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Do I need to explain once more the principle of institutional neutrality in academia, whereby a university is prohibited from making official statements about politics, morality, or ideology in its announcements or on its website—except in rare situations when such statements are made to further the mission of the University? This principle was originally devised at the University of Chicago, codified in 1967 as the Kalven Report.

The reason for the principle is to avoid chilling or impeding free speech (we have a separate Principle of Free Expression) by making people fearful of angering authorities and endangering their own status at a university. If a department’s website opposed Israel’s war on Hamas, for example, such opinion (or its opposite) would have to be removed here, for it has nothing to do with the mission of the University. (Of course, there are always Pecksniffs who, by judicious word-twisting, can make any position seem relevant to the mission of a university. But really, our mission is teaching, doing research, and promulgating debate and searches for truth.)

While our Principles of Free Expression were published in 2015, they’ve already been adopted by 110 schools, which adhere to them in varying degrees. However, the Kalven Principle, published 48 years earlier, has been adopted by only a handful of other schools, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University.  Some other schools are contemplating adopting institutional neutrality, but haven’t seemed to push it through.  I’m not sure why, given that freedom of speech and institutional neutrality are mutually supportive, but I suppose schools (and departments, also included in our Kalven Principles) simply can’t resist weighing in on the issues of the day. In fact, even departments at the University of Chicago sometimes can’t resist making statements that seem to violate Kalven, and the administration polices and adjudicates putative violations.

Now the University of California system, as reported by the L.A. Times, is considering adopting institutional neutrality, too, but has gutted the meaning of that principle by watering it down. Click the link below to read, or, if it’s paywalled, find it archived here

Here’s an excerpt from the July 17 article showing how the UC system’s “neutrality” works:

University of California regents voted Thursday to ban political opinion from main campus homepages, a policy initially rooted in concern about anti-Israel views being construed as official UC opinion.

Political opinions may still be posted on other pages of an academic unit’s website, according to the policy approved at the regents meeting in San Francisco. It will take effect immediately.

The main homepage of a campus department, division or other academic unit will be reserved for news about courses, events, faculty research, mission statements or other general information.

Opinion must be published on other pages specifically labeled as commentary, with a disclaimer that they don’t reflect the entire university or campus. Those who want to post statements on their department websites must follow specific procedures and allow faculty members to weigh in through an anonymous vote.

Regent Jay Sures, vice chairman at United Talent Agency, has pushed for such action for the last few years, previously saying he has been troubled by “abuse” and “misuse” of departmental websites featuring anti-Israel sentiment and other opinions that do not reflect official university views.

After initially proposing a more restrictive policy, Sures said the final draft reflects a better balance between free speech and acknowledging both those who want to make statements and those who oppose them.

“This reflects that we value academic freedom, and it provides a very inclusive environment for the individual departments to put out statements and reflecting minority opinions within those departments,” he said.

Sorry, but I find this deeply misguided.  What purpose is served by institutional neutrality on a departmental or division homepage that is violated if you simply click a link on that page?  After all, in California a department or a division can always weigh in on the war, affirmative action, gun control, politics, and so on, on other pages. Suppose the chairman of a sociology department puts up a post condemning Israel for its conduct of the war against Hamas. Even if it’s labeled as “commentary”, who would be foolish enough to think that this will have no effect on the speech of that department? Grad students, junior faculty, and others who are vulnerable will be inhibited from speaking otherwise, even at faculty meetings or in public. After all, your counterspeech could anger the chair, who could then exact retribution, damage your tenure and promotion, and so on.

There are other venues for expressing your opinions as private individuals: they are called “social media.” Or you can write letters to the editor, publish papers, write books, and so on. There is no need to bawl out your political or ideological views on a university website. (As for chairmen and University presidents and provosts, the line is blurred between their private speech and official unviersity speech, and in my view they’d best keep their views on nonacademic stuff to themselves. This is indeed the case at Chicago).

The best course of action is simply to tell people not to use any parts of university websites opinions other than those very relevant to a university’s or a department’s mission. Let us have none of this mishigass about taking votes or putting up disclaimers. That stuff can still chill speech.

A bit more from the article:

Sean Malloy, a UC Merced associate professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies, asserted that regents were trying to “gag faculty speech” and that the proposed policy reflected efforts to repress the growing movement for Palestinian solidarity across UC campuses.

He noted that regents never tried to intervene in faculty statements on the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd’s killing, on climate change or in defense of immigrant students.

“It is only when faculty speech threatened to upset support for Israel and Zionism that the Regents saw fit to enact such a policy,” Malloy said in a statement to The Times. “It must be seen along with the dispatch of police against UC students, faculty and staff, as well as the newly adopted measures aimed against encampments as part of an effort by a group of Regents to hold the UC hostage to their own commitment to Zionism in the midst of a genocide against Palestine.”

No, the purpose of such statements is not to “gag faculty speech”, and should certainly not be to profess commitment to Zionism! The principle is meant, again, to allow faculty and everyone else to speak freely without being nervous about revenge from the university.  You just can’t put your speech on official university web pages.

Now Dr. Malloy is right in saying that if there is such a policy, it has to be applied fairly and uniformly: statements not affecting a university’s mission should all be banned from official websites and statements. You simply can’t allow university members to approve of Black Lives Matter or weigh in on George Floyd on one hand, but then then prevent others from writing about Israel on the other. The fair and just solution is simply to tell people to publish all their personal opinions in other places.  After all, there are plenty of such places! This website is one of them: it’s private and not at all connected to or supported by my university. My opinions are, of course, my own, and not that of my school.

Sadly, the regents of the University of California don’t seem to understand either the meaning or the import of institutional neutrality.

Every now and then, I get a question from a reader that I suspect many other readers share. When possible, I try to reply to such questions here, so that the answer can be widely read.

Here’s the question for today:

I do have one question that I couldn’t find the answer to in your book. Maybe I missed it, but here it is:

You explained what the strong force does (encapsulate the quarks and gluons within the proton), but what is the source of the strong force’s agency? I know it has energy used to hold the protons and neutrons together, but where does that force originate? It seems counter-intuitive, given the electromagnetic forces that pull particles apart due to equal charges — but how and why did the strong force come about? — Jeff Cox

Below I give a qualitative answer, and then go on to present a few more details. Let me know in the comments if this didn’t satisfactorily address the question!

First, A Qualitiative Overview

Let me first address this question for other forces:  for instance, “what is the source of gravity’s agency?” Then I’ll turn to electromagnetism, and then to the strong nuclear force. [The explanations given here are based on the ones used in the book.]

The Gravitational Force

What makes gravity happen? There are two answers to this question, both given in the book (chapters 13-14).  

The first answer is from a field-centric perspective: the source of gravity’s effects is the gravitational field.  Object # 1 changes the gravitational field in its general neighborhood.  If object #2 wanders into that neighborhood, it will respond to the changed gravitational field that it encounters by changing its direction and speed of motion.  Watching this happen, we will say: the gravitational effect of object #1 pulled on and altered the motion of object #2.  But really, it was all done through the intermediary of the gravitational field: object #1 affected the gravitational field, which in turn affected object #2.  (The reverse is also true: object #2 affects the field around it and this in turn impacts object #1.)

The second, more complete answer is from the medium-centric perspective.  It was given by Einstein: space should be understood as a medium [albeit a very strange one, as described in the book], and the gravitational field is secretly revealing the warping of space itself (and of time, too).  In other words, what is “really” happening, from this perspective, is that object #1 warps the space around it, and when object #2 comes by, it encounters this warped space, which causes its path to bend.

Both answers are correct — they are two viewpoints on the same thing. But the second answer is more conceptually satisfying to most humans. It gives us a way of understanding gravity as a manifestation of the universe in action. The field-centric viewpoint is more abstract, and less grounded in intuition.

The Electromagnetic Force

For electric forces, we have a field-centric answer: the source of electrical effects (and magnetic ones too) is the electromagnetic field (whose ripples are photons, the particles of light.)  The story of how object #1 affects the electromagnetic field, which in turn affects object #2, has different details but the same outline as for gravity. (Object 1 affects the electric field around it; object 2 wanders by, and its motion is changed when it counters the altered electric field caused by object 1.)

What about the medium-centric answer?  Sorry — we don’t have one yet.  In contrast to the gravitational field, which describes the warping of space, we don’t know what the electromagnetic field really “is” — assuming that’s a question with an answer.   Perhaps it is a property of a medium, as is the case for the gravitational field, but we just don’t know.

This situation might seem unsatisfying. But that’s the limited extent of our current knowledge. Someday physicists may make progress on this question, but there hasn’t been any up to now.

There is a line of thinking (described in the book, chapter 14) in which the universe has more dimensions of space than are obvious to us, and electromagnetism is due to the warping of space along the dimensions that we are unaware of. This is called “Kaluza-Klein theory” and goes back to the 1920s; Einstein was quite enamoured of this idea, and it arises in string theory, too. But at this point, it’s all just speculation; there’s no experimental evidence in its favor.

The Strong Nuclear Force

The field-centric answer: the source of strong nuclear effects is the gluon field (whose ripples are gluons.)  Quark 1 affects the gluon field, which in turn may affect particle #2, which might be a gluon, an anti-quark, or another quark.  And in the proton, all the particles affect all the others, through very complicated processes involving the gluon field.

The medium-centric answer?  Again, we don’t have one yet. Kaluza-Klein theory might or might not play a role here too.

What the Forces Have in Common

Let’s go a little deeper now.

You can’t take a first-year course in physics without wondering why gravity and electromagnetism both satisfy an “inverse square law”. If the distance between two objects is , the gravitational force between them is

where represents an object’s mass and is a constant of nature, known as Newton’s constant; the minus sign means the force is attractive. Meanwhile the electric force between them is

where represents an object’s charge and is a constant of nature, known as Coulomb’s constant. Note there is no minus sign: if the product of the charges is positive, the force is repulsive, while if it is negative, the objects attract each other. (Like charges repel, opposite charges attract.)

Neither of these laws, which were discovered before the nineteenth century, are the full story for gravitation or for electromagnetism; they were heavily revised in the last two hundred years. Nevertheless, the similar behavior is striking.

Remarkably, in the right settings, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the Higgs force also exhibit inverse square laws. Every single one. Again, there are differences of detail — minus signs, the constant in front, and what appears in the numerator — but always a . What’s behind this?!

The answer? Geometry. The fact that a sphere in three spatial dimensions has area is behind the inverse square laws in all the five elementary forces of nature (and some less elementary ones, too.) The reasoning is known as Gauss’s law, which I explained here (see Figure 1 and surrounding discussion). If we lived in four spatial dimensions, the force laws would instead behave as ; in two spatial dimensions they would show ; and in one spatial dimension, the force between two electrically charged objects would be a constant.

However, although each of the forces exhibits an inverse-square law sometimes, none of them does always. And each one deviates from inverse-square in its own way.

How the Forces Differ Attraction and Repulsion

First, about attraction and repulsion. Gravity and the Higgs force between two objects are inevitably attractive forces, but electromagnetism and the nuclear forces (which all come from “spin-one” fields) can be either attractive or repulsive. [The reasons aren’t hard to show using math; I don’t know of a completely intuitive argument, though I suspect there is one.]

In electromagnetism it is simple: as I mentioned, like charges repel, opposite charges attract. But in the strong nuclear force, it is more complicated, because the strong nuclear force has three types of charges (referred to, metaphorically, as “colors”.) Quarks attract anti-quarks, but whether they repel other quarks depend on what charges they are carrying. Three quarks of different colors actually attract each other, and that’s what’s happening in a proton. [See here for some details.]

Distance Dependence

Next, what about the distance-dependence? Electromagnetism exhibits the only force that is always close to , deviating from it only by slow drifts (in math, by logarithms of ). All the other forces show dramatic differences.

The Weak Nuclear and Higgs Forces

At distances greater than meters, 1/1000 of the radius of a proton, the weak nuclear force dies off with distance very rapidly — exponentially, in fact:

where is the mass of the W boson (the wavicle of the W field), and where I am just showing the distance-dependence and am dropping various constants and other details. The same is true of the Higgs force, except in that case is the mass of the Higgs boson. Essentially, in the language of the book, the mass of the W and Higgs bosons represent a stiffening of the W and Higgs fields, and stiff fields cannot generate forces that remain powerful out to very long distances. This is in contrast to the electromagnetic field, which is not stiff and can maintain an inverse-square law out to any .

The Strong Nuclear Force

The strong nuclear force could not be more different. A distances approaching meters, approximately the radius of a proton, the strong nuclear force dies off more slowly than the inverse square law, and eventually, for distances of greater than meters, it becomes constant. One can again understand this in terms of Gauss’s law, but applied to a new physical situation that does not occur in electromagnetism (at least, not in empty space.)

This effect derives from the way that the gluon field interacts with itself, although it is far from obvious. I do give a glimpse of this story in the book’s chapter 24, where I briefly mention the feedback effect of the gluon field on itself. The full story is very subtle, eluded physicists for a number of years, and won a Nobel prize for David Politzer and for David Gross and Frank Wilczek. Today the effect is well-understood conceptually, and computer simulations confirm that it is true. But no one has completely proven it just using mathematics.

The effect is also responsible for why a proton has a larger mass than the objects (quarks, anti-quarks and gluons) than it contans, as I recently explained here.

Gravity

Gravity is different in the opposite sense: instead of deviating from the inverse square law at long distance, as the nuclear forces do, it does so at short distance. Somewhat as the long-distance effects in the strong nuclear force are caused by the gluon field interacting with itself, the complexity of gravity at short distance is caused by the gravitational field interacting with itself… though the former is caused by quantum physics, while the latter is not.

For elementary particles, the distances where gravity deviates from are far too short for us to observe experimentally. But fortunately, large objects such as stars magnify these effects at distances long enough for us to observe them.

The fact that the gravity of the Sun is not quite inverse-square, but has a small component, is what causes the orbit of Mercury to deviate very slightly from the prediction of Newton’s laws. This shift was calculated correctly by Einstein, using the new theory of gravity that he was then developing, and gave him confidence that he was on the right track.

Much more dramatic are the effects near black holes, where force laws are much stronger than the Newtonian inverse square law. These are now observed in considerable detail.

Summing Up

Remarkably, despite all the diversity in the behavior of the five known forces, each one arises in the same way: from a field that serves as an intermediary between objects (which themselves are made from wavicles in these and other fields). This leads naturally, in three spatial dimensions, to laws that are inverse-square, modified by details that make the forces all appear very different. In this way, the huge range of behavior of all known processes in nature can be addressed using a single mathematical and conceptual language: that of quantum field theory. [This is a point I wrote about recently in New Scientist.]

I sent this email to Matthew last night:

Tuesday night I read something about J D. Bernal in Hitchens’s “God is Not Great,” which I was rereading, and I remembered that everybody called Bernal by a nickname that testified to his wisdom.  I turned out the light and unsuccessfully tried to remember it for a while, then fell asleep. “I’ll think of it tonight,” I told myself.

Sure enough, I woke up at about 3 a.m. and the first thing that popped into my mind was “SAGE”. That was, of course, his nickname.  Clearly my cranial neurons had been turning it over while I slept.  And of course this happens to all of us: we can’t think of something and much later it suddenly comes to us.  Clearly the brain was working on it in the interim.

The brain is truly a wondrous organ!

J. D. Bernal was a polymath who pioneered the study of molecular shape using X-ray crystallography. I should add that to me this is evidence for determinism. Seeing that name activated a program in my brain to dig out his nickname (which had been stored there for several decades since I read his biography), and the program kept running while I was sleeping.

I’m sure readers have similar or even weirder stories. (Matthew says that this happens to him all the time when he can’t think of a word for a crossword puzzle, but then it comes to him after he takes a break for a while and goes away.

Well, except for singletons and some videos from Tara Tanaka, this is the very end of the queue. I hope it will be remedied soon.

Today’s photos come from UC Davis ecologist Susan Harrison, whose captions are indented. You can enlarge her pictures by clicking on them.

More from Finland:  mammals and songbirds

Here are yet more pictures from a May trip to Finland and Norway that was previously featured in posts on Arctic seabirds, other Arctic creatures, and birds of the northeastern Finnish forests.

Today’s post begins with mammals….

My first-ever Hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus), in the half-light of 4:00 am in Oulu:

An unbearably adorable Red Squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) defending a prize pine cone:

A Mountain Hare (Lepus timidus) in its summertime brown coat, and a far more nervous-looking one still wearing its conspicuous winter white coat; this species is found only in tundra, taiga, and moorlands of northern Eurasia:

A diminutive Roe Deer (Capreolus capreolus), belonging to a genus found only in Eurasia:

A young Eurasian Elk (Alces alces), closely related to our Moose (Alces americanus) rather than to what we call Elk in North America (genus Cervus, which in Europe are called Red Deer):

Next, some colorful songbirds:

Greenfinch (Chloris chloris):

Robin (Erithacus rubecula):

Bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula):

Siskin (Carduelis spinus):

And finally, some songbirds more remarkable for their elaborate music than for their plumages:

Thrush Nightingale (Luscinia luscinia):

Blyth’s Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus dumetorum):

Wood Warbler (Phylloscopus sibilatrix):

Forests and other land ecosystems emitted almost as much carbon dioxide as they absorbed in 2023 – it will be much harder to restrict global warming to agreed targets

Surveys are always tricky because how you ask a question can have a dramatic impact on how people answer. But it is useful to ask the exact same question over a long period of time, because that can indicate how public attitudes are changing. This is one of the benefits of Gallup, which was founded in 1935 and is dedicated to high quality and representative polls. They have been asking the following question since 1982:

“Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings — 1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?”

It’s an imperfect way to ask these questions – the “less advanced life forms” is not really accurate, and the questions all assume or imply the existence of God. But by asking “which one comes closest” it does capture the essence of this issue. Option 3 is basically young-Earth creationism, option 2 is pure scientific evolution, and option 1 is everything else. From my view as a skeptic and science communicator, the results of this survey are dismal but also encouraging. At the start of the survey in 1982 the numbers were stark: 1 – 38%, 2 – 9%, and 3 – 44% (the rest undecided). Therefore 82% of Americans endorsed some form of creationism, and only 9% were willing to say that life resulted from evolution acting all by itself.

The most recent poll from this perspective is encouraging: 1 – 34%, 2 – 24%, and 3 – 37%. There is still a plurality endorsing young-Earth creationism, but those endorsing scientific evolution is up to 24%. These numbers also track with surveys on religion in the US. The young-Earth creationism figure is about the same as the number of Americans who identify as some kind of evangelical (something between 30 and 39%). Admittedly, this number can be squirrely depending on how you define “evangelical” and ask the question, but broadly defined, the numbers track. The scientific evolution numbers also track with those who answer on surveys that they are religiously unaffiliated, also now in the 20’s.

One way to look at these numbers is that, on this specific issue, science education and communication may be entirely irrelevant. How you answer this question may be entirely due to your religious affiliation. But this can also mean that two thirds of Americans are open to the concept of evolution and could benefit from science communication on this topic. I also find that discussing claims surrounding creationism and evolution is a great way to teach science and critical thinking.

So let me pivot to a brief summary of why, as a scientific question, there is little doubt that life on Earth is the result of organic evolution. What I mean by this is that once life arose on Earth (the origin of life is a distinct but related question), a combination of variation followed by differential survival lead to evolution of living forms over time, including speciation, and resulting in a nestled hierarchy of branching relationships, resulting in all life that we see today on Earth. Variation derives from genetic mutations and recombination, while differential survival results from selective pressures and “survival of the fittest” but also genetic drift and possibly other factors.

Creationists (now using the term to broadly refer to all forms of evolution denial) have attempted to prove that evolution in this way is impossible or cannot work, but all such attempts have completely failed. Evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics (because the sun is inputting energy into the biosphere), is capable of generating an increase in information (through gene duplication and mutations), and does not have a problem with “irreducible complexity” (a concept that fundamentally misunderstands how evolution works).

Meanwhile the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, especially for the basic concept that all life is related through a nestled hierarchy of evolutionary relationships. We see this evidence when we look at the pattern of living things and how they are spread throughout the world. It’s not random – there is a reason, for example, that marsupials dominate in Australia. We see this in the fossil record, which extends our observations of anatomical patterns not only in space but time. The fossil record also fills in many gaps in the “tree of life”, revealing transitional species and the pattern of what evolved into what. l

Perhaps most powerful, however, is the molecular evidence. Genes evolved from other genes, and we can see this pattern as well, which nicely overlaps with species relationships. We see the same overlapping pattern when we look at protein structures, and at genetic sequences. We even see this pattern when we look at viral inclusions – bits of viral DNA that get stuck in the genome and get passed down. Species with shared ancestors tend to have shared viral inclusions as well. There is simply no possibility that the molecular patterns we seen in proteins and genes is a coincidence. You also cannot explain these clearly evolutionary patterns away by invoking function – we see these evolutionary patterns even when function is not involved, like in silent mutations and viral inclusions.

There is also evidence from developmental biology, as creatures develop in a pattern that reflects their evolutionary history. Develop does not exactly follow prior evolutionary forms, because there is no reason it should, but the stamp of evolutionary history is still clearly seen. The bones in our inner ear, for example, were previously part of the jaw, and when mammals develop these same bones migrate from the jaw to the inner ear.

Also, many times creationists point to “gaps” in the fossil record, eventually paleontologists find fossils that fill in those gaps. We now have an extensive record of bird and whale evolution, for example – previous favorite examples of creationists.

Most importantly, evolution as a scientific theory has proven to be extremely useful. It makes and has made many predictions about what we will find when we look at fossils and study living things, and these predictions have been remarkably successful. There is also no competing theory that can come close to explaining and making sense of all the evidence.

Creationism does not and cannot do this. If you drill down past all the noise and diversion, what creationists ultimately say about the evidence is that God simply chose to make life that way, for whatever reason – in essence God chose to make life look exactly as if it had naturally evolved. This, of course, is an unfalsifiable claim, which is part of the reason why creationism is not science. What creationists do is present a master class in deception, pseudoscience, and logical fallacies. They really have no choice. They reject for purely ideological reasons one of the most successful and powerful scientific theories that humans have come up with, one that is supported by a mountain of evidence.

 

The post Latest Gallup Creationism Poll first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

It is becoming clear that any amount of alcohol is harmful, so why do so many studies claim that moderate drinking could help you live longer?

We take high definition streaming for granted in many parts of the world. Even now, as I type this article, I have the Martian streaming in high definition but until now astronauts on board the Space Station have had to accept low definition streaming. A team of researchers at NASA have developed and used a new system using an aircraft as a relay. A laser terminal was installed on a research aircraft and data was sent to a ground station. The signals were sent around the Earth and beamed to a relay satellite which then sent the signal on to the Space Station. What the astronauts will actually use it for is less likely to be streaming HD movies but will certainly be able to take advantage of the high bandwidth for science data and communications. 

Over the years, space travellers from all countries have had to rely upon radio waves to transfer data and information to and from space. This has meant reliable communication but low quality video. Alternative technologies have been available but these are generally limited to Earth-based activity. Laser is an obvious alternative which uses infrared light to transmit 10 to 100 times more data transfer than radio based systems. 

A team of researchers based at the Glenn Research Centre, part of NASA’s Cleveland presence has succeeded in establishing sufficient bandwidth to stream 4K video to the ISS using laser communications. The study was part of a series of tests of new technology that could provide high quality live video coverage of the Artemis lunar landing missions. 

The International Space Station (ISS) in orbit. Credit: NASA

The team worked closely with the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program. Together they installed a temporary laser terminal on the bottom of a Pilatus PC-12 aircraft. The pressurised single engined aircraft then flew over Lake Erie in Cleveland sending data to a ground station nearby. The next hop was for the data to be sent over Earth-based infrastructure to White Sands, the NASA test facility in New Mexico where it was translated to an infrared signal. 

Orbiting Earth at an altitude of about 35,000 kilometres is NASA’s experimental Laser Communications Relay Demonstration satellite which received the infrared signal and then relayed it to the ISS via the Illuma-T, the Integrated LCRD LEO User Modem and Amplifier Terminal. A new system known as High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking was integrated into the transfer and helped to deal with cloud penetration more efficiently. 

Multiple flights were completed by the Pilatus aircraft and after each test, the functionality was improved. It’s far easier to identify issues and subsequent enhancements during aeronautical testing than during ground testing. 

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft launches on the Artemis I flight test, Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022, from Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky.

The upcoming Artemis missions to the Moon and beyond are a real driving force behind developing high bandwidth data transfer not just for streaming video but to provide full video conferencing abilities to the astronauts. This will not only aid mission efficiency but also help to maintain astronaut morale and wellbeing. The drive too for the capture of high quality video data along with vast amounts of scientific data will benefit this high bandwidth technology as NASA embraces laser communications as a core part of their future projects. 

Source : NASA Streams First 4K Video from Aircraft to Space Station, Back

The post Astronauts Can Now Watch 4K Streaming Video on the Station appeared first on Universe Today.

Check any container of over-the-counter medicine, and you’ll see its expiration date. Prescription medicines have similar lifetimes, and we’re told to discard old medications rather than hold on to them. Most of them lose their effectiveness over time, and some can even become toxic. We’re discouraged from disposing of them in our wastewater because they can find their way into other organisms, sometimes with deleterious effects.

We can replace them relatively easily on Earth, but not on a space mission beyond Low Earth Orbit.

A round trip to Mars takes about three years. A lot can happen in that time. Important medical supplies, including medicines, might not remain as effective for that long.

That could create problems for astronauts who make the journey.

New research in Nature’s npj Microgravity examines the lifetimes of medicines and how they could affect astronauts on long-duration space missions. It’s titled “Expiration analysis of the International Space Station formulary for exploration mission planning,” and the senior author is Daniel Buckland. Buckland is from the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine and is an aerospace medicine researcher. The lead author is Thomas Diaz, a pharmacy resident at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Getting sick in space isn’t rare. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield talked about the problem in 2013. “When we first get to space, we feel sick. Your body is really confused. And so, you know, you’re dizzy, your lunch is floating around in your belly ’cause you’re floating, and what you see doesn’t match what you feel.” NASA calls it ‘space adaptation syndrome,’ and motion sickness and anti-nausea medications can help.

Research also shows that astronauts’ immune systems are weakened in space. Weaker immune systems raise the risk of infections. Humans carry latent viruses that can become active when immune systems are weakened, and the entire problem is amplified on longer missions.

When used properly and early enough, common medications can prevent relatively simple afflictions, such as a minor infection, from growing into more dangerous problems. Expired medications can create a problem because their effectiveness is often diminished over time.

“Effective medications will be required to maintain human health for long-duration space operations,” the authors write in their paper. “Previous studies have explored the stability and potency of several of the medications used on the International Space Station (ISS).”

However, this is the first time researchers have compared medications used in space with drug expiration dates in four different international drug registries.

Lead author Thomas Diaz got the idea for this work and then contacted Buckland.

Daniel Buckland, MD, PhD, is an emergency medicine physician at Duke School of Medicine and a NASA affiliate. He studies the risk of spaceflight on humans, including using robotics to deliver care in space. (Photo by Eamon Queeney.)

“Tom reached out with the idea, knowing my work on risk mitigation for extended spaceflight,” said Buckland. “He was concerned that not enough research addressed the problem of medication longevity on a Mars mission.”

NASA doesn’t reveal what medicines it stores on the ISS. For this research, Diaz used a Freedom of Information Act Request to get the list of medicines. The researchers assumed that the formulary would be the same or at least similar for a Mars mission.

The ISS carries 111 medications, divided among five different colour-coded kits. Each kit holds medicines pertinent to its designated use.

• Convenience kit: 23 medications.
• Emergency/Advance Life Support: 4 medications.
• Oral Medication: 36 medications.
• Topical and Injectable: 37 medications.
• Vascular Contingency: 11 medications.

Some medications are duplicated in multiple kits, and two of them are diluents for other medications.

This table from the research shows the four medications in the Advanced Life Support kit, along with their expiry dates in different jurisdictions. Some have a range of dates because of different manufacturers making the same drug. Image Credit: Diaz et al. 2024.

The ISS’s formulary, a list of drugs stocked on the station, contains 106 medications, excluding multiples and diluents. The most common issues that need to be addressed with medicines are motion sickness, allergies, minor pains, and infections. The list of medicines includes antibiotics, sleep aids, pain relievers, and allergy medicines. The drugs are chosen because they are effective in microgravity environments and because they have longer shelf lives than similar medications.

The research shows that over half of the medicines stocked on the ISS would expire on a Mars mission before astronauts returned to Earth.

“Of the 106 medications in the ISS formulary, shelf-life data was found in at least 1 of the registries for 91 (86%) medications,” the authors write in their research. “Of these 91 medications, 54 have an estimated terrestrial shelf-life of less than or equal to 36 months when stored in their original packaging. 14 will expire in less than 24 months.”

This graph from the research shows the survival percentage of ISS medicines by mission length for a lunar mission (Moon image) and a Mars mission (Mars image.) After five years, all medicines would expire. Image Credit: Diaz et al. 2024.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean the medicines won’t work, but in the same way you shouldn’t take expired medications you have lying around at home, space exploration agencies will need to plan on expired medications being less effective,” said Buckland.

On Earth, different medications become less effective at different rates after expiration. However, the effects of space flight on their effectiveness are largely unknown. Space is a harsh environment, and radiation could have a pronounced effect on medications. Increasing the amount of each medication carried on a Mars mission could help deal with the problem, but it’s a rather clumsy solution.

“Hopefully, this work can guide the selection of appropriate medications or inform strategies to mitigate the risks associated with expired medications on long-duration missions,” Buckland said.??

“Prior experience and research show astronauts do get ill on the ISS, but there is real-time communication with the ground and a well-stocked pharmacy that is regularly resupplied, which prevents small injuries or minor illnesses from turning into issues that affect the mission,” he said.??

In their conclusion, the researchers note that pharmaceutical drugs will be the cornerstone of astronaut health on long missions. They also point out a gap in data regarding the shelf lives of the drugs in the ISS’s formulary. For example, 14% of the medicines in the formulary lack expiration data. “It is imperative to know and understand these pharmacologic parameters in order to supply a safe and effective astropharmacy,” they write.

If medicines become unstable sooner on long space missions, it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.

“Ultimately, those responsible for the health of spaceflight crews will have to find ways to extend the expiration of medications to the complete mission duration or accept the elevated risk associated with administration of an expired medication,” they conclude.

The post The Shelf Life of Many Medications Is Shorter Than A Round Trip To Mars appeared first on Universe Today.

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