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I have spent the last few years thinking, perhaps assuming that astronauts live off dried food, prepackaged and sent from Earth. There certainly is an element of that but travellers to the International Space Station have over recent years been able to feast on fresh salad grown in special units on board. Unfortunately, recent research suggests that pathogenic bacteria and fungi can contaminate the ‘greens’ even in space.

It’s been at least three years that astronauts have been able to eat fresh lettuce and other leafy items along with tortillas and powdered coffee.. Specially designed chambers on board allow them to grown plants under carefully controlled temperature, water and lights to ensure a successful harvest.  There is however an issue that the ISS is a relatively closed environment and so it is easy for bacteria and fungi to spread and astronauts to get ill. 

The International Space Station stretches out in an image captured by astronauts aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour during a fly-around in November 2021. Credit: NASA

A paper just published in Scientific Reports and NPJ Microgravity and authored by a team led by Noah Totsline explores what happens with lettuce grown under ‘simulated’ weightless environments (the device known as a clinostat rotate them so that plants did not know which way was up or down). This was achieved by being gently rotated. Plants it seems though, are pretty good at sensing gravity using their roots. The team found that plants under these conditions were more prone to infection than those on Earth in particular Salmonella.

One of the main lines of defence for plants is their stomata. These are tiny pores in the leaves, much like the pores in our skin, that close to defend when an environmental stress is detected, such as bacteria.  The team exposed plants in their micro-gravitational environment to find the plants opened the stomata instead of closing them. 

The team went a step further and introduced a natural bacteria known as UD1022 which usually helps to protect plants. In the clinostat however, it failed to help the plant to protect itself from other more harmful bacteria.

The research was not just an interesting scientific problem but does solve real world problems. Space is slowly opening up with more and more non-astronauts becoming astronauts and travelling into space and this is only going to increase. As SpaceX and the like press ahead with the commercialisation of space travel we absolutely must find a way to grow and farm sustainable and healthy food instead of prepackaged snacks if we are to become a truly space fairing civilisation. 

We are some way away from that of course but this is step one in a long journey. Sadly it is not as simple a task as sterilising the seeds since their could easily be microbes in the environment on board the ISS (or other space craft that come in the future) and perhaps it is these that pose the greatest risk. The team are now looking at ways to genetically modify plants to help them cope in the microgravity of space.

Source : PROBLEMS WITH ROCKET SALAD

The post Plants Growing in Space are at Risk from Bacterial Infections appeared first on Universe Today.

As more and more people without diabetes start to monitor their blood glucose levels, we take a look at what the evidence says about limiting your blood sugar spikes after eating

With more and more people monitoring their glucose levels in an attempt to boost their health, we take a look at what the evidence says about limiting your blood sugar spikes after eating

A raft of new measures aimed at reducing underage vaping are set to come into law next year

Please send in your wildlife photos! I have enough for a week or so, but the need is constant!

Today we have photos of Australian reptiles taken by reader Chris Taylor. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I thought that I would share photos of some of the reptiles that I have encountered.

There are three orders of reptile in Australia: Crocodilia (crocodiles), Testudines (Turtles), and Squamata (Lizards and Snakes).  I don’t encounter Crocodiles here, but the other two orders are well represented.

By far the largest order is the Squamata, and the photos here represent four of the families in the order. First of all, there is the Scincidae – Skinks, which are found throughout Australia, and one common species across much of Australia is the Blue Tongued Lizard, Tiliqua scincoides scincoides. This subspecies is found in the east and south of the continent. They are a fairly hefty animal, weighing up to 1kg (2.2lb). We encouraged them to come into the vegetable gardens by putting out pipes and rocks for them to rest in. In return they look after the garden by eating snails, slugs and insects. This particular individual has managed somehow to climb up into our old laundry room window, and doesn’t look happy the we are suggesting it might prefer to be outside again!

As its name suggests, they do have a bright blue tongue, that they use as a warning display, together with a loud hiss. But by and large they are very docile. There is another related species, the Blotched Blue-tongued Skink, Tiliqua nigrolutea, and this individual is demonstrating its warning display!

Cunningham’s skink, Egernia cunninghami.  A closely related species is the Cunningham’s Skink.  Smaller than the blue tongues, it is variable in colour, ranging from black to a brown that could be mistaken for the blue tongue.  They are relatively common here.  These were photographed in the Namadgi National park.

Eastern Water Skink, Eulamprus quoyii. Another skink that was common in out garden in our old house in the Hawkesbury Valley to the north west of Sydney, is the Eastern Water Skink.  This is much smaller and lighter than the Blue Tongue, but we welcomed it into the garden as well because it helped to control insects.

The second family here is the Agamidae or Dragons.  Whereas the skinks generally have smooth skin, the dragons are rather more spiky, culminating in the Thorny Devil (Moloch horridus). There are two species that I see often. First is the Jacky Dragon, Amphibolurus muricatus.

This photo is of an adult climbing up on a tree trunk used as a fence post.

The second photo is of a juvenile Jacky, that I saw outside my bedroom window while I was confined to bed for a while – though I was still able to take in what was going on around!  This individual is very small – the pieces of gravel are only 20mm long, so that gives some scale. I suspect it was quite a recent hatching.

Australian Water Dragon, Intellagama lesueurii howitti. These are quite large animals, growing 60 – 100 cm in length, although the tail accounts for more than half of that. The photos were taken at the Australian National Botanical Gardens in Canberra.  The first one has been fitted with a collar for tracking.

The second photo shows how long the tail is.

The third family is the Varanidae – Monitors. This includes the Lace Monitor, Varanus varius, which is often called Goanna, though this name is used for a number of different members of the Varanus genus.  They do exist in my locality, though not on my property, preferring the rocky and tree covered areas to the open paddocks.  But on a property that I used to own near Mudgee in Central West NSW, we would see them often. They are the second largest reptile in Australia, only the Perentie being bigger. They can be up to 2m long, and weigh as much as 14kg (30lb).

They have powerful claws that make them very adept climbers, like this one up the trunk of a eucalypt.

Finally, there are the Ophidia – Snakes. Canberra is often called “The Bush Capital” and as such snakes are found fairly regularly, even in the CBD.  This includes the Eastern Brown Snake, Pseudonaja textilis. A very common snake around here.  I have had a small number of them on my paddocks, and in the vicinity.  It is a beautiful slender snake, and can grow to be 2m long. It is considered to be extremely dangerous, as the toxicity of its venom is surpassed only by that of the Taipans. They are also supposed to be very aggressive, although my few encounters with them have not proved this to be the case. Many years ago, I found that Tansy and Cinnamon, two of our goats, were lying dead side by side near their shelter. I didn’t investigate enough to truly determine the cause of death, but suspect that a brown snake was responsible for this. I encountered this one on a bike ride on a path only a few kilometres from the centre of Canberra. It is probably at least 1.5m long – the path is about 3m wide. I decided to wait until it crossed over before continuing on with my trip!

Red-bellied Black Snake, Pseudechis porphyriacus. The snake that I see most commonly on my place is the red-bellied black snake.  It’s venomous, but no deaths have been reported from this snake. One of its food sources is other snakes, including the Eastern Brown, and anything that keeps them away is OK by me. Indeed, it is said although probably apocryphally, that if you have Red-bellied Blacks on your property then you will not see any Browns.  They are docile, and I’ve even got up closer than I ever intended to one that was keeping hidden in a patch or pumpkin plants in the vegetable bed.  I think I was the more surprised of the two of us. This first one had a home in an old hollow fence post that lay in the front paddock. We knew that it was there, and so were careful when we needed to work in the area, and gave it plenty of space. Here it is on a cold morning just outside its den, trying to get some sun to warm itself up.  This is quite a dark morph of the snake.

The second photo is of a lighter morph, with almost orange belly scales.

Common Death Adder, Acanthophis antarcticus. Very rarely seen, in fact I’ve only ever come across one, is the Death Adder.  The name probably derives from a corruption of “Deaf Adder”, which is how the first settlers in Australia referred to it. It is rarely seen because of its cryptic behaviour.  It will bury itself in leaf litter and coil around so that the had and tail are close together. It will wait there for hours or days, and wait for its prey to come close and so ambush it. To help with this the last part of the tail is very much thinner than the rest of the snake, and it can use this as a lure.  When a bird or mammal comes to investigate, the snake has to move very little to strike its prey.  While it is in this position it will no move away even if one were to get very close, and so because of this was thought to be deaf.  It is very venomous, but because it is so cryptic, few bites are recorded. This photo comes courtesy of my nephew Rich, who has made it a quest to find and photograph snakes!

Finally, there are the Testudinae – Turtles, including the sea turtles as well as land dwellers. This individual is of the Eastern Long Necked Turtle, Chelodina longicollis. This one is determinedly plodding down the drive to the front of my property. We had to wait for it to move before we could proceed down to the front gate, for fear of running it over, a fate that happens to too many of its kin, as they try to cross the roads around here.

Sometimes they just need a little hand to get them out of the road… Unlike some other turtles and tortoises, they don’t draw their neck back into the shell, but instead fold it sideways into the space.

Drone footage filmed off the coast of California shows a 1.5-metre-long, entirely white great white shark pup, probably just hours old – something that has never been seen before

The water that life knows and needs, the water that makes a world habitable, the water that acts as the universal solvent for all the myriad and fantastically complicated chemical reactions that make us different than the dirt and rocks, can only come in one form: liquid.

The vast, vast majority of the water in our universe is unsuitable for life. Some of it is frozen, locked in solid ice on the surface of a world too distant from its parent star or bound up in a lonely, wayward comet. The rest is vaporized, existing as a state of matter where molecules lose their electron companions, boundless and adrift through the great nebular seas that dot the galaxies, or ejected completely into the great voids between them. Either way, that water exists only one molecule at a time, at a temperature of over a million degrees yet its density so low that you could pass through it and mistake it for the cold, hard vacuum of space itself.

No, for water to be liquid it must exist in special place around a star, not too cold for it turn to ice, not too hot for it to turn to gas. It must lay within what astronomers call the habitable zone, or, if they’re feeling playful, the Goldilocks zone.

The habitable zone is different for every star throughout the galaxy, because no two stars are alike. The smallest red dwarfs are barely a tenth the mass of the Sun, with luminosities a thousand times weaker. The largest are great beasts, a hundred solar masses or more, so bright they can be seen from thousands of light-years away by the unaided eye. Around each star a simple iron law holds, the fact that the intensity of light, and all the warmth and comfort that light brings with it, diminishes with the square of the distance from the source. An object twice as far away will experience a quarter of the brightness; at a distance of four times that drops to a sixteenth, and so on. That is why Pluto, despite only sitting about 30 times further away from the Sun than the Earth, is forced to experience never-ending dim twilight, even at the height of its day.

Too far from a star and the radiant temperatures are too cold, and any water freezes. Too close, and the water slips its bonds, free to roam as a gas. In between, in a special band determined by the star’s mass, age, and brightness, sits the habitable zone, where a planet is capable – yes, merely capable – of hosting water in its liquid state on its surface.

For our own Sun, the habitable zone stretches from just within the orbit of Venus to just beyond the orbit of Mars. Three planets perfectly situated within the warm embrace of our Sun, and yet only one has life. What happened? What made our planet so special, or so lucky? It’s impossible to say for sure, because the potential of habitability is not a promise.

There is, however, one other place where we know liquid water can exist. Ironically, it’s in the frozen moons of the outer solar system. There, under surfaces of frozen ice a hundred kilometers thick sit globe-spanning liquid water oceans, with more liquid water than exists on the surface of the Earth. There the habitability isn’t given by the rays of the Sun, but from their molten cores emanating heat, driven by the gravitational warping of the giant planets they orbit. Life could certainly find a purchase there, in places of darkness that the Sun never can touch, even though there worlds are not, according to the traditional definition, habitable.

The post Is the Habitable Zone Really Habitable? appeared first on Universe Today.

There is an ongoing battle in our society to control the narrative, to influence the flow of information, and thereby move the needle on what people think and how they behave. This is nothing new, but the mechanisms for controlling the narrative are evolving as our communication technology evolves. The latest addition to this technology is the large language model AIs.

“The media”, of course, has been a large focus of this competition. On the right there is constant complaints of the “liberal bias” in the media, and on the left there are complaints of the rise of right-wing media which they feel is biased and radicalizing. The culture wars focus mainly on schools, because those schools teach not only facts and knowledge but convey the values of our society. The left views DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiates as promoting social justice while the right views it as brainwashing the next generation with liberal propaganda. This is an oversimplification, but it is the basic dynamic. Even industry has been targeted by the culture wars – which narratives are specific companies supporting? Is Disney pro-gay? Which companies fly BLM or LGBTQ flags?

But increasingly “the narrative” (the overall cultural conversation) is not being controlled by the media, educational system, or marketing campaigns. It’s being controlled by social media. This is why, when the power of social media started to become apparent, many people panicked. Suddenly it seemed we had seeded control of the narrative to a few tech companies, who had apparently decided that destroying democracy was a price they were prepared to pay for maximizing their clicks. We now live in a world where YouTube algorithms can destroy lives and relationships.

We are not yet over panicking about the influence of social media and the tech giants who control them when another player has crashed the party – artificial intelligence, chatbots, and the large language models that run them. This is an extension of the social media infrastructure, but it is enough of a technological advance to be disruptive. Here is the concern – by shaping the flow of information to the masses, social media platforms and AI can have a significant effect on the narrative, enough to create populist movements, to alter the outcome of elections, or to make or destroy brands.

It seems likely that increasingly we will be giving control of the flow of information to AI. Now, instead of searching on Google for information you can have a conversation with Chat GPT. Behind the scenes it’s still searching the web for information, but the interface is radically different. I have documented and discussed here many times how easy human brains are to fool. We have evolved circuits in our brain that construct our perception of reality and make certain judgements about how to do so. One subset of these circuits is dedicated to determining if something out there in the world has agency (are they a person or just a thing) and once the agency-algorithm determines that something is an agent, that then connects to the emotional centers of our brain. We then feel toward that apparent agent and treat them as if they were a person. This extends to cartoons, digital entities, and even abstract shapes. Physical form, or the lack thereof, does not seem to matter because it is not part of the agency algorithm.

It is increasingly well established that people respond to an even half-way decent chatbot as if that chatbot were a person. So now when we interface with “the internet”, looking for information, we may not just be searching for websites but talking with an entity – an entity that can sound friendly, understanding, and authoritative. Even though we may know completely that this is just an AI, we emotionally fall for it. It’s just how our brains are wired.

A recent study demonstrates the subtle power that such chatbots can have. They asked subjects to talk with ChatGPT-3 about black lives matter (BLM) and climate change, but gave them no other instructions. They also surveyed the subjects attitudes toward these topics before and after the conversation. Those who scored negatively toward BLM or climate change ranked their experience half a point lower on a five point scale (which is significant), so they were unhappy when the AI told them things they did not agree with. But, more importantly, after the interaction their attitudes moved 6% in the direction of accepting climate change and the BLM movement. We don’t know from this study if this effect is enduring, or if it is enough to affect behavior, but at least temporarily ChatGPT did move the needle a little. This is a proof of concept.

So the question is – who controls these large language model AI chatbots, who we are rapidly making the gatekeepers to information on the internet?

One approach is to make it so that no one controls them (as much as possible). Through transparency, regulation, and voluntary standards, the large tech companies can try to keep their thumbs off the scale as much as possible, and essentially “let the chips fall where they may.” But this is a problem and early indications are this approach likely won’t work. The problem is that even if they are trying not to influence the behavior of these AI, they can’t help but to have a large influence on them by the choices they make about how to program and train them. There is no neutral approach. Every decision has a large influence, and they have to make choices. What do they prioritize.

If, for example, they prioritize the user experience, well, as we see in this study, one way to improve the user experience is to tell people what they want to hear, rather what the AI determines is the truth. How much does the AI caveat what it says? How authoritative should it sound? How thoroughly should it source whatever information it gives? And how does it weight different sources that it is using? Further, we know that these AI applications can “hallucinate” – just make up fake information. How do we stop that, and to what extent (and how) to we build in fact-checking processes into the AI?

These are all difficult and challenging questions, even for a well-meaning tech company acting in good faith. But of course, there are powerful actors out there who would not act in good faith. There is already deep concern about the rise of Tik Tok, and the ability of China to control the flow of information through that app to favor pro-China news and opinion. How long will it be before ChatGPT is accused of having a liberal bias, and ConservaGPT is created to combat that (just like the Conservapedia, or Truth Social)?

The narrative wars go on, but they seem to be increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer choke points of information. That, I think, is the real risk. And the best solution may be an anti-trust approach – make sure there are lots of options out there, so no one or few options dominate.

The post Controlling the Narrative with AI first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Covering paintings with very thin layers of graphene, or mixing graphene-derived materials into mortars used for repairing historical structures, could protect them from degrading

SLIM was put into hibernation after landing on the moon upside down, but it woke up when sunlight hit its solar panels

Conventional thermodynamics says that heating and cooling are essentially mirror images of each other, but an experiment with a tiny silica sphere suggests otherwise

A couple of weeks ago, I discussed why antivax quacks' claimed biological mechanisms for COVID-19 vaccine "shedding" reminded me of homeopaths. Confabulation about fantastical scientific mechanisms continues, courtesy of "A Midwestern Doctor."

The post Antivax quacks are continuing to make up fantastical biological mechanisms for COVID-19 vaccine “shedding” first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

As part of the Artemis Program, NASA intends to establish all the necessary infrastructure to create a “sustained program of lunar exploration and development.” This includes the Lunar Gateway, an orbiting habitat that will enable regular trips to and from the surface, and the Artemis Base Camp, which will permit astronauts to remain there for up to two months. Multiple space agencies are also planning on creating facilities that will take advantage of the “quiet nature” of the lunar environment, which includes high-resolution telescopes.

As part of this year’s NASA Innovative Advance Concepts (NIAC) Program, a team from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has proposed a design for a lunar Long-Baseline Optical Imaging Interferometer (LBI) for imaging at visible and ultraviolet wavelengths. Known as the Artemis-enabled Stellar Imager (AeSI), this proposed array of multiple telescopes was selected for Phase I development. With a little luck, the AeSI array could be operating on the far side of the Moon, taking detailed images of stellar surfaces and their environments.

The proposal was made by Kenneth Carpenter and his colleagues at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Carpenter is the Hubble Operations Project Scientist at GSFC and the ground system scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST). As they note in their proposal, NASA’s return to the Moon offers several significant opportunities for him-impact scientific research. Not the least of these is the potential for creating observatories that take advantage of the “radio quiet” environment and extended periods of darkness on the far side of the Moon.

Artist’s illustration of a radio telescope inside a crater on the Moon. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Due to the tidally locked nature of its orbit, where one side of the Moon is always facing toward Earth, the Moon’s day/night cycle lasts for 14 days. This means a “lunar day” consists of two weeks of continuous sunlight, while a lunar night consists of two weeks of continuous darkness. At the same time, the Moon’s airless environment means that any observations by optical telescopes will not be subject to atmospheric interference. This makes the far side of the Moon a pristine environment for conducting high-resolution interferometric imaging, a method where multiple telescopes collect light to look for patterns of interference.

Astronomers extract data from these patterns to create a detailed picture of celestial objects that are difficult to resolve with conventional telescopes. This same technique allowed the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of radio telescopes, to acquire the first image of a black hole ever taken. According to the team, a lunar interferometry array has immense scientific potential and could be built incrementally to limit construction costs:

“This can resolve the surfaces of stars, probe the inner accretion disks surrounding nascent stars and black holes, and begin the technical journey towards resolving surface features and weather patterns on the nearest exoplanets. A fully developed facility will be large and expensive, but it need not start that way. The technologies can be developed and tested with 2 or 3 small telescopes on short baselines. Once the technology is developed, baselines can be lengthened, larger telescopes can be inserted, and the number of telescopes can be increased. Each of these upgrades can be accomplished with minimal disruption to the rest of the system.”

Despite these advantages, the team notes how previous studies on interferometers in space concentrated on designs for free-flying arrays. This was largely due to the 2003-2005 NASA Vision Missions Studies that examined the trade-offs between free-flying space concepts and kilometer-sized interferometers built on the lunar surface. The study concluded that it was better to pursue space-based free-flyers, given the absence of pre-existing human infrastructure on the lunar surface that could provide power and regular maintenance.

Illustration of NASA astronauts on the lunar South Pole. Mission ideas we see today have at least some heritage from the early days of the Space Age. Credit: NASA

However, with the Artemis Program, Carpenter and his team argue that this situation is now changing. With the completion of surface habitats, transportation, drilling, and power facilities planned for the coming years, now is a good time to investigate the possibility of building interferometers on the lunar surface. “Our study of a lunar surface-based interferometer will be a huge step forward to larger arrays on both the moon and free-flying in space, over a wide variety of wavelengths and science topics,” they write. “It will determine, given the current and anticipated state of our space technology and human exploration plans, whether it is better to pursue designs for the lunar surface or for deep space.”

They further envision that a lunar interferometer will lead to advancements in astrophysics, like the study of stellar magnetic activity, the nuclei of active galaxies, and the dynamics of cosmological phenomena on many scales. The design and construction of such a facility will address key engineering concerns, like the best way to incorporate variable-length optical lines, the best configurations for the telescopes, and the optimal mirror size for meeting both technical and scientific goals. They also hope to create a plan for maintaining and expanding the facility over time using a mix of human and robotic support.

Beyond that, the anticipated benefits include technical advances that will enable a UV-optical interferometer and space-based missions capable of imaging black holes (similar to the EHT), searching for biosignatures, and directly imaging rocky exoplanets around other stars. Carpenter and his colleagues also anticipate that the creation of a major facility on the Moon, in conjunction with the Artemis Program’s human exploration goals, will generate tremendous public interest and engagement:

“Finally, this effort will make people dream again – and remember that we can do great things, even in [the] face of difficult times. Our study will help keep the focus on the grandeur of the Universe and what humans can do if they work hard together. Our project will excite generations of future Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics (STEAM) workers, who will be inspired by this bold vision.”

Further Reading: NASA

The post NASA Wants to Put a Massive Telescope on the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

According to my go-to source, the Oxford English Dictionary, “civil disobedience is defined this way:

Rebellion of the populace against a governing power; (in later use) spec. refusal to obey the laws, commands, etc., of a government or authority as part of an organized, non-violent political protest or campaign.

The three key aspects here involve deliberately breaking the law, doing it as part of a “political protest or campaign”, and doing it in a peaceful, nonviolent way. But I would add potential effectiveness: the actions must aim at achieving political results, and do so in a way that could reach those results.

The archetypal examples of civil disobedience that met these four criteria are the nonviolent protests of Gandhi and the Indian people that led the British to “quit India” in 1947, and the American civil rights actions of the 1960s that led to the nation-changing civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.

Gandhi, of course, was one inspiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., who adopted Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance. These were epitomized in his “Salt March” of 1930, which began when Gandhi led protestors on a three-week, 200-mile march to the sea, where Gandhi picked up a lump of salty mud, which was converted into salt. This violated the onerous “salt tax” that the British imposed on Indians buying the produce. Below is the moment that changed India; the caption is “Mahatma Gandhi at Dandi Beach 6 April 1930. Standing behind him is his second son Manilal Gandhi and Mithuben Petit.”

This civil disobedience launched an India-wide resistance movement, and a peaceful one, which played a major role in India gaining its independence in 1947.  Civil disobedience is best used as a way of changing people’s minds. And the Salt Resistance kindled similar protests across India, promoted other resistance, and eventually changed the mind of the British rulers. Here’s a video:

 

To quote Wikipedia:

The Salt Satyagraha campaign was based upon Gandhi’s principles of non-violent protest called satyagraha, which he loosely translated as “truth-force” Literally, it is formed from the Sanskrit words satya, “truth”, and agraha, “insistence”. In early 1920 the Indian National Congress chose satyagraha as their main tactic for winning Indian sovereignty and self-rule from British rule and appointed Gandhi to organise the campaign. Gandhi chose the 1882 British Salt Act as the first target of satyagraha. The Salt March to Dandi, and the beating by the colonial police of hundreds of nonviolent protesters in Dharasana, which received worldwide news coverage, demonstrated the effective use of civil disobedience as a technique for fighting against social and political injustice. The satyagraha teachings of Gandhi and the March to Dandi had a significant influence on American activists Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, and others during the Civil Rights Movement for civil rights for African Americans and other minority groups in the 1960s. The march was the most significant organised challenge to British authority since the Non-cooperation movement of 1920–22, and directly followed the Purna Swaraj declaration of sovereignty and self-rule by the Indian National Congress on 26 January 1930 by celebrating Independence Day.  It gained worldwide attention which gave impetus to the Indian independence movement and started the nationwide Civil Disobedience Movement which continued until 1934 in Gujarat.

A key principle of satyagraha is that the protest must be peaceful, and the protestors must take what punishment is dished out. One must, according to Gandhi, “Suffer the anger of the opponent” without retaliating.  (As you see above, that happened: Gandhis and thousands of other protestors were beaten and arrested.

When adopted by the American Civil Rights Movement, these principles were adopted wholesale. Rosa Parks protested an unjust segregation law and was arrested for peacefully sitting in the front of a bus and refusing to move.  The blacks and whites who demonstrated together at the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins in Mississippi and North Carolina were peacefullyt protesting an immoral segregation law, and, as the video shows below, the protestors were jeered, pushed, and had food dumped over them, but did not resist.

If this video disappears, see it here.

The most iconic instances of civil disobedience that provoked violence by authorities, leading to sympathy for the protestors and eventually ending in the changing the laws, were the marches and civil protests in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama in 1963 and 1965, respectively, which led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965. Two videos:

“Bloody Sunday” in Selma: March 7, 1965:

The sight of peaceful protestors, both black and white, being attacked by dogs, drenched by fire hoses, run down by horses, and battered with billy clubs—all this was too much for America, and bent the moral arc upwards. It was the visuals, and the knowledge that the protestors were peaceful, yet protesting unjust laws and getting injured for their actions—all this horrified viewers. It’s one thing to read about it, but another to see it.  And in the end, this led to the greatest advance in civil rights in a century.

Protests like this one below are not peaceful. While the painting wasn’t damaged, the walls were, and we had simple vandalism.

NEW – Climate radicals attack the Mona Lisa painting in the Louvre Museum, Paris.pic.twitter.com/OP3AGiNe0W

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) January 28, 2024

From the NYT report:

Two protesters from an environmental group hurled pumpkin-colored soup on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday, splashing the bulletproof glass that protects the most famous painting in the world, but not apparently damaging the work itself.

As the customary crowd around the 16th-century painting by Leonardo da Vinci gasped in shock, the protesters, two young women, followed up their attack by passing under a barrier and standing on either side of the artwork, hands raised in an apparent salute.

“What is more important? Art or the right to have a healthy and sustainable food system?” the activists said, speaking in French. “Our agricultural system is sick.” They were led away by Louvre security guards.

It was not immediately clear how the women got the soup through the elaborate security system at the museum, which borders the Seine and contains a vast art and archaeological collection spanning civilizations and centuries.

One of the women removed her jacket to reveal the words Riposte Alimentaire, or Food Response, on a white T-shirt. Riposte Alimentaire is part of a coalition of protest groups known as the A22 movement. They include Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, the group that poured tomato soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London in 2022.

Does this help the cause of climate change? I doubt it. You might say it does because it calls attention to the problem, but I’m guessing that most of the people who saw this were angry at the protestors and not inclined to take a more salubrious view towards the idea that humans are changing the climate.  This is not only not civil disobedience, but, in my view, ineffective and immature.  Why, then, are they doing it? Your guess is as good as mine.

What about blocking traffic, bridge, and tunnels? This is the speciality of pro-Palestinian demonstrators; an example from Los Angeles is below.

Does this help the protestors accomplish their aims, which is either to bring peace in the Middle East, often to erase Israel and extend Palestine “from the river to the sea”? I doubt it: those whose cars are blocked may be more aware of the protests, but I don’t think they’ll become more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.  But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe impressionable young people, who are ignorant of history but impressed by the loud, aggressive demonstrations of those favoring Palestine, will come to favor their cause. After all, it is the young who most take the side of Hamas (or Palestine) in the Hamas/Israel war.

At any rate, this is the new form of civil disobedience, although the protestors don’t willingly take punishment. Often there is  no punishment: when pro-Palestinian protestors illegally blocked the University of Chicago’s administration building, or, last Friday, did a lie-in in the Pret a Manger campus food-and-coffee shot, blocking entry, the University police stood by and did nothing.  Protestors here were arrested last year for conducting a sit-in in the admissions office, but the charges were dropped. (I am prevented from learning if the University will exercise its own sanctions for violating university regulations.)

This is the new form of civil disobedience in which protestors publicize a cause, violate regulations and laws, but face little or no punishment. And often they resist punishment or feel that they don’t deserve it. Publicity may be all they want, but it seems to me that political protest must go beyond publicizing a cause, but, to paraphrase Karl Marx, must have a chance of changing the world.

Do these protestors actually accomplish the kind of change they want?  I’ll leave it to the readers to discuss the issue, and I would appreciate hearing as many readers’ takes as possible.

In the early days of telescopic astronomy, you could only focus on one small region of the sky at a time. Careful observations had to be done by hand, and so much of the breakthrough work centered around a particular object in the sky. A nebula or galaxy, quasar or pulsar. But over the years we’ve been able to build telescopes capable of capturing a wide patch of sky all at once, and with automation, we can now map the entire sky. Early sky surveys took years to complete, but many modern sky surveys can look for changes on the order of weeks or days. This ability to watch for changes across the sky is changing the way we do astronomy, and it is beginning to yield some interesting results. As a case in point, an infrared sky survey is revealing hidden stars we hadn’t noticed before.

In a series of papers published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the authors have analyzed data from a decade-long survey called the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope (VISTA). VISTA allows astronomers to keep an eye on hundreds of millions of stars at infrared wavelengths. In these works, the team combed through the observations to focus on about 200 stars that showed the most dramatic shifts in brightness. These transient changes are important because they can reveal the subtle dynamics of stars.

Artist’s impression of an eruption in the disc of matter around a newborn star. Credit: Philip Lucas/University of Hertfordshire

One goal of the studies was to look for very young stars. Stars in the earliest moments of transition toward becoming true fusion-powered stars. And within their selected stars they found 32 erupting protostars. All of them experienced a rapid increase of at least a factor of 40, and some brightened as much as a factor of 300. The outbursts lasted for months or years, and they seem to occur within the disk of matter surrounding the young stars. Based on the dynamics, these bursts can accelerate the growth of young stars, but they could also make it more difficult for planets to form. They refer to these turbulent protostars as squalling newborns.

The team also found a surprise. Deep within the center of our galaxy, they found 21 red giant stars with dramatic brightness changes. They turned out to be a new type of red giant known as old smokers. The center of our galaxy is rich with heavy elements, so these red giants have a high metalicity. As they age, they can cast off clouds of dust that can obscure the star for a time. So the star temporarily fades from view and then re-brightens as the clouds disperse. This discovery could change our understanding of how heavy elements are released into the galaxy to be used by new stars.

Reference: Lucas, P W, et al. “The most variable VVV sources: eruptive protostars, dipping giants in the nuclear disc and others.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 582.2 (2024): 1789–1822.

Reference: Guo, Zhen, et al. “Spectroscopic confirmation of high-amplitude eruptive YSOs and dipping giants from the VVV survey.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 582.2 (2024): 1769–1788.

Reference: Peña, Carlos Conteras, et al. “On the incidence of episodic accretion in Class I YSOs from VVV.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 582.2 (2024): 1823–1840.

Reference: Guo, Zhen, et al. “Multiwavelength detection of an ongoing FUOr-type outburst on a low-mass YSO.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 582.2 (2024): L115–L122.

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This morning I was surprised to read this headline in the NYT (click to read, or find it archived here). A halt in fighting for weeks?

Here’s the gist of the “deal” as the NYT reports it:

American-led negotiators are edging closer to an agreement in which Israel would suspend its war in Gaza for about two months in exchange for the release of more than 100 hostages still held by Hamas, a deal that could be sealed in the next two weeks and would transform the conflict consuming the region.

Negotiators have developed a written draft agreement merging proposals offered by Israel and Hamas in the last 10 days into a basic framework that will be the subject of talks in Paris on Sunday. While there are still important disagreements to be worked out, negotiators are cautiously optimistic that a final accord is within reach, according to U.S. officials who insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive talks.

President Biden spoke by phone separately Friday with the leaders of Egypt and Qatar, who have served as intermediaries with Hamas, to narrow the remaining differences. He is also sending his C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, to Paris for Sunday’s talks with Israeli, Egyptian and Qatari officials. If Mr. Burns makes enough progress, Mr. Biden may then send his Middle East coordinator, Brett McGurk, who just returned to Washington, back to the region to help finalize the agreement.

“Both leaders affirmed that a hostage deal is central to establishing a prolonged humanitarian pause in the fighting and ensure additional lifesaving humanitarian assistance reaches civilians in need throughout Gaza,” the White House said in a statement Friday night summarizing the president’s conversation with Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, Qatar’s prime minister. “They underscored the urgency of the situation and welcomed the close cooperation among their teams to advance recent discussions.”

In a statement in Israel on Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed his commitment to securing the release of those hostages who were not freed as part of a more limited agreement in November. “As of today, we have returned 110 of our hostages and we are committed to returning all of them home,” he said. “We are dealing with this and we are doing so around the clock, including now.”

. . . The deal now coming together would be more expansive in scope than the previous one, officials say. In the first phase, fighting would stop for about 30 days while women, elderly and wounded hostages were released by Hamas. During that period, the two sides would work out details of a second phase that would suspend military operations for roughly another 30 days in exchange for Israeli soldiers and male civilians being held. The ratio of Palestinians to be released from Israeli prisons is still to be negotiated but that is viewed as a solvable issue. The deal would also allow for more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

I found this report dubious for several reasons. First, I don’t believe that Israel would suspend action in Gaza for two months, as that would give Hamas a huge opportunity to revive itself. Second, Netanyahu’s statement is hardly expressive of someone looking for a compromise, but a simple assertion that Israel is working to get the hostages released.  Third, the hostages would not all be released at once, but in dribs and drabs. That is not something that’s propitious, especially because of condition #4: Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons are also to be released. And I’m very distressed that no deal has ever been proposed to let all the hostages go at once. There are about 120, but I suspect that about 20 of them are dead.  The International Court of Justice stipulated release of all the hostages now, but of course Hamas won’t do it and the world is hardly even mentioning that.  The UN in particular, which created the International Court of Justice and elects its 15 judges, should be pressuring Hamas and Palestine hard on the hostage issue. If Israel does obey the ICJ’s stipulations, then Palestine and Hamas should as well.

And then, when I read the website below, which gives opinions expressed in Israeli news, I became even more dubious.

The two paragraphs below, in informal language, are from Balkonic, a website that translate Israeli news from Hebrew into Polish. According to Malgorzata, it has been an almost totally reliable source of information, and the translator makes corrections when he/she is wrong.  This time the translator said what’s below in Polish, and I’ve used Google translate to put it into English. It’s jargon, but that’s the way this informal website is written.

and again some fake news from the new york times, which reports, that ‘there is progress towards the release of all the kidnapped in exchange for a 2-month break in the war’… of course, in Israel they deny this information…

2 months yeah… I’m not saying that it would be total surrender to Hamas, practically the end wars and Hamas rearming at a rapid pace, but it is clear that Hamas would leave a few kidnapped people as a human shield and a bargaining chip… what normal-thinking Israeli can believe in such nonsense…

Now that doesn’t give sources, which is why I’m also taking Balkonic with a grain of salt. However, my suggestion is to take the NYT report with many grains of salt, and not start thinking that a cease-fire and hostage release are at hand.

We do not yet know how, where, or why life first appeared on our planet. Part of the difficulty is that “life” has no strict, universally agreed-upon definition.

Normally this is not an issue, as the vast majority of life is most definitely alive, and only biologists interested in the extreme edges – viruses, prions, and the like – need to worry about precise classifications. But to study the origins of life we must, by necessity, examine a process that takes non-living matter and fundamentally changes it. Presumably this process happened in stages, with fits and starts along the way, and so the line between uncoordinated chemical reactions and the beginnings of vibrancy must be blurred.

It’s helpful here to present at least a simple working definition of life, not to rewrite the biology textbooks, but so that at least we can properly frame the discussion of life’s origins. And for those purposes a simple statement will suffice: life is that which is subject to Darwinian evolution. That is, life experiences natural selection, that unceasing pressure that chooses traits and characteristics to pass down to a new generation through the simple virtue of their survivability. If the trait contributes in some way, even circuitously, to the survivability of an organism and its ability to reproduce, it persists. All else is discarded (or, at best, gets carried unceremoniously along for the ride).

Earth is the only known place in the solar system, in the galaxy, in the entire universe where Darwinian evolution takes place.

To succeed at evolution and separate itself from mere chemical reactions, life must do three things. First, it must somehow store information, such as the encoding for various processes, traits, and characteristics. This way the successful traits can pass from one generation to another.

Second, life must self-replicate. It must be able to make reasonably accurate copies of its own molecular structure, so that the information contained within itself has the chance to become a new generation, changed and altered based on its survivability.

Lastly, life must catalyze reactions. It must affect its own environment, whether for movement, or to acquire or store energy, or grow new structures, or all the many wonderful activities that life does on a daily basis.

By interacting with its environment, making copies of itself, and storing information (like how to interact with the environment and make copies of itself), life can evolve, growing in complexity and specialization over geologic time, from humble molecules to conscious minds capable of peering into its own shrouded origins.

In the modern era, with billions of years of practice behind it, life on Earth has evolved a dizzying array of chemical and molecular machines to propagate itself – a menagerie so complex and interconnected that we do not yet fully understand it. But a basic picture has emerged. Put exceedingly simply (for I would hate for you to mistake me for a biologist), life accomplishes these tasks with a triad of molecular tools.

One is the DNA, which through its genetic code stores information using combinations of just four molecules: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. The raw ability of DNA to store massive amounts of information is nothing short of a miracle; our own digital system of 1’s and 0’s (invented because it’s much simpler to tell if a circuit is on or off than some stage in-between) is the closest comparison we can make to DNA’s information density. Natural languages don’t even earn a place on the chart.

The second component is RNA, which is intriguingly similar to DNA but with two subtle, but significant, differences: RNA swaps out thymine for uracil in its codebase, and contains the sugar ribose, which is one oxygen atom short of the deoxyribose of DNA. RNA also stores information but, again speaking only in generalities, has the main job of reading the chemical instructions stored in the DNA and using that to manufacture the last member of the triad, proteins.

“Proteins” is a generic catch-all term for the almost uncountable varieties of molecular machines that do stuff: they snip apart molecules, bind them back together, manufacture new ones, hold structures together, become structures themselves, move important molecules from one place to another, transform energy from one form to another, and so on.

Proteins have one additional function: they perform the job of unraveling DNA and making copies of it. Thus the triad completes all the functions of life: DNA stores information, RNA uses that information to manufacture proteins, and the proteins interact with the environment and perform the self-replication of DNA. This cycle allows living organisms to experience the gift of evolution.

And this cycle is, as I said, gloriously complex and obviously the result of billions of years of fine-tuning and refinement. The interconnected nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins means that it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze, because if only one component is missing then the whole system falls apart – a three-legged table with one missing cannot stand.

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Sensible Medicine doctors often utter the words "do an RCT". So why are their readers so ignorant about RCTs?

The post Why Are Sensible Medicine Doctors Indifferent to the Nonsense Comments of Sensible Medicine Commentators? As Instructed, I Consider the Dualities of Interest and Motivating Biases. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a collaborative effort between NASA, the ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), has revealed some stunning new images of the Universe. These images have not only been the clearest and most details views of the cosmos; they’ve also led to new insight into cosmological phenomena. The latest image, acquired by Webb‘s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), is of the star-forming nebula N79, located about 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The image features a bright young star and the nebula’s glowing clouds of dust and gas from which new stars form.

The image above is centered on one of the three giant molecular cloud complexes – dubbed N79 South (S1) – a region dominated by interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionized. The star is identifiable as the brightest spot in the image, surrounded by six large spokes of light that cross the image. The processed image uses many different colors to indicate different infrared wavelengths, with near-infrared light (7.7-10 microns) shown in blue, while mid-infrared wavelengths (10, 15, and 21 microns) are shown in cyan, yellow, and red (respectively).

The Tarantula Nebula as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Webb ERO Production Team.

This N79 nebula spans over 500 parsecs (1,630 light-years) in the largely unexplored southwest region of the LMC and is often regarded as the younger sibling to the Tarantula Nebula (aka. 30 Doradus). This nebula was imaged recently by Webb (see above), where combined light from varying wavelengths created a detailed image revealing many interesting features (like star-forming regions astronomers were not expecting to find). However, research suggests that for the past 500,000 years, N79 has had star formation efficiency more than twice that of the Tarantula Nebula.

Several other bright objects can be seen in the cloud, which are stars in the early stages of formation (aka. protostars) shown in great detail as layers of colorful wisps. Thanks to Webb‘s ability to capture longer and shorter wavelengths of infrared light, these latest image provides insight into the nebula’s star forming regions. Since shorter wavelengths are absorbed or scattered by dust grains, mid-infrared light reveals what is happening deeper inside the clouds (which include some young protostars). The image shows a distinct “starburst” pattern surrounding a bright object.

This is known as a “diffraction spike,” an artifact only visible around very bright and compact objects that arises from the design of a telescope’s mirrors. In this case, the six diffraction spikes extending from the center are due to the hexagonal symmetry of Webb’s eighteen primary mirror segments. Astronomers are particularly interested in star-forming regions because their chemical composition resembles that of nebulas observed when the Universe was only a few billion years old.

Unlike nebulae in the Milky Way today, star formation was at its peak during this time, producing particularly massive stars with low concentrations of metal and short-lived by current standards. By taking details images from N79 and similar nebulae, astronomers can compare and contrast star-formation rates to deep observations of distant galaxies in the early Universe.

Webb images of early galaxies shaped like surfboards and pool noodles. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA

These latest observations by Webb are part of a program to study the evolution of circumstellar discs and envelopes around stars in formation over a wide range of mass and evolutionary stages. Webb‘s sensitivity will allow astronomers for the first time, to detect these planet-forming disks around stars of similar mass to that of our Sun and at distances comparable to that of the LMC (around 160,000 light-years). This will shed light on how planetary systems like our own formed and evolved, potentially providing clues as to where life may have also emerged in our galaxy.

Further Reading: ESA

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