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Ask any property inspector, and they’ll tell you one of the maxims of their profession – where there’s moisture, there’s mold. That relationship also holds true for the International Space Station. The interior climate on the ISS is carefully controlled, but if thrown out of whack, potentially dangerous mold could sprout overnight. A new paper by researchers at The Ohio State University explains why – and provides some insights into how we might prevent it if it does happen.

The paper’s main finding was that dust collection, when exposed to moisture for only a short time, leads to a massive increase in the microbial population and a fundamental change in the dust itself to make it easier for the microbes to grow. There is plenty of dust on the ISS, so astronauts must be careful.

They already clean the screens covering the air filtration system on board regularly. The dust they collected from those screens formed the basis of the samples provided to Dr. Karen Dannemiller and her team at OSU. They separated the dust samples into different sub-samples and exposed each to a varying amount of moisture. Then, they watched as the microbes already present in the dust did their work.

A picture of mold growing on the ISS.
Credit – NASA

Dust is naturally created in the ISS from dead human skin and, of course, the microbes that live alongside us on a daily basis. However, in closed environments, an outbreak of bacteria would cause even more severe reactions than they do on Earth, including allergies and asthma. It is even possible that the dust and associated bacteria degrade the material structure of the ISS itself.

Running the collected samples through a higher moisture content is designed to mimic a possible failure on the ISS, such as an equipment malfunction. Knocking out an air ventilation fan in one part of the space station could create an environment similar to the one the dust is subjected to back on the ground.

So, what does that mean for our astronauts? For now, it’s best to understand where mold could form and keep up with cleaning schedules that allow them to nip it in the bud. There are several famous pictures of mold growing in a space station, so while generally successful, that has still been a known problem for a long time in space exploration. 

Bacteria were also found growing in the old Mir space station, as discussed in this Science Channel episode.
Credit – Science Channel YouTube Channel

Dr. Dannemiller and her colleagues have developed a model that could track mold growth in a closed environment like the ISS to combat this. They used data collected by analyzing the dust samples as part of their proof of concept for the software, but the eventual end goal is to predict where mold will grow before it begins and give the astronauts time to clean it out before it becomes a hazard. 

There will be plenty of space stations to work on this system in the future. Private spaceflight companies have become increasingly involved in developing space habitats, and NASA is setting up the ambitious Lunar Gateway to help with its Artemis missions to the moon. As more enclosed, sealed environments come online, it will be increasingly important to keep them free of these potentially dangerous microbial infestations. Experimenting with them and modeling that growth is one way to stay ahead of the curve.

Learn More:
Phys.org – Keeping mold out of future space stations
Nastasi et al – Predicting how varying moisture conditions impact the microbiome of dust collected from the International Space Station
UT – How Can Biofilms Help or Hinder Spaceflight?
UT – Earth’s toughest bacteria can survive unprotected in space for at least a year

Lead Image:
Scanning Electron Microscope image of dust from the ISS.
Credit – Microbiome / Nastasi et al.

The post Space Stations Get Pretty Moldy. How Can We Prevent it? appeared first on Universe Today.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is regularly plagued by the fact that humanity has a very limited perspective on civilization and the nature of intelligence itself. When it comes right down to it, the only examples we have to go on are “life as we know it” (aka. Earth organisms) and human civilization. On top of that, given the age of the Universe and the time life has had to evolve on other planets, it is a foregone conclusion that any advanced life in our galaxy would be older than humanity. Luckily, this presents an opportunity to develop and test theoretical frameworks in the field.

To paraphrase Freeman Dyson, if we can conceive of a concept (and the physics are sound), an advanced species will likely have built it already. In this respect, imagining where humanity will be centuries or eons from now could provide potential “technosignatures” to look for. In a recent paper, a team from the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center modeled a series of scenarios that attempt to predict what humanity’s “technosphere” could look like 1,000 years from now. Their research could have implications for future SETI studies.

The research team was led by Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist and Research Scientist at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. He was joined by George Profitiliotis, an Affiliate Research Scientist with BMSIS and a co-founder of the Greek NewSpace Society, and Ravi Kopparapu, a Planetary Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The preprint of their paper recently appeared in Elsevier and is being reviewed for publication in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. The paper is the first in a series titled “Projections of Earth’s technosphere.”

Searching for Technosignatures

When it comes to predicting what advanced civilizations might look like and the technologies they will employ, scientists are often marred by our limited perspective. When it comes right down to it, humanity is familiar with only one example of an advanced species relying on technological innovations to ensure food security, health and safety, transportation, defense, and other applications – i.e., ourselves! But as Freeman Dyson once related when discussing his theory of a Dyson Sphere, if we can conceive of an idea and the physics of it are sound, an advanced civilization may have already built it.

As they indicate in their paper, this process is similar to how astrobiologists rely on the study of Earth organisms to predict what biosignatures they should be searching for. As Haqq-Misra told Universe Today via email:

“Astrobiology has the entire history of Earth to draw upon as examples of how life has modified the planet. The search for extraterrestrial biosignatures can use Earth today or Earth in its past for ideas of what to look for. In the same way, the search for extraterrestrial technosignatures begins with the history of technology on Earth, although technology is much more recent in Earth’s history when compared to life in general. Our paper is an effort to provide a theoretical basis for technosignatures that is based on our undersstanding of life and technology on Earth.”

Similarly, SETI research has benefitted in recent years from anthropological studies that consider the totality of human activity on Earth. This collective activity is known as the “anthroposphere,” which corresponds to the concept of the Anthropocene—the current geological era in which humanity has become the largest driving force in environmental change. When considering this through the lens of technological activity and the technosignatures this would produce, the term “technosphere” is used.

Multiple SETI experiments have been mounted in the past sixty years, most of which searched for signs of extraterrestrial radio transmissions. This should come as no surprise since radio communications are a time-tested and validated technology that humanity has relied on for more than a century. But as Haqq-Misra explained, SETI also has a rich history of drawing upon various projections of future technology as well:

“[T]echnosignature studies begin with what exists on Earth, what could exist on Earth in the near-term, or what could theoretically be possible given known understanding of physics as places for extrapolations into the future. This approach does not assume that such projections are inevitable or even probable, but it at least provides a way to think about the astronomical tools that would be needed to remotely detect an extraterrestrial civilization with even greater technological capabilities than on Earth today.”

Radio telescopes monitor the sky at the Allen Telescope Array in California. Finding a signal from a distant civilization is one way we could experience first contact with ET. Credit: SETI Institute A New Approach

When it comes to predicting humanity’s future (and, by extension, advanced technosignatures), prior studies tend to have suffered from an inherent bias. In many cases, there is the assumption that a technological civilization will continue to grow exponentially. A perfect example is the Kardashev Scale, which predicts how advanced civilizations will invariably grow to occupy more space and harness more energy. This is an understandable assumption given human history and the exponential increase in the global population – from 1 billion in 1800 to 8.1 billion in 2024 (an increase of over 800%)

Similarly, global energy use also grew exponentially during this same period – from 5,653 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 1800 to 182,230 TWh in 2023 (an increase of more than 3200%). This model of continuous growth well into the future has motivated many observational and theoretical approaches for finding technosignatures. Among them is the search for possible megastructures around stars that experience periodic drops in brightness (like Boyajan’s Star) and “disappearing stars.” But as Haqq-Misra explained, this is merely one possibility for an advanced civilization.

Instead of predicting a single evolutionary pathway, Haqq-Misra and his colleagues adopted the “futures studies” approach. This interdisciplinary field relies on various systematic methodological approaches for predicting self-consistent future trajectories. Said Haqq-Misra:

“The plural “futures” is used to indicate that the actual future is unknown and cannot be predicted; instead, futures studies develops systematic projections of multiple contrasting futures that can provide insight into the range and diversity of possible outcomes. Most attempts at making informal projections in technosignature science inevitably succumb to biases based on internal assumptions or prevailing cultural narratives, which can limit the possibility space of imagined futures. The methodological approaches developed by practitioners of futures studies are designed to minimize such biases and enable much more robust exploration of possibilities for the future —in our case, the future of civilization.”

Our Possible Futures

Their approach involved a method known as a “general morphological analysis,” a means of exploring possible solutions to multi-dimensional, non-quantified problems. This method is intended to minimize the bias in underlying assumptions and encompass a wide range of possibilities. From this, the first step for Haqq-Misra and his colleagues was to ask the question:

“What are the technological phenomena of the future anthroposphere,
and how can they be described?”

They then defined a large set of scenarios based on different political, economic, societal, and technological factors, each with different values corresponding to different possible futures. This yielded almost 5,800 scenarios, but the team eliminated many based on logical inconsistencies while clustering others based on similarities. The team also used the Claude large language model (LLM) to assist with analyzing, comparing, and clustering. This allowed them to work their way down to ten future scenarios.

The Arecibo Radio Telescope. Though it’s decommissioned now, Arecibo Data may explain 1977’s mysterious Wow! Signal. Credit: UCF

The next step was to develop a novel worldbuilding “pipeline” based on an assessment of human needs in all ten scenarios. This allowed them to incorporate details for each scenario that would define observable properties for the corresponding technosphere. As Haqq-Misra explained:

“The underlying assumption in our worldbuilding process is that technology is intended to fulfill basic human needs. This means that any future technosphere must be reflective in some way of the needs of humans in a given future scenario. We do not assume that any given technosignature will exist for an arbitrary reason, but any feature of the physical technosphere in our scenarios is the outcome of political, social, or economic factors that drive human needs. We likewise expect that any technosignatures we find in extraterrestrial settings will exist because they are indicative of or derivative from processes that relate to extraterrestrial needs.”

One interesting finding was that only one of the ten scenarios involved the kind of rapid growth predicted by the Kardeshev Scale, Haqq-Misra added. Others showed slower growth, no growth at all, while another oscillated between growth and collapse. “This suggests that focusing the search for technosignatures on the idea of advanced, energy-intensive, and expansive extraterrestrial civilizations may be too limiting,” he said. “Numerous possibilities exist from our modeling alone that show alternative possibilities for long-term futures, and such civilizations could even be more likely or more numerous than longer-lived or galactic-spanning civilizations.”

Among the potential technosignatures these scenarios predicted, nitrogen dioxide emerges as a possible means of distinguishing between modern-day Earth, Earth before the introduction of agriculture, and a more industrial Earth in the future. They also found that the atmospheric spectra produced in three scenarios were “indistinguishable from nature,” meaning there was no discernible distance between a pre-agriculture and a more technologically advanced Earth.

“These three scenarios still include expansive technosphere, but much of the detectable technology is on Mars and other parts of the outer solar system,” said Haqq-Misra. “This raises an important possibility for false negatives in the search for technosignatures: a planet with no obvious technosignatures may not necessarily be devoid of technology, and the best places to look may even be elsewhere in the system.”

As always, the field of SETI and technosignature searches are constrained by the limits of our knowledge, where scientists must speculate about what we don’t know based on what we do. However, the process is becoming increasingly sophisticated thanks to advanced modeling and simulations that can account for various possibilities. In addition, scientists are questioning underlying assumptions regarding advanced civilizations and their motivations. The work of Haqq-Misra and his colleagues represents a first in a key way.

As he explained, futures studies methods tend to be applied to short-term projections of a few years or decades, while some climate science studies have looked ahead a few centuries:

“Our study is the first to use futures studies methods to develop projections across a 1000-year timescale, which requires us to focus on the longer-term trends that could shape different outcomes for civilization on Earth. This provides a solid theoretical basis for thinking about the range of technosignatures in planetary systems, and how to search for them, and much more work can be done from these scenarios alone to develop new search strategies. These scenarios also help us to imagine a broader range of possibilities for Earth’s future, which include numerous optimistic outcomes that avoid collapse or extinction. Our civilization may face numerous challenges, but studies like ours are important to remind us that the future remains open.”

Further Reading: arXiv

The post Projecting what Earth will Look Like 1000 years from now Could Assist in the Search for Advanced Civilizations appeared first on Universe Today.

Astronomers have achieved a major breakthrough in solar physics by successfully producing detailed maps of the Sun's coronal magnetic fields. This milestone promises to enhance our understanding of the Sun's atmosphere and how its changing conditions lead to impacts on Earth's technology-dependent society. The corona, or the Sun's outer atmosphere, greatly influences solar winds and space weather events like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. However, the magnetic forces that drive these events and the corona are challenging to measure.

Researchers have developed a flexible, durable electronic prototype that can harvest energy from body heat and turn it into electricity that can be used to power small electronics, such as batteries, sensors or LEDs. This device is also resilient -- it still functions even after being pierced several times and then stretched 2,000 times.

Researchers have developed a flexible, durable electronic prototype that can harvest energy from body heat and turn it into electricity that can be used to power small electronics, such as batteries, sensors or LEDs. This device is also resilient -- it still functions even after being pierced several times and then stretched 2,000 times.

Researchers have created microscale robots less than 1 millimeter in size that are printed as a 2D hexagonal 'metasheet' but, with a jolt of electricity, morph into preprogrammed 3D shapes and crawl.

Researchers have created microscale robots less than 1 millimeter in size that are printed as a 2D hexagonal 'metasheet' but, with a jolt of electricity, morph into preprogrammed 3D shapes and crawl.

Katie Steckles enlists the help of fluid dynamics researcher Kat Phillips to explain the versatile piece of maths behind dispensing wine from a box

Cyborg: A documentary tells the intriguing story of Neil Harbisson, who wears an antenna to “hear” colour, but it is lacking in depth and should have probed its subject more, says Simon Ings

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

This claustrophobia-inducing image is taken from photographer Martin Broen's new book Light in the Underworld, a collection of shots from the Yucatán’s cenotes, or sinkholes

What is it like to be a dog? And what can we learn from them? Mark Rowlands's take, in his book The Happiness of Dogs, is full of insights, finds Abigail Beall

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. This time, Rowan Hooper takes us to the early 2030s, when a technological step change enabled us to produce all the food we needed without the use of animals

From serpents to zombie pathogens, there is science behind our love of monsters. It reveals a lot about who we are, says Natalie Lawrence

Supremacy, a new book from tech journalist Parmy Olson, takes us inside the rise of machine learning and AI, and examines the people behind it

Far from being a behavioural quirk, obsessive-compulsive disorder is a debilitating condition with complex causes that we're just beginning to understand. We should treat it as such, and stop with the misguided quips

In this short video, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, chief spokesman for the IDF, shows us the conditions under which the six recently-murdered hostages were kept. (Trigger warning: blood.) For some reason I thought the hostages were being kept either in private residences or in rooms off the tunnels, not in the tunnels themselves. When you realize how many days these hostages have been sequestered by Hamas, even a few days of these conditions seem unbearable.  Clearly the IDF has already done DNA analysis of the blood and will do so on hair from hairbushes.

The conditions under which Israel keeps Palestinian prisoners, including convicted terrorists, are far, far better than the conditions under which Hamas keeps its hostages. Palestinian prisoners in Israel live in sheer luxury compared to what you see below, with food they can cook themselves, fresh air, and good beds.

Remember too that there are still about 60 living hostages in Gaza.  They should be released unconditionally—no deals, no bargaining.  Of course Hamas won’t do it, but in my view making a deal for the hostages by releasing Palestinian terrorists is a bad business.  Right now the world should be baying not for a cease-fire or a deal, but for Hamas to surrender unconditionally and release the hostages, or the IDF has the right to, and will, continue going after the enemy.

Here is a question that keeps me awake at nights: how do you define right versus left without referring to something, like the placement of our heart, an organ that is already tilted toward one side of the body (the left except in rare cases of situs inversus)?

For example, have a look at a bilaterally symmetrical organism below, in this case one of my favorites (Merriam-Webster defines bilateral symmetry as “symmetry in which similar anatomical parts are arranged on opposite sides of a median axis so that only one plane can divide the individual into essentially identical halves”.) We know left from right because we define them consistently, and that’s because humans are NOT bilaterally symmetrical so we can all agree on which side is which.

But now I’ll ask you to answer this. (i.e., by pointing) Assume you’re talking to a person (a Martian?) who has never heard about right vs. left sides.  Tell them, using the diagram of one of my favorite organisms below, standing upright, which side is the right and which the left without referring to your own body, to any minute differences in the diagram, or to asymmetries in the environment (e.g. the world or the solar system).  Since both sides are identical, how do you know which one is right without referring to how we’ve already defined it, presumably based on our own bodies?  Explain to a Martian who is bilaterally symmetrical which side is its right and which its left, and how they would know it.

Partial image by Charl Hutchings, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

 

I’m not sure if I’m making myself clear here, so I looked in the Oxford English Dictyion for the definition of “right”. There are of course many definitions that don’t refer to the direction, but here’s what it gives for the direction:

a.  of, relating to, situated on, or being the side of the body which is away from the side on which the heart is mostly located b.  located nearer to the right hand than to the left c. located to the right of an observer facing the object specified or directed as the right arm would point when raised out to the side d. located on the right of an observer facing in the same direction as the object specified

This didn’t help, because it all comes down to how humans have defined the sides based on our own asymmetries.

This problem is connected with something that’s always intrigued me: how do directional asymmetries evolve, in which an animals is predictably asymmetrical, like our hearts being more on one side or the others?  (There are some creatures with “fluctuating asymmetry”, in which right is different from left, but it’s not consistent, like lobsters in which one claw is a crusher and the other a slicer, or flatfish that develop to lie randomly on its left or right side sides as adults.  Evolving these doesn’t pose the problem I describe below.)

If we evolved from a bilaterally symmetrical (or radially symmetrical) organism, then even if front and back are genetically specified, as they are, how can you evolve from such a creature into an organism that has features consistently on the right (or left) sides?  The chemical gradients in a bilaterally symmetrical ancestor are presumably the same on both sides, so how can a gene mutation arise that consistently recognizes a given side to give rise to a feature on that side? In other words, how can a mutation KNOW whether it is on the left or right side of the body? (Of course once an initial directional asymmetry has evolved, it creates a directional cue that can be used to evolve further directional asymmetries. It’s the evolution of the first directional feature that is the difficulty.)

I’ve discussed this more clearly in two old posts on this site (here and here), which gives some partial answers residing in how asymmetrical molecules or asymmetrical beating of cilia could lead to the evolution of directional asymmetry from bilateral asymmetry.

But the problem above still nags at me: how do you tell a bilaterally symmetrical Martian which side is right and which is left without referring to our own bodies? Can it be done?

Again, this may be a non-problem, but I’ve seen no definition of “right” or “left” independent of our own bodily asymmetries.

Analysis of DNA from a Neanderthal fossil found in a French cave indicates that it belonged to a group that was isolated for more than 50,000 years

DNA analysis shows that people from Easter Island had contact with Indigenous Americans around the 1300s, and finds there was no population crash before the arrival of Europeans