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In animal tests, a cube of hydrogel the length of a rice grain was implanted in the brain with a needle to monitor temperature or pressure, and then dissolved away after a few weeks

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The global average temperature during May was highest for any May on record, reaching 1.52°C above the 1850 to 1900 average

As I mentioned in the last post, after our discussion at the University of Amsterdam was canceled on grounds of Maarten Boudry’s and my sympathies for Israel, the sponsors who brought us to Amsterdam kindly had the discussion restaged in an empty room and professionally filmed.  I haven’t listened to the whole 80-minute discussion as I can’t stand to see and hear myself, but as I recall it went smoothly, even without an audience.

The filming and appended notes on the screen are due to videographer David Stam, who did a great and professional job, clarifying any references that aren’t spelled out.

To reiterate, the subject of the discussion was a paper by myself and Luana Maroja published in the Skeptical Inquirer, “The ideological subversion of biology.” If you watch the video, you’ll see that the topic of the war and Israel wasn’t even raised.  We did range beyond the ambit of the paper, for we talked about biology, philosophy, and other topics, but you’ll see that we were deplatformed for something we didn’t even intend to mention.

Here are David’s notes on the video:.

Welcome to an eye-opening discussion on “The Ideological Subversion of Science” featuring evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, philosopher of science Maarten Boudry, and embryologist Michael Richardson. In this thought-provoking video, our distinguished panel delves into the growing influence of ideology on scientific research and education. They explore how societal pressures and cultural trends can distort scientific integrity, the implications for scientific progress, and the importance of safeguarding objectivity in the pursuit of knowledge. Join us for a conversation that champions the true spirit of scientific inquiry.

Em. Prof. Dr. Jerry Coyne, Evolutionary Biology at University of Chicago
Dr. Maarten Boudry, Philosopher of Science at University of Ghent
Prof Dr. Michael Richardson, Evolutionary Developmental Zoology at University of Leiden

The moderator, who did an superb job of keeping the discussion going, is Gert Jan van ‘t Land.

As I recounted on May 14, philosopher Maarten Boudry from Ghent, developmental biologist Michael Richardson from Leiden and I were “deplatformed” by a student-run group, “BetaBreak”, at the University of Amsterdam. We were recruited to discuss a paper that I wrote with Luana Maroja, “The ideological subversion of biology,” in which we discussed several areas (sex, race, evolutionary psych0logy, etc.) in which “progressive” ideology had crept into biology, distorting the science.

A few days before our event, we got a note that BetaBreak was canceling our discussion because Maarten and I had “unacceptable” sympathies towards Israel in the Gaza War. This had nothing to do with our discussion, as you’ll see when I put the video in the next post. But it didn’t matter, if you’re more on the side of the Jews, you’re tainted—at least in Amsterdam. (Maarten had in fact been deplatformed a few days before that when he was scheduled to give a talk on climate change, which he eventually gave remotely.)

At any rate, BetaBreak then came up with a second explanation for our deplatforming, which was that the event “could get violent” and they couldn’t guarantee our safety. Well, that sounds bogus to me (a scientific descussion?), and of course none of us were worried about our safety.  The fact that the “safety” trope came only in a subsequent explanation of course makes us think it was confected, for, as the group explained in its first message to us: “Another fear is how [the deplaforming] would reflect on us as a committee and that we might be blackballed at UvA/AUC.” Oh, dearie me. They might have been blackballed! They canceled others so they wouldn’t get canceled themselves. . . And the advantage of raising the “safety” issue, of course, is that it can’t be refuted: if you cancel an event on those grounds, you’ll never know if your worries were justified.

The details of the deplatforming are in the first link above, but Maarten and I collaborated on a new article in Quillette, which you can see below (click the headline) for free, BUT READ IT WITHIN A DAY OR SO, AS IT’S GOING TO BE PAYWALLED. (I did find an archived link here.) But the point of our article was not to play the victim, for within a few days we staged the discussion without an audience, and it was recorded professionally and put on YouTube. (More people can hear it now!)

The point of our Quillette piece, as you see, is that deplatforming invited speakers is a disservice not just to the speakers, but, more important, to the audience. In the article I added an apposite quote from John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” to show why, whether or not you disagree with speakers whose views offend you, you should still listen to them. I’ll put it here:

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

That is, if you listen carefully to such a speaker, you might not only change your mind on some issues, but, even if you don’t, it gives you the chance to hear the best arguments of your opponents, and thus a chance to hone your ideas.  (Further, the person speaking is “outed” in that you finally can learn what they really believe.)

But I see I’m summarizing the piece for you. Please read it yourself (and before the weekend!) by clicking below. It’s not very long.

Also, if you’re a regular reader of Quillette, remember that it has no ads and is sponsored by reader support alone. You can subscribe by going here.

I’ll give the first paragraph and then the last two:

Like being struck by lightning, getting deplatformed—first invited to speak and then disinvited for your political views—is something you assume happens only to other people. But, unlike a lightning strike, it’s not a rare occurrence. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s “campus deplatforming database” of US universities lists 626 successful deplatforming attempts since 1998. This year alone, there have already been 110 attempts to cancel talks, most involving speakers sympathetic to Israel. Neither of us, however, had ever personally experienced this kind of cancellation before.

And the ending:

The problem with this approach [deplatforming or canceling people] is that plenty of unsavoury people have produced wonderful work in music, art, literature, and science, and that work should be judged on its own merits. In any case, who is to judge which beliefs and behaviours should render you untouchable? As Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four shows, “approved” opinions have a way of changing, and it’s impossible to predict which widely held opinions of today will be considered grounds for damnation tomorrow. Who could have predicted the current “orthodox” view on the war in Gaza several decades ago, when most Western progressives were staunchly pro-Israel? A hundred years ago, vegetarians were seen as cranks. A century hence, will killing and eating animals for food be seen as beyond the pale?

It’s been 155 years since Mill published his famous essay and, sadly, we have still not taken its lessons to heart. If BetaBreak had allowed our discussion to proceed, the students would not only have been able to engage in a lively discussion, but might also have learned something or—heaven forbid—even changed their minds about the relationship between science and ideology.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “kaput”, came with the one-word comment, “nearly”.  Once again, faced with the truth about individual extinction, the Divine Duo simply deny it. And they always accuse others (the barmaid in this case) of their own sins; here it’s having appealing fantasies. 

 

At a conference like LHCP12, covering all of Large Hadron Collider [LHC] physics and beyond, there’s far too much to summarize: hundreds of talks, with thousands of incremental experimental results and theoretical insights. So instead, today I’ll draw attention to one of the longest-running puzzles of the LHC era, and to a significant step that’s been made toward resolving it. The puzzle in question involves a rare decay of bottom quarks.

[All figures in this post are taken from LHCP12 talks by Zhangqier Wang and Eluned Smith.]

The Decay of a Bottom Quark to a Lepton-Antilepton Pair

In the Standard Model of particle physics, bottom quarks most often decay to charm quarks. They do so via a “virtual W boson” — a general disturbance in the W field — which subsequently is converted either

• to a quark-antiquark pair, or
• to a “lepton” (an electron, muon or tau) and an anti-neutrino.

[See for instance Figure 1 of this post.]

But rarely, a bottom quark can decay to a strange quark and to a lepton-antilepton pair (an electron and a positron, or a muon and an anti-muon, or a tau and an anti-tau.) The example of a muon-antimuon pair is shown below.

Figure 1: The general form of a rare process in which a bottom quark b decays to a strange quark s, a muon μ– and an anti-muon μ+.

Within the Standard Model such a process can occur through quantum physics, involving subtle interactions of the known elementary fields. It is very rare; less than one in a million bottom quarks decays this way. But it can be measured in detail.

Figure 2: In the Standard Model, the decay shown in Fig. 1 occurs through a quantum effect, involving the up, charm or top quark field (u,c,t), the W field, and the electromagnetic (γ) or Z fields. The rate is small but measurable. The details depend on the invariant mass-squared, called q2 here, of the muon and anti-muon.

Because it is rare, the rate for this process is easily altered by new particles and fields that aren’t included in the Standard Model, making it an interesting target for theorists to explore. And since the process is relatively easy to measure, it has been a key target for experimentalists at the LHC experiments, expecially LHCb and CMS, and to some degree ATLAS.

The Discrepancy at the LHCb Experiment

For a decade, theorists’ predictions for this decay have been in conflict with the measurements made by the LHCb experiment. This is quantified in the plot below, which shows a certain aspect of the process as a function of the invariant mass-squared (q2) of the muon/anti-muon pair. (More precisely, as shown at the bottom of Figure 1 of this post from 2013, the measurement involves a B meson decaying to a K meson plus a muon/anti-muon pair)

Figure 3: Older data from the LHCb experiment (black crosses), showing a certain measure of the process in the previous figure as a function of q2. It shows significant disagreement with a theoretical prediction (orange bars). Light gray bars are regions where predictions are not possible and are excluded from the comparison.

What are we to make of this disagreement? Well, as always in such situations, there are three possibilities:

• The experimental measurements have a mistake somewhere,
• The theoretical calculations behind the prediction have a mistake somewhere, or
• The Standard Model of particle physics is missing something

The third case would be of enormous importance in particle physics: a discovery of something fundamentally new, and a cause for celebration. The first two options would be far less exciting, and we must rule both of them out convincingly before celebrating.

If there is an error in the measurements or calculations, it is unlikely to be something simple. The people involved are experienced professionals, and their work has by now been checked by many other experts. Still, subtle mistakes — an underestimate of a complex quantum effect, or a feature of the experimental detector that hasn’t been properly modeled — do happen, and are more common than true discoveries.

The Contribution of the CMS Experiment

Importantly, we can now rule out the first possibility: there’s no mistake in the LHCb measurement. The CMS experiment has now repeated the measurement, with much improved precision compared to their previous efforts. As shown in Fig. 4, the LHCb and CMS measurements match. (CMS and LHCb are so different in their design that there’s no reasonable possibility that they have correlated detector issues.)

Figure 4: New data from CMS (black) compared to LHCb’s data (orange) and CMS’s older, less precise data (maroon). (The right-hand panel is the update of Fig. 3.) Agreement of the new higher-precision data from CMS with that of LHCb is now clear and compelling.

Since the experiments agree, focus now moves squarely to the theorists. Are their predictions correct? We have at least two sets of predictions; they appear as blue and orange bars in Fig. 5, which shows they agree with each other but disagree, in the center and right panels, with CMS data (and therefore, from Fig. 4, with LHCb data.)

Figure 5: The new data from CMS (black) compared to two theoretical predictions in blue and orange. The two theoretical predictions agree, but disagree with the CMS data, which (as seen in Fig. 4) agrees with LHCb.

Even though the two theoretical calculations agree, they are based on similar assumptions. Perhaps those assumptions are flawed?

There are certainly things to worry about. Anything involving the strong nuclear force, when it acts at distances comparable to the size of a proton, has to be subjected to heavy scrutiny. Far too often, discrepancies between theory and experiment have dissolved when potential theoretical uncertainties from the strong nuclear force were reconsidered. (For a recent example, see this one.) We will have to let the theory experts hash this out… which could take some time. I would not plan to order champagne any time soon. Nevertheless, this bears watching over the next few years.

The multi-billion dollar “snake oil” industry is nothing if not good at marketing. This is probably because this is not one or even a small number of companies, but likely thousands of companies and millions of individuals crowdsourcing many different marketing strategies. Those that work tend to prosper and proliferate, spawning variations. The rhetoric has been evolving in this way for at […]

The post What are “Adaptogens”? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Earth’s energy imbalance, a key measure of global warming, has doubled in the past 20 years, raising concerns about how much heat the oceans are absorbing

What does "equals" mean? For mathematicians, this simple question has more than one answer, which is causing issues when it comes to using computers to check proofs. The solution might be to tear up the foundations of maths

A pulsar, the spinning remnants of a star that blew up in a supernova, has been spotted rotating at a comparatively slow rate of once every 54 minutes. That means it may be about to cross the "death-line" - the first time we have seen one of these stars die a second death

Researchers trained a hawk outfitted with microphones to fly through a swarm of 600,000 bats, revealing how they can hear their own voice in a crowd

A film made of lithium niobate and gratings of silicon dioxide converts infrared light into visible light better than the other leading compound, potentially allowing nighttime vision

Five children have had gene therapy to treat inherited deafness, this time in both ears, following the success of earlier treatments in just one ear

On January 19th, 2024, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully landed its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) on the lunar surface. In so doing, JAXA became the fifth national space agency to achieve a soft landing on the Moon – after NASA, the Soviet space program (Interkosmos), the European Space Agency, and the China National Space Agency (CNSA). SLIM has since experienced some technical difficulties, which included upending shortly after landing, and had to be temporarily shut down after experiencing power problems when its first lunar night began.

On the Moon, the day/night cycle lasts fourteen days at a time, which has a drastic effect on missions that rely on solar panels. Nevertheless, SLIM managed to reorient its panels and recharge itself and has survived three consecutive lunar nights since it landed. However, when another lunar night began on May 27th, JAXA announced that they had failed to establish communications with the lander. As a result, all science operations were terminated while mission controllers attempt to reestablish communications, which could happen later this month.

As JAXA stated via its official X account (formerly Twitter):

“We tried again on the night of the 27th, but there was no response from #SLIM. As the sun went down around SLIM on the night of the 27th, it became impossible to generate electricity, so unfortunately this month’s operation will end. Thank you very much for the overwhelming support you have shown us since our post the day before.”

27??????????????????#SLIM ???????????????27??????SLIM??????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????#JAXA

— ????????SLIM (@SLIM_JAXA) May 28, 2024

JAXA further indicated that the command transmission to restore communication was performed using an “unplanned ground station antenna” and with the cooperation of JAXA’s tracking network.” They also indicated that they plan to try reestablishing communications once the current lunar night ends later this month – at which point, they expect the lander will be recharged. “The power was turned off overnight, so we hope that the whole system will be reset and restarted,” they wrote.

The SLIM mission also carried two rovers, which separated from it in lunar orbit and landed independently on the same day. Known as the Lunar Excursion Vehicle-1 and -2 (LEV-1 and LEV-2), these rovers are the first Japanese robotic missions to traverse and explore the lunar surface. According to JAXA, LEV-1 is the world’s first “hopping exploration rover” while LEV-2 is the world’s smallest and lightest. During the four months since they landed, LEV-1 has measure the local temperatures, topography, and taken images.

The rovers can conduct operations autonomously and transmit data to Earth directly without assistance from the lander. As such, JAXA’s mission controllers are still likely to hear from LEV-1 and LEV-2 while attempting to restore communications with SLIM.

Further Reading: Twitter.com

The post Japan’s Lunar Lander Fails to Check-in appeared first on Universe Today.

Engineers have developed a model that combines machine learning and collaborative robotics to accelerate the design of aerogel materials used in wearable heating applications.

Engineers have developed a model that combines machine learning and collaborative robotics to accelerate the design of aerogel materials used in wearable heating applications.

Adolescents with an internet addiction undergo changes in the brain that could lead to additional addictive behavior and tendencies, finds a new study.

For a small, lumpy chunk of rock that barely reflects any light, Mars’ Moon Phobos draws a lot of attention. Maybe because it’s one of only two moons to orbit the planet, and its origins are unclear. But some of the attention is probably because we have such great images of it.

Phobos is the largest of Mars’ two moons, the other one being Deimos. Scientists are uncertain about their history. They could be a pair of captured main-belt asteroids, two lobes of what once was a binary asteroid until capture separated them, or a second-generation object formed after Mars had already formed. Or they could be surviving fragments from an ancient collision between more massive objects.

Phobos isn’t very large. It’s about 26 km × 23 km × 18 km and not massive enough to be rounded. Studies of its density show that it’s a rubble-pile body loosely held together by its own gravity.

When the ESA launched its Mars Express Orbiter in 2003, its mission was to study Mars. One of its instruments is the High-Resolution Stereo Camera, a German contribution that produces colour images with up to two meters resolution. The instrument also has a black-and-white mode, and the original image of Phobos was black-and-white.

Andrea Luck is a skilled image processor from Glasgow, Scotland, with a healthy enthusiasm for space images. He decided the original B&W image, which he describes as epic, needed to be updated to colour. “I was kinda tired of seeing this epic photo online only in black and white, so I decided to jazz it up with some colours!” he wrote on his Flickr page.

It’s interesting to note that it’s a single image, not a composite.

Here’s the original B&W image.

This is the original image from the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. It caught Phobos over Mars’ limb on March 26, 2010. The waviness of Mars in the background is a by-product of HRSC’s line-scanning operation. Image Credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

The HRSC’s mission is to take stereographic images of Mars’ surface, capturing geological and morphological details. The goal is to map as much of the surface as possible. But at the bottom of its list of objectives are images of Phobos and Deimos.

The HRSC captured this image of Phobos in 2017. It shows the Stickney Crater, Phobos’ largest impact crater, and the unusual grooves on the moon’s surface. Mars Express images helped scientists conclude that the grooves are likely from impact ejecta. Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Images of Phobos have helped scientists better understand the odd moon, but they’re not enough to reach solid conclusions. Fortunately, a mission to Phobos and its sibling Deimos will be launched in a couple of years.

JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, is launching the MMX mission in 2026. MMX stands for Martian Moons Exploration. Its goal is to understand the origins of Phobos and Deimos. MMX will also return a sample from Phobos in 2031. Once in Earthly labs, those samples should reveal a lot.

But for now, we can enjoy this processed image of Phobos, which captures its nature as a fast-moving, rubble-pile moon with uncertain origins.

The post How Mars’ Moon Phobos Captures Our Imaginations appeared first on Universe Today.

There are plenty of problems that spacecraft designers have to consider. Getting smacked in the sensitive parts by a rock is just one of them, but it is a very important one. A micrometeoroid hitting the wrong part of the spacecraft could jeopardize an entire mission, and the years of work it took to get to the point where the mission was actually in space in the first place. But even if the engineers who design spacecraft know about this risk, how is it best to avoid them? A new programming library from research at NASA could help.

Admittedly, engineers already have a tool for this purpose. NASA’s Meteoroid Engineering Model (MEM) allows them to plug in a planned trajectory for their spacecraft and receive an output that defines where and from which direction they are likely to encounter micrometeoroids.

The James Webb Space Telescope is a perfect example of why such a system is necessary. On its way to the L2 Lagrange point, it has already suffered at least 20 micrometeoroid impacts, at least one of which hit the space telescope’s primary mirror, leaving a dent that still affects the quality of its images to this day.

How do micrometeroids affect spacecraft?
Credit – Chris Pattison YouTube Channel

Due to such high-profile occurrences, spacecraft designers are already aware of the risks. However, many don’t know their trajectories when designing their systems. Without a planned trajectory, the MEM is all but useless.

Enter Althea Moorhead from NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center and her colleagues Katie Milbrandt from Auburn and Aaron Kingery from ERC, Inc., also based at Marshall. They improved the MEM’s functionality by introducing a library of known spacecraft trajectories and the MEM outputs for each.

Instead of knowing their end trajectory, spacecraft designers would be able to simply look at the library and determine whether there are any significant risks from meteoroids on any number of potential trajectories. In particular, the library includes data on orbital paths around every significant planet, some transfer orbits, and at least two “halo” orbits, where the spacecraft would take advantage of the relative stability of a planet’s Lagrange points.

How Webb deals with the micrometeroid impacts its already suffere.
Credit – Launch Pad Astronomy

The output of the library allows for visualizations of the risks the spacecraft would encounter, which is much easier to understand than complex equations and probabilities for designers who don’t necessarily specialize in micrometeoroid hazards. That was the original impetus for developing the library – to provide generalists who don’t necessarily have time to grok the details of micrometeoroid location and risks but still need to consider it as part of their mission design.

The paper authors stress that the library shouldn’t be used for the formal risk assessment that NASA requires of all missions destined for launch. That requirement can still be met by the MEM itself, along with a well-established orbit. But, if that orbit happens to be informed by the library described in the paper, all the better for it.

Learn More:
Moorhead, Milbrandt, & Kingery – A library of meteoroid environments encountered by spacecraft in the inner solar system
UT – NASA has a Plan to Minimize Future Micrometeoroid Impacts on JWST
UT – What Does Micrometeoroid Damage do to Gossamer Structures Like Webb’s Sunshield?
UT – Ouch. Canadarm2 Took a Direct Hit From a Micrometeorite

Lead Image:
Visualization of one of the trajectories planned out in the new micrometeroid library.
Credit – Moorhead, Milbrandt, & Kingery

The post NASA has a New Database to Predict Meteoroid Hazards for Spaceflight appeared first on Universe Today.