“My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”  Do you believe that?  We don’t.

Basic science, even basic consensual reality, seems under attack these days.  Science and education are increasingly something for the ‘elite’; something to be distrusted by honest folk.  Scientists aren’t trusted on public health, environmental science, or even cosmology, not because they’ve been proven wrong but because they’ve been proven so ruthlessly right.  Objective reality is inconvenient for those who would like their whims to create reality instead.  But society has always and only existed in the real world and modern society isn’t possible without science.  Pretending otherwise can, and will, get us all killed.

The way to promote understanding and appreciation of science isn’t to tell people they should care… it’s to show them why it’s so exciting.  From the unimaginable expanse of the multiverse to the tiniest living beings and the quarks and leptons they’re made of, science is an adventure.  The “Department of Reality Studies” may do little to affect the appreciation of science for many people one way or another, but we’ll enjoy sharing our own excitement with you so we hope you’ll check back frequently to see glimpses of Reality that may not have made your radar.  Let’s go!

March 2024-  Sea ice shrinks, climate refugees flee, and defining “Natural” climate solutions

Antarctic Sea Ice Near Historic Lows; Arctic Ice Continues Decline, Goddard Digital Team, NASA, Mar 2024

“Sea ice at both the top and bottom of the planet continued its decline in 2024. In the waters around Antarctica, ice coverage shrank to near-historic lows for the third year in a row. The recurring loss hints at a long-term shift in conditions in the Southern Ocean, likely resulting from global climate change, according to scientists at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Meanwhile, the 46-year trend of shrinking and thinning ice in the Arctic Ocean shows no sign of reversing.  “Sea ice acts like a buffer between the ocean and the atmosphere,” said ice scientist Linette Boisvert of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Sea ice prevents much of the exchange of heat and moisture from the relatively warm ocean to the atmosphere above it.”  Less ice coverage allows the ocean to warm the atmosphere over the poles, leading to more ice melting in a vicious cycle of rising temperatures…”

‘On the Move’ examines how climate change will alter where people live, Review in Science News, Apr 2024

“Across the United States, people facing extreme fires, storms, floods and heat are looking for the escape hatch. In On the Move, Abrahm Lustgarten examines who these people are, where they live, where climate change may cause them to move and how this reshuffling will impact the country (SN: 5/12/20)… At about 300 pages, the book is a relatively quick read, but Lustgarten’s reporting is deep. Leaning on interviews with such high-profile sources as former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and on published research, Lustgarten explains the scientific and political sides of climate migration. Anecdotes from people across the socioeconomic spectrum reveal the mind-sets of people at the front lines of the climate crisis. And the author’s decades of experience as a climate journalist result in a particularly accessible analysis of the insurance landscape, which has long lent a false sense of economic safety to people living in places vulnerable to climate change…”

The Five Principles That Define Natural Climate Solutions, The Nature Conservancy, Jan 2024

“Natural climate solutions (NCS) are actions to protect, better manage, or restore ecosystems to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and store carbon. Science shows that—combined with cutting fossil-fuel use and accelerating renewable energy—natural climate solutions can help us avoid the worst effects of climate change while supporting communities, thriving ecosystems, and biodiversity.  By now we know the world is facing a climate emergency requiring immediate and coordinated action. We also know that nature can be a meaningful part of the solution, with the potential to mitigate one-third of global emissions by 2030. So, why aren’t we harnessing the power of nature to its fullest climate potential?  So, why aren’t we harnessing the power of nature to its fullest climate potential?  One of the reasons has been a lack of understanding around how these solutions are defined. A new paper led by Peter Ellis, Director of Global Natural Climate Solutions Science at The Nature Conservancy (TNC), hopes to change that by outlining five principles to guide the global implementation of NCS…”

Older Reality…

First pig kidney transplant in a person: what it means for the future, Mallapaty and Kozlov on Nature.com, Mar 2024

“Early success in the first transplant of a pig kidney into a living person has raised researchers’ hopes for larger clinical trials involving pig organs. Such trials could bring ‘xenotransplantation’, the use of animal organs in human recipients, into the clinic…  The case demonstrates that, at least in the short term, these organs are safe and function like kidneys, says Luhan Yang, chief executive of Qihan Biotech in Hangzhou, China, who is also a founder of the biotech firm that produced the pigs, eGenesis in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company is in discussions with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about planning clinical trials for its programmes for transplanted pig kidneys and paediatric hearts and for pig livers that would be connected to the recipient from outside the body, says Wenning Qin, a molecular biologist at eGenesis…”

James Webb Space Telescope complicates expanding universe paradox by checking Hubble’s work, Keith Cooper on Space.com, Mar 2024

“The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has double checked the work of its older sibling, the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble’s measurements of the expansion rate of the universe are exemplary, the trailblazing observatory found, further ratcheting up the so-called “Hubble tension”…  On one hand, observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, …means that every volume of space a million parsecs (3.26 million light years) across should be expanding at a rate of 67.8 kilometers (42.1 miles) every second…  The problem, however, is [the standard] method gives us a completely different value of the Hubble constant: Somewhere around 73.2 kilometers (45.5 miles) per second per megaparsec… The apparent paradox between the two measurements is what cosmologists have started calling the Hubble tension. Nobody knows what is causing it, but some hypotheses call for new physics to explain the apparent contradiction.”

Tiny Worms at Chernobyl Appear Mysteriously Unscathed by Radiation, Michelle Starr in Nature, Mar 2024

“Microscopic worms that live their lives in the highly radioactive environment of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) appear to do so completely free of radiation damage.  Nematodes collected from the area have shown no sign of damage to their genomes, contrary to what might be expected for organisms living in such a dangerous place. The finding doesn’t suggest the CEZ is safe, the researchers say, but rather the worms are resilient and able to adroitly adapt to conditions that might be inhospitable to other species… “Now that we know which strains of O. tipulae are more sensitive or more tolerant to DNA damage, we can use these strains to study why different individuals are more likely than others to suffer the effects of carcinogens,” Tintari says.

Scientists Devised a Way to Tell if ChatGPT Becomes Aware of Itself, Clare Watson on ScienceAlert, Sep 2023

“…The Turing Test has long been the fallible standard set to determine whether machines exhibit intelligent behavior that passes as human. But in this latest wave of AI creations, it feels like we need something more to gauge their iterative capabilities.  Here, an international team of computer scientists – including one member of OpenAI’s Governance unit – has been testing the point at which large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT might develop abilities that suggest they could become aware of themselves and their circumstances…”

‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point, Robin McKie in The Guardian, Feb 2024

“Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities… “The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.””

Quantum physics makes small leap with microscopic gravity measurement, Ian Sample in The Guardian, Feb 2024

“Scientists have detected the pull of gravity on the microscopic scale in a feat that lays the groundwork for probing its nature in the mysterious quantum realm. In an experiment involving sophisticated superconducting apparatus cooled to within a whisker of absolute zero, and brass weights stuck to an electrical bicycle wheel, physicists recorded a minuscule gravitational tug of 30 quintillionths of a newton on a particle less than a millimetre wide.  The demonstration paves the way for future work in which researchers aim to measure the gravity generated by ever smaller particles to understand how the unusual force behaves in the subatomic world where quantum rules dominate…”

An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang, and can still be observed today, says Nobel winner, Sarah Knapton in The Telegraph, Oct 2020

An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics.  The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future.  “We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon.  So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points…”

Three reasons why the periodic table needs a redesign, Joshua Howgego in NewScientist, Feb 2019

“But there are doubts over whether the periodic table is in the best possible configuration. Just as notes can be arranged in various ways to produce music, so the essence of the relationships between the elements could be depicted differently. There is no easy way to judge which is better, or more “true”. So arguments over perceived flaws in the current arrangement rumble on, with some chemists arguing that certain elements should be relocated – and others working on more radical ways to recompose the table…”

Seawater could provide nearly unlimited amounts of critical battery material, Robert Service in Science, Jul 2020

Booming electric vehicle sales have spurred a growing demand for lithium… Lithium’s scarcity has raised concerns that future shortages could cause battery prices to skyrocket and stymie the growth of electric vehicles and other lithium-dependent technologies such as Tesla Powerwalls, stationary batteries often used to store rooftop solar power… But the light metal, which is essential for making power-packed rechargeable batteries, isn’t abundant. Now, researchers report a major step toward tapping a virtually limitless lithium supply: pulling it straight out of seawater.

Portable, non-invasive, mind-reading AI turns thoughts into text, Univ. of Technology Sydney (UTS) Dec 2023

In a world-first, researchers from the GrapheneX-UTS Human-centric Artificial Intelligence Centre at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have developed a portable, non-invasive system that can decode silent thoughts and turn them into text. The technology could aid communication for people who are unable to speak due to illness or injury, including stroke or paralysis. It could also enable seamless communication between humans and machines, such as the operation of a bionic arm or robot.  The study has been selected as a spotlight paper at the NeurIPS conference, a top-tier annual meeting that showcases world-leading research on artificial intelligence and machine learning, held in New Orleans.  The research was led by Distinguished Professor CT Lin, Director of the GrapheneX-UTS HAI Centre, together with first author Yiqun Duan and fellow PhD candidate Jinzhou Zhou from UTS Faculty of Engineering and IT.

Asteroid pieces brought to Earth may offer clue to life’s origin, Washington Post, Dec 2023

Before Earth had biology, it had chemistry. How the one followed from the other — how a bunch of boring molecules transformed themselves into this special thing we call life — is arguably the greatest unknown in science. It’s also a big reason NASA sent a robotic spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, on a multiyear journey around the sun to fetch some crumbly material from an ancient asteroid named Bennu and then bring it back to Earth.  On Monday, the scientific community got its first description of that precious, exotic stuff, revealed by the mission’s top scientist, Dante Lauretta, at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, showed slides with a long list of intriguing molecules, including carbon-based organics, in the grains and pebbles retrieved from Bennu. They will shine light on the molecular building blocks of the solar system and “maybe — still early phase — maybe insights into the origin of life.”

How our Milky Way galaxy would look in gravitational waves (video), Space.com, Sep 2023

A simulated map of the Milky Way as it would appear in gravitational waves has given a powerful impression of what future space-based detectors will observe.  Over 90 gravitational-wave events have been detected so far by the triumvirate of ground-based detectors — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the U.S., Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan. All these detected events are mergers of stellar-mass black holes and/or neutron stars in distant galaxies; no gravitational-wave events have been found coming from our Milky Way galaxy.  “Our image is directly analogous to an all-sky view of the sky in a particular type of light, such as visible, infrared or X-rays,” said team-member James Ira Thorpe, who is also based at NASA Goddard. “The promise of gravitational waves is that we can observe the universe in a totally different way, and this image really brings that home.”

Rice-engineered material can reconnect severed nerves, Silvia Cernea Clark, Oct 2023

Researchers have long recognized the therapeutic potential of using magnetoelectrics ⎯ materials that can turn magnetic fields into electric fields ⎯ to stimulate neural tissue in a minimally invasive way and help treat neurological disorders or nerve damage. The problem, however, is that neurons have a hard time responding to the shape and frequency of the electric signal resulting from this conversion. Rice University neuroengineer Jacob Robinson and his team designed the first magnetoelectric material that not only solves this issue but performs the magnetic-to-electric conversion 120 times faster than similar materials. According to a study published in Nature Materials, the researchers showed the material can be used to precisely stimulate neurons remotely and to bridge the gap in a broken sciatic nerve in a rat model. …

Toyota Inks Deal to Mass Produce Solid State EV Batteries With 932-Mile Range, PCMag, Oct 2023

Idemitsu Kosan, Japan’s second-largest oil refiner, may seem like an unlikely partner for the EV space. But Toyota says Idemitsu has been working on developing the “elemental technologies” for the batteries since 2001, five years before Toyota began pursuing them in 2006.  Specifically, Idemitsu has been working on developing a new material to go in the batteries, a solid sulfide electrolyte. With the partnership, Toyota aims to combine Idemitsu’s material expertise with its own production prowess to make solid-state batteries a reality for consumers.  “This collaboration focuses on sulfide solid electrolytes, which are seen as a promising material to achieve high capacity and output for BEVs [battery electric vehicles],” Toyota says. “Sulfide solid electrolytes are characterized by softness and adhesiveness to other materials, which is suitable for battery mass production.”.…

Why the earliest galaxies are sparking drama and controversy among astronomers, Barber, Carlson, McCoy, and Ramirez on NPR

The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful telescope ever put into space. As such, its helping usher in a new era of astrophysics. Astronomers can now study farther, earlier galaxies than ever before.  “If you were a paleontologist, you would dig deeper and deeper to find the oldest bones. In astronomy, what we do is look at our history,” says Jorge Moreno, an associate professor of astronomy at Pomona College. “We have to look back in time, but we don’t have a time machine. So what we do is we look at really faraway distances.” As they peer into the deep, distant history of the universe, scientists are shocked to find galaxies showed in our cosmic history much sooner than scientists ever expected. It’s a galactic controversy that has astronomers around the world excited—and puzzled.  So what is it about these galaxies that is getting astronomers worked up? Not only is JWST finding galaxies forming 200-500 million years after the Big Bang, but also that they are bigger and brighter than astronomers expected.

Nano rocket thruster can run on water, fit on a fingertip, Rizwan Choudhury in Interesting Engineering, Sep 2023

Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18 b, NASA TV, Sep 2023

A new investigation with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, has revealed the presence of carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb’s discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface.  The first insight into the atmospheric properties of this habitable-zone exoplanet came from observations with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which prompted further studies that have since changed our understanding of the system.  The suggestion that the sub-Neptune K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet is intriguing, as some astronomers believe that these worlds are promising environments to search for evidence for life on exoplanets…

A student accidentally created a rechargeable battery that could last 400 years, Tod Perry on Upworthy, Sep 2023

There’s no better example of that than a 2016 discovery at the University of California, Irvine, by doctoral student Mya Le Thai. After playing around in the lab, she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. That means longer-lasting laptops and smartphones and fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in landfills.  A team of researchers at UCI had been experimenting with nanowires for potential use in batteries, but found that over time the thin, fragile wires would break down and crack after too many charging cycles. A charge cycle is when a battery goes from completely full to completely empty and back to full again.  But one day, on a whim, Thai coated a set of gold nanowires in manganese dioxide and a Plexiglas-like electrolyte gel.  “She started to cycle these gel capacitors, and that’s when we got the surprise…”

Cornell University researchers break their record with stunning high-res photo of atoms, Jeremy Gray in Digital Photography Review

“The team’s paper, ‘Electron Ptychography Achieves Atomic-Resolution Limits Set by Lattice Vibrations,’ outlines a new electron microscope pixel array detector (EMPAD) that includes more sophisticated 3D reconstruction algorithms. The combination of the EMPAD and algorithms is so finely tuned that the only blurring of atoms in the image is due to the atoms’ ‘thermal jiggling… ‘This doesn’t just set a new record,’ said Muller, ‘It’s reached a regime which is effectively going to be an ultimate limit for resolution. We basically can now figure out where the atoms are in a very easy way. This opens up a whole lot of new measurement possibilities of things we’ve wanted to do for a very long time. It also solves a long-standing problem – undoing the multiple scattering of the beam in the sample, which Hans Bethe laid out in 1928 – that has blocked us from doing this in the past…’

Scientist Unveils a Bold Plan to Turn an Asteroid Into a Space Station, Andy Tomaswick in Universe Today, Aug 2023

“The basic idea of turning an asteroid into a rotating space habitat has existed for a while. Despite that, it’s always seemed relatively far off regarding technologies, so the concept hasn’t received much attention over the years.  But, if you’re retired and have an underlying interest in researching space habitats, developing a detailed plan for turning an asteroid into one seems like a great use of time. And that is precisely what David W. Jensen, a retired Technical Fellow at Rockwell Collins, recently did. He released a 65-page paper that details an easy-to-understand, relatively inexpensive, and feasible plan to turn an asteroid into a space habitat…”

Could Solar Panel Arrays in Earth Orbit provide all the Clean Electricity We’d Ever Need? Juan Cole in Informed Comment, Jul 2023

“The European Space Agency isn’t as well known in the U.S. as NASA or even Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. The $7 bn.-a-year agency funded by 22 European states, however, has what could turn out to be a game-changing idea for solar power. ESA is contemplating installing a solar panel array the size of a shopping mall in earth orbit. The agency has funded a three-year study called “Solaris.” I don’t know if that is a reference to Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 science fiction novel of the same name. The project is outlined at length here…”

Urbanization is driving evolution of plants globally, study finds, Kim Eckart in UW News, Mar 2022

“A study led by evolutionary biologists… examines whether parallel evolution is occurring in cities all over the world. In findings published March 18 in the journal Science, the Global Urban Evolution Project (GLUE) analyzed data collected by 287 scientists in 160 cities in 26 countries, who sampled the white clover plant in their cities and nearby rural areas.  What they found is the clearest evidence yet that humans in general, and cities specifically, are a dominant force driving the evolution of life globally.  “We’ve long known that we’ve changed cities in pretty profound ways and we’ve dramatically altered the environment and ecosystems,” said co-lead author James Santangelo, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto Mississauga. “But we just showed this happens, often in similar ways, on a global scale…”

Scientists create ‘synthetic human embryos’ from stem cells.  Brandon Gage on AlterNet, Jun 2023

“Scientists speaking at the International Society for Stem Cell Research’s annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts revealed that for the first time, researchers have successfully engineered “synthetic human embryos using stem cells,” the Guardian exclusively reported on Wednesday.  “Scientists say these model embryos, which resemble those in the earliest stages of human development, could provide a crucial window on the impact of genetic disorders and the biological causes of recurrent miscarriage,” the British outlet wrote.  It noted, however, that “the work also raises serious ethical and legal issues as the lab-grown entities fall outside current legislation in the UK and most other countries…”

The Universe is disappearing, and we’re powerless to stop it, Ethan Siegel on Big Think, Jan 2022

“NASA just shared a stunning image of a nearly perfect rectangular iceberg in Antarctica. The monolithic slab of ice, floating just off the Larsen C ice shelf appears quite unnatural given the 90-degree angles.  NASA took the image as part of Operation IceBridge, a mission to image Earth’s polar regions in order to understand how ice (thickness, location, accumulation, etc.) has been changing in recent years.  While the iceberg is quite strange to look at, it is an entirely natural phenomenon. Most of us are used to seeing pictures of angular icebergs with just a small tip jutting out of the water. However, there is an entirely different type of iceberg called tabular icebergs…”

Here’s what happens in your dog’s brain when you speak, Tess Joosse in Science, Apr 2022

“My dog Leo clearly knows the difference between my voice and the barks of the beagle next door. When I speak, he looks at me with love; when our canine neighbor makes his mind known, Leo barks back with disdain. A new study backs up what I and my fellow dog owners have long suspected: Dogs’ brains process human and canine vocalizations differently, suggesting they evolved to recognize our voices from their own.   “The fact that dogs use auditory information alone to distinguish between human and dog sound is significant,” says Jeffrey Katz, a cognitive neuroscientist at Auburn University who is not involved with the work.  Previous research has found that dogs can match human voices with expressions. When played an audio clip of a lady laughing, for example, they’ll often look at a photo of a smiling woman…”

Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common.  Jeffrey Brainard in Science, May 2023

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.  “It is just too hard to believe” at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic…”

A couple other articles on this subject you might be interested in are “Fake Studies In Academic Journals May Be More Common Than Previously Thought”, “What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia”, and “The Fight Against Fake-Paper Factories That Churn Out Sham Science”

NASA Finds Perfectly Rectangular Iceberg In Antarctica As If It Was Deliberately Cut, Trevor Nace in Forbes, Oct 2018

“NASA just shared a stunning image of a nearly perfect rectangular iceberg in Antarctica. The monolithic slab of ice, floating just off the Larsen C ice shelf appears quite unnatural given the 90-degree angles.  NASA took the image as part of Operation IceBridge, a mission to image Earth’s polar regions in order to understand how ice (thickness, location, accumulation, etc.) has been changing in recent years.  While the iceberg is quite strange to look at, it is an entirely natural phenomenon. Most of us are used to seeing pictures of angular icebergs with just a small tip jutting out of the water. However, there is an entirely different type of iceberg called tabular icebergs…”

NASA released more images of the rectangular iceberg, which you can see here.

Scientists grew living human skin around a robotic finger, Maria Temming in ScienceNews, Jun 2022

“Researchers at the University of Tokyo have built a robotic finger that, much like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s titular cyborg assassin, is covered in living human skin. The goal is to someday build robots that look like real people — albeit for more altruistic applications. The lab-made skin was strong and stretchy enough to withstand the robotic finger bending. It could also heal itself: When researchers made a small cut on the robotic finger and covered it with a collagen bandage, the skin’s fibroblast cells merged the bandage with the rest of the skin within a week.  To cover the finger in skin, Takeuchi and colleagues submerged the robotic digit in a blend of collagen and human skin cells called…”

The Idea That Everything From Spoons to Stones is Conscious is Gaining Academic Credibility,   Olivia Goldhill on Quartz,

“Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.  This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the “panpsychist” view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose.  ‘Why should we think common sense is a good guide to what the universe is like?’ says Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. ‘Einstein tells us weird things about the nature of time that counters common sense; quantum mechanics runs counter to common sense. Our intuitive reaction isn’t necessarily a good guide to the nature of reality.”

Life: modern physics can’t explain it – but our new theory, which says time is fundamental, might, Sara Imari Walker, The Conversation, Apr 2023

“Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle. Even today, we can’t really explain what the difference is between a living lump of matter and a dead one. But my colleagues and I are creating a new physics of life that might soon provide answers.

Isaac Newton described a universe where the laws never change, and time is an immutable and absolute backdrop against which everything moves. Darwin, however, observed a universe where endless forms are generated, each changing features of what came before, suggesting that time should not only have a direction, but that it in some ways folds back on itself. New evolutionary forms can only arise via selection on the past.

Presumably these two areas of science are describing the same universe, but how can two such diametrically opposite views be unified? The key to understanding why life is not explainable in current physics may be to reconsider our notions of time as the key difference between the universe as described by Newton and that of Darwin. Time has, in fact, been reinvented many times through the history of physics…”

Astronomers detect water molecules swirling around a star

From CNN- A nearby star system is helping astronomers unravel the mystery of how water appeared in our solar system billions of years ago.  A team of researchers used ALMA to measure chemical signals in the planet-forming disk, and they detected gaseous water, or water vapor. Their detection allowed the astronomers to trace the water’s journey from the gas clouds that formed the star and will eventually give rise to planets. Their findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that comets formed from the sun’s planet-forming disk could have brought water to Earth. That means the water on Earth could actually be older than our sun, which is 4.6 billion years old.

Cephalopods Can Pass a Cognitive Test Designed For Human Children

Last year, a test of cephalopod smarts reinforced how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence. Cuttlefish were given a new version of the marshmallow test, and the results appeared to demonstrate that there’s more going on in their strange little brains than we knew. Their ability to learn and adapt, the researchers said, could have evolved to give cuttlefish an edge in the cutthroat eat-or-be-eaten marine world they live in.  This ability to delay gratification demonstrates cognitive abilities such as future planning, and it was originally conducted to study how human cognition develops; specifically, at what age a human is smart enough to delay gratification if it means a better outcome later.  Because it’s so simple, it can be adjusted for animals…

‘Impossible’ new ring system discovered at the edge of the solar system, and scientists are baffled

From LiveScience.com- Astronomers have discovered an entirely new ring system within the solar system, and it’s located at such a great distance from its dwarf planet parent that it should be impossible. The ring surrounds Quaoar, which is around half the size of Pluto and located beyond Neptune. It is only the third ring to be found around a minor planet and the seventh ring system in the solar system, with the most famous and well-studied rings surrounding the giant planets Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus.  “The six [previously known] planets with ring systems all have rings which are quite close to the surface of the planet. So this really challenges our ring formation theories,” study co-author Vik Dhillon (opens in new tab), a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Sheffield in England, told Live Science. “It was previously thought to be impossible to have rings that far out, so in a nutshell, the ring of Quaoar is a real challenge to explain theoretically.”

Electrostatic Levitation: MIT Engineers Test an Idea for a New Hovering Moon Rover, Jennifer Chu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology December 21, 2021

A levitating vehicle might someday explore the moon, asteroids, and other airless planetary surfaces.  Aerospace engineers at MIT are testing a new concept for a hovering rover that levitates by harnessing the moon’s natural charge.  Because they lack an atmosphere, the moon and other airless bodies such as asteroids can build up an electric field through direct exposure to the sun and surrounding plasma. On the moon, this surface charge is strong enough to levitate dust more than 1 meter above the ground, much the way static electricity can cause a person’s hair to stand on end.  Engineers at NASA and elsewhere have recently proposed harnessing this natural surface charge to levitate a glider with wings made of Mylar, a material that naturally holds the same charge as surfaces on airless bodies…

New Quantum Gravity Sensor Can Look Under Earth’s Surface in Unprecedented Detail, David Nield in Physics, Feb 2022

Physicists Broke The Speed of Light With Pulses Inside Hot Plasma, Mike McRae on Science Alert, Sep 2022

“Most of us grow up familiar with the prevailing law that limits how quickly information can travel through empty space: the speed of light, which tops out at 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second.  While photons themselves are unlikely to ever break this speed limit, there are features of light which don’t play by the same rules.  Physicists in the US have shown that, under certain conditions, waves made up of groups of photons can move faster than light.  Researchers have been playing hard and fast with the speed limit of light pulses for a while, speeding them up and even slowing them to a virtual stand-still using various materials like cold atomic gases, refractive crystals, and optical fibers.  But impressively, last year, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the University of Rochester in New York managed it inside hot swarms of charged particles, fine-tuning the speed of light waves within plasma to anywhere from around 1/10 of light’s usual vacuum speed to more than 30% faster.”

They made a material that doesn’t exist on Earth. That’s only the start of the story.  Paddy Hirsch on NPR, Nov 2022

“It sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie: humans are destroying the Earth, gouging huge scars in its crust, and polluting the air and the ground as they mine and refine a key element essential for technological advance. One day, scientists examining an alien meteorite discover a unique metal that negates the need for all that excavation and pollution. Best of all, the metal can be replicated, in a laboratory, using base materials. The world is saved!  OK, we amped the story a wee bit there. No aliens, for one thing.  But the rest of it is true. Two teams of scientists recently announced that they managed to manufacture, in a lab, a material that does not exist naturally on Earth. It has only been found in meteorites-  until now.”

Expert Proposes a Method For Telling if We All Live in a Computer Program, Melvin Vopson in The Conversation, Nov 2022

“Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets, and ultimately life to develop?  A common answer is that we live in an infinite multiverse of Universes, so we shouldn’t be surprised that at least one Universe has turned out as ours. But another is that our Universe is a computer simulation, with someone (perhaps an advanced alien species) fine-tuning the conditions.   Assuming that the Universe is indeed a simulation, then what sort of experiments could we deploy from within the simulation to prove this?  The recently proposed mass-energy-information (M/E/I) equivalence principle – suggesting mass can be expressed as energy or information, or vice versa – states that information bits must have a small mass. This gives us something to search for.  The experiment involves erasing the information contained inside elementary particles by letting them and their antiparticles (all particles have “anti” versions of themselves which are identical but have opposite charge) annihilate in a flash of energy – emitting “photons”, or light particles.  The exact range of expected frequencies of the resulting photons [has been calculated] based on information physics . The experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools, and we have launched a crowdfunding site to achieve it.”

Why fuzzy definitions are a problem in the social sciences, Sujata Gupta in ScienceNews.org, Oct 2022

“The social sciences have some special challenges, Flake says. The field is a youngster compared with a discipline like astronomy, so has had less time to sort out its definitions. And social science concepts are often inherently subjective. Describing abstract ideas like motivation or feelings can be squishier than describing, say, a meteorite.  It’s tempting to assume, as I did until I began researching this column, that a single, imperfect definition for individual concepts is preferable to this definitional cacophony. And some researchers encourage this approach. “While no suburban definition will be perfect, standardization would increase understanding of how suburban studies relate to each other,” the Harvard researchers wrote in that suburbia paper.  But a recent study taking aim at how we define the middle class showed me how alternative definitions can lead to a shift in perspective….”

Portable MRI May Offer More Accessible Imaging for Stroke Survivors, Shannon Kelleher on AAAS.org, Apr 2022

“Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology is a mainstay of modern medicine — at least, for those who can access it. MRI field scanners can now provide more detailed brain images than ever, yet for much of the world they remain out of reach.  However, a less powerful and less resource-intensive MRI may give more people access to lifesaving imaging resources. According to a new study published in the April 22 issue of Science Advances, neuroimages obtained using a portable magnetic resonance imaging (pMRI) machine with very low magnetic field strength detected areas of dead tissue in the brains of 50 stroke patients.  Doctors revised treatment plans for two intensive care COVID-19 patients based on stroke damage revealed by pMRI. The results support the idea that low-field pMRI may offer a clinically viable technology for stroke patients and could potentially help democratize access to critical medical equipment in resource-scarce environments….”

Here are the Top 10 times scientific imagination failed, Tom Siegfried on ScienceNews.org, Mar 2022

“Science, some would say, is an enterprise that should concern itself solely with cold, hard facts. Flights of imagination should be the province of philosophers and poets.  On the other hand, as Albert Einstein so astutely observed, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Knowledge, he said, is limited to what we know now, while “imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress.”  So with science, imagination has often been the prelude to transformative advances in knowledge, remaking humankind’s understanding of the world and enabling powerful new technologies.  And yet while sometimes spectacularly successful, imagination has also frequently failed in ways that retard the revealing of nature’s secrets. Some minds, it seems, are simply incapable of imagining that there’s more to reality than what they already know.  On many occasions scientists have failed to foresee ways of testing novel ideas, ridiculing them as unverifiable and therefore unscientific. Consequently it is not too challenging to come up with enough failures of scientific imagination to compile a Top 10 list, beginning with #10…”

The Surprising Science of Why It’s Dark at Night, Animated, Maria Popova in The Marginalian

“We’ve already seen how humankind conquered the night, but why is the sky dark after nightfall in the first place? The real reason, like most of science, is far less obvious than it seems, and far more expansive. Count on the fine folks of MinutePhysics — who have previously explained why the color pink doesn’t exist and why the past is different from the future — and their signature hand-drawn animation to illuminate the answer. And if Richard Feynman didn’t give you enough pause in demonstrating that the fire in your fireplace is actually the light and heat of the sun, how about knowing that the glow of the sky you see today isn’t starlight but leftover light from the Big Bang? Now that’s a moment of cosmic awe…”

Scientists Have Developed ‘Living’ Skin For Robots, And It’s Quite Something, Tessa Koumoundouros in Science Alert, Jun 2022

From Talos, the giant bronze automaton who guarded the princess Europa in ancient Greek myths, to Cylons and Terminators, the idea of artificial humans has both fascinated and creeped us out for centuries. Now, we’re closer than ever to making a robot look remarkably like a human, with the development of living robot skin. This icky-looking substance is water repellent, self healing, and has a texture just like our own skin.  Because it’s actually made of human skin cells.  “I think living skin is the ultimate solution to give robots the look and touch of living creatures since it is exactly the same material that covers animal bodies,” said University of Tokyo tissue engineer Shoji Takeuchi.  The researchers have successfully coated a three-jointed, functioning robot finger with a prototype of this lab-grown skin…”

We Have Even More Evidence Life’s Building Blocks Came to Earth From Space, Conor Feehly on Science Alert, Apr 2022

“We still don’t know just how the first life emerged on Earth. One suggestion is that the building blocks arrived here from space; now, a new study of several carbon-rich meteorites has added weight to this idea.  Using new, extremely sensitive analysis techniques for these meteorites, a team led by scientists from Hokkaido University in Japan detected organic compounds that form the very backbone of the nucleic acid molecules common to all life as we know it – DNA and RNA.  The researchers analyzed three carbon-rich meteorites: the Murchison meteorite which landed in Australia in 1969, the Murray meteorite which landed in Kentucky in 1950, and the Tagish Lake meteorite which fell to Earth in 2000, landing in British Columbia…”

Lab-made mouse embryos grew brains and beating hearts, just like the real thing, Nocoletta Lanese on LiveScience, Aug 2022

The lab-made embryos, crafted without any eggs or sperm and incubated in a device that resembles a fast-spinning Ferris wheel full of tiny glass vials, survived for 8.5 days. That’s nearly half the length of a typical mouse pregnancy. In that time, a yolk sac developed around the embryos to supply nutrition, and the embryos themselves developed digestive tracts; neural tubes, or the beginnings of the central nervous system; beating hearts; and brains with well-defined subsections, including the forebrain and midbrain, the scientists reported in a study published in the journal Nature.

“This has been the dream of our community for years and [a] major focus of our work for a decade, and finally, we’ve done it,” senior study author Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a developmental and stem-cell biologist with labs at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement…

A new kind of time crystal has been created and lasts 10 milliseconds, Alex Wilkins on NewScientist, Jun 2022

A new kind of time crystal has been created and it could explain how these mysterious substances function and reveal the scale at which quantum effects kick in.

The existence of time crystals was first proposed in 2012 by Frank Wilczek at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Normal crystals have patterns that repeat in three-dimensional space, creating a lattice structure, but Wilczek imagined a crystal-like quantum system whose constituent parts would regularly …

The Strange and Secret Ways That Animals Perceive the World, Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, Jun 2022

it was a cold, wet March night, he decided to drive to the shore. When he arrived, he discovered that the animal had been mutilated. Two passersby had carved their initials in its flanks. Someone had hacked off its flukes, and another person, or perhaps the same one, had stuck a cigar butt in its blowhole. Payne stood in the rain for a long time, gazing at the corpse. He had been studying moths; now he decided to switch his attention to cetaceans.

Aside from the dead one, Payne had never actually seen a whale, nor did he know where whales could be observed. At the suggestion of an acquaintance, he made his way to Bermuda. There he met an engineer who had worked for the United States Navy, monitoring Soviet submarines via microphones installed off the coast. While listening for enemy subs, the engineer had chanced upon other undersea sounds. He played a tape of some of them to Payne, who later recalled, “What I heard blew my mind.”

July, 2022-  The James Webb Telescope.  Of course.

There are amazing discoveries every day in every field of science, but this month was all about the new James Webb Telescope.  Here are some great links to dive into the deepest parts of the universe.

NASA- First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope

NASA- James Webb Space Telescope, Goddard Space Flight Center

Take a cosmic tour inside the images captured by NASA’s Webb telescope, Joel Achenbach and Aaron Steckelbert in Washington Post, July 2022

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope: The ultimate guide, Elizabeth Howell and Daisy Dobrijevic on Space.com, Jul 2022

First light machine- At long last, the James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch. It will capture cosmic dawn and bring alien worlds into view, Daniel Clery in Science Magazine, Nov 2021

And some bad, but up-to-the-minute news…

Meteor impact left ‘uncorrectable’ damage to the Webb telescope’s mirror, new report shows, by Brandon Specktor on LiveScience.com, Jul 2022

How life could have arisen on an ‘RNA world’

It’s the ultimate chicken-and-egg conundrum. Life doesn’t work without tiny molecular machines called ribosomes, whose job is to translate genes into proteins. But ribosomes themselves are made of proteins. So how did the first life arise?  Researchers may have taken the first step toward solving this mystery. They’ve shown that RNA molecules can grow short proteins called peptides all by themselves—no ribosome required. What’s more, this chemistry works under conditions likely present on early Earth…

Comparing the Incredible Webb Space Telescope to Other Infrared Observatories

The images released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team last week aren’t officially ‘first light’ images from the new telescope, but in a way, it feels like they are. These stunning views provide the initial indications of just how powerful JWST will be, and just how much infrared astronomy is about to improve. The images were released following the completion of the long process to fully focus the telescope’s mirror segments. Engineers are saying JWST’s optical performance is “better than the most optimistic predictions,” and astronomers are beside themselves with excitement.

Astronomers Spot A Baby Gas Giant In The Process Of Forming

Have you ever wondered how gas giant planets like Jupiter or Saturn were formed? In a study published in Nature, astronomers took a detailed look at the formation of a gas giant in a star system 505 light-years away from our own. This star system contained what researchers suggest may be evidence of the earliest stages of a gas giant being born for the first time…  The international team used tools including the Subaru Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the system and inspect the disk of gas around the star. Taken together, readings provided evidence of a truly enormous planetary body in its infancy.

A newly discovered planet renews debate about how some giant worlds form, Allison Gasparini in ScienceNews, Apr 2022

A young, massive planet is orbiting in an unusual place in its star system, and it’s leading researchers to revive a long-debated view of how giant planets can form.  The protoplanet, nine times the mass of Jupiter, is too far away from its star to have formed by accreting matter piece by piece, images suggest. Instead, the massive world probably formed all at once in a violent implosion of gas and dust, researchers report April 4 in Nature Astronomy.  “My first reaction was, there’s no way this can be true,” says Thayne Currie, an astrophysicist at the Subaru Telescope headquartered in Hilo, Hawaii…

“Beyond our wildest dreams”: Scientists find fossil from dinosaur that died the day the asteroid hit, Nicole Karlis in Salon, Apr 2022

“Scientists believe they have discovered a fossilized time capsule from the exact day when Earth transformed from being a verdant, dinosaur-ridden world to a soot-covered apocalyptic hellscape. Within that time capsule was a very well-preserved dinosaur leg from a dinosaur that scientists believe died that spring day, some 66 million years ago.  The discovery, which was made at the Tanis dig site in North Dakota, will be discussed in more detail in a BBC documentary narrated by David Attenborough titled “Dinosaurs: The Final Day.” A version of the documentary will be broadcast on PBS in the United States next month. While the findings have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, scientists are very excited about the discovery and the prospect of what information it might hold…”

Here are the Top 10 times scientific imagination failed, Sometimes scientists dismiss an idea if they can’t think of a way to test it.  Tom Siegfried in ScienceNews.org, Mar 2022

Science, some would say, is an enterprise that should concern itself solely with cold, hard facts. Flights of imagination should be the province of philosophers and poets.  On the other hand, as Albert Einstein so astutely observed, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Knowledge, he said, is limited to what we know now, while “imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress.”  So with science, imagination has often been the prelude to transformative advances in knowledge, remaking humankind’s understanding of the world and enabling powerful new technologies.  And yet while sometimes spectacularly successful, imagination has also frequently failed in ways that retard the revealing of nature’s secrets. Some minds, it seems, are simply incapable of imagining that there’s more to reality than what they already know…”

‘Brief Answers To The Big Questions’ Is Stephen Hawking’s Parting Gift To Humanity

(from NPR)  “Stephen Hawking is one of those rare luminaries whose life symbolizes the best humanity has to offer.His uncanny creativity as a theoretical physicist and his decades-long struggle with a horribly debilitating motor neuron disease (also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease) inspired millions to revisit their bonds with science and with their personal challenges.

Like Albert Einstein, he achieved superstardom while still alive, which is not something that happens to many scientists. The image of a brain traveling to the confines of space and time, diving deep into some of the biggest mysteries of science while imprisoned in a wheelchair, excited the public imagination.  Condemned by doctors to live a short life while still a young Ph.D. student in Cambridge, England, Hawking’s long survival seemed like a miracle, even if he would never use such a word. “After my expectations had been reduced to zero, every new day became a bonus, and I began to appreciate everything I did have. While there’s life, there is hope,” he wrote. Hawking took the progressive deterioration of his body with tremendous dignity, raising a family, traveling the world, and even getting involved in some pretty saucy scandals and a messy divorce…”

Amazing Video Shows Inside Fusion Reactor During Record Breaking Test

(from the Byte)  “Scientists were excited to announce a major breakthrough in fusion energy research today.  The UK-based Joint European Torus (JET) lab smashed its own 25-year-old record, producing 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds, roughly the equivalent of 30 pounds of TNT.

Conditions inside the reactor are extreme to say the least, with temperatures reaching in excess of 100 million degrees Celsius, ten times the core of the Sun. The plasma glow is created by isotopes of deuterium and tritium fusing together to form helium, essentially the same process that powers stars like our Sun.

The goal of achieving fusion — a virtually limitless supply of truly green and safe energy — is likely still many years out. The reaction may have lasted for a record five seconds, but the amount of energy needed to get the reaction going still far exceeds the amount that was gained…”

What’s inside a black hole? Physicist uses quantum computing, machine learning to find out

(from Phys.org and University of Michigan)  “What if everything around us was just … a hologram?  The thing is, it could be—and a University of Michigan physicist is using quantum computing and machine learning to better understand the idea, called holographic duality.

Holographic duality is a mathematical conjecture that connects theories of particles and their interactions with the theory of gravity. This conjecture suggests that the theory of gravity and the theory of particles are mathematically equivalent: What happens mathematically in the theory of gravity happens in the theory of particles, and vice versa.

Both theories describe different dimensions, but the number of dimensions they describe differs by one. So inside the shape of a black hole, for example, gravity exists in three dimensions while a particle theory exists in two dimensions, on its surface—a flat disk.

To envision this, think again of the black hole, which warps space-time because of its immense mass. The gravity of the black hole, which exists in three dimensions, connects mathematically to the particles dancing above it, in two dimensions. Therefore, a black hole exists in a three-dimensional space, but we see it as projected through particles.

Some scientists theorize our entire universe is a holographic projection of particles, and this could lead to a consistent quantum theory of gravity…”

Return to Neptune? The plans to send an orbiter to the elusive planet

(from the Planetary Society)  “Is it time NASA sent an orbiter to study the other blue planet in our solar system? Proposals for missions to study the ice giant planet Neptune and its mysterious moon Triton have been on NASA’s to-do list for over a decade, but nothing has happened until now.

A mission to explore one of the ice giants — Uranus or Neptune — was one of the three priorities set out by the last Decadal Survey in 2010, along with Jupiter’s moon Europa and a sample return mission to Mars. With the Europa Clipper mission due to launch in October 2024 and the Perseverance rover already on the red planet, NASA had made good progress on two of those.  But what about the ice giants?

Reasons to send a Flagship-class mission to Neptune are laid out in two papers: “Neptune Odyssey: Mission to the Neptune–Triton System” and “Neptune and Triton: A Flagship for Everyone.” The latter is one of over 500 white papers now being considered by the National Academies, which will publish in the first half of 2022 its once-per-decade Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey that will make recommendations for NASA missions. Will Neptune feature?…”

Behold, The Most Accurate Virtual Simulation of Our Universe to Date

(from Science Alert)  “Everything we understand about the evolution of the Universe, we’ve had to piece together. We simply haven’t been around for pretty much any of the 13.7 billion-year history of the cosmos to observe it in action.  That detective work has been pretty epic. And one of the tools in our kit is simulations of the formation and evolution of the vast structures that span observable space.

Now, using supercomputers, an international team of scientists led by the University of Helsinki in Finland has produced the largest and most accurate simulation yet of the evolution of the local Universe. This can help us understand the dynamics at play as the Universe continues to evolve, including the mysterious dark matter and dark energy.

“The simulations simply reveal the consequences of the laws of physics acting on the dark matter and cosmic gas throughout the 13.7 billion years that our Universe has been around,” says cosmologist Carlos Frenk of Durham University in the UK.  “The fact that we have been able to reproduce these familiar structures provides impressive support for the standard Cold Dark Matter model and tells us that we are on the right track to understand the evolution of the entire Universe…”

United Kingdom Declares Octopuses, Squids Are Sentient Beings- The country says the creatures can feel “pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement.”

(from The Byte) “The country is adding an amendment to its Animal Welfare Sentience Bill to recognize creatures such as octopus, crabs, squids, and lobsters along with “all other decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs” as sentient creatures, according to a press release from the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. The bill aims to ensure animal sentience is taken into account when developing government policy, and as such could inform debates around animal rights and dietary choices.  The science is now clear that decapods and cephalopods can feel pain and therefore it is only right they are covered by this vital piece of legislation,” Animal Welfare Minister Lord Zac Goldsmith said in the release”…

U.S. science no longer leads the world. Here’s how top advisers say the nation should respond- Growing competition means U.S. must decide where to excel, says National Science Board’s Julia Phillips

(from Science.org) A new data-rich report by the National Science Foundation (NSF) confirms China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leader in several key scientific metrics, including the overall number of papers published and patents awarded. U.S. scientists also have serious competition from foreign researchers in certain fields, it finds.  That loss of hegemony raises an important question for U.S. policymakers and the country’s research community, according to NSF’s oversight body, the National Science Board (NSB). “Since across-the-board leadership in [science and engineering] is no longer a possibility, what then should our goals be?” NSB asks in a policy brief that accompanies this year’s Science and Engineering Indicators, NSF’s biennial assessment of global research, which was released this week…”

What Is a Lagrange Point?- NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will travel to a special spot where the gravity from Earth and the sun is balanced

(from Scientific American) The most ambitious space telescope built to date is about to start peering at the universe through infrared eyes. The $10-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is designed to see farther back in space and time than ever before, where light has been stretched by the expansion of space into much longer wavelengths. To see this faint light, the telescope must observe far from Earth and its contaminating light and heat. After launch, JWST will travel 1.5 million kilometers to Earth’s second “Lagrange point” (L2), a spot in space where the gravitational forces of our planet and the sun are roughly equal, creating a stable orbital location. This vantage point will allow JWST to orbit with its giant sunshield positioned between the telescope and the sun, Earth and moon, shielding the telescope and keeping it at a frigid –370 degrees Fahrenheit. [The attached] Graphic shows how balancing gravitational forces form Lagrange points and highlights the planned orbit of JWST around L2…”

Scientists Create Synthetic Organisms That Can Reproduce, MJ Banias in Futurist, Nov 2021

“Scientists have created synthetic organisms that can self-replicate. Known as “Xenobots,” these tiny millimeter-wide biological machines now have the ability to reproduce — a striking leap forward in synthetic biology.  Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a joint team from the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and Harvard University used Xenopus laevis frog embryonic cells to construct the Xenobots.  Their original work began in 2020 when the Xenobots were first “built.” The team designed an algorithm that assembled countless cells together to construct various biological machines, eventually settling on embryonic skin cells from frogs…”

DARPA and NASA Scientists Accidentally Create Warp Bubble for Interstellar Travel, Lauren Coontz on CoffeeOrDie, Dec 2021

“A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-funded research project at NASA’s Johnson Space Center may have accidentally discovered how to build a warp drive engine. The scientists published their findings in July.  Harold “Sonny” White, a NASA researcher at the Eagleworks Laboratory in Houston, Texas, published a research paper with his team in July about the “possible structure of the energy density present in a Casimir cavity.”  According to the report, the Eagleworks team came across “a micro/nano-scale structure … that predicts negative energy density distribution that closely matches requirements for the Alcubierre metric.”  In other words, White and his colleagues accidentally created a microscopic experiment while researching how energy distributes around wavelengths — a theory developed by Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir. The experiment resulted in enough theoretical energy to achieve “warp speed,” a concept theorized by Mexican mathematician and physicist Miguel Alcubierre…”

50 Years Ago, Scientists Caught Their First Glimpse Of Amino Acids From Outer Space, Maria Temming on ScienceNews, Dec 2020

“Amino acids in a meteorite — from Science News, December 5, 1970— [Researchers] present evidence for the presence of amino acids of possible extraterrestrial origin in a meteorite that fell near Murchison, Victoria, Australia, Sept. 28, 1969.… If over the course of time their finding becomes accepted … it would demonstrate that amino acids, the basic building blocks of proteins, can be and have been formed outside the Earth.”

Update– Scientists confirmed in 1971 that the Murchison meteorite contained amino acids, primarily glycine, and that those organic compounds likely came from outer space (SN: 3/20/71, p. 195). In the decades since, amino acids and other chemical precursors to life have been uncovered in other fallen space rocks. Recent discoveries include compounds called nucleobases and sugars that are key components of DNA and RNA. The amino acid glycine even has been spotted in outer space in the atmosphere of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Such findings bolster the idea that life could exist elsewhere in the universe…”

Weird quantum effect that can turn matter invisible finally demonstrated, Ben Turner in LiveScience, Nov 2021

A weird quantum effect that was predicted decades ago has finally been demonstrated — if you make a cloud of gas cold and dense enough, you can make it invisible…  The bizarre effect is the first ever specific example of a quantum mechanical process called Pauli blocking… Now that researchers have finally demonstrated the Pauli blocking effect, they could eventually use it to develop materials that suppress light. This would be especially useful for improving the efficiency of quantum computers, which are currently hindered by quantum decoherence — the loss of quantum information (carried by light) to a computer’s surroundings.  “Whenever we control the quantum world, like in quantum computers, light scattering is a problem and means that information is leaking out of your quantum computer,” Ketterle said. “This is one way to suppress light scattering, and we are contributing to the general theme of controlling the atomic world.”

NASA Rover Has Found Previously Unknown Organic Molecules on Mars, Carly Cassella on ScienceAlert, Nov 2021

Using a new on-board experiment, NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered traces of previously undetected organic molecules on Mars.  None of the organic molecules identified in the sand hold unequivocal signs of life, but they do suggest the new technique, which didn’t require the rover to drill, is an effective tool when it comes to searching for evidence of carbon-based molecules, which are important building blocks for life as we know it.

Brain Implant Translates Paralyzed Man’s Thoughts Into Text With 94% Accuracy, Peter Dockrill on ScienceAlert, Nov 2021

A man paralyzed from the neck down due to a spinal cord injury he sustained in 2007 has shown he can communicate his thoughts, thanks to a brain implant system that translates his imagined handwriting into actual text…  The device – part of a longstanding research collaboration called BrainGate – is a brain-computer interface (BCI), that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret signals of neural activity generated during handwriting…during the experiment, reported in Nature earlier in the year, the man concentrated as if he were writing – effectively, thinking about making the letters with an imaginary pen and paper…  As he did this, electrodes implanted in his motor cortex recorded signals of his brain activity, which were then interpreted by algorithms running on an external computer, decoding T5’s imaginary pen trajectories, which mentally traced the 26 letters of the alphabet and some basic punctuation marks…  In tests, the man was able to achieve writing speeds of 90 characters per minute (about 18 words per minute), with approximately 94 percent accuracy (and up to 99 percent accuracy with autocorrect enabled).

New Universal Force Tested by Blasting Neutrons through Crystal, Karmela Padavic-Callaghan in Scientific American, Oct 2021

Mysterious forces may be a reliable trope in science fiction, but in reality, physicists have long agreed that all interactions between objects evidently arise from just four fundamental forces. Yet that has not stopped them from ardently searching for an additional, as-yet-unknown fifth fundamental force. The discovery of such a force could potentially resolve some of the biggest open questions in physics today, from the nature of dark energy to the seemingly irreconcilable differences between quantum mechanics and general relativity…

New nuclear fusion reactor design may be a breakthrough, Stephen Johnson in TheBigThink, Mar 2020

The promise of nuclear fusion is tantalizing: By utilizing the same atomic process that powers our sun, we may someday be able to generate virtually unlimited amounts of clean energy.  But while fusion reactors have been around since the 1950s, scientists haven’t been able to create designs that can produce energy in a sustainable manner. Standing in the way of nuclear fusion are politics, lack of funding, concerns about the power source, and potentially insurmountable technological problems, to name a few roadblocks. Today, the nuclear fusion reactors we have are stuck at the prototype stage.  However, researcher Michael Zarnstorff in New Jersey may have recently made a significant breakthrough while helping his son with a science project. In a new paper, Zarnstorff, a chief scientist at the Max Planck Princeton Research Center for Plasma Physics in New Jersey, and his colleagues describe a simpler design for a stellarator, one of the most promising types of nuclear fusion reactors…

After decades, room temperature superconductivity achieved, Bobert Service on Science.org, Oct 2020

Fulfilling a decades-old quest, this week researchers report creating the first superconductor that does not have to be cooled for its electrical resistance to vanish. There’s a catch: The new room temperature superconductor only works at a pressure equivalent to about three-quarters of that at the center of Earth. But if researchers can stabilize the material at ambient pressure, dreamed-of applications of superconductivity could be within reach, such as low-loss power lines and ultrapowerful superconducting magnets that don’t need refrigeration, for MRI machines and maglev trains.  “This is a landmark,” says Chris Pickard, a physicist at the University of Cambridge. But the extreme conditions of the experiment mean that even though it was “pretty spectacular,” says Brian Maple, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, “this is certainly not going to be useful in making a device.”

The Top 10 scientific surprises of Science News’ first 100 years, Tom Siegfried on Science News, Sep 2021

If you’ve covered science for a hundred years, you’ll have covered some surprises.  Science News turned 100 this year and celebrated with 10 of the biggest surprises they’ve seen, and in a century that included both the Wright Brothers and Apollo there was a lot to choose from.  From the groundbreaking (sorry!) theory of Plate Tectonics to the life-changing (sorry!) theory of DNA to the explosive (sorry!) implications of Nuclear Fission, the biggest takeaway might be just how common-sense we think these paradigm-shattering ideas are today.  Oh, and to meet our clickbait requirements… number 2 will blow you away!

Physicists take the most detailed image of atoms to date, Anil Oza on Science.org, Jun 2021

(from the article)- “Physicists just put Apple’s latest iPhone to shame, taking the most detailed image of atoms to date with a device that magnifies images 100 million times, Scientific American reports. A method called electron ptychography, in which a beam of electrons is shot at an object and bounced off to create a scan that algorithms use to reverse engineer the above image, were used to visualize the sample. Previously, scientists could only use this method to image objects that were a few atoms thick. But the new study lays out a technique that can image samples 30 to 50 nanometers wide—a more than 10-fold increase in resolution, they report in Science. The breakthrough could help develop more efficient electronics and batteries, a process that requires visualizing components on the atomic level.”

Could fundamental physical constants not be constant across space and time?, Ethan Siegel in BigThink, Sep 2021

(from the article)- “Every assumption, no matter how well-grounded it may be or how justified we believe we are in making it, has to be subject to challenge and scrutiny. Assuming that atoms behave the same everywhere — at all times and in all places — is reasonable, but unless the universe supports that assumption with convincing, high-precision evidence, we are compelled to question any and all assumptions. If the fundamental constants are identical at all times and places, the universe should show us that atoms behave the same everywhere we look. But do they? Depending on how you ask the question, you might not like the answer…”

“Missing Puzzle Piece” Discovered: Critical Advance in Quantum Computer Design, University of New South Wales, Aug 2021

Quantum engineers from UNSW Sydney have removed a major obstacle that has stood in the way of quantum computers becoming a reality: they discovered a new technique they say will be capable of controlling millions of spin qubits – the basic units of information in a silicon quantum processor.  Until now, quantum computer engineers and scientists have worked with a proof-of-concept model of quantum processors by demonstrating the control of only a handful of qubits.  But with their latest research, published today (August 13, 2021) in Science Advances, the team have found what they consider ‘the missing jigsaw piece’ in the quantum computer architecture that should enable the control of the millions of qubits needed for extraordinarily complex calculations.

Remembering the Scopes Monkey Trial, Noah Adams on NPR’s All Things Considered, Jul 2005

Eighty years ago, in July 1925, the mixture of religion, science and the public schools caught fire in Dayton, Tenn. The Scopes trial — or “Monkey Trial,” as it was called — dominated headlines across the country. The trial lasted just a week, but the questions it raised are as divisive now as they were back then. NPR looks back at the Scopes trial, the events that led up to it and its aftermath:

Mysterious DNA sequences, known as ‘Borgs,’ recovered from California mud, Elizabeth Pennisi on ScienceMag.org, Jul 2021

In the TV series Star Trek, the Borg are cybernetic aliens that assimilate humans and other creatures as a means of achieving perfection. So when Jill Banfield, a geomicrobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, sifted through DNA in the mud of her backyard and discovered a strange linear chromosome that included genes from a variety of microbes, her Trekkie son proposed naming it after the sci-fi aliens. The new type of genetic material was a mystery. Maybe it was part of a viral genome. Maybe it was a strange bacterium. Or maybe it was just an independent piece of DNA existing outside of cells. Whatever it is, it’s “pretty exciting,” says W. Ford Doolittle, an evolutionary biologist at Dalhousie University who was not involved with the work.

Carbon-ring molecules tied to life were found in space for the first time,

Lisa Grossman on ScienceNews.org, Mar 2021

Complex carbon-bearing molecules that could help explain how life got started have been identified in space for the first time.  These molecules, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, consist of several linked hexagonal rings of carbon with hydrogen atoms at the edges. Astronomers have suspected for decades that these molecules are abundant in space, but none had been directly spotted before.

Simpler molecules with a single ring of carbon have been seen before. But “we’re now excited to see that we’re able to detect these larger PAHs for the first time in space,” says astrochemist Brett McGuire of MIT, whose team reports the discovery in the March 19 Science.  Studying these molecules and others like them could help scientists understand how the chemical precursors to life might get started in space. “Carbon is such a fundamental part of chemical reactions, especially reactions leading to life’s essential molecules,” McGuire says. “This is our window into a huge reservoir of them.”…

Why I’m Inoculating My Kids Against The Dangers Of Scientific Evidence,

Hannah Kane in McSweeney’s, Jul 2019

Hi, I’m Nancy, mother of five beautiful children, none of whom have stepped foot in a science classroom or seen a Bunsen burner in three years. I work every day to protect them from the harmful consequences of knowing too much about how things actually work.

Some people downplay the risks of scientific knowledge, arguing that the benefits outweigh the costs. They make this claim based solely on the fact that science has led to important life-saving medical advances, revealed many wonders of the universe, and opened up vast new frontiers of human potential. But they are not considering the unintended negative side effects such as the possibility of learning something scary or feeling extremely overwhelmed…

World’s First Rechargeable Cement Battery Could One Day Power Cities,

David Mantey on ThomasNet, Jun 2021

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have created the first rechargeable cement battery. One day, the work could lead to large concrete buildings that store and deliver energy like giant municipal batteries.

The cement batteries have an iron-coated carbon fiber mesh that acts as the anode layer on top of a conductive cement-based mixture sandwiched by a nickel-coated carbon-fiber mesh cathode layer. The team added a small amount of short, electroplated carbon fibers to the cement mix to make it conductive.

Research of concrete batteries is rare. The few previous efforts to make cement-based batteries weren’t rechargeable, and the output was meager.   The applications are many, including powering LEDs, providing 4G connectivity in remote areas, and even supporting infrastructure monitoring systems. For example, they could use solar panels to power sensors used to detect cracking or corrosion.

Global warming may have already passed irreversible tipping point

Al Jazeera, Jun 2021

From the article- Global warning may have already passed an irreversible tipping point, the scientist who led the biggest-ever expedition to the Arctic has warned.  Presenting the first findings of the world’s largest mission to the North Pole, an expedition involving 300 scientists from 20 countries, Markus Rex said on Tuesday that the researchers had found that Arctic ice is retreating faster than ever before.   “The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we push warming too far,” he said during the presentation in Germany’s capital, Berlin.  “And one can essentially ask if we haven’t already stepped on this mine and already set off the beginning of the explosion.”

We Tried to Publish a Replication of a Science Paper in Science. The Journal Refused.

Arceneaux, Bakker, Gothreau, and Schumacher on Slate.com, Jun 2019

From the article- Our story starts in 2008, when a group of researchers published an article (here it is without a paywall) that found political conservatives have stronger physiological reactions to threatening images than liberals do. The article was published in Science, which is one of the most prestigious general science journals around. It’s the kind of journal that can make a career in academia.

It was a path-breaking and provocative study. For decades, political scientists and psychologists have tried to understand the psychological roots of ideological differences. The piece published in Science offered some clues as to why liberals and conservatives differ in their worldviews. Perhaps it has to do with how the brain is wired, the researchers suggested—specifically, perhaps it’s because conservatives’ brains are more attuned to threats than liberals’. It was an exciting finding, it helped usher in a new wave of psychophysiological work in the study of politics, and it generated extensive coverage in popular media. In 2018, 10 years after the publication of the study, the findings were featured on an episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast…

Does the Trolley Problem Have a Problem?

Daniel Engber on Slate.com, Jun 2018

From the article–  Picture the following situation: You are taking a freshman-level philosophy class in college, and your professor has just asked you to imagine a runaway trolley barreling down a track toward a group of five people. The only way to save them from being killed, the professor says, is to hit a switch that will turn the trolley onto an alternate set of tracks where it will kill one person instead of five. Now you must decide: Would the mulling over of this dilemma enlighten you in any way?

I ask because the trolley-problem thought experiment described above—and its standard culminating question, Would it be morally permissible for you to hit the switch?—has in recent years become a mainstay of research in a subfield of psychology. Scientists use versions of the kill-one-to-save-five hypothetical, reworded and reframed for added nuance, as a standard way to probe the workings of the moral mind. The corpus of “trolleyology” data they’ve produced hints that men are more likely than women to sacrifice a life for the sake of several others, for example, and that younger people are inclined to do the same…

A fungus could turn some cicadas into sex-crazed ‘salt shakers of death’

(from the Washington Post)-  Yellow-white fungus grows inside the cicadas, filling their insides and pushing out against their abdomens. One by one, the rings that compose the back halves of their bodies slough off and fall to the ground. Driven by a chemical compound in the fungus — and now lacking butts and genitals — the bugs try to mate like crazy.  Some researchers call these infected cicadas “flying salt shakers of death.” And they’re lurking among Brood X.  Unlike other fungal pathogens, the fungus Massospora cicadina doesn’t kill the insects on which it grows. Instead, it forces the cicadas to act in ways that promote the fungus’s spread.  “That’s what people can immediately recognize as, ‘This is a zombie, this is no longer a normal cicada, something strange is happening here,’ ” said Brian Lovett, a postdoctoral researcher at West Virginia University who co-wrote a 2020 study about the fungus…

Warp drives: Physicists give chances of faster-than-light space travel a boost

(from the Space.com)-  In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican theoretical physicist, showed that compressing spacetime in front of the spaceship while expanding it behind was mathematically possible within the laws of General Relativity. So, what does that mean? Imagine the distance between two points is 10 meters (33 feet). If you are standing at point A and can travel one meter per second, it would take 10 seconds to get to point B. However, let’s say you could somehow compress the space between you and point B so that the interval is now just one meter. Then, moving through spacetime at your maximum speed of one meter per second, you would be able to reach point B in about one second. In theory, this approach does not contradict the laws of relativity since you are not moving faster than light in the space around you. Alcubierre showed that the warp drive from “Star Trek” was in fact theoretically possible…

Breaking Down the Scarcity Mindset

(from the Harvard Crimson)-  You can’t invest in the future when your present needs are not met. Limited money and extreme focus on the short-term make it hard to plan ahead. It’s having to repeatedly buy cheap pairs of boots versus buying one expensive pair that will last your whole life. While it makes sense at the time to buy daily necessities like food rather than pay bills, putting off those tasks ends up costing more in the long run when you have to pay late fees. People are not poor because they make bad decisions; people remain poor because poverty inhibits their ability to make good decisions.

The effects of poverty and scarcity go beyond just the brain. The link between poverty and poor health is well-established, and to guarantee adequate healthcare to all Americans, we have to fix the economic conditions that make them prone to sickness in the first place. Chronic stress, often the result of constant financial worries, puts millions of Americans at increased risk for a litany of preventable illnesses like heart disease, depression, weight gain, and more…

6 billion planets like Earth? Scientists make stunning estimate

(from the Big Think)-  Astronomers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) analyzed data from NASA’s Kepler mission to reach the stunning conclusion. The information on 200,000 stars was gathered by the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft from 2009 to 2018.  The criteria used by the scientists for selecting such a planet maintained it had to be rocky, about the same size as Earth, and orbiting a star like our Sun. This planet also had to be in the habitable zone of its star, where the conditions would be just right to potentially allow for water and life.  UBC researcher Michelle Kunimoto, who co-authored the new study, and previously discovered 17 new planets (“exoplanets”) outside our Solar System, said their calculations “place an upper limit of 0.18 Earth-like planets per G-type star.” In other words, that’s about 5 planets per Sun…

Scientists Connect Human Brain To Computer Wirelessly For First Time Ever

(from The Independent)-  “The first wireless commands to a computer have been demonstrated in a breakthrough for people with paralysis.  The system is able to transmit brain signals at “single-neuron resolution and in full broadband fidelity”, say researchers at Brown University in the US.  A clinical trial of the BrainGate technology involved a small transmitter that connects to a person’s brain motor cortex.  Trial participants with paralysis used the system to control a tablet computer, the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering reports.  The participants were able to achieve similar typing speeds and point-and-click accuracy as they could with wired systems…”

Tracking Orcas with Tech: ‘The Images Took Our Breath Away’

(from The Tyee)-  “Late last summer, a team of scientists from the University of British Columbia tracked southern and northern resident killer whales off the B.C. coast using cutting-edge technology that opened a new window into the lives of these charismatic creatures.  The array of high-tech tools included aerial drones, electronic fish finders and data loggers equipped with satellite telemetry, a gyroscope, hydrophone and an underwater camera. Attached to the killer whales with suction cups, these devices allowed the scientists to record what the whales see and hear, as well as their movements in the water, and their diving and hunting behaviour. “Some of the images took our breath away,” says team leader Andrew Trites, a professor at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries Department of Zoology and the director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at UBC. “It was amazing to watch the whales rolling through the water and moving in three-dimensions…”

Life Is Inevitable Consequence Of Physics, According To This Research

(from IFL Science)-  “A few years back, a remarkable new hypothesis made its way into the scientific zeitgeist – namely, that life is an inevitable consequence of physics. The author of this concept, an associate professor of biophysics at MIT named Jeremy England, has now published the first major papers testing out this idea, and it’s looking like he might be right on the money.  England’s hypothesis is a key bridge between physics and biology. Although it’s not yet conclusively proven, it potentially holds the key to answering one of the greatest questions of all: Where did we come from?”

In a comprehensive new test, the EmDrive fails to generate any thrust

(from Phys.org)-  “The EmDrive is a hypothetical rocket that proponents claim can generate thrust with no exhaust. This would violate all known physics. In 2016, a team at NASA’s Eagleworks lab claimed to measure thrust from an EmDrive device, the news of which caused quite a stir. The latest attempt to replicate the shocking results has resulted in a simple answer: The Eagleworks measurement was from heating of the engine mount, not any new physics. Physicists were… skeptical.   But in the spirit of scientific replication, a team at the Dresden University of Technology led by Prof. Martin Tajmar rebuilt the Eagleworks experimental setup.  And they found squat…”

Ancient kauri trees capture last collapse of Earth’s magnetic field

(from Science Magazine)-  “Several years ago, workers breaking ground for a power plant in New Zealand unearthed a record of a lost time: a 60-ton trunk from a kauri tree, the largest tree species in New Zealand. The tree, which grew 42,000 years ago, was preserved in a bog and its rings spanned 1700 years, capturing a tumultuous time when the world was turned upside down—at least magnetically speaking.  Radiocarbon levels in this and several other pieces of wood chart a surge in radiation from space, as Earth’s protective magnetic field weakened and its poles flipped, a team of scientists reports today in Science. By modeling the effect of this radiation on the atmosphere, the team suggests Earth’s climate briefly shifted, perhaps contributing to the disappearance of large mammals in Australia and Neanderthals in Europe. “We’re only scratching the surface of what geomagnetic change has done,” says Alan Cooper, an ancient DNA researcher at the South Australian Museum and one of the lead authors of the study.

Scientists Create Living Entities In The Lab That Closely Resemble Human Embryos

(from NPR)-  “…scientists have created living entities in their labs that resemble human embryos; the results of two new experiments are the most complete such “model embryos” developed to date.  The goal of the experiments is to gain important insights into early human development and find new ways to prevent birth defects and miscarriages and treat fertility problems.  But the research, which was published in two separate papers Wednesday in the journal Nature Portfolio, raises sensitive moral and ethical concerns.  “I’m sure it makes anyone who is morally serious nervous when people start creating structures in a petri dish that are this close to being early human beings,” says Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, a bioethicist at Georgetown University.  “They’re not quite there yet, and so that’s good. But the more they press the envelope, the more nervous I think anybody would get that people are trying to sort of create human beings in a test tube,” Sulmasy says.”

Scientists determine the origin of extra-solar object ‘Oumuamua’

(from Phys.Org)-  “In 2017, the first interstellar object from beyond our solar system was discovered via the Pan-STARRS astronomical observatory in Hawaii. It was named ‘Oumuamua’, meaning “scout” or “messenger” in Hawaiian. The object was like a comet, but with features that were just odd enough to defy classification.  Two Arizona State University astrophysicists, Steven Desch and Alan Jackson of the School of Earth and Space Exploration, set out to explain the odd features of ‘Oumuamua and have determined that it is likely a piece of a Pluto-like planet from another solar system. Their findings have been recently published in a pair of papers in the AGU Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.  “In many ways ‘Oumuamua resembled a comet, but it was peculiar enough in several ways that mystery surrounded its nature, and speculation ran rampant about what it was,” said Desch, who is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration.  From observations of the object, Desch and Jackson determined several characteristics of the object that differed from what would be expected from a comet…”

New Result From Large Hadron Collider Challenges Leading Theory in Physics – Cannot Be Explained by Our Current Laws of Nature

(from SciTech Daily)-  “…Dr. Michael McCann said: “We know there must be new particles out there to discover because our current understanding of the Universe falls short in so many ways – we do not know what 95% of the Universe is made of, or why there is such a large imbalance between matter and anti-matter, nor do we understand the patterns in the properties of the particles that we do know about.

While we have to wait for confirmation of these results, I hope that we might one day look back on in this as a turning point, where we started to answer to some of these fundamental questions.”

Primordial lightning strikes may have helped life emerge on Earth

(from NBC News)-  “Researchers said on Tuesday that lightning strikes during the first billion years after the planet’s formation roughly 4.5 billion years ago may have freed up phosphorus required for the formation of biomolecules essential to life.

On early Earth, this chemical element was locked inside insoluble minerals. Until now, it was widely thought that meteorites that bombarded early Earth were primarily responsible for the presence of “bioavailable” phosphorus. Some meteorites contain the phosphorus mineral called schreibersite, which is soluble in water, where life is thought to have formed.”

NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover lands; UAE and China in orbit

There’s been a traffic jam forming at the Red Planet as the first successful probes from the UAE and China entered orbit, and NASA made the 10^th successful soft touchdown.  There’s already been amazing HD footage (with sound!) of the Perseverance entry and touchdown, and they haven’t even unpacked the world’s first helicopter for off-world use.  There’s three probes studying Martian Reality right now, and here’s links to all of them…

NASA Perseverance Mission

UAE Hope Mission

Chinese Tianwen-1 Mission

Why We Must Rebuild Trust in Science

(from Pew Trusts)- “When the history of our current moment is written, science will be central to the story. In the crucible of 2020, did science rebuild the societal trust needed to defeat the coronavirus? Or did a break in trust lead to a lingering pandemic that foreshadowed future failures to solve the coming crises of climate change, food and water insecurity, and economic stagnation? Historians will consider what led to this pivotal moment in the relationship of science and society and how it was resolved. Scientists and society must work together to ensure that this time of uncertainty and upheaval leads to a new era of solutions that enrich the lives and well-being of us all…”

Transparent Aluminum and Transparent Wood

One of the best moments in Star Trek is in the Trek Whale movie, when Scotty tells a 20^th Century materials engineer how to make 23^rd Century transparent aluminum.  It turns out transparent aluminum doesn’t just exist sci-fi, it’s a real (albeit expensive) thing in today’s reality.  Not only that, but we’re working on other transparent materials… like WOOD!  Here’s a glimpse into the future of materials from our vantage point in the 2000’s…

• Scientists develop transparent wood that is stronger and lighter than glass, CBC radio, Feb 2021
• Military: New Aluminum Windows Stop .50-Caliber Bullet, LiveScience, Oct 2005
• Transparent Aluminum Is ‘New State Of Matter’, Science Daily, July 2009
• ALON Optical Ceramic, Surmet.com

Not bot, not beast: Scientists create first ever living, programmable organism

(from Phys.org)- This week, a research team of roboticists and scientists published their recipe for making a new lifeform called xenobots from stem cells. The term “xeno” comes from the frog cells (Xenopus laevis) used to make them.  One of the researchers described the creation as “neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal”, but a “new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism”.  Xenobots are less than 1mm long and made of 500-1000 living cells. They have various simple shapes, including some with squat “legs”. They can propel themselves in linear or circular directions, join together to act collectively, and move small objects. Using their own cellular energy, they can live up to 10 days.  While these “reconfigurable biomachines” could

Earth Looks Like A Living Creature In This Amazing NASA Video

NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) has released a stunning video that shows Earth in a way you may have never seen before.  The video is a timelapse simulation that depicts seven days in 2005 when a category-4 typhoon developed off the coast of China. The seven-day period is repeated several times during the course of the visualization.  Scientists used data from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5), to depict the simulation’s volume-rendered clouds. This particular run of the simulation, called 7km GEOS-5 Nature Run (7km-G5NR), was executed on a supercomputer. This short visualization produced petabytes of output and referenced nearly a terabyte of brickmap files.

NASA Curiosity rover celebrates 3,000th day on Mars with stunning panorama of planet

NASA’s Curiosity rover just celebrated a major milestone — 3,000 days on the surface of Mars. To mark the occasion, the space agency has released a stunning new panorama of the red planet, captured by the rover.  Curiosity landed on Mars on August 6, 2012. However, scientists track its activities in Martian days, called “sols,” which are a bit longer than Earth days, at 24 hours and 39 minutes.  The epic new panorama, released by the space agency on Tuesday, captures the view of the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater and part of Mount Sharp, its central mountain. It was taken by Curiosity’s eyes, AKA the Mast Camera.

Mystery of massive, train-stopping millipede swarms solved

For over a century, thousands of poisonous millipedes have swarmed train tracks in the thick, forested mountains of Japan, forcing trains to grind to a halt. These “train millipedes,” so-called for their famous obstructions, would appear every so often — and then disappear again for years at a time. Now, scientists have figured out why.  It turns out that these millipedes (Parafontaria laminata armigera), endemic to Japan, have an unusually long, and synchronous, eight-year life cycle. Such long “periodical” life cycles — in which a population of animals moves through the phases of life at the same time — have only previously been confirmed in some species of cicadas with 13- and 17-year life cycles, as well as in bamboos and some other plants.

People with extreme anti-science views know the least, but think they know the most: study

Recently, researchers asked more than 2,000 American and European adults their thoughts about genetically modified foods.  They also asked them how much they thought they understood about GM foods, and a series of 15 true-false questions to test how much they actually knew about genetics and science in general. The researchers were interested in studying a perverse human phenomenon: People tend to be lousy judges of how much they know.  Across four studies conducted in three countries — the U.S., France and Germany — the researchers found that extreme opponents of genetically modified foods “display a lack of insight into how much they know.” They know the least, but think they know the most.  “The less people know,” the authors conclude, “the more opposed they are to the scientific consensus.”  “Science communicators have made concerted efforts to educate the public with an eye to bringing their attitudes in line with the experts,” they write in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang, and can still be observed today, says Nobel winner

An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics.  The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future.  “We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon.  So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points…”

Europe’s Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

There are vertical farms all over the world, from Singapore to the UK to the US. And this week, the first phase of construction was completed on what will be a major addition to the industry.  The new facility is in Denmark, in an area called Taastrup outside of Copenhagen. At 7,000 square meters (just over 73,000 square feet), it will be the biggest vertical farm in Europe. Crops will grow in stacks 14 layers high and will use more than 20,000 LED lights.  Beyond the abundance of layers and lights, it takes automation to the next level; little robots on wheels will be tasked with delivering seeds to the various rows of stacked growing shelves. Sensors combined with smart software will monitor and process more than 5,000 different data points; a key one, for example, is the intensity of the LED light as it relates to the stage of growth the plant is in…

Scientists Invent New Glue That’s Activated by Magnetic Field – Saves on Energy, Time and Space

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), have developed a new way to cure adhesives using a magnetic field.  Conventional adhesives like epoxy which are used to bond plastic, ceramics, and wood are typically designed to cure using moisture, heat, or light.  NTU’s new “magnetocuring” glue can cure by passing it through a magnetic field. Nanoparticles are designed to heat up when electromagnetic energy is passed through them, activating the curing process. The maximum temperature and rate of heating can be controlled by these special nanoparticles, eliminating overheating and hotspot formation. Without the need for large industrial ovens, the activation of the glue has a smaller footprint in space and energy consumption terms. The energy efficiency in the curing process is crucial for green manufacturing, where products are made at lower temperatures, and use less energy for heating and cooling…

The science behind kids’ belief in Santa

You’d think that this Santa saturation might make kids doubt that each one was the real deal. For one thing, they look quite different. Brewery Santa’s beard was a joke, while Christmas-tree-lighting Santa’s beard was legit. Add to that variations in outfits and jolliness levels.  But as I delved into the Santa-related research, I found I was wrong to think his omnipresence might throw kids off. It turns out that the more kids see real, live Santa Clauses, the more likely they are to think he’s real. More exposure actually tracked with stronger belief, scientists reported in Cognitive Development in 2016.  Many of these former children had their Christmas beliefs shattered around age 8, other studies suggest.  A fascinating paper from 1978 found that 85 percent of 4-year-olds believed in Santa. Five percent didn’t, and 10 percent were still thinking about it. But only 25 percent of 8-year-olds believed in Santa, with 20 percent not believing and 55 percent transitioning in their beliefs. Funnily enough, 60 percent of these same 8-year-olds still believed in the tooth fairy…

A new iron-based catalyst converts carbon dioxide into jet fuel

Today, airplanes pump a lot of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But someday, carbon dioxide sucked from the atmosphere could be used to power airplanes.  A new iron-based catalyst converts carbon dioxide into jet fuel, researchers report online December 22 in Nature Communications. If CO2, rather than oil, were used to make jet fuel, that could reduce the air travel industry’s carbon footprint — which currently makes up 12 percent of all transportation-related CO2 emissions.  The new catalyst powder is made of inexpensive ingredients, including iron, and transforms CO2 in a single step…

Unusual molecule found in atmosphere on Saturn’s moon Titan, Ashley Stricland, CNN, Oct 2020

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is the only moon in our solar system that has a thick atmosphere. It’s four times denser than Earth’s. And now, scientists have discovered a molecule in it that has never been found in any other atmosphere.  The particle is called cyclopropenylidene, or C3H2, and it’s made of carbon and hydrogen. This simple carbon-based molecule could be a precursor that contributes to chemical reactions that may create complex compounds. And those compounds could be the basis for potential life on Titan.

10 Steps That Can Restore Scientific Integrity in Government, Lauren Kurtz and Gretchen Goldman in Scientific American, Nov 2020

These scientific integrity policies are largely products of the Obama administration, building upon earlier policies that prohibited plagiarism, data manipulation and other forms of research misconduct. Designed to prevent against abuses seen in previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat, these policies represent a substantial stride forward, but there are still major holes. The last few years have illustrated that much more needs to be done to guarantee that federal scientific integrity can be protected even under tremendous political pressures…

Study Maps The Odd Structural Similarities Between The Human Brain And The Universe, Michelle Starr on ScienceAlert, Nov 2020

In a bold new pilot study, an astrophysicist and a neurosurgeon have bumped it up a notch, using quantitative analysis to compare two of the most complex systems in nature: the neuronal network in the human brain and the cosmic network of galaxies in the Universe.   It’s actually not that peculiar a comparison. You may have seen an image that occasionally gets shared around, showing a human neuron and a simulated galaxy cluster, side-by-side; the two look startlingly similar.  But there’s a lot more to the human brain – and the Universe – than how it looks…

Top 100 Images from Hubble Space Telescope

Your future home could be powered by the bricks it’s built with, Emily Pontecorvo in Grist, Aug 2020

Imagine a world where instead of threading the walls of your house with copper wires that deliver electricity from the grid, the walls themselves stored that energy, potentially drawn from a solar array on your roof.  While the science isn’t anywhere near delivering that fantasy yet, Julio D’Arcy’s lab at Washington University in St. Louis has developed a proof-of-concept simple red construction brick imbued with the ability to store energy, as well as power small devices. His team revealed its invention in a study published in Nature Communications this week.

An unusual meteorite, more valuable than gold, may hold the building blocks of life, Joshua Sokol in Science Magazine, Aug 2020

From the beginning, the inky Aguas Zarcas resembled a legendary carbonaceous chondrite that exploded in 1969 over Murchison, an Australian cattle town. Geology students helped collect about 100 kilograms of Murchison, and a local postmaster mailed pieces of it to labs across the world. To date, scientists have recognized nearly 100 different amino acids in it, many used by organisms on Earth and many others rare or nonexistent in known life. Hundreds more amino acids have been inferred but not yet identified…

Archaeologists Found 115,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Where They Shouldn’t Be, Caroline Delbert in Popular Mechanics, Sep 2020

That means their special, tiny batch of preserved footprints were made in unique conditions that also form a kind of “fingerprint” for pinning them all to the same timeframe. From there, scientists started to look at who made the footprints. Homo sapiens weren’t the only upright humanoid primate in the game, but the evidence, the scientists say, suggests we were the ones traipsing through the drying lakebed…

Chinese Asteroid Mining Robot Due to Launch in November, Evan Gough in Universe Today, Sep 2020

A Chinese company says that they’ll be launching an asteroid-mining robot by November.  Origin Space is a private company based in Beijing. Though they’re calling this an “asteroid mining robot,” it’s really a pre-cursor mission to actual mining. In reality, NEO-1 as it’s called, will be testing technologies aimed at the eventual mining of asteroids…

Rising Temperatures Are Pushing Antarctica Past Point of No Return, Scientists Warn, Marlowe Hood in ScienceAlert, Sep 2020

These devastating increases in the global waterline – enough to cripple coastal cities from Mumbai to Miami and displace hundreds of millions of people – would unfold over hundreds to thousands of years.  But the man-made greenhouse gas emissions that could guarantee such an outcome are on track to occur on a timescale measured in decades, they reported in the journal Nature.

Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50, Anil Ananthaswarmy in Scientific American, Oct 2020

Ever since Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford wrote a seminal paper about the simulation argument in 2003, philosophers, physicists, technologists and, yes, comedians have been grappling with the idea of our reality being a simulacrum. Some have tried to identify ways in which we can discern if we are simulated beings. Others have attempted to calculate the chance of us being virtual entities. Now a new analysis shows that the odds that we are living in base reality—meaning an existence that is not simulated—are pretty much even. But the study also demonstrates that if humans were to ever develop the ability to simulate conscious beings, the chances would overwhelmingly tilt in favor of us, too, being virtual denizens inside someone else’s computer…

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Sample Return Mission (asteroid Bennu)

Selected in 2011 as NASA’s next New Frontiers mission. OSIRIS-REx launched in Sept. 2016 on a 7-year voyage to return a pristine sample of asteroid Bennu.  It made contact with Bennu and collected a sample this week.

We may have spotted a parallel universe going backwards in time–

Strange particles observed by an experiment in Antarctica could be evidence of an alternative reality where everything is upside down.

Watch Atoms of Gold on FeO Move Under an Electron Microscope– Video

Some Planets May Be Better for Life Than Earth: Researchers Identify 24 Superhabitable Exoplanets– 

Earth is not necessarily the best planet in the universe. Researchers have identified two dozen planets outside our solar system that may have conditions more suitable for life than our own. Some of these orbit stars that may be better than even our sun.  A study led by Washington State University scientist Dirk Schulze-Makuch recently published in the journal Astrobiology details characteristics of potential “superhabitable” planets, that include those that are older, a little larger, slightly warmer and possibly wetter than Earth. Life could also more easily thrive on planets that circle more slowly changing stars with longer lifespans than our sun.

Reality in September 2020…

Alien life on Venus? Phosphine gas discovery is a potential game changer, Seth Shostak on NBCNews, Sep 2020

“It could be atmospheric chemistry. Or pollution from unseen volcanoes. But there’s a chance — a not insignificant chance — that scientists have made the first clear discovery of life beyond Earth. Researchers at Cardiff University in Wales and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, together with colleagues from Asian and other British universities, have just published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy in which they claim to have found a smelly, toxic gas — phosphine — high in the thick clouds of the Venusian atmosphere. On Earth, phosphine is produced by certain types of bacteria…”

Scientists Detect New Kind of Black Hole After Massive Collision, Ryan Whitwam in ExtremeTech, Sep 2020

“We still don’t understand a lot of things about black holes, which hover at the very edge of our scientific knowledge. We do know that black holes seem to fall into two categories; those that result from the collapse of a single large star and supermassive black holes that have millions of billions of solar masses. So-called intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH) between the two extremes have been elusive — until now. Scientists with the LIGO and VIRGO Scientific Collaboration report spotting an IMBH billions of light-years away thanks to peculiar gravitational waves…”

Elon Musk Says Settlers Will Likely Die on Mars. He’s Right. by Caroline Delbert in Popular Mechanics, Sep 2020

“Earlier this week, Elon Musk said there’s a “good chance” settlers in the first Mars missions will die. And while that’s easy to imagine, he and others are working hard to plan and minimize the risk of death by hardship or accident. In fact, the goal is to have people comfortably die on Mars after a long life of work and play that, we hope, looks at least a little like life on Earth…”

An unusual meteorite, more valuable than gold, may hold the building blocks of life, Joshua Sokol in Science, Aug 2020

“Meteorites are not uncommon: Every year, tens of thousands survive the plunge through Earth’s atmosphere. More than 60,000 have been found and classified by scientists. But meteorite falls, witnessed strikes that take their name from where they land, are rare—just 1196 have been documented. And even among that exclusive group, there was something extraordinary about this particular meteorite, something anyone with the right knowledge could know from the first pictures. The dull stone was, as far as rocks go, practically alive…”

Astronomy photographer of the year (2020) winners – in pictures.  The Guardian, Sep 2020

High-fidelity record of Earth’s climate history puts current changes in context by UC Santa Cruz in Phys.org, Sep 2020

“For the first time, climate scientists have compiled a continuous, high-fidelity record of variations in Earth’s climate extending 66 million years into the past. The record reveals four distinctive climate states, which the researchers dubbed Hothouse, Warmhouse, Coolhouse, and Icehouse. These major climate states persisted for millions and sometimes tens of millions of years, and within each one the climate shows rhythmic variations corresponding to changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun. But each climate state has a distinctive response to orbital variations, which drive relatively small changes in global temperatures compared with the dramatic shifts between different climate states…”

(As we were wrapping up News To Make You Furious we noticed we’d done several stories over the years that overlap heavily with Reality Studies.  Click any one below, but they’re all in our new Vault of Venom anytime you want to check them out.  Enjoy!)