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Like several people I know, I’m caught up in a temporary fit of the downs because the world seems to be going off kilter. I worry about politics, I worry about Israel, I worry about Ukraine, I worry about Iran and its forthcoming nukes, I worry about fulminating wokeness and its effect on science, and, well, the list goes on.  But something is keeping me awake at night. Although I don’t lie abed racked with conscious worries, my theory (which is mine) is that the worry has become internalized. Further, it’s hard, for me at least, to avoid converting the worry into anger, as it’s made me short-tempered, so I have to exert more control over my behavior.

So much for the personal stuff. But since all the stuff I have to write about is depressing (in the wings are articles about the ideological capture of chemistry, Wikipedia’s “Jewish problem”, the school curriculum in New Zealand—in other words, the kind of thing you see her regularly), there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. I’m thinking of writing about more personal stuff, just to improve my writing and go off on a different tangent. But there will always be the Hili dialogues with their daily five news items.

Do recall that on Saturday I leave for a month in South Africa, and posting will be very sparse for that month and somewhat sparse from now until Saturday.

So let’s have a couple of polls—about politics, of course. Please vote if you’re reading this and, more important, explain your feelings below if you wish.

First poll:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Second poll (remember, all answers are anonymous and I don’t know who votes which way):

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Weigh in below.  You needn’t tell me that this is not a scientific poll. It’s simply a survey of the readers.

Researchers have synthesized a bio-inspired polymer for water purification. The polymer was designed to mimic phytochelatin, a plant protein that selectively captures and neutralizes harmful heavy metal ions. The hyperconfinement of the polymer enabled a flow-through system and effectively removed cadmium ions from contaminated water, making it safe to drink. The system was selective for heavy metals and provides a new way to remove specific contaminants from water.

A new generation of specialty optical fibers has been developed by physicists to cope with the challenges of data transfer expected to arise in the future age of quantum computing.

A new generation of specialty optical fibers has been developed by physicists to cope with the challenges of data transfer expected to arise in the future age of quantum computing.

Sometimes, brainstorming does work. In 2019, America’s National Science Foundation (NSF) held the CubeSat Ideas Lab, a shindig that brought together some of the world’s best CubeSat designers. One outcome of that shindig is the Virtual Super-Resolution Optics with Reconfigurable Swarms, or VISORS, mission. Expected to launch in October, this mission will be a proof of concept for many swarming technologies in CubeSats. Hopefully, It will also capture a pretty impressive picture of the Sun’s corona.

VISORS was formally defined in a paper in 2022, with input from experts at nine different academic institutions, one NASA lab, and one private lab. The concept of operations (or ConOps in the paper) is easy enough – fly two separate 6U CubeSats in formation and take an extreme ultraviolet picture of the Sun. 

The obvious question is—why do you need two CubeSats to do that? A single spacecraft could do the job, but the science goal of the VISORS missions is to take an image at a very high resolution in a very specific extreme ultraviolet wavelength. To do that, the mission would need an optical mirror diameter of around 40m.

Fraser discusses how swarms could change how we explore the solar system.

That is beyond humanity’s current capability to fit onto a rocket fairing and blast into space. So, VISORS will actually consist of two spacecraft. One, known as the Detector Spacecraft (DSC), will house an ultraviolet detector, and one, known as the Optics Spacecraft (OSC), will act as an optical system that mimics the characteristics of a 40m diameter mirror.

However, the secret sauce of the VISORS mission lies in the coordination between the DSC and the OSC. They will fly in formation with each other, about 40 m apart, with the OSC placed between the Sun and the DSC. The light from a specific region of the Sun’s corona will pass through a photon sieve on the OSC and be directed into the detector of the DSC 40 m away, effectively creating the effect of a 40m wide mirror without the need for a continuous surface.

The only problem is that this type of coordinated alignment between CubeSats has never been done before. So, really, the VISORS mission could be looked at as a technology demonstration mission for CubeSat swarm formation rather than a heliophysics one. The mission statement in the ConOps paper states that the mission will be considered successful if it captures one ten-second image over the course of a six-month primary mission duration.

YouTube video from the Space REndezvous Laboratory describing VISORS formation.
Credit – Space Rendevzous Laboratory YouTube Channel

Ten seconds out of almost 16 million may not seem like much, but it shows the difficulty of getting CubeSats to align properly at the right time. To do so, researchers at the Space Rendezvous Laboratory at Stanford have created novel Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) software based on a concept familiar to any controls engineer—a state machine.

In software, a state machine is defined by various variables that will change the software’s behavior based on the values of those variables. In the case of VISORS, there will be five different states. Standby is pretty self-explanatory – wait in your current orbit for further instructions. Transfer is an attempt to move into formation to allow the system to capture an image. Science is when the mission will attempt to capture that ten-second image. But if something goes wrong, it also has two recovery states – Safe mode is pretty standard for all spacecraft, but Escape mode is unique for VISORS. This would move either spacecraft out of the way of the other, and collision between the two is one of the primary risks of the mission architecture and one of the things the GNC algorithm is designed to avoid.

Development of that software appears to be ongoing, though the planned launch date for the mission is only three months away. If all goes well and VISORS is successfully deployed and takes at least one picture, that proof of concept will shortly enable plenty more CubeSat swarm missions. It might even inspire more successful brainstorming Idea Labs.

Learn More:
Lightsey et al – CONCEPT OF OPERATIONS FOR THE VISORS MISSION: A TWO SATELLITE CUBESAT FORMATION FLYING TELESCOPE
UT – What a Swarm of Probes Can Teach Us About Proxima Centauri B
UT – Tiny Swarming Spacecraft Could Establish Communications with Proxima Centauri
UT – A Pair of CubeSats Using Ground Penetrating Radar Could Map The Interior of Near Earth Asteroids

Lead Image:
Artist’s depiction of the VISOR spacecraft flying in formation.
Credit – Simone D’Amico

The post Taking a High-Resolution Ultraviolet Image of the Sun’s Corona Will Require VISORS appeared first on Universe Today.

A subatomic particle called the muon caused waves when its experimental behaviour didn't align with a prediction based on the standard model. A new calculation might resolve the discrepancy – but some particle physicists are sceptical

A mathematical model suggests there is an unusual region of space where objects can get pulled into the sun’s orbit – meaning we may have to redraw the boundary of the solar system

On Friday, JAMA Health Forum published a study that is just more evidence that public health interventions against COVID-19 saved lives.

The post As imperfect as they are, public health interventions save lives first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

What would the economy of a future Mars society look like, and how could it be self-sustaining while being completely sovereign from Earth and its own economy? This is what a recent study submitted to Space Policy hopes to address as a sole researcher discusses a model that could be used for establishing economic freedom on Mars, enabling both monetary and political stability across all Red Planets settlements. This study holds the potential to help scientists, economists, and world leaders better understand plausible governmental systems used by human settlers on other worlds while maintaining sovereignty from Earth and its own governmental law and order.

Here, Universe Today discusses this incredible study with Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra, who is the Director and a Senior Research Investigator of Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS) and sole author of the study, regarding the motivation behind the study, significant ideas presented in the study, the importance of establishing a sovereign economic system on Mars, eliminating capital exchange between Mars and Earth, how Mars can become a sovereign entity from Earth after humans settle there, and how an economic system can be established on a sovereign Mars. Therefore, what was the motivation behind the study?

“My motivation was to build on the idealistic framework for an independent Mars that I developed in my book Sovereign Mars,” Dr. Haqq-Misra tells Universe Today. “In my book, I describe five conditions for enabling Mars to be an independent planetary state, a juridical peer to Earth. In this new study, I develop a possible economic model that would be consistent with these five conditions.”

These five conditions outlined in Sovereign Mars include all permanent settlers on Mars completely acquiescing Earth citizenship and interests; Earthlings being unable to interfere with the Mars affairs, including financial, political, and social aspects; Earthlings requiring permission from Mars to conduct scientific investigations on the Red Planet; only Mars citizens can own land; and all resources brought from Earth, including technological or other items, will remain on Mars permanently.

For the study, Dr. Haqq-Misra dives deeper into the economic facets of a future sovereign Mars government while embodying these five conditions, specifically focusing on the financial aspects of such an economic system, including banking, currencies, capital ownership, and Earthling tourism. He emphasizes how such a system builds off the mistakes from Earth’s present-day economic systems that could potentially lead to both financial and political stability on Mars. He notes this is an “idealistic but feasible model” with the goal of establishing full economic freedom for future Mars citizens from Earth. So, what were the most significant ideas presented in this study?

“The first idea is ‘full reserve banking’,” Dr. Haqq-Misra tells Universe Today. “Our banking system today allows banks to loan out more money than they hold as cash in reserves, which is known as a ‘fractional reserve’ system. This can lead to problems such as a ‘run on the bank,” where too many people try to take out their deposits all at once, only to find that the bank does not have their money.”

Dr. Haqq-Misra continues, “The second idea is the diffusion of capital ownership. Many visions of space settlement imagine something like a world space agency or other centralized authority that could ensure justice and perhaps even serve as a way to redistribute wealth. But the centralization of sovereign power also carries significant risks for the abuse of such power. Some arguments even suggest a somewhat Marxists approach toward the centralized or government ownership of wealth-producing capital, which is then redistributed equitably, but this again carries significant risk of abuse and corruption. An alternative idea is to widely diffuse the ownership of capital, instead of wealth. This means that ownership of companies, equipment, and anything else that can generate wealth would be held in a wider range of hands than today—ideally, by everyone.”

Along with the five conditions of a sovereign Mars noted above, requirements will also be established by the full reserve banking system on Mars, including all transactions staying on Mars, no currency exchange with Earth, and currency issuance will be based on changes in population. All tourism on Mars will follow three conditions that coincide with the conditions of both a sovereign Mars and the Mars full reserve banking system, including tourists being unable to own capital on Mars, the prohibition of Mars currency from being returned to Earth, and no currency transactions from tourists while services would only be provided from the exchange of goods.

On present-day Earth, currency exchange is the primary method for purchasing goods and services, with a total of 180 currencies being recognized across 195 countries around the world. While the value of each currency across the globe varies daily, this system allows individuals from separate countries to own capital in other countries with minimal government interference. But what is the importance behind the complete lack of capital exchange between Earth and Mars?

“This is part of the idealistic framework in Sovereign Mars,” Dr. Haqq-Misra tells Universe Today. “Preventing exchange between the two planets would enable Mars to retain its maximum potential to develop new ideas in civilization, such as this economic model. In practice, these ideas could still be attempted on Mars even if there is some exchange between the two planets, although this may lead to different results.”

The prospect of sending humans to Mars has been the purview of science fiction and countless scientific discussions for over 100 years. this began with the Danish silent film A Trip to Mars and other films continuing throughout the 20th century while incorporating current Mars inhabitants or remnants of past Mars civilizations. While films of the last few decades of the 20th century and into the 21st century conveyed the first human trips to Mars, most recently with the film The Martian, little has been discussed regarding permanent human settlements on the Red Planet.

The closest this notion came was in the television series The Expanse, which depicted the Martian Congressional Republic on Mars being a sovereign entity from Earth, complete with its own military and political hierarchy. However, the economic system within this government wasn’t discussed in detail. But what steps need to be taken for Mars to become a sovereign entity after humans settle there?

“The biggest challenge is having sufficient infrastructure and resources to become self-sustaining on Mars,” Dr. Haqq-Misra tells Universe Today. “Some resources could be used on Mars, but not right away, and actually enabling an independent Mars may require benefactors with long-term visions for humanity or even Earth, without the need for an immediate or near-future financial return. I call this ‘deep altruism’ in Sovereign Mars.”

Additionally, regarding the importance of establishing a sovereign economic system on Mars and the steps required for this economic system to take hold, Dr. Haqq-Misra tells Universe Today, “We have many examples even in recent history of economic recessions and collapses. If space settlement is really to be a long-duration venture, then we need economic ideas that can remain sustainable over long timescales.”

Dr. Haqq-Misra continues, “The best way to establish this economic system would be for any initial settlers to agree on a method for implementing such a system prior to actually arriving on Mars. Part of the value in thinking about martian governance today is to anticipate such possibilities prior to the actual landing of humans on Mars. And thinking about governance on Mars can also help us gain better insight into our governance and economic systems on Earth.”

Sending humans to Mars could happen within the next decade, but sending humans to live there could be decades away, and establishing a sovereign Mars could be at least 100 years away, along with establishing and maintaining a sustainable economy separate from Earth. However, establishing protocols well in advance could lead to a smooth transition into an economic system on a sovereign Mars that is completely separate and free from the Earth’s systems.

Dr. Haqq-Misra concludes by telling Universe Today, “I am working with a talented group of students this summer through the BMSIS Young Scientist Program to examine historical analogues for sovereignty on Mars. We hope to have some new studies finished in the coming year.”

Will a future sovereign Mars successfully establish an economic system that is separate from Earth some time in the distant future? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

The post What could a future sovereign Mars economy look like? appeared first on Universe Today.

Last October I posted a critique of a new National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative designed to combine indigenous knowledge with modern science—in the U.S. this time, and  to the tune of $30 million. The NSF was very optimistic, as you can see from the article below in Science (click to read; see also a similar report in Nature):

My main beef with that study is that it conflated a fusion of indigenous and modern knowledge with an attempt to create equity among researchers themselves. As I wrote at the time:

Thus, if you’re going to use money to improve science, and help indigenous people at the same time, virtually all of that money should be earmarked for training indigenous youngsters to learn science, and ensure that there’s no bigotry against them. That is, indigenous people should have equal opportunity from the outset to learn STEM. Then, those with talent and desire can become scientists using modern science.  To my mind, this is better than simply scouring indigenous cultures for bits of knowledge that can be further investigated, or giving money to indigenous people without fixed projects to fund, simply as a form of reparations.  To fund education rather than cultures themselves is preferable because the results are permanent and self-sustaining (once the pipeline is open, it tends to stay open).

But I was unaware that another “braiding” project—yes, they both use that word—attempting to fuse two “ways of knowing” had been undertaken by a different funding group: the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). This project had a mere $2 million in funding, with the dosh provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and NASA.

I don’t know the fate of the NSF project, but the NASEM one didn’t last long, with the joint effort collapsing after a short period of time, and for two reasons.

Click the Science article below to read about the failure of the new endeavor:

The purpose of this endeavor, which involved a panel whose lucubrations were then to be published by NASEM, was this:

. . . to explore how best to pursue coproduction, the process by which scientists, Indigenous community members, and other scientific stakeholders jointly create and share knowledge in a way that values diverse perspectives.

. . . Gregory Symmes, NASEM’s chief program officer, confirmed the panel’s job was “to summarize what’s known about … coproduction,” and that he was aware of the committee’s desire to use the concept in its study early on. But, he says, “The study itself was not intended to be coproduced.” Instead, “We thought we could work through those differences” by, for example, including a discussion in the final report of the obstacles the committee faced.

Note that “coproduction” links back to the first NSF-funded study, involving “two-eyed seeing,” the notion that you can increase our knowledge of the world most efficiently if you combine vision from one “eye” (modern science) with vision from the other eye (indigenous “ways of knowing”). The original NSF project, which largely involved trying to fix climate change, reported this:

The center will explore how climate change threatens food security and the preservation of cultural heritages through eight research hubs in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (Ranco co-leads the U.S. Northeast hub.) Each hub will also serve as a model for how to braid together different knowledge traditions, or what its senior investigators call “two-eyed seeing” through both Indigenous and Western lenses.

The new NASEM study, which involved a committee of 11 members including three Native scholars, began well, with a harmonious initial meeting. But then things fell apart, and for two reasons (my headings below; quotes are indented):

1.)  The committee was not tasked with producing the final report. Normally, National Academies reports are written by a National Academies-designated committee that includes both Academies members and selected experts who are not Academies members.   In addition, every study has many other ‘participants’ who are not members of the committee, but interviewees or presenters who bring information into the discussion, while not participating in the committee’s internal deliberations or report writing. Also excluded from writing the report are people who could conceivably profit from what that report says, and this may have involved people excluded below.

Committee members knew the approach ran counter to NASEM’s rules for what it calls a consensus study. “The traditional way in which a National Academies report works is that you go and meet with people, and they can inform you, but they can’t participate in the [committee’s] deliberations or help shape the report,” says committee member ecologist F. Stuart “Terry” Chapin, emeritus professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

But in this case some of the members of the committee, realizing that they wouldn’t be writing the final report, were upset. The deliberations about “coproduction of knowledge” apparently didn’t involve the coproduction of the report.  The indigenous members also felt that they were marginalized in the deliberations:

Many committee members who spoke to Science say they believed their assignment—to explore the “challenges, needs, and opportunities associated with coproduction of environmental knowledge between scientists and local and Indigenous experts”—would require them to take a different approach given the subject matter. “At our first meeting [in August 2023], several people raised concerns that here was a project talking about coproduction of knowledge, but we weren’t allowed to use those processes to carry out the study,” says Gordon, who runs a company that advises scientists and government agencies on coproduction.

In the following, Kyle White is an “environmental justice expert at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.”

. . . Whyte also vented his frustration that the committee’s statement of task did not require that the study be coproduced. However, he told participants at the February workshop he “was willing to keep working on the project” to “figure out a way to do this right.” But in late March, he and three other committee members wrote to their colleagues and NASEM staff calling for the study to be “paused.” The four proposed instead writing an interim report on how to “allow equitable participation by Indigenous partners” that could be the basis for a new study on coproduction.

. . . Another participant who was not a committee member, Philomena Kebec, says comments she and other Native people made about coproduction during discussions at breakout sessions weren’t brought back up during plenary sessions and felt like sidestepping. Kebec, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and its head of economic development, says Native representatives were hoping for a dialogue about traditional knowledge across a range of scientific topics as well as “about the power dynamics affecting the ability to share information effectively.”

The issue of “power dynamics” will come up in a second.

2.) The second workshop was to be held in an indigenously-owned casino, and the NASEM didn’t want that. 

But that high didn’t last long. Before a second workshop in February, tensions arose over the choice of its venue, which was the Kewadin casino owned by the Sault Ste. Marie tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan. Tribal casinos hold important meaning to Native nations as places of gathering and bastions of tribal sovereignty. Yet several sources told Science NASEM leaders saw the venue as inappropriate for a meeting the institution was sponsoring.

The tension made four members of the committee write to the NASEM asking that the deliberations be “paused” and that they be allowed to write an interim report. But that didn’t fly. Shortly thereafter, Whyte was told that he was dropped from the committee, and then the committee (and the whole study) were dropped and removed from the NASEM’s website.

The whole thing was a big failure.  Yes, the casino fracas looks a bit trivial, but there are really two issues, not emphasized in the report, that doomed this project to failure, as it will doom others like it.

First, while there is indeed indigenous knowledge, and some of it can indeed be “braided” with knowledge coming from modern science, the latter is far more broad and important than the former.  Indigenous knowledge, as far as I can see from reading about it, involves conclusions, based on trial and error, that help local people lives their lives in their environment. It involves things like when to plant and harvest crops, where and when to hunt and fish, how to navigate (in the case of Polynesians) and so on. It’s practical knowledge, which still makes it knowledge, but does not involve empirical studies of the wider world like the ambits of modern chemistry, physics, and biology.

Even if we think about the knowledge that we “colonists” use to live our lives in our environment, that depends heavily on modern science: we take antibiotics, use cellphones, fly in planes, rely on scientifically-generated weather predictions, and so on.  When you think of how indigenous knowledge not derived from modern science can be braided with it, almost all of the braid will consist of knowledge coming from modern science.  There is simply no way to make indigenous knowledge coequal in breadth or social importance to modern science. It sounds patronizing and colonialist to say that, but that’s really the way it is. (Note that Science buys into the erroneous “Western knowledge” trope in the title above; this trope is insulting to the many people around the world who do science.)

This lack of coequality is exacerbated by the second observation: these discussions are as much about power as about science. It’s an attempt of “minoritized” groups to wield as much scientific power as do majority (“Western) groups—a way, I suppose to compensate for historical bigotry against indigenous people. The power trope is most obvious—and successful—in New Zealand, where the attempt to equalize science with local “ways of knowing” has already infiltrated science, secondary schools, and colleges.  Here are two expressions of it in the article:

“There’s a dearth of knowledge on how to apply other ways of knowing,” said Chad English of the Packard foundation, speaking at the panel’s kickoff meeting. “And it’s not just scholarship,” English noted about the scope of the study. “It’s also about addressing the power dynamic—who is at the table, and whose voices are being heard.”

and from the quote above:

 Kebec, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and its head of economic development, says Native representatives were hoping for a dialogue about traditional knowledge across a range of scientific topics as well as “about the power dynamics affecting the ability to share information effectively.”

It is of course churlish to mistreat indigenous people or make them feel inferior, especially when they’re invited to participate with others on an equal basis on a panel like this. But perhaps the “power imbalance” ultimately reflects the “knowledge imbalance” that I describe above. If your group isn’t really coequal in scientific knowledge to another, you can hardly expect to have as much influence in the conclusions as does the group espousing the more effective and important “way of knowing.”

That, of course, is no excuse to ignore people or talk over them. But perhaps it’s time to have a hard look at the “indigenous science versus modern science” issue and lay out which “way of knowing” is most important in doing things like fixing anthropogenic climate change or ameliorating epidemics of infectious disease.  People avoid this discussion because it’s uncomfortable—indeed, the University of Auckland, after promising such a discussion, has avoided it for three years. But eventually it’s a discussion that must be had, and it helps nobody to pretend in the interim that all “ways of knowing” are equal.

h/t Jon

Mars exploration vehicles typically have wheels, allowing them to traverse some challenging terrain on the Red Planet. However, eventually, their systems start to wear down, and one of their wheels gets stuck. The “Free Spirit” campaign in 2009 was the most widely known case. Unfortunately, that campaign wasn’t successful, and now, 15 years later, Spirit remains stuck in its final resting place. Things might have been different if NASA had adopted a new robot paradigm developed by Guangming Chen and his colleagues at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics Lab of Locomotion Bioinspiration and Intelligent Robots. They devised a robot based on a desert lizard, with adaptable feet and a flexible “spine” that, according to their calculations, would be well suited to traversing over Martian regolith.

Planning for traversing tough terrain isn’t limited to rovers that are stuck. Curiosity and Perseverance, perhaps the two best-known operating rovers on Mars, currently spend a lot of their time trying to avoid areas where they might become entangled. This limits their ability to capture any data from those areas, potentially missing out on some cool rocks, like the pure sulfur that Curiosity recently found for the first time on Mars. 

A lizard-inspired robot, on the other hand, would have no trouble traversing such terrain. It also has some advantages over traversing different types of terrain, such as rocks. Most rovers don’t have enough leg lift to get over medium-sized rocks, whereas a legged robot would, especially one with adjustable “toes” that would allow it to grip a rock tighter than would otherwise be possible with typical legged robots.

Lizard-inspired robots aren’t only useful for walking – they can also jump like their biological cousins, as demonstrated in this video from UC Berkeley’s robotics lab.
Credit – UC Berkeley YouTube Channel

The design for the robot itself is relatively simple – it has four “feet” that are offset from each other by a chassis that essentially looks like a desert lizard. It even has a tail for counterbalancing. Each foot has a series of three “toes” powered by springs. They also have a servo for ankle articulation and a bearing for rotational control. This combination allows the lizard robot to walk on all fours effectively and adjust each leg to best adapt to the surface it is “walking” over.

The authors performed a series of kinematic calculations for different types of terrain to help understand how the robot would interact with each of those surfaces. Kinematic calculations are typically used in robotics when designers attempt to find the best way to move a specific robot part. The calculations are relatively detailed in this case, given the number of variable parts. However, a control algorithm is possible using just on-board computation, allowing for some basic autonomous terrain navigation if architecture is ever adopted for use in space.

Building an actual prototype would be a great way to work on that navigation algorithm, and that’s precisely what the researchers did. They 3D printed many of the parts for the chassis and foot, embedded some batteries and controllers in the head and tail sections, and started testing the prototype on simulated Martian test terrain.

Mars isn’t the only place that could benefit from legged robots – they could work on the Moon as well, as Fraser discusses.

They tested everything from grasping loose regolith to climbing over small rocks, and their algorithm seemed to work effectively for handling the relatively simple terrain in the test bed. However, the robot’s actual speed of movement was slower than originally simulated, mainly due to technical difficulties in balancing the motions of the springs and the spine. 

Despite any problems that arose during physical testing, this new robot iteration is a step in the right direction, as this lab has been designing similar systems for years. They also plan to continue to another version, including mounting a continuous power supply and fully implementing an autonomous navigation algorithm. Their research is funded by both Jiangsu Province and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, so it seems it will continue to gain support, at least for the foreseeable future.

Learn More:
Chen et al. – Development of a Lizard-Inspired Robot for Mars Surface Exploration
UT – Spirit Extrication, Day 1: Drive Stopped After 1 Second
UT – Bio-Mimicry and Space Exploration
UT – Robots Might Jump Around to Explore the Moon

Lead Image:
Image of the prototyped lizard biomimetic robot.
Credit – Chen et al.

The post Having Trouble Traversing the Sands of Mars? A Lizard Robot Might Help appeared first on Universe Today.

Dark matter is a mysterious and captivating subject. It’s a strange concept and we don’t really have a handle on what it actually is. One of the strongest pieces of evidence that dark matter is a particle comes from cosmic collisions. These collisions chiefly occur when clusters of galaxies interact such as the famous Bullet Cluster. Gravitational lensing reveals how the dark matter component couples from gas and dust in the cluster but now, astronomers have found another galaxy cluster collision but it is different, showing the collision from a new angle. 

Dark matter was first talked about in the 1930’s by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky who observed the Coma Cluster. The observations found that the galaxies in the cluster were travelling faster than could be explained by visible mass alone. Zwicky proposed the existence of an unseen type of material, known as dark matter which was gravitationally effecting the galaxies. In the 1970s’s even more evidence emerged when spiral galaxy observations found the other regions rotated at the same speed as the inner regions. Again, it suggested some otherwise unseen matter which surrounded the stars in the galaxies. Even so, dark matter has not yet been directly observed, largely due to its complete lack of interaction with normal matter. 

Fritz Zwicky. Image Source: Fritz Zwicky Stiftung website

Galaxy clusters are one phenomenon where dark matter seems to have a significant impact. The component galaxies are bound together under the force of gravity. When we explore galaxy clusters and the amount of matter that seems to be present, only about 15% is from normal matter. In the case of galaxies, this s mostly in the state of hot gas but the rest will be made up of stars, planets and even people! The remaining 85% must be therefore, dark matter. 

Recent observations of the collision of clusters collectively known as MACS J0018.5+1626 show that the individual galaxies are largely unscathed. In galaxy clusters the distance between the galaxies are vast however the gas components have become turbulent and superheated. Typically such events would be revealed through gravitational and electromagnetic effects from normal matter but dark matter just interacts through gravity. 

The Submilimeter Observatory from Caltech, the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, Herschel Space Observatory and Planck Observatory were all part of the project which have been observing the collision of MACS J0018.5+1626. The disassociation or decoupling of dark matter and normal matter in such collisions has a been seen before in the Bullet Cluster. In this event the hot gas and normal matter was lagging behind dark matter as the clusters passed through each other. MACS J0018.5+1626 is the same and with similar lagging between normal and dark matter. MACS J0018.5+1626 however has a slightly different orientation and offers a unique view on this type of event. 

Detailed views of the Orion Bullet region. In each image pair, left is the Altair 2007 image and right is the new 2012 GeMS image. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA

To try to understand the process, a team of researchers used  a method known as the Kinetic-Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect (the spectral distortion of the cosmic microwave background through inverse Compton scattering.) This is not the first time the effect has been observed though, a team of astronomers detected it in a cluster known as MACS J0717. Multiple observations have since been made of the effect allowing astronomers to measure the speed of gas and normal matter. Measuring the speed of galaxies allowed for the deduction of the speed of the dark matter too. 

It is hoped that future studies will reveal even more clues about the nature of dark matter. The observations of MACS J0018.5+1626 and previously the Bullet cluster have given a good starting point but more detailed steeds are required. 

Source : Dark Matter Flies Ahead of Normal Matter in Mega Galaxy Cluster Collision

The post Giant Collision Decouples Dark Matter from Regular Matter appeared first on Universe Today.

Johannes Kepler is probably most well known for developing the laws of planetary motion. He was also a keen solar observer and in 1607 made some wonderful observations of our nearest star using a camera obscura. His drawings were wonderfully precise and enabled astronomers to pinpoint where the Sun was in its 11-year cycle. Having taken into account Kepler’s location and the location of sunspots, a team of researchers have identified the Sun was nearing the end of solar cycle-13.

Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician who was born in 1571. His contribution to the world of celestial mechanics and the movement of the planets is second to none. The laws of planetary motion that he formulated from the observations of Tyco Brahe have stood the test of time. Other than his work on planetary motion, he was a renowned observer in his own right and he made one of the earliest records of solar activity before the invention of the telescope! 

Johannes Kepler in 1610. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Kepler used a camera obscure which consisted of a small hole in a wall through which, sunlight would be allowed to pass. It would then full upon a sheet of paper allowing the observer to study an image of the Sun. Kepler used this to record and sketch the visible features of the Sun and in May 1607 he recorded what he thought was a transit of Mercury. It turned out that it wasn’t a transit of Mercury but instead, group of sunspots. 

The sunspots seen by Kepler and seen on the Sun often by modern amateur astronomers are temporary solar phenomena. They exist in the visible layer of the sun’s atmosphere known as the photosphere and appear dark compared to their surroundings. In reality, if they could be isolated from the much brighter solar disk but kept at their existing distance from Earth they would be brighter than the full Moon. The spots are simply cooler and darker than the surrounding hot and bright material. Their temperature is around 3,800 K instead of just under 6,000 K for the average photospheric temperature. 

Sunspot image from the newly upgraded GREGOR Telescope

The Sun is a great big ball of plasma and it has a magnetic field like Earth. Plasma is electrically charged gas that can drag magnetic field lines with it. As the Sun rotates it drags the magnetic field with it causing it to get wound up and tangled. Often the stress the field lines are under are so intense that they burst through the surface, inhibiting convection making the temperature in this region cooler, the sunspot. The sunspot (and general solar activity) peaks over an 11 year cycle. 

A team of researchers led by Hisashi Hayakawa from Nagoya University have used new techniques to analyse Kepler’s drawings and have uncovered new information about the solar activity at the time. Spörer’s law (which examines variation of heliographic latitudes at which solar active regions form during a solar cycle) was applied to the drawings placing them at the end of the solar cycle before the cycle that Thomas Harriot, Galileo and other telescopic observers first captured solar cycle information. This placed the observations just before the well documented Maunder Minimum – an unexplained period of significantly reduced sunspot activity that occurred between 1645 and 1715.

Until now, this period of minimal solar activity has been hotly debated and, whilst no definitive conclusion has been reached, the team hopes that Kepler’s information may put us finally on a path to understand great periods of solar inactivity. 

Source : Kepler’s 1607 pioneering sunspot sketches solve solar mysteries 400 years later

The post Kepler Sketched the Sun in 1607. Astronomers Pinpointed the Solar Cycle appeared first on Universe Today.

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In 1956, The New York Times prophesied that once global warming really kicked in, we could see parrots in the Antarctic. In 2010, when science deniers had control of the climate story, Senator James Inhofe and his family built an igloo on the Washington Mall and plunked a sign on top: AL GORE’S NEW HOME: HONK IF YOU LOVE CLIMATE CHANGE. In The Parrot and the Igloo, best-selling author David Lipsky tells the astonishing story of how we moved from one extreme (the correct one) to the other.

With narrative sweep and a superb eye for character, Lipsky unfolds the dramatic narrative of the long, strange march of climate science. The story begins with a tale of three inventors―Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla―who made our technological world, not knowing what they had set into motion. Then there are the scientists who sounded the alarm once they identified carbon dioxide as the culprit of our warming planet. And we meet the hucksters, zealots, and crackpots who lied about that science and misled the public in ever more outrageous ways. Lipsky masterfully traces the evolution of climate denial, exposing how it grew out of early efforts to build a network of untruth about products like aspirin and cigarettes.

Featuring an indelible cast of heroes and villains, mavericks and swindlers, The Parrot and the Igloo delivers a real-life tragicomedy―one that captures the extraordinary dance of science, money, and the American character.

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many others. He contributes to NPR’s All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He’s the author of the novel The Art Fair; a collection, Three Thousand Dollars; and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American: Four Years at Westpoint, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year. His book, The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, is just out in paperback.

Shermer and Lipsky discuss:

• how he became a professional writer and how you can become one too
• the scientists who first sounded the alarm about climate change: Roger Revelle, Charles Keeling, James Hansen, Michael Mann
• when there was science consensus that global warming is real and human caused
• how George H.W. Bush was on board with combatting global warming
• Obama’s dilemma over which cause to back: climate change or healthcare?
• climate change as a collection action problem
• climate skeptics: S. Fred Singer, Fred Seitz, Jim Tozzi, Lord Christopher Monckton, Patrick Michaels
• Climategate
• strategies of global warming skeptics
• connection between cigarette smoking/tobacco industry and climate change
• when the politicization of climate change began
• what is to be done now.

The five basic questions about climate change:

1. Is the Earth getting warmer?
2. Is human activity the primary driver of the warming?
3. How much warmer is it going to get?
4. What are the effects of the warming?
5. What should we do about it?

Climate concensus (the 97% figure)

Here’s what Dr. Shermer wrote in Scientific American:

A 2013 study published in Environmental Research Letters by John Cook, Dana Nucitelli, and their colleagues examined 11,944 climate paper abstracts published from 1991 to 2011. Of those papers that stated a position on AGW, 97.1 percent concluded that climate change is real and human caused. What about the three percent? What if they’re right? In a 2015 paper published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology, Rasmus Benestad, Dana Nucitelli, and their colleagues examined the three percent and found “a number of methodological flaws and a pattern of common mistakes.” That is, instead of the three percent converging to a better explanation than that provided by the 97 percent, they failed to converge to anything. “There is no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming” Dana Nuccitelli concluded in an August 25, 2015 commentary in The Guardian. “Some blame global warming on the sun, others on orbital cycles of other planets, others on ocean cycles, and so on. There is a 97% expert consensus on a cohesive theory that’s overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence, but the 2–3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other. The one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking, curve fitting, ignoring inconvenient data, and disregarding known physics.” For example, one skeptical paper attributed climate change to lunar or solar cycles, but to make these models work for the 4,000-year period that the authors considered they had to throw out 6,000 years’ worth of earlier data.

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Mercury, the closest planet to our Sun, is also one of the least understood in the Solar System. On the one hand, it is similar in composition to Earth and the other rocky planets, consisting of silicate minerals and metals differentiated between a silicate crust and mantle and an iron-nickel core. But unlike the other rocky planets, Mercury’s core makes up a much larger part of its mass fraction. Mercury also has a mysteriously persistent magnetic field that scientists still cannot explain. In this respect, Mercury is also one of the most interesting planets in the Solar System.

But according to new research, Mercury could be much more interesting than previously thought. Based on new simulations of Mercury’s early evolution, a team of Chinese and Belgian geoscientists found evidence that Mercury may have a layer of solid diamond beneath its crust. According to their simulations, this layer is 15 km (9 mi) thick sandwiched between the core and the mantle hundreds of miles beneath the surface. While this makes the diamonds inaccessible (for now, at least), these findings could have implications for theories about the formation and evolution of rocky planets.

The international team consisted of researchers from the Center for High-Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research, the School of Earth Sciences and Resources at the China University of Geosciences, the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at KU Leuven, and the Department of Geology at the University of Liege. The paper that describes their findings, “A diamond-bearing core-mantle boundary on Mercury,” recently appeared in Nature Communications.

Based on MESSENGER data, a team of geologists believe that (a) a layer of diamond may have been deposited early in Mercury’s history on top of a molten core, or (b) that diamond crystallized in the cooling core and rose to the core-mantle boundary. Credit: Xu et al., Nature Communications, 2024

The team was originally inspired by previous research by a team from MIT, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and several prominent universities. This consisted of a reassessment of Mercury’s gravity field based on the radio tracking measurements taken by NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission, which allowed scientists to gain a better understanding of the potential structuring of Mercury’s interior. This data led scientists to theorize that Mercury’s internal structure consisted of a metallic outer core layer, a liquid core layer, and a solid inner core.

While the composition of the core remains uncertain, it seemed likely that the core contained abundant iron, nickel, silicon, and possibly sulfur and carbon. The MESSENGER data further led scientists to believe that the large dark patches observed on Mercury’s surface were largely made up of graphite that was likely turned up from the interior. This data suggests that sufficient quantities of carbon could have crystallized in Mercury’s interior between the core and mantle boundary and floated up to the surface as graphite.

Given the amount of graphite on Mercury’s surface, it stands to reason that the planet was saturated with carbon. Previously, diamond (a mineral composed of pure carbon) was ruled out as a possible product because it was believed that the necessary pressures did not exist close to Mercury’s core. However, if the boundary between the core and the mantle were deeper than previously thought, the necessary pressure conditions may have existed after all.

For their study, the team relied on thermodynamic modeling to recreate these pressure conditions based on the existence of a deeper core-mantle boundary. These experiments allowed them to simulate what conditions were like for Mercury as it slowly cooled. Their results indicated that presuming a sulfur content of around 11% and a pressure of roughly 1-2% percent of that in Earth’s interior, diamond could crystalize within the molten core. They further found that this diamond would form a layer that could remain stable enough to rise along with graphite towards the mantle.

Mercury’s Magnetic Field. Credit: NASA

Over the course of eons, their experiments suggested that this diamond would form a layer around 15 to 18 km (~9 to 11 mi) thick. Considering how diamond is an exceptional thermal conductor, the presence of this layer could change the way astrogeologists model the interior dynamics of Mercury and shed light on its mysterious magnetic field. The way heat rises from the core significantly affects the cooling and evolution of rocky planets, and the movement of materials in the interior is responsible for the generation of magnetic fields.

Not only is Mercury the only rocky planet other than Earth to have a magnetosphere, but there is evidence that it may be far older than our own. As such, revised models of Mercury’s interior could explain how the planet’s magnetosphere has persisted for so long. Beyond Mercury, these findings could have significant implications for prevailing theories of how the rocky planets of our Solar System formed and evolved.

Further Reading: Science Alert, Nature Communications

The post Mercury Could be Housing a Megafortune Worth of Diamonds! appeared first on Universe Today.

The JWST has directly imaged its first exoplanet, a temperate super Jupiter only about 12 light-years away from Earth. It could be the oldest and coldest planet ever detected.

The planet orbits the star Epsilon Indi A (Eps Ind A,) a K-type star about the same age as our Sun. Epsilon Indi is a triple star system, and the other two members are brown dwarfs. The exoplanet is named Epsilon Indi Ab (Eps Ind Ab.)

Eps Ind Ab’s detection is presented in a paper published in Nature. Its title is “A temperate super-Jupiter imaged with JWST in the mid-infrared.” The lead author is Elisabeth Matthews, a Postdoc in the Department of Planet and Star Formation at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.

This new detection is important for several reasons. The vast majority of the 5,000+ exoplanets we’ve discovered were detected by the transit method. Others were detected with the radial velocity method. Comparatively few have been directly imaged as Eps Ind Ab has.

There were already hints that a massive planet orbited Eps Ind A. Previous work using the radial velocity method found the telltale wobble induced in the star by a massive planet orbiting it. Now, the JWST has confirmed the planet’s presence.

“Our prior observations of this system have been more indirect measurements of the star, which actually allowed us to see ahead of time that there was likely a giant planet in this system tugging on the star,” said team member Caroline Morley of the University of Texas at Austin. “That’s why our team chose this system to observe first with Webb.”

This image from the research is a full field-of-view JWST/MIRI coronagraphic image of Eps Ind A in the 10.65µm filter. (1) is the star Eps Ind A, and (2) and (3) are background stars. Image Credit: Matthews et al. 2024.

Direct images of exoplanets are difficult to acquire. The blinding light from the star washes out the relatively dim light that comes from the planet. Telescopes like the JWST use coronagraphs to eliminate the starlight and allow the planetary light to get through. In this case, the space telescope imaged the exoplanet using its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) Coronagraphic Imaging capability.

The JWST’s direct image of Eps Ind Ab revealed some surprises compared to earlier radial velocity measurements.

“While we expected to image a planet in this system because there were radial velocity indications of its presence, the planet we found isn’t what we had predicted,” shared Matthews. “It’s about twice as massive, a little farther from its star, and has a different orbit than we expected. The cause of this discrepancy remains an open question.”

Eps Ind Ab is about 6 times more massive than Jupiter, and its semi-major axis is about 28 AU. It’s inclined about 103 degrees.

These two panels from the research show Eps Indi Ab’s orbit. The left panel shows the planet’s orbit according to previous RV measurements and Hipparcos/Gais measurements, and the right panel shows the orbit according to JWST observations. The JWST-measured orbit is wider. Image Credit: Matthews et al. 2024.

“The atmosphere of the planet also appears to be a little different than the model predictions,” Matthews added. “So far, we only have a few photometric measurements of the atmosphere, meaning that it is hard to draw conclusions, but the planet is fainter than expected at shorter wavelengths.”

Eps Ind Ab is more similar to Jupiter than any other exoplanet ever imaged, even though it’s a little warmer and several times more massive. Other imaged exoplanets tend to be hotter and are still radiating the heat from their formation. Their heat makes them easier to see in infrared. As planets like this age, they tend to contract and cool down. As they get cooler, they can become harder to image directly.

As planets age and cool, the wavelength of their emissions changes, making them harder to see. Most other directly imaged planets are much younger than Eps Ind Ab—all younger than 500 million years. But the JWST is uniquely suited to spotting older exoplanets.

This image shows the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum for NIR (Near Infrared) to FIR (Far Infrared). Image Credit: NASA.

“Cold planets are very faint, and most of their emission is in the mid-infrared,” explained Matthews. “Webb is ideally suited to conduct mid-infrared imaging, which is extremely hard to do from the ground. We also needed good spatial resolution to separate the planet and the star in our images, and the large Webb mirror is extremely helpful in this aspect.”

Many of the Jupiter-size exoplanets we’ve discovered are hot Jupiters. These gas giants are easily found using the transit method because they orbit so close to their stars, which makes them hot. They’re also usually tidally locked, meaning their daysides can reach extreme temperatures. One hot Jupiter, KELT-9b, has a dayside temperature greater than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit (4,600 Kelvin), which is hotter than most stars.

But Eps Ind Ab is different. With an approximate temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), it’s one of the coldest exoplanets directly detected. It’s the coldest exoplanet ever directly imaged and is only 180 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) warmer than our Solar System’s gas giants. It’s more similar to planets in our system and gives astronomers an opportunity to study the atmospheres of Solar System analogs.

The planet’s atmosphere doesn’t exactly match our expectations. “The atmosphere of the planet also appears to be a little different than the model predictions. So far we only have a few photometric measurements of the atmosphere, meaning that it is hard to draw conclusions, but the planet is fainter than expected at shorter wavelengths,” Matthews said.

It could be fainter at those NIR wavelengths because the atmosphere is cloudy. Or it could be because it contains compounds like CH4 (methane), CO, and CO2 which absorb shorter wavelengths of IR light.

Eps Ind Ab’s faintness at those wavelengths hints at a high carbon-to-oxygen ratio. A high C/O ratio is a significant indicator of how the planet formed and evolved. It suggests that the disk the planet formed in was carbon-rich. It’s a clue as to where exactly the planet formed and if it migrated.

High carbon also allows more carbon-containing molecules like CH4, CO2 and CO to form. Since CO2 and methane are greenhouse gases, the high C/O ratio affects the planet’s climate.

High C/O ratios also affect cloud formation, which can raise a planet’s albedo. A higher albedo reflects more sunlight away from the planet, which also affects climate.

Eps Ind Ab displays high metallicity. High metallicity indicates a higher mass and suggests a more efficient formation process since the planet could’ve attracted more mass more quickly. It also can affect how the planet may have migrated through the disk.

The researchers wonder whether other cool exoplanets have the same characteristics. But first they need to better constrain these characteristics in Eps Ind Ab. This initial detection and imaging is just the beginning. Future spectroscopy and further imaging will reveal more details about the planet.

The fact that Eps Ind Ab is in a group with two brown dwarfs is also an opportunity for more interesting observations. “The system is also co-moving with a widely separated brown dwarf binary, making it a particularly valuable laboratory for comparative studies of substellar objects with a shared age and formation location,” the authors write in their paper. The demarcation line between massive gas giants and brown dwarfs isn’t always clear, and astronomers are keen to learn more about how each type forms, especially in the same system as one another.

This research also illustrates the effectiveness of using prior results from other telescopes to choose targets for the JWST. “Even though the detected planet does not match the previously claimed exoplanet properties, long-term RV information provided a clear signpost for the value of imaging this target,” the authors explain.

Fortunately, the exoplanet is an excellent candidate for more observations.

They conclude that “the bright flux and wide separation of Eps Ind Ab mean the planet is ideally suited to spectroscopic characterization efforts, allowing the metallicity and carbon-to-oxygen ratio to be more accurately constrained.”

The post Webb Directly Images a Jupiter-Like Planet appeared first on Universe Today.

What's the Word: Calculus; News Items: Water Harvesting, Chimp Communication, Dark Oxygen, Nuclear Clocks, Creationism Survey; Who's That Noisy; Name That Logical Fallacy; Your Questions and E-mails: The Logic of God; Science or Fiction

This will be the last Caturday felid for a while because I’ll be in the air heading to Africa a week from today.  I’ll be gone for a month, and don’t know how often I’ll have internet.  However, Matthew has vowed to continue Hili’s daily dialogue.

Cat posts will resume when I return. As always, I do my best.

The first item today reports a well-cited cat but also demonstrates the weakness of the scientific citation system against scams.  The article below (see also this article from ZME Science)  is from the website of Reese Richardson, a “a PhD candidate working in metascience and computational biology at Northwestern University.”

Click to read how Reese used this scam to get his cat to have a huge rate of citation as author of scientific papers:

Reese saw the ad above on Google Scholar and it turned out to advertise a service that “helped” scientists to manufacture fake citations of their papers—for a price. As Richardson notes:

The advertisement links to several success stories consisting of unredacted “before” and “after” screenshots of clients’ Google Scholar profiles. These clients had apparently bought anywhere between 50 and 500 citations each. Of 18 apparent previous clients, 11 still had active Google Scholar profiles that we could visit. All identifiable clients were affiliated with Indian universities except for two: one client affiliated with a university in Oman and one client in the United States. Although the advertisement also mentions Scopus, we did not find evidence of this company successfully boosting these clients’ Scopus citation counts.

Here’s how it worked:

How was this company so effective at manipulating citation counts? For some clients, a wealth of citations came from dozens of papers in the same suspicious journal. These were probably papers on which the company had sold authorship. In one instance, the highest numbered reference in the text of the paper was Reference 40, while the reference list extended up to Reference 53. References 48 through 53 were to the client.

For most other clients, the scheme was more brazen. Inspecting citations to these clients revealed dozens of papers authored by such celebrated names as Pythagoras, Galileo, Taylor and Kolmogorov. The papers were not published in any journal or pre-print server, only uploaded as PDF files to ResearchGate, the academic social networking site. They had since been deleted from ResearchGate, but Google Scholar kept them indexed. Although the abstracts contain text relevant to their titles, the rest of the paper was usually complete mathematical gibberish. We quickly recognized that these papers had been generated by Mathgen (a few years back, Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé flagged hundreds of ostensibly peer-reviewed papers generated by Mathgen and its relative SCIgen).

At this realization, this company’s citation-boosting procedure fell into sharp focus:

1. Get contracted by a client.
2. Auto-generate several nonsense papers with Mathgen [Optional: change the titles and abstracts to something more plausible for the citation context].
3. Insert citations to several of the client’s papers at a random point in the nonsense paper.
4. Upload the nonsense papers to ResearchGate.
5. Wait for Google Scholar to index the nonsense papers and their citations to the client.
6. Congratulate the client on their newfound academic clout [Optional: delete the nonsense papers from ResearchGate].

The upshot: Richardson, knowing how to do this for free, decided to make Larry, his grandmother’s cat, a highly cited researcher.  In fact, for a short while Larry was the most highly-cited cat in the world. Here he is with Reese’s dad (photo from website):

Out of all the cats with human-ish names in our lives, “Larry Richardson” sounded the most like a tweedy academic and thus was a natural candidate for the title of world’s highest cited cat. As far as we could tell, the standing record-holder was F.D.C. Willard, a Siamese cat named Chester whose owner Jack H. Hetherington added him as an author on a physics paper because he had accidentally written the paper in the first person plural (“we, our”) instead of the first person singular (“I, my”). Chester went on to author one more paper and a book chapter under this name, which have since accumulated 107 citations according to Google Scholar. This was the bar to clear.

And so Reese fabricated 12 papers with his cat namesake as author and went through the procedure above, uploading the fake papers to ResearchGate. Eventually, Larry got 132 citations!:

Larry Richardson is officially history’s highest cited cat (according to Google Scholar, at least).

Notice the cat photo, which should have been a giveaway:

And the point:

Of course, this isn’t about making a cat a highly cited researcher. Our efforts (about an hour of non-automated work) were to make the same point as the authors of this aptly titled pre-print: Google Scholar is manipulatable. Despite the conspicuous vulnerabilities of Google Scholar (and ResearchGate), the quantitative metrics calculated by these services are routinely used to evaluate scientists.

Of course revealing the scam had the predictable consequences: Google removed all of Larry’s citations, though not the fake papers in which he was cited. As Reese says, “Larry held the title of world’s highest cited cat for exactly one week.”  Who knows how many other fake cat authors lurk in the crannies of Google Scholar?

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Here’s a video from FB of an agile cat. It didn’t make it through the 5 cm (about two-inch) slot, but simply jumped over the whole apparatus.

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A post shared by Sydney Chaton (@sydneychat_officiel)

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As you’ve seen on this site several times, cats sometimes take up a life of crime, purloining socks, toys, shoes, and even underwear, and stashing the goods or bringing them home. The Guardian takes up the vexing questions of Why Cats Steal (click on screenshot below):

The answer: “We don’t know”:

The thieves went for particular items. Day after day, they roamed the neighbourhood and returned home to dump their loot. Before long they had amassed an impressive haul: socks, underpants, a baby’s cardigan, gloves and yet more socks.

It’s not unusual for cats to bring in dead or petrified mice and birds, but turning up with random objects is harder to explain. Researchers suspect a number of causes, but tend to agree on one point: the pilfered items are not presents.\

“We are not sure why cats behave like this,” says Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a museum in Leiden. “All around the world there are cats doing this, yet it has never been studied.” He now hopes that will change.

Apparently a cat mom can even teach their offspring to steal, something that’s new to me:

The clothing crime spree, perpetrated this year by a mother and her two offspring in the small town of Frigiliana in Spain, has made neighbourly interactions somewhat awkward for their keeper, Rachel Womack. But for scientists such as Hiemstra, it has provided fresh impetus to study the animals. “I want to know exactly why they do it,” he says. “And documenting cases like this could be the start of more research in the future.”

And theft can be on a grand (larceny) scale:

More pressing for Womack is how to return the stolen stuff. Daisy, Dora and Manchita can bring in more than 100 items a month. One recent arrival was a little stuffed bear. Before that, a baby’s shoe. Returning the items, without knowing the rightful owners, isn’t proving easy. “She’s just annoyed,” says Geene. “There are so many, she doesn’t know how to give them back.”

The Frigiliana three are repeat offenders, but they are not the only cats to be rumbled. Charlie, a rescue cat from Bristol, was dubbed the most prolific cat burglar in Britain after bringing home plastic toys, clothes pegs, a rubber duck, glasses and cutlery. His owner, Alice Bigge, once woke to a plastic diplodocus, one of many nabbed from a nearby nursery, next to her head on the pillow. It reminded her of the infamous scene in The Godfather. She puts the items on a wall outside for owners to reclaim.

Another cat, Dusty from San Mateo in California, had more than 600 known thefts, once returning with 11 items on one night. His haul included Crocs, a baseball cap and a pair of swimming trunks. The bra found in the house was fortunately spotted on a video of Dusty coming in. In a feat of accidental social commentary, another cat, Cleo from Texas, came home with a computer mouse.

Several theories are floated, including cats liking the smell, disliking the smell and wanting to remove stinky objects form their territories, looking for attention, engaging in mock hunting, or simply playing.  I can see how to test some of these theories, but not all, and the ultimate explanation is untestable:

Jemma Forman, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex who has studied cats playing fetch, agrees that the pets do not come bearing gifts. She says: “When it comes to cats, normally the explanation is they’re doing it for themselves.”

That’s a bit tautological, as there must be some “reason” embedded in the cat’s neurons, but it could be inaccessible.

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From Letters of Note, here’s a cat-related missive from the famous Nikola Tesla of electricity fame.

I must tell you a strange and unforgettable experience that stayed with me all my life. . .

It happened that one day the cold was drier than ever before. People walking in the snow left a luminous trail behind them, and a snowball thrown against an obstacle gave a flare of light like a loaf of sugar cut with a knife. In the dusk of the evening, as I stroked [my cat] Macak’s back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.

My father was a very learned man; he had an answer for every question. But this phenomenon was new even to him. “Well,” he finally remarked, “this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.”

My mother seemed charmed. “Stop playing with this cat,” she said. “He might start a fire.” But I was thinking abstractedly. Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded. Here I was, only three years old and already philosophising.

However stupefying the first observation, something still more wonderful was to come. It was getting darker, and soon the candles were lighted. Macak took a few steps through the room. He shook his paws as though he were treading on wet ground. I looked at him attentively. Did I see something or was it an illusion? I strained my eyes and perceived distinctly that his body was surrounded by a halo like the aureola of a saint!

I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvellous night on my childish imagination. Day after day I have asked myself “what is electricity?” and found no answer. Eighty years have gone by since that time and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.

Nikola Tesla
Letter to Pola Fotić4
23rd July 1938

This reminds me of a line from the best cat poem ever written, “For I will consider my cat Jeoffry,” by Christopher Smart:

For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.

Read that poem if you haven’t yet. It may have been written in the throes of mental illness, as Smart was confined in an asylum when he wrote it, but I haven’t seen a better paean to cats.

h/t: Ginger K., Gregory

We have one more batch of photos in the tank, but fortunately we have Tara Tanaka’s videos.

Here’s what Tara said about this video of wood storks (Mycteria americana) in a rookery.  The baby is adorable:

We got a sit on top kayak that I can shoot from and I’ve been going out every couple of week at sunrise and shooting video.  Here’s one from a month ago.  The rookery is SO loud!

Venus’s atmosphere has drawn a lot of attention lately. In particular, the consistent discovery of phosphine in its clouds points to potential biological sources. That, in turn, has resulted in numerous suggested missions, including floating a balloon into the atmosphere or having a spacecraft scoop down and suck up atmospheric samples. But a team of engineers led by Jeffrey Balcerski, now an adjunct at Kent State University but then part of the Ohio Aerospace Institute, came up with a different idea years ago – use floating sensor platforms shaped like leaves to collect a wide variety of data throughout Venus’ atmosphere.

The Lofted Environmental and Atmospheric Venus Sensors (or LEAVES) project was funded by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program in 2018. The mission design is simple enough: design lightweight platforms with a wide surface area, attach some low-cost and weight sensors to them, release them from a mothership transiting into orbit around Venus, and let those platforms float down through the Venusian atmosphere over the course of a few hours, all the while sending back atmospheric, chemical, and temperature data to the mothership.

There are a few enabling technologies behind the idea. The first is a lightweight yet robust and deployable structure that could support a platform of sensors and not be destroyed by Venus’s notoriously hellish environment. Designing this structure required understanding expected flight times and geolocation requirements, as well as the requirement that the system must be trackable by orbital radar in order to communicate back to the mothership. The resulting design resembles the famous inverted pyramid at the Louvre.

Venus is one of the most interesting planets in the solar system – and has captured Fraser’s imagination.

Inside that structure, the second enabling technology sits—harsh environment sensors designed to operate in Venus’s extreme environments. Chemical, pressure, and electrical sensors have undergone extensive development work over the past few years, and some are approaching readiness for use on Venus. They are also lightweight, allowing the structure to descend slowly, which is necessary to complete its mission goals.

After receiving the NIAC Phase I grant, the team led by Dr. Balcerski got to work modeling LEAVES’ structure and mission design. They quickly realized that delivery methodology and a system’s light weight would be critical to future missions. As such, they modeled depositing a series of upwards of 100 LEAVES throughout Venus’ atmosphere, each of which would be networked back to the mothership that deposited them as part of its planned orbital maneuver. They also thought there were several planned Venus missions, such as DaVINCI, which could easily take LEAVES on as a secondary payload with no real risk to mission success or uptime, as the LEAVES would fall and be destroyed by the lower Venusian atmosphere in a matter of hours.

But those hours of data, relayed back to the mothership and then on to Earth, could provide invaluable insights into the inner workings of Venus’s atmosphere. LEAVES would be able to reach a wide altitude range—it is estimated to operate between 100 km and 30 km in altitude. It could also be spread literally all over the world, allowing for a more complete picture of the Venusian atmosphere than other mission designs, which would only capture a small vertical slice of the atmosphere.

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Given the potential impact of what we might find in the Venusian atmosphere, any mission designs that allow us to capture a large amount of information about a wide swath of it would be welcome. Dr. Balcerski and his colleagues think they have advanced the LEAVES concept to a Technology Readiness Level of 3-4. However, they haven’t yet received further support for LEAVES, and development appears to be on hold. But, given the increasing interest in exploring the Venusian atmosphere, perhaps it’s time to look at this lightweight, inexpensive way of doing so again.

Learn More:
Balcerski et al. – LEAVES: Lofted Environmental and Atmospheric Venus Sensors
UT – There are Mysteries at Venus. It’s Time for an Astrobiology Mission
UT – Scientists Have Re-Analyzed Their Data and Still See a Signal of Phosphine at Venus. Just Less of it
UT – The Clouds of Venus Could Support Life

Lead Image:
Artist’s depiction of several LEAVES falling through Venus’s atmosphere.
Credit – Balcerski et al.

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