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Researchers have unveiled a vision system inspired by feline eyes to enhance object detection in various lighting conditions. Featuring a unique shape and reflective surface, the system reduces glare in bright environments and boosts sensitivity in low-light scenarios. By filtering unnecessary details, this technology significantly improves the performance of single-lens cameras, representing a notable advancement in robotic vision capabilities.

Researchers produced 3D-printed, semiconductor-free logic gates, which perform computations in active electronic devices. As they don't require semiconductor materials, they represent a step toward 3D printing an entire active electronic device.

If you’ve been teaching at the college level for a number of years, and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon discussed in this new Atlantic article (archived here). The phenomenon is that students just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span.

I noticed this years ago when teaching introductory evolution. I asked the students to read one book: On the Origin of Species by Darwin. Granted, it’s a large and sometimes tedious book, but it’s also the most important biology book ever written, and of course relevant to my topic.

The students hated it. They said it was too long and they didn’t cotton on to the Victorian prose.  So, after that failure, I found a condensed version (it might have been this one, about half the length of the original).  But that didn’t fly either. It turned out that the students just didn’t want to read any books, and I didn’t probe further to find out why. I simply gave up asking the students to read Darwin.

Now there aren’t many biology courses in which students have to read any books beyond the textbook (if even that), but when I was in college it was normal to read at least half a dozen books for a humanities course–sometimes one per week. As the article below says, however, they no longer even do that. They read fewer books or, more often, sections of books.

You can guess the most important reason!

Some excerpts:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Oy!  But why have high schools stopped assigning books? This just pushes the problem back to earlier education.

 Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot. No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

14 lines—too much!  But we all know the reason: DEVICES!

Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

Those statistics are depressing.

So now students read excerpts instead of books, and there’s a price to pay for that (see below). Another problem is a growing disparity between students educated at fancy private high schools and “regular” high schools.

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

The article goes on like this, getting more and more depressing, and winding up with the consequences of not reading books:

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

. . . I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

If Horowitch is right in her conclusion—and I think the trend will continue because there is no end in sight of students glued to “devices”—people will lose their skills at relating to other people. I already see signs of this in young people texting instead of phoning. Actually talking to someone is a dying practice, and talking in real time surely leads to better understanding of and communication with other people. Texting is the ultimate condensed reading, even using abbreviations like “BRB” or “l8r”.

Perhaps I sound like an old curmudgeon, but blame it on Horowitch. I myself have gained infinitely from reading, though I won’t claim that it’s made me more empathic or understanding.  All I can say is that it’s made my world richer, with nonfiction being educational and fiction plucking the strings of emotion. It’s also helped teach me to write, for how can you learn to write well without seeing how others have done it. I simply can’t imagine a world built entirely on texting and reading devices.

Right now I’m reading a fiction book so full of emotion and pain that I can’t do more than thirty pages a night. It’s a masterpiece at depicting the human condition. If you’re up for 700 pages, try this one: (clink cover for Amazon link).

And now, I suppose, we should extol reading by telling each other what books we’re reading, or which ones we’ve especially liked.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss477_Terry_Sejnowski_2024_10_15.mp3 Download MP3

In ChatGPT and the Future of AI, the sequel to The Deep Learning Revolution, Terrence Sejnowski offers a nuanced exploration of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and what their future holds. How should we go about understanding LLMs? Do these language models truly understand what they are saying? Or is it possible that what appears to be intelligence in LLMs may be a mirror that merely reflects the intelligence of the interviewer? In this book, Sejnowski, a pioneer in computational approaches to understanding brain function, answers all our urgent questions about this astonishing new technology.

Sejnowski begins by describing the debates surrounding LLMs’ comprehension of language and exploring the notions of “thinking” and “intelligence.” He then takes a deep dive into the historical evolution of language models, focusing on the role of transformers, the correlation between computing power and model size, and the intricate mathematics shaping LLMs. Sejnowski also provides insight into the historical roots of LLMs and discusses the potential future of AI, focusing on next-generation LLMs inspired by nature and the importance of developing energy-efficient technologies.

Grounded in Sejnowski’s dual expertise in AI and neuroscience, ChatGPT and the Future of AI is the definitive guide to understanding the intersection of AI and human intelligence.

Terrence J. Sejnowski is Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Distinguished Professor at the University of California at San Diego. He has published over 500 scientific papers and 12 books, including The Computational Brain with Patricia Churchland. He was instrumental in shaping the BRAIN Initiative that was announced by the White House in 2013, and he received the prestigious Gruber Prize in Neuroscience in 2022.

Sejnowski and Shermer discuss:

• Large Language Models
• ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-5 and beyond
• What is AI and AGI?
• The alignment problem
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it have?
• What is thinking?
• How brains evolved
• Reverse engineering brains
• How language evolved
• Artificial intelligence and natural intelligence
• Emotions, mind, and sentience
• What is “mind”, “thinking”, and “consciousness”, and how do molecules and matter give rise to such nonmaterial processes?
• The hard problem of consciousness
• The self and other minds
• How would we know if an AI system was sentient?
• Can AI systems be conscious?
• Does Watson know that it beat the great Ken Jennings in Jeopardy!?
• Self-driving cars
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it
• AI as an existential threat
• Why there is no such thing as “the” singularity. There are lots of them and we’ve already experienced them and will continue to do so.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

Friends who blow hot and cold put more strain on your physical and mental health than enemies. Here's how to spot them and handle them

Puppies that are raised in someone's home seem to benefit from that extra human interaction, by asking for help at a younger age than those brought up in kennels

As I reported earlier, last Friday anti-Israel protesters at the University of Chicago went wild, vandalizing our Henry Moore sculpture and the surrounding area with spray paint, putting up illegal banners, trying to lock the main northern gate to the campus, and battling with police (three protesters were arrested). University of Chicago United for Palestine (UCUP) issued a document (below) explaining their actions.

And they also put an “installation” on the Quad, consisting of a tent. It’s clearly designed to evoke the Encampment of last year, and has a sign saying “We are still here and Palestine is still here”.  According to the placard, the tent should be down by today. It’s authorized free speech, but I can’t say that it doesn’t make me queasy. Another year of demonstrations, Jew hatred, and disruptions seems to be in the offing.

The installation, photographed by a member of the University community:

UChicago United for Palestine, a group of students that includes the Students for Justice in Palestine, also put up a Google Document declaring their intentions and motivations. This too is free speech, but to me it’s nauseating. Click headline to read:

It’s the same boilerplate activism, but I noticed the repeated use of the words “Zionist entity” to refer to “Israel”, with the latter word hardly being used at all (and not capitalized when it is). The new term is of course meant to deny the existence of Israel, and also to suggest that it’s an artificial entity, i.e., that Jews aren’t indigenous to the area that is now Israel.

Some excerpts. First, the opening two paragraphs, nearly every word of which is a lie:

It has been more than a year since israel commenced its genocidal assault on Gaza. Armed and enabled by the US government, the Zionist entity has slaughtered more than 42,000 captive Palestinians within this timeframe while also systematically destroying Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and killing tens of thousands more by starvation and preventable disease. Nor has israel’s genocidal rampage been limited to Gaza—Zionist forces have murdered hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank within this timeframe, aggressively expanded israel’s settlement enterprise, and launched repeated attacks on Yemen, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq.

In the past week, israel’s aggression both in Gaza and across the region has reached unprecedented heights. As part of its ongoing effort to ethnically cleanse and erase Northern Gaza, it has imposed a total siege on the area, preventing all food and aid from entering it for the past 13 days. Deliberately assassinating journalists in the northern Gaza Strip, few bravely remain to broadcast to the world. Simultaneously, Israel [they forgot to use a small “i”] has launched an all-out invasion into Lebanon, displacing over a million Lebanese citizens and slaughtering nearly 2,000 in recent weeks. 

Below: a vow to disrupt the University of Chicago.  Unfortunately, the demands they list will not be met by the University, so their demonstrations are futile. I think they know this, which is why they act out, yelling, attacking cops, and vandalizing University property.  Will they be taken any more seriously after throwing red paint on a Henry Moore sculpture? I doubt it.

Note that they say Israel is conducting a “war of expansion in Lebanon”, which is simply a lie showing their willful ignorance of history. Do they not know about UN Resolution 1701 or Hezbollah’s repeated rocket attacks on Israel for a year?

UChicago United for Palestine called this action to interrupt business as usual at the University of Chicago, whose financial and institutional ties with the Zionist entity mirror its objective role as a colonial outpost on Chicago’s South Side—gentrifying neighborhoods and surveilling, policing, and displacing the people who live here. Our experiences during last year’s encampment taught us that our demands—disclosure, divestment, and repair—would not be taken seriously without demonstrating our willingness and ability to use every means at our disposal, including suspending the daily operation of the university. We called this action in conjunction with an international movement against a civil society, state, and international order that prop up the Zionist entity, facilitate its genocide in Palestine, and enable its war of expansion in Lebanon.

Their attack on the statue, which is far more than a celebration of the University’s involvement in developing nuclear weapons. Read what the sculptor said about it.  

More from the document, in which UChicago United swears “to pick apart this university”:

On the afternoon of October 11th, following a rally that drew more than 150 students, community members, and faculty, protestors locked the main gate of the University of Chicago shut before hanging a banner reading “FREE PALESTINE – HANDS OFF LEBANON.” This was the first of a series of autonomous actions that marked the end of the Week of Rage for Palestine and Lebanon, as we passed a year of genocide in Gaza. 

Protestors later marched to a statue commemorating the University’s involvement in the development of the nuclear bomb. A speaker said: “Today, Palestine and Lebanon are being used as the testing grounds of technologies built by universities like this one.” Tags reading FREE GAZA, FUCK THE BOMBS, and KEEP ESCALATING proliferated, and balloons full of paint were thrown at the statue. He continued: “our ultimate message today is that we can pick apart this university, and when we do, we can build something better in its place.” When the crowd regrouped and began to march north to disperse, UCPD cut into the middle of the march, targeting several protestors.

They then recount their battle with cops from the University as well as Chicago city cops, and make clear that their enemies are not just the University of Chicago, but America in general. At least they admit that!  Good luck with dismantling America!  But Americans should realize that the aspirations of the organized nationwide demonstrations go far beyond erasing Israel, extending to the erasure of Western democracies.

. . . . Whether on campus, in the city, or in the street, the Palestine movement must recognize and confront its enemies: the university, the police, American civil society, and the state, all of which collaborate to facilitate dispossession, land theft, and occupation at home and abroad. The people who locked the gate did so to shut down a university that has refused to even acknowledge the destruction of all Gazan universities, much less the ongoing genocide. It symbolized how, while we walk to class every day, the schools in Gaza are bombed, while israel’s genocide against Palestinians continues and the university remains materially and intellectually invested. Protestors painted the nuclear bomb statue red to expose the university’s culpability in the nuclear weapons program, a fact they memorialize through a statue that was explicitly designed to reflect “the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, but also ha[ve] the shape and eye sockets of a skull”—mirrored in the present by its ‘neutral’ research and development programs which directly abet the slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon.

They end by promising to disrupt the campus until Palestine is free.  For them that will be, well, forever, for “Palestine” includes Israel (aka “the Zionist entity”), and Am Yisrael Chai:

. . . We will never stop fighting as long as [Palestinians] face genocide and occupation. We will remain steadfast and committed in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and the cause of all those who face brutal violence and occupation from UCPD and CPD every day. And we will not stop fighting until Palestine is free!

I hope they’re prepared for a long and futile battle. They’ve already lost on campus, and, as Israel slowly wins the war in Gaza and Lebanon, they’ll become increasingly angry that they haven’t removed the Zionist entity “from the river to the sea.”

In June, physicist and origami master Robert Lang went on a Center for Inquiry cruise in the Arctic, visiting the isolated islands of that area as well as Iceland. The cruise headlined Richard Dawkins, and I was offered a last-minute berth, but it seemed too late to me, and now I much regret not going. But Robert has sent two batches of photos from tbe trip, and I’ll show the first one—the flowers of Iceland—this morning.

Robert’s narrative and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Iceland (and Elsewhere) Flowers

Living and working on the edge of the Southern California chaparral, I have a fondness for pretty wildflowers surviving in harsh places, and a recent shipboard trip from Ireland to Iceland provided a few nice examples of mostly unfamiliar blooms. (All IDs thanks to iNaturalist.)

After leaving Ireland and visiting Scotland, we visited islands with progressively harsher climate (though all are moderated by the Gulf Stream—at least, until the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation breaks down). On Shetland, we encountered Cuckooflower (Cardamine pratensis). It’s native throughout Europe and Western Asia:

Then on to the Faroe Islands. There we found Lawn daisy (Bellis perennis), another common European species of daisy:

From there, on to Iceland, the land of fire and ice! We saw plenty of the latter, but didn’t get close enough to see the former, though we did see plenty of its aftereffects in the geography and hot springs.

Near Höfn, we stopped at the base of one of the many glaciers draining the Vatnajokull ice cap; it ended in a small lake surrounded by scree and glacial till that was mostly bare but dotted here and there with lovely little clusters of flowers, starting with this Alpine cinquefoil (Potentilla crantzii):

Next is Sea thrift (Armeria maritima) (I think—iNat suggests this, but still waiting for human confirmation). It grows all over Europe and is also a popular garden or cut flower:

Moss campion (Silene acaulis) is another lovely cluster of tiny flowers that is common all over the high arctic and tundra:

Another campion, Sea campion (Silene uniflora) has larger flowers and interesting hollow vessels at the base of the flowers. (There was another variety of campion that looked similar in iNat; this one looked slightly closer):

From falling ice to falling water. Another stop was one of Iceland’s famous waterfalls, Goðafoss. There’s a lot of melting ice in Iceland, and it makes for many, many spectacular waterfalls (over 10,000 of them, according to Wikipedia). Here’s one of them:

The waterfall is vast and the vistas are sweeping, but there’s also beauty to be found at our very feet, including some of the biggest dandelion flowers I’ve ever seen. Dandelions (Taraxcum sp.) are found worldwide, but the ones in my yard are pretty tiny; this one and its brethren were something like 2” across:

One of the sights of Icelands is the Dimmuborgir lava field, a landscape of twisted spires of lava that originally formed underwater as upwelling lava tubes. There I saw this Eight-petal Mountain-Avens (Dryas octopetala), whose common and Latin names both make reference to its eight petals. An unusual thing, because it’s a member of the Rosaceae, whose petals usually come in five (unless they’ve been bred for more, like ornamental roses):

Marsh marigold (Caltha palustris) is found all over temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. These were growing  near a different waterfall, Dynjandi, which is almost unreal: it pours off of the edge of a cliff some 30 meters wide:

Dynjandi:

Last, the Nootka lupine (Lupinus nootkatensis). It’s native to North America, but was introduced into Iceland where it has spread widely. It’s now considered something of a nuisance, but it sure is a pretty nuisance:

Next: Icelandic birds and other critters.

Ever since the advent of space exploration we have seen some amazing images of the planets. New technology often brings with it a new perspective and we have been reminded of this again just recently with images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)  and New Horizons spacecraft. The two objects simultaneously imaged Uranus from different perspectives in an attempt to predict what astronomers would see when they look at exoplanets orbiting other stars. 

Uranus is the 7th planet from the Sun and is recognisable for its wonderful blue-green colour. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1781 and since then we have been probing its secrets with telescopes and space probes alike. Like the other outermost planets, Uranus is a giant ball of gas and its the presence of methane in its atmosphere that gives it the striking colour. It’s unusual among the other planets since it seems to rotate around the Sun with an axial tilt of 98 degrees so it has really quite extreme seasons. 

This zoomed-in image of Uranus, captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) Feb. 6, 2023, reveals stunning views of the planet’s rings. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI IMAGE PROCESSING: Joseph DePasquale (STScI).

HST and New Horizons have recently turned their gaze on Uranus but for a somewhat unusual project, to help develop imaging techniques for exoplanets. Directly imaging the distant alien worlds is tricky simply due to their distance and often due to their proximity to the host star. It’s of great importance to be able to study them directly to be able to learn more about their nature and possible habitability. Directly imaging exoplanets often just reveals pinpoints of light so researchers have used Uranus as a ‘proxy’ exoplanet to explore new imaging methods. 

The New Horizons instrument payload that is currently doing planetary science, heliospheric measurements, and astrophysical observations. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Uranus was chosen because the majority of exoplanets are gas giants and similar in nature. It was also chosen as New Horizons was on the far side of Uranus at the time of observation placing it 10.5 billion kilometres away. From its vantage point, New Horizons would see a crescent Uranus, a phase often seen on exoplanets when they are at their furthermost point from their star. They used the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera to grab the images with Uranus covering just a few pixels, much like an exoplanet when viewed from Earth. 

While New Horizons was taking its images, HST which was just 2.7 billion km away and with its high quality cameras could capture a fabulous amount of detail in the atmosphere. By comparing the two images, the researchers have been able to see how atmospheric features appear in the New Horizon data to help learn about exoplanet observations. The team found that both HST and New Horizons saw that the brightness did not vary as the planet rotated which revealed that the cloud features were not changing with the rotation of the planet.

This image of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was taken on May 19, 2009 after deployment during Servicing Mission 4. NASA

They also found that New Horizons showed exoplanets are likely to seem dimmer than predicted at partial and high phase angles. This means that a gas planet like Uranus reflects light differently at partial phases when compared to others. The results are a testimony to the wonderfully insightful approach to cracking an existing challenge in modern astronomy; The direct study of exoplanets. Over the coming years telescopes like Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope which is due for launch in 2027 has the ability to block out light to enable direct observations of exoplanets. This latest study will help to interpret the data revealed in future studies.

Source : NASA’s Hubble, New Horizons Team Up for a Simultaneous Look at Uranus

The post Hubble and New Horizons Look at Uranus at the Same Time appeared first on Universe Today.

A group of frogs from Madagascar have mating calls that sound like Star Trek sound effects – now their species names honour captains from the series

This buried rock wall found throughout Rockwall County has people wondering about its origin.

Hangovers: a problem with only one solution.

The post Hungover first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

From brighter TV screens to better medical diagnostics and more efficient solar panels, new research has discovered how to make more molecules stick to the surface of tiny nanocrystals, in a breakthrough that could lead to improvements in everyday technology.

From brighter TV screens to better medical diagnostics and more efficient solar panels, new research has discovered how to make more molecules stick to the surface of tiny nanocrystals, in a breakthrough that could lead to improvements in everyday technology.

The future of wireless technology -- from charging devices to boosting communication signals -- relies on the antennas that transmit electromagnetic waves becoming increasingly versatile, durable and easy to manufacture. Researchers believe kirigami, the ancient Japanese art of cutting and folding paper to create intricate three-dimensional designs, could provide a model for manufacturing the next generation of antennas.

The future of wireless technology -- from charging devices to boosting communication signals -- relies on the antennas that transmit electromagnetic waves becoming increasingly versatile, durable and easy to manufacture. Researchers believe kirigami, the ancient Japanese art of cutting and folding paper to create intricate three-dimensional designs, could provide a model for manufacturing the next generation of antennas.

At high altitudes, global warming is having its strongest effect on winter temperatures – and that might mean soils there store can less carbon than we expected

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft today began its six-year cruise to the Jupiter system, with the goal of determining whether one of the giant planet’s moons has the right stuff in the right setting for life.

The van-sized probe was sent into space from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 12:06 p.m. ET (16:06 UTC). A little more than an hour after launch, the spacecraft separated from its launch vehicle to begin a roundabout journey of 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) from Earth orbit to Europa.

For decades, scientists have been collecting evidence that Europa harbors a hidden ocean of salty water beneath its icy shell. Or are they hidden lakes? Europa Clipper is built to characterize the moon’s surface, and what’s beneath that surface, to an unprecedented degree.

The spacecraft won’t actually land on Europa. Instead, it will document the moon’s chemical composition, magnetic field, gravity field and subsurface structure over the course of four years, during 49 flybys that will pass as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers) above the surface.

“Europa Clipper carries the most sophisticated suite of instruments that we’ve ever sent to the outer solar system,” mission project scientist Bob Pappalardo said during today’s webcast.

“It carries a radar that can penetrate through ice like a CAT scan to find liquid water,” he said. “Super-high-resolution imaging will be able to look for warm spots, plumes at Europa — all these wonderful techniques that combine together to tell us, ‘Could Europa be the kind of place that could support life today?'”

Europa Clipper is the most massive interplanetary probe built for NASA, with a fueled-up weight of 13,000 pounds (6,000 kilograms). Putting the spacecraft on its proper trajectory required so much oomph that there wasn’t enough propellant left over for the recovery of SpaceX’s rocket afterward.

Getting the spacecraft off the pad was an odyssey in itself: This summer, mission planners worried that the probe’s radiation shielding wasn’t strong enough to protect its electronics, but those concerns were eased. Last week, Hurricane Milton forced a postponement of the Florida launch, but after the storm passed, NASA and SpaceX gave the all-clear for today’s attempt. During the countdown, the launch team detected — and successfully resolved — a last-minute temperature anomaly on the Falcon Heavy’s second stage.

On its way to the Jupiter system, Europa Clipper will rely on gravity boosts provided during a flyby of Mars next March, and during an Earth flyby at the end of 2026.

Once the spacecraft gets to its destination in 2030, it will fly over Europa repeatedly, following a flight path that’s meant to minimize exposure to the intense emissions from Jupiter’s radiation belts.

Europa Clipper’s science instruments include visible-light, ultraviolet and infrared cameras that will map the ridges and cracks in Europa’s surface — and check for thermal clues that could point to upwellings of liquid water.

Spectrometers will determine the chemical composition of the surface ice and “sniff” Europa’s thin atmosphere. Ice-penetrating radar and a gravity field detector will map Europa’s internal structure. Two instruments will chart the magnetic field, producing data that could confirm the depth and salinity of Europa’s subsurface ocean. A dust analyzer will sample the material that’s thrown up from the surface, to track down its composition and figure out where it’s coming from.

The spacecraft is also carrying a radiation-shielding plate that is decorated with graphical representations of the word “water” in 103 languages — in recognition of Europa’s status as a water world — plus a poem for Europa, celestial equations and other tributes. The names of 2.6 million people around the world have been etched in microscopic letters onto a silicon chip that’s attached to the plate, thanks to a “Message in a Bottle” campaign organized by NASA.

Is there life in Europa’s hidden ocean? Scientists say the $5.2 billion Europa Clipper mission shouldn’t be expected to answer that question definitively. “We’re not looking for life itself. We’re just looking for an environment in which life could thrive,” Kate Craft, a staff scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a video about the mission from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Nevertheless, the data could produce some surprises.

NASA has already started looking into the possibility of sending a robotic lander to Europa to follow up on findings from the Europa Clipper mission. Such a lander could sample the ice to a depth of, say, 4 inches (10 centimeters) — and look for signs of life in those samples using a microscope and other lab instruments.

The post Europa Clipper Begins Odyssey to Assess Jovian Moon’s Habitability appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA's Europa Clipper has embarked on its long voyage to Jupiter, where it will investigate Europa, a moon with an enormous subsurface ocean that may have conditions to support life. The largest spacecraft NASA ever built for a mission headed to another planet, Europa Clipper also is the first NASA mission dedicated to studying an ocean world beyond Earth.

The early Universe continues to offer surprises and the latest observations of infant galaxies are no exception. Astronomers found a surprisingly Milky Way-like galaxy that existed more than 13 billion years ago. That was a time when the Universe was really just an infant and galaxies should still be early in their formation. A well-formed one in such early history is a bit of a surprise.

The newly discovered galaxy is called REBELS-25. It was found as part of the “Reionization Era Bright Emission Line Survey (REBELS) survey using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. The idea of the survey is to search out and measure early galaxies.

REBELS-24 is a massive disc-like galaxy with structures that look like spiral arms. That’s pretty similar to our Milky Way Galaxy. It’s more than 13 billion years old and took billions of years to evolve into its present shape. Like REBELS-25, the Milky Way began as a clumpy, disorganized proto-galaxy not long after the Universe began. It merged with other protogalaxies and evolved into a beautiful spiral shape. It appears to be actively forming stars and is incredibly massive for such a young galaxy.

Early Spirals Aren’t New

So, REBELS-25 raises a big question: why is it so massive and well-evolved at a time when the infant Milky Way was still a clump? That’s what astronomers are working to figure out. “According to our understanding of galaxy formation, we expect most early galaxies to be small and messy looking,” said Jacqueline Hodge, an astronomer at Leiden University, the Netherlands. The fact that REBELS-25 looks so “modern” after less than a billion years does—in a sense—rebel against the generally accepted theories about galaxy formation and evolution.

This isn’t the first time that astronomical observations uncovered early spirals. JWST observations suggest that perhaps a third of early galaxies are already spirals in the infant Universe. Its Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS) found many of these in the first 700 million years of cosmic history. So, finding this one looking almost “modern” some 13 billion years ago just adds to the mystery of their formation.

REBELS-25 showed up in ALMA observations, which also gave hints that it had a rotating disk. A set of follow-up observations confirmed the rotation of this galaxy and its spiral arm structures. In addition, the ALMA data found hints of a central bar (just like our Milky Way galaxy has). “ALMA is the only telescope in existence with the sensitivity and resolution to achieve this,” said Renske Smit, a researcher at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK and part of the team that worked on this discovery.

The ALMA data produced an image of REBELS-25 (left) and a map of gas motions in this galaxy which lies more than 13 billion light-years away. Blue coloring indicates movement towards Earth. Red indicates movement away from Earth, with a darker shade representing faster movement. In this case, the red-blue divide of the image shows clearly that the object is rotating, making REBELS-25 the most distant and early (13 billion years old) rotating disc galaxy ever discovered. Courtesy ESO.

Surprisingly, the ALMA data also hinted at more developed features similar to those of the Milky Way. It looks like there’s a central elongated bar, and even spiral arms in REBELS0-25. “Seeing a galaxy with such similarities to our own Milky Way, that is strongly rotation-dominated, challenges our understanding of how quickly galaxies in the early Universe evolve into the orderly galaxies of today’s cosmos,” said Lucie Rowland, a doctoral student at Leiden University who led the research into REBELS-25. “Finding further evidence of more evolved structures would be an exciting discovery, as it would be the most distant galaxy with such structures observed to date.”

What Does This Mean for Galaxy Evolution?

As astronomers discover more of these well-evolved galaxies in the early Universe, they’ll have to adjust the working model of galactic birth and evolution. In that model, the baby galaxies are clumps of stars and gas that come together in collisions and cannibalism to form larger galaxies. It’s typically considered a messy and turbulent time in cosmic history. Infant galaxies collided and grew. They combined their stars and gases to make larger structures. Over time they begin to rotate, which also influences the formation of structures inside the galaxy. Further collisions add more mass to the galaxy, and they also spur bursts of star formation. All of this takes billions of years to accomplish. Or so astronomers always thought.

REBELS-25 and other early spirals challenge that general model. For one thing, REBELS-25 looks like a galaxy that’s evolving at an accelerated pace. Compared to the Milky Way’s ponderous billions of years of evolution, REBELS-25 is going at warp speed. That implies something is pushing that acceleration. T he big thing now will be to explain its advanced evolution at a very young age.

The REBELS program should help astronomers understand more about the processes at work only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. That survey will supply large enough amounts of data about high-mass galaxies in the early Universe. Those samples should allow astronomers to do targeted studies of more galaxies using both ALMA and JWST. Both observatories are powerful enough to give detailed looks at individual galaxies in those very early epochs of cosmic history.

For More Information

Space Oddity: Most Distant Rotating Disc Galaxy Found (PR)
Space oddity: Most Distant Rotating Disc Galaxy Found (the paper)
About REBELS

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