Items linked to crime duo Bonnie & Clyde sold for 186.000 $

In this July 29, 2019, photo provided by RR Auction, a wanted poster of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are shown. A book of poetry handwritten by Bonnie Parker and a watch belonging to Clyde Barrow are among items from the outlaw Texas couple being offered at auction

 DALLAS (AP) — Several personal items related to 1930s Texas outlaw Clyde Barrow have sold at a Boston auction for nearly 186,000 $.

In this May 9, 2019, photo provided by RR Auction, a watch belonging to Clyde Barrow is shown. A book of poetry handwritten by Bonnie Parker and a watch belonging to Clyde Barrow are among items from the outlaw Texas couple being offered at auction.

 RR Auction officials say the Bulova watch that Barrow wore when he and Bonnie Parker were killed in 1934 sold on Saturday for 112,500 $. Parker and Barrow were fatally shot by officers in Louisiana.

 Auction house executive vice president Bobby Livingston says a sawed-off shotgun that was in the possession of the Barrow gang in 1933 sold for 68,750 $. The weapon was confiscated after a shootout in Joplin, Missouri, left two lawmen dead.

This is an undated photo of bandits Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow

A draft of a Dallas police "wanted" poster for Barrow sold for $4,375.

All of the buyers wish to remain anonymous.

In this July 23, 2019, photo provided by RR Auction, a book of poetry belonging to Bonnie Parker is shown. A book of poetry handwritten by Parker and a watch belonging to Clyde Barrow are among items from the outlaw Texas couple being offered at auction.

Bidding for a poetry book written by Parker reached about 25,000 $ before the consigner withdrew the lot.

We Now Know What Smashed Into Jupiter Last Month

Last month, we got the exciting news of a rare flash of light on Jupiter, bright enough to be seen through telescopes. According to a new analysis, the cause of this smash was a small asteroid, with a density consistent with meteors that are equal parts stone and iron.

The meteor exploded in Jupiter's upper atmosphere, around 80 kilometres above the cloud tops, releasing energy equivalent to 240 kilotons of TNT - just over half the energy of the 440-kiloton meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk in 2013.

The results have been presented at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 in Geneva. The impact was captured entirely by accident by astrophotographer Ethan Chappel on 7 August 2019.

"I believe I was looking up at the sky for Perseid meteors when it happened, so I did not see the flash while recording," Chappel told ScienceAlert.

"I only noticed it afterwards thanks to a great piece of software called DeTeCt by Marc Delcroix, which is designed specifically for finding these flashes."

Atmospheric meteor explosions - called bolides - aren't thought to be particularly rare on Jupiter, since the planet is massive and right next to an asteroid belt (although its role as a cosmic vacuum cleaner protecting Earth may have been exaggerated).

However, Jupiter is far away, and the flashes are faint and brief. Unless you're looking with the right equipment at the right time… well, it's very much blink-and-you'll-miss-it. Only a few such impacts have ever been captured on camera.

That's where the open source DeTeCt software comes in. Developed by amateur astronomer Marc Delcroix and physicist Ricardo Hueso, the software is specially designed to detect impact flashes on Jupiter and Saturn.

"I was thrilled when Ethan contacted me," Delcroix said.

"This is the first impact flash at Jupiter found using the DeTeCt software. These detections are extremely rare because the impact flashes are faint, short and can be easily missed while observing the planets for hours.

"However, once a flash is found in a video recording it can be analysed to quantify the energy required to make it visible at a distance of 700 million kilometres."

That analysis was conducted by astronomers Ramanakumar Sankar and Csaba Palotai of the Florida Institute of Technology.

Based on the bolide flash, they determined that the object was likely 12 to 16 metres in diameter (40 to 50 feet), and had a mass of about 450 tons. The light curve (pictured above) of the explosion suggests a stony-iron composition, with equal parts meteoric iron and silicates - more likely to be, therefore, an asteroid than a comet.

This is consistent with what Hueso found, based on his comparisons with previous impact flashes detected on Jupiter.

"With six impact flashes observed in ten years since the first flash was discovered in 2010, scientists are becoming more confident in their estimates of the impact rate of these objects in Jupiter," Hueso said.

"Most of these objects hit Jupiter without being spotted by observers on Earth. However, we now estimate 20-60 similar objects impact with Jupiter each year. Because of Jupiter's large size and gravitational field this impact rate is ten thousand times larger than the impact rate of similar objects on Earth."

When it comes to Saturn impacts however, more work needs to be done. In their results, the pair noted that the DeTeCt database currently has 103 days' worth of Jupiter observations, but only 13 days' worth for Saturn - which means it's still too early to estimate impact rates on the ringed planet.

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NASA Juno orbiter captures solar eclipse on Jupiter

NASA’s Juno orbiter has captured stunning images of the swirling, hypnotic beauty of Jupiter in the three years it has been observing our solar system’s largest planet.

On Sept. 12, Juno sent back a scene from a close orbit of 8,000 kilometers. Data processed into a color image shows Jupiter’s moon Io casting a shadow over the planet.

While eclipses are commons for Jupiter, which has at least 67 known moons, the image stunningly showcases’s the planet’s massive scale. Io, roughly the same size at Earth’s moon, blocks out only a minor portion of Jupiter’s full surface area.

Sweden's tallest mountain has shrunk, thanks to climate change

View from the summit of Kebnekaise

The south summit of Kebnekaise mountain, the highest peak in Sweden, is iconic.

Several thousand climb or hike to the top every year, Ninis Rosqvist, director of Tarfala Research Station, which measures the summit annually, told USA TODAY.

But the reason for its notoriety has begun to shrink, literally.

Kebnekaise, the highest mountain in Sweden

Researchers at Stockholm University's Tarfala Research Station have found that the highest peak in the country, is the lowest it's been in recorded history. And the new height dethrones the peak from its status of tallest summit in Sweden. Scientists began recording the mountain's height in 1880, Rosqvist said.

Over the last 50 years, the height of Kebnekaise's southern peak has decreased by almost 78 feettotal.

They found that the southern peak of the mountain now stands at 6,875 feet,  nearly 4 feet shorter than the northern peak, which measured in at 6,879 feet, according to the report.

Last year, Rosqvist said that the elevation of the two peaks was the same.

The height of the southern summit varies around 10 feet between summer and winter, according to the report. The highest measurement is in May with the lowest in September.

At some point, the northern peak will become Sweden's highest point year-round. 

The top of mount Kebnekaise

The reason: Climate change.

Because a glacier covers the south peak, its height has decreased due to temperature increase.

"The melting of glaciers is mainly forced by higher summer temperatures," said Rosqvist. "If winters are snow rich and summers cool then glaciers can gain mass, but that does not occur very often anymore."

Now, a warm summer means winter snow melts away in addition to some of the glacier ice, resulting in a net loss of ice mass on the peak.

Sweden, Lapland, Snowy ridge and peak of Kebnekaise mountain

Glaciers have changed over the centuries. They grew larger from the 17th to the 19th centuries in Europe and elsewhere because the weather was colder. And in the early 20th century, the climate warmed. That kind of shift is considered natural, Rosqvist said.

"It is not possible to separate out what is ‘natural’ and human-induced climate change, but the relationship between the global temperature and the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is very clear over the past 50 years," she continued.

Rosqvist said that, in her opinion, the warming over the past decade can be attributed to human activity.

The Arctic is warming at almost twice the global average with sea ice disappearing from the ecosystem. While this has made the waters more navigable through the Northwest Passage, it is also contributing to a rise in global sea level.

Click through to see other places affected by climate change.

The north summit's height remains consistent because it is composed of bedrock and isn't covered by ice, Rosqvist explained.

But it's more difficult and more dangerous to get to the new highest peak. To reach the summit, climbers have to cross a thin strip of snow surrounded by a free fall.

"The climate scenarios do not look very good, summers will continue to warm, ," Rosqvist said. "Also the winters are warming, and sometimes it rains instead of snows and that is not good of course either."

Last day of the dinosaurs' reign captured in stunning detail

Comet C/2001 Q4, also known as NEAT, emits a blue-and-purple glow as it moves through the cosmos in May 2004. Its coma, or head, and a portion of its tail are visible in this shot, as are myriad stars. This image was taken by telescope from Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.

Inch by inch, the team pulled up the skinny core of ghostly white limestone from the ocean floor, gazing at the compressed remains of ancient organisms that died tens of millions of years ago. But then a stark divide appeared as the layers abruptly darkened.

“It was nothing like the stuff above,” recalls Sean Gulick, a co-chief scientist of the expedition and a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

This change in the rock marks one of the most catastrophic events in Earth’s history, some 66 million years ago, when an epic asteroid slammed into the sea just offshore of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The impact triggered a nightmarish sequence of events that sent some 75 percent of plant and animal species spiraling to extinction—including all the nonavian dinosaurs.

Now, by subjecting the rocky core to a battery of tests, including geochemical study and x-ray imaging, the research team has assembled a meticulous timeline chronicling events on that fateful day—sometimes down to the minute. As they report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the dark layers reveal stunning details, including the sheer amount of material that piled up mere hours after the strike, along with bits of charcoal later left by raging wildfires.

In an instant, the Chicxulub impact forever changed life on Earth—blasting out a huge crater, vaporizing and flinging up tons of rock, and devastating plant and animal life. Now, researchers have constructed a jaw-dropping timeline of the chaos by studying the rocks laid down inside the crater on that fateful day.

“They can put their fingers on moments in that event,” says Jennifer Anderson, an experimental geologist who studies impact cratering at Winona State University. “The level of detail kind of blows you away.”

While it’s unlikely another asteroid smashup of this magnitude will happen in our lifetimes, significant impacts are inevitable in the larger arc of our planet’s evolution, says Purdue University’s Jay Melosh, who is not part of the study team but who worked on other sections of the crater core. Studying these events helps us more strongly grasp the vulnerabilities of life on Earth, he says.

“It’s not a matter of whether there will be big impacts,” he says, “it’s just a matter of when.”

Drilling into disaster

Previous studies have been slowly piecing together what happened after the so-called Chicxulub impact using a combination of computer models and the geologic fallout found at a smattering of sites around the world. One controversial locale in North Dakota may even capture an entire ecosystem catastrophically tossed by the seismic waves that rippled out from the impact zone.

But the exact details of the chaos that ensued have been an enduring mystery, one that scientists hoped to solve by closely examining the impact crater itself. Layers of sediment had buried the crater over millennia, which prevented roaring winds and water from wearing it away, but also hid it out of reach of eager scientists. To actually touch this infamous moment in our planet’s history, researchers needed to drill.

One of the youngest and best-preserved impact craters on Earth, Meteor Crater formed about 50,000 years ago when a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) meteor weighing 100,000 tons slammed into the Arizona desert at an estimated 12 miles (20 kilometers) a second. The resulting explosion exceeded the combined force of today's nuclear arsenals and created a 0.7-mile-wide (1.1-kilometer-wide), 650-foot-deep (200-meter-deep) crater.

Scientists started exploring the crater’s structure in 1996 via seismic surveys led by Joanna Morgan, who co-led the latest drilling efforts with Gulick. Along with a second expedition in 2005, that work confirmed the presence of what’s known as a peak ring—a circle of buried mountains that rapidly forms within the largest of impact craters. Such a structure is an ideal place to drill, Gulick says. Not only can it reveal the fundamental processes behind the formation of mega-craters, its elevation places it relatively close to the modern ocean floor, which means easier access.

In the spring of 2016, the team at last sunk metal teeth into the Chicxulub crater, and over the course of two months, they extracted sections of core 10 feet at a time. In total, they collected a slice of Earth about a half-mile long that captures the shocked rocks that were below the impact, layers of melted rock, and the transition back to normal seafloor sediments.

“It was amazing to be on the ship and see those cores first coming up and realize we had some really exciting things to say,” Gulick marvels.

Mounds of melted rock

The new study of that core sample combines the rocky record with computer models to create an unprecedented timeline of the geologic chaos on the day sparking the dinosaurs' demise.

“To say that we’re looking at something that happened the day the impact happened 66 million years ago, that’s a kind of resolution that we almost never see in geology,” Anderson says.

One of the most striking finds is the rate at which material was re-deposited after the impact. The asteroid strike excavated miles of ocean floor, vaporizing rock and water in a flash. A ripple of shockwaves inside the crater sent solid rock flowing like liquid to form a towering peak, which then collapsed outward to form the peak ring. Just tens of minutes later, a jumble of debris piled onto the peak ring in a layer some 130 feet thick. Some of this material came from a sheet of melted rock that splashed into place within minutes as the peak collapsed.

Then, as the ocean rushed back into the yawning molten gap, pockets of steam burst forth, flinging up more fragments of rock. Within an hour, the crater was likely covered in a churning vat of rocky oceanic soup, periodically sloshed by the collapse of the crater’s steep wall.

“Just like if you pour a bucket of water into a bathtub, it doesn’t sit quiet, it sloshes around,” Melosh explains. “Each slosh as it went back and forth deposited more material.”

Rocky bits slowly settled out from the stew, piling up hundreds of feet of more debris. In total, the event laid down nearly 430 feet of new material in a single day.

Sulfur surprise

The team also found a notable lack of sulfur in the crater’s rocks. About a third of the rocks surrounding Chicxulub are sulfur-rich minerals known as evaporites, but these minerals are conspicuously absent from the core sample the team drilled.

Instead, the impact seems to have vaporized the crater’s sulfur-bearing rocks, backing up past work that suggests the event released as much as 325 gigatons of sulfur. Yet the element’s near total absence hints that even this gargantuan number may be too low. This gas could have formed a haze of sulfuric acid that blotted out sunlight and triggered years of global cooling. Or, Melosh says, it might have created acid rain that abruptly acidified the oceans. Either way, the effects would have devastated life of all kinds.

What’s more, the rock core offers clues to how the collision instantly affected life on land. Hurtling to Earth at some 45,000 miles an hour, the impact likely sent out a flash of energy that ignited landscapes within a 900 miles radius.

“Mexico was on fire immediately,” Anderson says. The impact also flung geologic shrapnel high into the skies that plummeted back around the globe, igniting fires even farther from the impact zone. And in the top few inches of the core’s sediment, the scientists found bits of charcoal, likely created by those raging wildfires.

Intriguingly, the researchers also found biomarkers from the fungal breakdown of wood, which further suggests that these burned bits came from a landscape set ablaze. The team thinks a mighty tsunami rippled across the Gulf of Mexico—and perhaps around the world—and that the watery wall bounced back after crossing the Mexican highlands, dragging with it charred terrestrial remains.

Opening salvo

There are still many more questions to answer about how the impact and its aftermath rippled around the world, says Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. But he praises the new work for providing such a stunningly preserved record of this terrifying day.

“In a way, it’s telling us things that we thought we knew, but it’s telling it with the data that underpins it for the first time,” Johnson says.

“I consider this to be an opening salvo,” adds the University of Washington’s Jody Bourgeois, who has studied the impact’s tsunami deposits in Texas and Mexico. Further study of the core samples and other evidence in the coming years will likely fill in many more details in the tumultuous tale.

“It’s heady,” Gulick says of finally publishing the first few papers from the drilling project. “The discoveries keep coming.”

Algorithms aren't all created equal

All around us, algorithms are invisibly at work. They're recommending music and surfacing news, finding cancerous tumors, and making self-driving cars a reality. But do people trust them?

Not really, according to a Pew Research Center survey taken last year. When asked whether computer programs will always reflect the biases of their designers, 58 percent of respondents thought they would. This finding illustrates a serious tension between computing technology, whose influence on people's lives is only expected to grow, and the people affected by it.

The lack of trust in any particular technology impedes its acceptance and use. On one hand, justified distrust of dangerous technology is a good thing. Nobody objects to eliminating the use of bad algorithms that have undesirable consequences, such as the Therac-25 software that delivered radiation overdoses to patients or the incorrect unit computation that caused NASA to lose its Mars Climate Orbiter. On the other hand, people's irrational fear of safe technology, such as vaccination, can itself be dangerous. It is not only that those who distrust technology will personally miss out on the benefits, but their refusal to participate can negatively affect other people and have an overall detrimental effect on society.

"Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing" by Martin Erwig.

 It is therefore important to distinguish between rational and irrational fears and to not contribute to the latter, particularly if you’re in the position to influence public opinion. Unfortunately, this particular Pew poll, or at least the way the results were reported, has muddied the waters. The survey asked respondents about four different scenarios in which algorithms were making decisions: computing a personal finance score, assessing criminal risk for making parole decisions, screening resumes of job applicants, and analyzing job interviews. The headline of the lead graphic sums up its findings: “Majority of Americans say computer programs will always reflect human bias; young adults are more split.”

A Pew research poll from November 2018 did not differentiate between human and black-box algorithms.

The problem with that statement is that it incorrectly equates the general notion of an algorithm with that of a particular kind of algorithm. The algorithms that are used in the presented scenarios are machine-learned, which means they are essentially black boxes that represent their logic internally as a collection of numbers that have no apparent meaning. A problem with these machine-learned algorithms is that they are effectively unreadable and cannot be understood by humans.

In contrast, human-created algorithms are readable; they are given in a language that can be understood by other humans. This includes descriptions given in natural languages (recipes, driving instructions, rules for playing a game, instructions to assemble furniture, etc.) as well as programs written in programming languages that can be executed by machines.

The difference in terms of readability and understandability between these two kinds of algorithms is crucial for judging the trustworthiness of algorithms. It's not that human-created algorithms are always correct. Quite the opposite is true: Since humans are fallible, so are their products, and algorithms and software, in general, are notorious for containing bugs. But a crucial difference between readable and unreadable algorithms is that the former can effectively be corrected while this is not possible for the latter.

If a dish is too salty, you can find the place in the recipe where salt is added and reduce the amount, or when driving instructions lead you to the wrong place, it is easy to identify the incorrect turn and fix the mistake. The situation is quite different for unreadable algorithms. When we observe an incorrect behaviour, we cannot identify a specific place in the algorithm description that is responsible for it and could be fixed. The black-box nature of machine-learned algorithms effectively prevents this. The only way to change the faulty behavior of a machine-learned algorithm is to retrain it with new data, which might then introduce other biases.

Bias in data is a legitimate concern for algorithms, but only for algorithms whose decisions are based on bad data. In talking about algorithms, in particular when assigning blame and raising alarm bells, we should be careful to distinguish between readable and unreadable (that is, machine-learned) algorithms.

Coming back to the Pew Research poll, we can notice that it too, is in fact an algorithm, one that is run with different people's answers as input. To be clear, there is no issue with the methodology employed, and the scenarios that people were asked about are important, but the way the results were reported is misleading and arguably irresponsible. Ironically, it is biased in its selection of example scenarios, and thus it's an example of the very phenomenon it decries. Fortunately, since the Pew poll was created by humans, we can identify the flaws and correct them. An easy fix is to simply change the headline and report that people don't trust machine-learned algorithms. Another possibility is to present a number of non-machine-learned algorithm examples and incorporate the people's responses to those in the survey as well.

To get a more accurate sense of people’s attitudes towards algorithms, and also to avoid creating unnecessary aversions and false panics, anyone judging algorithms should distinguish between those created by humans and those that are the result of machine learning. Pollsters, journalists, and everybody else involved in gauging, and influencing, public opinion would benefit from a better understanding of the nature of algorithms. As would the people being polled.

It is true that algorithms can be flawed, but so can opinion polls. Let’s try to avoid bias in both.