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A research team has successfully developed a new approach to create switchable magnetic materials by using hydrogen bonding at the molecular level. This groundbreaking study shows how certain metal complexes, previously unresponsive to external stimuli, can now exhibit sharp and complete magnetic transitions by introducing chiral hydrogen bonds.

Physicists have shown that extremely light particles known as axions may occur in large clouds around neutron stars. These axions could form an explanation for the elusive dark matter that cosmologists search for -- and moreover, they might not be too difficult to observe.

Physicists have shown that extremely light particles known as axions may occur in large clouds around neutron stars. These axions could form an explanation for the elusive dark matter that cosmologists search for -- and moreover, they might not be too difficult to observe.

A story passed down in folklore led scientists to evidence of an 8-metre tsunami that hit an island in Hawaii hundreds of years ago

A review of Informatica: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright (2023) and Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge, From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester (2023)

Can the history of how humans organize knowledge help us understand 21st century information overload? Two readable new books help us address these questions with interdisciplinary narratives: Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester, and Informatica: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright.

To varying degrees and slightly different ways, both books review the history of information technologies as a helpful tool. Both cover the familiar chronology from the clay tablets and papyrus scrolls of ancient times, monks in the Middle Ages copying texts in their scriptoria, the 15th and 19th century technologies that made books cheaper and more common, the development of reference books, and the mid-20th century innovations leading to modern computers and World Wide Web. Both books are also stimulatingly interdisciplinary, discussing many more historical topics than I’ve mentioned above, but also grounded in science and technology. After these similarities, the books diverge.

Cuneiform tablet
Mesopotamia, circa 31 CE

Although Knowing What We Know is rich in history, it is not chronological. It instead progresses from the learning of information (education) to the storing of knowledge (museums, libraries, and encyclopedias), and then to the dissemination of knowledge, concluding in thoughtful discussion of the implication of new technologies, such as the AI-based Large Language Models (LLMs). These topics are corralled by Winchester’s background in journalism, and the grounding of each topic in precise examples.

On education, for example, Winchester contrasts three striking 21st century cases. He vividly recalls the woman he interviewed who started a school in a poverty-stricken village in India. Those students’ joyous thirst for knowledge is contrasted against the high-tension stakes in China, where a single exam taken in students’ teenage years determines their job opportunities for the rest of their lives. Winchester’s third example of education is the most striking—that of an illiterate island group whose oral storytelling tradition saved them, alone, from a tsunami.

Winchester progresses to knowledge summarized in encyclopedias, recalling his own love of them in his youth and summarizes the rise and cessation of the leading print encyclopedia of the 19th and 20th century, Encyclopedia Britannica. How can complex issues about the leading online encyclopedia Wikipedia, with its vast size and reliability, be better illustrated than by Winchester’s own experience late in his research seeing there that a pioneer of internet technology was listed as having died, the correction of which Winchester learned the next morning on social media?

And so it goes: Winchester focuses on a few extraordinary cases to illustrate each of his points. For the preservation of knowledge in museums, it is the remarkable story of the saving of museum treasures in China during political turmoil, and how the Chinese government has viewed this precious collection. Similarly, the rise of mass media is illustrated by the BBC because, Winchester notes, its style was influential in the development of radio news around the world. This flows naturally to the following chapter’s discussion of propaganda, focusing on the chilling example of the Nazis. His penultimate chapter is about polymaths and, finally, wisdom, focusing less on religion than on whether it was wise to drop the atomic bombs in 1945. The book concludes with the implications of ChatGPT and other new technology for our brains.

Winchester has a remarkable ability to turn what could be a dry recitation of facts into a series of compelling stories, with numbered subsections in each chapter. The one time I felt that he could have used a copy editor was during his overly long digression on Krakatoa, the subject of one of his previous books, though he did make even this topic surprisingly relevant. In his hands, such meandering is usually done masterfully.

Like a well-structured novel, all that came before leads Winchester to his conclusion. His fear is that technology, as currently progressing, can hurt our ability to think for ourselves. Characteristically, he illustrates this with a specific example: the complex skill set he stumbled through when his small boat needed to navigate toward land rather than be lost in the ocean in the days prior to GPS. Can people even read maps anymore? In one of the book’s few missed opportunities, he does not draw an extended parallel to the people who (accurately) decried in Gutenberg’s era that if books were mass produced, people’s ability to remember vast amounts of knowledge would decline, which it did (the skill of modern mnemonists, such as the late Harry Lorrayne, notwithstanding).

If Winchester’s book is grounded in concise case studies, Wright’s contributions in Informatica are science and the history of structured systems for organizing knowledge. These merge when Wright discusses the biological classification scheme developed primarily by Carl Linnaeus, including an amusing anecdote involving Thomas Jefferson mailing the decaying body of a moose to acclaimed scientific theorist Comte de Buffon. Although science is mentioned several times in Winchester’s Knowing, Alex Wright’s Informatica opens with it, following the late biologist E.O. Wilson in speculating about the biological role of epigenetics in human knowledge transmission. Wright compares “networks and hierarchies” in the natural and the human worlds. He sees parallels between creations by groups that are unlikely to have communicated, such as the similarity between the plant taxonomies created by Western scholars and those formed through oral tradition in other societies.

Using more traditional evidence, Wright explicitly links the Linnaean classification scheme to the development of librarians’ attempts to organize books, culminating in the Dewey Decimal System at the turn of the 20th century. He appropriately refers to this 19th century arc as “the industrial library,” the creation of more elaborate organizational schemes being demanded by vastly increased numbers of published books, which was in turn allowed by new technology.

Successive chapters discuss early to mid-20th century utopian information sharing projects using then-existing technology, including index cards and telegraphy, or the briefly famous Mundaneum (an institution that aimed to gather together all the world’s knowledge and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification). In Informatica, Wright’s discussion of these utopian schemes does not flow as well as it could, the reader being left to make the connections.

Worse, Wright’s extended history of the developments leading to the modern internet is shoehorned into a subsection of the revised “Web That Wasn’t” chapter as “The Web That Was.” This combination of topics in the same chapter was tenable in Glut, but in Informatica the subsection discusses so many people and inventions, all of whose work made the World Wide Web possible, that it should have been a new chapter. Finally, Wright recycled some of his earlier writing and did not update it, such as referring to CD-Roms and America Online (AOL) as leading technologies. This could have been fixed easily.

That said, the narrative in Informatica is more clearly chronological than in Knowing What We Know, but Simon Winchester is so skilled a writer that his book is generally a smoother narrative despite being more episodic. Except in the book’s outline: I was halfway through the book before realizing that its main chapters had a logically progressive sequence to them, from data acquisition to information display to the uses of knowledge and finally to wisdom. Winchester could have made this clearer earlier in the book with just a few words.

One side topic bears noting: Winchester said in at least two media interviews that his discussion of the racism found in a leading mid-century encyclopedia was edited out of the published version of Knowing What We Know, on the grounds that it would be too controversial or offend too many of his readers. Perhaps it would have, but its inclusion would have been valuable, partly for highlighting the important point that even the most well-respected reference materials can be wrong. While it can be argued that this is excusable because Knowing is not written by an academic scholar, a similar edit was also made in a book by Yale historian Beverly Gage, G-Man, (which I reviewed in an earlier issue of Skeptic), with pages 62–63 twice leading the reader to guess, but never know for sure, which apparently offensive word is represented. The criticism that only elite scholars know about the history of racism will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if that history is not included in popular books.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.3
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On the other hand, Informatica and Knowing What We Know both have problems with the wording of their titles, and with such vast topics, it would be easy to quibble with decisions on which topics to focus. I wonder if Informatica’s new title could make readers think they are getting a wholly different book, rather than an update of Glut (originally published in 2007), with uneven revisions and only a chapter’s worth of new material? In Knowing What We Know, it’s the last third of the subtitle (“From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic”) that could mislead: in other cases, the phrase “Ancient Wisdom” has sometimes referred to religious traditions, but here seems to refer more to any ancient writing, and the book’s late discussion of wisdom is not primarily about religion.

The important point shared by Knowing What We Know and Informatica is that greater access to information also presents challenges. Informatica is more theoretical and historical, Knowing being more a historically informed snapshot of our present. Both are stimulating and both are informative.

About the Author

Michelle Ainsworth holds an MA in History and she is currently researching the cultural history of stage magic in the United States. She is a humanist and lives in New York City.

The first breakthrough in finding prime numbers for over 25 years has mathematicians celebrating, with hopes that the techniques behind the new proof could further advance other areas of maths

I can’t resist helping wild animals, and the local squirrels are hoarding nuts for the winter. But it’s only the best for the squirrels around Botany Pond (there are three), who get very expensive pecans ($5.99 per pound). Over the past weeks, I’ve convinced them that I am not only not dangerous, but also a dispenser of nuts.  First they learned to take them from my hand, and now they’re crawling up my leg to take them. They bury nearly all of them, but that’s okay; they’ll need them in winter.

No, I haven’t been hurt, and I love the feel of their little claws as they put their hands on my fingers to gently take a nut. This one got at least four pecans today.

Photo by Marie:

AI models have safeguards in place to prevent them creating dangerous or illegal output, but a range of jailbreaks have been found to evade them. Now researchers show that writing backwards can trick AI models into revealing bomb-making instructions.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the most powerful organization of American academics, issued a statement a while back ditching its previous opposition to boycotts of universities. Such boycotts were no longer, said the AAUP, violations of academic freedom.  Although their statement didn’t mention Israel, it was clear that their statement was meant to put the AAUP’s imprimatur on boycotts of Israeli institutions and academics.  It was wrongheaded and reprehensible.

But wait! There’s more! Now the AAUP has issued a new policy (pdf here) that it’s okay to use DEI statements to evaluate candidates for hiring, retention, tenure, and promotion. DEI statements, they say, are closely connected to academic freedom (academic freedom is the right of faculty to teach whatever they want, within reasonable limits, and to work on whatever they want):

The Association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure views the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) criteria in faculty recruitment, promotion, and retention within this broader vision of higher education for the public good. Since the 1990s, many universities and colleges have instituted policies that use DEI criteria in faculty evaluation for appointment, reappointment, tenure, and promotion, including the use of statements that invite or require faculty members to address their skills, competencies, and achievements regarding DEI in teaching, research, and service.2 Such criteria are one instrument among many that may contribute to evaluating the full range of faculty skills and achievements within a diverse community of students and scholars.

Some critics contend that such policies run afoul of the principles of academic freedom. Specifically, they have characterized DEI statements as “ideological screening tools” and “political litmus tests.” From this perspective, DEI statements are sometimes thought to constitute unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and a threat to faculty members’ academic freedom because they allegedly require candidates to adopt or act upon a set of moral and political views. This committee rejects the notion that the use of DEI criteria for faculty evaluation is categorically incompatible with academic freedom. To the contrary, when implemented appropriately in accordance with sound standards of faculty governance, DEI criteria—including DEI statements—can be a valuable component in the efforts to recruit, hire, and retain a diverse faculty with a breadth of skills needed for excellence in teaching, research, and service.

This is misguided because it okays ideological litmus tests that are the real purpose of DEI statements. Everyone in academia knows that, regardless of what the AAUP says, if you submit a statement saying that you will treat all students equally and fairly, regardless of race, your application or promotion goes into the dumpster.  And this is regardless of whether the DEI standards were confected by “faculty governance.”  And if you want to recruit, hire, and retain a “diverse faculty” (and of course they mean “racially diverse”), you can simply broaden your search, putting some emphasis on minority candidates and thus getting more of them into your pool. But you don’t have to hire or promote them on the basis of race, a move that is probably illegal but hasn’t yet been tested in the courts. Deemphasizing merit in favor of ethnicity—or fealty to a certain ideology—is never a good thing to do.

Anyway, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (the familiar FIRE), has issued a pretty splenetic statement criticizing the AAUP for its new stand. The article is called “The AAUP continues to back away from academic freedom,” and it’s on the mark.  As Special Counsel Robert Shibley writes:

The AAUP insists academic boycotts and DEI hiring criteria won’t threaten academic freedom — as long as everyone is always super careful.

In its latest statement, the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure notes that “some critics” (Hey, that’s us!) contend the use of DEI criteria and mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring and evaluation can

run afoul of the principles of academic freedom. Specifically, they have characterized DEI statements as ‘ideological screening tools’ and ‘political litmus tests.’ From this perspective, DEI statements are sometimes thought to constitute unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and a threat to faculty members’ academic freedom because they allegedly require candidates to adopt or act upon a set of moral and political views.

With the exception of the word “allegedly,” this is a pretty fair description of the main problem with mandatory DEI statements.

FIRE is careful to consider each such policy individually, as not every statement requirement is the same. But in general, when employees or job applicants are required to pledge or prove their allegiance to a school’s interpretation of DEI concepts, we object precisely because ensuring that allegiance is the stated goal of the policy. From the perspective of the policy authors, that’s not a bug, it’s the key feature.

Shibley adds this:

Schools adopting DEI requirements want to filter out people who don’t or can’t agree to act upon the institution’s specific set of views in the classroom and in their service work. If colleges and universities didn’t care whether applicants agreed with their conception of DEI, why would they bother to ask applicants to demonstrate that agreement?

. . . . FIRE isn’t alone in our observation that these policies can operate as ideological filters — many faculty think they do, too. A 2022 FIRE survey found faculty were almost evenly split on whether DEI statements in hiring were a justifiable requirement for a university job (50%) or are an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom (50%). While that’s bad on its own, a whopping 90% of conservative faculty, the group most likely to dissent from prevailing campus views on DEI, viewed such statements as political litmus tests. The Washington Post’s Editorial Board cited the survey in an op-ed arguing that “[w]hatever their original intent, the use of DEI statements has too often resulted in self-censorship and ideological policing.”

So are these critics right? The AAUP’s answer is a firm “not necessarily.”

The statements are, of course, political litmus tests. Berkeley used them by giving numerical rankings to three aspects of the statements (past involvement in DEI, philosophy of DEI, and a candidate’s plans to advance DEI), and simply throwing away those statements whose scores weren’t high enough—that is, “progressive” enough.  They didn’t even consider academic merit. And that is an ideological litmus test. Those tests are illegal.

Shibley finishes by excoriating the AAUP:

The AAUP’s transformation into just another political organization is highly discouraging. America needs an AAUP that is willing to go to the mat to defend professors even when they have something unpopular to say. More than members of any other profession, academics have reason to understand that they may someday be the first to grasp an unsuspected and perhaps unwelcome truth. Since 1915, the AAUP has been the traditional first stop for those who find themselves facing trouble for doing so. If the organization continues on its current course, it is hard to imagine that remaining true for much longer.

Finally, over at my colleague Brian Leiter’s website, he also takes issue with the AAUP policy and quotes his earlier opposition as well as some from a professor from Bates College:

Oh how the mighty have fallen; Committee A of the AAUP used to be a reliable defender of academic freedom, but since its capture by the enemies of academic freedom, it has been going downhill fast.   The latest absurd statement in defense of “diversity statements” reflects pretty clearly the influence of UC Davis law professor Brian Soucek (a member of Committee A), whose mistaken views we have discussed many times before (see especially).   Let me quote the appropriately scathing comments of Professor Tyler Harper (Bates College) from Twitter:

The AAUP statement insisting that mandatory DEI statements are compatible with academic freedom—and not political litmus tests—is ridiculous. DEI is not a neutral framework dropped from the sky, it’s an ideology about which reasonable people—including people of color—disagree.  I have benefited from and support affirmative action, and there are some things that fall under the rubric of DEI that I agree with. But pretending that DEI is not a political perspective or framework—when only people of one political persuasion support DEI—is a flagrant lie.  Evaluating a professor’s teaching with respect to their adherence to a DEI framework is a clear violation of academic freedom. DEI is not some bland affirmation that diversity is important and all people deserve accessible education. It’s a specific set of ideas.

Professor Harper adds:  “Recent events should have made clear that professors, particularly those of us on the left, must defend academic freedom without compromise, even when we disagree with how others use that freedom. When academic freedom is softened, we are always the ones who end up losing.”

Leiter adds:

DEI is an extramural social goal, just as much as being pro-America in MAGA-land is.  Committee A is dead.  We are fortunate that both FIRE and the Academic Freedom Alliance are actually still defending academic freedom.   I would encourage all readers to resign their membership in the AAUP.  It’s a disgrace.

Well, I’ve never been a member, so I couldn’t resign, but I would if I were a member.  The AAUP is indeed a disgrace, capitulating first to anti-Israel sentiment and now to those who want academics to show fealty to the tenets of progressivism.

Some day someone is going to challenge diversity statements in court. That hasn’t yet happened because someone with that kind of “standing” would lose any chance to be hired or promoted. But if some day some brave person does object, and can prove that he or she was hurt by an inadequate DEI statement, the case will work its way up to the Supreme Court, which will rule that DEI statements are illegal.

h/t: Greg Mayer

Unistellar’s new Odyssey Pro telescope offers access to deep-sky astrophotography in a small portable package.

Access to the night sky has never been simpler. The last half decade has seen a revolution in backyard astronomy, as ‘smartscopes’—telescopes controlled by smartphone applications—have come to the fore. These offer an easy entry into basic deep sky astrophotography even from bright urban skies, albeit at a higher price point versus traditional telescopes on the market. We’ve reviewed units from Vaonis and Unistellar before, as well as wrote commentary on the rise of the whole smartscope movement. Now, Unistellar has a new entry on the market in 2024: the Odyssey Pro.

The Odyssey Pro is lightweight, at 14.3-pounds (65 kilograms) assembled plus carbon fiber tripod. The telescope sets up quickly, with the tube and base securing to the top ring of the tripod.

Specifications for the Odyssey Pro

The telescope at the heart of the system is an 85mm aperture reflector with an f/3.9 320mm focal length. The image sensor (in place of where the secondary mirror would be on a traditional telescope) is a 4.2 megapixel camera. The turret on the side of the tube houses an electronic eyepiece incorporating Nikon’s Eyepiece Technology, providing an enhanced view. The addition of the eyepiece turret is the key difference between the Odyssey and Odyssey Pro.

Smartscopes find and aim at targets using a method known as ‘plate-solving’ in tandem with satellite GPS. This involves looking at segments of the sky, and comparing the star pattern with a known database. You can see this in action as the scope slews from one part of the sky to the next on startup. Unlike, Vaonis’s Stellina, Unistellar’s telescopes give you a live view during the slewing process, and allow users to manually slew around the sky in a virtual joy stick mode, a nice, hands-on touch.

Three views of the new Unistellar phone app controller in action.

The new app interface for Unistellar is updated as well… I was surprised to actually find all of my old eVscope images in the cloud memory, from years back. The unit is USB-C charged, and offers about five hours of use in the field. The Odyssey Pro has 64Gb (gigabytes) of internal storage memory.

The company offers a free backpack with each purchase. The Odyssey Pro runs for $3,999 USD, and the company frequently offers discount sales.

Odyssey Pro Versus the eVScope

The Odyssey Pro is smaller (85mm aperture, versus 112mm) than the eVscope, but similar in operation. The Odyssey features auto focus technology: no more Bahtinov mask manual focusing like with the eVscope. We also got to try out the smart solar filter for the unit. The filter clicks magnetically in place of the front of the telescope. I’d keep a close eye on the unit when using it this way during public observing, as curious hands could easily snag or pull the filter off during observation. While there’s no danger of blinding a viewer, a few seconds of unfiltered Sun could easily damage the telescope. The unit easily found and slewed to the Sun, then focused and color corrected the image.

The Odyssey Pro set up for solar observing.

What we like- Like the Unistellar eVScope, the Odyssey Pro just works as advertised: set it down, power it up, and you’re slewing to targets within minutes.

What we don’t like-The newer app seems a bit ‘balky,’ and I needed a cold boot the telescope during a few sessions to get things up and running again… also, it seems very sensitive to any vibration during enhanced imaging mode, even on solid concrete.

The telescope will wifi bond with the app in the field without a dedicated internet connection. This is a must for using it at a remote spot.

Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS through the Odyssey Pro.

But the real magic happens when you engage the enhanced vision mode. This initiates a process where the scope starts to stare at a target, stacking and cleaning up the image. The longer it runs, the brighter and sharper the image gets. Unistellar’s new method is known as ‘Vivid Vision’ and compares and refines images versus the user database to validate what the telescope is seeing. Color correction for stars and validation also uses Gaia’s latest DR3 catalog.

First Night Out

Our first night out with the Odyssey Pro saw us showing off about a dozen deep sky objects to a small group under the bright lights of downtown Bristol, Tennessee. Ironically, while you can view the Moon and planets with the Odyssey Pro, its relatively wide (33.6 x 45’, a little larger than a Full Moon) field of view really shines when viewing deep-sky nebulae and clusters.

Four deep-sky images of three different star clusters, taken with the Odyssey Pro in an urban environment. The Bottom Line

Are smartscopes worth the price? I’d say the Odyssey Pro (or any smartscope) has three key advantages:

-Finding objects: the whole plate-solving slewing method really puts me out of a job… and that’s probably a good thing. Rather than spending time star-hopping and studying star charts to find an object, the Odyssey Pro simply goes there and centers the target in the field.

-Imaging from urban sites: The Odyssey Pro puts fainter objects in reach of urban viewers.

-Use for public outreach: At a star party, folks can gather around and watch as the view emerges. No more queuing up to the eyepiece, refocusing for every user, or explaining how to look through a telescope. I can spend more time talking about space and what we’re seeing, rather than fussing with gear.

Also, Unistellar is alone in building an amazing science community around its worldwide network of smartscopes. Users are now tracking asteroids, following comets and even generating exoplanet light curves and more, all in real campaigns to contribute to science, all from their own backyards.

Be sure to give the Odyssey Pro a try, as a great introduction to smartscope astronomy.

The post Review: Unistellar’s New Odyssey Pro Smart Telescope appeared first on Universe Today.

Today we have some photographs by Lou Jost of the recent Aurora Borealis that was visible from the U.S.  Lou’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Although Lou works in Ecuador as a biologist, he was visiting the U.S. and saw this as lagniappe:

The earth has just moved through one of the strongest solar storms of the last century, and on Oct 10 this produced one of the most spectacular displays of aurora borealis ever seen in the midwest US. There were  even reports of aurora borealis as far south as Mexico and Puerto Rico!

I was visiting my brother that night in southern Wisconsin near the Illinois border. He saw the NASA aurora forecast and we decided to head out to a dark spot to see what we could see. We had heard that mostly it would be invisible to the naked eye and we would need to use a telephone camera to see the colors. But even while we were driving the car to our dark spot, we began to see faint moving bands of light in the sky,

When we got to the dark spot we were astonished to see deep red lights mixed with pale teal green stripes. I thought the aurora was always just green but I now know that especially powerful solar storms make reds and purples and blues too. We saw all those colors, pulsing and re-grouping into stripes and swirls. I had never seen aurora borealis in my whole life, so I was deeply surprised by this display. It was captured by many observers around the country but I think what we saw in Wisconsin was as stunning and colorful as anywhere.

The attached photos are unedited straight-off-the-telephone handheld shots taken by Paul Jost and Ayesha Abbassi; the hooded head in one of the photos is me. The bright light on the lower left corner of one shot is the half-moon, blurred by camera movement.  I am sure this would have been visible from dark areas outside of Chicago, and maybe even from the Chicago lakeshore looking out at the darker skies above Lake Michigan. The aurora changes very quickly and it is necessary to watch the aurora forecast, which is based on actual solar activity measurements made from a space satellite, and it has a 35 minute lead time.

There are many good websites that discuss the complex causes of the aurora. I learned that the red we saw was very unusual and probably caused by oxygen excitation hundreds of kilometers above the earth, while greens are caused  by a different oxygen energy level emission lower in the atmosphere.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/-articles-aps-v8-i1-c9.htm

https://www.theaurorazone.com/about-the-aurora/the-science-of-the-northern-lights/the-northern-lights-colours/

https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/northern-lights/colours-of-northern-lights.asp

People who listen to music after having surgery report lower levels of pain and require less morphine than those who don't

WWTI doctors' cared only about infecting unvaccinated children with SAR-CoV-2, and they were willing to blatantly contradict themselves and make things up achieve this goal.

The post Dr. Sunetra Gupta Versus Dr. Sunetra Gupta first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The search for exoplanets has grown immensely in recent decades thanks to next-generation observatories and instruments. The current census is 5,766 confirmed exoplanets in 4,310 systems, with thousands more awaiting confirmation. With so many planets available for study, exoplanet studies and astrobiology are transitioning from the discovery process to characterization. Essentially, this means that astronomers are reaching the point where they can directly image exoplanets and determine the chemical composition of their atmospheres.

As always, the ultimate goal is to find terrestrial (rocky) exoplanets that are “habitable,” meaning they could support life. However, our notions of habitability have been primarily focused on comparisons to modern-day Earth (i.e., “Earth-like“), which has come to be challenged in recent years. In a recent study, a team of astrobiologists considered how Earth has changed over time, giving rise to different biosignatures. Their findings could inform future exoplanet searches using next-generation telescopes like the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), destined for space by the 2040s.

The study was led by Kenneth Goodis Gordon, a graduate student with the University of Central Florida’s (UCF) Planetary Sciences Group. He was joined by researchers from the SETI Institute, the Virtual Planetary Laboratory Team at the University of Washington, NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NESS), the Space Science Division and Astrobiology Division at the NASA Ames Research Center, the Sellers Exoplanet Environments Collaboration (SEEC) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The paper that describes their findings is being considered for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Artist concept of Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment period. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.

As the team indicates in their paper, the current census of exoplanets includes more than 200 terrestrial planets, dozens of which have been observed in their parent stars’ habitable zone (HZ). Many more are expected in the coming years, thanks to next-generation instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Equipped with cutting-edge spectrometers, adaptive optics, and coronographs, these and other telescopes will enable the characterization of exoplanets, identify biosignatures, and determine their habitability.

This is a complex problem since a range of different planetary, orbital, and stellar parameters must be considered. To date, Earth is the only planet known to harbor life, which limits our perspective. But as Goodis Gordon told Universe Today via email, this is not the only way in which habitability studies have been constrained:

“Currently, there is only one example of a planet known to harbor life: our own Earth. However, when we think of habitability, most of the time, people will only relate that term to modern-day Earth-like conditions: large-scale vegetation, animals, humans, etc. This can severely limit our approach to finding habitable exoplanets because it only provides us with one data point to compare against.

“But we know from biogeochemical analyses that the Earth is not just one data point and that our planet has actually been habitable for eons. So better understanding the signatures of the Earth throughout its evolution provides us with more comparison points when searching for habitable worlds elsewhere.”

For instance, life emerged on Earth during the Archeon Eon (ca. 4 billion years ago), when the atmosphere was predominantly composed of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, and inert gases. By the late Paleoproterozoic Era (ca. 2.5 to 1.6 billion years ago), the Great Oxygenation Event occurred after a billion years of cyanobacterial photosynthesis. This period lasted from 2.46 to 2.06 billion years ago and caused Earth’s atmosphere to transition from a reducing atmosphere to an oxidizing atmosphere, which led to the emergence of more complex life forms.

Artist’s impression of Earth during the Archean Eon. Credit: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

During this same period, the Sun underwent evolutionary changes over the past 4.5 billion years. At this time, the Sun was 30% dimmer than it is today and has gradually grown brighter and hotter since. Despite this, Earth maintained liquid water on its surface, and life continued to survive and evolve. The complex interrelationship between Earth’s evolving atmosphere and our Sun’s evolution is key to maintaining habitability for billions of years. As Goodis Gordon explained:

“In addition to that, current exoplanet characterization strategies tend to rely solely on the unpolarized light received from these worlds, which studies have shown can result in errors in the retrieved fluxes and degeneracies in the calculated planetary parameters. For example, if an exoplanet has really thick clouds or hazes in its atmosphere, the observed flux spectrum can be flat with almost no spectral features. This makes it extremely difficult to detect what gases are in the atmosphere or even what those clouds or hazes that blocked the light are made of.”

In recent years, several studies have examined the flux and polarization signatures of light reflected by an early Earth. Others have simulated different scenarios throughout the Archean, Proterozoic (2.5 billion to 541 million years ago), and Phanerozoic Eons (538.8 million years ago to the present). Lastly, some studies analyzed how the signatures of these early-Earth analogs would change if they orbited different types of stars. But as Goodis Gordon pointed out, nearly all of these studies focused on the unpolarized flux from these worlds, so they missed some of the information available in the light:

“Polarization is a more sensitive tool than flux-only observations and can enhance exoplanet characterizations. Polarimetry is extremely sensitive to the physical mechanism scattering the light, thereby allowing for accurate characterizations of the properties of a planetary atmosphere and surface. Also, since polarization measures light as a vector, it is sensitive to the locations of features on the planet, such as cloud and land distributions, as well as diurnal rotation and seasonal variability.

“Within the Solar System, polarimetric observations helped characterize the clouds of Titan, Venus, and the gas giants, while outside of it, polarimetry has been used to characterize the cloud properties of brown dwarfs. In most of these cases, the characterizing discovery was possible only with polarimetry!”

This artist’s concept features one of multiple initial possible design options for NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

This could have profound implications for the study and characterization of exoplanets in the near future. Using an expanded concept of habitability that takes into account how Earth has evolved over time and benefits from the study of polarized light, astronomers will likely identify far more habitable planets when next-generation observatories like the HWO become available. The plans for this observatory build upon two earlier mission concepts – the Large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR) and the Habitable Exoplanets Observatory (HabEx).

Based on these previous studies and the experience astronomers have accrued by working with previous exoplanet-hunting missions—i.e., Hubble, Kepler, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and the JWST—the HWO will be designed specifically to examine the “atmospheres of exoplanets for potential indications of life” (aka “biosignatures”) and determine if they are potentially habitable planets. As Goodis Gordon indicated, his team’s research could help inform future surveys using the HWO and other next-generation observatories:

“Our models provide more data points to compare observations of terrestrial exoplanets against and therefore help to inform habitability studies of these worlds. Additionally, there has been a push in the exoplanet community in recent years to include polarimetry in near-future observatories like the Extremely Large Telescopes on the ground or the Habitable Worlds Observatory in space. Our hope is that our models will help prove the power of polarimetry in characterizing and distinguishing between different habitable exoplanet scenarios in ways that unpolarized flux observations cannot.”

Further Reading: arXiv

The post Establishing a New Habitability Metric for Future Astrobiology Surveys appeared first on Universe Today.

A research team is exploring new battery technologies for grid energy storage. The team's recent results suggest that iron, when treated with the electrolyte additive silicate, could create a high-performance alkaline battery anode.

Predicting the behavior of many interacting quantum particles is a complicated process but is key to harness quantum computing for real-world applications. Researchers have developed a method for comparing quantum algorithms and identifying which quantum problems are the hardest to solve.

Predicting the behavior of many interacting quantum particles is a complicated process but is key to harness quantum computing for real-world applications. Researchers have developed a method for comparing quantum algorithms and identifying which quantum problems are the hardest to solve.

How do complex mixtures of chemicals affect our health? New research has shown that chemicals that occur in complex mixtures and in concentration ratios as found in humans act together. Even if the concentrations of the individual substances were each below the effect threshold, the chemicals in the mixture showed a cumulative neurotoxic effect.

The Artemis program involves impressive technological advancements in robotics, communications, spacecraft, and advanced habitats, all of which are clearly necessary for such an ambitious endeavour. But the mission also requires updated spacesuits. Those spacesuits are critical to mission success, and the Italian luxury fashion house Prada is adding their knowledge and experience to the design.

More than 50 years have passed since the last human walked on the Moon. Entirely new technologies have been available since then, though spacesuits don’t look like they’ve changed that much, at least on the surface. But Axiom Space, the NASA contractor creating the new spacesuits, says they’ve redefined spacesuit development—and they’ve done it with help from Prada.

“We’re blending engineering, science and art.”

Russel Ralston, Axiom Space’s Executive Vice President of Extravehicular Activity.

It’s tempting to dismiss Prada as just a fashion brand. But according to the two companies, Prada has “expertise on high-performance materials, features, and sewing techniques,” that are critical to the new spacesuit.

“This is a groundbreaking partnership,” said Russel Ralston, Axiom Space’s Executive Vice President of Extravehicular Activity. “We’re blending engineering, science and art.”

“Our elite teams have redefined spacesuit development, establishing new pathways to innovative solutions and applying a state-of-the-art design approach for the AxEMU,” said Matt Ondler, the President of Axiom Space. “We have broken the mold. The Axiom Space-Prada partnership has set a new foundational model for cross-industry collaboration, further expanding what’s possible in commercial space.”

The AxEMU is impressive. It’s a single architecture that can be adapted for missions to the lunar surface and to Low-Earth Orbit. It can accommodate a wide range of body sizes from the first to the 99th percentile and is more flexible due to innovative soft and hard joints. This provides greater flexibility and allows more precise geological and scientific work while maximizing astronaut comfort.

The AxEMU spacesuit includes custom gloves made in-house, featuring several advancements over the gloves currently in use. Image Credit: Axiom Space/Prada

According to Axiom, the AxEMU is more reliable than previous suits and built-in redundancies provide increased safety for astronauts. If something fails, those redundancies allow astronauts to return to a spacecraft or habitat, where another benefit of the suit comes into play. The new suit is designed to be maintained in orbit.

Artemis aims to explore the Moon’s polar regions, where temperatures plummet to as low as -238°C (-396°F) in permanently shadowed craters. AxEMU can keep astronauts alive for two hours in those temperatures, and they will be able to perform spacewalks for eight hours.

This infographic highlights some of AxEMU’s components and capabilities. The suit features biometric monitoring, in-suit athlete-level nutrition, and 4G/LTE communications. Image Credit: Axiom Space/Prada

AxEMU employs an innovative regenerative carbon dioxide scrubbing system. This is an improvement over other suits, which employed lithium hydroxide (LiOH) canisters to absorb CO2 and had to be replaced after each use.

While many of the suit’s improvements are strictly technological, Prada contributed to its overall design. Both Prada and Axiom Space praise their ongoing partnership.

Lorenzo Bertelli is the Prada Group’s Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Corporate Social Responsibility. Bertelli said, “Going beyond our limits is one of the company’s values that perfectly reflects the spirit of the Prada brand and my parents’ vision. I’m very proud of the result we’re showing today, which is just the first step in a long-term collaboration with Axiom Space. We’ve shared our expertise on high-performance materials, features, and sewing techniques, and we learned a lot. I’m sure we’ll continue to explore new challenges, broaden our horizons, and build new scenarios together.”

“We are pioneering a new era in space exploration where partnerships are imperative to the commercialization of space,” said Ralston. “Partnerships build a strong, cohesive team, enabling industry experts to provide cutting-edge technology, specialized products and services to drive innovation. For the first time, we are leveraging expertise in other industries to craft a better solution for space.”

New visor coatings on the AxEMU give astronauts improved vision. Image Credit: Axiom Space/Prada.

From gloves to boots to electronics and visor coatings and everything in between, the AxEMU is an improvement over previous suits. Over the past two years, Axiom Space has been iteratively improving the design with an eye on the scheduled moon landing in 2026. They’ve tested the suit extensively with astronauts and with simulations in state-of-the-art facilities at SpaceX, NASA, and in-house. They also tested the suit underwater to simulate the lunar environment with an unoccupied spacesuit at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) and reduced gravity simulations at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

AxEMU is nearing its final testing stage. In 2025, it will enter its critical design testing phase. If all goes well, Artemis astronauts will wear them when they set foot on the Moon in 2026.

The post The Artemis Astronauts are Getting New Spacesuits With Some Help From Prada appeared first on Universe Today.

In 1995, Caltech researchers at the Institute’s Palomar Observatory first observed what appeared to be a brown dwarf orbiting Gliese 229 – a red dwarf star located about 19 light-years from Earth. Since then, this brown dwarf (Gliese 229 B) has mystified astronomers because it appeared too dim for its mass. With 70 times the mass of Jupiter, it should have been brighter than what telescopes had observed. However, a Caltech-led international team of astronomers recently solved the mystery by determining that the brown dwarf is a pair of closely orbiting twins!

The study was led by Jerry W. Xuan, a graduate student in Caltech’s Department of Astronomy working with Dimitri Mawet, the David Morrisroe Professor of Astronomy. They were joined by an international team from institutes and universities around the world, including the National Research Council of Canada Herzberg, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the European Space Agency (ESA), the Laboratory of Space Studies and Instrumentation in Astrophysics (LESIA), the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Their study, which appeared in Nature, was funded by NASA and the Heising-Simons Foundation. The study team responsible for discovering Gliese 229 B in 1995 included several co-authors on this latest study, including Rebecca Oppenheimer, a Caltech graduate student at the time (now an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History); Shri Kulkarni, the George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science; Keith Matthews, an instrument specialist at Caltech; and other colleagues.

At the time, their findings indicated that Gliese 229 B had methane in its atmosphere, which is typical of gas giants but not stars. These findings constituted the first confirmed detection of a brown dwarf, a class of cool star-like objects that constitute the “missing link” between gas giants and stars that had been predicted about 30 years prior. “Seeing the first object smaller than a star orbiting another sun was exhilarating,” said Oppenheimer in a Caltech news release, “It started a cottage industry of people seeking oddballs like it back then, but it remained an enigma for decades.”

“Gliese 229 B was considered the poster-child brown dwarf,” added Xuan. “And now we know we were wrong all along about the nature of the object. It’s not one but two. We just weren’t able to probe separations this close until now.” Hundreds of observations have been conducted since Gliese 229 B was discovered nearly 30 years ago, but its dimness remained a mystery to astronomers. While scientists suspected Gliese 229 B might be twins, the two brown dwarfs would have to be very close to each other to evade notice for almost three decades.

To confirm this theory, the team relied on the GRAVITY interferometer on the ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to spatially resolve the two brown dwarfs. They then used the CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle Spectrograph (CRIRES+) instrument to detect their distinct spectral signatures and measure their Doppler shift. Their results showed that Gliese 229 B consists of two brown dwarfs (Gliese 229 Ba and Gliese 229 Bb) about 38 and 34 times the mass of Jupiter, that orbit each other with a period of 12 days and a separation of 16 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.

The observed brightness levels also match what is expected for two small brown dwarfs in this mass range. “This discovery that Gliese 229 B is binary not only resolves the recent tension observed between its mass and luminosity but also significantly deepens our understanding of brown dwarfs, which straddle the line between stars and giant planets,” said Mawet, a senior research scientist at NASA JPL. The discovery of this duo raises new questions about how tight-knit brown dwarfs form and suggests similar binaries may be out there and waiting to be found.

An artist’s conception of looking back at Sol from the binary brown dwarf system WISE 1049-5319, 6.5 light years distant. Credit: Janella Williams, Penn State University

Some theories suggest that brown dwarf pairs could form within a star’s protoplanetary disk that fragments into two seeds of brown dwarfs that become gravitationally bound after a close encounter. The same mechanism might lead to closely orbiting exoplanet binaries, though all of this remains to be seen. In the meantime, said Oppenheimer, this discovery is a very exciting development. “These two worlds whipping around each other are actually smaller in radius than Jupiter,” she said. “They’d look quite strange in our night sky if we had something like them in our own solar system. This is the most exciting and fascinating discovery in substellar astrophysics in decades.”

In the future, Xuan and his colleagues plan to search for more brown dwarf binaries using existing and next-generation instruments. This includes the Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) and the Keck Observatory’s High-resolution Infrared SPectrograph for Exoplanet Characterization (HISPEC). A team led by Mawet developed the former, while the latter is currently under construction at Caltech and other laboratories by teams also led by Mawet.

A separate independent study that appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters was led by Sam Whitebook and Tim Brandt, a Caltech graduate student and an associate astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (respectively). Their findings also concluded that Gliese 229 B is a pair of tightly-orbiting brown dwarfs.

Further Reading: Caltech, Nature

The post Astronomers Solve the Mystery of the Famed Brown Dwarf That is Too Bright: It’s Twins! appeared first on Universe Today.