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Most people born before 1968 have antibodies against flu viruses similar to the H5N1 strain circulating today, which might lower their risk of severe illness

A team of researchers has successfully demonstrated nonlinear Compton scattering (NCS) between an ultra-relativistic electron beam and an ultrahigh intensity laser pulse using the 4-Petawatt laser. The innovative approach was the usage of only a laser for electron-photon collisions, in which a multi-PW laser is applied both for particle acceleration and for collision (also called an all-optical setup). This achievement represents a significant milestone in strong field physics, in particular strong field quantum electrodynamics (QED), offering new insights into high-energy electron-photon interactions without the need for a traditional mile-long particle accelerator.

Introducing the innovative 'UniMat' platform utilizing 3D engineered nanofiber membrane.

Introducing the innovative 'UniMat' platform utilizing 3D engineered nanofiber membrane.

LEDs with low polarization in a direction similar to standard LEDs show greater efficiency at higher power by resisting 'efficiency droop', a new study shows. The findings open the door to a new generation of efficient, high-powered LED lighting which exceeds the capabilities of existing systems.

A research team has achieved a major advance in X-ray science by generating unprecedented high-power attosecond hard X-ray pulses at megahertz repetition rates. This advancement opens new frontiers in the study of ultrafast electron dynamics and enables non-destructive measurements at the atomic level.

Researchers explored protective coatings to resist corrosion in fusion reactors. They tested -Al2O3 oxide layers on ODS alloys in a high-temperature, flowing lithium-lead environment. Even bare ODS alloys formed a durable -LiAlO2 layer in situ, which suppressed further corrosion. The layers exhibited strong adhesion under mechanical stress, making these findings crucial for improving material durability in fusion reactors and high-temperature energy systems.

Physical reservoir computing (PRC) utilizing synaptic devices shows significant promise for edge AI. Researchers from the Tokyo University of Science have introduced a novel self-powered dye-sensitized solar cell-based device that mimics human synaptic behavior for efficient edge AI processing, inspired by the eye's afterimage phenomenon. The device has light intensity-controllable time constants, helping it achieve high performance during time-series data processing and motion recognition tasks. This work is a major step toward multiple time-scale PRC.

The genome has space for only a small fraction of the information needed to control complex behaviors. So then how, for example, does a newborn sea turtle instinctually know to follow the moonlight? Neuroscientists have devised a potential explanation for this age-old paradox. Their ideas should lead to faster, more evolved forms of artificial intelligence.

Not all plastics are equal -- some types and colors are easier to recycle than others. For instance, black foam and black coffee lids, which are often made of polystyrene, usually end up in landfills because color additives lead to ineffective sorting. Now, researchers report on the ability to leverage one additive in black plastics, with the help of sunlight or white LEDs, to convert black and colored polystyrene waste into reusable starting materials.

A new study warns that current plans to achieve zero emissions on the grid by 2050 vastly underestimate the required investments in generation and transmission infrastructure. The reason: these plans do not account for climate change's impacts on water resources. Specifically, changes in water availability caused by climate change could decrease hydropower generation by up to 23% by the year 2050, while electricity demand could increase by 2%.

Investigators evaluated whether data collected from a fitness tracker could be used to accurately detect mood episodes in people with bipolar disorder.

With help from AI, scientists developed a method that generates satellite imagery from the future to depict how a region would look after a potential flooding event.

An international team of researchers has made new observations of an unusual supernova, finding the most metal-poor stellar explosion ever observed.

Scientists have recently identified electrons and positrons with the highest energies ever recorded on Earth. They provide evidence of cosmic processes emitting colossal amounts of energy, the origins of which are as yet unknown.

Scientists have recently identified electrons and positrons with the highest energies ever recorded on Earth. They provide evidence of cosmic processes emitting colossal amounts of energy, the origins of which are as yet unknown.

Europa, one of the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter is one of the most intriguing locations in the Solar System to search for life. However, its subsurface oceans are buried beneath thick layers of ice making exploration difficult. To explore its oceans, scientists have suggested using small swimming robots capable of penetrating the icy shell. Recently, NASA engineers tested prototypes designed to operate as a swarm, enabling them to explore the mysterious sub-ice oceans on Europa and other icy worlds in the Solar System.

Along with the other three Galilean satellites orbing Jupiter, Europa was discovered just over 400 years ago by Galileo. It is the smallest of the four measuring just 3,120 km across. It orbits Jupiter at a distance of 671,000 km in an almost circular orbit. In comparison to our own Moon, Europa is a little smaller but that is where the similarities end. Europa is made of a silicate rock and has a thick water ice crust below which is thought to be a liquid water ocean and it is this which has captured the interest of scientists. 

The Galilean moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The deep oceans of Europa may well harbour forms of aquatic life. Consider the deepest parts of the oceans of Earth where whole eco-systems thrive off thermal vents. At these depths, no light from the Sun penetrates so the organisms and creatures living at these depths take all their energy from the heat escaping from inside the planet.  It is this which tantalisingly suggests that maybe such life could have evolved in the oceans of Europa too.

A black smoker hydrothermal vent discovered in the Atlantic Ocean in 1979. It’s fueled from deep beneath the surface by magma that superheats the water. The plume carries minerals and other materials out to the sea. Courtesy USGS.

The exploration of Europa is already underway with NASA’s Europa Clipper expected to arrive in 2030. It will explore Europa with a powerful set of scientific instruments over a total of 49 flybys. Each pass will see the instruments search for signs that the ocean under the thick icy crust could sustain life. This will just be a flyby mission with Europa being probed from high above its surface. NASA are already shaping up their next mission to include even more complex robots that could survey the depths of the sub-surface oceans of Europa.

Artist’s concept of a Europa Clipper mission. Credit: NASA/JPL

This is where NASA’s new mission called SWIM ‘Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers’ comes in. The concept at least, is simple…a swarm of self-propelled robots that can swim around in the underground oceans having been deployed by the ice piercing cryobot. Once underway, the swimming robots, which are about the size of a mobile phone, would hunt for chemical and temperature signals that might indicate life.

The swimming robots are not just on the drawing board. Engineers have already used 3D printers to create prototypes that have already been tested in a 23 metre pool. The devices which are propelled along by two propellers, with flaps for steering were able to stay on course. These prototypes however were a little larger than those destined to make it into space measuring about three times larger. 

The results of the test were very promising but much more work is needed before they are ready for launch. Meanwhile the robots are likely to be trialled here on Earth to support oceanographic research before being sent on their way to Europa. 

Source : NASA Ocean World Explorers Have to Swim Before They Can Fly

The post Testing the Robots that Might Explore Europa appeared first on Universe Today.

Agustín Fuentes is a biological anthropologist at Princeton University, and has appeared in these pages more than a couple of times, for he is also somewhat of a “progressive activist” who, for example, has indicted Darwin for being a racist and espoused the view that sex is non-binary (see video below).   In the latest issue of Science, he justifies his activism, asserting that scientists should be political and ideological activists because this helps us fight what he sees as an encroaching attack on science that will accompany the Trump administration.

But Fuentes’s short letter is deeply confusing, for it conflates the idea of scientists being activists with science itself being activist. I’ll give some quotes to show that conflation, and then give my disagreement with the ideas that science should be activist, as well some reservations with the notion that it’s generally good for scientists to be activists. Click below to read the letter, ironically classified under “expert voices”:

First Fuentes implies that his promotion of activism in science and among scientists in this piece came explicitly because of the threat he sees posed by the Trump administration:

Science, both teaching and doing, is under attack. The recent US presidential election of a person and platform with anti-science bias exemplifies this.

That itself is a problem, as it’s not going to win over half of America (see below).

But to some extent I agree with this, for it certainly looks as scientific truth will be endangered by Trump and, especially, his appointments in the area of public health and science.

Certainly scientists who see their field as endangered are entitled to speak out as individuals against stuff like climate-change denial, vaccine denialism, and opposition to GMOs and nuclear energy.  When politicians or other scientists present misleading data to support a political  position, it is scientists who know the data to correct the record. After all, that is one of the great benefits of science: it is self-correcting.

But of course correcting the record, for example giving data showing that nuclear energy can replace fossil fuels, is not the same things as saying okay, we have to replace fossil fuels with nuclear energy now.  For fixing problems often requires expertise beyond the ambit of scientists: things like political savvy, economic and practical considerations, and so on. Ergo, accepting a scientific argument is not always identical to saying that we must go ahead and fix society according to the “winning” scientific assertion, for in the long run such fixes may be more harmful than helpful. (Note: I am not saying we should keep using fossil fuels as much as we do: this is just an example!)

But I digress. I want to show how Fuentes conflates the activism of scientists as individuals with the activism of science as an institution, something he does throughout the letter (bolding is mine):

Whether science is political, and if it should be, is an age-old debate. Some assert that scientific institutions and scientists themselves should seek to remain apolitical, or at least present a face of political neutrality. Others argue that such isolation is both impossible and unnecessary, that scientists are and should be in the political fray.

Notice that he conflates scientists with scientific institutions, the latter including scientific organizations, journals, and granting institutions.

Here’s more:

The Editor-in-Chief of Science recently wrote that although science has always been political, it “thrives when its advocates are shrewd politicians but suffers when its opponents are better at politics.” Given the current political reality and the expansion of attacks on science, it is time for scientists to be more effective, forceful, and vociferous as their own political advocates.

Who is supposed to be political here—science itself or scientists?  It’s clear that he means scientists, but also throws “science” into the mix as he does in the last sentence of the excerpt below. It’s also clear that the activism he wants from scientists is progressive left-wing activism, presumably of the kind that Fuentes himself has promoted in his previous articles. I don’t think he’s calling for right-wing scientists to be activists!

There are many taking vocal stances asserting key scientific findings and practices in the face of attacks by anti-science forces. Most scientists are familiar with the prominent cases of Anthony Fauci or Peter Hotez in public health, and of Michael Mann in climate science. But for every one of the high-profile examples, there are other, less publicly known attacks on scientists and science educators working in public spheres, social media, and the classroom. These attacks are often especially intense when the scientists are also women, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color), queer, or from other marginalized groups. The increasingly anti-science political ecosystem creates a dire need for science to be proactive, not only reactive.

More conflation:

If one’s job, salary, research support, etc. are at risk, it is not surprising that one may not want to “stick their neck out.” And such threats will grow in the US under the incoming administration. There also remains some prominent fear of the term “political” in the scientific community, as if being political represents a bad thing or something that diminishes the value of science or the scientist.

Finally, here’s Fuentes’s final pronouncement that science itself should become a vehicle for promoting a social mission, almost certainly the “progressive mission of the left”:

As the social scientists Fernando Tormos-Aponte, Scott Frickel, and John Parker discovered in a survey just after the 2020 US elections, for many scientists “political advocacy is no longer anathema to scientific research, but should be embraced as a central aspect of science’s social mission.” This is even more true here at the end of 2024.

Once again this conflates what scientists should do with how we conceive of the “social mission of science”, that is, we should change our view of science to make activism a part of it.

Fuentes doesn’t seem to realize, as we know from statistics about the public’s view of science and of universities, that there is indeed a danger to scientists and to science itself from scientists taking stands in particular venues, like journals or professional societies. We know that when Nature endorsed Joe Biden for President in 2020, it not only did not convince more people to vote for him, but reduced the credibility of the journal, and of science itself, in the eyes of readers. When Scientific American became activist, publishing article after article taking “progressive” stands, including two misguided pieces by Fuentes himself, it lost credibility in the eyes of many and, in the end, the editor-in-chief left the journal, probably because she had no choice.  What was the cause of the final rupture between the magazine and the editor? Her attacks on Bluesky against supporters of Trump.

Finally, we know that public trust in science among both Democrats and Republicans has declined significantly in the last decade, and there’s been an even steeper drop in public confidence in colleges and universities.

Now of course you’ve surely said to yourself, “But there is no impersonal ‘science’ that takes stands. It must be the scientists themselves who do.” And of course that’s correct.  But what I am trying say is that there are ways and ways of scientists being activists, and some of them are useful but others are not. My points are below:

a.) Scientists should use their recognized expertise to correct false arguments that affect society. For example, if vaccines are effective and we have data on their efficacy, and we also have data that they don’t cause autism, we should say so.  But arguments are more effective when the scientists making them are experts in the area, which leads to the next point:

b.) Scientists should shy away from making scientific arguments outside their sphere of expertise. A prime example of this is evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who has severely hurt his own reputation by making statements about covid vaccines and touting the efficacy of ivermectin as both a treatment for and preventive of Covid.  Weinstein did not know what he was talking about, and had no good data to back up his claims. He was dead wrong, but of course people used his statements to justify using horse de-wormer for their virus infection. Such statements may well harm or even kill people.

c.) Scientists should not make arguments that they say are scientific if they are imbued with ideology. This only serves to turn off a public who may know better. Luana and I deal with six of these arguments in the paper by me and Luana Maroja in Skeptical Inquirer, including rejection of the sex binary, claims that there are no evolved differences between males and females, and the idea that indigenous knowledge should be considered coequal with modern science. Ideology based arguments in these areas are misleading and injurious to the public understanding of science.

d.) “Science” itself should not be seen as incorporating activism as a necessary component.  Sure, scientists can use their knowledge to cure diseases like Covid, or create vaccines to fight polio. If you see that as “activism”, well, it’s not a form of activism that is very injurious, since nobody wants those diseases around. However, there will still be opposition to vaccination, and part of that, for covid, was due to scientists themselves either not being straightforward with data (not good) or changing their recommendations based on changing understanding of the virus and its transmission (a normal party of science).

Here are some forms of activism that can be seen as part of science itself and should be avoided:

1.) Scientific journals, magazines, or societies making ideological statements (viz. Lancet, the Society for the Study of Evolution. etc. saying that sex is a spectrum)

2.) Scientific organizations using ideology to dispense scientific funding, for example using criteria other than merit to advance “equity”.

3.) Scientists claiming the authority of science when advancing what is are biased and ideological views (see my paper with Luana).

4.) Scientists hiring other scientists or accepting graduate students based on criteria other than merit (ee #2).

In general, science gets eroded when its practitioners elevate criteria other than merit, including ethnicity, gender, or Marxist beliefs in human malleability.

Now all of these, in my view, have the potential to damage science itself, as well as to damage universities, in which science education plays a large part.  When people see the criteria above violated, they become more anti-science and more anti-university. They are less willing to support science or to give their kids (or themselves) higher education.

It is largely the ideological neutrality of “science itself”, as ideally instantiated in science departments, science journals, granting agencies, and science societies and organizations, that has kept the reputation of science unsullied.  But now it is getting sullied, and sullied from both the right and left. One of the reasons for this is the very activism that Fuentes wants so badly.

As I said, scientists have an important role to play in improving society, but that role should, as far as possible, be limited to ensuring that the data fed into societal arguments be as accurate as possible. When scientists go beyond that, infusing their data with ideology, the potential for harm to their brand is very real.  This doesn’t mean that scientists shouldn’t have free speech, for of course they should and they do.  What it means is that unless they speak carefully, and avoid a partisan bias, they risk the reputation of the very fields they love.

In the five-minute video below we see Fuentes being an ideologue while at the same time arguing that science shouldn’t “become ideology”.  He mischaracterizes atheism as saying ‘I know for sure there is no god,”  argues that evolutionary biology is imbued with racism and sexism, and maintains that the sex binary “is not the best way to characterize humans.” Yes, humans are messy and vary in their gender, but the sex binary, as I’ve argued, applies as much to humans as it does to any other animal. There are exactly two sexes, and there are no more than two sexes. Yes, Dr. Fuentes, the world is “complex and messy”, but I don’t buy your claim that the sex binary itself somehow misrepresents or distorts our knowledge of variation in human behavior or culture. After all, the sex binary is just a definition, and one that has the advantage of holding universally in all animals and vascular plants. It has nothing to say about culture or variation in behavior.

From the YouTube notes:

This interview is an episode from ‪@The-Well‬, our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the ‪@JohnTempletonFoundation‬.

Templeton! Wouldn’t you know it?

h/t: Anna and Luana, my partners in crime

When Albert Einstein introduced his theory of general relativity in 1915, it changed the way we viewed the Universe. His gravitational model showed how Newtonian gravity, which had dominated astronomy and physics for more than three centuries, was merely an approximation of a more subtle and elegant model. Einstein showed us that gravity is not a mere force but is rather the foundation of cosmic structure. Gravity, Einstein said, defined the structure of space and time itself.

But in the past century, we have learned far more about the cosmos than even Einstein could have imagined. Some of our observations, such as gravitational lensing clearly confirm general relativity, but others seem to poke holes in the model. The rotational motion of galaxies doesn’t match the predictions of gravity alone, leading astronomers to introduce dark matter. The expansion of the Universe is not steady but is accelerating, pointing to the presence of dark energy. For some astronomers, this points to the need for a new model. Something that can account for the motions of stars and galaxies without the need for those dark materials that remain undetected in the lab. The most popular alternatives focus on theories of modified gravity.

The standard model of cosmology is known as the LCDM model. The L, for lambda, is the symbol used in general relativity to represent the rate of cosmic expansion and represents dark energy, while CDM stands for cold dark matter. This model describes an expanding Universe that began as a hot, dense state about 13.78 billion years ago. It is a Universe made up of about 5% regular matter, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy. It is currently the model best supported by observational evidence. Modified gravity models have a big hill to climb. To topple LCDM they have to account for everything it predicts as well as eliminate the need for dark matter and energy.

Observations confirm the validity of general relativity and the standard model of cosmology. Credit: The DESI Collaboration.

This year, that hill has become much steeper. In a series of publications released by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, the standard cosmological model has been confirmed to be in complete agreement with Einstein’s model. The DESI survey mapped nearly six million galaxies across 11 billion years of cosmic time, allowing astronomers to see not just how galaxies cluster but how that clustering changes over time. It is the largest 3D map of the Universe made thus far.

The LCDM model makes very stringent predictions of cosmic structure. If dark energy were a kind of repulsive force rather than an inherent property of spacetime, clustering would evolve differently than observed. If dark matter was an illusion of modified gravitational forces, the scale of galactic clustering would be different. This latest survey shows in explicit detail that modified gravity models don’t hold up. The results strongly constrain which modified gravity models are possible and rule out many of the models currently proposed. Based on these new results, the standard cosmological model of Einsteinian gravity, dark matter, and dark energy is the one that best fits the observed Universe.

There are still mysteries that still need to be solved, most significantly the issue of the Hubble tension problem. Perhaps a novel modified gravity model will solve this mystery and finally topple Einstein, but for now, the wild-haired genius remains king of the hill.

Reference: Adame, A. G., et al. “DESI 2024 II: Sample Definitions, Characteristics, and Two-point Clustering Statistics.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.12020 (2024).

Reference: Adame, A. G., et al. “DESI 2024 V: Full-Shape Galaxy Clustering from Galaxies and Quasars.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.12021 (2024).

Reference: Adame, A. G., et al. “DESI 2024 VII: Cosmological Constraints from the Full-Shape Modeling of Clustering Measurements.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.12022 (2024).

The post Einstein Predicted How Gravity Should Work at the Largest Scales. And He Was Right appeared first on Universe Today.

Most dogs aren't bred to feel at ease in our homes, but scientists studying puppy cognition have found ways you can help yours adapt