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Biodegradable electronics allow for medical devices -- such as drug delivery systems, pacemakers or neural implants -- to safely degrade into materials that are absorbed by the body after they are no longer needed. But if the water-soluble devices degrade too quickly, they cannot accomplish their purpose. Now, researchers have developed the ability to control the dissolve rate of these biodegradable electronics by experimenting with dissolvable elements, like inorganic fillers and polymers, that encapsulate the device.

If history has taught us one thing, it is that science fiction often gives way to science fact. Consider the Star Trek communicator and the rise of flip phones in the late 1990s and early 2000s, or how 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted orbiting space stations and reusable space planes – like the International Space Station (ISS) and the Space Shuttle. And who can forget Jules Verne’s classic, From the Earth to the Moon, and how it anticipated that humans would one day walk on the Moon? Almost a century later, this dream would be realized with the Apollo Program.

The latest comes from Cornell University, where a team of researchers has developed a novel in-suit urine collection and filtration system inspired by the suits the Fremen wore in Frank Herbert’s Dune. Once integrated into NASA’s standard spacesuit—the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU)—this system has the potential to provide astronauts with additional water while reducing the risk of hygiene-related medical events. In short, the stillsuit technology has the potential to enable longer-duration missions on the surface of the Moon, Mars, and orbit.

The research team was led by student researchers Sofia Etlin, Luca Bielski, and Julianna Rose, specialists in space medicine, ornithology, and plant science at Cornell University. They were joined by multiple colleagues from the Department of Biology and the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences at Cornell University. Their paper that described their system appeared on July 11th in Frontiers in Space Technologies. As they indicate in their study, astronauts have been conducting extravehicular activities (EVAs) aboard the ISS using the same spacesuits as their Apollo predecessors.

The Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU). Credit: NASA

These suits include a disposable diaper, the Maximum Absorbency Garment (MAG), which collects urine and feces during EVAs lasting up to 8 hours. According to a report by the Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer (OCHMO), astronauts are expected to have seven urination and two defecation events daily, but the frequency varies during spacewalks. Based on the 37 EVAs conducted aboard the ISS between 2021 and 2023, NASA recorded an average spacewalk duration of 6 hours and 26 minutes, while the longest lasted 8 hours and 56 minutes.

Exposure to waste for extended periods leads to hygiene problems that could develop into urinary tract infections (UTIs) and gastrointestinal distress. In addition, the current EMU comes with a 0.95 liter (0.25 gallon) In-suit Drink Bag (IDB). According to NASA guidelines, this volume is roughly 25% to 35% of what an astronaut needs to consume daily – 3.7 liters (1 gallon) for men and 2.7 liters (0.71 gallons) for women. Given that missions on the lunar surface and Mars are expected to entail long-duration EVAs, neither of these systems is sufficient for NASA’s Moon to Mars mission architecture. As Etlin told Universe Today via email:

The next-generation spacesuits, known as the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU), were designed to reflect the recently updated Extravehicular Activity (EVA) hydration guideline of approximately 240 mL (~8 oz) per hour – effectively increasing the suit’s water supply to 2 liters (0.5 gallons). But as Etlin told Universe Today via email, these designs still fall short in the hygiene department. “In the new generation of spacesuits, which are currently being produced by the company Axiom Space, the system that deals with urine is being left as it was in the original suits from the 70s,” she said.

To address this, the team developed a novel in-suit urine collection and filtration system that addresses both concerns. Not only will it ensure that astronauts have a reserve supply of water that is replenished as they conduct long-duration EVAs. It also addresses the issue of health and hygiene by preventing the astronauts from remaining in contact with their urine. As Etlin explained, the inspiration came from the Fremen stillsuits featured in Frank Herbert’s Dune, which she read as an undergrad in 2022:

“In the novel and film adaptations, the stillsuit is a full-body suit worn by the Fremen, the people of the desert planet Arrakis. It collects all water produced by their body—primarily sweat and urine—and filters it into drinking water, helping them survive on their water-scarce planet. As I dove more into space, I came across Dr. Chris Mason through his book, The Next 500 Years, and decided to cold-email him, presenting my stillsuit idea. We had the chance to meet a couple of months later, and his first thought was: ‘Why not build this into a spacesuit for astronauts?'”

Artist’s illustration of the new spacesuit NASA and Axiom are designing for Artemis astronauts. It’s called the xEMU, or Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit. Credit: NASA

However, instead of building a full-body suit to accommodate this new system, the team designed a module focused specifically on urine collection and filtration that can fit into existing spacesuits. In time, a multidisciplinary team that included Mason, Bielski, and Rose was assembled, and from this, their stillsuit technology was born! As Elfin explained, the new system consists of two elements: the Urine Collection Device (UCD) and the Urine Filtration System (UFS).

“The first part of our design would replace the diaper, or MAG, that the astronauts currently wear with a garment that sucks urine away from the body when the astronaut starts to urinate. The key function of this is to avoid excessive exposure to urine, which causes some of the hygiene issues we outline in the paper. Next, the urine goes through a two-stage filtration system that uses forward osmosis coupled with reverse osmosis to produce pure water while minimizing energy use, which is another big concern in spacesuits. This clean water is then brough to the in-suit drink bag to be consumed.”

The urine collection garment (see above) maintains a diaper-like portion for feces, which Elfin and her colleagues hope to address in the future. The whole apparatus is intended to be placed in a pouch weighing about 8 kg (17.6 lbs) and measuring 38 x 23 x 23 cm (15 x 9 x 9 inches). This pouch could be mounted on the back of the AxEMU along with the suit’s portable life support system (aka the backpack), which provides air, heating and cooling, food, and water. The team emphasizes that the slight increase in weight and bulk will be offset by the increased comfort and resource efficiency provided by the system.

This system and its successors could become a regular feature in spacesuits worn by Artemis astronauts as they explore the lunar surface. The ability to remain healthy, hydrated, and comfortable for longer periods will ensure that NASA and its international and commercial partners can build the necessary infrastructure to allow for a “sustained program of lunar exploration and development.” Said Elfin:

“Spacewalks are going to become longer, more frequent, and more physically demanding when we go back to the Moon and in the decades following as we attempt to establish a more permanent presence there. After looking at the current spacesuit designs, we think they may be insufficient to keep the astronauts healthy and performing at a high level through these increasing challenges. The increased water available to astronauts would make them more productive and decrease the risks of any health complications during the spacewalk itself, while the urine collection component of our system would better preserve their health and morale in the long term.”

Further Reading: Frontiers in Space Technology

The post Dune-Inspired Stillsuits Could Allow Astronauts to Recycle Their Urine Into Water appeared first on Universe Today.

A device that generates a small electrical current from falling raindrops is able to power lights and fans

Researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have finally confirmed what models have previously predicted: An exoplanet has differences between its eternal morning and eternal evening atmosphere. WASP-39 b, a giant planet with a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter, but similar mass to Saturn that orbits a star about 700 light-years away from Earth, is tidally locked to its parent star. This means it has a constant dayside and a constant nightside -- one side of the planet is always exposed to its star, while the other is always shrouded in darkness.

Researchers are training neural networks to make decisions more like humans would. This science of human decision-making is only just being applied to machine learning, but developing a neural network even closer to the actual human brain may make it more reliable, according to the researchers.

An international study reveals the extreme atmospheric conditions on the celestial objects, which are swathed in swirling clouds of hot sand amid temperatures of 950C. Using NASA's powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers set out to capture the weather on a pair of brown dwarfs -- cosmic bodies that are bigger than planets but smaller than stars.

Researchers announced the latest findings from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of the supernova remnant, Cassiopeia A (Cas A). These observations of the youngest known core collapse supernova in the Milky Way provide insights into the conditions that lead to the formation and destruction of molecules and dust within supernova ejecta. The study's findings change our understanding of dust formation in the early universe in the galaxies detected by JWST 300 million years after the Big Bang.

As the planet continues to warm due to human-driven climate change, accurate computer climate models will be key in helping illuminate exactly how the climate will continue to be altered in the years ahead.

This new concept could allow the needs of previously separate industries to be combined: the production of hydrogen and the production of fertilizer.

Our universe is around 13.8 billion years old. Over the vastness of this time, the tiniest of initial asymmetries have grown into the large-scale structures we can see through our telescopes in the night sky: galaxies like our own Milky Way, clusters of galaxies, and even larger aggregations of matter or filaments of gas and dust. How quickly this growth takes place depends, at least in today's universe, on a sort of wrestling match between natural forces: Can dark matter, which holds everything together through its gravity and attracts additional matter, hold its own against dark energy, which pushes the universe ever further apart?

GPS jamming and spoofing has begun to affect transatlantic flights. Now the race is on to develop alternative ways of navigating

An AI can identify the sex of a 9 to 10-year-old child based on their brain scans, but may be less accurate when it comes to gauging their gender

We may have finally found an entry point to the caves hidden beneath the moon’s surface, which could shield future astronauts from dangerous radiation

Alex Lupsasca plans to extend Earth's largest telescope network beyond the atmosphere with a space-based dish. It could spot part of a black hole we've never seen before – and perhaps discover new physics

Researchers grew crystals containing actinium and illuminated them with X-rays to learn how the radioactive metal binds with other elements. That information could help design better cancer treatments.

Yesterday we had a video of Richard Dawkins and Kathleen Stock talking about gender activism, and today we have Dawkins writing about the intellectual and moral courage of atheists. This essay is needed because attacks on “New Atheism” continue, with many misguided people saying that New Atheism is dead because either its proponents were muddled or because they were sexual harassers.

Both claims are wrong. Yes, some New Atheists did engage in sexual harassment, but it certainly wasn’t characteristic of the “movement”, and none of the Four Horsemen who inspired Richard’s essay have been accused of it. But to reject New Atheism because of accusations against some of its proponents is fallacious: what’s important is the content of the movement.

And that content was not only unassailable, but based on evidence—or, in religion, the lack thereof. If there was one thing that distinguished the “New” Atheism from the “old” atheism of people like Bertrand Russell, Robert Ingersoll, and H. L. Mencken, was its scientific character. The arguments in the books of the “Four Horsemen”—Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins—were infused with science, with repeated assertions that there was no evidence for religious claims, be they for the existence of gods or the ancillary tenets of faith.  For once, faith was seen as a vice rather than a virtue.  Dennett was largely a philosopher of science, Dawkins and Harris were trained as scientists, and Hitchens was science-friendly, constantly keeping up with science.

I would argue that New Atheism was a resounding success, and is no longer touted actively simply because it did its job and is no longer needed. (It is needed, though, about once per generation, just to acquaint the young with its arguments.) Religion is disappearing throughout the West—largely, I think, because it’s been displaced by science and rationality (see Steve Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now for supporting evidence).  And religion, as sociologists tell us, is largely embraced by those who are needy, poor, or sick, with nobody but a god to turn to. Yet as the well-being of the world increases, so its need for religion decreases accordingly.

The rise in America and Europe of the “nones”—those people who lack religious affiliation—attests to the decline of faith. Now comprising 28% of Americans, the percentage of “nones” has risen from 16% in 2007. Yes, some “nones” do believe in a god, a higher power, or are spiritual, but the rejection of organized religion tells us something about Americans’ decreasing need for both faith and for religion as a way to commune with others. Northern Europe, and particularly Scandinavia, are losing faith as well: one of my favorite figures is that exactly 0.0% of Icelandic people under 25 believe that God created the world, while 94% believe that the world came about via the Big Bang.

I attribute the rise in atheism not just to the increase of well-being of people in the West, but also to the efforts of the New Atheists, who broadcast the arguments against God widely (all their books were best sellers) and erased much of the shame for publicly admitting you were a nonbeliever. Back in the early days of New Atheism, when I’d lecture in places like the American South, people would often come up to me and thank me for publicly arguing against religion, saying that they experienced strong familial and vocational pressures to adhere to the local faith.  That is disappearing.

On September 30, 2007, the Four Horsemen sat down for a two-hour discussion, filmed by Josh Timonen, that you can watch in two parts on YouTube (here and here). This discussion was then turned into a 2019 book: The Four Horsemen: The Conversation that Sparked an Atheist Revolution. By that time Hitchens had died, but the three surviving Horsemen were asked to write an additional introductory essay for the book.  The one below is Richard’s essay, which he’s now rewritten to be a standalone piece, and which he’s just published on his website.  I hadn’t read it because I didn’t read the Horsemen book (I listened to the whole conversation), and so missed the essays.

If you did, too, you can see Richard’s piece for free by clicking on the link below:

The three best parts of the essay are its no-pulled-punches denigration of theology (a discipline that has no content, though “religious studies” does), its suggestion of ideas that weren’t part of the original New Atheism, and its theme: that atheists possess a kind of courage that believers don’t have. I’ll give a few quotes (indented) for each area.

The vacuity of theology vs the substance of science:

. . . it is characteristic of theologians that they just make stuff up. Make it up with liberal abandon and force it, with a presumed limitless authority, upon others, sometimes – at least in former times and still today in Islamic theocracies – on pain of torture and death.

. . In 1950, Pope Pius XII (unkindly known as ‘Hitler’s Pope’) promulgated the dogma that Jesus’ mother Mary, on her death, was bodily – i.e. not merely spiritually – lifted up into heaven. ‘Bodily’ means that if you’d looked in her grave, you’d have found it empty. The Pope’s reasoning had absolutely nothing to do with evidence. He cited 1 Corinthians 15:54: ‘then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory’. The saying makes no mention of Mary. There is not the smallest reason to suppose the author of the epistle had Mary in mind. We see again the typical theological trick of taking a text and ‘interpreting’ it in a way that just might have some vague, symbolic, hand-waving connection with something else. Presumably, too, like so many religious beliefs, Pius XII’s dogma was at least partly based on a feeling of what would be fitting for one so holy as Mary. But the Pope’s main motivation, according to Dr Kenneth Howell, director of the John Henry Cardinal Newman Institute of Catholic Thought, University of Illinois, came from a different meaning of what was fitting. The world of 1950 was recovering from the devastation of the Second World War and desperately needed the balm of a healing message. Howell quotes the Pope’s words, then gives his own interpretation:

Pius XII clearly expresses his hope that meditation on Mary’s assumption will lead the faithful to a greater awareness of our common dignity as the human family. . . . What would impel human beings to keep their eyes fixed on their supernatural end and to desire the salvation of their fellow human beings? Mary’s assumption was a reminder of, and impetus toward, greater respect for humanity because the Assumption cannot be separated from the rest of Mary’s earthly life.

It’s fascinating to see how the theological mind works: in particular, the lack of interest in – indeed, the contempt for – factual evidence.

. . . The biblical evidence for the existence of purgatory is, shall we say, ‘creative’, again employing the common theological trick of vague, hand-waving analogy. For example, the Encyclopedia notes that ‘God forgave the incredulity of Moses and Aaron, but as punishment kept them from the “land of promise”’. That banishment is viewed as a kind of metaphor for purgatory. More gruesomely, when David had Uriah the Hittite killed so that he could marry Uriah’s beautiful wife, the Lord forgave him – but didn’t let him off scot-free: God killed the child of the marriage (2 Samuel 12:13–14). Hard on the innocent child, you might think. But apparently a useful metaphor for the partial punishment that is purgatory, and one not overlooked by the Encyclopedia’s authors.

The section of the purgatory entry called ‘Proofs’ is interesting because it purports to use a form of logic. Here’s how the argument goes. If the dead went straight to heaven, there’d be no point in our praying for their souls. And we do pray for their souls, don’t we? Therefore it must follow that they don’t go straight to heaven. Therefore there must be purgatory. QED. Are professors of theology really paid to do this kind of thing?

Richard gives a long list of things that science knows, pretty much with certainty even though all scientific truth is considered provisional. This is in contrast with theology, which of course has told us NOTHING about what’s true in the real universe. (This is why theology has no meaningful content.) I’ll just give a paragraph of our scientific truths; note that he even quotes Gould, not Dawkins’s BFF. But that quote by Gould is quite eloquent:

Let us by all means pay lip service to that incantation, while muttering, in homage to Galileo’s muttered eppur si muove,the sensible words of Stephen Jay Gould:

In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Facts in this sense include the following, and not one of them owes anything whatsoever to the many millions of hours devoted to theological ratiocination. The universe began between 13 billion and 14 billion years ago. The sun, and the planets orbiting it, including ours, condensed out of a rotating disk of gas, dust and debris about 4.5 billion years ago. The map of the world changes as the tens of millions of years go by. We know the approximate shape of the continents and where they were at any named time in geological history. And we can project ahead and draw the map of the world as it will change in the future. We know how different the constellations in the sky would have appeared to our ancestors and how they will appear to our descendants.

Matter in the universe is non-randomly distributed in discrete bodies, many of them rotating, each on its own axis, and many of them in elliptical orbit around other such bodies according to mathematical laws which enable us to predict, to the exact second, when notable events such as eclipses and transits will occur. These bodies – stars, planets, planetesimals, knobbly chunks of rock, etc. – are themselves clustered in galaxies, many billions of them, separated by distances orders of magnitude larger than the (already very large) spacing of (again, many billions of) stars within galaxies.

. . . Who does not feel a swelling of human pride when they hear about the LIGO instruments which, synchronously in Louisiana and Washington State, detected gravitation waves whose amplitude would be dwarfed by a single proton? This feat of measurement, with its profound significance for cosmology, is equivalent to measuring the distance from Earth to the star Proxima Centauri to an accuracy of one human hair’s breadth.

Novel additions to New Atheism (things that weren’t in the “Old” Atheism). I’ll give just one. Theologians and others argue about the claim below (some making the ridiculous argument that “God is simple”), but I think it’s a decisive blow against theistic and deistic religions:

But more important, even if we never understand all the steps, nothing can change the principle that, however improbable the entity you are trying to explain, postulating a creator god doesn’t help you, because the god would itself need exactly the same kind of explanation.’ However difficult it may be to explain the origin of simplicity, the spontaneous arising of complexity is, by definition, more improbable. And a creative intelligence capable of designing a universe would have to be supremely improbable and supremely in need of explanation in its own right. However improbable the naturalistic answer to the riddle of existence, the theistic alternative is even more so. But it needs a courageous leap of reason to accept the conclusion.

The courage of atheism

Why did I speak of intellectual courage? Because the human mind, including my own, rebels emotionally against the idea that something as complex as life, and the rest of the expanding universe, could have ‘just happened’. It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice. Emotion screams: ‘No, it’s too much to believe! You are trying to tell me the entire universe, including me and the trees and the Great Barrier Reef and the Andromeda Galaxy and a tardigrade’s finger, all came about by mindless atomic collisions, no supervisor, no architect? You cannot be serious. All this complexity and glory stemmed from Nothing and a random quantum fluctuation? Give me a break.’ Reason quietly and soberly replies: ‘Yes. Most of the steps in the chain are well understood, although until recently they weren’t. In the case of the biological steps, they’ve been understood since 1859.

And the moral courage:

[Atheism] requires moral courage, too. As an atheist, you abandon your imaginary friend, you forgo the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble. You are going to die, and you’ll never see your dead loved ones again. There’s no holy book to tell you what to do, tell you what’s right or wrong. You are an intellectual adult. You must face up to life, to moral decisions. But there is dignity in that grown-up courage. You stand tall and face into the keen wind of reality. You have company: warm, human arms around you, and a legacy of culture which has built up not only scientific knowledge and the material comforts that applied science brings but also art, music, the rule of law, and civilized discourse on morals. Morality and standards for life can be built up by intelligent design – design by real, intelligent humans who actually exist. Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you’re ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found it.

These are short excerpts from a longer essay, but it’s not all that long, and, for me at least, the essay bucked me up, reminding me of the personal and societal benefits of atheism. Yes, you can argue for “belief in belief”: Dan Dennett’s phrase denoting people who don’t need God but think that religion is necessary to hold society together as a kind of community Velcro.  But as we can see from the well-run, moral, but atheistic countries of Europe, that claim is false.  And as for the riposte that, well, Western humanism is a product of Christianity over the ages (viz. Ayaan Hirsi Ali), I find that Hail Mary argument insupportable.

By now most people have heard that on Saturday there was a failed assassination attempt on candidate Trump at a rally. While it has only been a few days, preliminary investigation has found that 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, using a AR style rifle purchased legally by his father, acted alone in attempting to kill the former president. Again preliminarily, Crooks fits the typical profile of someone who would do this (young white male, loner, fond of guns) although his ideology is not clear at this time, and may be complicated. He is a registered Republican but has donated to liberal groups.

This is a huge event, which may alter the course of the campaign (although I am not convinced, given how galvanized public opinion is at this point). It was also an extremely close call, and we can’t help considering how world history can turn over a fraction of an inch. It’s unsettling. How people react in the moment says a lot about their psychology and the broader culture. Unsurprisingly, many people immediately reached for a conspiracy theory to help make sense of these events. Even among people I know personally, who are generally savvy and not conspiracy theorists, the possibility was immediately raised.

The conspiracy theories come into basic flavors – on the left the possibility was raised that this was a false flag operation in order to help Trump’s campaign. On the right, there were accusations that Biden was somehow responsible for the shooting, or even directly ordered it. Some comments are just political opportunism and spin, but the reaction goes way beyond that to blatant conspiracy theories, which exploded on the internet within minutes of the event.

It is a great example of motivated reasoning and the pitfalls of conspiracy thinking, so at least can serve as a teachable moment. First, at least anecdotally it is pretty blatant that these casual conspiracy theories align with the politics of the one proposing the conspiracy. In this sense, they essentially amount to wishful thinking. With blood still on his face, Trump was immediately seizing the event for its obvious political opportunity. The wishful thinking comes in when one imagines that it can all be taken away, and even reversed, if it is discovered that Trump staged the whole thing. On the other side, a desire for the event to have maximal impact, even be a death blow to Biden, leads to thinking that the assassination attempt can be tied to him. In either case, people then search for reasons to support their emotionally generated conspiracy theory.

This is definitely a core lesson from events like these – we immediately grasp for the most emotionally appealing explanation, then make a concerted efforted to support (rather than refute) that notion. That is motivated reasoning in a nutshell.

This is where conspiracy thinking comes in. As I have written many times previously, there are some common intellectual elements to conspiracy thinking. One is a search for any apparent anomalies, then declaring those apparent anomalies as evidence for a conspiracy. There are two logical problems with this approach. The first is that what counts as an “anomaly” can be subjective. The second is that anomalies can happen for many reasons, and they don’t necessarily point to a specific explanation. Often far simpler explanations are ignored or rejected in favor of the far-fetched.

In this case both sides have cited the failure of the Secret Service (SS) to prevent the shooting. How was the shooter able to place themselves on a nearby rooftop with a good site of Trump? This is a genuinely good question, and seems to have been a real SS failure. A good rule of thumb is that simple incompetence should generally be favored over more complicated explanations (an application of Occam’s Razor). While this was clearly a failure (and should be investigated with appropriate consequences) is it really an anomaly? The last time a US president was shot in an attempted assassination was Reagan in 1981, 43 years ago. We can look at that record and conclude that it is fairly impressive, and also note that a rare failure (while not acceptable) is not such an anomaly that it deserves a special explanation, like an inside job. Interestingly, both sides use the SS failure to argue for their conspiracy – Trump had the SS let it happen to stage the event, or Biden had the SS let it happen to assassinate Trump.

Others point to the fact that the SS allowed Trump to stand up and delay extraction to give his already famous raised fist. But even though SS agents are highly trained, how often are they actually in this situation (I would wager that this was a first for every agent involved) and how would they react to a personality like Tump wanting to do his thing?

What people generally do not do, and not just in the context of conspiracy thinking, is try to come up with reasons why their preferred conspiracy theory is not true. They don’t consider how hard it would be to pull something like that off. The SS is not composed of people who can be easily ordered to engage in a coverup. The risk of exposure is also far greater than the rewards, which are uncertain. Trump feels he is doing well, and cruising for victory, so why try a risky gambit? If Trump were actually assassinated, that would also inflame the right with both predictable and unpredictable consequences.

I acknowledge it’s reasonable to briefly entertain many possibilities when a dramatic event like this occurs. We seek understanding and the illusion of control that it provides. But such notions should be entertained privately and quickly dispensed with. Today, however, wild emotional speculation is immediately shared on social media. It is supported by a distrust of authority, and sensibilities about what is plausible and common that have been shaped by cinema, not reality.

Such conspiracy theories don’t have a good historical track record, but that doesn’t seem to have much effect on people’s behavior. It should. If the method you are using is wrong again and again, you should adjust your methods. It is reasonable to defer coming to any conclusion until more time has passed and there has been more investigation, to hit the pause button on making pronouncements that are likely not to age well. At the same time, we should recognize that a good default position is the one favored by Occam’s Razor. Almost by definition, those are the explanations most likely to be correct in the end. In this case, simple failure, opportunism, and chaos are enough to explain everything that happened.  Further, apparent lone wolf operations generally turn out to be lone wolf operations. Absolutely, we need to carefully investigate this and all similar events, and even consider unlikely scenarios. That is due diligence. But we shouldn’t leap over highly plausible and extremely likely explanations and settle quickly on the far fetched simply because it’s emotionally appealing.

Far fetched but emotionally appealing explanations rarely turn out to be true (except in the movies).

 

The post World Events and the Conspiracy Instinct first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Novel ways to move on other celestial bodies always draw the attention of the space exploration community. Here at UT, we’ve reported on everything from robots that suspend themselves from the walls of Martian caves to robots that hop using jets of locally mined gas. But we haven’t yet reported on the idea of a balloon that “walks.” But that is the idea behind the BALloon Locomotion for Extreme Terrain, or BALLET, a project from Hari Nayar, a Principal Roboticist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and his colleagues.

How exactly does a balloon “walk,” you might ask? By picking up and moving one of its six feet. BALLET’s architecture involves a positively buoyant balloon supporting six “feet” attached to adjustable cables. The “feet” are small science packages capable of taking small surface samples or analyzing the chemical composition of the part of the surface it touches.

Each foot is attached to three cables, individually controlled by pulleys. When a foot is done doing its science work at a given location, BALLET retracts the cables for the foot, lifting it off the surface. It then extends the cables using different lengths for the cables to place the foot in a new location.

Balloons have been an integral part of NASA’s explorations, as SciShow describes in this video.
Credit – SciShow

Preliminary research on the concept was done as part of a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant in 2018. That research showed that it was better to lift two opposing feet off the ground at the same time to ensure the balloon’s stability. It also demonstrated where the concept would be most useful—Titan.

Balloon locomotion is typically considered somewhere like Venus, where it could float in the atmosphere in conditions similar to Earth. However, that altitude would make controlling a payload placed on the ground exceedingly tricky. Additionally, the harsh conditions close enough to the ground to be feasible would make the material requirements of the system untenable.

Similarly, a balloon could also work on Mars, but the high wind speeds of the sparse atmosphere would make controlling the balloon difficult. Titan offers the best of both worlds – a relatively stable, thick atmosphere where a negatively buoyant balloon would be feasible and stable environmental conditions that wouldn’t blow BALLET everywhere.

The current plan for exploring Titan – a helicopter named Dragonfly.

It also has many interesting places to explore, including cryovolcanoes and methane lakes. BALLET would allow traversal over even some of the most difficult terrain without accounting for considerations that would dramatically affect the capabilities of either a rover or a helicopter, such as the planned Dragonfly mission. 

There are still plenty of design considerations, though, such as the difficulty of controlling all the different variables, such as balloon orientation, cable length for each of the 18 cables, and pathfinding, simultaneously. After the completion of the Phase I project, the concept appears to be on hold in terms of receiving further funding from NASA at this point.

However, in terms of applications, BALLET also has some obvious ones on Earth. One that immediately sprang to mind is the collection of “nodules” as part of an undersea mining operation. Given the increased need for cobalt and other materials provided in those nodules and the bad image that comes from the destruction of the seabed that comes with traditional mining techniques, this idea might be one of those rare space exploration ideas that sooner sees an application on Earth than off of it.

Learn More:
Nayar et al. – Balloon Locomotion for Extreme Terrain
UT – A Robot With Expandable Appendages Could Explore Martian Caves And Cliffs
UT – A Hopping Robot Could Explore Europa Using Locally Harvested Water
UT – Drones Could Help Map the Lunar Surface with Extreme Precision

Lead Image:
Artist’s conception of the BALLET concept mission architecture, including a “single step” action.
Credit – Nayar et al.

The post A Walking Balloon Could One Day Explore Titan – Or Earth’s Sea Floor appeared first on Universe Today.

Two studies suggest the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation could collapse by the middle of the century and wreak havoc with the climate, but such predictions are controversial

Vaccine scientist Stanley Plotkin coauthored a commentary on vaccine postlicensure studies. Antivax lawyer Aaron Siri tries to spin it as an "admission" that vaccines aren't safe. Predictable.

The post Aaron Siri vs. Stanley Plotkin on post-licensure safety monitoring of vaccines first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.