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Well, folks, this is the penultimate batch of photos I have, so if you don’t contribute, the feature will die. Don’t make me beg.

Today, though, we have a contribution from reader Lukas Konecny, who has provided some introductory notes (indented). You can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Some of these nature shots are quite old and I have never had a good camera, but I tried to pick some good ones (some of the grasshopper photos may need zooming in and cropping but when I tried to do that, my software always distorted the photos). The cicada is from Greece (it sits on a wire rope), the rest are from Slovakia, the mushroom was in a forest and the dragonfly in my university dormitory in Bratislava while others (owls, hummingbird hawkmoth, cat, grasshopper) are all from a garden.  The autumn owl (in a cherry tree) is from the same year (2015) as the spring owlet (in an apricot tree) so it might be the same bird. The grasshopper and the cat are from this summer – the cat watched me while I was releasing the grasshopper that had made its way to my room during the night and to my relief didn’t immediately attack it but let it fly away in peace. Maybe nature finding its way into human spaces is the common theme (except for the mushroom, that’s just autumnal feeling).

Amanita muscaria:

Cat:

Cicada:

Dragonfly:

Grasshopper photos:

Macroglossumm a hummingbird hawkmoth:

Owl, autum:

Owlet, spring:

From not smoking to maintaining a healthy weight, there are many healthy habits that could help keep your brain young

A recent BBC article highlights some of the risk of the new age of social media we have crafted for ourselves. The BBC investigated the number one ranked UK podcast, Diary of a CEO with host Steven Bartlett, for the accuracy of the medical claims recently made on the show. While the podcast started out as focusing on tips from successful businesspeople, it has recently turned toward unconventional medical opinions as this has boosted downloads.

“In an analysis of 15 health-related podcast episodes, BBC World Service found each contained an average of 14 harmful health claims that went against extensive scientific evidence.”

These includes showcasing an anti-vaccine crank, Dr. Malhotra, who claimed that the “Covid vaccine was a net negative for society”. Meanwhile the WHO estimates that the COVID vaccine saved 14 million lives worldwide. A Lancet study estimates that in the European region alone the vaccine saved 1.4 million lives. This number could have been greater were in not for the very type of antivaccine misinformation spread by Dr. Malhotra.

Another guest promoted the Keto diet as a treatment for cancer. Not only is there no evidence to support this claim, dietary restrictions while undergoing treatment for cancer can be very dangerous, and imperil the health of cancer patients.

This reminds me of the 2014 study that found that, “For recommendations in The Dr Oz Show, evidence supported 46%, contradicted 15%, and was not found for 39%.” Of course, evidence published in the BMJ does little to counter misinformation spread on extremely popular shows. The BBC article highlights the fact that in the UK podcasts are not covered by the media regulator Ofcom, which has standards of accuracy and fairness for legacy media.

I have discussed previously the double-edged sword of social media. It did democratize information publishing and has made it easier for experts to communicate directly with the public. But this has come at the expense of quality control – there is now no editorial filter, so the public is overwhelmed with low quality information, misinformation, and disinformation. I think it’s difficulty to argue that this was a good trade-off for society, at least in the short run.

Journalism has never been perfect (nothing is), but at least there are standards and an editorial process. Much of those standards, however, were just norms. Even back to the 1980s there was a lot of handwringing about erosion of those norms by mass media. I remember those quaint days when people worried about The Phil Donahue Show, which dominated daytime television by having on sensational guests. Donahue justified the erosion of quality standards he was pioneering by saying, you have to get viewers. The, occasionally, you can slip in some quality content. But of course Donahue was soon eclipsed by daytime talk shows that abandoned any pretense of being interested in quality content, and who fought to outdo each other in brazen sensationalism.

Perhaps most notorious was Morton Downey Jr., who all but encouraged fights on set. He did not last long, and in a desperate attempt to remain relevant even faked getting attacked by neo-nazis. His hoax was busted, however, because he drew the swastika on himself in the mirror and drew it backwards. Downey was eclipsed by so-called “trash TV” shows like Jerry Springer. These shows were little more than freak shows, without any pretense of being “news” or informative.

But at the same time we saw the rise of shows that did seem to go back to more of a Phil Donahue format of spreading information, not just highlighting the most dysfunctional lives they could find. The Queen of this format was Oprah Winfrey. Unfortunately, her stated goal was to spread her particular brand of spirituality, and she did it very well. She spawned many acolytes, including Dr. Oz, whose shows were based almost entirely on profitable misinformation.

So even before social media hit, there were major problems with the quality of information being fed to the public through mass media. Social media just cranked up the misinformation by a couple orders of magnitude, and swept away any remaining mechanisms of quality control. Social media gives the ability of a few superspreaders of misinformation to have a magnified effect. Misinformation can be favored by algorithms that prioritize engagement over all else – not just misinformation, but radicalizing information. One result is that people trust all news sources less. This leads to a situation where everyone can just believe what suits them, because all information is suspect. In some social media cultures it seems that truth is irrelevant – it’s no longer even a meaningful concept. These are trends that imperil democracy.

Steven Bartlett defends the low quality of the health information he spreads in the laziest of ways, saying the this is about free speech and airing opposing opinions. He is essentially absolving himself of any journalistic responsibility, so that he can be free to pursue maximal audience size at the expense of quality information. Of course, in a unregulated market that is the inevitable result. Most people will consume the information that most people consume, with popularity being driven by sensationalism and ideological support, not quality. Again – this is nothing new. It’s now just algorithmically assured and there are no longer and breaks to slow the spread of misinformation. Worse, ideological and bad actors have learned how to exploit this situation to spread politically motivated disinformation.

Worse still, authoritarian governments now have a really easy time controlling information and therefore their populations. We may have (and this is my worst fear) created the ultimate authoritarian tools. In the big picture of history, this may lead to a ratcheting of societies in the authoritarian direction. We likely won’t see this happening until it’s too late. I know this will be triggering to many partisans, but I think it is reasonable to argue that we are seeing this in the US with the election of Trump, something that would likely have been impossible 20 years ago. His election (I know, it’s difficult to make sweeping conclusions like this) was partly due to the spread of misinformation and the successful leveraging of social media to control the narrative.

I don’t have any clear solutions to all this. We just have to find a way through it somehow. Individual critical thinking and media savvy are essential. But we do need to also have a conversation about the information ecosystem we have created for our societies.

The post Podcast Pseudoscience first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

The ability to admit ignorance could be a sign of truly intelligent AI, and a new quiz of unsolved or perhaps even unsolvable questions aims to put this idea to the test

We don't need "spirited debate" about RFK Jr. We've been trying to warn you about him for years. It's not our fault that some people didn't listen.

The post Anyone Who Supports Pro-RFK Jr. Doctors, Is Also Pro-RFK Jr. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Many children in the US seem to be using a chatbot to help them with their work, despite the risks of errors and often in defiance of school rules

Space largely seems quite empty! Yet even in the dark voids of the cosmos, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are streaming through space. The rays contain 10 million times as much energy as the Large Hadron Collider can produce! The origin of the rays though is still the source of many a scientific debate but they are thought to be coming from some of the most energetic events in the universe. A new paper suggests the rays may be linked to magnetic turbulence, coming from regions where magnetic fields get tangled and twisted up. 

Cosmic rays are high-energy particles, typically protons and atomic nuclei. They travel at speeds near the speed of light and are thought to come from different sources such as the Sun, supernova explosions and other events across the universe. As the rays travel through space, they bombard Earth, interacting with molecules in the atmosphere producing secondary particles that rain down. The term cosmic ray often leads to the confusion that they are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Instead they are streams of charged particles. 

Distant past supernovae could be linked by cosmic ray particles to climate change on Earth and changes in biodiversity. Courtesy: Henrik Svensmark, DTU Space.

A cousin of the cosmic rays are the ultra-high-energy rays. These are among the most energetic particles in the universe with energies that exceed 1018 electron volts, this equates to more energy than the energetic particles that escape from the Sun. The origin of these energetic particles is still not clearly understood but they are thought to originate in highly energetic events like active galactic nuclei, gamma ray bursts or the more massive black holes. Just like the typical cosmic rays, the ultra-high energy particles strike molecules in the atmosphere and produce secondary particles. Studying the secondary particles is one way researchers are trying to unravel their nature. 

This artist’s visualization of GRB 221009A shows the narrow relativistic jets (emerging from a central black hole) that gave rise to the gamma-ray burst (GRB) and the expanding remains of the original star ejected via the supernova explosion. Credit: Aaron M. Geller / Northwestern / CIERA / IT Research Computing and Data Services

These previous theories have seemed reasonable but a team of researchers have published their findings about their origins in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The team suggest the rays have instead originated in magnetic turbulence – the fluctuation of magnetic fields, often occurring in plasmas. Their research found that the magnetic fields get tangled up, swiftly causing the particles to accelerate with an increase in energy. 

According to Luca Comisso, associate research scientist from the Columbia Astrophysics Lab explained that ‘These findings help solve enduring questions that are of great interest to both astrophysicists and particle physicists about how the cosmic rays get their energy.’

The team ran several simulations that demonstrated particle acceleration by magnetic turbulence could accelerate cosmic rays to high energies. Using the Pierre Auger Observatory to measure magnetic turbulence samples, the team found their measurements supported the simulation results. This as perhaps the first successful analysis into ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. 

Source : A New Discovery About the Source of the Vast Energy in Cosmic Rays

The post Another Clue About the Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays: Magnetic Turbulence appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter sent its final signals to Earth in the earlier part of the year. Engineers have been studying these and have started to piece together a picture of events that led up to its final flight. They concluded that data provided by the navigation system was inaccurate leading to a chain of events that caused its ultimate demise. One of the biggest problems it seems is that the terrain was smooth leading to a lack of landmarks during Flight 72.

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and is well known for its distinctive red colour. It’s surface is is covered in iron-oxide which is known by the more common name – rust. The planet is just over half the size of the Earth and has some fascinating geological features like Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System. Valles Marineris is a canyon system which stretches thousands of kilometres and dwarfs the Grand Canyon. The atmosphere of the planet is mostly composed of carbon dioxide and currently incapable of supporting life. It’s not thought this has not always been the case and its missions like Mars 2020 that have helped to unravel the mysteries of the red planet. 

A full-disk view of Mars, courtesy of VMC. Credit: ESA

The Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity helicopter were both part of the Mars 2020 mission and have been exploring Mars since their launch in 2020 atop an Atlas V rocket. Ingenuity became the first robotic rotorcraft that undertook powered flight in the Martian atmosphere. The inaugural flight took place on 19 April 2021 the 1.8 kilogram drone took off under the power of two counter-rotating blades. The blades of the drone are 1.2m long, oversized by Earth standards but the atmosphere is only 1% as dense as Earth so larger than usual blades are needed. 

Image of the Mars Ingenuity helicopter (Source : NASA)

Flight 72 was scheduled for the 18th January this year and there was nothing special about it. The plan was a brief vertical hop to checkout the flight systems and to grab some photographs of the area. The flight data revealed it reached an altitude of 12 metres, took the images and was back on the surface after 32 seconds but had severed communications. After communications  was re-established, it was discovered that Ingenuity had sustained damage to its rotors. 

Now, almost a year after the incident, a team of engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been analysing the data. Their findings will be published in the next few weeks however the team of engineers assert it was harder than expected to complete an accident investigation from 160 million kilometres. The faults lie in the navigation system that was designed to visually track surface features using a camera pointed at the round. The system worked during early flights over more textured terrain but as Ingenuity moved over the Jezero Crater, it began operating over featureless sand ripples. 

The navigation system was designed to provide estimates of the helicopter’s velocity, chiefly to enable it to land. The data revealed from Flight 72 revealed that the navigation system couldn’t find features to track. Images showed that the lack of features led to a harden than usual touchdown leading to a pitch and roll of the craft. The sudden change of attitude led to increase load on the rotors, beyond their designed limits leading to the structural damage. 

Even though Ingenuity will not be able to fly anymore it can still provide weather and avionics data to the Perseverance rover. It will help us to understand more about the weather in its vicinity but perhaps its greatest legacy are its hours of flight on an alien world. 

Source : NASA Performs First Aircraft Accident Investigation on Another World

The post NASA Thinks it Knows Why Ingenuity Crashed on Mars appeared first on Universe Today.

For experiments that require ultra-precise measurements and control over atoms -- think two-photon atomic clocks, cold-atom interferometer sensors and quantum gates -- lasers are the technology of choice, the more spectrally pure (emitting a single color/frequency), the better. Conventional lab-scale laser technology currently achieves this ultra low-noise, stable light via bulky, costly tabletop systems designed to generate, harness and emit photons within a narrow spectral range.

Solid phase manufacturing can create new custom metal alloys through an innovative process called solid phase alloying, researchers report.

Household plumbing is alive with microbes; environmental engineers are working to study those ecosystems to ensure clean water flows in homes.

An international research team has controlled hybrid electron-photon quantum states in helium atoms. Control of these special quantum states was enabled by the pulse formation of very intense, extreme ultraviolet radiation. This method introduces the possibility not only of studying quantum mechanical effects in atoms and molecules, but also of controlling chemical reactions.

The US Navy has many tasks it wants quantum devices to tackle, from setting maintenance schedules to enabling nearly unhackable communication

Not long ago, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) peered into Cosmic Dawn, the cosmological period when the first galaxies formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. In the process, it discovered something rather surprising. Not only were there more galaxies (and brighter ones, too!) than expected, but these galaxies had supermassive black holes (SMBH) much larger than cosmological models predicted. For astronomers and cosmologists, explaining how these galaxies and their SMBHs (aka. quasars) could have grown so large less than a billion years after the Big Bang has become a major challenge.

Several proposals have been made, ranging from optical illusions to Dark Matter accelerating black hole growth. In a recent study, an international team led by researchers from the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) analyzed a sample of 21 quasars, among the most distant ever discovered. The results suggest that the supermassive black holes at the center of these galaxies may have reached their surprising masses through very rapid accretion, providing a plausible explanation for how galaxies and their SMBHs grew and evolved during the early Universe.

The study was led by Alessia Tortosa, a researcher with the INAF’s Astronomical Observatory of Rome. She was joined by researchers from the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica Milano, the Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe, the National Institute for Nuclear Physics, the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the European Space Agency (ESA), the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and multiple observatories and universities. The paper detailing their findings was recently published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory was launched in 1999 to study interstellar X-ray sources. Credit: ESA

Radio astronomers first observed quasars in the 1950s based on the large amounts of radiation they emitted at many frequencies. These objects, which they named “quasi-stellar objects” (quasar for short), were notable for how their cores would outshine all the stars in their disks. From the 1970s onward, astronomers learned that this phenomenon was due to the presence of SMBHs at the center of these galaxies. Since then, astronomers have been eager to get a look at the earliest galaxies in the Universe to see the “seeds” of these black holes and chart their evolution.

However, Webb’s observations revealed some surprisingly large “seeds” at the center of the early galaxies it imaged. This included galaxies like EGSY8p7, which existed just 570 million years after the Big Bang but had a central black hole roughly 9 million times the mass of the Sun. Even more surprising was UHZ1, a galaxy that existed when the Universe was about 470 million years old. At its center, Webb spotted a massive black hole (designated CEERS 1019) 40 million times the mass of our Sun – ten times the mass of Sagittarius A*, the SMBH at the center of the Milky Way.

According to the most widely accepted cosmological models, these galaxies and black holes did not have enough time to grow so large. For their study, Tortosa and her colleagues analyzed a sample of 21 quasars (including the most distant ever observed) based on X-ray data obtained by the XMM-Newton and Chandra space telescopes. This revealed a completely unexpected connection between the shape of the X-ray emissions and the speed of the winds ejecting matter from the quasars. This connection suggests that wind speeds are connected to the temperature of the gas closest to the black hole’s corona (the X-ray emitting region).

This means that the corona is connected to the powerful accretion mechanisms that allow black holes to grow. Specifically, they observed how quasars with low-energy X-ray emissions and lower temperatures have faster winds, leading to a rapid growth rate that exceeds the Eddington Limit – the theoretical limit to the mass of a star or an accretion disk. Meanwhile, quasars with higher X-ray emissions tended to exhibit slower wind speeds. As Tortosa explained in an INAF press statement:

“Our work suggests that the supermassive black holes at the center of the first quasars formed within the first billion years of the Universe’s life may have actually increased their mass very rapidly, challenging the limits of physics. The discovery of this connection between X-ray emission and winds is crucial for understanding how such large black holes could have formed in such a short time, thus providing a concrete clue to solve one of the greatest mysteries of modern astrophysics.”

By combining a large X-ray telescope with state-of-the-art scientific instruments, Athena will address key questions in astrophysics. Credit: ESA

Most of the XMM-Newton data was collected between 2021 and 2023 as part of a Multi-Year XMM-Newton Heritage Program known as HYPerluminous quasars at the Epoch of ReionizatION (HYPERION). This program is directed by Luca Zappacosta, an INAF researcher and the second author of the paper, and aims to study hyperluminous quasars during the cosmic dawn of the Universe. Said Zappacosta:

“In the HYPERION program, we focused on two key factors: on one hand, the careful selection of quasars to observe, choosing the titans, meaning those that had accumulated as much mass as possible, and on the other hand, the in-depth study of their properties in X-rays, something never attempted before on such a large number of objects from the cosmic dawn. We hit the jackpot! The results we’re getting are genuinely unexpected, and they all point to a super-Eddington growth mechanism of the black holes.”

This study provides valuable insights into the formation and evolution of SMBHs and their host galaxies. The team’s findings will also inform future X-ray missions, like the ESA’s Advanced Telescope for High Energy Astrophysics (ATHENA) and NASA’s Advanced X-Ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) and Lynx X-ray Observatory, which are scheduled to launch in the next two decades. These and other next-generation instruments are expected to reveal even more about the early Universe and help resolve its deepest mysteries.

Further Reading: INAF, Astronomy & Astrophysics

The post New Research may Explain how Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe Grew so Fast appeared first on Universe Today.

The study, conducted in the US, found that mothers take on seven in ten (71%) of all household mental load tasks.

Researchers have synthesized new molecules able to quickly capture significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, an important tactic in climate change mitigation.

Researchers developed an AI debiasing technique that improves the fairness of a machine-learning model by boosting its performance for subgroups that are underrepresented in its training data, while maintaining its overall accuracy.

A research team has developed an ultra-thin, flexible film that could power next-generation wearable devices using body heat, eliminating the need for batteries.

A research team has developed an ultra-thin, flexible film that could power next-generation wearable devices using body heat, eliminating the need for batteries.

Stars similar to the Sun produce a gigantic outburst of radiation on average about once every hundred years per star. Such superflares release more energy than a trillion hydrogen bombs and make all previously recorded solar flares pale in comparison. This estimate is based on an inventory of 56450 sun-like stars. It shows that previous studies have significantly underestimated the eruptive potential of these stars. In data from NASA's space telescope Kepler, superflaring, sun-like stars can be found ten to a hundred times more frequently than previously assumed. The Sun, too, is likely capable of similarly violent eruptions.