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Taylor Roades's images of a river in north-west Alaska that has turned orange because of global warming have won the New Scientist Editors Award at the Earth Photo competition

Paulina Rowińska's Mapmatics: How we navigate the world through numbers is an intelligent exploration of a fascinating subject

In this week's Future Chronicles column, which explores an imagined history of future inventions, we visit a cult in 2080s Japan that engineered a way of becoming chimeric with fungal biology. Rowan Hooper reveals their history

A foot-shaped piece of flotsam has caused confusion among forensic scientists – but Feedback is relieved that the matter was cleared up thanks to that old stalwart, "examination"

From chess to nuclear war planning, Kelly Clancy takes a wide-ranging look at how games and gaming have changed society in Playing With Reality

Creating "walled gardens", much like TV channels do, would provide children better tools to navigate a lifetime of social media than banning smartphones altogether

There’s no perfect way of doing anything, including searching for exoplanets. Every planet-hunting method has some type of bias. We’ve found most exoplanets using the transit method, which is biased toward larger planets. Larger planets closer to their stars block more light, meaning we detect large planets transiting in front of their stars more readily than we detect small ones.

That’s a problem because some research says that life-supporting planets are more likely to be small, like Earth. It’s all because of moons and streaming instability.

Consider Earth’s Moon. While there’s no consensus on every aspect of the Moon and its role, there’s evidence that it helps make life on Earth possible and has helped life sustain itself for so long. As natural satellites go, it’s massive. Of the approximately 300 (and counting) moons in our Solar System, the Moon is the fifth largest. But that doesn’t tell the tale of its relationship with our planet.

The Moon’s diameter is about one-quarter of Earth’s diameter, and its mass is about 1.2% of Earth’s. The four natural satellites in the Solar System that are larger than the Moon orbit the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. Those moons are tiny compared to their planets.

This means that the Moon has different effects on Earth than other moons do on their planets.

The Moon stabilizes Earth’s orbital tilt, which helps keep the climate stable and allows life to flourish and organisms to adapt. It creates tides, which may have played a role in the formation of nucleic acids and life. The Moon may even help Earth maintain its protective magnetosphere. One way or another, Earth would be a very different place without its huge Moon.

New research published in The Planetary Science Journal shows that we should look for small planets if we want to find life-supporting worlds because small planets are more likely to host larger moons. The research is titled “The Limited Role of the Streaming Instability during Moon and Exomoon Formation.” The lead author is Miki Nakajima, an Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Rochester University.

“Relatively small planets similar to the size of Earth are more difficult to observe and they have not been the major focus of the hunt for moons,” said lead author Nakajima. “However, we predict these planets are actually better candidates to host moons.”

The leading theory for the Moon’s formation is the Giant Impact Hypothesis. It states that when the Earth was very young, about 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized protoplanet named Theia slammed into Earth. The collision created a rotating torus of molten rock that orbited the Earth. Some fell back down to Earth, and the rest coalesced into the Moon. There’s still a lot of debate over this, but it is the leading theory.

Here’s where streaming instability comes in.

This research questions the role of streaming instability in moon formation. Some scientists think that planet formation is the same as moon formation. However, while streaming instability is important for planet formation, it may not be for the formation of large moons like Earth’s, which help make planets habitable.

In their research, Nakajima and her colleagues used simulations to examine the role of streaming instability in moon formation. Streaming instability describes the effect that drag has on the accretion of matter in a protoplanetary disk that leads to planetesimals. Inside a disk, drag rapidly drives solid particles to concentrate spontaneously into clumps. These clumps can then collapse and form planetesimals.

The question is, does streaming instability play the same role in the formation of moons around planets? In this case, the disk isn’t a protoplanetary disk but a disk of debris resulting from a collision.

“Here, we investigate the effect of the streaming instability in the Moon-forming disk for the first time and find that this instability can quickly form ~100 km-sized moonlets,” the authors write in their paper. “However, these moonlets are not large enough to avoid strong drag, and they still fall onto Earth quickly.”

“These moonlets could grow further once the disk cools enough and the vapor mass fraction of the disk becomes small,” the researchers write in their article. “However, by this time a significant amount of the disk mass is lost, and the remaining disk could make only a small moon.”

This figure from the research shows four snapshots from the simulations. At t = 2.87, streaming instability starts to form clumps. Gravity is turned on at t = 3.18, and by t = 3.39 and 3.55, moonlets start to form by gravitational instability. Image Credit: Nakajima et al. 2024.

For a large moon like Earth’s to form, the collision has to be less energetic than one between much more massive planets. If Theia had been more massive, the heat from the impact would’ve created a completely vapourized disk. Only a much smaller moon could’ve formed in such a disk.

This figure from the research shows how long moonlets can reside in a disk before crashing into their planet. The two lines show the cases of an icy planet collision and a rocky planet collision. The x-axis shows the planet’s mass, and the y-axis shows time in days. Since the moonlets can’t stay in the disk for long, it indicates that “streaming instability likely plays a limited role in impact-induced moon-forming disks,” as the authors explain. Image Credit: Nakajima et al. 2024.

The researchers think that streaming instability may not help large moons form in vapour-rich disks. Fractionally large moons like Earth’s Moon, which may be necessary for life, might only form in vapour-poor disks. More massive planets have more energetic collisions, which creates vapour-rich disks. Smaller planets have vapour-poor disks where larger moons can form.

This graphic from the research illustrates the researchers’ hypothesis. It shows how only small moons form in vapour-rich disks from energetic impacts. Streaming instability plays a small role in forming moons in impact-induced disks because they’re vapour-rich. Image Credit: Nakajima et al. 2024.

So, if we want to find life-supporting planets, look for small worlds where larger moons are more likely to form.

“We find a limited role of streaming instability in satellite formation in an impact-induced disk, whereas it plays a key role during planet formation,” the authors conclude.

The post If We Want To Find Life-Supporting Worlds, We Should Focus on Small Planets With Large Moons appeared first on Universe Today.

UPDATE: Go here for Melanie Phillips’s take on the debate (she had been a “yes” in an earlier debate (2019) on the same question in London).

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Normally you’d have to pay to watch this Munk Debate (they’re all in Toronto),  but it recently appeared on FIRE’s YouTube site.  And normally I wouldn’t watch it as it’s nearly two hours long, but it’s a holiday and I get to do something besides writing.

In my view, this is a “good” debate for two reasons. First, and less important, the opponents of the motion show themselves up to be zealots: both fanatical, purveyors of lies, and swallowers of Hamas propaganda. They both want Israel eliminated in favor of a “one-state” solution, which only a fool would think wouldn’t lead to the elimination and/or dispersal of its Jews. In that sense, the debate shows the opponents of the motion up for who they are, both anti-Zionists and antisemites.

But mainly it’s good because both Murray and Hausdorff show their typical debating skill, eloquence, and adherence to the truth. (As I note below, I’ve already said in previous posts that I agree that modern anti-Zionism (i.e., calls for the elimination of Israel) is also anti-Semitism, so I came to this debate with my own strong pro-proposition opinion. That said, I think I was open to having my mind changed, but I can’t envision what arguments would do it. In the same way, I’m open to see evolution proven as false, but I can’t imagine what arguments (or data) would do it.

Here’s the motion under debate:

Motion: Be it Resolved, anti-Zionism is antisemitism

And here are the relevant definitions given by the moderator:

antisemitism: “Hate directed at Jewish people, or cruel and unfair treatment of people because they are Jewish”

anti-Zionism: being against Zionism, defined as “the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.”

We have four people participating. As the Munk site notes (I’ve added the links to the people):

Arguing for the resolution is award winning journalist, best-selling author, and former Munk Debater Douglas Murray. His debate partner will be Natasha Hausdorff, an international law expert and legal commentator on antisemitism.

Hausdorff is director of the UK Lawyers for Israel, and, like Murray, is whip-smart, eloquent, and passionately pro-Israel. If I had to choose a pair to defend the motion, it would be these two. (Look up some of Hausdorff’s interviews and debates on YouTube.)  Hausdorff is the only one of the four without a Wikpedia page, and that needs to be fixed.

Opposing the resolution is Mehdi Hasan. Mehdi is a best-selling author, former MSNBC anchor, and the CEO and editor-in-chief of the new media company Zeteo. He will be joined by the award winning Israeli broadcaster and Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy.

Hasan had an MSNBC show but left the network when his show was canceled.  Levy, who writes for Haaretz, seems to hate the idea of a Jewish state, for he, like Hasan, favors a “one-state solution” and he also supports boycotts of Israel.  As Malgorzata says, “he believes that Jews can live happily and peacefully alongside Palestinians in a single state.”   She added, “Levy is either a fanatic or stupid—and he’s not stupid.”

There are four six-minute presentations, four three-minute rebuttals, and then the moderator asks the debaters questions, which leads to a back-and-forth that got quite heated, especially on the “no” side. There were lots of interruptions. (Hausdorff, however, seems incapable of shows of anger, but she’s nevertheless passionate.) Finally, the debate ends with four 4-minute closing statements by the debaters and then the final vote (spoiler: Murray and Hausdorff win).

But enough palaver.  Watch for yourself. The debate preliminaries start at 4:00, while the debate proper starts at 14:02 with Douglas Murray’s 6-minute statement.

My notes as I watched:

Hausdorff’s opening speech, giving what she sees as the four “blood libels” of anti-Zionism, is magnificent. These are, she avers, libels used by anti-semites to justify their ant-Zionism. She denies that (at least now) Zionism is not a political movement.

Levy, on the other hand, sees Zionism as “Jewish supremacy.” By that I don’t think he means Jews are superior to all other people or to the Arab citizens of Israel. Rather, he sees Zionism as the view that Jews are superior to Palestinians.  This is likely connected with his preferred “one-state” solution. Levy thus sees Zionism as an ideology: the doctrine of Jewish supremacy that has to be leveled by creating one Jewish + Palestinian state. He also argues that Israel is “more Jewish than democratic” as sees Israel as “occupiers”.

In his own rebuttal, Hasan agrees that Zionism is the doctrine of “Jewish supremacy”.

In her rebuttal, Hausdorff argues that the use of double standards against Jewish state omstantiates both anti-Zionism AND anti-Semitism. She scores a huge debate point when she catches Hasan lying about the Balfour declaratin, and happens to have his out-of-context quote on hand, which she corrects.

In his rebuttal, Levy argues that to create a real democracy in Israel, you more or less have to get rid of Israel, creating a single state in which there is a single regime promoting equality of Palestinians and Israels. Levy, an Israeli Jew, apparently believes that Israel is not a democracy because citizens of the Palestinian territories can’t vote in Israeli elections. Murray calls both of his opponents out for argui9ng Israel is not a “democracy.” Indeed, that argument is not even stupid.

One of the best parts of the debate is Murray’s description of how anti-Israel students in America (and other countries, I suppose) as falling in two classes: the “sinister and the silly” That starts at 1:10:16.

To my mind, the most sagacious statement of the debate was Hausdorff’s analogy that, to her, explains why antisemitism is the same thing as anti-Zionism.  She says that a couple can argue about whether or not to have a child, and that there could be good arguments on both sides. But she adds this: “Once a child is born, to suggest that that child be got rid of is murder.”  What she means, of course, is that before 1948 there was a debate, even among Jews, about whether a Jewish state should be created. But once it came into being in that year, it was a fait accompli, Jews flocked there to find refuge, and it is a nation like other nations, with the right to defend itself against aggression.

That is why to Hausdorff, and to me, it is murder to call for the elimination of a Jewish state that already exists. Whether it be through war or the one-state “solution”, that elimination, an “anti-Zionist” endeavor, shows “cruel and unfair treatment of people because they are Jewish”—the given definition of anti-Semitism.

In the end, the “one-state solution” will lead not only to dissolution of Israel, but the targeting of Jews.  Since both Levy and Hasan favor that “one-state solution”, they are in effect calling for either the destruction of the Jews through murder or through dispersion of them throughout the world, for those are the two fates of the Jews under a one-state “solution.” Antisemitism, as Murray maintains, has taken the form of anti-Zionism.

You may ask yourself, as I did, whether a Jew like Levy can be antisemitic if they are anti-Zionist. How can a Jew be antisemitic? The answer is this: for the same reason that an American can be anti-American. In the end it’s not your own identity that determines whether or not you like or hate that identity, but how you feel about those who share your identity.

Unique cell responses mean some people may be immune to catching the coronavirus, even if they are unvaccinated

A material made of liquid salt mixed with polymers is extremely stretchy but still as strong as the plastics used to make water bottles

The New Horizons mission to Pluto, now zooming out of the Kuiper belt, has made a discovery that could upend what we know about where the solar system ends

A giant flower, one of the smelliest in the world, is currently blooming at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Studying the history of science shows how often serendipity plays a role in some of the most important discoveries. Sometimes, the stories are apocryphal, like Newton getting hit on the head with an apple. But sometimes, there’s an element of truth to them. That was the case for a new discovery of the oldest pair of merging quasars ever discovered – and it all started with a pair of red blots on a picture.

Those red blots were on a very particular picture – one taken by the Hyper Subprime-Cam on the Subaru telescope in Manuakea, Hawai’i. Yoshiki Matsuoka of Ehime University in Japan, who was manually reviewing the picture with colleagues, noticed two faint red splotches. Unlike an automated algorithm, which might have overlooked them, he was interested in what might have caused them and decided to look closer.

To do so, he recruited another instrument on the Subaru telescope, known as the Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph, and the Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph on the neighboring Gemini North telescope. After combing through this more targeted data, Dr. Matsuoka and his colleagues found something no one had seen before—a pair of merging quasars from less than a billion years after the universe was created.

Fraser explains what a quasar is, and why they’re so important.

Quasar mergers were theorized to happen all the time during that period, but despite having found 300 separate quasars around the same time frame, astronomers had yet to find any pairs. This was important because that time period, known as the Epoch of Reionization, was key in creating the structure of the modern-day universe.

During the Epoch of Reionization, energy, potentially from merging quasars, stripped the free-floating hydrogen abundant in the early universe of its electrons in a process called ionization. Around 1 billion years after the Big Bang and the theoretical end of the Epoch of Reionization, the structure of the modern universe was largely settled, and it had officially moved out of the period known as the “cosmic dark ages.” 

Understanding this period is critical for theorizing how the universe formed. Astronomers had long thought that merging quasars would have been common in the period, as supermassive black holes were relatively close, and structures were still working themselves out. So, the lack of them in experimental data was concerning. 

Quasars aren’t only ancient history – could our own supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way become one?

Enter the pair found by Dr. Matsuoka and his colleagues. They appear about 900 million years after the Big Bang, still well within the Epoch of Reionization. However, collecting data on them wasn’t easy, as old objects suffer from contamination in their signals, such as gravitational lensing and stars in the foreground. The researchers eventually found that some of the optical light wasn’t directly coming from the quasars but rather the formation of stars around them.

However, the quasars were massive behemoths, weighing over 100 million times more than our Sun. They also had a bridge of gas connecting them, implying that the two galaxies they formed the core of were undergoing a massive merger, which we will now get to observe as it happens. 

That merger is going to take millions, if not billions, of years, though, so it might be some time before we see the full effect. But in the meantime, cosmologists can start studying this quasar pair in earnest to see what other details can be gleaned about the Epoch of Reionization or the formation of the universe more generally. And it will all happen because someone noticed some red blots on a picture and decided to investigate it further.

Learn More:
NOIRLab – International Gemini Observatory and Subaru Combine Forces to Discover First Ever Pair of Merging Quasars at Cosmic Dawn
Matsuoka et al – Discovery of Merging Twin Quasars at z = 6.05
UT – Hubble Sees Two Quasars Side by Side in the Early Universe
UT – The James Webb Is Getting Closer to Finding What Ionized the Universe

Lead Image:
Illustration of merging quasars
Credit – NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick

The post The Earliest Merging Quasars Ever Seen appeared first on Universe Today.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “perfect,” is a bit confusing.  Mo can be imperfect, but he could also be right in asserting that Allah is the true God. He’s wrong, of course, but I don’t think Mo is being mendacious!

Sadly, we’ve nearly run out of wildlife photos. I could put up one, but that’s all I have that contains acceptable photos.  I hope readers will consider using this holiday (well, American readers) to put together some photos to display.  Otherwise, this feature will be sporadic at best.

Help me (and us) out if you can!

Thank you.

We can add decaffeinated (decaf) products to the list of things you probably shouldn’t worry about but someone wants to make you worry anyway. You may have read recently that some decaf coffee and tea brands have “chemicals” in them that may be a health risk. The real story, as you might imagine, is more complicated. The cause of the recent headlines […]

The post The Decaf Wars first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Radiation surveys suggest that it is now safe to grow food on farmland that has been unused since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but changing its status would face local opposition in Ukraine

The Hubble Space Telescope has experienced ongoing problems with one of its three remaining gyroscopes, so NASA has decided to shift the telescope into single gyro mode. While the venerable space telescope has now returned to daily science operations, single gyro mode means Hubble will only use one gyro to maintain a lock on its target. This will slow its slew time and decrease some of its scientific output. But this plan increases the overall lifetime of the 34-year-old telescope, keeping one gyro in reserve. NASA is also troubleshooting the malfunctioning gyro, hoping to return it online.

Last week, NASA said that the telescope and its instruments are stable and functioning normally.

Gyroscopes help the telescope orient itself in space, keeping it stable to precisely point at astronomical targets in the distant Universe. Hubble went into safe mode back in November 2023, and then again in April and May 2024 due to the ongoing issue, where the one gyro had been increasingly returning faulty readings.

The end of a Hubble gyro reveals the hair-thin wires known as flex leads. They carry data and electricity inside the gyro. Credit: NASA

Going in to safe mode suspends science operations, and in the meantime, engineers tried to troubleshoot to figure out why the gyro experiencing the fault-producing issues and doing work-arounds to get the telescope up and running again. The most recent last safe-mode event in May led the Hubble team to transition from a three-gyro operating mode to observing with only one gyro. This enables more consistent science observations while keeping the other operational gyro available for future use.

Launched in 1990, Hubble has more than doubled its expected design lifetime, providing stunning images and scientific discoveries that have changed our understanding of the Universe and re-written astronomy textbooks.  

During its 34-year history, Hubble has had eight out of 22 gyros fail due to a corroded flex lead, which are thin (less than the width of a human hair) metal wires, that carry power in, and data out, of the gyro.  The flex leads pass through a thick fluid inside the gyro and over time, the flex leads begin to corrode and can physically bend or break.

With his feet firmly anchored on the shuttle’s robotic arm, astronaut Mike Good maneuvers to retrieve the tool caddy required to repair the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph during the final Hubble servicing mission in May 2009. Periodic upgrades have kept the telescope equipped with state-of-the-art instruments, which have given astronomers increasingly better views of the cosmos. Credits: NASA

Thankfully, for the first 18 years of Hubble’s life in space, the telescope had the advantage of being able to be serviced and upgraded by space shuttle astronauts. For example, in 1999, four out of six gyros had failed, with the last one failing about a month before a servicing mission was scheduled to replace them (and do other upgrades to the telescope). This meant Hubble sat in safe mode waiting for the space shuttle and astronauts to arrive.

When the final planned Hubble servicing mission was (temporarily) canceled following the space shuttle Columbia disaster, engineers developed and inaugurated a two-gyro mode to prolong Hubble’s life. The mission was reinstated after outcry from scientists and the public, and so NASA figured out a way to mitigate the risks of flying the space shuttle. Servicing Mission 4 replaced all six gyros one last time in 2009, but it has been running on three since 2018. The three gyros all quit working due to flex lead failures. The retirement of the space shuttle means Hubble has now been operating for 15 years without servicing.

The Hubble Rate Gyro Assembly contains a gyroscope and all of its associated electronics. The gyroscopes are part of Hubble’s pointing system. They provide a frame of reference for Hubble to determine where it is pointing and how that pointing changes as the telescope moves across the sky. They report any small movements of the spacecraft to Hubble’s pointing and Control System. The computer then commands the spinning reaction wheels to keep the spacecraft stable or moving at the desired rate. Credit: NASA

However, during the time it was thought no future servicing mission would happen, the team also devised a one-gyro mode, which will further extend Hubble’s life.

“We knew gyros would be a limiting factor so we started to working on a reduced gyro mode to extend their life,” the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute Ken Sembach told me back in 2015 for my book, “Incredible Stories From Space.” “As it turned out, we did need that reduced gyro mode, and now they aren’t [as big of a] limiting factor for Hubble because we now know how to use the gyro resources in a new way. That added a longer life to the mission we didn’t think we would have.”

While engineers say the difference between two-gyro mode and one gyro-mode is negligible, one-gyro mode provides the option to have one of the remaining gyros placed in reserve.

NASA says that although one-gyro mode is an excellent way to keep Hubble science operations going, it does have limitations, which include a small decrease in efficiency (roughly 12 percent) due to the added time required to slew and lock the telescope onto a science target. One gyro mode also means it takes additional time for the telescope’s fine guidance sensors to search for the guide stars. Additionally, in one-gyro mode Hubble has some restrictions on the science it can do. For example, Hubble cannot track moving objects that are closer to Earth than the orbit of Mars. Without the full complement of gyros, the motion of these objects are too fast for the telescope to track. Additionally, the reduced area of sky that Hubble can point to at any given time also reduces its flexibility to see transient events or targets of opportunity like an exploding star or an impact on Jupiter. NASA says that when combined, “these factors may yield a decrease in productivity of roughly 20 to 25 percent from the typical observing program conducted in the past using all three gyros.”

Read more about the “new normal” for Hubble’s one-gyro mode at this NASA webpage.

The post Hubble's Back, but Only Using One Gyro appeared first on Universe Today.

Humans may have shaped the development of aromatic herbs like lavender and mint, but did herbs also shape our own evolution?

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss441_Michelle_Dowd_2024_06_18.mp3 Download MP3

As a child, Michelle Dowd grew up on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest. She was born into an ultra-religious cult, “The Field,” started in the 1930s by her grandfather, who convinced generations of young male followers that he would live five hundred years and ascend to the heavens when doomsday came. Comfort and care are sins, Michelle is told. As a result, she was forced to learn the skills necessary to battle hunger, thirst, and cold; she learns to trust animals more than humans; and most importantly, she learns how to survive in the natural world.

At “The Field,” a young Michelle lives a life of abuse, poverty, and isolation as she obeys her family’s rigorous religious and patriarchal rules. But as Michelle gets older, she realizes she has the strength to break free. Focus on what will sustain you, she tells herself. Use everything. Waste nothing. Get to know the intricacies of the land, like the intricacies of your body. And so she does.

Using stories of individual edible plants and their uses to anchor each chapter, Forager is both a searing coming-of-age story and a meditation on the ways in which understanding nature can lead to freedom, even joy.

Michelle Dowd is a professor of journalism at Chaffey College and contributor to The New York Times, Alpinist, The Los Angeles Book Review, Catapult, OnlySky, and other national publications. She founded The Chaffey Review, an award-winning literary journal, advises student media, teaches poetry and critical thinking in the California State prisons, and has been recognized as a Longreads Top 5 for The Thing with Feathers, on the relationship between environmentalism and hope. She grew up in a family cult called “The Field,” located in a compound in the Angeles Forest outside of Los Angeles. After escaping the cult she found her way into college, earning a degree from the prestigious liberal-arts Pitzer College, then went on to earn a graduate degree from the University of Boulder. Her memoir is Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult.

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