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Is Lemuria a real place, or the fever dream of crackpots, mystics, conspiracy theorists, and Bigfoot hunters?

Below the waters where the Pacific and Indian Oceans lies a lost continent. One of hopes and dreams that housed a race of beings that arrived from foreign planets and from which sprang humanity, religion, civilization, and our modern world. It was called Lemuria and it was all fake.

What began as a theoretical land bridge to explain the mystery of lemurs on Madagascar quickly got hijacked to become the evolutionary home of humankind, the cradle of spirituality, and then the source of cosmological wonders. Abandoned by science as hokum, Lemuria morphed into a land filled with ancient, advanced civilizations, hollowed-out mountains full of gold and crystals, moon-beings descending in baskets, underground evil creatures, and a breast-feeding Bigfoot.

The history of Lemuria is populated with a dizzying array of people from early Darwinists to conspiracy spouting Congressmen, globetrotting madams, Rosicrucians, Hollow-Earthers, sci-fi writers, UFO contactees, sleeping prophets, New Age channelers, a “Mother God”, and a tequila swigging conspiracy theorist. Historian Justin McHenry provides a thoughtful exploration of how pseudo-science hijacked the gentle Victorian-era concept of Lemuria and, in following decades, twisted it into an all-encompassing home for alternative ideas about race, spirituality, science, politics, and the paranormal.

Justin McHenry is a writer, historian, and archivist. His writing has appeared in magazines such as FATE, newspapers, journals, and various online publications like Belt Mag, 100 Days of Appalachia, and he edited the collection of stories, The Garden at Rose Brake. He received his Master’s degree in History from West Virginia University. His new book is Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place.

Shermer and McHenry discuss:

• how organisms get to islands from mainlands
• rafting sweepstakes vs. land bridges.
• Alfred Russel Wallace and Island biogeography
• how lemurs get to Madagascar
• Zoologist Philip Sclater, 1864, first to propose a sunken continent beneath the Indian Ocean as a land bridge to account for biogeographical facts
• Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: proposed Lemuria as an explanation for the absence of proto-human missing links: monogenists vs. polygenists
• Haeckle to Hitler
• German romance sturm and drung science of hidden forces: Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• James Churchward, Mu, lost continent in the Pacific Ocean
• Land of Mu and Atlantis
• Lemuria and human origins
• L. Sprague de Camp, Los Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature
• Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis, and the romance of a lost past
• continental drift and plate tectonics and Lemuria
• Lemuria and Theosophy, anthroposophy and other occult beliefs
• Madame Blavatsky theorized that Australia was a remnant inland region of Lemuria that Aboriginal Australians and Aboriginal Tasmanians were of Lemurian and Lemuro-Atlantean origin
• Hermes Trismegistus and Hermeticism, Rosicrucians
• romancing the past
• Golden ages
• lost races
• pseudohistory, pseudoarchaeology and mythology.

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

Mars holds a very special place in our hearts. Chiefly because of all the other planets in the Solar System Mars is probably the place we are going to find some tantalising clues or maybe even evidence of prehistoric life. NASA Perseverance Rover has been trundling around the Jezero Crater looking for evidence that it was once hospitable to life. To that end it has not only been collecting rock samples but air samples too and scientists can’t wait to get their hands on them. 

The Mars Perseverance Rover is part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. It launched on 30 July 2020 and landed in the Jezero Crater successfully on 18 February 2021. The site was picked because it’s a dried up river bed and if there is any evidence of ancient primitive life on Mars, it is a likely location. Perseverance is equipped with a host of instruments including a drone named Ingenuity to survey the planet. 

Mars Perseverence rover sent back this image of its parking spot during Mars Solar Conjunction. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

One exciting element of the mission is the collection of rock samples as part of the Mars Sample Return Campaign. Twenty four core samples have been collected to date and deposited on the surface ready for collection by a future mission. It’s not just rock samples that have been collected though. Known as ‘headspace’ there is air in the space around the rock samples and it is this that has got scientists excited. 

Not only do the rocks hold secrets about Mars but the atmosphere does too. It’s an atmosphere rich in Carbon Dioxide but is expected to have trace amounts of other gasses  too. Information about the current climate can be gained from the trapped gasses but it’s also possible to learn about the evolution of the atmosphere through analysis of the rocks. There is one particularly important tube that has been filled entirely with gas from the atmosphere. 

Image of the Martian atmosphere and surface obtained by the Viking 1 orbiter in June 1976. (Credit: NASA/Viking 1)

With the sample sat on the surface of Mars potentially for many years, the gas trapped will interact with the rock in the sample tube. It will only be when the tubes are opened up when they arrive back here on the Earth that the interaction will cease. It’s hoped to understand more about the levels of water vapour near the Martian surface. 

It isn’t just the water vapour that is of interest but the levels of trace gas too are of interest. Through analysing the gas samples we can tell if there are gasses like neon, argon and xenon which are non reactive gasses. Because these gasses do not react then there presence in the tube samples may suggest that Mars stated with an atmosphere. We know that it had a much thicker atmosphere in the past but we don’t know whether it has always been there or whether it developed later.  

There are many benefits that will come from analysing the samples even, the prevalence of dust that will help future human exploration. As Justin Simon from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston said “The gas samples have a lot to offer Mars scientists, even those who don’t study Mars would be interested because it will shed light on how the planet forms and evolves.”

Source : Why Scientists Are Intrigued by Air in NASA’s Mars Sample Tubes

The post It’s Not Just Rocks, Scientists Want Samples Mars’s Atmosphere appeared first on Universe Today.

The long-term economic effects of tropical cyclones far outweigh the direct damages from high winds and flooding, with local incomes declining for years after the storm hits

The Earth-sized storm on Jupiter known as the red spot was thought by many to have been first observed in 1665, but it turns out that may have been an entirely different enormous storm, with today's storm dating back only to 1831

The Crab Nebula has always fascinated me, albeit amazed me that it doesn’t look anything like a crab! It’s the result of a star that exploded at the end of its life back in 1054 CE, leaving behind what is known as a supernova remnant. Back then the explosion would have been visible to the naked eye, even in daytime. It was thought that the supernova that led to the cloud was from a less evolved star with a core made from oxygen, neon and magnesium. Recent studies by the James Webb Space Telescope reveals that it may actually be the core collapse of an iron rich star. 

The Crab Nebula can be found in the constellation Taurus measuring 11 light years across. Deep inside the cloud, which expands at a rate of 1,500 kilometres per second, lies a rapidly rotating neutron star known as a pulsar. It emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation that sweeps across space much like a lighthouse sweeping out across the ocean. It has been the subject of many studies to learn about the dynamics of stellar evolution. 

Previous studies have attempted to understand the total kinetic energy of the original explosion based upon the velocity of the expanding cloud. The data suggested that the supernova was relatively low energy so the progenitor star was likely to be in the range of 8 to 10 times the mass of the Sun. If it had been more massive it would have experienced a more violent supernova which would be revealed in higher velocity of the expanding gas cloud. But there was a problem. 

The Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory’s 48-inch telescope captured this visible-light image of the Pinwheel galaxy (Messier 101) in June 2023. The location of supernova 2023ixf is circled. The observatory, located on Mount Hopkins in Arizona, is operated by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Hiramatsu et al. 2023/Sebastian Gomez (STScI)

The observations of the Crab Nebula, particularly the high rotational speed of the pulsar, seemed to conflict with current supernova theory. In the model for lower mass stars like that which was the progenitor star of the Crab Nebula, the oxygen in the core ignites as the core collapses. This process does not have sufficient energy to generate such a fast rotating pulsar. 

A team of astronomers have addressed this curiosity using MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) onboard the James Webb Space Telescope to collect data from the Crab Nebula. The team was led by Tea Temim from the Princeton University in New Jersey. They report that the gas composition of the cloud suggests the star may have been more evolved with some iron in the core which could have led to a higher energy supernova than previously thought.

Artist impression of the James Webb Space Telescope

With Webb’s sensitive infrared instruments, the iron and nickel emission lines can be seen with more clarity than ever before. Studying the bright lines in the spectrum of the nebula has allowed a much more reliable estimate of the iron and nickel ratio to be deduced. They found it was a higher percentage compared to the Sun which was expected for a more energetic supernova. 

The results are promising but the readings were taken from two small regions of the nebula so to rule out variations across the entire 11 light years further readings are needed. If the data from Webb is representative from the entire nebula then it’s possible one of the mysteries of the nebula may finally be solved.

Source  : Investigating the Origins of the Crab Nebula With NASA’s Webb

The post Something’s Always Been Off About the Crab Nebula. Webb Has Revealed Why! appeared first on Universe Today.

Historians have claimed the people of Easter Island overexploited natural resources, causing a population crash, but new evidence suggests they lived sustainably for centuries

Distant Titan is an oddball in the Solar System. Saturn’s largest moon—and the second largest in the entire Solar System—has an atmosphere denser than Earth’s. It also has stable lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons on its surface.

New research shows that waves on these seas are eroding Titan’s coastlines.

The research is “Signatures of Wave Erosion in Titan’s Coasts,” and it’s published in Science Advances. The lead author is Rose Palermo, an MIT graduate and research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey.

In 2007, the Cassini spacecraft spotted lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons, mostly methane and ethane, on Saturn’s moon Titan. Titan and Earth are the only two bodies in the Solar System known to have surface liquids. Scientists have only Cassini data from Titan to work with, and they’ve been poring over the data in an effort to understand this strange world.

The moon’s seas are one of the most intriguing features throughout the entire Solar System. But they’re difficult to observe because of the thick atmosphere. Researchers have wondered if waves shape the coastlines, but there are conflicting signs about the nature of the seas. They could be rough, or they could be smooth. A paper from 2014 suggested that transient features in Titan’s northern sea, Ligeia Mare, could be waves.

But there’s no certainty.

“We found that if the coastlines have eroded, their shapes are more consistent with erosion by waves than by uniform erosion or no erosion at all.”

Rose Palermo, lead author, U.S. Geological Survey

“Some people who tried to see evidence for waves didn’t see any, and said, ‘These seas are mirror-smooth,'” lead author Palermo said in a press release accompanying the research. “Others said they did see some roughness on the liquid surface but weren’t sure if waves caused it.”

It seems likely that there would be waves on Titan. To investigate this question, researchers at MIT compared Titan’s shorelines to shorelines on Earth to see if they match.

The seas and lakes on Titan look much like some on Earth. They appear to be flooded valleys and depressions. But scientists are uncertain if these bodies of water are eroding their coastlines like those on Earth. “Spacecraft observations and theoretical models suggest that wind may cause waves to form on Titan’s seas, potentially driving coastal erosion, but the observational evidence of waves is indirect, and the processes affecting shoreline evolution on Titan remain unknown,” the authors write in their paper.

The problem is that there’s no reliable way to connect shoreline morphology directly to the mechanisms that shape it, even on Earth. To try to understand how erosion affects Titan’s coastlines, the researchers started with Earth. They examined how different coastal erosion mechanisms shape Earth’s coastlines, then applied the framework to Titan.

There are basically two types of coastal erosion: wave-driven erosion and uniform erosion. Each type produces different coastlines.

Wave erosion is driven by wind and produces a change proportional to the strength of the waves. Waves are usually stronger the farther they travel before they hit a coast. Wave erosion creates long, smooth stretches of coast where the coast is fully exposed and bays in protected areas where less erosion occurs. The distance the wind can blow to generate waves on a particular water body before striking a coast is called ‘fetch.’

“Wave erosion is driven by the height and angle of the wave,” Palermo explained. “We used fetch to approximate wave height because the bigger the fetch, the longer the distance over which wind can blow and waves can grow.”

Uniform erosion is different. It doesn’t rely on mechanical wave action. The compositional differences between Earth and Titan are apparent when it comes to uniform erosion. “Titan’s crust consists mainly of water ice, but its surface solids may also include heavy hydrocarbon molecules, such as benzene, that are soluble in liquid methane and ethane, such that the liquid lakes and seas may slowly dissolve the solid coasts of the north polar terrain,” the authors explain in their research.

Over a long enough period of time, uniform erosion occurs at the same rate in all locations, producing distinct morphological features: shorelines that are generally smooth even inside bays with sharp headlands that punctuate them.

“Here, we test the hypothesis that coastal erosion has shaped Titan’s seas by investigating whether coastline shapes are most consistent with wave-driven erosion, uniform erosion, or no coastal erosion,” the authors write.

This figure from the research illustrates how the two types of erosion would shape shorelines. The images are based on simulated Titan landforms and shorelines. A shows the initial condition of Titan’s water bodies, where rivers carved out channels, and rising seas flooded them. B shows the morphology that wave erosion would produce, where the erosion rate depends on fetch. C shows the morphology that Uniform erosion would produce, where the erosion is uniform in all locations. Darker blue indicates deeper water and lighter yellow indicates higher land. Image Credit: Palermo et al. 2024.

The different morphological features produced by wave-driven erosion and uniform erosion are obvious. Wave-driven erosion tends to smooth exposed sections of the coastline where fetch is large and preserve the coastline where fetch is small inside embayments.

Uniform erosion is different. It widens embayments and smooths out small-scale roughness on the coastline regardless of fetch. Headlands are the exception, which sharpen into thick-necked points that stick out into the main basin.

“We had the same starting shorelines, and we saw that you get a really different final shape under uniform erosion versus wave erosion,” said co-author Taylor Perron, Professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. “They all kind of look like the Flying Spaghetti Monster because of the flooded river valleys, but the two types of erosion produce very different endpoints.”

Titan’s Ligeia Mare is the second largest liquid body on Titan. The researchers say that its coastline appears to be altered by wave-driven erosion. Image Credit: By NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell – http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17031, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26294960

“We found that if the coastlines have eroded, their shapes are more consistent with erosion by waves than by uniform erosion or no erosion at all,” Perron said.

But these are just simulations, and they have to be tested rigorously. The team’s next step was to quantify these differences in the real world. The researchers explain that they “developed a technique focusing on local relationships between shoreline roughness and fetch area” to understand and quantify the differences. Specifically, they quantified what they call “roughness” to differentiate wave-driven erosion from uniform erosion. “Simply put, a lower roughness means a smoother stretch of shoreline compared to the rest of the lake, and a higher roughness means a comparatively rough stretch of shoreline,” they write.

This figure from the research shows roughness and fetch area for two of Titan’s seas: Kraken Mare and Ligeia Mare. C and D show roughness for each sea. E and F show the normalized fetch area, assuming waves are fetch-limited. Fetch-limited means waves continue to grow as long as the fetch length increases. G and H show normalized fetch area assuming a saturation fetch length of 20 km. That means that waves only grow up to a certain fetch length and then saturate. In that case, the system is saturation-limited, and the “fetch length in all directions is truncated to a maximum value.” Image Credit: Palermo et al. 2024.

The researchers say that “… shoreline roughness and normalized fetch area can be used to fingerprint wave-driven and uniform erosion and distinguish them from a coastline consisting only of flooded river valleys,” as shown in the first image.

So, what does this all boil down to?

“Our results suggest that the coastlines of Titan’s largest liquid bodies are most consistent with shorelines that have been modified by wave erosion and river incision,” the researchers write in their paper. They analyzed four coastlines and found a less than 5% probability of uniform erosion in a saturation-limited scenario and a less than 20% probability of uniform erosion in a fetch-limited scenario. That leaves wind-driven erosion as the most likely cause of erosion, which seems to confirm that Titan’s lakes and seas experience waves. “Therefore, our results suggest that the largest seas and lakes are not consistent with erosion by uniform processes (i.e., dissolution), as previously hypothesized for some of Titan’s landscapes,” they conclude.

That’s the scientific way of presenting their results, and their paper is like part of a long conversation with other scientists. In the press release, they state their conclusion more plainly for the rest of us.

“We can say, based on our results, that if the coastlines of Titan’s seas have eroded, waves are the most likely culprit,” said Perron, Professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. “If we could stand at the edge of one of Titan’s seas, we might see waves of liquid methane and ethane lapping on the shore and crashing on the coasts during storms. And they would be capable of eroding the material that the coast is made of.”

“Waves are ubiquitous on Earth’s oceans. If Titan has waves, they would likely dominate the surface of lakes,” says Juan Felipe Paniagua-Arroyave, associate professor in the School of Applied Sciences and Engineering at EAFIT University in Colombia, who was not involved in the study.” It would be fascinating to see how Titan’s winds create waves, not of water, but of exotic liquid hydrocarbons.”

The next step is to determine how strong Titan’s winds have to be to create coastal erosion. The researchers also hope to decipher which directions the wind is predominantly blowing from.

“Titan presents this case of a completely untouched system,” Palermo said. “It could help us learn more fundamental things about how coasts erode without the influence of people, and maybe that can help us better manage our coastlines on Earth in the future.”

The post Lake Shorelines on Titan are Shaped by Methane Waves appeared first on Universe Today.

This is just a preview for my half-hour talk at the CSICon meeting in Las Vegas this October, where I’ll talk about some of the distortions of biology created by ideology, distortions summarized in my Skeptical Inquirer paper coauthored with Luana Maroja.

Below is one slide I’m using to address the misguided claim (one made by the top editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association), that “Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

Now the definition of “race”, as we discuss in our paper, is slippery, so we prefer to use “ethnicity” or “geographic populations,” but the implication is the same (read the paper before you kvetch): the claim is that there are no meaningful genetic differences between geographically separated populations.

But if that were the case, then you couldn’t identify people’s ancestry from their genes. But we can: with good accuracy! If your genetic endowment said nothing about your ancestry, then companies like 23andMe would go out of business.  And the fact that this works shows that ethnicity, or ancestry, or geographic population, or “race,” if you want to use the term, are not simply made-up social constructs, but indeed have important and often near-diagnostic genetic differences.

One example is me. Here’s a slide I’m going to show at CSICon. It’s the 23andMe readout of my ancestry, with 97.2% of my genes coming roughly from the dark green area on the map. I’m 100% Jewish, and mostly Ashkenazi.

That matches with what I know of my ancestry, and so my genetic endowment is surely of biological significance. The data from my genome, as analyzed by 23andMe, tells me something about the history of the genes I carry. Apparently, I have not a single nucleotide that isn’t Jewish!

At any rate, come to the meeting. It features much bigger fish like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox, and for sure it will be a good time, as it’s going to be similar in spirit and content to James Randi’s Amazing Meetings, which were great.

A new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has some good news and some bad news. I’ll highlight what I see are the important results, but you can read the whole thing by clicking below.

The poll was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago (formerly the National Opinion Research Center), and their results are generally solid.  The sample, says the page, “The

.. . . was conducted May 17-19, 2024, using NORC’s AmeriSpeak® probability-based panel, and sampled 1,309 Americans. The overall margin of error for the survey is +/- 4%.

Here are some graphs:

While some of these protest actions are regulated on campuses (ours, for example, regulates the times when you can use amplified sound), the poll is simply about whether it’s okay for college students to engage in these activities. No “time, place, or manner” restrictions are discussed.

Given that, and looking at the dark and light red bars as indications of “not very acceptable”, we see pretty much what we expect. What’s surprising is that a huge majority of Americans (these are not just students) find burning an American flag unacceptable (about 70% “never acceptable and 12% “rarely acceptable”), despite the fact that burning an American flag is protected as free speech by the First Amendment!  (So is holding signs.) Americans either don’t know or don’t care about that interpretation of flag-burning by the courts. As the FIRE site notes:

“It’s no shocker that Americans tend to disapprove of illegal and illiberal conduct by student protesters,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “But it’s alarming that a third of Americans say constitutionally protected and non-threatening activities like sign-holding or petitions are only ‘sometimes’ or ‘rarely’ acceptable. Nonviolent protest should always be acceptable on college campuses.”

But I disagree with FIRE in part here as there are time, place, and manner restrictions that apply even to nonviolent protests. Blocking access to campus or impeding classes with megaphones and shouting are nonviolent forms of protest, but prevent academia from operating propetly. In my view, FIRE is simply wrong that these should always be acceptable.  Much of the time, yes, but not always. 

Encamping is also of interest, and 43% of American think that establishing them is “never acceptable” while about 22% see them as “rarely acceptable”. About 25% see encampments as “sometimes or always acceptable”, with the “sometimes” outnumbering “always’ here.  Whether universities consider encampment acceptable, of course, depends on the school and the form of encampment.  Williams College, for instance, had a small, out-of-the-way encampment and nobody was bothered.

Here are the consequences that the American public thinks should fall onto students participating in encampments.

FIRE’s summary:

Nearly three-fourths of Americans (72%) believe that campus protesters who participated in encampments should be punished, but only 18% believe they should receive the harshest penalty of expulsion. Other responses ran the gamut from suspension (13%), to probation (16%), to written reprimand (12%), to community service (13%). Only 23% believe the students should receive no punishment at all.

LOL; I think more than 23% of colleges themselves believe that encamping students should receive no punishment at all. At least that’s my guess based on the number of students who seem to be getting of scot-free for encamping.  As for punishment, there’s roughly equal sentiment in faor of a written reprimand, community service, probation, suspension, or expulsion.  Perhaps a written reprimand would be okay for students who are first-time violators, but the penalty should go up if there are previous violations on a student’s record, and also on how much warning they were given by the university, as well as whether they engaged in any harassment of individuals during the encampment.

There’s a bit more:

“Public colleges and universities can usually ban encampments without violating the First Amendment, so long as the ban serves a reasonable purpose, enforcement is consistent and viewpoint-neutral, and students maintain other avenues for expressing themselves,” said FIRE Director of Campus Rights Advocacy Lindsie Rank. “Universities can’t disproportionately punish students just because administrators don’t agree with the viewpoint being expressed at the encampment.”

Agreed!

And I’ve saved the good news for last:

FIRE’s summary:

Almost two-thirds of Americans (63%) said that the campus protests had no impact at all on their level of sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza, and respondents were as likely to say that the campus protests made them sympathize less with the Palestinians (17%) as they were to say they made them sympathize more (16%).

In other words, the net effect of campus protests—and they surely mean “pro-Palestinian protests”—is ZERO: as just as many people become more sympathetic as become less sympathetic, while most people don’t change their minds at all. In other words, the protests are performative, at least with respect to American opinion. They could, of course, hearten or disappoint Hamas, but again the net effect would be nil.  What the protests do accomplish is reduce America’s confidence in colleges and universities, which seems to be continuously slipping. And yes, that’s bad news:

FIRE’s poll also shows that American confidence in colleges and universities continues to slip. Only 28% of respondents said that they have either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in U.S. colleges and universities. By comparison, 36% of Americans told Gallup in summer 2023 that they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education in the U.S.

The FIRE summary concludes with more bad news: a pessimistic take of Americans on whether institutions of higher education protest free speech

Colleges received middling grades in particular on the issue of protecting speech. Almost half of Americans (47%) say that it is “not at all” or “not very” clear that college administrators protect free speech on their campus. Roughly two-in-five Americans (42%) said that it is “not at all”or “not very” likely that a school administration would defend a speaker’s right to express their views during a controversy on campus.

Encapsulating copper nanoparticles within hydrophobic porous silicate crystals has been shown to significantly enhance the catalytic activity of copper-zinc oxide catalysts used in methanol synthesis via CO2 hydrogenation. The innovative encapsulation structure effectively inhibits the thermal aggregation of copper particles, leading to enhanced hydrogenation activity and increased methanol production. This breakthrough paves the way for more efficient methanol synthesis from CO2.

Meet SQUID, a new computational tool. Compared with other genomic AI models, SQUID is more consistent, reduces background noise, and can yield better predictions regarding critical mutations. The new system aims to bring scientists closer to their findings' true medical implications.

Meet SQUID, a new computational tool. Compared with other genomic AI models, SQUID is more consistent, reduces background noise, and can yield better predictions regarding critical mutations. The new system aims to bring scientists closer to their findings' true medical implications.

Green hydrogen often, but certainly not always, leads to CO2 gains.

Behavioral analysis can provide a lot of information about the health status or motivations of a living being. A new technology makes it possible for a single deep learning model to detect animal motion across many species and environments. This 'foundational model', called SuperAnimal, can be used for animal conservation, biomedicine, and neuroscience research.

Researchers have discovered that by shining different wavelengths (colors) of light on a material called magnetite, they can change its state, e.g. making it more or less conducive to electricity. The discovery could lead to new ways of designing new materials for electronics such as memory storage, sensors, and other devices that rely on fast and efficient material responses.

Researchers have created a deep learning pipeline for designing soluble analogues of key protein structures used in pharmaceutical development, sidestepping the prohibitive cost of extracting these proteins from cell membranes.

Biomedical engineers have grown muscles in a lab to better understand and test treatments for a group of extremely rare muscle disorders called dysferlinopathy or limb girdle muscular dystrophies 2B (LGMD2B). The research revealed the biological mechanisms underlying the disease and showed that a combination of existing treatments could alleviate its symptoms.

An urn found in a tomb in Spain contained the cremated remains of a man, a gold ring and about 5 litres of liquid, which has been identified as now-discoloured white wine

Artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm lately. It also requires loads of band-end computing capability to do the near-miraculous things that it does. So far, that “compute,” as it’s known in the tech industry, has been based entirely on the ground. But is there an economic reason to do it in space? Some people seem to think so, as there has been a growing interest in space-based data centers. Let’s take a look at why.

Space-based data centers have several advantages over ground-based ones. The first and most obvious is the near-unlimited amount of space in space. Second, there are plenty of potential options for novel power and cooling technologies that can’t exist back on Earth. Third, using a space-based data center as a relay point for information could cut down on lag in data transfer between continents. Let’s look at each in turn.

One of the significant constraints for data centers is space – they require large amounts of it, and it is expensive in the areas where they are most needed (i.e., next to large population centers). The tech giants have massive budgets associated with real estate for data centers, and that amount will only continue to grow as their computational requirements increase. On the other hand, building a modular data center in space, with each launch adding additional computing power, is a reasonable way to infinitely expand a company’s hardware resources without the constraint of a physical location.

OrbitsEdge is a start-up company focusing on building space-based data centers. Here’s a video describing their business model.
Credit – OrbitsEdge YouTube Channel

Data centers would also have access to novel power and cooling technologies in space. They could utilize solar panels directly attached to them to harness unlimited green energy, and ones in a high enough orbit could be powered effectively all the time, no matter weather conditions or Earth’s rotation. Power satellites run off a similar idea, and the underlying technology is already there; it hasn’t been applied to this use case yet.

Many data centers also use water cooling systems. While water is heavy and expensive to launch into orbit, plenty of asteroids have enough water on them to supply millions of data centers with all the cooling they need. A recent paper from researchers in South Africa looked at this process and found several asteroids with relatively close trajectories that could supply orbiting data centers with enough water to last centuries.

Space-based data centers could also allow for fast transmission between two points on the globe without sending data over a complicated path from one continent to another. Directly linking two computers is easier if they have a line of sight to the same relay point, such as a data center floating around the Earth. Using that data center to relay information between the two, similar to what Starlink currently does with satellite internet technology, would solve latency problems between far-away locations.

Diagram of the collaboration between Axiom, Kepler, and Skyloom for an orbital data center.
Credit – Axiom Space

But there are also some hurdles. Data transfer rates on satellites aren’t up to speed with modern ground-based technologies, though that is consistently improving every year thanks to efforts like Starlink. Getting the hardware into orbit poses an obvious challenge and expense. However, that bar might be better lower with the continual development of Starship and its low-cost launch capability. Finally, coordinating across different governments, especially regarding wireless bandwidth, can be tricky, but without that coordination, the ability to talk across borders is severely limited.

None of those limitations are insurmountable; technologists and investors seem to realize that. As our own Alan Boyle reported in March, a company called Lumen Orbit raised $2.4 million only three months after being founded to bring data centers to space. Axiom Space, which we’ve mentioned in several articles in the last few years, is also partnering with Kepler Space and Skyloom to develop the world’s first functional space-based data center.

With this increased interest, it seems only a matter of time before some of the computing power that is enabling the AI and computing revolution makes its way into orbit. But for now, the question remains: who will be the first one to do it?

Learn More:
GeekWire – Lumen Orbit emerges from stealth and raises $2.4M to put data centers in space
Periola, Alonge, & Ogudo – Space-Based Data Centers and Cooling: Feasibility Analysis via Multi-Criteria and Query Search for Water-Bearing Asteroids Showing Novel Underlying Regular and Symmetric Patterns
UT – Starlinks are Easily Detected by Radio Telescopes
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There is a new law in the benighted state of Louisiana requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms, including colleges. It is an arrant violation of the First Amendment—indeed, it was intended to test whether it comports with the First Amendment—and it is motivated by religion.  The fact that the law is admittedly religious in origin and nature is pathetically masked by saying that the Commandments are really an important part of American history, and that three other secular documents like the Declaration of Independence may also be displayed alongside Moses’s Laws.

Click below to read, or find it archived here:

The NYT article above has a brief summary of the law and the motivations of its promoters, which I’ve excerpted below.

Gov. Jeff Landry signed legislation on Wednesday requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every public classroom in Louisiana, making the state the only one with such a mandate and reigniting the debate over how porous the boundary between church and state should be.

Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, vowed a legal fight against the law they deemed “blatantly unconstitutional.” But it is a battle that proponents are prepared, and in many ways, eager, to take on.

“I can’t wait to be sued,” Mr. Landry said on Saturday at a Republican fund-raiser in Nashville, according to The Tennessean. And on Wednesday, as he signed the measure, he argued that the Ten Commandments contained valuable lessons for students.

“If you want to respect the rule of law,” he said, “you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”

The legislation is part of a broader campaign by conservative Christian groups to amplify public expressions of faith, and provoke lawsuits that could reach the Supreme Court, where they expect a friendlier reception than in years past. That presumption is rooted in recent rulings, particularly one in 2022 in which the court sided with a high school football coach who argued that he had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.

. . .The measure in Louisiana requires that the commandments be displayed in each classroom of every public elementary, middle and high school, as well as public college classrooms. The posters must be no smaller than 11 by 14 inches and the commandments must be “the central focus of the poster” and “in a large, easily readable font.”

It will also include a three-paragraph statement asserting that the Ten Commandments were a “prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.”

That reflects the contention by supporters that the Ten Commandments are not purely a religious text but also a historical document, arguing that the instructions handed down by God to Moses in the Book of Exodus are a major influence on United States law.

I’ve put the bill that became law below, and there’s a lot to unpack in it. But read for yourself; I’ll simply single out the highlights.

Click to read:

The bill begins with a long rationale trying to show that the Ten Commandments are an important part of American history, and therefore should be displayed because it’s not really promoting religion, but recounting our history. After all, some of the Founders mentioned God!  But doesn’t explain why, say, the Constitution or Declaration of Independence are NOT required to be displayed. No, the Ten Commandments is the only historical document required to be displayed; other documents are optional.  Here’s some of the rationale for making that display mandatory—the “historical context” argument that Christians use to push religion into schools (and put “In God We Trust” on our money):

Recognizing the historical role of the Ten Commandments accords with our nation’s history and faithfully reflects the understanding of the founders of our 9 nation with respect to the necessity of civic morality to a functional self-government. History records that James Madison, the fourth President of the United States ofAmerica, stated that “(w)e have staked the whole future of our new nation . . . upon  the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.”

. . .  The text of the Ten Commandments set forth in Subsection B of this 17 Section is identical to the text of the Ten Commandments monument that was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677, 688 19 (2005).  Including the Ten Commandments in the education of our children is part of our state and national history, culture, and tradition.

The Mayflower Compact of 1620 was America’s first written constitution and made a Covenant with Almighty God to “form a civil body politic”. This was the first purely American document of self-government and affirmed the link between civil society and God.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided a method of admitting new states to the Union from the territory as the country expanded to the Pacific. The Ordinance “extended the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty” to the territories and stated that “(r)eligion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

. . . .The Supreme Court of the United States acknowledged that the Ten Commandments may be displayed on local government property when a private donation is made for the purchase of the historical monument. Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summan, 555 U.S. 460 (2006).

The bill cites other religious statements by the founders, but of course the word “God,” while appearing in the Declaration of Independence, does not appear at all in the Constitution. The Founders barely believed in God, were not very religious at all, and it’s misleading to suggest that this nation was founded on the rules adumbrated in the Ten Commandments. (Or were there Eleven Commandments? See below.)

Note too that the Supreme Court ruled—and this too seems a First Amendment violation—that one could display the Ten Commandments on government property if the money for the display did not come from the public.  This, I suppose, is a lame attempt to avoid excessive entanglement of the government and religion vis-à-vis the Lemon Test, and, indeed, this bill requires that the money for the many classroom copies of the Ten Commandments must come from “donations”. That tells you right away that something fishy is going on.

Display of other documents is optional:

A public school may also display the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Northwest Ordinance, as provided in R.S. 26 25:1282, along with the Ten Commandments.

The Northwest Ordinance? What about the fricking Constitution?

There is another requirement: the Ten Commandments must be displayed along with a “context” statement, to wit:

The History of the Ten Commandments in American Public Education

The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries. Around the year 1688, The New England Primer became the first published American textbook and was the equivalent of a first grade reader. The New England Primer was used in public schools throughout the United States for more than one hundred fifty years to teach Americans to read and contained more than forty questions about the Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments were also included in public school textbooks published by educator William McGuffey, a noted university president and professor. A version of his famous McGuffey Readers was written in the early 1800s and became one of the most popular textbooks in the history of American education, selling more than one hundred million copies. Copies of the McGuffey Readers are still available today.

The Ten Commandments also appeared in textbooks published by Noah Webster in which were widely used in American public schools along with America’s first comprehensive dictionary that Webster also published. His textbook, The American Spelling Book, contained the Ten Commandments and sold more than one hundred million copies for use by public school children all across the nation and was still available for use in American public schools in the year 1975.

This is all more striving by the sweating lawmakers to show that, because the Ten Commandments were mentioned in early textbooks, they have become an integral part of American education and thus should remain so today. But since then the courts have tried erect and maintain a “wall of separation between church and state”, a metaphor used by Jefferson, who drew on earlier ideas of Roger Williams.

The enforcement of the Establishment Clause hasn’t been perfect: as I said, we have “In God We Trust” on our money; the Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase “0ne nation, under God”; and the Supreme court has allowed various First Amendment violations to slip through, including, as the NYT mentions, affirming a “Constitutional right” of a football coach to kneel on school property and publicly say a Christian prayer after football games.  Christians, it seems, cannot seem to keep their religion out of public schools. (That is, of course, why we have to eternally battle against creationism, which comes from the fictional narrative of Genesis 1 and 2.

Will this law stand?  It’s certainly going to be challenged by the ACLU and FFRF, and I’ve no doubt that these and other groups will take the law all the way to the Supreme Court. What happens then? The answer is murky. The court has allowed public prayer after public-school games, and a display of the Ten Commandments on public property if it’s funded privately.  The latter ruling may provide a precedent to uphold this law as well.

And we all know that the court is largely religious: 7 of the 9 justices are Catholic (I’m counting Gorsuch, who is “Anglican Catholic”), Jackson is a Protestant, and Kagan is the lone Jew. It’s not hard to imagine that most of the Supremes will be sympathetic to this law. And then. . . I’m worried about the resurgence of creationism.

By the way, as Steve Orzack pointed out, somehow the bill lists not ten but eleven commandments, to wit:

I count ELEVEN, right?  The authors of the bill have some revision to do!