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Gene therapies for cystic fibrosis have previously struggled to reach the faulty lung cells, but a new approach has succeeded in achieving long-lasting modifications in mice

Minuscule black holes that formed right after the big bang could have had a strange property called colour charge, and spotting them could help unravel the mystery of dark matter

Researchers have developed a technique that allows artificial intelligence (AI) programs to better map three-dimensional spaces using two-dimensional images captured by multiple cameras. Because the technique works effectively with limited computational resources, it holds promise for improving the navigation of autonomous vehicles.

Researchers have developed a technique that allows artificial intelligence (AI) programs to better map three-dimensional spaces using two-dimensional images captured by multiple cameras. Because the technique works effectively with limited computational resources, it holds promise for improving the navigation of autonomous vehicles.

The small footprint and dim light of white dwarfs, remnants of stars that have burned through their fuel, may make excellent backdrops for studying planets with enough water to harbor life. The trick is spotting the shadow of a planet against a former star that has withered to a fraction of its size and finding that it's a planet that has kept its water oceans for billions of years even after riding out the star's explosive and violent final throes. A new study of the dynamics of white dwarf systems suggests that, in theory, some watery planets may indeed thread the celestial needles necessary to await discovery and closer scrutiny.

This study discovered mini-Neptunes around four red dwarfs using observations from a global network of ground-based telescopes and the TESS space telescope. These four mini-Neptunes are close to their parent stars, and the three of them are likely to be in eccentric orbits.

A new computational method developed by physicists can be used to estimate the risk of sudden cardiac death from a one-minute heart rate measurement at rest. The study was carried out in interdisciplinary collaboration between cardiology and computational physics.

Data assimilation is an important mathematical discipline in earth sciences, particularly in numerical weather prediction (NWP). However, conventional data assimilation methods require significant computational resources. To address this, researchers developed a novel method to solve data assimilation on quantum computers, significantly reducing the computation time. The findings of the study have the potential to advance NWP systems and will inspire practical applications of quantum computers for advancing data assimilation.

Data assimilation is an important mathematical discipline in earth sciences, particularly in numerical weather prediction (NWP). However, conventional data assimilation methods require significant computational resources. To address this, researchers developed a novel method to solve data assimilation on quantum computers, significantly reducing the computation time. The findings of the study have the potential to advance NWP systems and will inspire practical applications of quantum computers for advancing data assimilation.

Researchers have engineered nanosized cubes that spontaneously form a two-dimensional checkerboard pattern when dropped on the surface of water. The work presents a simple approach to create complex nanostructures through a technique called self-assembly.

How can Douglas Murray lecture on antisemitism in Amsterdam, the very city that deplatformed several of us simply for having sympathy for Israel, which wasn’t a topic of our scheduled discussion? Maarten Boudry tells me that for the video below “he was invited by a right-wing party, so the rabid anti-Israel activists have no clout there.”

Yes, Murray is a conservative, but on the topic of Israel he’s on both the money and on the morality. That’s why many dislike him, though he’s been demonized for other reasons, like his distaste for immigrants coming to the West. I won’t discuss that here, as the video below doesn’t deal with that.  If you’ve heard Murray on this topic before, there’s not much new, but I listened anyway.

If you click on “notes” at the youTube site after expanding the details, you’ll  get a link to a transcript that goes along with the video. I actually listened to this rather than read it, as I like Murray’s eloquence. The lecture itself ends at 36:15, and then there are 24 minutes of audience questions, which Murray writes down and then answers. Here’s a near-comprehensive list:

Is it possible to defeat Hamas?
How do we get the ball rolling to get rid of antisemitism?
What are the psychological sources of antisemitism?
Should we stop using the word “Palestine” or “Palestinian” or “pro-Palestinian” given that there is not really a Palestinian people or country?
Given that the people of Iran are pro-Israel but its regime is the biggest source of anti-Israel weapons and support, what do we do?”
Why are the countries of Spain and Ireland vehemently anti-Israel while other European countries are more sympathetic to the country?
What can we do to make the silent majority about Israel “rise up”?
What do you think about Europe defending Western values?
What about Russia and China and other countries attacking Western values?

I can’t resist calling attention to his barb about Greta Thunberg, and why she’s the Nordic equivalent of a rōnin, a samurai without a master. The analogy starts at 47:14.

h/t: Bat

Our previous provost, Daniel Diermeier, became Chancellor (i.e., President) of Vanderbilt University, and that was a great loss to us. Since he went to Vandy, he’s enforced prohibitions against trespassing and illegal violations of free speech (building occupations), and also adopted both the Free Speech Principles and the Institutional Neutrality that he experienced at the University of Chicago. I wish he were our President now, as he’s doing a bang-up job at Vandy.

Harvard recently tried to go institutionally neutral, too, and it did a pretty good job, as I wrote about here and here.  But Diermeier finds one problem with Harvard’s neutrality that eluded me. It’s important, as it involves university investments—the object of much rancor these days. Diermeier identifies Harvard’s blind spot in the following WSJ article (it isn’t archived, so ask if you want a pdf):

Click to read:

Actually, the article makes two points. First, it explains why institutional neutrality is importantin a clear and succinct way (the Kalven Report is much longer):

In explaining institutional neutrality and why it’s important, most proponents point to the 1967 Kalven Report from the University of Chicago. At the report’s heart is the assertion that neutrality is necessary for maintaining conditions conducive to a university’s purpose. The report points out that universities and their leaders risk stifling debate when they stake out official positions. Moreover, when a university or its administrative units take a political stance, it invites lobbying and competitive advocacy by various campus constituencies, which turns the university into a political battlefield and erodes its unique purpose—promoting the pursuit of knowledge and truth.

Taking official positions also erodes the university’s commitment to expertise. Recognizing and rewarding deep knowledge, and making sharp distinctions between experts and nonexperts, is part of a university’s reason for being. When university leaders make declarations on issues they know little about, often in haste, they compromise that reverence for expertise. Even in the rare case where leaders are domain experts, they should avoid making official statements to keep from chilling debate.

He also points out a semantic issue that, comparing Harvard’s neutrality with Chicago’s, is a distinction without a difference:

Oddly, the two co-chairs of the Harvard faculty working group that recommended the new policy wrote in a recent op-ed piece that “the principle behind our policy isn’t neutrality.” Instead, they seek to further “values that drive the intellectual pursuit of truth: open inquiry, reasoned debate, divergent viewpoints and expertise.” There is little to distinguish those values from those of the Kalven Report.

Sorting out these semantics can be left to future historians of academia. The important thing is that Harvard agrees the duty of the university is to be a forceful advocate only when it comes to its core functions—and to be silent on other matters.

The recent op-ed by two Harvard professors who confected their neutrality report, an op-ed that I criticized in the first link above, appeared in the NYT, and can be found archived here. The op-ed was quite a bit different from the proposed policy. But the policy is what’s in force.

BUT. . . . somehow neutrality went out the window at Harvard when it comes to investing, about which Harvard refuses to  explicitly affirm institutional neutality. Diermeier says this:

Yet although Harvard’s change of heart is encouraging news for higher education, its new policy makes a crucial omission that is at the core of the current controversy on campuses.

Students at universities nationwide have called on their institutions to join the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. According to the Harvard working group co-chairs, it didn’t “address, much less solve, the hard problem of when the university should or shouldn’t divest its endowment funds from a given portfolio.” Its members classified divestment “as an action rather than a statement” and thus treated the question as “outside our mandate.”

This is a distinction without a difference. Whether you call it an action or a statement, politically or socially motivated divestment plainly violates institutional neutrality because it requires a university to choose a side in a debate unrelated to its core function, thus signaling that there is only one acceptable way to think about the issue.

When a university’s portfolio manager makes the considered and consequential decision to divest from a company because its stock seems overvalued, this is legitimate fiduciary oversight. But divesting because an entity does business with the Israeli government is a clear violation of institutional neutrality. A university’s investment goal should be to maximize the rate of return, which means more funding for faculty research and student aid.

Institutional neutrality firmly supports a university’s purpose. So after an era when universities have been quick to issue position statements on the political controversies of the day, it is good that they are getting out of that game. It is a university’s job to encourage debates, not settle them. But for any university policy prohibiting political statement-making to be comprehensive and effective, it must address and discourage politically driven divestment.

This is why any university aspiring to institutional neutrality must not make an exception of investments, which could lay the university open to all kinds of moral, political, and ideological pressures from both within and without the school. Calls for universities to divest from Israel, which are ubiquitous, should not be heeded—and they often aren’t. The same goes for Palestine or any kind of call for divestment driven by other than pecuniary considerations.  Diermeier’s explanation of why investments should also be institutionally neutral is important, and those who want universities to be neutral should read it and absorb it.  That includes Harvard.

I wonder how much money it would take to lure Diermeier back to Chicago, where he should, in my view, be promptly installed as President.

At our current level of knowledge, many exoplanet findings take us by surprise. The only atmospheric chemistry we can see with clarity is Earth’s, and we still have many unanswered questions about how our planet and its atmosphere developed. With Earth as our primary reference point, many things about exoplanet atmospheres seem puzzling in comparison and generate excitement and deeper questions.

That’s what’s happened with GJ-3470 b, a Neptune-like exoplanet about 96 light-years away.

Astronomers discovered the planet during a 2012 High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) campaign. The campaign was searching for short-period planets orbiting M-dwarfs (red dwarfs). When it was discovered, it was called a hot Uranus. It doesn’t take an astrophysicist to figure out why that term has fallen out of favour, and now it’s called a sub-Neptune planet.

GJ-3470 b is about 14 times more massive than Earth, takes 3.3 days to complete one orbit, and is about 0.0355 AU from its star.

New research presented at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society and soon to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters shows that the planet’s atmosphere contains more sulphur dioxide than expected. The lead researcher is Thomas Beatty, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“We didn’t think we’d see sulphur dioxide on planets this small, and it’s exciting to see this new molecule in a place we didn’t expect since it gives us a new way to figure out how these planets formed.”

Thomas Beatty, University of Wisconsin, Madison

GJ-3470 b’s atmosphere is well characterized among exoplanets. The JWST has aimed its powerful spectroscopic eyes at the planet and revealed more detail than ever. Spectroscopy examines the light from its star as it passes through the planet’s atmosphere, revealing its chemical constituents.

Sub-Neptunes like GJ-3470 b are the most common type of exoplanet detected. Astronomers have detected carbon and oxygen in two of them, TOI-270d and K2-18b, which are important scientific results. But in GJ-3470 b’s atmosphere, astronomers also detected water, methane, and, more significantly, sulphur dioxide (SO2).

“The thing is, everybody looks at these planets, and often everybody sees flat lines,” said Beatty. “But when we looked at this planet, we really didn’t get a flat line.”

Finding SO2 was a surprise because GJ-3470 b is the smallest and coolest exoplanet to have the compound in its atmosphere. Image Credit: Beatty et al. 2024

This is the coldest and lightest exoplanet with sulphur dioxide in its atmosphere. The finding is significant in the effort to understand the different ways that planets form and evolve. The sulphur dioxide probably comes from chemical reactions in the atmosphere, as radiation from the nearby star tears hydrogen sulphide molecules apart, freeing the sulphur, which then bonds to oxygen, forming sulphur dioxide.

The amount of sulphur dioxide is also surprising. There’s about one million times more SO2 than expected.

“We didn’t think we’d see sulphur dioxide on planets this small, and it’s exciting to see this new molecule in a place we didn’t expect since it gives us a new way to figure out how these planets formed,” said Beatty, who worked as an instrument scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope before joining the UW–Madison faculty. “And small planets are especially interesting because their compositions are really dependent on how the planet-formation process happened.”

Astronomers found sulphur dioxide in WASP-39b, a hot Jupiter. But it’s 100 times more massive and two times hotter than GJ-3470 b. It forms the same way on both planets.

This image shows what the powerful JWST found in WASP-39b’s atmosphere. It was the first exoplanet where carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide were detected. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)

“On both planets, SO2 is produced through photochemistry on the planetary daysides: light from the star hits the top of the atmosphere and breaks apart sulfur-bearing molecules, and then the sulfur-atom wreckage from those photon/molecule collisions recombines with other molecules in the atmosphere and forms into SO2,” Beatty told Universe Today.

Beatty and his co-researchers tried to identify the pathways that could create SO2 through recombination. But the planet’s coolness led to dead ends.

“Identifying the correct recombination pathways was an important part of understanding SO2 on WASP-39b – but these predicted effectively zero SO2 on a planet as cool as GJ 3470b,” Beatty told Universe Today. It turns out that the atmospheric metallicity allows it to happen.

“As a part of these observations, we determined that the high metallicity of GJ 3470b’s atmosphere (it’s about 100x more metal-rich than WASP-39b) can drive SO2-producing reactions at much lower temperatures,” Beatty explained in an email exchange. “Put another way, we realized that all of the ambient water and carbon dioxide in GJ-3470 b’s atmosphere make the recombination process to form sulphur dioxide much more efficient than on larger giant exoplanets like WASP-39b.”

Astronomers can’t piece together a planet’s formation history without a complete account of its atmospheric constituents. With a complete list, they can start to tell the story of its formation. “Discovering sulfur dioxide in a planet as small as GJ 3470 b gives us one more important item on the planet formation ingredient list,” said Beatty.

But there’s more to the planet’s story than the SO2 and other atmospheric chemicals. It follows a polar orbit, which is a strong clue that the planet has been bullied out of its original orbit. It’s also extremely close to its star and has likely lost much of its atmosphere, blown away into space by the star’s powerful stellar wind. It may have lost 40% of its atmosphere.

“That migration history that led to this polar orbit and the loss of all this mass — those are things we don’t typically know about other exoplanet targets we’re looking at,” Beatty said. “Those are important steps in the recipe that created this particular planet and can help us understand how planets like it are made.”

The post Sulphur Makes A Surprise Appearance in this Exoplanet’s Atmosphere appeared first on Universe Today.

Taking a combination of short and long strides as you walk increases the amount of energy used by the body

Nature, perhaps the world’s premier science journal, has, like most of its kind, gone woke. Nowhere is this more obvious than its abandoning of science articles in favor of ideological ones, so it’s undergoing convergent evolution with not only its competitor Science, but also Scientific American.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the essay below, which is not only science-free, but wholly about semantics.  And useless semantics to boot, at least to my eye.  The whole purpose is to introduce a new term, “gender modality,” which, the authors say, will be of great help to people who don’t identify as “male” or “female”, and keep them from being “erased”.  The thing is, the other terms that fall under this rubric already exist, so grouping them as aspects of “gender modality,” a term whose definition is confusing, adds nothing to any social discourse that I can see.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Click below to read; you can also find it archived here.

The usual caveat applies again: people of non-standard gender, including transgender people, deserve nearly every right—and certainly every moral and legal right—as well as every civility, as people of the two standard genders. (My exceptions, as usual, include sports, where one is incarcerated, sex-specific shelters for the abused and rape counseling.) That said, let’s proceed to the semantics.

The authors are promoting the term “gender modality” because it was invented by the first author, Florence Ashley, whose page says she is “metaphorically a biorg witch with flowers in their hair.”  Dr. Ashley is a transwoman who uses the “they” pronoun.

The term gender modality was coined in 2019 by one of us (F.A.) in response to frustrations felt as a trans bioethicist and jurist with the limits of existing language (see go.nature.com/3×34784). The term has since been used by transgender communities, clinicians and policymakers to describe the realities of trans communities and the heterogeneity of trans experiences.

So what is the definition of the term? Here it is (bolding is mine):

A person’s gender identity is their sense of gender at any given time. By contrast, gender modality refers to how a person’s gender identity relates to the gender they were assigned at birth (see go.nature.com/3×34784). It is a mode or way of being one’s gender.

The best-known gender modalities are ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’, but the term allows for other possibilities, such as ‘agender’, which includes those who do not identify with any gender, and ‘detrans’ or ‘retrans’ for people who have ceased, shifted or reversed their gender transition. The term also makes space for gender modalities specific to intersex individuals, gender-questioning people, people with dissociative identity disorder and people with culture-specific identities (see ‘Many ways of being’). Gender modality serves a similar purpose to sexual orientation, which describes a facet of human existence and makes space for orientations beyond gay and straight.

Well, this is confusing. First of all, I reject the notion of “gender assigned at birth”.  The proper term here is SEX DETERMINED AT BIRTH. Once again, like so many gender ideologues, the authors think that sex is not a binary, but represents some point on a spectrum that doctors “assign”.  But sex is a reality, not a semantic, socially constructed invention, and, using the gametic definition for “biological sex”, 99.82% of humans  (and surely an equally high percentage of other animals) fall into the classes “male” or “female” depending on whether they have the developmental equipment to make small mobile gametes or large, immobile ones.

Leaving that aside, I still can’t quite understand how “gender modality” differs from “gender identity”.  Doesn’t “agender” or “intersex” refer to a person’s sense of how they feel? If not, what does it mean to say that those two terms “refer to how someone’s gender identity relates to the ‘gender they were assigned at birth'”? In fact, neither of those terms say anything about what sex someone was determined to be at birth. Those terms, and the ones the authors list below as “gender modalities”, leave the question of “gender assigned at birth” undetermined, so the notion of “relating how you identify with what you were determined to be at birth” seems meaningless.  For example, here’s the list they give of these terms.

You’ve probably seen many of these terms before, and they all refer to people’s sense of who they are.  In fact, you can simply eliminate the term of gender modality and just use the identities themselves, perhaps—as in complicated cases like “two spirit identities”—with some necessary explanation. If you’re asked by a person or on a questionnaire, “Are you transgender?” You can either say “yes” or “no”, or explain how you identify (in many cases you ‘ll have to do this).

For some reason, the authors, who simply reiterate only part of a list of gender identities, but call them gender modalities, think that the “gender modality” term itself can improve the work of scientific researchers in three ways:

First, scientists can expand the gamut of gender modalities included in questionnaires given to participants, to capture a broader range of experiences than those represented by the binary of cis and trans. Formulating new categories, adapted to the study design, will enhance the validity of the research7,8. It could also improve response rates and reduce the likelihood of people dropping out.

What they’re really saying is that sometimes, for some purposes, it’s useful to use gender identities to avoid “erasing” people. (Yes, they use that term, saying that using the wrong term will “erase gender trajectories and experiences”.  No, they don’t get erased: you still have yours!) It’s just that if it’s important to researchers to know these things, then you they have to ask specifically how you feel about yourself. Using the word “gender modality” instead of “gender identity” adds nothing to this endeavor.

Number two:

The second way in which researchers can use gender modality to improve their work is by using it to refine how they phrase questions or discuss results.

By reflecting on gender modality, researchers can better ensure that participants feel respected, and can avoid assigning gender modalities that conflict with participants’ identities. Recognizing gender modalities beyond cis and trans is a matter of justice. In some studies, offering write-in opportunities can help participants to feel respected despite the nuances of their experiences not being captured. But it could be as simple as using ‘gender modality’ instead of ‘gender identity’ or ‘transgender status’ in a table heading, because the last two terms can be seen as inaccurate or marginalizing.

If gender identity is important in a study (and realize that this applies only to humans and gender identity isn’t relevant for every study involving sex), then by all means use in a write-in option, which to me, given the number of “gender identities” available (there are over 100 now!) seems necessary in any case.

The key to this paper lies in the second paragraph above: getting people’s gender identity correct is a matter of “justice”, and by that they mean “social justice”. Well, sometimes it is important, in which case you must use the write-in option (given 100d+ different gender identities, ticking boxes won’t work. Or if both biological sex and gender identity are important, here’s a questionnaire I suggest.

Biological Sex

Male
Female
Other (please explain)__________

Gender identity

Male
Female
Other (please explain)__________

That should take care of everything.

“Advantage” number three is like number two, but is about civility rather than justice:

Finally, researchers can use gender modality to think more meticulously about what it is that they are really trying to capture in their study.

Linguistic gaps abound when it comes to our ability to describe trans people’s experiences. For instance, discrimination against trans people is often described as discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Although this shorthand might be workable, it is not entirely accurate. If a trans woman is fired for being trans, should we say that her gender identity was targeted when she has the same gender identity as cis women? Although her gender identity was part of the equation, it would be more accurate to say that she was discriminated against on the basis of her gender modality. Gender modality, not gender identity, is what distinguishes trans women from cis women.

No, what distinguishes trans women from cis women is their biological sex, not “modality rather than identity”. Adding “modality” here doesn’t change the legal case, which is this: someone was fired because their gender identity didn’t match their biological sex. As you can see, this whole mishigas comes from the authors’ refusal to use the word “sex”, which does not appear by itself in the whole article (it shows up a few times in words like “intersex”).

The authors say this at one point: “Not everyone is male or female.”  Well, only one out of 5600 persons is not, and they’re exaggerating that number, as many do, thinking that it somehow empowers those of different gender identity. But biological sex is a scientific term with a well-understood meaning, and those who feel that they don’t conform to the “male” or “female” stereotypes still have a biological sex, but sense their nonconformity with the stereotypes associated with that sex. That’s fine, and they can explain their feelings to anyone they want—if explanation is important. (Like race, gender identity has become someone’s single most important characteristic.) In fact, I think that everyone who has a gender identity different from male or female would explain the differences in a unique way, so explanation is nearly always imperative.

Towards the end, the authors sort of admit that using the term “gender modality” isn’t a big fix:

Gender modality is not a panacea. Rather, it is one piece in the toolbox of those who engage in research involving human participants, whether in the medical, biological or social sciences. Its power lies in what people make of it. Our hope is that researchers and others will play with it, stretching it and exploring its full potential. Rather than foreclosing the evolution of language, gender modality welcomes it.

“Its power lies in what people make of it.”  Well, I don’t make anything of it; it seems to me identical to “gender identity”.  And I’m not going to “play with the term.”  That suggestion itself shows the postmodernism inherent in this view.

The most important aspect of this article to me is this: Why on earth did one of the world’s best science journals publish it?  The answer is undoubtedly this: Nature is virtue signaling, publishing an article on semantics to cater to gender activists. It’s progressive, Jake!  But it also demeans the journal. Just think: there could have been three pages of real science in its place, science from which you could learn something. Did you learn anything from this article beyond the fact that Nature is falling prey to ideology?

Mark Sturtevant has returned with some lovely insect photos. His captions and ID’s are indented (he also provided links, as he always does), and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I took these pictures of local insects from various locations last summer, either in area parks or in a staged setting.

First are a pair of Buffalo Treehoppers, beginning with Stictocephala sp., followed by Stictocephala diceros:

Next up is another treehopper, Telamona sp. As a group, treehoppers are of course distinctive with that enlarged “helmut’ that covers much of the body. There had been some debate about the homology of this novel structure to the general insect body plan, with the rather exciting interpretation that the helmet is serially homologous to insect wings, only they are considerably re-purposed in treehoppers. But that view has been largely discarded now. The helmet is as it seems — a very expanded part of the first thoracic segment:

The small moth shown next is one of the plume moths, which is a large family of cryptic moths with wings that are deeply split into feathery plumes. This can be better seen here. The one I show here is the Rose Plume moth, Cnaemidophorus rhododactyla:

Next up is our Red Admiral Butterfly, Vanessa atalanta. These butterflies are exceedingly common, but they are super wary and so I find them to be difficult to photograph. This one was surprisingly calm, though, as it sunned itself on my shed. So the laws of physics made me trot back to the house to get the long lens:

While visiting an area park, I was a little surprised to see this Northern Paper wasp nest (Polistes fuscatus) in a bush. Aren’t these supposed to be attached to human structures?:

I was quite happy to find this interesting beetle, which has the ghastly name of Twice-stabbed Lady Beetle Chilocorus stigma. All readers will be more familiar with the Asian Lady Beetle — which is the ubiquitous orange and black species that was introduced into Europe and North America. I bring this up because the Asian Lady Beetle comes in different color morphs, and surprisingly one of the variants is a close match to the Twice-stabbed species, as shown here.  I have no idea why:

Lastly, I was pretty darn ecstatic to find several large Cecropia Moth (Hyalophora cecropia) caterpillars that were stripping down some snowberry bushes at a park. Not quite fully grown here, they will soon grow up into a bratwurst-sized caterpillar before spinning cocoons, and this season, the survivors will emerge as our largest moth. I took one caterpillar home to raise up, and the last picture shows it in its grumpy “Harrumph” pose, being annoyed that I had briefly stopped it from feeding. The cocoon had over-wintered with me, and it is now sitting where I can keep an eye on it. The adult will be released after the necessary pictures, of course. An enjoyable video showing the adult is at the link:

A little known periodic comet graces northern hemisphere summer skies.

Short summer nights present a tough dilemma for nighttime astronomy: to stay up late, or wake up early? Summer 2024 gives you at least one reason to opt for the former, as periodic Comet 13P/Olbers graces the evening sky.

The History of the Comet

The comet was first spotted on the night of March 6th, 1815 by astronomer Heinrich Olbers (of Olbers’ Paradox fame) observing from Bremen, Germany. The orbit was later described by Carl Gauss and Friedrich Bessel as just shy of 74 years, about five years off of the present value.

A sketch of Comet 13P Olbers from 1887 by William Robert Brooks. Credit: Public Domain The Comet’s Orbit

Comet 13P/Olbers is on a 69 year orbit, which takes it from a perihelion 1.175 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun just outside of the Earth’s orbit, out to an aphelion of 32.5 AU out beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Perihelion for the comet occurs June 30th, 2024 at 1.175 AU from the Sun and 1.919 AU from the Earth.

The orbit of Comet 13P Olbers. Credit: NASA/JPL A Synopsis of the Current Apparition

In 2024, Comet 13P Olbers loiters low to the west this summer for northern observers at dusk. This is because it’s approaching Earth along our line of sight. The comet will seem to hang about 20-30 degrees above the horizon on summer evenings for mid-latitude northern hemisphere observers.

The location of the comet in the evening sky in mid-June. Credit: Stellarium

Here’s our look at what to expect from the comet month-by-month. Unless otherwise noted, ‘Passes near’ means a closest approach of less than one angular degree:

June

17-The orbital path of the comet is edge on as seen from our point of view, and the comet may exhibit a spiky anti-tail.

19-Passes into the constellation of the Lynx.

28-Passes near the +4.3 magnitude star 31 Lyncis.

The celestial path of the comet through September 1st. July

5-Passes near the +4th magnitude star 10 Ursae Majoris. (note: 10 Uma is one of the several ‘stray stars’ littered across the sky that found themselves on the wrong side when constellation borders were formalized in 1922. Thus, the star calls Ursa Major its home constellation, though it’s now located in the Lynx(!)

9-Crosses into the constellation Ursa Major.

11-Crosses back into the Lynx.

13-Crosses into the constellation Leo Minor.

20-Passes closest to Earth, 1.876 AU distant.

28-Crosses back into the constellation Ursa Major.

The observed and projected light curve for Comet 13P Olbers. Credit: Weekly Information on Bright Comets. August

13-Crosses into the constellation Coma Berenices.

14-Passes in front of the open star cluster Melotte 111.

16-Passes 1.3 degrees from the +4.3 magnitude star Gamma Coma Berenices.

19-Passes near the +10th magnitude galaxy NGC 4565.

21-Passes three degrees from the North Galactic Pole.

25-Passes near the +9th magnitude galaxy Messier 65 (the Black Eye Galaxy).

September

1-May drop back down below +10th magnitude.

Observing a comet like 13P Olbers is as simple as sweeping the suspect target field at low power, and looking for a tiny ‘fuzz ball’ that’s out of place. Binoculars work great in the regard. Visually, binocular comets in the +6th to +10th magnitude range look lots like a bright globular cluster that stubbornly refuses to snap into focus. It was for this very reason that French astronomer Charles Messier established the first rough deep sky catalog in 1774, to mark the ‘false comets’ in the sky.

One thing’s for sure: we’re definitely due for the next naked eye ‘Great Comet’ for the 21st century… in the meantime, be sure to hunt down comet 13P Olbers on its 2024 apparition.

The post Catching Comet 13P Olbers This Summer appeared first on Universe Today.

No one ever said that nuclear power is simple or easy. It’s a tricky and expensive technology. But it also has tremendous potential to create large amounts of reliable green low carbon energy, and many believe that we cannot ignore this potential if we are going to tackle climate change. Billionaire Bill Gates is one of those people.

In the US, since around 1990, we have generated about 19% of our electricity from nuclear power plants. Nuclear produces about 10% of the world’s power from 440 plants. The average age of a nuclear power plant in the US is 42 years – these plants were designed with a 40 year life expectancy. There have been three plants to go online this century, and the last one before that was completed in 1996 – with a 20 year gap with no new nuclear. The bottom line is that we have not been maintaining our expertise in nuclear reactors. Now we are trying to make up for lost time, but find ourselves far behind.

There are several challenges (this list is not meant to be exhaustive) – the cost of building large nuclear power plants, safety issues, sourcing the fissile material, and storing spent nuclear fuel. But there are also lots of advantages – safe reliable green power, predictable (not variable) power, and a small land footprint. Further, we can choose to build nuclear power plants on existing coal fired plant sites. This also has several advantages – the new plant can use existing connections to the grid, will minimize the economic impact to the community of shutting down a job source, and much of the site work is already done.

While wind and solar are great renewable energy sources, they have their own challenges – they use a relatively large amount of land for the amount of power produced, they require lots of upgrades and extensions to the grid, and they are intermittent. I see the two energy sources as complementary. Put solar on roofs, put wind where it is optimal, and replace existing coal plants with nuclear plants while maintaining our existing nuclear fleet.

The challenge is this – how do we revitalize our nuclear industry to make it more modern and competitive? It will require lots of that universal resource, the resource that makes all things possible, money. This is the reason the IRA includes subsidies for new nuclear, to kickstart the process of ramping up and modernizing our nuclear industry. This is also where Bill Gates comes in. What I describe sounds like exactly how he sees things, and he understands that making new nuclear feasible requires deep pockets to absorb the short term costs. He is willing to be those deep pockets.

He is doing this through a company called Terrapower. They are building their first plant in Wyoming, near the site of a coal-fired plant that is being retired.  The plant has two main design innovations intended to make it more cost effective. The first is that it uses molten salt rather than water to cool the reactor and transfer heat to the turbine. This allows for much lower pressure and the molten salt also will cool faster on its own. Avoiding the need for high pressure can be a significant cost saving and would make the plant much safer.

The molten salt design also has another huge advantage over older designs – it makes it easier to ramp up or down the power output of the entire plant, so that it can combine better with intermittent sources. In fact, energy can be stored in the molten salt when it is not needed, and then sold to the grid when demand spikes or intermittent sources wane. This plant design therefore can help stabilize the grid.

The second design change is to separate the part of the plant that produces heat – the nuclear reactor – from the turbine that makes electricity. The molten salt is transported from one building to the other to transfer the heat. Separate these buildings means that the turbine part of the plant does not need all the safety measures that the nuclear reactor part requires. That, at least, is the theory. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission still needs to sign off on this design.

But these are great examples of the kinds of innovations that can make nuclear safer, more nimble, and more cost effective. The plant is also smaller than traditional large nuclear power plants, which also reduces the upfront costs.

I have to say, as billionaires go, I am impressed with Gates. I admired his charity work for a long time, and his stated goal to “vaccinate the world”. He has shrugged off the conspiracy theories from the tin-hat brigade, and has just plugged along trying to make the world a better place. He is doing that now, and I think he gets the issue exactly right. He says:

“Wind and solar are absolutely fantastic, and we have to build them as fast as we can, but the idea that we don’t need anything beyond that is very unlikely,”

He also understands his role in this:

“We’re taking that risk, which, because of our design, we feel very good about,” Mr. Gates said. “But it means you need very deep pockets.”

The plant is scheduled to come online in 2030. We need a hundred more similar plants. We also need to continue to innovate and improve the designs so that nuclear is more competitive and integrates well into the future grid. At the same time we also need to redevelop domestic sources of fissile material. We allowed Russia to corner that market, and that may not be sustainable in the current geopolitical climate. We also need federal regulation for long term spent fuel storage, to end the NIMBYism that has hampered such projects so far.

On a side note, because this always comes up, spent nuclear fuel is not the deal-killer many make it out to be. First, the highly radioactive materials have a short half-life – by definition. Half life and intensity are inversely related. The very long half-life materials, the ones that need to be stored for thousands of years, are near background radiation levels. Further, if we wanted to, we could reprocess much of this spent fuel into new fuel for modern reactors. In the meantime, we just store it.

All of the issues with nuclear power are solvable, and it is becoming increasingly clear that we may not have any other choice if we are going to avoid the worst of climate change. This is especially true as our electricity demand is rapidly growing, even faster than previous estimates. All those AI data centers need lots of power. The only solution is the “all of the above” approach, and that includes nuclear. The advantages I listed above just can’t be ignored.

If Bill Gates, who seems to agree with all this, is successful, this may be his greatest contribution to the world.

The post Bill Gates Backs Nuclear first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Using the tools of computational complexity, researchers have discovered it is impossible to figure out whether certain Super Mario Bros levels can be beaten without playing them, even if you use the world's most powerful supercomputer

At first glance, the universe and night sky seem largely unchanging. The reality is very different, even now, a gas cloud is charging toward the Milky Way Galaxy and is expected to crash into us in 27 million years. A team of astronomers hoping to locate the exact position of the expected impact site have been unsuccessful but have accidentally measured the thickness of the Milky Way! Analysing radio data, they have been able to deduce the thickness of the inner and outer regions and discovered a dramatic difference between the two. 

The team of astronomers from the US National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory were attempting to study the Smith Cloud. This high velocity cloud of hydrogen gas is located in the constellation Aquila at a distance of somewhere between 36,000 and 45,000 light years. Previous studies from the Green Bank Observatory have shown the cloud contains at least 1 million times the mass of the Sun and measures 9,800 light years long by 3,300 light years wide. 

A false-color image of the Smith Cloud made with data from the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). New analysis indicates that it is wrapped in a dark matter halo. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF

The plan was simple enough, to observe the spot where the cloud is currently interacting with the Milky Way. The observation is tricky enough though as the cloud is on the far side of the Milky Way and there is a lot of stuff in the way! The team, led by Toney Minter used the 20m Green Bank Telescope to search for dust and emissions from hydroxyl molecules (composed of a hydrogen and oxygen molecule.)  What the team expected to see was a difference in composition in the region of the Milky Way interacted with the cloud which, should have very little dust and hydroxyl molecules. Clouds in the Milky Way tend to have both so a difference should be detectable. 

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. Credit: Jay Young.

Minter was candidly open about the study joking ‘I knew there was a low probability that I’d find what I was looking for—and I didn’t,. But this is all part of the scientific process. You learn from what you DO and DON’T find.’

Disappointingly the team did not detect any differences in composition but what they did find was equally as interesting. The study revealed information about the Milky Way itself and the structure of its inner regions. Minter and his team had to look through the Milky Way’s inner regions for their study and what they were able to determine was the thickness of the layer of molecules in the inner Galaxy. The information enabled them to deduce the scale height of the clouds of molecular gas in the inner Milky Way. The results showed that the layer of molecules in the inner region measured 330 light years thick while those in the outer parts measured twice as much, around 660 light years. 

The discovery still leaves questions unanswered. The observation certainly shows the difference in thickness between the inner and outer regions but it doesn’t give any clue as to what is driving the difference. Further observations are now required to follow up on this discovery to try and model the underlying process.  Of course one other question remains unanswered and that is the nature and mechanics of the Smith Cloud and how it will impact our own Galaxy. Far from being disappointed though, Minter stated ‘That’s why astronomy is exciting, our knowledge is always evolving’

Source : While Aiming for Massive Gas Cloud, Astronomers Spot Differences in Thickness of Milky Way Galaxy

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