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As someone that has always lived in the UK countryside I am no stranger to the glory of a dark star-filled sky. Sadly 60% of the world’s population has already lost access to the night sky thanks to light pollution. Across Europe and the US that number climbs to nearer 80%. A team of researchers want to try and track the growth of light pollution and to that end have developed an inexpensive sensor made from “off-the-shelf” parts. Their hope is that people around the world will build and install these sensors to share their data enabling them to track the spread of light pollution. If you’ve got technical skills, this could be a fun project.

Astronomers the world over are all too familiar with the scourge of light pollution. It’s one of the main reasons observatories tend to be located in the middle of nowhere. Of course the night sky is illuminated by natural light from the stars and Moon but also zodiacal light and aurora can shed their own mystical light on our sky. Light pollution doesn’t refer to these natural wonders, instead it refers to the excessive or misdirected artificial light from human activity. 

Urban sprawl and accompanying light pollution is an issue for both astronomers and fireflies. This view shows the light dome from the city of Duluth, Minn. 20 miles north of town. It erases the dark skies. Credit: Bob King

Light pollution not only effects astronomers but it disrupts ecosystems, wildlife and even human health. It typically comes from streetlights, building lighting, advertising and even car headlights. It generally creates a nasty orange or white glow that hangs over towns and cities obscuring the beauty of the universe. It also interferes with with the behaviour of nocturnal animals, has a negative impact on human sleep cycles and can lead to health issues like insomnia or stress. There are suitable ways external lighting can be controlled and its impact minimised but we need to get people to actually want to make that change. 

An annotated light pollution map for Nebraska. Credit: Dave Dickinson/The Light Pollution Atlas.

That’s the dream of the team behind the FreeDSM device and the Gaia4Sustaniability project. Their aim is to provide an easy to use piece of hardware and software which is reliable and will be able to measure night sky brightness caused by light pollution. The framework will be able to calculate the excess light pollution which is in excess of natural sky brightness to inform public, non-scientific stakeholders and the science community about the spread of light pollution.

Using hardware that is readily available the device is relatively cheap to build coming in at less than $65 USD (around £50 GBP.) It is based around the Osram TSL2591 sensor with two diodes.  One of them takes sky brightness measurements in the infrared and the other in the full visible spectrum. It then samples the brightness every minute while it also captures humidity and temperature. Looking at the relatively comprehensive instructions it looks like anyone with modest DIY skills will be able to build this. 

The device is an excellent step forward toward analysing the state of light pollution across the planet. It uses data from the Gaia satellite to greatly enhance the accuracy of the light pollution measurements. It does require legions of groups or individuals to build and install a device however. Hopefully it will appeal to the several thousands of fellow geeks out there   to pick up their screwdriver and soldering iron to make the dream of turning the tide on light pollution a reality.

If you want to have a go for yourself then you can learn more about the project here and find the instructions to build your own sensor here

Source : FreeDSM and the Gaia4Sustaniability project: a light pollution meter based on IoT technologies

The post Building a Worldwide Map of Light Pollution appeared first on Universe Today.

Nearly imperceptible quantum flickers used to limit how precisely we could detect the way space-time ripples, but squeezing the laser light used in detectors overcomes this and doubles the number of gravitational waves we can see

The average surface temperature varied more widely and was even hotter than previously thought during much of the past 500 million years, according to the most rigorous study so far

The Sun is midway through its life of fusion. It’s about five billion years old, and though its life is far from over, it will undergo some pronounced changes as it ages. Over the next billion years, the Sun will continue to brighten.

That means things will change here on Earth.

As the Sun goes about its business fusing helium into hydrogen, the ratio of hydrogen to helium in its core changes. Over time, the core slowly becomes more enriched in helium. As helium accumulates in its core, the core’s density increases, meaning protons are more closely packed together. That creates a situation where the Sun can fuse hydrogen more efficiently. After a chain reaction of processes and cause and effect, the end result is that the Sun’s luminosity increases. The Sun’s luminosity has already increased by about 30% since its formation, and the brightening will continue.

Any increase in the Sun’s luminosity can have a pronounced effect on Earth. Environmental cycles like the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycles sustain Earth’s biosphere. As the Sun becomes brighter, it will affect these cycles, including the carbonate-silicate cycle, which moderates the accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the planet’s atmosphere.

This schematic shows the relationship between the different physical and chemical processes that make up the carbonate-silicate cycle. In the upper panel, the specific processes are identified, and in the lower panel, the feedbacks associated are shown; green arrows indicate positive coupling, while yellow arrows indicate negative coupling. Image Credit: By Gretashum – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79674633

Scientists think that over the next billion years, the brightening Sun will disrupt this cycle, leading to declining CO2 levels. Plants rely on CO2 and the levels are expected to plummet, which means that complex land life would end in the next billion years.

It’s a bleak prognosis, but new research suggests it might not happen.

The new research is “Substantial extension of the lifetime of the terrestrial biosphere,” and it’s been accepted for publication in the Planetary Science Journal. It’s in pre-print now, and the lead author is R.J. Graham, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago.

“Approximately one billion years (Gyr) in the future, as the Sun brightens, Earth’s carbonate-silicate cycle is expected to drive CO2 below the minimum level required by vascular land plants, eliminating most macroscopic land life,” the authors write.

As stars like our Sun age, they become brighter and warmer. Image Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

As the Sun brightens and warms the Earth’s surface, scientists expect the carbonate-silicate cycle to draw more CO2 out of the atmosphere because of carbonate-silicate weathering and carbonate burial. Rainwater is enriched with atmospheric carbon, which reacts with silicate rocks and breaks them down. The products of the chemical reactions that break them down find their way to the ocean floor, where they form carbonate minerals. As these minerals are buried, they effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Normally, the cycle acts as Earth’s natural thermostat. However, higher temperatures make the reactions more efficient, meaning the carbonate-silicate cycle will remove more CO2 from the atmosphere. That’s what led scientists to conclude that the CO2 will become so low that planet life will perish. However, the authors examined these ideas and found that it may not quite work out that way.

“Here, we couple global-mean models of temperature- and CO2-dependent plant productivity for C3 and C4 plants, silicate weathering, and climate to re-examine the time remaining for terrestrial plants,” they write. C3 and C4 plants are two main plant groups that are classified based on how they perform photosynthesis and absorb carbon. They’re relevant because they respond differently to higher temperatures.

The researchers say recent data shows that the carbonate-silicate cycle isn’t as temperature-dependent as previously thought. Instead, it’s only weakly temperature-dependent and more strongly CO2-dependent. In that case, “we find that the interplay between climate, productivity, and weathering causes the future luminosity-driven CO2 decrease to slow and temporarily reverse, averting plant CO2 starvation,” they explain.

Instead of a one billion-year outlook for Earth’s plant life, the researchers say atmospheric CO2 levels will mean plants have another 1.6-1.86 billion years. When plants can no longer survive, it won’t be because of plummeting CO2 levels. Instead of CO2 starvation, it’ll be because of what scientists call the moist greenhouse transition.

When that transition happens, a planet’s atmosphere becomes saturated with water vapour as the planet warms. Since water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas, it creates a feedback loop of increased warming. Eventually, it’s simply too hot for plants to survive. The consequences don’t end there. As the Earth’s upper atmosphere becomes more saturated with water vapour, UV energy splits water apart, and the hydrogen drifts off into space. In this situation, there’s a gradual and irreversible loss of water into space.

According to the authors, Earth won’t experience this transition for between about 1.6 and 1.86 billion years.

This astronaut photograph shows the sky over the Amazon Basin during the rainy season. Image Credit: NASA

“We show that recent data indicating weakly temperature-dependent silicate weathering lead to the prediction that biosphere death results from overheating, not CO2 starvation,” the authors write. “These findings suggest that the future lifespan of Earth’s complex biosphere may be nearly twice as long as previously thought.”

These results also affect our understanding of exoplanet habitability. It has to do with what are called ‘hard steps’ in the appearance and evolution of life. The hard steps model says that certain evolutionary transitions were difficult and unlikely to happen twice. Some examples are the appearance of multicellular organisms and the Cambrian explosion.

But if Earth’s biosphere has a much longer lifespan than thought, that affects the hard steps model.

“A longer future lifespan for the complex biosphere may also provide weak statistical evidence that there were fewer “hard steps” in the evolution of intelligent life than previously estimated and that the origin of life was not one of those hard steps,” the authors conclude.

If that’s the case, then exoplanet habitability could be less rare than thought.

The post Life Might Thrive on the Surface of Earth for an Extra Billion Years appeared first on Universe Today.

Genetic testing on samples collected during the earliest days of the covid-19 outbreak suggests it is likely that the virus spread from animals to humans at the Huanan seafood market

Divalent samarium compounds are important reagents for reductive transformations in organic chemistry. However, currently, a high amount of this reagent is required in most reactions, and it also necessitates the use of harmful chemicals. To address this issue, researchers have developed a visible-light-antenna ligand that coordinates with stable trivalent samarium compounds, which, upon exposure to visible light, are reduced to divalent samarium, enabling milder conditions and smaller amounts of samarium for reactions.

Researchers have developed an innovative new method for identifying biomarkers in wastewater using origami-paper sensors, enabling the tracking of infectious diseases using the camera in a mobile phone. The new test device is low-cost and fast and could dramatically change how public health measures are directed in any future pandemics.

Hydrogen is in great demand due to its promising role as a sustainable resource in the energy transition. Researchers have made an important breakthrough in the efficient and cost-effective provision of isotopes. These are the three forms in which hydrogen occurs in nature -- as protium, deuterium or tritium. The team has taken a big step towards realizing its dream of separating hydrogen isotopes at room temperature at low cost.

Scientists are now able to directly compare the different kinds of injury that mechanical ventilation causes to cells in the lungs. In a new study, using a ventilator-on-a-chip model, researchers found that shear stress from the collapse and reopening of the air sacs is the most injurious type of damage.

Researchers have developed a groundbreaking soft cortical device that could revolutionize the treatment of epilepsy and other neurological disorders.

A research team has successfully recreated the structure of wrinkles in biological tissue in vitro, uncovering the mechanisms behind their formation.

Can an immunoassay be created and selectively detect a virus in under 5 minutes? In a new study, researchers report that it can be done using a low-power laser like a laser pointer with a little liquid sample like a sesame seed.

Modern integrated microelectronic devices are often poorly repairable and difficult to recycle. Debondable adhesives play a key role in the transition to a circular economy with sustainable resources, less waste, and intelligent repair/recycling strategies. A research team has now introduced a method for making adhesives that can be deactivated 'on command'.

Researchers have developed a Martian atmospheric evolution model to propose a new theory about Mars's past.

Thermoelectric devices are devices that can convert heat into electrical energy. Researchers have now developed a thermoelectric device composed of organic materials that can generate electricity from ambient temperature alone. The device is made from copper phthalocyanine and copper hexadecafluoro phthalocyanine as charge transfer materials and was combined with fullerenes and BCP as electron transport layers.

A new way of making ammonia by harnessing the unique power of liquid metal could lead to significant cuts in carbon emissions caused by production of the widely-used chemical. Ammonia is used in fertilizer to grow much of our food, but also plays a role in clean energy as a carrier to safely transport hydrogen.

Abigail Shrier has a new book out, and it’s doing quite well despite the vitriol she received for her first book, Irreversible Damage, the Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters. I read the latter one, and thought it was quite good—not nearly as inflammatory as the gender activists deemed it. But of course the topic—that social media was contributing to a desire of young women to identify as men, a
“rapid-onset” change that was unnecessary and generally harmful—was tailor-made to anger gender activists. Remember this tweet by ACLU LAWYER Chase Strangio about that book?

An ACLU lawyer advocating censorship! What has the world come to? Well, Strangio, a biological woman who identifies as male, deleted that tweet, but the Internet is forever.

Now Shrier has a somewhat related book, in that it’s about children’s psychological difficulties, but this one isn’t directly related to gender. Click on the icon to go to the Amazon link.

I haven’t yet read it, but have ordered it by interlibrary loan (I can no longer buy books because I have no space on my shelves), and will report my take forthwith.  But Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE and coauthor of two books (one a blockbuster bestseller), has reviewed Shrier’s new book on his website, The Eternally Radical Idea. He pronounces Bad Therapy a “masterpiece,” which is high praise. But he also takes up about 70% the review listing the varieties of opprobrium that Shrier will meet.  Click to read Lukianoff’s review; I’ll just give a couple of excerpts:

First, Lukianoff’s assessment and brief summary. Bolding is mine:

“Bad Therapy” is simply a masterpiece — easily the most important book of the year. Unfortunately, it most desperately needs to be read by the very people who are likely most hostile to Shrier’s work. The book focuses on the harms of the therapeutic approach to raising our children and how the generation treated with the most psychological therapy and psychiatric drugs has become the most miserable, anxious, and disempowered generation on record. (“Disempowered,” by the way, was the original title of the book I wrote with Jonathan Haidt, which became “The Coddling of The American Mind.”)

Shrier comes to many of the same conclusions that Haidt and I came to in “Coddling,” which I’d sum up like this: As a culture, we seem to be teaching young people the mental habits of anxious and depressed people — encouraging them, often through example, to engage in negative mental exaggerations called cognitive distortions. It’s a kind of reverse-cognitive behavioral therapy. I’ve talked about this problem for the last decade, beginning with Haidt’s and my original 2015 article for The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and most recently with my piece, “What’s behind the campus mental health crisis?” for UnHerd.

Shrier’s book also focuses on how parenting in the K-12 environment is informed by an ideology that completely undermines students’ sense of an internalized locus of control. Indeed, if you really want to make someone despondent, just persuade them that all important decisions are out of their hands and that they are essentially powerless in their own lives.

Haidt and I — and more recently a Substacker named Gurwinder Bhogal — have pointed out that the current campus left ideology inherently tells young women in particular that they are unavoidably simultaneously both oppressors and oppressed; that their life is determined by their immutable characteristics; that the planet is doomed; that fascists are everywhere; and that there’s not much that can be done about this other than consciousness-raising and feeling guilt, shame, and despair.

What I’ve been emphasizing more recently is that, in many cases, teaching people these cognitive distortions was largely done in the name of motivating them towards some positive social action. This is a terrible strategy, of course, because depressed and anxious people make terrible activists. Depression and anxiety more often result in fatalism and despair than an attitude capable of bringing about positive social change, so it’s a weird way to build a movement.

Here are the three conclusions from Haidt and Lukianoff’s best-selling and influential book:

1.)  We young people are fragile (“What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”)

2.) We are prone to emotional reasoning and confirmation bias (“Always trust your feelings.”)

3.) We are prone to “dichotomous thinking and tribalism” (“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”)

So what’s the difference between Shrier’s book and the earlier one? I’m sure they are quite different, but Lukianoff says very little about this issue. In fact, he says nothing about what Shrier add’s to the Haidt and Lukianoff book:

But Shrier’s book goes far beyond what Haidt and I did in “Coddling,” and that is why every single parent and K-12 teacher must read it. Despite being steeped in this stuff for the better part of two decades, I still learned a great deal from it — including that the research behind the health harms of growing up with “adverse childhood experiences” is far weaker than I understood it to be.

The book is gorgeously written, thoughtful, compassionate, and has gobs of both research and common sense. It also features some of my favorite experts, including my friend Camilo Ortiz, a professor and clinical psychologist who specializes in CBT. Other friends who make an appearance include Jonathan Haidt, Lenore Skenazy, Rob Henderson, Richard J. McNally, Paul Bloom, and Peter Gray.

And that first paragraph is all you’ll get. The review and assessment of the book takes up only a third of Lukianoff’s piece. Now I don’t mind someone using a review as a platform to launch their own ideas into the ether (H. L. Mencken was famous for that), but Lukianoff uses the book as a way to list all the potential criticisms that Shrier’s book will face, criticisms that he outlined in another book with Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There is a Solution. The review leaves me, at least, not knowing what Shrier’s book is really about.

The criticisms that Lukianoff says that Shrier will face fall into three categories: “The Obstacle Course” (“rhetorical doges and logical fallacies” like strawmanning and misrepresenting the book’s arguments); “The Minefield” (dissing the book by attacking the author, a tactic with which we’re quite familiar), and “The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” (raising guilt by association, labeling people as bad because of their politics, and so on). If you read Shrier’s earlier book, you’ll see all of these tactics were indeed used to dismiss it. It turns out that Shrier had a good point, as we now know as European countries dismantle their use of “affirmative treatment” and puberty blockers for gender-dysphoric youth, most of whom would come out as gay (and not lose body parts nor get sterilized) if they were treated less “affirmatively” and they deep-sixed the hormones for adolescents. But now that Shrier has been labeled a Bad Person and guilty of Ideological Wrongthink, that label can be used to discredit everything she writes in the future.

At any rate, and despite the digressions by Lukianoff that are aimed at pushing his own platform, this is certainly a book worth investigating. I haven’t read any other reviews, but just found on on Slate that is quite critical.  We shall see if the author of that one, Anna Nordberg, engages in the bad-faith criticisms described by Lukianoff. (Nordberg does have expertise in the area of parenting and child psychology.)

A meta-analysis of 137 clinical trials finds triptan drugs are among the most effective for treating migraines, while newer ditan and gepant drugs were rated less highly

Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered orbit red dwarf stars. This isn’t because red dwarfs are somehow special, simply that they are common. About 75% of the stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs, so you would expect red dwarf planets to be the most abundant. This also means that most habitable worlds are going to orbit these small, cool stars, and that has some significant consequences for our search for life.

To begin with, any potentially habitable red dwarf world will need to orbit their star closely, just to be warm enough for things like liquid water. The TRAPPIST-1 system I talked about yesterday is a good example of this. The three potentially habitable planets of the system orbit at a small fraction of the distance between Mercury and the Sun. This means they are at risk of things such as stellar flares, but it also means they are almost certainly tidally locked.

Tidal locking occurs when a planet or moon is so close to its companion that tidal forces cause its rotation to sync with its orbital motion. When a planet is tidally locked, one side always faces its star while the other side is forever in darkness. As you might imagine, this would mean the warm side fries while the other freezes. That’s true unless the planet were to have a good atmosphere. With a water-rich Earth-like atmosphere heat could move between the day and night sides. Weather would be strange on such a world, but a tidally locked world could be habitable, with fairly even day-side and night-side temperatures.

How clouds could make a planet appear airless. Credit: Powell, et al

Observing the atmospheres of tidally locked planets is difficult, but astronomers have a trick to see whether an atmosphere exists. Rather than trying to capture an atmospheric spectra, they can simply measure the surface temperature of the planet on opposite sides. So, look at the star as the planet moves in front of it to determine the temperature of the dark side, and look at it again as the planet moves behind the star to get the light side temperature. If the dark and light sides have dramatically different temperatures, then it must not have an atmosphere. Easy-peasy. But a new study shows that isn’t necessarily true.

In this paper the authors argue that clouds on the dark side of a world could skew our data. To show this, they considered a tidally locked world with a thick atmosphere. Based on their models, the atmosphere would moderate global temperatures on the planet so that the day side is only a few dozen degrees warmer than the dark side. This is similar to the day and night extremes of a dry region on Earth. While moderate, the temperature shift would be enough to trigger the formation of thick clouds on the dark side.

In this scenario, the day side would be mostly cloudless and we would measure the warm temperature of the planet’s surface. But with a cloudy dark side we would measure temperature of the upper layer of clouds, which would be much colder. So even though surface temperatures of the planet are fairly uniform, it would appear to have an extreme temperature shift like an airless world. The authors go on to look at how observations from the JWST could distinguish between cloudy planets and those without an atmosphere, but it is clear that one simple trick in the search for habitable planets isn’t quite so simple.

Reference: Powell, Diana, Robin Wordsworth, and Karin Öberg. “Nightside Clouds on Tidally-locked Terrestrial Planets Mimic Atmosphere-Free Scenarios.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.07542 (2024).

The post Exoplanets Could be Hiding Their Atmospheres appeared first on Universe Today.

Today we have LEOPARD photos taken by Phil Frymire, whom I met in the line for the plane from Newark to Johannesburg. Someone said, as I perused the line, “Are you Jerry Coyne?” I was shocked, but it turned out that Phil and his brother read this site and recognized me. My 5 minutes of fame!  Phil’s IDs captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

My brother and I visited South Africa at the same time as our host. We stayed at Kambaku River Sands lodge in the Timbavati Nature Preserve and at Mala Mala Sable Camp. Kambaku River Sands is about 35 miles northwest of Manyeleti (where Jerry visited) and Mala Mala is about 12 miles south of Manyeleti. The routine at both lodges was very similar to what Jerry described for Manyeleti. Here are a selection of leopard (Panthera pardus) photos which also include some unfortunate impalas (Aepyceros melampus). The first six photos are from Timbavati and the last five are from Mala Mala.

This leopard was eating an impala she had killed and cached up a tree when part of the carcass fell onto some lower limbs. She slipped briefly when retrieving it, hence the expression. A lone hyena was lurking below, hoping in vain for scraps.

Another Timbavati female:

The same cat in a different pose:

This cub was stashed up a tree about 30 yards away from its mother:

This female was relaxing in between bites of impala. What is she thinking?:

This is a screenshot of a video I took. We missed this leopard’s taking of an impala by only a couple of minutes. When we came upon the scene, it was dragging its prey, looking for a suitable tree to store the kill. We found out later that hyenas had stolen the carcass.

Closeup of another Mala Mala female:

She was part of a mating pair. The larger male is on the right:

A Mala Mala female:

Her nearby cub:

Just above the mother and cub, in a dense tree, you can see the disembodied head of her impala victim: