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Andrew Sullivan’s latest column (click first headline to read, but I couldn’t find an archived version) is a strange one.  His main point—that “progressives’ think that some scientific research should be ignored because it flouts their ideological conventions—is a good one, and one that Luana Maroja and I made before.

In this piece, Sullivan attacks three of these issues: assumption that there are no evolved differences among races, especially in intelligence; that gender reassignment may not always be a good thing; and, an issue I’ve mentioned before, the falsity of recent claims that black newborns have a higher mortality when taken care of by white rather than black physicians (this fact, falsely imputed to racism, actually reflects that underweight black newborns are preferentially given to the care of white doctors).  Sullivan’s conclusion is that science should proceed untrammeled by ideology:

Let science go forward; may it test controversial ideas; may it keep an open mind; may it be allowed to flourish and tell us the empirical truth, which we can then use as a common basis for legitimate disagreements. I think that’s what most Americans want. It’s time we stood up to the bullies and ideologues and politicians who don’t.

He’s right, but he also commits what I see as a serious error.  He describes recent studies by a crack geneticist (David Reich at Harvard) and his colleagues, studies showing that there has been natural selection on several traits within Eurasian “populations” in the last 8000 years. But then Sullivan extrapolates from those results to conclude there must then have been natural selection causing differences among populations.  Now we know that the latter conclusion is true for some traits like skin pigmentation and lactose intolerance, but we can’t willy-nilly conclude from seeing natural selection within a population to averring that known differences among populations in the same trait have diverged genetically via natural selection rather by culture culture (or a combination of culture and selection).

The hot potato here, of course, is IQ or “cognitive performance.”  This does differ among races in the U.S., but the cause of those differences isn’t known (research in this area is pretty much taboo).So even if there’s been natural selection on cognitive performance within Eurasians, as Reich et al. found, one isn’t entitled to conclude that differences among populations (or “races”, a word I avoid because of its historical misuse) must therefore also reflect genetic results of natural selection.

Here’s what Sully says, and basis it on the bioRχiv paper by Akbari et al. (Reich is the senior author) which you can access by clicking below.

Sullivan (bolding is mine):

But how have human sub-populations changed in the last, say, 10,000 years? A new paper, using new techniques, co-authored by David Reich, among many others, shows major genetic evolution in a single human population — West Eurasians — in the last 14,000 years alone. The changes include: “increases in celiac disease, blood type B, and a decline in body fat percentage, as farming made it less necessary for people to store fat for periods without any food.” Among other traits affected: “lighter skin color, lower risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disease, slower health decline, and increased measures related to cognitive performance.” Guess which trait is the controversial one.

The study was able, for the first time, to show

a consistent trend in allele frequency change over time. By applying this to 8,433 West Eurasians who lived over the past 14,000 years and 6,510 contemporary people, we find an order of magnitude more genome-wide significant signals than previous studies: 347 independent loci with >99% probability of selection.

Not just evolutionary change in the last 14,000 years — but “an order of magnitude” more than any previous studies had been able to show. Gould was not only wrong that human natural selection ended 50,000 years ago — but grotesquely so. Humans have never stopped evolving since we left Africa and clustered in several discrete, continental, genetic sub-populations. That means that some of the differences in these sub-populations can be attributed to genetics. And among the traits affected is intelligence.

The new study is just of “West Eurasians” — just one of those sub-populations, which means it has no relevance to the debate about differences between groups. But it is dramatic proof of principle that human sub-populations — roughly in line with what humans have called “races” — can experience genetic shifts in a remarkably short amount of time. And that West Eurasians got suddenly smarter between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago and then more gradually smarter since.

If the results have no relevance to differences between groups, then why in the next sentence does he extrapolate the results to differences between sub-populations or “races”?

Well, yes, Sullivan does indeed admit that the West Eurasian study (below), showing selection within tjat group, can’t be extrapolated to differences between groups.  But he does so anyway, saying that “it is the dramatic proof of a principle that human sub-populations — roughly in line with what humans have called “races” — can experience genetic shifts in a remarkably short amount of time.

Well, no, it doesn’t really “prove” that.  It’s surely true that 1) if two or more populations show genetic variation in a trait and 2) natural selection ACTS DIFFERENTIALLY in those different populations (or “races” or “subpopulations”), then yes, selection can in principle cause genetic differences among populations.  But this is not an empirical observation, but a hypothetical scenario. It’s almost as if Sullivan wants to use within-population data to show that differences among populations (especially in “cognitive performance”) must, by some kind of logic rather than empirical analysis, also be genetically based, and instilled by natural selection. But he is talking about what is possible, not what is known.

The relevant article below, which is somewhat above my pay grade, shows that Reich’s group used a combination of ancient and modern DNA to look for coordinated changes in the sequences of genes  involved in the same trait. Using GWAS analysis (genome-wide association studies), investigators can find out which segments of the genome are associated with variation in various traits within a population.  This way, for example, you can find out which areas of the genome (I believe there are about 1200) vary in a coordinated fashion with variation in an individual’s smarts (they use “educational attainment” as a surrogate for intelligence.

Click title to read:

Knowing this association, you can then compare the bits of the genome in ancient DNA associated with various traits like those listed above, and then estimate a) whether the bits of the genome that are jointly associated with variation in a trait measured today have changed in a coordinated way (i.e., have the genes affecting body fat in a population today changed over the last 8000 years in a coordinated way, with a decrease in those gene variants associated with higher body fat?); and b) the likelihood that natural selection has changed those bits over time.

Although we don’t, for example, know the “educational attainment” of ancient people, we can see that gene variants associated with higher attainment have increased by positive selection in the past few thousand years, implying that the Eurasian population has gotten smarter.  It’s thus fair to conclude that, within the study population,  there was selection for higher cognitive ability, known to be associated with educational attainment.  Here, for example, are two findings of selection from the paper:

CCR5-Δ32: Positive selection at an allele conferring immunity to HIV-1 infection (panel 7)

The CCR5-Δ32 allele confers complete resistance to HIV-1 infection in people who carry two copies43–45. An initial study dated the rise of this allele to medieval times and hypothesized it may have been selected for resistance to Black Death46, but improved genetic maps revised its date to >5000 years ago and the signal became non-significant47,48. We find that the allele was probably positively selected ∼6000 to ∼2000 years ago, increasing from ∼2% to ∼8% (s =1.1%, π=93%). This is too early to be explained by the medieval pandemic, but ancient pathogen studies show Yersinia was endemic in West Eurasia for the last ∼5000 years49–51, resurrecting the possibility that it was the cause, although other pathogens are possible.

Selection for light skin at 10 loci (panels 8-17).

We find nine loci with genome-wide signals of selection for light skin, one probable signal, and no loci showing selection for dark skin.

Depending on which level of stringency you want to use to identify natural selection on bits of the DNA, Reich’s group found between 300-5,000 “genes” (DNA bits) that have undergone positive or negative natural selection in our ancestors. But remember this: when you are talking about selection on traits, we didn’t KNOW the traits of our ancestors (like “intelligence” or “propensity to smoke” in our ancestors. Instead, what we see is that gene variants affecting those traits in modern populations have changed over time from ancient populations, with gene variants affecting a given trait changing in a coordinated way (i.e., different bits of DNA associated today with “higher intelligence” have generally increased over time).

Below is a figure from the paper showing 12 traits that have coordinated changes in the genes affecting them. Click to enlarge, and note that the traits vary from darker skin color (DNA bits associated with darker skin color declined in frequency, implying selection for lighter skin), waist to hip ratio (genes affecting this ratio declined in frequency), and both “intelligence” and “years of schooling” (both showing strong increases in “smart” DNA over the last 8,000 years).  It’s a clever analysis.

From paper: Figure 4: Coordinated selection on alleles affecting same traits (polygenic adaptation). The polygenic score of Western Eurasians over 14000 years in black, with 95% confidence interval in gray. Red represents the linear mixed model regression, adjusted for population structure, with slope γ. Three tests of polygenic selection—γ, γsign, and rs—are all significant for each of these twelve traits, with the relevant statistics at the top of each panel.

This is a lovely study (it needs vetting, of course, as this is a preprint), but doesn’t buttress Sullivan’s conclusion that changes within a group wrought by natural selection, such as the changes above, mean that differences between populations must also have been caused by natural selection. That’s simply a mistake, or a fallacy resting on confirmation bias. Sullivan insists, though, that he’s just interested in what the facts are, and those facts must play into any societal changes we want to make. (He’s sort of right here, but not completely, but I’ve discussed this issue in a WaPo book review.)

Sullivan:

Why do I care about this? It’s not because I’m some white supremacist, or Ashkenazi supremacist, or East Asian supremacist. It’s because I deeply believe that recognizing empirical reality as revealed by rigorous scientific methods is essential to liberal democracy. We need common facts to have different opinions about. Deliberately stigmatizing and demonizing scientific research because its results may not conform to your priors is profoundly illiberal. And, in this case, it runs the risk of empowering racists. As Reich wrote in his 2018 op-ed:

I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

Scientific illiberalism is on both sides. The denial of natural selection by creationists and the denial of carbon-created climate change by some libertarians is damaging to any sane public discourse, but so too is the denial of any human evolution for 50,000 years by critical race theorists and their Neo-Marxist and liberal champions.

Okay, but I wish he’d been a bit more explicit about the limitations of Reich’s study for concluding things about selection among populations or “races”.  Note, though, that he chastises both Left and Right for committing scientific “illiberalism.”

One area in which his conclusions seem more sound, however, involves gender and trans issues:

You see this [scientific illiberalism] also in the left’s defense of “no questions asked” gender reassignment for autistic, trans, and mainly gay children on the verge of puberty. The best scientific systematic studies find no measurable health or psychological benefit for the children — and a huge cost for the thousands of gay or autistic or depressed kids who later regret destroying their natural, functioning, sexed bodies. And a new German-American study has just “found that the majority of gender dysphoria-related diagnoses, including so-called gender incongruence, recorded in a minor or young adult’s medical chart were gone within within five or six years.” Yet the entire US medical establishment refuses to budge.

I should say that my own priors might also need checking. Maybe some, well-screened kids would be better off with pre-pubertal transition. Right now, we just don’t know. That’s why I favor broad clinical trials to test these experiments, before they are applied universally, and why I believe kids should have comprehensive mental health evaluations before being assigned as trans. And yet, as I write, such evaluations are being made illegal in some states, and gay kids are being mutilated for life before puberty, based on debunked science — and Tim Walz and the entire transqueer movement is adamant that no more rigorous research is needed.

Agreed!  I think that Sullivan should have added that studies do show that adults accrue overall benefits from changing gender (at least that’s what I remember). If that’s the case, then he’s made another omission that. if admitted would strengthen his credibility (always admit the caveats with your conclusions!) But I think he’s dead-on right about affirmative therapy for minors.

(h/t: Christopher)

CRISPR-Cas is used broadly in research and medicine to edit, insert, delete or regulate genes in organisms. TnpB is an ancestor of this well-known 'gene scissor' but is much smaller and thus easier to transport into cells. Using protein engineering and AI algorithms, researchers have now enhanced TnpB capabilities to make DNA editing more efficient and versatile, paving the way for treating a genetic defect for high cholesterol in the future.

If there really are advanced alien civilizations out there, you’d think they’d be easy to find. A truly powerful alien race would stride like gods among the cosmos, creating star-sized or galaxy-sized feats of engineering. So rather than analyzing exoplanet spectra or listening for faint radio messages, why not look for the remnants of celestial builds, something too large and unusual to occur naturally?

The most common idea is that aliens might build something akin to a Dyson sphere. In their need for more powerful energy sources, an advanced civilization might harness the entire output of a star. They wrap a star within a sphere to capture every last photon of stellar energy. Such an object would have a strange infrared or radio spectrum. An alien glow that is faint and unique. So astronomers have searched for Dyson spheres in the Milky Way, and have found some interesting candidates.

One major search was known as Project Hephaistos, which used data from Gaia, 2MASS, and WISE to look at five million candidate objects. From this they found seven unusual objects. They appear to be M-type red dwarfs at first glance, but have spectra that don’t resemble simple stars. This kind of star-like infrared object is exactly what you’d expect from a Dyson sphere. But of course extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that’s where things get fuzzy.

Almost immediately after the paper was published, other astronomers noted that the seven objects could also be hot Dust-Obscured Galaxies, or hotDOGs. These are quasars, so they appear star-like, but are obscured by such a tremendous amount of dust that they mostly emit in the infrared. And their spectra can be quite different from a M-type star. So the challenge is to distinguish between a hotDOG and a Dyson sphere. Which is where a new paper on the arXiv comes in.

Rather than trying to specifically distinguish between the two, the authors instead look at the distribution of known hotDOGS. They found that statistically about 1 in 3,000 quasars are of the hotDOG type, so that a broad search for Dyson spheres would likely include some dusty quasars. The authors go on to note that any civilization powerful enough to build star-scale structures would also have the ability to obscure their infrared signal. We can’t simply assume that aliens would build a Dyson sphere in such an obvious way. Overall, the authors argue, the seven candidate superstructures can be accounted for by hotDOGs and other phenomena, thus there is currently no clear evidence for alien superstructures.

Reference: Suazo, Matías, et al. “Project Hephaistos–II. Dyson sphere candidates from Gaia DR3, 2MASS, and WISE.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 531.1 (2024): 695-707.

Reference: Blain, Andrew W. “Did WISE detect Dyson Spheres/Structures around Gaia-2MASS-selected stars?.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.11447 (2024).

The post Those Aren't Dyson Spheres, They're HotDOGs appeared first on Universe Today.

Ancient DNA extracted from layers of sediment in a Czech forest shows how a drop in biodiversity coincided with a shift to pig herding about 4000 years ago

An atlas doesn’t seem to be an essential item in cars these days but think about them and most people will think about distances. An atlas of the stars not only covers distances but must also take into account time too. The Andromeda galaxy for example is so far away that its light takes 2.5 million years to reach us. A team of researchers have now built a catalogue that contains information on millions of galaxies including their distance and looks back in time up to 10 billion years!

Like anything that has – hmmmm lots of stuff, there are always catalogues to capture information about them. Astronomy is no different and there are plenty of catalogues; Messier, New General, Second Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources and the Two Micron All Sky Survey, the list goes on. Now a new catalogue has been created to provide information on millions of distant galaxies. It’s been created by a collaboration of organisations led by the Institute of Space Sciences as a result of the Physics of the Accelerating Universe Survey (PAUS.)

This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows Messier 96, a spiral galaxy just over 35 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo (The Lion). It is of about the same mass and size as the Milky Way. It was first discovered by astronomer Pierre Méchain in 1781, and added to Charles Messier’s famous catalogue of astronomical objects just four days later. The galaxy resembles a giant maelstrom of glowing gas, rippled with dark dust that swirls inwards towards the nucleus. Messier 96 is a very asymmetric galaxy; its dust and gas is unevenly spread throughout its weak spiral arms, and its core is not exactly at the galactic centre. Its arms are also asymmetrical, thought to have been influenced by the gravitational pull of other galaxies within the same group as Messier 96. This group, named the M96 Group, also includes the bright galaxies Messier 105 and Messier 95, as well as a number of smaller and fainter galaxies. It is the nearest group containing both bright spirals and a bright elliptical galaxy (Messier 105).

Over a period of 200 nights between 2015 and 2019, the teams embarked on their survey using the PAUCAM mounted upon the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in La Palma. The camera is mounted at the prime focus of the WHT giving it a whopping 1 degree field of view. There are filter trays in front of the CCDs with 42 narrowband filters ranging from 4400 to 8600 angstroms. The team used the different filters to image the same field numerous times. The light from more distant objects will be shifted toward the red end of the spectrum and the multiple images of the same field will enable distance calculations to be made.

The William Herschel Telescope, part of the Isaac Newton group of telescopes, located on Canary Island. Credit: ing.iac.es

Overall, the survey covers 50 square degrees on the sky. To put that into context, the full moon measures half a degree across so the full survey maps out an area of sky equivalent to about 250 full moons. Having analysed the full set of images, the catalogue that has been developed includes data for 1.8 million objects which will be the foundations for astronomers to better understand the structure of the Universe. 

Understanding the structure of the universe is to understand the distribution of dark matter and dark energy. Dark energy is thought to make up 70 percent of the Universe but we still don’t know what it is. We can see its effect in the accelerated expansion of the Universe but its nature remains a mystery to us. The new survey will help to shine a light on dark energy with its comprehensive data set of galaxies that span more than 10 billion light years. 

This multiwavelength image of the Cloverleaf ORC (odd radio circle) combines visible light observations from the DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) Legacy Survey in white and yellow, X-rays from XMM-Newton in blue, and radio from ASKAP (the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder) in red. X. Zhang and M. Kluge (MPE), B. Koribalski (CSIRO)

The results are a significant step forward in research into the cosmic distance scale and offers an extensive catalogue of photometric redshift measurements as they appeared billions of years ago. Over the months that follow, the team are planning on exploring galaxy clustering and galaxy shapes to help understand the evolution of the universe. 

Source : New cosmic distance catalogue to unlock the mysteries of Universe formation

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Field trials indicate that pumping seawater onto the snow on top of Arctic sea ice can make the ice thicker, offering a possible way to preserve sea ice throughout the summer

CAPTCHA tests are supposed to distinguish humans from bots, but an AI system mastered the problem after training on thousands of images of road scenes

Researchers found that X-rays of the kidneys using gold nanoparticles as a contrast agent might be more accurate in detecting kidney disease than standard laboratory blood tests.

A gravitational lens is the ultimate funhouse mirror of the Universe. It distorts the view of objects behind them but also supplies amazing information about distant galaxies and quasars. Astronomers using Hubble Space Telescope (HST) recently released a new image of one of these weird apparitions called “The Carousel Lens”. It’s a rare alignment of seven background galaxies that all appear distorted by an intervening galaxy cluster.

According to Berkeley Lab senior scientist David Schlegel, this gravitational lens is a great find for astronomers. “This is an amazingly lucky ‘galactic line-up’—a chance alignment of multiple galaxies across a line-of-sight spanning most of the observable universe,” he said. “Finding one such alignment is a needle in the haystack. Finding all of these is like eight needles precisely lined up inside that haystack.”

The Carousel Lens was uncovered in Dark Energy Survey data a few years ago. Now astronomers are zeroing in on it to measure its mass and the effects on the images of more distant galaxies. This gravitational lens alignment of seven galaxies and a foreground galaxy cluster could well provide new insights into the early Universe via the high-redshift galaxy sources, the properties of the lensing cluster, and unanswered questions in cosmology.

An example of the Carousel gravitational lens found in the DESI Legacy Surveys data. There are four sets of lensed images in DESI-090.9854-35.9683. They correspond to four distinct background galaxies — from the outermost giant red arc to the innermost bright blue arc. All of them appear gravitationally warped — or lensed — by the orange galaxy at the very center. Deconstructing the Carousel Gravitational Lens

Typical large-scale gravitational lenses in the Universe consist of a “lensing object” and more distant objects behind it. Generally, those distant objects are galaxies and quasars. (Small-scale gravitational lenses occur when a planet passes in front of its star, for example.) However, the Carousel Lens is more “cosmic” in nature, covering objects millions of light-years apart. In particular, the cluster doing the lensing is about 5 billion light-years from Earth. It’s also designated as DESI-090.9854-35.9683 and has at least four large galaxy members as well as several other possible cluster members.

The Carousel lenses at least seven distant galaxies. They lie anywhere from 7.62 to 12 billion light-years away from Earth. Their alignment with the lensing cluster resulted in multiple images of each of the more distant galaxies. Their shapes are the result of the “funhouse mirror” effect that stretches their apparitions. The galaxy labeled “4a, 4b, 4c, 4d” actually forms a nearly perfect “Einstein Cross”, which shows the symmetrical distribution of mass in the lens.

The Carousel is a great example of a “strong lens” in the Universe, according to Xiaoshang Huang, who is part of the team at Berkeley studying it. “Our team has been searching for strong lenses and modeling the most valuable systems,” said Huang. “The Carousel Lens is an incredible alignment of seven galaxies in five groupings that line up nearly perfectly behind the foreground cluster lens. As they appear through the lens, the multiple images of each of the background galaxies form approximately concentric circular patterns around the foreground lens, as in a carousel. It’s an unprecedented discovery, and the computational model generated shows a highly promising prospect for measuring the properties of the cosmos, including those of dark matter and dark energy.”

The Carousel Lens as seen by the HST marked up by the galaxies. The “L” indicators near the center (La, Lb, Lc, and Ld) show the most massive galaxies in the lensing cluster. Seven unique galaxies (numbered 1 through 7) – located an additional 2.6 to 7 billion light years beyond the lens – appear in multiple, distorted “fun-house mirror” iterations (indicated by each number’s letter index, e.g., a through d), as seen through the lens. (Credit: William Sheu (UCLA) using HST data.) What Makes this Lens So Special?

In their recently released paper, Schlegel, Huang, and others described modeling the Carousel Lens to understand its structure. They point out that it shows nearly every lensing configuration that astronomers see in such apparitions. There are various arcs, diamond shapes, the Einstein Ring, and double lensing.

The big spread of distances between the lens itself and the galaxies it’s distorting also presents some interesting cosmological areas of study. In particular, the science team hopes to do more spectral studies to understand the lensing cluster’s matter distribution. At least seven lensed sources will help constrain the amount of matter in the cluster and aid in understanding the amounts of dark and baryonic matter in such systems.

In addition to matter distribution, the team can also use this lensing system as a way to understand the characteristics of the distant lensed sources. This is important because the most distant ones give insight into conditions in their various epochs of cosmic history. For example, source 7 is an interesting “nearby” source that could be a very high-redshift “quiescent” galaxy. It appears to be very “red” in infrared measures and others of this sort have been observed by HST. Source 7 could be an efficient example of what’s called “early galaxy quenching”.

That occurs when star formation shuts down and the galaxy becomes quiescent. There are several ways that could happen, but the most common is some kind of feedback loop between the central supermassive black hole and outlying regions. This could occur as a result of galaxy mergers, for example, which were very common in the early Universe. The Carousel Lens (and others of its type) provides a special way to study that epoch of cosmic history and the events that shaped the galaxies we see today.

For More Information

Magnifying Deep Space Through the ‘Carousel Lens
The Carousel Lens: A Well-modeled Strong Lens with Multiple Sources Spectroscopically Confirmed by VLT/MUSE

Gravitational lens found in the DESI Legacy Surveys data

The post This Might Be the Best Gravitational Lens Ever Found appeared first on Universe Today.

Solar flares are a fascinating thing and have a profound effect on what astronomers refer to as “space weather.” These events vary with the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle, releasing immense amounts of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum (from extreme ultraviolet to X-rays) into space. The effects of flares have been observed since time immemorial, which include aurorae at high latitudes (Aurora Borealis and Australis), but have only been the subject of study and prediction for about a century and a half. Still, there is much that remains unknown about these dramatic events.

For instance, flares are known to affect the Sun’s atmosphere, from the visible surface (photosphere) to its outermost layer (corona). However, there are still questions about how these events influence the lower layers of the atmosphere. In a recent study led by the University of Colorado, Boulder, a team of researchers documented the rotation of two very small sunspots of the Sun’s surface (pores) using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) at Mauna Kea. These pores were linked to a less powerful flare and moved in a way that has never been observed, suggesting that the dynamics of the Sun’s atmosphere are more complex than previously thought.

The study was led by Rahul Yadav, a Research Scientist from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder (UC Boulder). He was joined by colleagues from UC Boulder’s Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Solar Observatory (NSO), and the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics of SB RAS. The paper that details their findings, “Photospheric Pore Rotation Associated with a C-class Flare from Spectropolarimetric Observations with DKIST,” recently appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The NSO Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Credit: NSF/NSO/AURA

Solar flares are thought to occur when stored magnetic energy in the Sun’s atmosphere accelerates charged particles in the surrounding plasma. They occur in active regions and are often accompanied by a significant amount of plasma being ejected into space – a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) – and the release of accelerated particles – a Solar Particle Event (SPE). These can play havoc with satellites in Earth’s orbit, and interfere with radio antennas and electronic grids on the surface, which is why scientists are interested in learning more about them.

Flares are classified according to their strength: B-class is the weakest, C and M-class are slightly more energetic, and X is the strongest. Previous studies have shown how intense solar flares can lead to large sunspots rapidly rotating and distorting active regions on the Sun’s surface. But as Dr. Yadav explained in an NSO press release, what they observed was quite unexpected. “[T]his study marks the first time that such rotation has been observed on a smaller scale—less than 2,000 kilometers [~1,245 mi] across—associated with a less intense C-class flare,” he said.

In addition, previous observations have found that rotational movements of sunspots occur directly at the flare ribbon, where the most intense emissions occur during a flare event. This time, the team observed a pre-flare rotation located a short distance from the flare ribbon, which suggests that the coupling between different layers of the Sun’s atmosphere during flares may be more complex than previously thought. Yadav and his colleagues suggest that the process they observed is driven by changes in the Lorentz force caused by interactions between solar charged particles (aka. solar wind) and its magnetic fields.

As Prof. Maria Kazachenko, an NSO scientist and co-author of the study, explained:

“As the magnetic field lines in the corona reorganize, they could induce changes in the lower atmosphere, leading to the observed rotation. This discovery adds a new dimension to our understanding of the complex magnetic interactions that occur during solar flares.”

This animation shows the temporal evolution of a solar flare region and the surrounding sunspots/pores as observed by the VBI instrument on the Inouye Solar Telescope. Credit: NSO–NSF

The unique observations the team made using the Inouye telescope offer new insights into the mechanisms through which solar flares influence the lower layers of the Sun’s atmosphere. For example, past observations have revealed much about sunspot rotations that occurred during more powerful flares (M—or X-class). However, the Inouye data revealed that similar rotational movements can occur with less intense flares and on smaller scales. These findings could lead to new research avenues and help refine our models of solar activity.

This will have implications for the growing constellations of telecom, research, internet, and Earth observation satellites in Earth’s orbit. Predicting space weather, which affects everything in the Solar System to the very edge of the Heliosphere, is also important for long-duration missions in space. For astronauts working on the Moon and Mars and transiting through deep space, knowing more about flare activity will help mitigate the risk of radiation exposure.

Further Reading: NSO, AJL

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Earlier today I criticized Angel Eduardo for making a useful but un-original plea for comity between people of conflicting ideologies. (Try that with Jewish students and pro-Palestinian demonstrators!)

Apparently a false rumor started that J.D. Vance (whom he calls a “giant asshole”) was copulating with his couch, leading to Maher’s claim that we’re all willing to believe the worst things possible about our opponents. That leads to the conclusion that we shouldn’t characterize farmers as “hicks”, nor write off entire states as either “red” or “blue”.  The conclusion: “America is a funny, mixed-up place now.”  He then admits that while he used to hate country music, it’s become good and shouldn’t be dismissed as the music of racists and bumpkins.

So why do I beef about Angel Eduardo and show you Maher’s weekly comedy bit, both of which make the same point? Because Maher’s presentation is funny and entertaining, He concludes by saying, “Why don’t we just resist our worst impulses?”

The audience applauds, but then they’ll go home and demonize the other side!

Here we have two different British media venues: the Sunday Times of London and The Economist, coming to different conclusions about a questions that gnaws on many of us: “Is wokeness in America on the wane or on the rise?”

The Times (second article below) says “no, we aren’t even near peak wokeness”, taking issue with the Economist article (first headline below), which, based on thei analysis of trends in views and in the use of “woke” terms in the media, says wokeness has peaked.  First, the Economist piece (click to read)

The results of the Economist survey and a chart:

The simplest way to measure the spread of woke views is through polling. We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (GSS), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried “a great deal” about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In GSS’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left.

Here’s their chart. I have to say that, with the exception of race being the most important issue in the U.S., which could be dampened by the election and concerns about the economy and immigration, I’m not impressed by the “peaks”.  Wokeness is still way higher than it was just ten years ago.

Polling about sexual discrimination reveals a similar pattern, albeit with an earlier peak than concerns about race. The share of Americans who consider sexism a very or moderately big problem peaked at 70% in 2018, in the aftermath of #MeToo. The share believing that women face obstacles that make it hard to get ahead peaked in 2019, at 57%. Woke views on gender are also in decline. Pew finds that the share of people who believe someone can be a different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily since 2017, when it first asked the question. Opposition to trans students playing in sports teams that match their chosen gender rather than their biological sex has grown from 53% in 2022 to 61% in 2024, according to YouGov.

Now that last statistic, about trans students—clearly males identifying as females playing on teams not matching their biological sex (I love that term)—I do find convincing, simply because in the media I see increasing opposition to it, and think that, on issues of fairness alone, the “transwomen are women” trope, and vice versa, is on the way out. This is about fairness (morality), not solely ideology. And, of course, you can’t contest the data on the frequency of terms used, but again, Biden and the election have pushed woke issues largely to the side. More from The Economist:

To corroborate the trend revealed by opinion polls, we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since. Take the term “white privilege”: in 2020 it featured roughly 2.5 times for every million words in the New York Times, but by 2023 had fallen to just 0.4 mentions for every million words.

Still, maybe, just maybe, the Economist is right. The use of “white privilege”, for example, is only 16% of what it was just three years before.

The Times rejects the “peak” conclusion, although they are going largely on intuition rather than statistics. Still, the article has a point: we need longer-term data, and the wokesters haven’t yet taken over society since they’re too young to have attained much power.

Click to read, or find the Times article archived here.

Matthew Syed, disagrees with the Economist thesis because of “invisible data”! I couldn’t resist some self-aggrandizement in what I excerpt below, but it does belong in their analysis:

Last week The Economist published an exhaustive analysis of the rise and apparent fall of wokeism. The magazine defined woke — I think rightly — as a term that has morphed over the decades from denoting an awareness of racism to a spectrum of views encompassing structural racism, radical trans rights, cancellation and the like. I won’t waste time pinning down definitions since, as with pornography, I suspect most of us know wokeism when we see it (although perhaps that is now a view that could get me cancelled).

The Economist looked at a variety of trends: how often terms like “intersectionality” and “white privilege” are used in print media (it examined millions of articles); how often they are used in TV programmes (it analysed thousands of transcripts); how often they are used in scientific papers; how often they feature in companies’ financial reports; how often calls are made for academics to be disciplined; and so on. As I say, the data was exhaustive and, I would add, superbly assembled.

But it was the way The Economist interpreted the data that troubled me. It noted that trends, by almost all these measures, particularly in America, were falling back after a high point roughly around the aftermath of the George Floyd riots. It concluded that the phenomenon was on the decline. We are, it said, almost audibly breathing a sigh of relief, “past peak woke”.

I disagree. I say this because, while the visible data reveals a clear pattern, I find myself asking: what about the invisible data? What about the cancellations that have become so normalised they are no longer reported? What about the initiatives (like mandatory unconscious bias training, which has never had evidence to support it) that are no longer mentioned in quarterly reports because they have become routine? What about the conservatives who self-censor out of fear of cancellation? When you take a step back, the data shows that woke is not past its peak but has moved from the wallpaper and into the brickwork.

Consider that Auckland University has now started requiring all students to take a course that is “effectively indoctrination in the coloniser/indigeneity hierarchy”, according to the decorated academic Jerry Coyne. This was scarcely reported. The list of cancellations in western universities grows daily, but is no longer newsworthy.

Or take a blog post from ten days ago revealing the scale of censorship in publishing, none of which shows up in datasets because the books are not, well, published (the subhead was: “Widespread censorship is killing writers’ careers before they begin”). I know authors who have had to edit out words like “stupid” and “mad” because they are considered “ableist”; who have deleted references to drinking through straws as they might prove offensive to people with disabilities who can’t use a straw; who have referred to the moon as “a small white rock orbiting the Earth” and had to remove “white” because it was racially sensitive. And I haven’t even mentioned how difficult it is to publish anything that hints at benign aspects of the British empire.

(I have to note that my article was about New Zealand, not the U.S., which was what the Economist piece was about.)

But, as you see, Syed doesn’t really give data; rather, he gives anecdotes (there are more). But it is true that deplatformings and censorship aren’t considered by the Economist, and I suspect that FIRE’s database of college deplatforming really would show an increase in the last few years (do the analysis yourself). And of course a lot of wokeness was instantiated by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, who are by and large on the Left and see Israel as white oppressors. Yet none of the friction caused by those demonstrations aren’t measured, either, and the issue isn’t going away any time soon.

Syed’s main thesis is that the woke are young and haven’t gotten societal power that will keep wokeness increasing.

Forgive a crude generalisation, but those on the right tend to go into finance and business because they are motivated by money. Those on the left tend to go into museums, charities and academia because they are willing to play a longer game. That is why cultural institutions trend left and Marxists console themselves with the thought that, while they live in smaller houses, they have the greater — if subtler — influence.

And this, I fear, is the other fallacy in The Economist’s analysis. It’s true that a fightback against wokeism has begun, largely driven by older liberals who — after cowering rather pathetically out of fear of cancellation — started to stand up for free speech, due process and the reality of biological sex. But you can glimpse its grip on our cultural institutions in the fact that much of Gen Z, which will soon replace the present generation in positions of political, cultural and corporate power — has markedly different views. And that is why it is in a decade or so that the rubber will hit the road: on women’s rights, single-sex spaces, free speech, the West’s relationship with Israel, our understanding of history, indeed our very sense of self.

Well, the liberal mainstream media is already colonized by the woke (check reports about the Slack channel of NYT reporters), but there are still nonwoke people writing for the paper. What happens when they leave?

In the end, Syed asserts that he is somewhat of a progressive, and is in favor of diversity, forms of affirmative action, and so on. But he ends like this:

But I have long feared radical wokeism, a strangely transmissible virus that could yet prove lethal to our future, and that has inspired a mirror version on the populist right, which seems just as keen to denigrate our history, the memory of Churchill and Nato.

That is why epitaphs for wokeism are not just premature but dangerous. Indeed, when you look at the invisible data, you’ll see that the fightback has only just begun.

My take: I am not sure if wokeness is on the wane. Certain aspects of it are, like the willingness to allow men identified as women to enter women’s spaces, but other aspects are on the rise, most visibly (to me) the incursion of wokeness into science journals and magazines. But the important conclusion is that wokeness is here and ubiquitous, and seems entrenched in many areas. But whether or not it’s increasing, it needs to be fought at every turn. And that means that those of us who object to the invidious side of Social Justice—of course “social justice” is not all bad; I’m referring to  the ca[ota;ozed performative and non-effective pretense of fixing society by changing words, bird names, and monitoring speech and behavior—must stand up and call out this nonsense when we see it,  It’s not pleasant, as you’ll be ostracized and demonized, if not fired, but since when was society ever improved without people taking flak from those who wrongly see themselves as the pinnacle of morality?

h/t: Pyers

 

When you get close to a black hole, things can get pretty intense. The tremendous gravity can squeeze gas to ionizing temperatures, and fierce magnetic fields can accelerate plasma into jets speeding at nearly the speed of light. That’s a lot of power, and wherever there is power someone will figure out how to harness it.

Back in 1969 Roger Penrose noted that you could theoretically extract energy from a black hole simply by dumping garbage into it. The idea was to pack a spaceship full of junk, fly really close to a black hole so that you travel within the region of strongly twisted space known as the ergosphere, then simply dump your trash. The trash gets consumed by the black hole and your spaceship gets a boost of energy. No need to reduce, reuse, recycle, just toss it down the cosmic hole.

How to turn trash into energy. Credit: Atomic Rockets, adapted from Misner, Thorne and Wheeler

While this should work in principle, the engineering needed to carry it off would be challenging, and harnessing energy from a fast-moving rocket wouldn’t be very efficient. Fortunately there should be another way, just using electromagnetic waves. In 1971 Yakov Zeldovich demonstrated how a rotating black hole could amplify electromagnetic waves. Essentially if you beam light toward a rotating black hole, some of the light will be ampified due to the frame dragging of gravity.

At least in theory.

Therein lies the problem. While all of this is theoretically sound, we don’t have a spare black hole lying around to prove it. Luckily the Zeldovich effect works for more than just black holes. Zeldovich showed that the effect should work for any rotating body that absorbs a bit of the energy aimed at it. So you should be able to bounce light against a rotating cylinder and see the effect. No black hole needed. The only problem is that the cylinder would need to rotate at relativistic speeds and the effect would be tiny. Then in 2020 a team showed how a similar effect worked with sound waves. They beamed low-frequency sound waves into an absorptive rotating disk and measured an increase in acoustic energy, proving the Zeldovich effect worked for sound.

Measuring the electromagnetic Zeldovich effect. Credit: Braidotti, et al

Now the team is back with a new paper showing the effect with electromagnetic waves.[^4] The way they did it was to adapt a resonant circuit. The circuit could focus an oscillating magnetic wave through a through an aluminum cylinder. By itself the cylinder would act as a simple resistor and dampen the magnetic field, but when the team rotated the cylinder in a particular way the magnetic field was amplified just as Zeldovich predicted. Since aluminum isn’t magnetic, the isn’t due to some dynamo effect. Thus the team could demonstrate it is a new effect.

So we now know rotating bodies, including black holes, can amplify electromagnetic fields. What’s also interesting about this experiment is how surprisingly straight forward it is. The design is similar to an induction generator used in wind turbines. The experiment could have been done decades ago, it’s just that no one had thought of it before. Sometimes the answer to a scientific question is right in front of you.

Reference: Braidotti, M. C., et al. “Amplification of electromagnetic fields by a rotating body.” Nature Communications 15.1 (2024): 5453.

The post Researchers Mimic Extracting Energy From Black Holes in the Lab appeared first on Universe Today.

I’m in America at the start of a five-week tour of America promoting this book, The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, which is being published on the 17th of September in America. I’m having a good time. I’m in Texas—the first stop was Dallas, and the second stop is… pic.twitter.com/ogJpvmnoUi

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) September 9, 2024

Last night I went to Richard Dawkins’s appearance at the Chicago Theater as part of his “The Final Bow” tour: the last time, he says, he’s going on the road to do lectures. (After here he goes to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Vancouver, winding up in Old Blighty with talks at Oxford and Coventry.) I suppose that Richard, now 83, figured he was too old to be traipsing around on a five-week tour, but he also has a new book to promote and discuss, The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie.

The event last night was mixed: redeemed almost entirely by the presence and eloquence of Dawkins himself. As far as I can see, this tour, organized not by the Richard Dawkins Foundation (RDF) but a commercial outfit, was thrown together at the last minute, with the format being an initial ten-minute “warmup” lecture unrelated to the discussion, and then an interchange between Richard and a selected interlocutor, who happened last night to be journalist Jessie Singal.  In my view, it was not a great choice to enlist both Singal and the introducer, Angel Eduardo (now an editor with FIRE).  They weren’t even announced until a few days before the event, something that the RDF wouldn’t have done had they hosted this event. And neither person performed as well as I expected.

Eduardo talked for ten minutes about the divisiveness of online discussions, and how we should always assume the best intentions of our opponents, as well as characterizing their arguments as strongly as possible (“steelmanning”) instead of giving distorted views of their arguments (“strawmanning”). He bemoaned the nasty tone of much online argument. But these points have been amply made others like by Dan Dennett, and the hand-wringing about divisiveness, while pointing out a real phenomenon, was anodyne: we’ve heard it a million times before. I just wanted to get to the discussion between Singal and Dawkins, which lasted about an hour. You don’t need a warmup act for Dawkins.

Singal’s expertise in biology is limited to gender issues, and so the biology part of his questions concerned Richard’s views of transgender issues, and although the audience might not have known them, they do now. Richard asserted, for example, that it’s simply wrong for a man to identify as a woman and immediately, for example, to start competing in women’s sports. It was good to hear that pronounced with such authority from the stage, though I have no idea whether the audience questions took Richard to task about this (I had to leave after the discussion to catch a train).

Richard was also asked about having his 1996 “Humanist of the Year” award revoked because of the first tweet below:

I do not intend to disparage trans people. I see that my academic “Discuss” question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue .

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 12, 2021

Shame on the American Humanists for this! Richard was simply puzzled about why changing gender is applauded but changing race is demonized. He was especially baffled because, he said, gender is a spectrum, and it’s much easier to sell the claim that you’ve changed genders (without drugs and surgery, that is) than to claim that you’re actually a member of a race you weren’t born into. This in fact is the subject of Rebecca Tuvel’s famous Hypatia article that caused such a fracas when it was published, and yet it’s a valid subject to discuss. (In fact, I’ve discussed it here.) I still don’t understand why it’s okay to change genders but not races—especially, as in the case of Rachel Dolezal, her identification as black (she was born white) seemed to be an honest one.

At any rate, perhaps the audience didn’t know this, but in my view Singal, who actually crowdsourced most of his questions to Richard from friends and others, sorely neglected Richard’s book itself (I wonder if he’d read it) in favor of asking a series of largely unrelated questions—questions about life on other planets and the future of humanity.

Richard did get in a few statements about evolution. One was an eloquent description of how cuckoos parasitize the nests of other species and mimic the eggs of their hosts, who will reject eggs that look “wrong.”  This had led to the enduring mystery of how each cuckoo manages to lay eggs that mimic those of its host, given that each female lays only one kind of egg but different cuckoo females parasitize diverse species of birds, and yet the different egg-types of female cuckoos (“gentes”) manage to remain egg-color specific despite mating with males who carry genes for other egg color. Why doesn’t a female carry both her color genes and different color genes from the male, producing intermediate eg that would be rejected by the hosts?

When I first heard about this years ago, I immediately thought of a solution: the egg-color-and-pattern genes must be on the female’s W chromosome. In in birds females are “heterogametic” WZ and males are “homogemetic” ZZ—unlike in mammals, in which males are XY and females XX. Thus, in cuckoos, the W chromosome is passed on exclusively from mothers to daughters, and no genetic material on that chromosome is mixed with DNA from males. This could ensure that a female lays only the same type of egg as her mother, no matter with whom her mother mated. (Females imprint on the nests of their hosts, and thus return yearly to the same species of host to lay their host-mimicking eggs.) We don’t yet know if this is the answer, but I suspect it’s correct, and we’ll find out within a few years.  Richard clearly became excited when describing this, and I was sad that this was about all the evolutionary biology he discussed in detail. Most of the “discussion” was simply Richard answering a series of diverse questions from Singal. Singal was more interested i, for example, n whether humans would somehow be made of metal in the future, and whether there was life on other planets—a tired old subject.

But what redeemed the discussion was Richard’s ability to take any question, no matter how many times he’d heard it, and make the answer fresh and interesting. So, with the exoplanet life question, he didn’t just saym “yes, there are millions of planets that could support life, so it must exist somewhere else”. Rather, he added that there were likely several barriers to producing technologically advanced life elsewhere in the universe (without technology to produce radio or light waves, we wouldn’t know if such life existed). The barriers, which Dawkins said were of several types, included the origin of life (probably pretty easy given that life evolved very soon after Earth cooled down), and then harder barriers like the evolution of a eukaryotic cell, the evolution of multicellularity, and then the evolution of a multicellular species with the smarts to produce technology.

Singal apparently didn’t have the acumen to ask Richard what I would have: a problem with his thesis that I wanted to explore. The thesis of The Genetic Book of the Dead is that we can reconstruct the environments of our ancestral species simply from knowing their DNA sequences. We simply sequence a species (ours is done, of course), look at the genes we have, figure out what those genes were involved in when they were active, and from that going on to conclude which adaptations our ancestors had. Ergo, we might conclude what kind of ancestral reptile, or what kind of ancestral fish, our ancestors were, and thus what environments they lived in.

There are two problems with this.  We can certainly use DNA sequences to reconstruct family trees, confirming our conclusion (already known at from morphology, fossils, and development) that yes, we’re evolved from fishy and reptilian ancestors. But trying to suss out the environments of those ancestors from DNA sequences is probably futile. For one thing, we don’t know what most genes actually do, and thus would be stymied since we don’t know which ancestral DNA constituted adaptations to the environment,—and if so, what kind of adaptations.  More important, most of the ancestral DNA we still have has been overwritten by the endless churning of natural selection, so even finding out what deep ancestral genes we had would be nearly impossible today. That’s the first question I would have asked Richard after he described the thesis of his book.

But perhaps this is just the biologist in me kvetching. Yet somehow, having known Richard for years, I think he’s most energized when discussing his first love, evolutionary biology and its wonders, and less energized when answering questions like “Would you like to be immortal?” (His answer, “No. I love life, but the prospect of eternity is frightening. Still, I’d like to have 200 years.”)

But one of the last questions from Singal was good: “If you died and found yourself in Heaven, and could get answers to three questions that have puzzled you, what would you ask?” Richard’s answers:

“How did life on Earth originate?”
“What is consciousness?” (I presume he means what neuronal configuration gives rise to subjective sensations, or “qualia”.)
“Is there ‘advanced’ life in other places in the Universe?”

The audience applauded these answers, which were good, though I’m sure Richard’s been asked this before. (I would probably have thought of the first and third, but not the second.)

I just thought of another question I would have asked him. (I may have even asked this during the few times I’ve been part of an onstage discussion with Richard.)

“If you were put in a time machine, and could be transported back to one location for one day, hoping to answer a question about biology, and were given only a paper and pencil to record what you say, when would you choose?”

(You couldn’t say “I would like to be there when life originated”, because in a day you couldn’t answer that question. But you could go back and look at things like dinosaurs or hominin ancestors.)

My conclusion: go see Richard if you get the chance. There are only a few more stops on his tour, and tickets are available. No matter who questions him, he will be giving good answers—and often funny ones. But really, the organizers of this tour should have thought better about who to enlist as interlocutors and “warm-up” acts. (To their credit, though, Masih Aliejad was one warm-up.)  And they shouldn’t have chosen these people at the last minute.

If you go, and if you’ve bought VIP tickets, bring your Dawkins books, for he’ll autograph as many as you have (no duplicate books, though, and you have to have shelled out for those VIP tickets. Still, when else are you going to get him to autograph his books?)

It’s Sunday, and that means another batch of bird photos by the estimable John Avise. John’s narrative and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them,

Dominican Republic Birds, Part 2  

This concludes our two-part series on birds of the Dominican Republic.  All of these photos were taken in 2006 during our annual meeting of the Pew Fellows in Marine Conservation.  The intent has been to showcase just a few of the many birds you might encounter on even a brief visit to this beautiful Hispaniolan country.

Hispaniolan Woodpecker (Melanerpes striatus):

House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) female:

Lesser Scaup (Aythya affinis), females:

Magnificent Frigatebird (Fregata magnificens) female:

Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura):

Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos):

Palmchat (Dulus dominicus):

Ruddy Turnstone (Arenaria interpres):

Shiny Cowbird (Molothrus bonariensis) male:

Smooth-billed Ani (Crotophaga ani):

Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura):

Vervain Hummingbird (Mellisuga minima):

Yellow-faced Grassquit (Tiaris olivaceus):

Yellow-throated Warbler (Setophaga dominica):

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Biologist Colin Wright joins the podcast to explore one of today’s most contentious topics: the intersection of biological sex and gender.

Drawing on his expertise in animal behavior and evolutionary biology, Colin breaks down key concepts such as biological sex, gender identity, and gender dysphoria. He also examines the shift in societal definitions of what it means to be a man or woman, and how these evolving perspectives fit with long-standing biological principles.

This session was presented at FreedomFest 2024. To see more speeches and sessions from FreedomFest, visit freedomfest.com/civl.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

Earth’s average global temperatures have been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), Earth has been heating up at a rate of 0.06 °C (0.11 °F) per decade since 1850 – or about 1.11 °C (2 °F) in total. Since 1982, the average annual increase has been 0.20 °C (0.36 °F) per decade, more than three times as fast. What’s more, this trend is projected to increase by between 1.5 and 2 °C (2.7 to 3.6 °F) by mid-century, possibly more! This is a direct consequence of burning fossil fuels, which has increased exponentially since the mid-19th century.

Depending on the extent of temperature increases, the impact on Earth’s habitability could be catastrophic. In a recent study, a team of scientists examined how temperature increases are a long-term issue facing advanced civilizations and not just a matter of fossil fuel consumption. As they argue, rising planetary temperatures could be an inevitable result of the exponential growth of energy consumption. Their findings could have serious implications for astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

The study was conducted by Amedeo Balbi, an Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Universita di Roma Tor Vergata, and Manasvi Lingam, an Assistant Professor with the Department of Aerospace, Physics and Space Sciences and the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech). The paper detailing their findings, “Waste Heat and Habitability: Constraints from Technological Energy Consumption,” recently appeared online and is being reviewed for publication in the journal Astrobiology.

This chart shows the meteorological summer (June, July, and August) temperature anomalies each year since 1880. Credit: NASA’s Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

The idea that civilizations will eventually overheat their planet harkens back to the work of Soviet scientist Mikhail I. Budyko. In 1969, he published a groundbreaking study titled “The effect of solar radiation variations on the climate of the Earth,” where he argued that “All the energy used by man is transformed into heat, the main portion of this energy being an additional source of heat as compared to the present radiation gain. Simple calculations show that with the present rate of growth of using energy the heat produced by man in less than two hundred years will be comparable with the energy coming from the Sun.”

This is a simple consequence of all energy production and consumption invariably producing waste heat. While this waste heat is only a marginal contribution to global warming compared to carbon emissions, long-term projections indicate that this could change. As Lingam related to Universe Today via email:

“The current contribution of waste heat to a rise in global temperature is minimal. However, if waste heat production proceeds on an exponential trajectory for the next century, a further 1 degree Celsius (1.8 F) rise in temperature may stem from waste heat, independent of an enhanced greenhouse effect because of fossil fuels. If the waste heat generation maintains its exponential growth over centuries, we show that it can eventually lead to a complete loss of habitability and the demise of all life on Earth.”

The Dyson Sphere is a fitting example of waste heat resulting from the exponential growth of an advanced civilization. In his original proposal paper, “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation,” Freeman Dyson argued how the need for more habitable space and energy could eventually drive a civilization to create an “artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star.” As he described, these megastructures would be detectable to infrared instruments due to the “large-scale conversion of starlight into far-infrared radiation,” meaning they would radiate waste heat to space.

“The heating we explore in our paper results from the conversion of any form of energy and is an unavoidable consequence of the laws of thermodynamics,” added Balbi, who was the study’s lead author. “For present-day Earth, this heating represents only a negligible fraction of the warming caused by the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. However, if global energy consumption continues to grow at its current rate, this effect could become significant within a few centuries, potentially impacting Earth’s habitability.”

To determine how long it would take for advanced civilizations to reach the point where they would render their home planet uninhabitable, Balbi and Lingam crafted theoretical models based on the Second Law of thermodynamics (as it applies to energy production). They then applied this to planetary habitability by considering the circumsolar habitable zone (CHZ) – i.e., the orbits where a planet would receive sufficient solar radiation to maintain liquid water on its surface.

“We adapted the calculation of the habitable zone, a standard tool in exoplanetary studies. Essentially, we incorporated an additional source of heating—stemming from technological activity—alongside the stellar irradiation,” said Balbi. Another key factor they considered is the exponential growth rates of civilizations and their energy consumption, as predicted by the Kardashev Scale. Using humanity as a template, we see that global energy consumption rates went from 5,653 terawatt-hours (TWh) to 183,230 TWh between 1800 and 2023.

This trend was not only exponential but accelerated over time, similar to population growth in the same period (1 billion in 1800 to 8 billion in 2023). Balbi and Lingam extrapolated this trend to measure the implications for habitability and determine the maximum lifespan of an advanced civilization once it has entered a period of exponential growth. Ultimately, they concluded that the maximum lifetime of technospheres is about 1000 years, provided that they experience an annual growth rate of about 1% throughout the period of interest.

Humanity’s energy consumption has experienced accelerated and exponential growth in the past two centuries. Credit: OurWorldInData.org/Energy Institute – Statistical Review of World Energy (2024)

These findings, said Balbi, have implications for humanity and in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI):

“Our results indicate that the effect of waste heat could become substantial not only in Earth’s future but also in the development of any hypothetical technological species inhabiting planets around other stars. Consequently, considering this constraint could influence how we approach the search for technologically advanced life in the universe and how we interpret the outcomes of such searches. For instance, it may offer a partial explanation for the Fermi paradox.”

Balbi and Lingam also stress how these results present some possible recommendations for how we could avoid rendering our planet uninhabitable. Once again, there are implications for SETI since any solution we can envision is likely to have already been implemented by another advanced species. Said Balbi:

“Although our paper focuses on physics rather than solutions to societal challenges, we envision a few scenarios that could help a technological species mitigate the constraints of waste heating and delay its onset. A sufficiently advanced civilization might use technology to counteract heating, such as employing stellar shielding.”

“Alternatively, they could relocate much of their technological infrastructure off-world, moving into space. Such mega-engineering projects would have significant implications for our search for technosignatures. A less ambitious but perhaps more feasible approach would be to reduce energy consumption by slowing growth. Of course, we cannot predict which of these options is the most plausible.”

Further Reading: arXiv

The post Advanced Civilizations Will Overheat Their Planets Within 1,000 Years appeared first on Universe Today.

Today we have Part One of reader Chris Taylor’s photos from Queensland. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

After having been unable to travel for the last five years, I was at last able to get away again, so my partner and I decided to escape the cold of Canberra’s winter and travel up to tropical North Queensland. We had arranged to go out to the Bush Heritage Australia reserve at Yourka again, but before going there we had some time to visit the rainforest near the coast. After flying in to Cairns, we drove up to our first campsite in Mossman.

Above the town, the pristine Mossman River flows through a steep sided gorge.

The rainforest here is said to be the oldest on earth. Many ancient plant families are preserved here, including cycads, ferns and primitive conifers. We had a couple of short walks along the paths into the rainforest.

Our campground was on the banks of the Mossman River. A sign in the site was slightly alarming!

I’m not sure how often the crocodiles get up into the town.

But a few days later we travelled the few kilometres further north to the Daintree River, and there were plenty of crocodiles to be seen. There are two species of crocodile found in Australia, the smaller Freshwater Crocodile, and the larger Saltwater species.

This is a Saltwater Crocodile, Crocodylus porosus:

On the Daintree River, a dominant male will rule a territory of many kilometres of the river, and will keep a harem of females. The male will also tolerate a number of juvenile males until they are three or four years old, at which time they will be driven out of the area. Once fully grown they may return to the river to challenge the resident male for his territory and females.

This is a young male. He was only about 2.5m in length.

This is a female of breeding age. She is regulating her body temperature by entering the water, and gaping her mouth to the wind. There are many blood vessels in the roof of the mouth and this cools the blood going to her brain.

There is some concern in Queensland that climate change is having a big adverse effect on the crocodiles. The sex of the hatchling is determined by the temperature:  less than 32oC produces males, but over 34oC the litter is predominantly female. This warming, together with the effects of the flooding caused by Tropical Cyclone Jasper, has led to no young crocodiles surviving in the Daintree for two years.

We also saw the dominant male of this part of the river, a 5m long, 500kg animal known as Scarface.

He is thought to be at least 70 years old, and carries witness to many fights he has had to retain his kingdom. He has lost most if not all of his teeth, but is still able to feed, often on carrion that is carried down the river.

Lining the river banks are stands of Mangrove trees of different species. Here the mangroves are combining to form an island in the river. There are three different forms that the roots take to enable the tree to live in the brackish water.  All three can be seen in this picture.  Most obvious is the prop or stilt root system, where many roots branch off from the trunk of the tree and spread out to form a strong supporting network.  Then there are some that have Buttress roots flaring out from the trunk. These sometimes bend up above the surface before returning to the mud, and are called knee roots. Lastly there are the roots that stick up pencil-like structures known as pneumatophores. All of these are mechanisms that help the plant to regulate oxygen, salt and water intake and removal, and all help to stabilise the mud around the plant, as well as providing a habitat for fish and invertebrates to breed.

In amongst the mangroves were other creatures. This is a Little Pied Cormorant, Microcarbo melanoleucos, a very common bird around Australia.

Further upstream in one of mangroves was a Scrub Python, Simalia kinghorni:

This is Australia’s largest snake, growing to 5m and 20kg., but it is quite at home in the trees. It was resting in the sun when we first encountered it, but soon began to move around in the tree tops. This one was probably approaching the 3m mark. It was fascinating to see how it was able to span the gaps in the branches.

Back at Daintree we saw this White-Lipped Tree Frog, Litoria infrafrenata. This is the largest tree frog in the world. There are other larger frogs but these are unable to climb:

Back at Mossman, we photographed a Giant Orb Weaving spider, Nephila pilipes. This individual had a span across her legs of about 150mm, and a body of 25mm. Her web was rather more that 1m across!

Also in the campground were a number of Orange-footed Scrub Fowl, Megapodius reinwardt. These birds belong to the Megapodidae, along with the Brush Turkey that I will describe later:

There were also Olive-backed Sunbirds, Cinnyris jugularis, flying around the site. This one is a female emerging from the hanging nest made from woven grasses fibres and bark. It is the female who does most of the work of raising the two eggs laid in the nest:

There was also a spectacular display of Red Jade Vine, Mucuna bennettii. Introduced into Australia, this member of the Legume family is a native of Papua New Guinea:

Returning to Cairns for a night we were able to go for a swim in a nearby rainforest stream at the (crocodile free) Crystal Cascades:

Next morning, while waiting to board the bus to Atherton, we went to a café for breakfast. A cheeky Willie Wagtail, Rhipidura leucophrys, decided to join us in the hope of getting crumbs of food from the table.

Continued in Part 2.

 

Quickie with Steve: Minimoon; News Items: Dead Internet Theory, Classroom CRISPR, CAM Market, ADHD Increasing; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Changing Names, Net Metering and Residential Solar; Science or Fiction

Black holes often appear in science fiction movies, largely because elements of their existence are still a mystery. They have fascinating impacts on the surrounding region of space too with distortions in space and time high on the list. A team of astronomers have found a supermassive black hole with twin jets blasting out an incredible 23 million light years, the longest yet. To put this into context, if you lined up 140 Milky Way galaxies side by side, then that’s the length of the jet! 

The presence of mass in the Universe distorts space-time in its vicinity and the more massive, the greater the distortion. Black holes are regions where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape. They form when a massive star runs out of fuel in the core and collapses under its own gravity. The process creates a point of infinite density known as a singularity. Surrounding the singularity at a distance that depends on the properties of the progenitor star, is the event horizon. If matter of any sort, even a passing spacecraft, gets dragged in through the event horizon then it is never able to escape. 

After the death of a massive, spinning star, a disk of material forms around the central black hole. As the material cools and falls into the black hole, new research suggests that detectable gravitational waves are created. Ore Gottlieb

One of the properties of a black hole are powerful jets, high speed streams of particles ejected from the regions around a black hole. The material ejected never quite reaches the event horizon but instead has been ejected from within the accretion disk. The magnetic fields of a black hole and the rotation of the disks of heated gas and dust can launch jets from the polar regions. They can travel at speeds near the speed of light and can shoot across thousands and millions of kilometres of space. The exact mechanisms of the jets are still not well understood. 

Astronomers observing with LOFAR (the Low Frequency Array) radio system spotted a jet so massive that its the equivalent of 140 Milky Way galaxies lined up side by side! For comparison the jet emanating from Centaurus A at the centre of our Galaxy spans about 10 Milky Way’s! It’s been nicknamed Porphyrion after the mythological giant in Greek culture. Dating back to a time when the universe was 6.3 billion years old, the jet has been found to be producing power equivalent to trillions of Suns!

The LOFAR ‘superterp’, part of the core of the extended telescope located in the Netherlands. Credit: LOFAR/ASTRON

The team that have studied the jet suggest that if giant jets like this were common in the early universe then they may well have been an influential force in the formation of galaxies. Modern jets seen in the nearby universe (and therefore at a later era in the evolution of the universe) seem to be much smaller by comparison. The conclusion is that perhaps the giant jets would have connected and fed energy and material to other nearby galaxies, driving their evolution. 

The survey undertaken by LOFAR revealed more than 10,000 of these megajets. Previous studies revealed only a few hundred large jets suggesting they were more rare but this latest research shows otherwise. It was a real labour of love though as the team searched radio images by eye, used machine-learning tools to scan the images and even enlisted citizen scientists around the world to help. Their paper was published in the Astronomy and Astrophysical journal. 

What of Porphyrion? The team followed up with observations with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in Kitt Peak and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to reveal the host galaxy 7.5 billion light years away. 

Source : Gargantuan Black Hole Jets Are Biggest Seen Yet

The post Astronomers Find the Longest Black Hole Jets Ever Seen appeared first on Universe Today.