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Astronomers have directed NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to examine the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy. Scientists call this region the Extreme Outer Galaxy due to its location more than 58,000 light-years away from the Galactic Center. (For comparison, Earth is approximately 26,000 light-years from the center.)

Researchers mined the molecular foundations of cancer and uncovered a new reason chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T cell therapy) fails in some patients. This discovery has fueled new strategies that incorporate antibodies and gene editing to improve the outcome of this breakthrough treatment for patients.

Researchers have been able to initiate a controlled movement in the very heart of an atom. They caused the atomic nucleus to interact with one of the electrons in the outermost shells of the atom. This electron could be manipulated and read out through the needle of a scanning tunneling microscope. The research offers prospects for storing quantum information inside the nucleus, where it is safe from external disturbances.

Researchers have been able to initiate a controlled movement in the very heart of an atom. They caused the atomic nucleus to interact with one of the electrons in the outermost shells of the atom. This electron could be manipulated and read out through the needle of a scanning tunneling microscope. The research offers prospects for storing quantum information inside the nucleus, where it is safe from external disturbances.

A research team has made a major discovery by designing molecules that could revolutionize computing.

An area of missing Antarctic sea ice twice the size of Texas adds to concerns that the ice has seen a lasting “regime shift”, with consequences for ecosystems and global ocean circulation

A new book looks at the latest scientific insights versus a key question in astronomy and space science.

It’s tough to answer a scientific question, with a just data point of one. How special are we, and how common (or rare) is the story of how life arose on the Earth in the grander drama of the cosmos?

A new book out this week entitled Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life by Mario Livio and Jack Szostak looks at the scientific state of answering this key question. The book offers a sweeping view of the nascent science of astrobiology, a multi-disciplinary field melding biology, chemistry, astronomy and more.

Astrophysicist Mario Livio is also the author of Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein, Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists that Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe and The Equation That Couldn’t be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry.

Co-author and Nobel laureate Jack Szostak worked on the Human Genome Project and was the co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for discovering how telomeres defend chromosomes.

The basic premise of the book looks at the riddle of how the basic building blocks of life—from amino acids, RNA and the first cells—emerged on Earth. Could the same processes by common elsewhere?

An artist’s conception, of an Earth analog. Credit: NASA

Remember Rare Earth from about 20 years back? That book definitely made ripples in the fledgling field of astrobiology, by positing that a series of rare circumstances led to life to arise on the Earth. Is Earth Exceptional? Updates the science on this question and debate a generation later.

Exceptional Earth

The book doesn’t shy away from some pretty extensive organic chemistry in the first half. It’s rather tantalizing to researchers that simple life came into existence almost as soon as the conditions were ready for it. Was this a fluke, or a cosmic imperative? The chemistry of primordial life is a big mystery. Is Earth Exceptional looks at the latest findings, and what breakthroughs may be imminent in the field of astrobiology.

We live in an amazing time, a golden age of astronomy that may give us hard answers to these questions in our lifetimes. SETI searches, exoplanet surveys, and space telescopes such as TESS, JWST and the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope (set to launch in 2027) could bare fruit this century. The book points out that even a null result—however disappointing—could still be profound.

JWST’s direct views of an exoplanet. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/Alyssa Pagan(STScI)

The answer could come from missions to worlds in our own solar system searching for signs of life past or present on Mars, Europa or Titan. The book deals with prospects for life on worlds in our solar system, and implications of such a discovery. Farther afield, detections of signs in exoplanet spectra could also herald the detection of exobiology on distant worlds.

An artist’s conception of ‘Orbilander’ on the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Credit: NASA

For example, we now have the ability to see what’s known as the Vegetation Red Edge. This would be a very strong hint that photosynthesis was afoot via chlorophyll. This is a molecule that—as far as we know—only arises due to life.

A conceptualization of Earth’s ‘Red Edge’ due to vegetation. Credit: NASA

All amazing thoughts to consider, as you read Is Earth Special and ponder the state of modern astrobiology.

The post Book Review: Is Earth Exceptional? appeared first on Universe Today.

I have written previously about the concept of structural batteries, such as this recent post on a concrete battery. The basic idea is a battery made out of material that is strong enough that it can bare a load. Essentially we’re asking the material to do two things at once – be a structural material and be a battery. I am generally wary of such approaches to technology as you often wind up with something that is bad at two things, rather than simply optimizing each function.

In medicine, for example, I generally don’t like combo medications – a single pill with two drugs meant to take together. I would rather mix and match the best options for each function. But sometimes there is such a convenience in the combination that it’s worth it. As with any technology, we have to consider the overall tradeoffs.

With structural batteries there is one huge gain – the weight and/or volume savings of having a material do double duty. The potential here is too great to ignore. For the concrete battery the advantage is about volume, not weight. The idea is to have the foundation of a building serve as individual or even grid power storage. For a structural battery that will save weight, we need a material is light and strong. One potential material is carbon fiber, which may be getting close to characteristics with practical applications.

Material scientists have created in the lab a carbon fiber battery material that could serve as a structural battery. Carbon fiber is a good substrate because it is light and strong, and also can be easily shaped as needed. Many modern jets are largely made out of carbon fiber for this reason. Of course you compromise the strength when you introduce materials needed for the energy storage, and these researchers have been working on achieving an optimal compromise. Their latest product has an elastic modulus that exceeds 76 GPa. For comparison, aluminum, which is also used for aircraft, has an elastic modulus of 70 GPa. Optimized carbon fiber has an elastic modulus of 200-500 GPa. Elastic modulus is one type of strength, specifically the resistance to non-permanent deformity. Being stronger than aluminum means it is in the range that is suitable for making lots of things, from laptops to airplanes.

How is the material as a battery? The basic features are good – it is stable, can last over 1000 cycles, and can be charged and discharged fast enough. But of course the key feature is energy density – their current version has an energy density of 30 Wh kg. For comparison, a typical Li Ion battery in an electric vehicle today has an energy density of 200-300 Wh kg. High end Amprius silicon anode Li ion batteries are up to 400-500 Wh kg.

So, as I said, the carbon fiber structural battery is essentially bad at two things. It is not as strong as regular carbon fiber, and it is not as good a battery as Li ion batteries. But is the combination worth it? If we run some numbers I think the answer right now is – probably not. What I don’t know is the cost to mass produce this material, which so far is just a laboratory proof of concept. All bets are off if the material is super expensive. But let’s assume cost is reasonable and focus on the weight and energy storage.

If, for example, we look at a typical electric vehicle how would the availability of this material be useful? It’s hard to say exactly because I would need to see the specs on a vehicle engineered to incorporate this material, but let’s do some rough estimates. A Tesla, for example, has a chassis made of steel and titanium, with a body that is almost entirely aluminum. So we can replace all the aluminum in such a vehicle with structural carbon fiber, which is stronger and lighter. Depending on the vehicle of course, we’re talking about 100kg of carbon fiber for the body of a car. The battery weighs about 500 kg. The carbon fiber battery has one tenth the specific energy as a Tesla Li ion battery, so 100 kg of carbon fiber battery would hold as much energy at 10 kg of battery. This would allow a reduction in the battery weight from 500 kg to 490 kg. That hardly seems worth it, for what is very likely to be a more expensive material than either the current battery or aluminum.

Of course you could beef up the frame, which could have the double advantage of making it stronger and longer lasting. Let’s say you have a triple thick 300 kg carbon fiber frame – that still only saves you 30 kg of battery. My guess is that we would need to get that energy density up to 100 Wh kg or more before the benefits start to become worth it.

The calculus changes, however, when we talk about electric aircraft. Here there is a huge range of models but just to throw out some typical figures – we could be talking about a craft that weighs 1,500 kg and battery that weight 2,000 kg. If the body of the craft were made out of structural carbon fiber, that could knock 150 kg off the weight of the battery, which for an aircraft is significant. For a commercial aircraft it might even be worth the higher cost of the plane, given the lower operating costs.

What about at the low end of the spectrum – say a laptop or smart phone? A laptop might be the sweet spot for this  type of material. If the case were made of a carbon fiber battery that could allow for a thinner and lighter laptop or it could extend the battery life of the laptop, both of which would be desirable. These are already expensive, and adding a bit to the overall cost to improve performance is likely something consumers will pay for. But of course the details matter.

Given all this – is the carbon fiber structural battery ready for commercial use? I think it’s marginal. It’s plausible for commercial electric aircraft and maybe laptops, depending on the ultimate manufacturing cost, and assuming no hidden gotchas in terms of material properties. We may be at the very low end of viability. Any improvement from this point, especially in energy density, makes it much more viable. Widespread adoption, such as in EVs, probably won’t come until we get to 100 Wh kg or more.

The post Carbon Fiber Structural Battery first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

New research suggests that cannabis use may be harmful and could be causing cardiovascular disease.

The post Cannabis use and cardiovascular disease first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A groundbreaking civilian spacewalk saw two astronauts partially exit a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule wearing a brand new design of spacesuit. Every previous spacewalk completed before this was performed by government-trained astronauts.

If you were standing on Mars as it was hit by a solar flare, you might be able to see an aurora just like on Earth

I’ve been an avid stargazer for a fair few decades now and not once have I seen anything that makes me believe we are being visited by aliens! My own experiences aside, there’s no evidence of alien visitations but it seems much of the population believes anything that they cannot immediately identify in the sky MUST be ailens. A new paper suggests there are costs associated with increasing claims such as disctractions to government programs and background noise that hampers science communication. How on Earth should we deal with it? If debunking doesn’t work, then maybe its time for a scientific investigation. 

Do you believe in aliens? It seems that a great proportion of the population does. That’s despite all the usual issues that those of us in science communication trot out to enrich the debate with a little factual information; everything is a long way away, the universe is actually quite young and so on and so on  Yet still we have a problem that a lot of people still think we are being visited by our cosmic cousins. 

With thousands of exoplanets discovered so far, astronomers are learning how different planets can be. What if intelligent alien civilizations arise on extremely different habitable worlds? Some civilizations could develop space exploration technologies, but others would be trapped underwater, under ice, or in enormous gravity wells. How could they escape? Image Credit: DALL-E

Tony Milligan from Kings College London, the author of a new paper into this very phenomenon says that it is ‘no longer a quirk but a widespread societel problem.’ He goes on to explain that it is really quite unusual because there is zero evidence that aliens even exist let alone travel to Earth. He cites the same arguments about the sheer scale of the Universe and how we are far more likely to start to engage and learn about them from remote observation. 

Somewhat worryingly is that the paper articulates almost a quarter of Americans have seen a UFO. This is then supported by a poll that shows 68% of people believe the US Government knows more about UFOs than they are letting on! Of course, and as I have often retorted in such discussions, if you see an aeroplane in the sky but don’t know it’s an aeroplane then it is indeed an Unidentified Flying Object. Doesn’t mean it’s an alien though! 

Screenshot from the “UFO Over Santa Clarita VFX Breakdown” video.

The essence of the report is that alien visitation claims become a problem when they do one of three things; 1 – move into mainstream debate in such a way that governments have to reply and respond to them; 2 – when they generate background noise which impedes science communication and 3 – when they become entangled with indigenous origin narratives, making it hard to recover the latter.

The rise of artificial intelligence and sheer volume of content in social media makes item 2 even more difficult to separate the proveribal wheat from the chaif. The paper concludes that there it is clear the popular belief in alien visitations makes it difficult to articulate and discuss such topics. Even bursts of debunking seem to fail to cut through the noise and certainly seem to show no sign of reducing it. The Moon landing is another great exmple where people that believe the landings were faked seem to have great trouble in accepting evidence when it is presented to them. 

There will come a time in the not too distant future, asserts Tony Milligan when it will require something of a more structured scientific research program to investigate and explore the concept. The time may not be now but in the near future a program can apply scientific rigour to the debate and perhaps provide an answer. 

Source : Equivocal Encounters: Alien Visitation Claims as a Societal Problem

The post Are Claims of Alien Visitation Causing a Problem to Society? appeared first on Universe Today.

A single dose of a smallpox vaccine seems to lower the risk of catching mpox by around 60 per cent, and two doses would probably be even better

Jupiter’s moon, Io, is the most volcanic body in the Solar System. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been getting closer and closer to Io in the last couple of years, giving us our first close-up images of the moon in 25 years.

Recent JunoCam images show a new volcano that appeared sometime after the Galileo spacecraft visited the region.

The new volcano is just south of Io’s equator. Since tidal heating from Jupiter causes Io’s volcanic activity, most volcanoes are in the moon’s equatorial region, within about 30 degrees north and south of the equator. When NASA’s Galileo spacecraft imaged the region where the new volcano was spotted in 1997, the surface was featureless.

The new volcano is near an existing volcano called Kanehekili. JunoCam’s image from April 2024 revealed multiple lava flows and volcanic deposits covering an area of about 180 kilometres by 180 kilometres.

The grey inset image shows what the Galileo spacecraft saw about 25 years ago. The larger colour image is from JunoCam and clearly shows a new volcano and lava flows. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Europlanet.

“Our recent JunoCam images show many changes on Io, including this large, complicated volcanic feature that appears to have formed from nothing since 1997,” said Michael Ravine. Ravine is the Advanced Projects Manager at Malin Space Science Systems, the company that built and operates JunoCam for NASA’s Juno mission.

Of course, the volcano didn’t form from nothing. Io is in a tough spot orbitally. Tidal friction from massive Jupiter, and some from its fellow moon Europa, is dissipated as orbital and heat energy in Io. In its sibling ocean moons like Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, the heat keeps their subsurface oceans in liquid form. But Io doesn’t have an ocean, so the heat causes magma to well up and break through the surface as volcanoes. Io has over 400 active volcanoes, and the surface is covered in sulphuric compounds from these eruptions, which give it its colours.

JunoCam’s best image of the region and the new volcano was taken on February 3rd, 2024, from a distance of about 2,530 km. The scale is about 1.7 km per pixel. In this image, Io is illuminated with sunlight reflected off of Jupiter.

This image shows the Galileo and JunoCam images sisde by side. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS.

There are unanswered questions about Io, its volcanism, and its interior composition. Scientists know that tidal heating from Jupiter is the moon’s primary heat source, but they aren’t certain how the heat is distributed inside. They are also uncertain about the extent of Io’s magma ocean.

They also want to know what initiates eruptions and what drives the different types of eruptions, like plumes, lava flows, and pyroclastic flows. There are unanswered questions about Io’s volcanic history and how often the surface is reshaped. There are no impact craters on Io, which means the surface must be young.

This schematic illustrates four competing explanations for Io’s interior and how tidal heating is dissipated. Though Juno won’t tell us which one is correct, every volcanic eruption is a piece of the puzzle. Image Credit: Chuck Carter and James Tuttle Keane / Keck Institute for Space Studies.

Researchers are also keen to understand how the gases from eruptions might affect the surface and the moon’s extremely thin atmosphere. Io’s volcanic activity has likely changed over time, and how that happens and what drives it are also unknown.

Answers to these questions will not only help us understand Io, but other rocky planets as well.

Juno’s discovery of a new volcano on Io is interesting, and its observations are a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge. However, Juno won’t provide the in-depth answers scientists seek. It has several more flybys of Io in the future, with the last one in 2025. Unfortunately, it’ll be getting further from the moon, and the last one will be at a distance of 94,000 km.

This graphic shows Juno’s orbits around Jupiter. PJ (perijove) 58 was its closest approach to Io, and as time goes on, its flybys will be more and more distant. Image Credit: Scott Bolton/SWRI

These images do highlight an important part of the Juno mission, though. The JunoCam isn’t a scientific instrument, strictly speaking. It was included for the rest of us, and the images are freely available for anyone to work on and post.

By spotting the new volcano, JunoCam has proven its scientific value.

The post Juno Sees a Brand New Volcano on Io appeared first on Universe Today.

Although stars are enormous, they’re extremely far away, and appear as point sources in telescopes. Usually, you never get to see more than a pixel. Now astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to resolve details on the surface of the star R Doradus and track its activity for 30 days. The images revealed giant, hot bubbles of gas 75 times larger than the entire Sun. R Doradus is 350 times larger than our Sun, but only 180 light-years away.

“This is the first time the bubbling surface of a real star can be shown in such a way,“ said Wouter Vlemmings, a professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and lead author of the study, in a press release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). “We had never expected the data to be of such high quality that we could see so many details of the convection on the stellar surface.”

In the study, published in Nature, the astronomers detailed how they observed R Doradus, a massive red supergiant star, over four weeks between July 2 and August 2, 2023. The observations were made using the longest available ALMA baselines. The images revealed a stellar disk with prominent small-scale features that provide the structure and motions of convection on the stellar surface.

Convection is the mixing of gas within a star, where heated gas from the interior of the star created by nuclear fusion in the core rises to the surface and the cooler, denser gas on the star’s photosphere sinks. This continuous motion also distributes the heavy elements formed in the core, such as carbon and nitrogen, throughout the star, and convection is also thought to be responsible for the stellar winds that carry these elements out into the cosmos to build new stars and planets.

“Convection creates the beautiful granular structure seen on the surface of our Sun, but it is hard to see on other stars,” said Theo Khouri, a researcher at Chalmers who is a co-author of the study. “With ALMA, we have now been able to not only directly see convective granules — with a size 75 times the size of our Sun! — but also measure how fast they move for the first time.”

While convection bubbles have been previously observed in detail on the surface of other stars, including another observation of a red giant star using with the PIONIER instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer, ALMA’s higher resolution allowed astronomers to track the motion of the bubbles in a way that was not possible with other telescopes.

The researchers found that the granules of R Doradus appear to move on a one-month cycle, which is faster than scientists expected based on how convection works in the Sun.

“We don’t yet know what is the reason for the difference. It seems that convection changes as a star gets older in ways that we don’t yet understand,” said Vlemmings. In their paper, the team wrote, “This indicates a possible difference between the convection properties of low-mass and high-mass evolved stars.”

This wide-field view, created from Digitized Sky Survey 2 images, shows the region around R Doradus, the bright, orange star in the centre. The star’s surface was recently imaged in detail using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin

Red giant stars are what become of main sequence stars like our Sun once they have exhausted their hydrogen fuel, and they expand to becomes hundreds of times their normal diameter. Since R Doradus has a mass similar to that of our Sun, this red giant star is likely a good example of how our Sun will look like in approximately five billion years.

“It is spectacular that we can now directly image the details on the surface of stars so far away, and observe physics that until now was mostly only observable in our Sun,” said Behzad Bojnodi Arbab, a PhD student at Chalmers who was also involved in the study.

The post High Resolution Images Show Bubbling Gas on the Surface of Another Star appeared first on Universe Today.

Mars is known for its unique geological features. Olympus Mons is a massive shield volcano 2.5 times taller than Mt. Everest. Hellas Planitia is the largest visible impact crater in the Solar System. However, Mars’ most striking feature is Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the Solar System.

This fascinating geological feature begs to be explored, and a team of German researchers think that a swarm of robots is best suited to the task.

Valles Marineris (VM) is named after NASA’s Mariner 9 spacecraft, which discovered the massive canyon in 1971. It’s about 4,000 km long, 8 km deep at its deepest point, and 600 km wide in some places. These measurements dwarf the Grand Canyon in the USA.

From a distance, VM looks like a scab on Mars’s surface. It’s an interconnected network of chasms, faults, valleys, and probably caves. Unlike the Grand Canyon, VM wasn’t excavated by a flowing river. Instead, scientists think it was likely formed by rift faults, regions on the surface where plates receded from one another.

Annotated close-up of High-Resolution Stereo Camera images of Valles Marineris. The HRSC is an instrument on the ESA’s Mars Express mission. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Michael)

German scientists are developing a way to explore this unique region. It’s called the Valles Marineris Explorer (VaMEx), and the idea dates back several years. VaMEx is an initiative of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and it’s making significant progress.

NASA’s Mars rovers have made great progress in understanding Mars and its potentially habitable past. They’re incredible machines that put humanity’s inventiveness on display. But they’re ill-suited to rough, obstacle-strewn terrain like Valles Mariners. Instead of building one robotic vehicle, VaMEx will build several types of vehicles and stationary units that will work together to explore VM and its chasms, valley walls, and caves.

VaMEx will be a swarm of interconnected vehicles that fly, move across the ground, and visit caves in VM. They’ll be linked with a ground station that acts as a command center, and a satellite will provide communications with Earth. The vehicles will collect images and data and send them to the command center and an orbiter or satellite, then to Earth.

This image outlines the different components of the VaMEx Mars Symphony concept. Image Credit: Clemens Riegler / University of Wuerzburg

VaMEx is particularly aimed at caves that scientists think are likely plentiful in VM. Caves are protected from radiation, and if Mars hosted simple life in its past, there may be traces of it deep in these caves. VaMEx also includes ground repeater stations that will allow cave-exploring robots to share data and images in real time.

All of this will require finely tuned communications.

“We have given our sub-project the name ‘VaMEx3-MarsSymphony’ because the aim is to make the individual elements of the robot swarm play together harmoniously like an orchestra,” said project leader Professor Hakan Kayal. Kayal is a professor of Astronautics at the Satellite Mission Control Centre at the University of Würzburg.

The walls of Valles Mariners are an ideal place to study Mars’ layered geology, as shown in this HiRISE image of layered deposits. Scientists can learn about the planet’s geological history without the need for excavation. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/UA/HiRISE

Units called autorotation bodies are also part of the swarm. Autorotation is a term from rotary-wing (helicopter) flight. It describes a situation where power to the rotors is lost, and as the helicopter falls toward Earth, air makes the rotors spin, providing enough energy for a controlled descent. VaMEx’s autorotation bodies aren’t helicopters. They’re like maple seeds, which float gently to the ground, spinning as they descend. Once they’ve reached the surface, they’re stationary.

VaMEx is also taking an unusual approach to cameras. The stationary ground station will feature a camera that monitors the Martian sky. “All previous Mars missions have focussed on the surface of the planet, but we want to look upwards for the first time,” says Hakan Kayal. The camera can monitor cloud formation and dust in the atmosphere. It will also capture any transient phenomena like unusual cloud illumination or lightning.

NASA’s Mars rovers have occasionally imaged the Martian sky. The gif below is from the Perseverance rover, which used one of its navigation cameras to capture images. A purpose-built sky-monitoring camera would image the Martian sky like never before.

via GIPHY

It will also see incoming meteors, and data shows that one about the size of a basketball strikes Mars every day. “We could further substantiate this with data if we film the entry of meteorites with our UAP camera and correlate these events with the seismic signals,” says Hakan Kayal.

VaMEx faces many technical challenges that still need to be overcome. The mobile robots will need powerful route-finding AI to maneuver through difficult terrain, especially in caves. It takes about 40 minutes for a signal to travel from Mars and back, making remote real-time control impossible.

There are also communication challenges. A key challenge is getting VaMEx’s ground segments to communicate with a satellite. One company is working on special transceivers that operate in the Ka-band to handle all of the scientific data. The Ka-band is used in satellites because it allows higher bandwidth communications, but landers currently use the S or X-band. The issue is that the Ka-band usually requires more and bulkier equipment, including larger antennae, that may not be practical on a surface robot.

In August, scientists tested some aspects of VaMEx at the DLR site in Oberpfaffenhofen. They tested LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), and GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) sensors for ground truth validation. This compared sensor information against known data. They also successfully tested Wi-Fi-like communication systems and radio-ranging.

“One of the highlights of our field test was the live test of multi-robot SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping),” the VaMEx website says. “In a dual-robot scenario, we tested the real-time capabilities of our SLAM algorithms.” They say the results were promising and illustrate a way forward for individual robots to cooperate.

This image shows several robots during tests at the DLR site. Image Credit: VaMEX/DLR

Not everything in the tests went well, though. The Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) encountered some challenges with so many units trying to communicate with one another. Bandwidth and synchronization were both problematic.

These results are helping the VaMEx team prepare for upcoming analog tests in 2025. These will take place at a quarry in Germany, where the robot swarm will be tested after improvements gained from August’s tests. The Wurzburg UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) Skycam will be part of these tests, with its resource-hungry video data added to the mix to test the system’s overall robustness.

This image shows an early version of the automated Wurzurg UAP Skycam from 2021. Image Credit: Hakan Kayal / Universität Würzburg

If all goes well, the next step is to harden the VaMEx equipment. Mars has much harsher conditions, with much lower temperatures, a thin atmosphere, and global dust storms that can interrupt exploration.

“In a possible follow-up project, the hardware would have to be adapted for use on Mars,” explains Hakan Kayal.

The post A Swarm of Robots to Explore Mars’ Valles Marineris appeared first on Universe Today.

Ask any property inspector, and they’ll tell you one of the maxims of their profession – where there’s moisture, there’s mold. That relationship also holds true for the International Space Station. The interior climate on the ISS is carefully controlled, but if thrown out of whack, potentially dangerous mold could sprout overnight. A new paper by researchers at The Ohio State University explains why – and provides some insights into how we might prevent it if it does happen.

The paper’s main finding was that dust collection, when exposed to moisture for only a short time, leads to a massive increase in the microbial population and a fundamental change in the dust itself to make it easier for the microbes to grow. There is plenty of dust on the ISS, so astronauts must be careful.

They already clean the screens covering the air filtration system on board regularly. The dust they collected from those screens formed the basis of the samples provided to Dr. Karen Dannemiller and her team at OSU. They separated the dust samples into different sub-samples and exposed each to a varying amount of moisture. Then, they watched as the microbes already present in the dust did their work.

A picture of mold growing on the ISS.
Credit – NASA

Dust is naturally created in the ISS from dead human skin and, of course, the microbes that live alongside us on a daily basis. However, in closed environments, an outbreak of bacteria would cause even more severe reactions than they do on Earth, including allergies and asthma. It is even possible that the dust and associated bacteria degrade the material structure of the ISS itself.

Running the collected samples through a higher moisture content is designed to mimic a possible failure on the ISS, such as an equipment malfunction. Knocking out an air ventilation fan in one part of the space station could create an environment similar to the one the dust is subjected to back on the ground.

So, what does that mean for our astronauts? For now, it’s best to understand where mold could form and keep up with cleaning schedules that allow them to nip it in the bud. There are several famous pictures of mold growing in a space station, so while generally successful, that has still been a known problem for a long time in space exploration. 

Bacteria were also found growing in the old Mir space station, as discussed in this Science Channel episode.
Credit – Science Channel YouTube Channel

Dr. Dannemiller and her colleagues have developed a model that could track mold growth in a closed environment like the ISS to combat this. They used data collected by analyzing the dust samples as part of their proof of concept for the software, but the eventual end goal is to predict where mold will grow before it begins and give the astronauts time to clean it out before it becomes a hazard. 

There will be plenty of space stations to work on this system in the future. Private spaceflight companies have become increasingly involved in developing space habitats, and NASA is setting up the ambitious Lunar Gateway to help with its Artemis missions to the moon. As more enclosed, sealed environments come online, it will be increasingly important to keep them free of these potentially dangerous microbial infestations. Experimenting with them and modeling that growth is one way to stay ahead of the curve.

Learn More:
Phys.org – Keeping mold out of future space stations
Nastasi et al – Predicting how varying moisture conditions impact the microbiome of dust collected from the International Space Station
UT – How Can Biofilms Help or Hinder Spaceflight?
UT – Earth’s toughest bacteria can survive unprotected in space for at least a year

Lead Image:
Scanning Electron Microscope image of dust from the ISS.
Credit – Microbiome / Nastasi et al.

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The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is regularly plagued by the fact that humanity has a very limited perspective on civilization and the nature of intelligence itself. When it comes right down to it, the only examples we have to go on are “life as we know it” (aka. Earth organisms) and human civilization. On top of that, given the age of the Universe and the time life has had to evolve on other planets, it is a foregone conclusion that any advanced life in our galaxy would be older than humanity. Luckily, this presents an opportunity to develop and test theoretical frameworks in the field.

To paraphrase Freeman Dyson, if we can conceive of a concept (and the physics are sound), an advanced species will likely have built it already. In this respect, imagining where humanity will be centuries or eons from now could provide potential “technosignatures” to look for. In a recent paper, a team from the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center modeled a series of scenarios that attempt to predict what humanity’s “technosphere” could look like 1,000 years from now. Their research could have implications for future SETI studies.

The research team was led by Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist and Research Scientist at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. He was joined by George Profitiliotis, an Affiliate Research Scientist with BMSIS and a co-founder of the Greek NewSpace Society, and Ravi Kopparapu, a Planetary Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The preprint of their paper recently appeared in Elsevier and is being reviewed for publication in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. The paper is the first in a series titled “Projections of Earth’s technosphere.”

Searching for Technosignatures

When it comes to predicting what advanced civilizations might look like and the technologies they will employ, scientists are often marred by our limited perspective. When it comes right down to it, humanity is familiar with only one example of an advanced species relying on technological innovations to ensure food security, health and safety, transportation, defense, and other applications – i.e., ourselves! But as Freeman Dyson once related when discussing his theory of a Dyson Sphere, if we can conceive of an idea and the physics of it are sound, an advanced civilization may have already built it.

As they indicate in their paper, this process is similar to how astrobiologists rely on the study of Earth organisms to predict what biosignatures they should be searching for. As Haqq-Misra told Universe Today via email:

“Astrobiology has the entire history of Earth to draw upon as examples of how life has modified the planet. The search for extraterrestrial biosignatures can use Earth today or Earth in its past for ideas of what to look for. In the same way, the search for extraterrestrial technosignatures begins with the history of technology on Earth, although technology is much more recent in Earth’s history when compared to life in general. Our paper is an effort to provide a theoretical basis for technosignatures that is based on our undersstanding of life and technology on Earth.”

Similarly, SETI research has benefitted in recent years from anthropological studies that consider the totality of human activity on Earth. This collective activity is known as the “anthroposphere,” which corresponds to the concept of the Anthropocene—the current geological era in which humanity has become the largest driving force in environmental change. When considering this through the lens of technological activity and the technosignatures this would produce, the term “technosphere” is used.

Multiple SETI experiments have been mounted in the past sixty years, most of which searched for signs of extraterrestrial radio transmissions. This should come as no surprise since radio communications are a time-tested and validated technology that humanity has relied on for more than a century. But as Haqq-Misra explained, SETI also has a rich history of drawing upon various projections of future technology as well:

“[T]echnosignature studies begin with what exists on Earth, what could exist on Earth in the near-term, or what could theoretically be possible given known understanding of physics as places for extrapolations into the future. This approach does not assume that such projections are inevitable or even probable, but it at least provides a way to think about the astronomical tools that would be needed to remotely detect an extraterrestrial civilization with even greater technological capabilities than on Earth today.”

Radio telescopes monitor the sky at the Allen Telescope Array in California. Finding a signal from a distant civilization is one way we could experience first contact with ET. Credit: SETI Institute A New Approach

When it comes to predicting humanity’s future (and, by extension, advanced technosignatures), prior studies tend to have suffered from an inherent bias. In many cases, there is the assumption that a technological civilization will continue to grow exponentially. A perfect example is the Kardashev Scale, which predicts how advanced civilizations will invariably grow to occupy more space and harness more energy. This is an understandable assumption given human history and the exponential increase in the global population – from 1 billion in 1800 to 8.1 billion in 2024 (an increase of over 800%)

Similarly, global energy use also grew exponentially during this same period – from 5,653 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 1800 to 182,230 TWh in 2023 (an increase of more than 3200%). This model of continuous growth well into the future has motivated many observational and theoretical approaches for finding technosignatures. Among them is the search for possible megastructures around stars that experience periodic drops in brightness (like Boyajan’s Star) and “disappearing stars.” But as Haqq-Misra explained, this is merely one possibility for an advanced civilization.

Instead of predicting a single evolutionary pathway, Haqq-Misra and his colleagues adopted the “futures studies” approach. This interdisciplinary field relies on various systematic methodological approaches for predicting self-consistent future trajectories. Said Haqq-Misra:

“The plural “futures” is used to indicate that the actual future is unknown and cannot be predicted; instead, futures studies develops systematic projections of multiple contrasting futures that can provide insight into the range and diversity of possible outcomes. Most attempts at making informal projections in technosignature science inevitably succumb to biases based on internal assumptions or prevailing cultural narratives, which can limit the possibility space of imagined futures. The methodological approaches developed by practitioners of futures studies are designed to minimize such biases and enable much more robust exploration of possibilities for the future —in our case, the future of civilization.”

Our Possible Futures

Their approach involved a method known as a “general morphological analysis,” a means of exploring possible solutions to multi-dimensional, non-quantified problems. This method is intended to minimize the bias in underlying assumptions and encompass a wide range of possibilities. From this, the first step for Haqq-Misra and his colleagues was to ask the question:

“What are the technological phenomena of the future anthroposphere,
and how can they be described?”

They then defined a large set of scenarios based on different political, economic, societal, and technological factors, each with different values corresponding to different possible futures. This yielded almost 5,800 scenarios, but the team eliminated many based on logical inconsistencies while clustering others based on similarities. The team also used the Claude large language model (LLM) to assist with analyzing, comparing, and clustering. This allowed them to work their way down to ten future scenarios.

The Arecibo Radio Telescope. Though it’s decommissioned now, Arecibo Data may explain 1977’s mysterious Wow! Signal. Credit: UCF

The next step was to develop a novel worldbuilding “pipeline” based on an assessment of human needs in all ten scenarios. This allowed them to incorporate details for each scenario that would define observable properties for the corresponding technosphere. As Haqq-Misra explained:

“The underlying assumption in our worldbuilding process is that technology is intended to fulfill basic human needs. This means that any future technosphere must be reflective in some way of the needs of humans in a given future scenario. We do not assume that any given technosignature will exist for an arbitrary reason, but any feature of the physical technosphere in our scenarios is the outcome of political, social, or economic factors that drive human needs. We likewise expect that any technosignatures we find in extraterrestrial settings will exist because they are indicative of or derivative from processes that relate to extraterrestrial needs.”

One interesting finding was that only one of the ten scenarios involved the kind of rapid growth predicted by the Kardeshev Scale, Haqq-Misra added. Others showed slower growth, no growth at all, while another oscillated between growth and collapse. “This suggests that focusing the search for technosignatures on the idea of advanced, energy-intensive, and expansive extraterrestrial civilizations may be too limiting,” he said. “Numerous possibilities exist from our modeling alone that show alternative possibilities for long-term futures, and such civilizations could even be more likely or more numerous than longer-lived or galactic-spanning civilizations.”

Among the potential technosignatures these scenarios predicted, nitrogen dioxide emerges as a possible means of distinguishing between modern-day Earth, Earth before the introduction of agriculture, and a more industrial Earth in the future. They also found that the atmospheric spectra produced in three scenarios were “indistinguishable from nature,” meaning there was no discernible distance between a pre-agriculture and a more technologically advanced Earth.

“These three scenarios still include expansive technosphere, but much of the detectable technology is on Mars and other parts of the outer solar system,” said Haqq-Misra. “This raises an important possibility for false negatives in the search for technosignatures: a planet with no obvious technosignatures may not necessarily be devoid of technology, and the best places to look may even be elsewhere in the system.”

As always, the field of SETI and technosignature searches are constrained by the limits of our knowledge, where scientists must speculate about what we don’t know based on what we do. However, the process is becoming increasingly sophisticated thanks to advanced modeling and simulations that can account for various possibilities. In addition, scientists are questioning underlying assumptions regarding advanced civilizations and their motivations. The work of Haqq-Misra and his colleagues represents a first in a key way.

As he explained, futures studies methods tend to be applied to short-term projections of a few years or decades, while some climate science studies have looked ahead a few centuries:

“Our study is the first to use futures studies methods to develop projections across a 1000-year timescale, which requires us to focus on the longer-term trends that could shape different outcomes for civilization on Earth. This provides a solid theoretical basis for thinking about the range of technosignatures in planetary systems, and how to search for them, and much more work can be done from these scenarios alone to develop new search strategies. These scenarios also help us to imagine a broader range of possibilities for Earth’s future, which include numerous optimistic outcomes that avoid collapse or extinction. Our civilization may face numerous challenges, but studies like ours are important to remind us that the future remains open.”

Further Reading: arXiv

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