News Feeds

Synthetic biology combines principles from science, engineering and social science, creating emerging technologies such as alternative meats and mRNA vaccines; Deconstructing synthetic biology across scales gives rise to new approach to uniting traditional disciplines; Case studies offer a modular, accessible approach to teaching at different institutions.

Trilobites are one of the most common fossils we know, but normally only their hard exoskeleton is preserved. Now, researchers have discovered a site that was buried by a Pompeii-style volcanic eruption, leaving the arthropods outlined in exquisite detail

Utilizing regolith on the Moon or Mars, especially to refill propellant for rockets to get back off the surface, is a common theme in the more engineering-minded space exploration community. There have been plenty of proof-of-concept technologies that could move us toward that goal. One of the best supported was the Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR). Let’s take a look at what made this project unique.

It was initially conceived at Swamp Works, NASA’s version of Skunk Works, the famous Lockheed Martin development facility that worked on the SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 stealth plane. So far, it has gone through two iterations, known as 1.0 and 2.0, released in 2013 and 2016, respectively. 

RASSOR consists of a chassis, a drive train, and two large bucket drum excavators. The excavating elements are on opposing sides of the rover, allowing the system to cancel out any horizontal forces caused by the excavating activity. On Earth, those horizontal forces would be offset by the physical weight of the digging machinery. Since weight is a precious commodity on space missions, this force-canceling technology is arguably the most crucial innovation in the system.

Video showing testing of the RASSOR 2.0 prototype.
Credit – NASA Video Collection YouTube Channel

The RASSOR 2.0 prototype had several design goals, but it’s probably most helpful to walk through a use-case scenario. According to the soil samples collected by Curiosity and other rovers, around 2% of the regolith on Mars is water, even in the relatively “dry” regions outside the poles. Collecting that water could help refuel rockets and supply settlements with drinking water, radiation shielding, or water for agriculture.

NASA commonly uses a mission structure involving four astronauts on a journey to Mars. In a paper describing the 2.0 version of the robot back in 2016, the authors, including Robert Mueller, the founder of the Swamp Works facility and a doyen of ISRU research, describe a mission structure that would see RASSOR mining 1,000,000 kg of Martian regolith per year and supplying 10,000 kilograms of oxygen to the mission.

To do so, it would utilize a lander with processing capabilities for separating the useful parts from the chaff and would trek from the lander site to the regolith collection site about 35 times a day. With a charging cycle that would take about 8 hours a day, that would leave upwards of 16 hours to continuously mine the surface of Mars for these valuable materials.

Fraser describes how to live off the land in space using ISRU.

The paper goes on to describe the design process for the RASSOR’s various subsystems, including the powerful actuators that make up the majority of the weight of the system. They also used 3D-printed titanium to make the bucket drum excavating tools, which required some ingenious machining by Swamp Work’s machinists. 

But in the end, they did make a working prototype. They tested it with improvements like a 50% drop in weight and an autonomous mode that utilizes simple stereo-vision cameras. The team believes this project is ready to move on to the next phase, taking a step closer to making it a reality.

That paper, however, was published eight years ago. A relatively detailed internet search doesn’t produce any results for RASSOR 3.0 other than a brief mention at the end of the 2.0 paper. So, for now, it seems the project is on hold. However, another NASA project, the Lunabotics Challenge, keeps university teams working toward effectively mining regolith for us in ISRU systems. Maybe one of those teams will pick up where the RASSOR team left off – or come up with a completely new design. We’ll have to wait and see.

Learn More:
Mueller et al. – Design of an Excavation Robot: Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR) 2.0
UT – Japan Tests Robotic Earth-Moving Equipment in a Simulated Lunar Jobsite
UT – NASA Wants to Learn to Live Off the Land on the Moon
UT – What is ISRU, and How Will it Help Human Space Exploration?

Lead Image:
CAD model of the RASSOR 2.0 excavating robot.
Credit – Mueller et al.

The post A Single Robot Could Provide a Mission To Mars With Enough Water and Oxygen appeared first on Universe Today.

A genetic study of woolly mammoths found on an isolated Arctic island shows they reached a stable population that lasted millennia, so were probably wiped out by a random event rather than inbreeding

The skeletons of ancient Egyptian scribes reveal the health toll of sitting on the floor while performing administrative tasks like writing

If you’ve studied Freud, or read the New York Review of Books, then you’ll surely have heard of Fred Crews.  Although I met him only once (see below), we exchanged tons of emails over the years and, after reading his works, became a big fan and admirer. Sadly, according to the NYT, Fred died six days ago at his home in Oakland. He was 91.  The NYT gives a fair accounting of his accomplishments; click on the link below or see the archived obituary here. Indented quotes in this piece, save for the last one, come from this NYT piece:

Fred was a literary critic—and later a Freud critic—and taught English at UC Berkeley for 36 years, eventually becoming Chair before retiring. He told me he left because he couldn’t stand the way literary criticism was going, becoming too tendentious and ridden with various “theories”, effacing the value of a work of literature itself. He made fun of these schools of criticism in two of his books (The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh) in which the Winnie the Pooh stories were analyzed through the lenses of various literary schools. The books are hilarious, and the NYT says this about them:

As a young professor at Berkeley, Mr. Crews made a splash in 1963 with “The Pooh Perplex,” a best-selling collection of satirical essays lampooning popular schools of literary criticism of the time; they carried titles like “A Bourgeois Writer’s Proletarian Fables” and “A.A. Milne’s Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-Tail-Bathtubcomplex.”

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Gardner called it a “virtuoso performance” and “a withering attack on the pretensions and excesses of academic criticism.” (In 2001, Professor Crews published “Postmodern Pooh,” a fresh takedown of lit-crit theories.)

The Pooh Perplex should be read by all English majors, or anyone who likes literature. It’s a hoot! Click below to see the Amazon site:

Fred was perhaps the most scientific literary critic I know of.  This was seen both in his willingness to change his mind (he began as a Freudian critic but later repudiated Freud), and in one of the big projects of his life, debunking Freud, which he did elegantly, trenchantly, and in a thorough way that nobody has rebutted (the critics didn’t like his analyses mostly because they were imbued with love of Freud).

And having read a lot of Freud myself and being appalled as a scientist by its empirical vacuity, I agreed with Fred: Freud was simply a charlatan, fabricating theories that were never tested, pretending he had hit on the truth, and stealing ideas from others.  As you know, Freud did, and still does, dominate the mindset of Western intellectuals.  But Freud was also tendentious, an intellectual thief, and a miscreant in his own life, as well as a cocaine addict whose addiction influenced his work. If you want to read one book to show what a fraud the man was, go through Fred’s book Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017), which is at once a biography and a demolition of Freudianism as a whole.  You can get the book on Amazon by clicking on the title below. Anybody who has the pretense of being an intellectual in our culture simply has to read this book; and it’s best read after you’ve read some Freud, so you can see the effectiveness of Crews’s demolition.

The NYT says this about the book:

“Freud: The Making of an Illusion” was his most ambitious attempt to debunk the myth of Freud as a pioneering genius, drawing on decades of research in scrutinizing Freud’s early career. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2017, George Prochnik found the book to be provocative if exhaustingly relentless: “Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.”

But Freud didn’t develop: his ambition was overweening from the start, as was his tendency to fabricate stuff and steal ideas from others.

I read many reviews of that book, and virtually all were negative, for they were written by acolytes of Freud, many of whom, lacking a scientific mindset, had no idea that his theories were fabricated, false, or untestable. Even now Freud has a strong grip on the therapy culture, and you can still find expensive analysts who will make you see them several times a week at unbelievable prices. They may mutter a few tepid disavowals of Freud, but their technique is based on Freud’s model.

Fred was a great guy, and in the face of this criticism, he simply moved on, unleashing other attacks on Freud, and on other unpopular views. More from the NYT:

Professor Crews started writing for The New York Review of Books in 1964, beginning with a review of three works of fiction, including a story collection by John Cheever. His essays over the decades covered a lot of territory, literary and otherwise, and while his writing was invariably erudite and carefully argued, it was often mercurial, by turns sarcastic, penetrating, acerbic and witty.

What’s wrong with mercurial?  Here the NYT is trying to sneak in some criticism, but I urge you to read some of his essays yourself (you can find many of the NYRB  essays here, and some are free).  The writing is wonderful and stylish. I don’t get why “mercurial”, turning at times to humor, sarcasm, and penetrating analysis, is pejorative.

Another unpopular cause that Fred took up after retirement was the reexamination of the case of Jerry Sandusky, which I posted about (and about Fred’s commentary) in 2018.

One unlikely cause that he devoted himself to in recent years was to assert the innocence of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing young boys and is now in prison.

“I joined the small group of skeptics who have concluded that America’s paramount sexual villain is nothing of the sort,” Professor Crews wrote in one article in 2021, adding, “believe it or not, there isn’t a shred of credible evidence that he ever molested anyone.”

He also went after “recovered memory therapy” in league with his friend Elizabeth Loftus (see my post here, which contains a comment by Fred). That, too, rests on no empirical evidence, but simply on the wish-thinking assertions of therapists and prosecutors.

Professor Crews linked the charges against Mr. Sandusky to another of his notable targets, the recovered memory movement, which took hold in the 1990s and which he saw as stemming from the excesses of psychoanalytic theory. His two-part essay, “The Revenge of the Repressed,” which appeared in 1994, was included in his collection “Follies of the Wise,” a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award.

“Thanks to the ministrations of therapists who believe that a whole range of adult symptoms can probably be best explained by the repression of childhood sexual abuse,” he wrote in The Times in 1997, “these people emerge from therapy drastically alienated not only from their families but also from their own selves. In all but the tiniest minority of cases, these accusations are false.”

Professor Crews’s work “was and remains an invaluable weapon, wielded on behalf of sanity and science, against the forces of ignorance, self-interest and moral panic,” Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and another longtime critic of recovered memory therapy, said in an email.

His recovered memory essay prompted a series of no-holds-barred exchanges with readers that spilled over into multiple issues of the magazine. Professor Crews was often at his most full-throated in The Review’s letters to the editor column, where intellectual debates can border on trench warfare.

He proved to be a merciless adversary over the decades, especially for Freud supporters, and in the process helped elevate the letters column into something of an art form.

“Mercurial” my tuches!

And some on his other efforts (he was a busy man):

Frederick attended Yale University and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1958 with a dissertation on E.M. Forster. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1958 and taught there until his retirement in 1994. In the mid-1960s, he became involved in the antiwar movement, serving as a co-chairman of Berkeley’s Faculty Peace Committee, “but when even moderate Republicans joined the antiwar cause around 1970, I felt that my activism wasn’t needed anymore,” he told an interviewer in 2006.

In addition to his essays and critical works, Professor Crews wrote “The Random House Handbook,” a popular composition and style manual first published in 1974, and edited several anthologies and style guides. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Fred helped me once or twice by suggesting edits on my own popular writing, and in gratitude I purchased, at long distance, a good bottle of Italian red wine at a store in Berkeley, and then told Fred to go pick it up.

As I said, Fred was a great guy, and despite the academic squabbles in which he participated (which show both his heterodoxy and his courage), he was a man of sanguinity and of even keel.

His emails were works of art themselves, and during one of our exchanges I asked him what, given his numerous achievements (and battles), he thought was his most memorable accomplishment. I still have his response, and here it is (I’ve given a link to what he cites):

My most memorable feat, though it originated simply from a book review assignment, was the exposé “The Unknown Freud,” in NYRB, issue of 11/18/93. It caused the biggest hubbub in the magazine’s history. When there was a similar stir, a year later, regarding my piece on recovered memory, NYRB decided to turn the two controversies into a book (The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute). Because I’ve always been a debater, the sparring with shrinks was a special pleasure.

Indeed!

After many years of e-communication, I finally met Fred and his wife Betty for lunch in Chicago in 2009. That was a great pleasure, and here’s a photo of Fred and Betty that I took in the restaurant. He doesn’t look like a man who would battle with shrinks and academics, does he?

No prayers need be offered, for Fred was a diehard atheist, but I’ve given a few thoughts in this short memoriam.  The world in general, and especially the literary world, is poorer for his absence.

Pictograms and petroglyphs depicting abstract lines and shapes offer a rare glimpse into the culture of people who lived in South America thousands of years ago

Most major cities in the US experienced a major fire sometime between 1860 and 1920. Actually these fires, called conflagrations, have been occurring since colonial times and into the middle of the 20th century, but saw a peak in the late 19th and early 20th century. Many cities experienced multiple conflagrations, and in the 19th century was responsible for more loss of property than any other phenomenon.

Why this is true is an interesting historical story. But in the world of social media, especially platforms like TikTok, history may seem irrelevant. I have been reviewing videos on TikTok and it’s been quite the journey. I find it interesting that each social media platform has its own subculture within the broader social media culture, which itself is a subculture of the broader culture. In any case, what I have found is that TikTok is a cesspool of confident ignorance. Obviously there is lots of kinds of content there, and some of it good, but there is also a high proportion of people just making stuff up and presenting it to the world as if it were some great realization or bit of wisdom.

I have been thinking quite a bit about what this phenomenon actually is. I think a large part of it may be generational as well as just part of the changing times brought to us by social media. My overall impression is that TikTok videos are primarily about performance. Everything in infotainment. I often find it difficult to determine if someone believes what they are saying or not, and am often left with the impression that even they don’t know. More precisely, they don’t care – whether or not something is true is irrelevant in the world of TikTok. Engagement matters. Performance matters. All ideas are equally valid.

This is a great environment in which conspiracy theories and pseudoscience can spread. There are no standards of evidence, scholarship, or even common sense. Take this dude, for example. He correctly observes that most major cities in the US experienced a conflagration in the late 19th and early 20th century. He then leaps from that fact to the conclusion that these fires were part of a deliberate conspiracy to destroy historical evidence. Because, of course, if you are some secret government cabal and you want to, for some reason, hide evidence pertaining to ancient history from the world, you do it by indiscriminately burning down large parts of major cities and causing trillions of dollars in damages. What other option do you have?

He then further leaps to the conclusion that “they” were doing this to cover up ancient advanced civilizations, like that of Tartaria. The Tartarian Empire, by the way, is huge on TikTok. This alleged empire never existed, but there is a large subculture on TikTok that believes it existed and that there were mud floods in the 19th century that buried all the Tartarian cities, ruins, and artifacts. The notion that such a massive world-changing event could have happened so recently without leaving behind any cultural memory is, of course, absurd.

What is also sad is that this conspiratorial pseudoscience misses an opportunity to learn some actual history, which is rather interesting. Let’s get back to the original question – why were there so many conflagrations over this time period? There were a number of factors, but many of them can be linked to the industrial revolution. Industrialization resulted in a massive increase in urban populations and density. Houses were build closer together, in larger numbers, and they were build taller. They were mostly built out of wood. Industrialization also saw increasing use of combustibles – you need to burn stuff to fire industry. So cities saw increasing storage of oil and things like gunpowder. City lights were converted to gas lamps, and so natural gas had to be piped into cities.

What all this meant was that when a fire did inevitably occur (because most heating, cooking, and lighting was done with fire), the chance that it would spread out of control was much greater. Flames could leap from one building to the next, and if the fire came across something combustible, it was over. Entire neighborhoods or even entire sections of cities would burn to the ground.

We can also look at firefighting technology. From colonial times the state-of-the-art was the bucket brigade. This was adequate (but not ideal) for a single building fire, but completely inadequate for a major city fire. So fire departments arose, mostly volunteer at first. They also came with trucks with tanks of water, pumps, and hoses. This was a great improvement over buckets, but still not able to deal with any major conflagration. The addition of steam power for the pumps sometime in the mid to late 19th century was a help, but still not enough. Then came the addition of pumping water into cities and having fire hydrants the firefighters could access to have much more water. Eventually professional firefighting organizations also arose.

But all of this took time. At the same time city planners knew that if modern industrial city life were to be possible, they had to reduce the risk of major conflagrations. This lead to regulations and ordinances to limit the causes and spread of fire. Buildings had to have a minimum distance between them. City streets were widened. More building were built out of bricks rather than wood. Fire codes and fire regulations became a necessary part of any modern city.

By the 1930s most cities had adopted enough of these fire regulations and safety features, and supported and standardized firefighting, so that the rate of major conflagrations plummeted. This was a hard-won victory, done through planning, legislation, and investment. Chalking up these major fires to some weird conspiracy denies all of this history. It also misses the important lessons that a true understanding of this history teaches.

At least the conspiracy mongering provides a teachable moment, which is why I make response videos on TikTok. It feels like I (and the other science communicators on the platform) have my finger in the dike, but at least the platform also allows for the injection of some sanity.

The post Cities on Fire first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted hundreds of odd, distant galaxies that seem to either produce an impossible amount of stars or host black holes far more enormous than they should be

ITER, a €20 billion nuclear fusion reactor under construction in France, will now not switch on until 2035 - a delay of 10 years. With smaller commercial fusion efforts on the rise, is it worth continuing with this gargantuan project?

How the media's need for tales of intrigue and villains fosters the political weaponization of uncertainty

The post The Lab Leak Theory and the Complicit Media first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

By using carbonated -- rather than still -- water during the concrete manufacturing process, a team of engineers has discovered a new way to store carbon dioxide (CO2) in the ubiquitous construction material.

A new study shows new insight into the quantum state that describes the condition of electrons on an electron-on-solid-neon quantum bit, information that can help engineers build this innovative technology.

A new study shows new insight into the quantum state that describes the condition of electrons on an electron-on-solid-neon quantum bit, information that can help engineers build this innovative technology.

New analyses find that public perceptions of scientists' credibility -- measured as their competence, trustworthiness, and the extent to which they are perceived to share an individual's values -- remain high, but their perceived competence and trustworthiness eroded somewhat between 2023 and 2024. The research also found that public perceptions of scientists working in artificial intelligence (AI) differ from those of scientists as a whole.

A non-invasive ultrasound device can stimulate deep parts of the brain with far greater precision than previously achieved, which could help to treat depression, long-term pain and post-traumatic stress disorder

Researchers are reporting progress on the road to more efficient utilization of solar energy: They have developed an innovative light-harvesting system.

With a single leap from tabletop to the microscale, engineers have produced the world's first practical Titanium-sapphire laser on a chip, democratizing a once-exclusive technology.

With a single leap from tabletop to the microscale, engineers have produced the world's first practical Titanium-sapphire laser on a chip, democratizing a once-exclusive technology.

Dark energy -- a mysterious force pushing the universe apart at an ever-increasing rate -- was discovered 26 years ago, and ever since, scientists have been searching for a new and exotic particle causing the expansion. Physicists combined an optical lattice with an atom interferometer to hold atoms in place for up to 70 seconds -- a record for an atom interferometer -- allowing them to more precisely test for deviations from the accepted theory of gravity that could be caused by dark energy particles such as chameleons or symmetrons. Though they detected no anomalies, they're improving the experiment to perform more sensitive tests of gravity, including whether gravity is quantized.