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Showing posts from March, 2017

Humankind’s water use greater than thought

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WATER LOSS   Humans water crops, like the rice fields shown here, using methods such as irrigation. Water management practices like these are taking a toll on water sources, a new study finds. Humans’ global water footprint is up to 18 percent greater  than previous estimates, researchers from Sweden report in a new study. An analysis of water and climate data from 1901 to 2008 from 100 large water basins around the world revealed more water loss to the atmosphere and less water runoff compared with conclusions from earlier studies. The researchers link both water impacts to human activities. Water management techniques such as irrigation and damming rivers to create reservoirs, rather than climate conditions or geographic location, better explain the findings, they say. On a global scale, the new results suggest that humans use about 10,700 cubic kilometers of water­­ per year, more than all the water in Lakes Michigan, Huron, Ontario and Erie combin...

The young boro writer return with another story

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Jebilion Boro, a young boro writer returns with his new book OBLIVION. This is second book, his first book was The last letter was was quite a hit and also a bestseller. Here's the blurb "Simang had a very rough time after his father’s demise. He is poverty-stricken and studies in a wrecked school but despite his exertions, he still manages to attain good marks. He dreams to be a doctor but for that, he needs to get into a better school first. Simang’s life was drowned to the song of melancholy, he lost his smile. But one day he meets Pooja who brings his smile back. His joy returns and now he’s not faking his smile. Finally, he joins a better school but his star-crossed fate takes his dreams and future away from him. What happens next?" Jebilion Boro completed his schooling from Assam and did a diploma in film making. He is currently pursuing his bachelor’s in mass communication in New Delhi. He’s also a part-time cinematographer. Jebilion Boro debuted with h...

Debate grows over whether X‑rays are a sign of dark matter

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The search for a suspected calling card of the universe’s most elusive matter has come up empty. Multiple days of telescope time spent looking for a specific X-ray glow coming out of the nearby dwarf galaxy Draco failed to turn up any signal , two University of California, Santa Cruz astrophysicists report online December 7 at arXiv.org. Finding such a glow would have offered a compelling clue for the identity of dark matter, the invisible, inert stuff that makes up more than 80 percent of the universe’s matter. The study’s authors say that the absence of the X-rays in Draco, one of the most dark matter–dominated objects known, means that scientists had previously detected the X-ray emissions of interstellar atoms rather than dark matter. Not everyone agrees with the study’s conclusion, including a different team of scientists who commissioned the lengthy Draco observations and are reviewing the same data. Those scientists, who haven’t yet published their analysis, say th...

This black hole is an extreme recycler

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Like a cosmic water fountain, a supermassive black hole is cycling gas through a galaxy-sized pump. The black hole powers jets that blast gas over 30,000 light-years away from the galaxy only to  rain back down on a reservoir from which the black hole feeds . Yale University astronomer Grant Tremblay described this phenomenon January 6 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The fountain sits at the heart of a galaxy within the Abell 2597 cluster, a galactic gathering over 1 billion light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. Observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array  in Chile reveal that the fountain billows into plumes with the mass of about 1 billion suns. The force of the jets appear to trigger the formation of new stars within these plumes. Most of the ejected gas falls back down onto the central region of the galaxy and then slowly trickles back toward the black hole to start the loop again. This galactic pump mig...