The lost continent of Argoland has been found (and other science news of the week)

[Music] welcome everyone to this week's science news this week we have new evidence that the dinosaurs were killed by the aftermath of an asteroid impact then we have a look at the biggest Universe simulation ever talk about the Lost Continent that's been found Roman ruins in spy footage a new record for a single Photon camera an asteroid that might contain chemical elements which not in the periodic table super lightning bolts solar glass and of course the telephone woring a new study that just appeared in nature geoscience supports the theory that an asteroid impact was the reason why the dinosaurs went extinct in 1980 the American physicist Lis Alvarez and his son Walter put forward the hypothesis that a massive asteroid impact was the reason for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs they thought that that the asteroid caused massive tsunamis and firestorms it also kicked a lot of dust into the atmosphere which blocked the Sun that killed off a lot of plants and in turn the dinosaurs stared at first their idea was heavily criticized because that's how it goes the physicists talk about anything but physics but the discovery of a huge impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico a decade later provided strong evidence for it it's called the chiel crater it's not quite subtle though if whatever caused that crater also killed the dinosaurs because it's not clear just how that would have happened the issue is that theoretically the grains of asteroid dust would have had neither the right size nor composition to stay in the atmosphere long enough to explain what happened for the new study now they analyzed sediment layers of an ancient Lake that formed just after the asteroid impact they find find ings give the atmospheric dust hypothesis more support according to their study the material shot into the atmosphere by the asteroid was about 75% silicate dust 24% sulur and 1% suit the silicate dust grains were just about a few micrometers in size they would have stayed in the atmosphere almost 15 years long enough to kill most plants and the dinosaurs with them it's a shame about the dinosaurs really I wish theyd have stayed around long enough to chime in on the paleo diet a team of international researchers have created the largest cosmological computer simulation to date modeling our universe at unprecedented accuracy they've named the simulation Flamingo and yes that's another one of those smart acronyms it short for four Hydro large scale structure simulations with all Sky mapping for the interpretation of next Next Generation observations Flamingo is different from previous simulations in that it incorporates all matter in the universe dark matter and ordinary matter most other simulations only track dark matter because there's more of it if it exists which it may not tracking only the dark matter is easier to compute and in the end they distribute ordinary matter around the dark matter the new simulation does it both together Flamingo simulates about 300 billion ele ments each with the mass of a small Galaxy it covers a cube with edges about 10 billion light years long their simulation ran on about 30,000 CPUs as they report in a paper that was just published they used their simulation to look at some discrepancies between predictions and observations if Einstein's theory of general relativity was correct its predictions should match the observation but they don't one of the possible reasons for this discrepancy could have been the lack of normal matter in the simulations but then their simulation with normal matter it still doesn't come out correctly nevertheless I'm very impressed and Albert is too a few weeks ago we talked about a group of Dutch geologists who said they found a new tectonic plate today we have another Dutch team which says they found an entire Lost Continent the Dutch seem somewhat paranoid about losing land don't they the Lost Continent is called aroland that might sound like something from The Lord of the Rings but aroland is believed to have been a real micro continent which split off from Australia 155 million years ago it then supposedly floated north towards Asia before mysteriously disappearing into the Earth's mantle or at least that's what geologists thought is what happened they don't really know because there's been very little evidence of the continent's existence for the new paper they collected new evidence from Stone samples on Islands in Southeast Asia and the northwest coast of Australia they then used the shapes of the known continents and their geological makeup together with the new information from the samples to create a computer model they found that these shapes their makeup and their expected drift fit together and they do fit with the Arland hypothesis the largest bits of that lost continent slide into place in modernday Myanmar and Indonesia and it all fits together if micro continents are a thing can I call myself a micr billionaire a group of anthropologists from Dartmouth College has found Roman ruins in Declassified cold war footage they looked at Roman forts built in the fertile Cresent that's an area in the Middle East of the coast of the Mediterranean Sea the Romans built fors there probably around the year 200 already in the 1920s a man named father antoan pbar used a Word War one plane to take aerial photos of the area he found those fors and claimed they were a defense line for the new study they looked at this area again in footage from Cold War spy satellites and arrived at a different conclusion they saw the same fors that poor Bart had found though one can see how much they degraded in the Years between the 1920s and the Cold War era but more importantly they found a lot of other fors too the top half of the imature shows the ones that were already known suggesting a defense line the bottom half of the image shows the forts found in the new footage this suggests that the Romans used their fors to facilitate trade across the region which agrees with the idea that the area was the center for cural exchange during the Roman Empire and not so so much a defense line fascinating according to my theory the Romans even had a space program it just never took off because their togas didn't fit into the space suit researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology nist say they've created the world's largest single Photon camera a photon is a Quantum of light it's the smallest possible unit of light so single photo on cameras are as sensitive as the camera can possibly B the new camera contains 400,000 pixels which is about 400 times larger than the previous record holder camera of its type this is an example of an image It produced the new camera is made up of a grid of super thin wires which have electric currents flowing through them to properly work the wires need to be cooled to near absolute zero temperature then they become super conducting the currents flow without resistance and base basically without noise that's why the camera is so sensitive when the photons come into contact with the wire grid they interrupt its super conductivity the detector collects the locations and intensities of these disruptions and forms an image from that the nest team plans to put this super sensitive camera to use in a variety of fields including Imaging farway galaxies photon-based quantum computers and even biomedical applications which use near infrared light for Imaging I really like this but what I'd like to know even more is if you work on single photo on cameras what do your targeted ads look like by the way this video comes with a quiz that lets you check how much you understood a team of researchers from the University of Arizona say that an unusually dense asteroid might just contain superheavy chemical elements that we've never previously observed and that are not in the periodic table the periodic table tapers out at the bottom because the heavier the atomic nuclei the faster they Decay but maybe that's not the end of the story The Holy Grail of nuclear physics is the island of stability that's a hypothetical group of very heavy Atomic nuclei which are stable again it's called an island because that's what it looks like if you put each nucleus on a graph where one axis is the number of photons and the other the number of neutrons the authors the new paper now say that some of those conjectured super heavy but stable elements might exist in asteroids they are particularly interested in an asteroid named 33 polymnia it floats around in our solar systems main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter according to instrumental readings polymnia is far denser than any conventional material humans have ever observed the heaviest naturally occurring element on earth is osm with atomic number 76 it has a density of roughly 23 g per cubic cm polymnia has a density more than three times higher about 75 G per cubic cm the authors of the new study now say that the best fit for the asteroids density would be an element with atomic numbers around 164 if the Americans get their hands on that stuff they use it to make even heavier cheesecake hello hi Elon you lost $25 billion dollar what a shame you could have blown up a lot of rockets for that oh happens to the best of us don't worry love you too bye a team of geologists say they figured out a key ingredient for lightning super bolts about 100 times per second a lightning bolt hits Earth somewhere but super bools are not your ordinary Lightning these bools can be up to 1,000 times more powerful than normal lightning luckily you don't have to worry about them wiping your neighborhood off the face of the Earth at least not much they make up only about 0.001% of all lightning strikes and most of them come down over the sea the land areas most affected are Chile and Western Europe scientists have tried to figure out the mechanisms Behind These super boards for quite some time but it's remained a mystery how they form and why they occur in these specific locations for the new paper they used new data from a Global Network database and looked for patterns they found that the energy of lightning bolts increases when they're created closer to the surface of Earth they say that makes sense because that makes the electric discharge more powerful it happens more often over the Northeast Atlantic and the mediter terranean because in the winter cold air masses hang low there and in Chile the altitude is high while storm clouds push down on the mountains so if you live in Chile or the UK and go out in a storm better avoid waving your fist at the sky an Australian solar glass company has just received a $30 million investment pushing the concept of a power generating window closer to Consumer hands the company Clear View technology has created panels of solar glass which look like normal sheets of glass but also generate electricity like a solar panel they collect their electricity by harvesting infrared and ultraviolet light which are both invisible to the human eye while letting most visual light through clever the glass collects energy with the help of a nanoparticle layer in the middle of the glass as well as a special coating on the surface that selects parts of the light spectrum the nanoparticle a captures most of the infrared and UltraViolet and transports them to photovoltaic cells around the edges of each panel the interior coating helps the nanoparticle layer do its job by deflecting any infrared and ultraviolet light back to the panel that way the photovolatic cells can collect more energy Clear View is not the only company that's working on this kind of Technology but this big new investment will bring their products closer to mass production and to the consumer Market the company says that currently 10 square m of its glass can generate up to 1.35 kwatt hours per day under ideal circumstances that's about as much as the solar panel does on one square meter so it's probably not going to charge your electric vehicle unless you park it in a lital greenhouse I constantly see you guys in the comments saying you understand only half of what I talk about and how so being asso smart just among you and I I'm not all that smart you can do it too and the best place to get started is at brilliant.org who have been sponsoring this video brilliant offers courses on a large variety of topics in Science and Mathematics and they're adding new content each month all their courses come with interactive visualizations and follow-up questions some also have videos for demonstration experiments or executable Python scripts this read gives you a feeling for what's going on whether you want to know more about solar panels neuron networks astrophysics special relativity or computational biology brilliant has you covered I like to look things up on brilliant because it's such a fast and easy way to learn I even have my own course there that's an introduction to my favorite topic quantum mechanics it's a beginner's course and covers topics such as interference superpositions and entanglement the uncertainty principle and B theorem and after that you can continue learning more about Quantum objects or maybe Quantum Computing to give it a try yourself use our link brilliant.org Saina and sign up for free you'll get access to everything brilliant has to offer for 30 days and the first 200 subscribers using this link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription thanks for watching see you next week

Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 264,210

Keywords: science without the gobbledygoook, hossenfelder, science humor, science news sabine, asteroid dinosaur, asteroid dinosaur extinction, universe, universe simulation, lost continent, heavy elements, island of stability, super lightning bolt, super lightning, solar glass, science funny, how did the dinosaurs go extinct, dinosaurs, asteroid dust dinosaurs, chicxulub, argoland, lost continent found, science news

Id: 90jgO7n8K-Q

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2023