Sousa-Silva, "there's plenty of life, mostly in the shadows, that doesn't particularly enjoy oxygen and doesn't rely on oxygen. And these anaerobic ecosystems on Earth happily produce phosphine in reasonably large quantities."

Life that makes phosphine on Earth is found in swamps and sewage plants and the bottoms of lakes, she says, as well as in the intestines of animals — that's why phosphine can be detected in their flatulence.

Excellent. :)

Addendum ...

Artist’s impression of the large probe that entered Venus’s atmosphere in 1978 after deployment by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Multiprobe mission. Credit: NASA

42 years ago, NASA's Pioneer Venus probe might have discovered phosphine and perhaps Russia's Venera probes did as well.

Many experts believe the best chance of verifying Venusian phosphine lies in atmospheric probes that can directly sniff out the gas. But such missions are not futuristic flights of fancy—they have, in fact, been launched before, with notable examples including the former Soviet Union’s long series of Venera spacecraft and NASA’s Pioneer Venus Multiprobe, a mission that dropped four probes into the planet’s atmosphere in December 1978.

On the biggest of Pioneer’s probes, an instrument called the Large Probe Neutral Mass Spectrometer (LNMS) looked for gases in the atmosphere, with mission scientists focusing on molecules such as carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and argon that were known to be abundant there. After taking another look at the data, however, Rakesh Mogul, a professor of biological chemistry at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, posits that scientists on the mission underestimated their instrument, which may have spotted trace amounts of other molecules—including, excitingly, phosphine. “We were able to extract some data from the literature from about 40 years ago,” says Mogul, whose team recently posted its findings on the preprint server arXiv.org. “And we think we’re able to identify some interesting things. We believe that the evidence suggests the presence of phosphine.”

Out of the blue times 2. :)

Experimentation & then some ...

A quiet Get Toghether

Stepping Lightly

Relaxing before dusk

Seeds

Tough Guy

My 4-year-old GD: Strike a pose :)

My 4-year-old GD: It's all about DA feet :)

A 30's state of mind ...

Water Lines ...