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There are four fundamental forces in the Universe. These forces govern all the ways matter can interact, from the sound of an infant’s laugh to the clustering of galaxies a billion light-years away. At least that’s what we’ve thought until recently. Things such as dark matter and dark energy, as well as a few odd interactions in particle physics, have led some researchers to propose a fifth fundamental force. Depending on the model you consider, this new force could explain dark matter and cosmic expansion, or it could interact with elemental particles we haven’t yet detected. There are lots of theories about this hypothetical force. What there isn’t a lot of is evidence. So a new study is looking for evidence in the orbits of asteroids.

Many of the fifth-force models focus on what are known as Yukawa-type interactions. Back in the early days of nuclear physics, Hideki Yukawa proposed a potential interaction to describe how protons and neutrons could bind together in the nuclei of atoms. The resulting force was similar to the inverse-square forces of gravity and electromagnetism but had an exponential decay aspect, so it only affected nucleons. Over time, as we began to better understand nuclear interactions, the Yukawa potential model was replaced by the strong nuclear force, though it remains a good approximation for low-energy nucleons. Similar to the way Newtonian gravity is a good approximation for general relativity.

As scientists started to develop fifth-force models, the Yukawa interaction gained attention once again. For example, the Higgs boson generates mass in particles through a Yukawa interaction. Dark energy is often described as a part of the fundamental aspects of spacetime, but it can also be described as a Yukawa-type fundamental force. If there is such a fifth force, then it would have an effect on things such as planetary motion. But the effect would be so tiny that we haven’t had a chance of detecting it until recently, which is where this new study comes in.

The potential impact on the orbit of Bennu from other forces. Credit: Tsai, et al

The team considered the effects of a Yukawa-type fundamental force mediated by a massive scalar field. In other words, just as the electromagnetic field is mediated by the massless bosons known as photons, the fifth force is mediated by a similar boson, but one with mass. The mass of these new bosons would determine how strongly the force would affect orbital motions. Given how well orbital motions agree with Newtonian gravity, any Yukawa boson would need to have an extremely tiny mass. With standard optical observations and radar observations of planets, we know that the mass of these bosons couldn’t be more than about 10-16 eV. That’s really tiny, but still large enough to measure with an asteroid-visiting spacecraft.

In this work, the team looked at data from the OSIRIS-REx mission, which gathered sample material from the asteroid 101955 Bennu. Since we get radio signals directly from OSIRIS-REx, we know its motion with extreme precision. And since it orbited and landed on Bennu, we know the orbital motion of the asteroid extremely well. Based on this data, the team found no evidence of a fifth force, but they did put even further constraints on the mass of any fifth-force particle. We now know these hypothetical dark bosons can’t have a mass greater than 10-18 eV, roughly a factor of 100 stronger than previous limits.

So as far as we can tell, when it comes to fundamental forces, five is right out.

Reference: Tsai, Yu-Dai, et al. “Constraints on fifth forces and ultralight dark matter from OSIRIS-REx target asteroid Bennu.” Communications Physics 7.1 (2024): 311.

The post Can an Asteroid's Movements Reveal a New Force in the Universe? appeared first on Universe Today.

A new way to store numbers in computers can dynamically prioritise accuracy or range, depending on need, allowing software to quickly switch between very large and small numbers

It’s been quite a week… Spectacular northern lights for hours on Thursday night. A great comet in the evening skies (though so far I’ve have only caught glimpses, thanks to atrocious viewing conditions.) And now, I’m at CERN (the pan-European particle physics laboratory) for the first time since the pandemic began. I’ll be giving a talk at a conference of CMS experimenters. (CMS and ATLAS are the two general purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC].)

The topic of the workshop is a novel technique called “Level-1 Scouting” — though it isn’t really about “scouting” for anything. It has to do with evading the strait-jacket of the trigger, an essential feature of data gathering at each of the LHC experiments. With tens of millions of collisions per second, the data flood at CMS is too great, and only a tiny fraction of these collisions can be stored. The trigger decides real-time which ones to keep and which ones to discard forever. That’s been the basic rule since the LHC began running.

But this rule no longer applies, thanks to new technology and human ingenuity. CMS now uses level-1 scouting to record sketchy information about every single collision that happens in their detector. LHCb, with a smaller detector, was the first to try something along these lines. ATLAS is on a parallel track. These developments have the potential, looking ahead, to substantially enhance the capability of these detectors. More about this after I’ve given my talk.

Auroras after sunset. (These were as bright to the naked eye) Comet A3 after sunset. (Brighter than to the naked eye.)

Post-sunset light over CERN. (As to the naked eye.)

SpaceX has conducted their most successful test launch of a Starship system to date. The system they tested has three basic components – the Super Heavy first stage rocket booster, the Starship second stage (which is the actual space ship that will go places), and the “chopsticks”, which is a mechanical tower designed to catch the Super Heavy as it returns. All three components apparently functioned as hoped.

The Super Heavy lifted Starship into space (suborbital), then returned to the launch pad in Southern Texas where it maneuvered into the grasping mechanical arms of the chopsticks. The tower’s arms closed around the Super Heavy, successfully grabbing it. The engines then turned off and the rocket remained held in place. The idea here is to replicate the reusable function of the Falcon rockets, which can return to a landing pad after lifting their cargo into orbit. The Falcons land on a platform one the water. SpaceX, however, envisions many Starship launches and wants to be able to return the rockets directly to the launch pad, for quicker turnaround.

The Starship, for its part, also performed as expected. It came back down over the designated target in the Indian Ocean. Once it got to the surface it rolled on its side and exploded. They were never planning on recovering any of the Starship so this was an acceptable outcome. Of course, eventually they will need to land Starship safely on the ground.

The system that SpaceX came up with reflects some of the realities and challenges of space travel. The Earth is a massive gravity well, and it is difficult to get out of and back into that gravity well. Getting into orbit requires massive rockets with lots of fuel, and falls prey to the rocket equation – you need fuel to carry the fuel, etc. This is also why, if we want to use Starship to go to Mars, SpaceX will have to develop a system to refuel in orbit.

Getting back down to the ground is also a challenge. Orbital velocity is fast, and you have to lose all that speed. Using the atmosphere for breaking works, but the air compression (not friction as most people falsely believe) causing significant heat, so reentering through the atmosphere requires heat shielding. You then have to slow down enough for a soft landing. You can use parachutes. You can splash down in the water. You can use bouncy cushions on a hard landing. Or you can use rockets. Or you can land like a plane, which was the Shuttle option. All of these methods are challenging.

If you want to reuse your rockets and upper stages, then a splashdown is problematic as salt water is bad. No one has gotten the cushion approach to work on Earth, although we have used it on Mars. The retro-rocket approach is what SpaceX is going with, and it works well. They have now added a new method, by combining rockets with a tower and mechanical arms to grab the first stage. I think this is also the planned method for Starship itself.

On the Moon and Mars the plan is to land on legs. These worlds have a lower gravity than Earth, so this method can work. In fact, NASA is planning on using the Starship as their lunar lander for the Artemis program. We apparently can’t do this on Earth because the legs would have to be super strong to handle the weight of the Super Heavy or Starship, and therefore difficult to engineer. It does seem amazing that a tower with mechanical arms grabbing the rocket out of the air was considered to be an easier engineering feat than designing strong-enough landing legs, but there it is. Needing a tower does limit the location where you can land – you have to return to the landing pad exactly.

SpaceX, however, is already good at this. They perfected the technology the the Falcon rocket boosters, which can land precisely on a floating landing pad in the ocean. So they are going with technology they already have. But it does seem to me that it would be worth it to have an engineering team work on the whole strong-landing-legs problem. That would seem like a useful technology to have.

All of this is a reminder that the space program, as mature as it is, is still operating at the very limits of our technology. It makes it all the more amazing that the Apollo program was able to send successful missions to the Moon. Apollo solved these various issues also by going with a complex system. As a reminder, the Saturn V used three stages to get into space for the Apollo program (although only two stages for Skylab). You then had the spaceship that would go to the moon, which consisted of a service module, a command module, and a lander. On approach to the Moon, it would have to undergo, “transposition, docking, and extraction”. The command module would detach from the service module, turn around, then dock with the lunar lander and extract it from the service module. The pair would then go into lunar orbit. The lander would detach and land on the lunar surface, and eventually blast off back into orbit around the Moon. There it would dock again with the command module for return to Earth.

This was considered a crazy idea at first within NASA, and many of the engineers were worried they couldn’t pull it off. Docking in orbit was considered the most risk aspect, and if that failed it would have resulted in astronauts being stranded in lunar orbit. This is why they perfected the procedure in Earth orbit before going to the Moon.

All of this complexity is a response to the the physical realities of getting a lot of mass out of Earth’s gravity well, and having enough fuel to get to the Moon, land, take off again, return to Earth, and then get back down to the ground. The margins were super thin. It is amazing it all worked as well as it did. Here we are more than 50 years later and it is still a real challenge.

Spaceflight technology has not fundamentally changed in the last 50 years – rockets, fuel, capsules are essentially the same in overall design, with some tweaks and refinements. Except for one thing – computer technology. This has been transformative, make no mistake. SpaceX’s reusable rockets would not be possible without advanced computer controls. Modern astronauts have the benefits of computer control of their craft, and are travelling with the Apollo-era equivalent of supercomputers. Computer advances have been the real game-changing technology for space travel.

Otherwise we are still using the same kinds of rocket fuel. We are still using stages and boosters to get into orbit. Modern capsule design would be recognizable to an Apollo-era astronaut, although the interior design is greatly improved, again due to the availability of computer technology. There are some advanced materials in certain components, but Starship is literally built out of steel.

Again, I am not downplaying the very real advances in the aerospace industry, especially in getting down costs and in reusability. My point is more that there haven’t been any game-changing technological advances not dependent on computer technology. There is no super fuel, or game-changing material. And we are still operating at the limits of physics, and have to make very real tradeoffs to make it work. If I’m missing something, feel free to let me know in the comments.

In any case, I’m glad to see progress being made, and I look forward the the upcoming Artemis missions. I do hope that this time we are successful in building a permanent cis-lunar infrastructure. That, in turn, would be a stepping stone to Mars.

The post Latest Starship Launch first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

A 6000-kilogram spacecraft will embark on a six-year journey to Jupiter to explore whether its icy moon Europa has the conditions to support life

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been antivax for two decades. His fellow travelers are not happy about his leaving out vaccines in his "Make America Healthy Again." To them it's an obvious misdirection, and they are turning on him.

The post Antivaxxers easily see through the misdirection of RFK Jr.’s MAHA first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the popular Netflix show and the science fiction novel on which it is based, The Three-Body Problem, by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin. The story’s premise is a star system where three stars orbit each other, which leads to periodic destruction on a planet orbiting one of them. As Isaac Newton described in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the interaction of two massive bodies is easy to predict and calculate. However, the interaction of three bodies leads is where things become unpredictable (even chaotic) over time.

This problem has fascinated scientists ever since and remains one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in mathematics and theoretical physics. The theory states that the interaction of three gravitationally bound objects will evolve chaotically and in a way that is completely detached from their initial positions and velocities. However, in a recent study, an international team led by a researcher from the Niels Bohr Institute ran millions of simulations that showed “isles of regularity in a sea of chaos.” These results indicate that there could be a solution, or at least some predictability, to the Three-Body Problem.

The study was led by Alessandro Alberto Trani, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute (NBI), the Research Center for the Early Universe at The University of Tokyo, and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST). He was joined by researchers from the Universidad de Concepción in Chile, the American Museum of Natural History, the Leiden Observatory, and NASA’s Ames Research Center. The paper that details their findings was recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Millions of simulations form a rough map of all conceivable outcomes when three objects meet, which is where the isles of regularity appear. Credit: Alessandro Alberto Trani

To investigate this problem, Trani and his colleagues used a software program he developed himself named Tsunami. This program calculates the movements of astronomical objects based on known physical laws, such as Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. They then set it to run millions of simulations of three-body encounters with specified parameters, including the positions of two co-orbiting objects (i.e., their phase along a 360-degree axis) and the angle of approach of the third object – varying by 90°. As Trani explained in a recent NBI Research News story:

“The Three-Body Problem is one of the most famous unsolvable problems in mathematics and theoretical physics. The theory states that when three objects meet, their interaction evolves chaotically, without regularity, and completely detached from the starting point. But our millions of simulations demonstrate that there are gaps in this chaos – ‘isles of regularity’ – which directly depend on how the three objects are positioned relative to each other when they meet, as well as their speed and angle of approach.”

The millions of simulations they conducted covered all possible combinations of this framework. The results formed a rough map of all conceivable outcomes from the threads of initial configurations, which is when the isles of regularity appeared. This discovery could lead to a deeper understanding of an otherwise impossible problem and represents a new challenge for researchers. Whereas it is possible to calculate our chaos using statistical methods, they become more complex when the chaos is interrupted by regularities. Said Trani:

“When some regions in this map of possible outcomes suddenly become regular, it throws off statistical probability calculations, leading to inaccurate predictions. Our challenge now is to learn how to blend statistical methods with the so-called numerical calculations, which offer high precision when the system behaves regularly. In that sense, my results have set us back to square one, but at the same time, they offer hope for an entirely new level of understanding in the long run.”

This illustration shows the merger of two supermassive black holes and the gravitational waves that ripple outward as the black holes spiral toward each other. Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle

Since the encounter of three objects in the Universe is a common occurrence, the Three-Body Problem is more than just a theoretical challenge. Trani hopes that this discovery will lead to a deeper understanding that will pave the way for improved astrophysics models:

“If we are to understand gravitational waves, which are emitted from black holes and other massive objects in motion, the interactions of black holes as they meet and merge are essential. Immense forces are at play, particularly when three of them meet. Therefore, our understanding of such encounters could be a key to comprehending phenomena such as gravitational waves, gravity itself and many other fundamental mysteries of the Universe.”

Further Reading: Neils Bohr Institute

The post New Research Could Help Resolve the “Three-Body Problem” appeared first on Universe Today.

The “Epoch of Reionization” was a critical period for cosmic evolution and has always fascinated and mystified astronomers. During this epoch, the first stars and galaxies formed and reionized the clouds of neutral hydrogen that permeated the Universe. This ended the Cosmic Dark Ages and led to the Universe becoming “transparent,” what astronomers refer to as “Cosmic Dawn.” According to our current cosmological models, reionization lasted from 380,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang. This is based on indirect evidence since astronomers have been unable to view the Epoch of Reionization directly.

Investigating this period was one of the main reasons for developing the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which can pierce the veil of the “dark ages” using its powerful infrared optics. However, observations provided by Webb revealed that far more galaxies existed in the early Universe than previously expected. According to a recent study, this suggests that reionization may have happened more rapidly and ended at least 350 million years earlier than our models predict. Once again, the ability to peer into the early Universe has produced tensions with prevailing cosmological theories.

The study was led by Julian B Muñoz, an assistant professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. He was joined by John Chisholm, also an assistant professor of astronomy at UT Austin; Jordan Mirocha, a NASA postdoctoral student at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology; Steven R Furlanetto, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California-Los Angeles, and Charlotte Mason, an associate professor with the Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute. The paper that describes their findings was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The history of the Universe is outlined in this infographic. Credit: NASA

According to current cosmological models, the Universe was filled with a hot, dense plasma of protons and electrons for the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Eventually, the Universe cooled enough for protons and electrons to come together and form neutral hydrogen. By ca. 100 million years after the Big Bang, the first stars (Population III) began to form, which were extremely massive and hot. These stars came together to create the first galaxies, and their ultraviolet light caused neutral hydrogen to once again split into protons and electrons (aka. became ionized).

Once most of the hydrogen in the Universe became ionized (ca. 1 billion years after the Big Bang), the Epoch of Reionization ended. At this point, the Universe was transparent, and light from this period is visible to optical telescopes today. As Chisholm indicated in a UT Austin news release, reionization also played a major role in how the Universe evolved. “The process heated and ionized gas in the Universe, which regulated how fast galaxies grew and evolved,” “These early stars established the overall structure of galaxies in the Universe.”

Before the deployment of the JWST, scientists relied on measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the relic radiation from the Big Bang, and the Lyman-alpha Forest – the wavelength of light associated with hydrogen reionization. From this, astronomers have gained a sense of how much energy was available for reionization to occur (a “photon budget”) and how long it lasted. As Muñoz explained:

“[Reionization] is the last major change to happen. You went from neutral and cold and boring to ionized and hot. And this isn’t something that only happened to one or two galaxies. It happened to the whole Universe. It’s an accounting game. We know that all hydrogen was neutral before reionization. From there, you need enough extreme ultraviolet to split each atom. So, at the end of the day, you can do the math to figure out when reionization ended.”

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. Credit: NASA

However, observations made with the JWST have revealed things that challenge accepted models. This includes a greater abundance of galaxies, which produce more UV radiation than previously anticipated. These findings suggest that reionization should have ended 550 to 650 million years after the Big Bang rather than 1 billion years. But if this were true, the CMB and Lyman-alpha Forest would look different. In short, there is a tension between these measurements and Webb‘s observations – as the team describes in their study, a “photon budget crisis.”

Much like the Hubble Tension, these findings suggest something could be missing from our current cosmological models. One possibility that the team explored is recombination, where ionized protons and electrons come together again to form neutral hydrogen. This is precisely what happened 380,000 years after the Big Bang, known as the “Era of Recombination.” If this process happened more often than our models suggest, it could increase the amount of extreme-UV light needed to reionize the Universe. As Muñoz explained, follow-up observations are needed to confirm this theory:

“We need more detailed and deeper observations of galaxies, and a better understanding of the recombination process. Resolving this tension on reionization is a key step to finally understanding this pivotal period. I am excited to see what the coming years hold.”

Further Reading: Phys.org, MNRAS

The post Webb Observations Shed New Light on Cosmic Reionization appeared first on Universe Today.

Sam Kahn, an editor at Persuasion, has written a piece taking issue with the claim that wokeness is on the way out—that we’ve passed “peak woke”.  I though we had, given the increasing frequency of stories in the MSM that questioned the “received wisdom” of progressive authoritarianism, like this 2022 piece from the NYT (it did, by the way, encounter strong pushback from the paper’s staff).

And we all know that DEI programs are being dismantled in both the academic and corporate world.  So I was hopeful that “wokeness”—by which I mean “progressive and performative authoritarianism that does little to improve society but inflates the reputation of the promoter”—was on its way out. This was buttressed by an article in The Economist which used graphs (see below) to show a decline in wokeness.

Click below to read Kahn’s piece (Michelle Goldberg of the NYT also made this claim about “peak wokeness” going away):

Kahn takes issue with the “wokeness-is-declining” conclusion on two grounds. First, he argues that wokeness is so deeply entrenched in mainstream institutions that we barely notice it any more. Second, he argues that the statistics presented in The Economist article are misleading: they may show a small decline in indices of wokeness in the past couple of years, but no long-term trend.  I find his argument pretty convincing, especially the main example he uses to demonstrate his thesis. Click below to read:

Kahn’s example of his thesis is the infamous interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates by CBS journalist Tony Dokoupil. Coates has just published a book containing three essays, one of which is a 100-page anti-Israel screed based on a mere ten days that Coates spent in “Palestine,” by which he means both Israel and the West Bank.  I will be reading that, but the book hasn’t arrived at the library yet. However, Dokoupil’s questions, the scathing review of the book by Coleman Hughes, along with other reports, are indicate a one-sided accusation of Israel. The fact that Coates doesn’t even mention Hamas or the terrorism inflicted on Israel is a telling sign that his essay is misleading, as is the praise for it.

The sign for Kahn that we haven’t reached peak woke is the fact that Dokoupil was called on the carpet by CBS officials simply for asking civil but hard questions of Coates (see the video here). The problem, as everyone knows but only a few will admit, is that Dokoupil challenged some dubious conclusions and observations of a black American icon. That is simply beyond today’s journalistic pale, and that’s why Kahn sees wokeness as deeply embedded in the media. Had Coates been white rather than black, the pushback on Dokoupil would have been far less intense. Race mattered.

Kahn:

My point here is that a clash like Coates v. Dokoupil v. CBS News is Exhibit A for how the “woke wars” never went away, how if “peak woke” seems quieter than it did circa 2020, woke censoriousness is, contra Goldberg and contra The Economist, part of American institutional life, now maybe more than ever.

. . . What’s going on is a bit subtle. The woke revolution already said its piece. The University of California endocrinology professor long ago apologized for saying “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people” in class and “imply[ing]” that only biological women can give birth. The University of Michigan music professor long ago stepped back from teaching after showing Lawrence Olivier’s 1965 blackface film of Othello in class. The fear of being “canceled” remains pervasive. Wokeism, now, has been so internalized by the institutions that they barely need to articulate it—and employees have an acute danger sense of what not to talk about. Meanwhile, “peak woke” finds itself memory-holed. An article like The Economist’s depicts it as a temporary blip—a reaction to Trump’s election. Michelle Goldberg, in her New York Times op-ed, finds herself longing for the “progressive urgency” of the “peak woke” moment. A representative NPR piece, from 2023, frames the whole discourse as a Republican talking-point—something that has “been co-opted as a political slogan on the right … [and] could lead to violence.”

All of those dynamics emerged in the Dokoupil fracas. The admonishment by the CBS executives was a delectable bit of muddled corporate speak. “We are journalists and as hard as it is, this means we set our personal feelings and beliefs aside,” CBS executive Adrienne Roark said on the staff call. “Our job is to serve our audiences without bias or perceived bias, to provide objective news that we know and they know they can trust.”

The phrase “perceived bias” (what a wide-ranging idea!) gives the game away. It tips off that the issue with Dokupil had very little to do with journalistic standards and was instead that he strayed outside of the bounds of acceptable expression. By challenging a much-beloved author and his ferocious critique of Israel, he was violating unspoken tenets of the new woke corporate regime. The fact that it’s literally his job to argue with on-air guests seemed to matter not at all to the corporate brass.

Regardless of what Coates said in his book, and I will be checking it, you don’t treat a journalist like this for asking hard questions.  That is what we expect journalists to do when they interrogate someone having strong opinions on contentious issues. The fact that CBS would give Dokoupil a verbal spanking (and later refuse to admit that Jerusalem is in Israel), shows that they have “structural wokeism.”

As for the Economist‘s statistics, it is true that they shows rise in indices of wokeness until 2020, but then a tiny decline in the subsequent three years. It may mean something, but it may not. Here are three graphs given by Persuasion and taken from The Economist:

As The Economist notes:

. . ., . 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.

Yes, but it’s not much of a fall: a small drop in one year and a tiny rise in 2023:

A plot of those who think that inequities are due to discrimination, again showing just a slight drop after 2021.  No statistics are given so we don’t know if the figures are significantly different, but at any rate the drop is tiny.

And woke terms in social-science papers. Again, a smallish dip between 2022 and 2023.

None of this is convinces me that wokeness is decreasing. You’d need a longer-term analysis to show that. The Economist article also gives data on the censuring of academics, mentioning DEI on earnings calls, and DEI jobs in big companies, all showing declines between 2021 or 2022 and 2023.  And the first two declines look significant, but again we’d like long-term data. It may be that DEI as an institution is on the way out, but is still embedded in academia in non-obvious ways (I think this is the case for my university). I have no idea what to make of the “earnings calls” mentions.

Perhaps Kahn is right: wokeness has so thoroughly imbued America that we no longer notice it. Teachers are inhibited from saying certain things in the classroom; the NYT and Washington Post are still biased in their news coverage towards progressive issues, and identiarianism—a sure sign of wokeness—is still with us.  Perhaps wokeness has just become hidden so much that we no longer see it as wokeness.  But I’ll give Kahn the last word (feel free to tendewr your opinion below):

A situation like what happened at CBS has become something very close to a new normal in institutional America. Some perspective, even a very radical one, gets favored. Any opposition to that favored perspective goes beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and is suggestive of “perceived bias.” Corporate management, in its attempt to smooth things over, placates whatever the loudest voices are at the moment and punishes whomever espouses the less-favored perspective. At CBS News—which is a company full of journalists dedicated, at least in theory, to independence of thought—there’s some pushback, but in most companies, employees would simply know where the guardrails are and steer well clear of causing any offense.

It’s not placards or encampments or Twitter mobs but it’s no less insidious. “Peak woke” has profoundly changed the way that American institutions operate. If it’s impossible to have honest, challenging conversations at CBS News—a place whose whole reason for existence is to pursue journalistic truth—then it’s likely impossible to do so anywhere else in the American institutional structure. “Wokeism” may have peaked around 2020, but that doesn’t mean that it just disappeared afterwards. What happened was that there was a culture war and “wokeism” won.

I can’t help adding that the wokeness evinced by asserting that Israel is a demonic, apartheid-ridden, and settler-colonialist state—a “progressive” view evinced by Ta-Nehisi Coates—has certainly not declined over the last year. It began on October 7 and has ramped up ever since.

h/t: Ginger K.

 

For the first time ever, SpaceX has followed through on a Starship test launch by bringing back the Super Heavy booster for an on-target catch in the arms of its “Mechazilla” launch-tower cradle in Texas.

“This is a day for the engineering history books,” SpaceX launch commentator Kate Tice said.

Today’s successful catch marks a giant step toward using — and reusing — Starship for missions ranging from satellite deployments to NASA’s moon missions to migrations to Mars.

The amazing catch took place minutes after Super Heavy lofted Starship’s second stage, known as Ship, into space for the launch system’s fifth test flight. Liftoff occurred at 7:25 a.m. CT (1225 UTC) at SpaceX’s Starbase on the South Texas coast.

Although the primary objective of the test was to have Ship survive atmospheric re-entry and splash down intact in the Indian Ocean, the Super Heavy booster was the star of the show.

Super Heavy is too massive to set down on landing legs, as is the case for SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. Perfecting the Mechazilla catch is an essential part of SpaceX’s strategy for Starship rocket reusability.

The feat required pinpoint accuracy during the booster’s autonomous descent back through the atmosphere. It had to position itself precisely between Mechazilla’s adjustable arms, also known as “chopsticks,” and hover while the mechanism was engaged to secure the rocket.

“Even in this day and age, what we just saw, that looks like magic,” launch commentator Dan Huot said after the booster shut down its engines and came to rest, hanging on its launch tower.

Today’s test of Starship, which is the world’s most powerful rocket, proceeded according to plan from launch to splashdown. All 33 of the booster’s methane-fueled Raptor engines fired up for launch, and 13 of the Raptors powered the Super Heavy’s return to the pad.

The second stage continued at orbital speeds, on a suborbital test trajectory that rose as high as 200 kilometers (124 miles). An hour after launch, Ship restarted three of its own Raptor engines and made an autonomous descent to its target splashdown point in the Indian Ocean.

During SpaceX’s fourth Starship test flight in June, the Ship sustained damage on the way down but survived for a splashdown. Ship’s thermal protection system was beefed up for today’s test.

Video views of the rocket’s flaps, sent down to Earth via SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, showed heat building up on the control surfaces. Sparks flew off during the descent, but eventually the flaps cooled off — bringing rounds of applause from SpaceX employees who were watching the feed.

Minutes later, the rocket’s video stream showed Ship making a vertical dive into the water, and then a different stream from a nearby buoy showed Ship blazing as it floated on the surface.

“What an incredible end to Starship’s journey,” Tice said.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk hailed the results in a posting to his X social-media platform: “Ship landed precisely on target!” he wrote. “Second of the two objectives achieved.”

Data from the test flight will be used to fine-tune the launch system for future tests, using Starship hardware that has been stacked up at Starbase. Eventually, SpaceX aims to make the entire system fully reusable.

“We just caught a booster,” Huot said. “We’re going to start real soon looking at when we can catch a Ship.”

Starship could be used to accelerate the deployment of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, and perhaps to provide point-to-point travel between terrestrial destinations as well.

NASA is depending on SpaceX to provide a modified version of Starship that would serve as the lander for crewed Artemis missions, beginning as soon as 2026. “As we prepare to go back to the moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead — including to the South Pole region of the moon and then on to Mars,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a congratulatory message posted to X.

SpaceX plans to use Starship for missions to Mars — starting with uncrewed trips that could get off the ground by as early as 2026, and continuing with crewed flights that could bring permanent residents to the Red Planet. Musk reportedly envisions building a city on Mars by the 2040s — and Starship is the key to his quest.

“Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today,” Musk wrote on X.

The post SpaceX’s Mechazilla Catches a Starship Booster on First Try appeared first on Universe Today.

Thanks to the readers who answered my appeal for photos, I now have at least a week’s worth. But please keep them coming in!

Today is Sunday, ergo we have a batch of photos by biologist John Avise; this is the second part of a four-part series on the birds of Hawaii (part 1 is here). John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Birds in Hawaii, Part 2 

Today we continue our photographic montage of native and introduced birds that might be seen on a natural-history tour of the Hawaiian Islands.

O’ahu ‘Elepaio (Chasiempis ibidis) in the hand of a bird-bander (this species is endemic to the Hawaiian Islands):

Erckels spurfowl (Pternistis erckelii) (native to Africa):

Great Frigatebird female (Fregata minor) (native to Hawaii and many other locales in the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans):

Hawaiian Coot (Fulica alai) (endemic to the Hawaiian Islands), dark morph:

Hawaiian Coot, light morph (the color morph refers to the color of the frontal shield):

Hawaiian Duck (Anas wyvilliana) (a non-migratory endemic to the large island of Hawaii):

Hawaiian Goose, or Nene (Branta sandvicensis) (an endemic to the Hawaiian Islands, and the official state bird):

House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus)(native to North America), male:

House Sparrow (Passer domesticus), male (native to Europe and Asia but introduced to many other parts of the world):

Japanese White-eye (Zosterops japonicus) (native to East Asia):

Java Sparrow (Lonchura oryzivora) (native to Indonesia):

Laysan Albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) (native to the Hawaiian islands):

Laysan Albatross flying:

Laysan Albatross chick:

JAC:  Note that the Laysan albatross, in the form of one female bird named Wisdom, is the oldest confirmed living wild bird in the world. She was first tagged in 1950s and is still alive, now about 72 or 73 years old. She has gone through a couple of mates and produced at least 30-36 chick, including at least one grandchick. I love her.

In 2012, astronomers detected a gas giant transiting in front of WASP-49A, a G-type star located about 635 light-years from Earth. The data obtained by the WASP survey indicated that this exoplanet (WASP-49 b) is a gas giant roughly the same size as Jupiter and 37% as massive. In 2017, WASP-49 b was found to have an extensive cloud of sodium, which was confounding to scientists. Further observations in 2019 using the Hubble Space Telescope detected the presence of other minerals, including magnesium and iron, which appeared to be magnetically bound to the gas giant.

WASP-49 b and its star are predominantly composed of hydrogen and helium, with only trace amounts of sodium – not enough to account for this cloud. In addition, there was no indication of how this sodium cloud was ejected into space. In our Solar System, gas emissions from Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io create a similar phenomenon. In a recent study, an international team led by scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found potential evidence of a rocky, volcanic moon orbiting WASP-49 b. While not yet confirmed, the presence of a volcanic exomoon around this gas giant could explain the presence of this sodium cloud.

The study was led by Apurva Oza, a former postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and now a staff scientist at Caltech. He was joined by colleagues from NASA JPL and researchers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, the Caltech/IPAC-NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, and multiple universities. The paper that details their findings was recently published in The Astrophysical Letters.

Io is the most volcanic body in our Solar System, with hundreds of active volcanoes and extensive lava formations. This activity is the result of tidal interaction with Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field, which causes the interior of Io to flex and contract, creating dense lava flows that break through the surface. These volcanoes spew lava up to 300 km (186 mi) into space, along with sulfur dioxide, sodium, potassium, and other gases, creating a massive cloud around Jupiter up to 1,000 times the planet’s radius.

While the team’s observations did not detect any exomoons directly around WASP-49 b, a massive sodium cloud could constitute indirect evidence of a volcanic moon that is simply too small and dim to detect. For years, Oza has investigated how exomoons might be detected via their volcanic activity. To determine if this was the case around WASP-49 b, he and the team observed WASP-49 b over time using the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) on the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).

This proved quite challenging because of the distance involved and the way the star, planet, and cloud often overlap, making it very difficult to distinguish between them. Nevertheless, their observations revealed several pieces of evidence that suggest that a separate body is responsible for the sodium cloud. For example, their observations indicated that the cloud suddenly increased in size during two observations, suggesting it was being replenished. In fact, they estimate that the cloud is replenished at a rate of 100,000 kg (220,000 lbs) per second.

They also observed the cloud moving faster than the planet, suggesting it was generated by another body orbiting faster than the planet. “We think this is a really critical piece of evidence,” said Oza. “The cloud is moving in the opposite direction that physics tells us it should be going if it were part of the planet’s atmosphere.” Their observations also noted something interesting as WASP-49 b orbited its parent star every 2.8 days. During this time, the cloud appeared and disappeared behind the star or the planet irregularly.

This artist’s concept depicts a potential volcanic moon between the exoplanet WASP-49 b, left, and its parent star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

To address this, the team also used a computer model to simulate the presence of an exomoon and compare it to their observations. Their results showed that an exomoon with an orbital period of eight hours could explain the cloud’s motion and activity, including how it appeared to pass in front of the planet and will disappear and reappear at intervals. Another takeaway from this study was what it suggests about this possible exomoon’s future.

If WASP-49 b is similar in size to Earth’s Moon, Oza and his colleagues estimate that the tidal interaction with the planet’s gravity and its rapid mass loss will eventually cause it to disintegrate. “If there really is a moon there, it will have a very destructive ending,” said Oza. While these observations are intriguing, the team emphasizes that follow-up observations are needed to learn more about the cloud’s orbit and structure.

Further Reading: NASA, The Astrophysical Letters

The post A Possible Exomoon Could be Volcanic, like Jupiter’s Moon Io appeared first on Universe Today.

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Situating her analyses within the broader intellectual landscape, First Amendment scholar and philosopher Tara Smith takes up the views of such historical figures as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill, while also addressing contemporary clashes over issues ranging from speech on social media, “cancel culture,” and the implications of “religious exemptions” to the crucial difference between speech and action and the very vocabulary in which we discuss these issues, dissecting the exact meanings of “censorship” and “freedom.”

Tara Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has taught since 1989. A specialist in moral, legal, and political philosophy, she is author of the books Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge, 2006), Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), and Moral Rights and Political Freedom (Rowman and Littlefield 1995). Smith’s scholarly articles span such subjects as rights conflicts, the morality of money, everyday justice, forgiveness, friendship, pride, moral perfection, and the value of spectator sports.

Shermer and Smith discuss:

• What is freedom?
• What are rights?
• How are rights and freedoms won or lost?
• Private vs. government restrictions on speech
• Social media, tech companies, and censorship
• speech and expression
• Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission
• Speech – Action distinction and where the lines between speech and conduct are blurry
• Hate speech = violence?
• Is Twitter a platform or a publisher?
• Is Facebook an information service or a telecommunications company?
• Incitement to violence and the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection
• Libel and slander
• Self-censorship
• Free expression as speech (flag burning, Madonna’s videos, etc.)
• Corporate controls on speech
• Compelled speech
• How Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced the clear and present danger test, which would become an important test under First Amendment law over the coming decades.

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

If you don’t know who Chappell Roan is, she’s a singer/songwriter who recently became famous; you can read about here.  She identifies as queer and as a drag queen, even though she’s apparently a biological woman.

In this video, Bill Maher addresses an open letter to her. Roan has touted the virtues of open-mindedness, which Maher admires, but according to him she seems to get all her history from Tik Tok and is apparently sympathetic to Palestine and Hamas and sees Israel as a “colonizer”. Maher proceeds to give her a history lecture couched in Generation Z jargon. As he tells her, “you have it completely ass-backwards as to who is doing the oppressing” (of Palestinians).

This is more serious than most of Maher’s “comedy” videos, but he’s passionate about the subject.

It’s been quiet at the University of Chicago—too quiet!  We almost got through Students for Justice in Palestine’s “week of rage” without nary a megaphone blaring or any graffiti painted on campus walls and sidewalks. But, as I predicted, this was not to last. With Hamas losing the war with Israel, and all universities refusing to divest their endowment from any Israel-related companies, the protestors were bound to get even more enraged than last year.

They’re already back at it at Columbia University, and yesterday afternoon the terrorism-lovers struck our campus again. One of their targets was a famous Henry Moore sculpture on campus called “Nuclear Energy.” It sits on the site of the world’s first nuclear reactor, built by Fermi and his colleagues underneath the old Stagg Field, an athletic field. Wikipedia gives the themes of this work:

Moore cited a number of inspirations for the sculpture, from earlier works with similar forms to natural objects like stones. About the shape of the sculpture, Moore said:

When I had made this working model I showed it to them and they liked my idea because the top of it is like some large mushroom, or a kind of mushroom cloud. Also it has a kind of head shape like the top of the skull but down below is more an architectural cathedral. One might think of the lower part of it being a protective form and constructed for human beings and the top being more like the idea of the destructive side of the atom. So between the two it might express to people in a symbolic way the whole event. (Henry Moore quoted in Art Journal, New York, Spring 1973, p.286)

Moore’s work explores the hopes and fears of the Atomic Age. The potential of controlled nuclear power or a nuclear holocaust is tied to the historical events of the site with the iconography of a mushroom cloud or skull, supported by pillars topped by arches like a protective cathedral. Interviews with Moore highlight the dual nature of the top and bottom portions of the sculpture, meant to represent the creative and destructive power possible with nuclear energy. An abstract sculpture was chosen by the University to highlight the importance of the events at the site, and their implications for humanity, rather than the importance of Fermi in bringing them about.

Curiously, this campus attraction draws a lot of Japanese tourists, who visit it by the busload, competing to have their picture taken in front of the mushroom cloud.

But yesterday, the enraged activists covered it with red paint and then spray-painted “FREE GAZA” on the sidewalk beside it. Here’s a picture taken by a member of the University community, who sent it to me.  What on earth do the protestors think they are accomplishing by doing this? They sure aren’t enlisting sympathy. They are simply acting out, like the petulant toddlers they are.

The person who took the photo sent it to me along with this email (all words and photos are used with permission):

I just came back to work to find this (see attached). It is probably a very good thing that I was not around a few minutes ago. The protestors are now one block down and I cannot see any signs of arrests having been made, regardless of heavy UC and City police presence. About one hundred and fifty children of privilege, calling the UC Police “the KKK’. To their face—with most officers present being black. We are dealing with imbeciles of a species the world has never seen before. Every single student involved in the desecration of this monument needs to be expelled, ipso facto. The whole lot.

Another member of the University community weighed in, and sent some photographs as well:

Today at about 3pm, pro-Palestine protesters forcefully attempted to lock the University gate on 57th Street with chains and padlocks. Two brave UChicago police officers fought back and were able to prevent that. Police cars joined the scene shortly afterwards. I was about to walk through the gate when this happened.

Actually, according to the news report below, they protestors did lock the gate.

Below: the photos (captions are mine). The protestors put their signs on Hull Gate, which is right outside my building, and then tried to lock the gate so their signs would be visible and conspicuous (see more below):

Both campus cops and Chicago city police were on the site. Here two campus cops try to prevent the protestors from locking the gate, the main entry from the north to the Quad:

Note that many of the protestors are masked. That is not for health reasons, but because they are cowards, fearful of being identified because they might be punished. Many are also wearing keffiyehs, sometimes described as “swastikas for hipsters”.

Whoops—there’s a coward inside the gate:

Masks everywhere. I can’t tell you how reprehensible I find acts of civil disobedience that are not only not peaceful, but whose perps try to disguise themselves:

The outside. Whoops, we have an identifiable human here:

More from outside the gate. My building is to the left, and the Anatomy building, housing Organismal Biology and Anatomy, is to the right:

University of Chicago cops on the scene:

The student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, did a live-stream report on the protests that is now a full news report. There were student scuffles with cops, three arrests, and reports that police used batons and pepper spray. Here are a few indented excerpts from the news, with my words flush left.

A UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) rally saw three protesters arrested and physical altercations between protesters and officers. Earlier, protesters locked Cobb Gate using a bike lock despite UCPD’s efforts to keep the gate open. During the rally multiple police officers used pepper spray and batons. Protesters damaged UCPD vehicles and kicked at least one officer.

The rally, which began with a walk out at 2:30 p.m., morphed into a brawl that involved at least 200 University- and community-affiliated protesters, 20 University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officers, and 30 Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers.

Deans-on-Call informed UCPD at approximately 2:15 p.m., that the University had “zero tolerance” for excessive noise before attempting to hand out warning cards to protest leaders using bullhorns to lead chants on the quad at 2:45 p.m. The cards read, “FINAL WARNING: This card serves to inform you or your student organization that your conduct is violating policies outlined in the Student Manual.” The cards also contained four QR codes linked to relevant University policies, which were updated in advance of the beginning of the academic year. Protesters refused to accept the cards.

The Deans-on-Call have always been useless in these altercations. From the lack of punishments last year, the protestors know that “zero tolerance” really means “infinite tolerance.”

. . . At approximately 3 p.m., protesters marched from the center of the quad and proceeded through the Hull and Cobb Gates on the north end. Once all protesters had passed through Cobb Gate, protesters pushed the gate closed and secured it with a bike lock despite police attempts to stop them. They also hung a banner on the gate that read “Free Palestine” and “Hands Off Lebanon.”

By this point, the protest had grown to include over 150 people, spilling out onto East 57th Street. Protesters allowed space for cars to pass through, but UCPD patrol cars blocked the street on both ends.

Protesters told police officers “Pigs go home” and chanted “Intifada, intifada, long live the intifada.”

The “intifada” is an armed uprising of Palestinians against Israel. The protestors want that, and doubtless many of them are proud of the butchery of October 7.

At 3:15 p.m., protesters left Cobb Gate and proceeded north on S. Ellis Avenue. They stopped in front of the Nuclear Energy Sculpture next to the Regenstein Library, at which point some protesters threw paint on the statue and wrote graffiti in the surrounding area that read “Free Gaza,” “hands off Lebonan” [sic], and “fuck the bombs.” CPD officers arrived on scene, joining at least 20 UCPD officers. Some were in riot gear and carried batons and zip-ties.

At approximately 3:30 p.m., the protest moved further north along the street, stopping between Ratner Athletics Center and the Court Theater. Police searched for and then tackled and detained one protester, whom they put into a patrol car. Protesters attempted to prevent the detainment, physically confronting officers. The Maroon was unable to confirm why that protester was detained.

Other protesters began chanting “Let him go!” and surrounded the patrol car that held the detained protester. An officer attempted to drive the UCPD patrol car away from the scene but was blocked by the crowd of protesters. Officers and protesters continued to push against each other.

Another protester struck the side mirror of a separate police car several times with what appeared to be a rock and then rejoined the crowd.

As tensions escalated, a third protester kicked a CPD officer in the back of his leg. Officers attempted to detain the protester, hitting him with a baton. They chased him briefly and tackled him halfway down the block, at which point they detained him and placed him into a patrol car.

The attack on cops takes the protest out of the realm of civil disobedience, which is supposed to be peaceful protests. And of course rule #1 of that type of demonstration is NEVER HIT A COP.

Officers used pepper spray on protesters, who were seen afterward rubbing and washing their eyes with water. One student told the Maroon that he was pepper sprayed by an officer who had “harassed students at the encampment.” A Maroon reporter witnessed a UCPD officer inadvertently pepper spraying a Chicago Police Department Captain, an incident which the UCPD officer later apologized for.

I don’t know about the pepper spray, but I saw the encampment taken down, at least the beginning of it, and I saw no harassment of students by the University police.

At approximately 3:45 p.m., protesters began dispersing north along South Ellis Avenue, south towards the quad, and through the SMART Museum courtyard. One CPD officer remarked to gathered officers, “that was fun for a little while.” Shortly after, CPD and UCPD officers also dispersed. By 4 p.m., the lock on Cobb Gate was removed and the gate was reopened.

And of course the mess around the sculpture, involving painted vandalism, had to be cleaned up by workers from Facilities. The protestors don’t care that workers have clean up after them.

The University issued a statement (below) that seems to me a bit ambiguous. Yes, university policiers prohibit disruptive violations and destruction of property, but what will happen if (as happened during the last academic year) the arrested protestors have their charges dropped by the Chicago district attorney, who seems sympathetic to the protests?  Here’s the statement:

According to a University spokesperson, “the University of Chicago is fundamentally committed to upholding the rights of protesters to express their views on any issue. At the same time, University policies make it clear that protests cannot jeopardize public safety, disrupt the University’s operations, or involve the destruction of property.”

This year, I hope, the University will actually enforce violations of the law and of university regulations. As far as I know, despite arrests and dismantling of the encampment last academic year, in the end not a single student was punished. Last spring I recounted four protests by Students for Justice in Palestine and their umbrella organization, UChicago United, and yet though all of these constituted legal or university violations, not a single student was punished. 13 of them had their degrees withheld, but they all got them reinstated after a short while. And though a sit-in in the admissions office led to the arrest for criminal trespassing of 28 people by Chicago Police (18 undergraduates, eight graduate students, and two professors), all the charges were dropped.

As far as I know—and there may be proceedings of which I’m unaware—the only punishment meted out the entire academic year was a mild rebuke to Students for Justice in Palestine–just a note on their record that if they continue to violate university regulations, there may be trouble for them in the future.

Frankly, I’m tired of the University proclaiming that violations will be punished, but then doing nothing about it. I don’t want to live through another year with protestors illegally shouting through megaphones during class hours, spraying graffiti on University walls, and holding sit-ins in University buildings.  Many of us feel that the University, despite eventually dismantling the illegal encampment, is doing as little as it can to punish protestors—perhaps because they don’t want the attention. But if this kind of mishigas continues, it will eventually lead to more attention focused on the University of Chicago, and perhaps, as has happened at Harvard, a decline in the number of Jewish students applying for admission.

Dumbest Thing of the Week: Loch Ness Sonar; News Items: Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry, and Physics, Fruit Fly Connectome, Shroud of Turin Again; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Hydrogen Cars; Name That Logical Fallacy; Science or Fiction

If you find cat-related material, send it along (one reader already does).

From Cosmos we see that scientists have developed new ways to give brain scans to cats, which of course don’t want to wear electrodes on their head.  Click headline to read:

Cosmos caption: Fée, an abandoned cat with chronic osteoarthritis, was one of 11 who went through the knitted cap tests at Université de Montréal’s veterinary school. Credit: Aliénor Delsart / Université de Montréal

An excerpt:

Knitted wool caps are a good way to give cats brain scans, according to a new study.

Cats tend to chew off wires and electrodes in electroencephalograms (EEGs), which means that they need to be sedated to get a scan.

This hinders vets’ abilities to assess chronic pain from conditions like osteoarthritis.

But a Canadian research team, publishing in Journal of Neuroscience Methods, has developed a less invasive method.

The team’s solution is a hand-knitted cap, embedded with ten gold-plated electrodes.

“The knitted hat helped to keep the electrodes in place during the evaluation and prevented cats to try to play with or chew the wire,” the team writes in their paper.

They used this cap to take EEG scans of 11 cats, assessing each cat’s response to stressful and soothing stimuli, like scented oils and coloured lights.

“One cat was able to shake its head and to remove the electrodes. In this case, we stopped the procedure, re-placed the electrodes, and resumed recording,” write the researchers.

“The entire procedure lasted around 45 min per cat, including positive reinforcement (treats and petting) between the sensory exposure.”

A cat styling the knitted cap and electrodes. Credit: Delsart et al., 2024, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2024.110254

The team was able to collect EEG data from all cats, and analysed 4 in detail.

They’re now looking for funding to perform more scans, “to enable us to establish a genuine EEG signature for chronic pain, and many other applications that will enable us to automate chronic pain detection in the future,” according to co-lead researcher Professor Éric Troncy, a researcher at the Université de Montréal.

Here’s are some EEGs from scanned moggies:

Graphs recorded from feline subjects. Credit: Delsart et al., 2024, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2024.110254

 

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Here we have my favorite genre of YouTube video: an animal rescue, and particularly cat rescues. This cat must have fallen or climbed onto the pipes, and then jumps into the water to escape. The soggy moggy was rescued by a nice man with a net, though the rescue wasn’t straightforward. The man wields the net with great dexterity, and finally snags it. This reminds me of how I rescued some ducks with a net (though I was actually in the water). I hope the cat found a good home.

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Maybe if Marxism was explained by a cat, we’d understand it better. Here’s a 2+-minute short explanation of Marxism using cats. The YouTube notes:

There is nothing the internet loves more than cats. So here is a very brief introduction to Marxism, explained by Bosley.

There is also a book that helps teach kitties about Marxism: Marx for Cats.

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Lagniappe:  A cat rescue story; click to read. Toilet water! Click to read the Telegram article:

The piece:

When stray pets are left to wander under the Texas summer sun for days and weeks on end, it could lead to a death sentence. But one cat in the Lone Star State proved his will to survive by finding at least some refuge.

When Edd was discovered by Houston SPCA investigators, he was living in a closed-down tanning salon, living off toilet water with no food in sight, the shelter said in an Aug. 27 Facebook post. He was also underweight and skittish.

“Shoppers and fellow business owners said they could see him in the window,” Julie Kuenstle with the Houston SPCA told McClatchy News. “It’s estimated that Edd was inside the closed store for around a month but survived on the water in the toilet.”

Now, weeks later, Edd is ready to start a new chapter of his life — his now-healthy life.

The SPCA ad for Edd is below.  There’s a happy ending, as the article says,

Kuenstle told McClatchy News that it didn’t take long for someone to offer Edd a forever home — he was adopted at the end of September.

 

h/t: Barry, Ginger K., Michael

Systems that can harvest water from moisture in the atmosphere could offer a valuable water source in the wake of disasters

A new technique enables makers to finely tune the color, shade, and texture of 3D-printed objects using only one material. The method is faster and uses less material than other approaches.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons spacecraft simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very different viewpoints. The results inform future plans to study like types of planets around other stars.