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A new microscopy method has allowed researchers to detect tiny changes in the atomic-level architecture of crystalline materials -- like advanced steels for ship hulls and custom silicon for electronics. The technique could advance our ability to understand the fundamental origins of materials properties and behavior.

Physicists have made a significant breakthrough in solar cell technology by developing a new analytical model that improves the understanding and efficiency of thin-film photovoltaic (PV) devices.

Physicists have made a significant breakthrough in solar cell technology by developing a new analytical model that improves the understanding and efficiency of thin-film photovoltaic (PV) devices.

Researchers developed a prototype of an implantable microphone for a cochlear implant. Their device, which senses the movement of the ear drum in the inner ear, performed as well as commercial hearing aids and could someday enable a fully internalized cochlear implant.

Ants are one of the few animals that tend to the injuries of their peers, and now it seems they are also the first non-humans known to perform life-saving amputations

Remote sensing, including lidar, reveals that the Amazon was once home to millions of people. The emerging picture of how they lived challenges ideas of human cultural evolution

Humans finally achieved controlled flight on another planet for the first time just a few years ago. Ingenuity, the helicopter NASA sent to Mars, performed that difficult task admirably. It is now taking a well-deserved rest until some intrepid human explorer someday comes by to pick it up and hopefully put it in a museum somewhere. But what if, instead of a quadcopter, NASA used a series of flexible-wing robots akin to bees to explore the Martian terrain? That was the idea behind the Marsbee proposal by Chang-Kwon Kang and his colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. The project was supported by a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant back in 2018 – let’s see what they did with it.

The concept was initially inspired by work at the University of Tokyo on a dragonfly-like micro aerial vehicle (MAV). It is one of the few drones able to fly in Earth’s gravity using flexible wings that flap. But would it be useful on Mars?

Mars has both advantages and disadvantages compared to Earth when considering whether flexible wing flight is possible. In the advantage column, it has about ? of the gravity of our home planet, so less force is necessary for an aircraft to lift off. However, there is only about 1% of the atmosphere on Mars compared to Earth, so a flexible-wing aircraft would have significantly less atmosphere to push off to create that force.

Fraser explains Ingenuity’s final fate.

Ultimately, part of the Phase I project for the Marsbee grant was to determine whether the approach was feasible. But why do so in the first place? Ingenuity, known at the time as the Mars 2020 Helicopter, was already on the path to conducting the first powered flight on another planet. While it was successful at its stated mission, it had several downsides, including a relatively large size, which is at a premium on interplanetary trips, and a flight time limited to only about 3 minutes. 

Neither of those limitations was a show-stopper, obviously, but a flexible-wing aircraft that is smaller and lighter could solve both of those problems. Engineers could potentially even store multiple craft in the same space as what Ingenuity needed in its ride-along with Perseverance. But would they work?

The short answer appears to be “not without additional technical development.” Modeling of the design showed weaknesses in a few areas that must be addressed before launching any successful Marsbee mission. The biggest hurdle appeared to be how flexible structures, like those that would make up the system’s wings, interacted with the uncertain aerodynamic environment of the Red Planet. 

Video describing the Marsbee concept.
Credit – NASA 360 YouTube Channel

Other challenges include the weight of the battery pack and the development of a guidance and control system that could deal with the randomly windy Martian atmosphere while remaining small and light enough to fit on a flexible wing flyer. Also, it would be challenging to direct the flyers without a GPS, which doesn’t yet exist on Mars.

For now, efforts to develop Marsbees seem to have been put on hold, at least for the last several years. With the success of Ingenuity, many questions about the feasibility of flight on the Red Planet have already been answered. But with a little more technical development and derisking, it might be possible that someday we’ll see flights of robotic bees buzzing around the Red Planet.

Learn More:
Kang et al. – Marsbee – Swarm of Flapping Wing Flyers for Enhanced Mars Exploration
UT – The Ingenuity Team Downloads the Final Data from the Mars Helicopter. The Mission is Over
UT – A Helicopter is Going to Titan. Could an Airplane be Next?
UT – Cruising the Cloud Tops of Venus With a Solar-Powered Airplane

Lead Image:
Artist’s depiction of the Marsbee concept.
Credit – Kang et al.

The post Could We Replace Ingenuity With a Swarm of Robotic Bees? appeared first on Universe Today.

As the war in Gaza proceeds—and remember that Israel said it would take a long time—the world’s opprobrium against Israel continues to increase. What frustrates many of us who are sympathetic to Israel is that those who denigrate it—and I’m talking not about Netanyahu but about worldwide criticism of the conduct of the war itself, or of the existence of Israel and Jews themselves—base their opprobrium on either lies or misconceptions.  These include what I call the Three Big Lies:

1.) Israel is an apartheid state (it’s not clear to me what’s being said here: whether it means apartheid within the country or, somehow, apartheid between Israel and other Arab countries),

2.) Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (that is, actions designed to wipe out all the people of Gaza),

and the one I’ll discuss today:

3.) Israel is killing too many Gazan civilians, and therefore the war should be stopped. This is connected with #2 above.  The “too many” is often couched as a disproportionality: there are too many Gazan civilians killed compared to Gazan combatants killed (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.).

Of all of these accusations, it is the last that has brought the wrath of the world down on Israel, and, though the deaths of Gazan civilians seem to have been part of Hamas’s own strategy to get the world to hate Israel, let’s ignore that, too, and look at the “proportionality” argument.

Let me begin by saying that I am not trying to ignore the human toll in Gaza: every civilian gone represents a life that was surrounded by friends, relatives, and loved ones. This is the case in every war, and, unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a war that leaves all civilians untouched. But we’re dealing with the world’s view that too many Palestinian civilians have died. Of course when you say “too many”, you must specify, given the fact that there will always be civilian deaths in wartime, what figure would not be too many.

How many Gazan civilians have been killed in comparison to Gazan combatants?  This of course must always be an approximation. The Hamas-run Gazan Ministry of Health estimates a total of over 35,000 Gazans have been killed since October 7, not breaking them down by status as combatant or noncombatant.  These Ministry of Health figures were of course reported uncritically by the world’s media.

In May the UN itself revised Hamas’s overall death toll, saying that 24,686 Gazans who were dead have been “fully identified.” This again includes both civilians and combatants (some of which are “children” according to the convention of “people under 18 years old”), and realize that some of the dead were killed by misfired Hamas rockets or directly by Hamas themselves.  It’s not clear whether how many of the “unidentified” dead were really killed, and whether they were combatants or civilians.

We can assume, then, that the number of Gazans killed lies somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000, depending on whether you are closer to accepting Hamas’s figures or the UN’s. These include both fighters and civilians.

How many of these were combatants? Newsweek reports: about 15,000 from a month ago. Note that this is Israel’s estimate, and of course is also an approximation. In this messy urban warfare, we’re going to have to make do with rough guesses.

Finally, how many Israelis have been killed? 1200 were killed on October 7, and about 700 Israeli soldiers and reservists have been killed since October 7, making a total of roughly 2000, including Israeli civilians killed since October 7. This is relevant, as we’ll see, only to a misguided notion of “proportionality.”

If you calculate, then, the ratio of Gazan civilians killed to Gazan combatants killed using these rough figures, you figures ranging from 0.64 to ([24,686-15,000/15,000, using the UN’s figures) to 1.3 ([35,000-15,000]/15,000). Note again we’re using Israel’s figures for the deaths of Gazan combatants in both calculations, but using higher (Hamas) and lower (UN) estimates for total deaths of Gazan civilians.

The point I want to make is that figures for ratios of Palestinian civilian/combatant deaths in Gaza, ranging from 0.64 to 1.3, are extraordinarily low for warfare—lower than any figures I’ve seen bandied about in other conflicts (see below). Note that these figures are in the ballpark calculated by military and urban warfare expert John Spencer: about 1 to 1, though, if you use Hamas’s figures, you get 1.5 or 1.6 to 1.

How does this compare with estimates from other modern wars?  Spencer adds this:

In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, the biggest urban battle since WWII, the U.S. led Iraqi Security Force killed 10,000 civilians to destroy 4,000 ISIS in the city. That is a 1 to 2.5 combatant to civilian death ratio [JAC: 2.5 in the calculations above]. In the 1945 Battle of Manila (which did have some variables similar to Gaza like high number of defenders, tunnels, and hostages), the American military killed 100,000 civilians to destroy 17,000 Japanese defenders, that is a 1 to 6 ratio [or 6 to 1 by my ratio]. The 1950 Second Battle of Seoul (another battle with similar variables to the battles in Gaza) American forces likely killed 10s of thousands (there is no record out how many died in the city battle out of the 2 million civilians that died in the war) to kill 7,000 North Korean enemy.

Spencer adds two caveats:

But the IDF also did reduce an already low combatant to civilian casualty ratio in the war. The New York Times reported in January that the daily civilian death toll had more than halved in the December and was down almost two-thirds from its peak by January. By time I visited Khan Yunis in February the civilian deaths caused by IDF actions in the war was very low.

The real truth is that no one knows how many civilians have died in Gaza, especially not Hamas. There has never been a war/battle, especially an urban battle, where anyone could track the civilian deaths on a day-to-day basis and especially not down to the single digit. It is impossible. A year after the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, the Iraqi government did not know how many civilians had died in the battle with estimates from 11,000 to 40,000.

All we can do is base our present conclusions on what figures are reported. And those figures seem to show, as I’ve written before, that the ratio of civilian deaths to combatant deaths among Palestinians in Gaza is very low when compared to other wars—wars in which Americans fought. The conclusion that this ratio is “too high” probably comes from the media, propaganda, and ignorance of history. If you’ve followed the war, you know that Israel is taking a number of steps to reduce civilian casualties, often at the risk of the lives of IDF soldiers. This probably accounts for a civilian/combatant death ratio lower than that produced by warfare involving the U.S.—wars when we heard little or nothing about a ratio that was too high.

 

When people talk about disproportionality, you might think they mean instead that the ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths is too high, but that’s not the take I get from the news, nor from the world’s reaction. For if this is what you mean by “disproportionality,” then you’d have to say, given that Israel continues to pursue this war while trying to minimize civilian deaths, that Israel needs to let more of its soldiers and civilians get killed.  Perhaps they should dismantle the Iron Dome, or simply pull out of Gaza.  And those actions aren’t on the table.

It is these figures that give the lie to the fact that Israel is committing a genocide, or is producing an inordinately high ratio of civilian deaths to combatant deaths. Even given Hamas’s figures (and remember, the estimates of deaths of Hamas combatants comes from Israel), the data themselves cannot be what’s angering the world. Why the world is angry about this reflects, in my view, the fact that it is the Israeli army (mostly Jews) who are doing the fighting, and Jews cannot be allowed, as Douglas Murray says, to win a war.

Will knowing such figures and their historical context get the world to stop baying at Israel?  I wouldn’t count on it, for the howls come not from data, but from feelings about Israel and the Jews.

Today’s bird photos come from Damon Williford of Bay City, Texas (there will be a second batch). Damon’s narrative and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

I took these photos at Brazos Bend State Park on June 23 of this year. Brazos Bend State Park is located about 45 miles south of central Houston and 45 miles north of Bay City where I live. The park contains a variety of habitats, including prairie, woodlands, marshes, swamps, and lakes. The Brazos River forms the eastern boundary of the park.

A family of Common Gallinules (Gallinula galeata). This is one of the most common bird species in the park:

Common Gallinule chick, another member of the brood from the photo above:

A headshot of a Yellow-crowned Night-heron (Nyctanassa violacea):

Yellow-crowned Night-heron:

Yellow-crowned Night-heron:

Little Blue Heron (Egretta caerulea):

Headshot of a Little Blue Heron:

Purple Gallinule (Porphyrio martinica):

White Ibis (Eudocimus albus):

An immature Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias):

Green Heron (Butorides virescens):

How’s that for a provocative title? But it is technically accurate. The title of the paper in question is: “A DNA robotic switch with regulated autonomous display of cytotoxic ligand nanopatterns.” The study is a proof of concept in an animal model, so we are still years away from a human treatment (if all goes well), but the tech is cool.

First we start with what is called “DNA origami”. These are sequences of DNA that fold up into specific shapes. In this case the DNA origami is used to create a nanoscale “robot” which is used as a delivery mechanism for the kill switch. The skill switch is quite literal – a “death receptor” (DR) which is a ligand of 6 amino acids. These exist on all healthy cells, but when sufficiently clustered on the surface of a cell, DRs trigger apoptosis, which is programmed cell death – a death switch.

The DNA origami robot has six such ligands arranged in a hexagonal pattern on the interior of its structure. The DNA, in fact, creates this structure with precise distance and arrangement to effectively trigger apoptosis.  When it opens up it reveals these ligands and can attach them to a cell surface, triggering apoptosis. The researchers have managed to create a DNA robot that remains closed in normal body pH, but also will open up in an acidic environment.

If the DR kill switch was just injected into an organism like a drug, it would kill cells indiscriminately. One approach to treating cancer is to find something that is different about cancer cells from healthy cells and then target that cancer-specific feature. The classic feature that is targeted is the fact that cancer cells are rapidly reproducing, so chemotherapy targets all rapidly reproducing cell populations. This is effective but also leads to lots of side effects, like hair loss. Newer techniques are more sophisticated, but based on the same idea – what is different about cancer tissue from healthy tissue?

In this case the researcher are targeting the environment of solid cancer tumors, which tend to be more acidic than healthy tissue. The DNA robots, therefore, should remain closed in healthy tissue, then open up in the acidic environment of a tumor, releasing their hexagons of death. After showing this is what happens in vitro, they studied their nanorobots on mice that were given an analogue of human breast cancer. The treatment reduced the growth of this cancer by up to 70%. This is not bad for a first proof of concept.

The next step is to include on the outside of the DNA robot receptors that are specific for individual tumor types. This way they are not only triggered by the tumor environment, they will specifically seek out the cancer. Unleashing a powerful kill switch into a living organism is obviously a risky proposition, so there will need to be lots of safety testing. The trick will be making the DNA robot as targeted and specific as possible, making sure it leaves healthy tissue alone.

As exciting as this is, we also have to recognize the broader potential of DNA nanorobots more generally in medicine and even outside of medicine. The basic technology of designing and building DNA robots is advancing quickly. They could potentially deliver drugs over time or to specific tissues. They could also be used diagnostically, sensing the presence of disease markers inside the body. Perhaps they could become vectors for gene-editing tools.

Outside of medicine DNA nanorobots could be used in manufacturing at the nanoscale. Basically it’s a platform for building tiny structures, and we are learning how to control the shape and design of those structures.

As always it is difficult to predict what a new cutting edge technology will really take of. It also always seems to take longer than people initially think. Will this be a technology for the 2030s, or perhaps the 2040s? Either way it is very promising, and will likely have a significant role in nanotechnology sometime in the future.

But we are pretty close to the first applications, such as this anticancer kill switch, which could potentially be in use by the end of the decade.

 

The post DNA Nanorobot Kill Switch for Cancer first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Fear not; the aliens are not coming to Earth.

An AI model learned to predict the choices made by monkeys and their eye movements while playing Pac-Man, hinting that a machine intelligence can “think” in a similar way to mammals

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss445_Aella_2024_07_02.mp3 Download MP3

Aella is a writer, blogger, data analyst, and sex worker who has written extensively about the psychology and economics of online sex work, conducting extensive surveys and research in order to understand the ecosystem of sex workers. She grew up in Idaho as the oldest of three daughters of conservative parents who were part of a community of fundamentalist Christians, where she was homeschooled; their family name has been withheld in media coverage for privacy reasons. She moved out at age 17 after a fallout with her parents, and in 2012, after quitting a job as an assembly line worker in a factory, began working as a camgirl. She eventually became one of the highest-earning creators on OnlyFans, making over $100,000 in some months. By 2021, she was described as having set herself apart partly by conducting extensive market research, e.g. surveying almost 400 fellow female OnlyFans performers about their incomes and identifying factors that were correlated with higher earnings.

Shermer and Aella discuss:

• Aella’s upbringing in a conservative Christian home-schooled household
• sex work or prostitution?
• her response to Rachel Moral’s Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution
• her response to Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
• the evolutionary psychology of sex differences
• male-female sexual psychology differences
• why women are choosier and more risk averse
• why men want more sexual variety
• what men and women regret about sex
• sexual jealousy and how the sexes differ
• what it’s like being in an orgy
• how does she determine how much to charge as an escort
• BDSM, fetishes, and sexual violence
• autogynephilia
• trans matters
• Who are the women who sell sex?
• Who are the men who buy sex?
• agency and volition in sex work: women and men
• virtual sex, phone sex, cyber sex, cam sex, etc. (OnlyFans and other sites)
• feminism and sex work
• pornography: good or bad?
• decriminalizing sex work.

Anthropologist Alan Fiske’s Model of Four Types of Human Relationships

1. Communal Sharing: Relatives, couples, marriage, families, friends—freely share resources within a group, no tab keeping, egalitarian, “one flesh” common essence, no contamination, evolved: maternal care, kin selection, mutualism
2. Authority Ranking: Employer/Employee, Teacher/Student, Parent/Child—linear hierarchy, dominance, status, age, size, strength, wealth, precedence, tribute from inferiors, obedience, paternalistic, noblesse oblige; evolved: hierarchical primates
3. Equality Matching: Friends splitting gas, informal exchanges. Tit-for-tat reciprocity, division of resources equitably via turn-taking, coin-flipping, matching contributions, cut and divide cake equally; evolve: fairness & reciprocity, intuitive economics, cheating detection, perspective taking & calculation
4. Market Pricing: Economy of strangers, money is the social currency of exchange and reciprocity—currency, prices, rents, salaries, benefits, interest, credit; evolve: none

Violations of Fiske’s 4 Models

• Restaurant diner invites owner to dinner instead of paying
• Dinner guest offers to pay host
• Woody Allen’s watch/my neighbor’s car
• Organ sale
• Roads: Public vs. Private
• Sex between Employer & Employee, Teacher & Student, Parent & Child
• Prostitution: Sex is usually within communal sharing or equality matching, not market pricing.

David Buss: When Men Behave Badly
Number of Sexual Partners Preferred

“Many men are burdened by lust for a variety of different women, constant cravings that cannot ever be fully satisfied … It explains why a handsome movie star such as Hugh Grant would have sex with a prostitute, despite having Elizabeth Hurley, a gorgeous model and actress, as his then steady girlfriend.”

Length of Time Before Engaging in Sex

Even in the most egalitarian countries, men prefer more sexual partners compared to women. In Norway, researchers asked people how many sex partners they would prefer over the next 30 years. On average, women preferred five, men preferred 25. Even the desire to kiss before intercourse differs between the sexes. About 53 percent of men report that they would have sex without kissing, while only 14.6 percent of women would have sex without kissing.

Choosiness vs. Less Discerning

Studies of online dating, for example, find that most men find most women to be at least somewhat attractive. In contrast, women, on average, view 80 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. Another study found that on the dating app Tinder, men “liked” more than 60 percent of the female profiles they viewed, while women “liked” only 4.5 percent of male profiles.

Sexual Regrets

Sexual mistakes are viewed differently. Research indicates that when asked to reflect on their sexual history, women are more likely to regret having had sex with someone, while men are more likely to regret having missed out on sexual opportunities.

What Men and Women Look for in a Mate

For same-sex friends, men and women prioritized personality and social intelligence. For opposite-sex friends, though, men assigned greater value on attractiveness, whereas women placed greater value on economic resources and physical prowess.

Sexual Harassment Perceptions

When men were asked how they would feel if their co-worker of the opposite sex asked them to have sex, 67 percent of men said they would be flattered and only 15 percent said they would be insulted. In contrast, 63 percent of women said they would be insulted and only 17 percent said they would be flattered.

Back-Up Mates and Cheating

Why do people cheat on their romantic partners? For men, it appears that the main reason they stray is the desire for sexual variety. In fact, men who cheat are just as happy in their marriages as men who are faithful. In contrast, women who stray are often unhappy. Women who have affairs often want to detach themselves from relationships in which they are unsatisfied and seek a better partner. In fact, only 30 percent of men report falling in love with their affair partners, while for women it is 79 percent.

From Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc

Consider the morality of the biblical warlords who had no qualms about taking multiple wives, adultery, keeping concubines, and fathering countless children from their many polygamous arrangements. The anthropologist Laura Betzig has put these stories into an evolutionary context by analyzing the Old Testament. She found no less than 41 named polygamists, not one of which was a powerless man. “In the Old Testament, powerful men—patriarchs, judges, and kings—have sex with more wives; they have more sex with other men’s women; they have sex with more concubines, servants, and slaves; and they father many children.” And not just the big names. According to Betzig’s analysis, “men with bigger herds of sheep and goats tend to have sex with more women, then to father more children.” Most of the polygynous patriarchs, judges, and kings had two, three, or four wives with a corresponding number of children, although King David had more than eight wives and twenty children, King Abijah had 14 wives and 38 children, and King Rehoboam had 18 wives (and 60 other women) who bore him no fewer than 88 offspring. But they were all lightweights compared to King Solomon, who married at least 700 women. There were Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women he married, then for good measure added 300 concubines, which he called “man’s delight.” (What Solomon’s concubines called him was never recorded.)

Carol Tavris

From a review of Nona Willis Aronowitz’s Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution; Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation; Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution; Bridget Phetasy’s Substack essay “Beyond Parody”

After devoting many years to the scientific study of women’s heterosexual experiences—through reading, observing, listening, and participating—I have drawn a few conclusions:

1. Many women like sex when it brings erotic pleasure and they like the guy. This is called “good sex.”
2. Many women don’t like sex when the guy is a dork, rude, thoughtless, clumsy, coercive, or violent. This is called “bad sex.”
3. Many women enjoy hookups, short affairs, conference connections, orgies (planned and spontaneous), and adventures with multiples and variations of all kinds. This is called “having fun.”
4. Many #3 women get tired after a few years (“Oh God, Murray, another orgy?”), whereas others make it a way of life. This is called “being in the lifestyle.”
5. Many women prefer sex with one doting partner at a time, the “time” lasting from as long as love does, from a week to a lifetime. This is called “a loving relationship.”

In every era, there are people who devote their energies to telling women they’re doing it all wrong. Are you enjoying monogamy with your sweetheart when others all around you are claiming that it is liberating, feminist, and “sex positive” to have many partners? Are you hopelessly straight or gay, or a hopelessly old-fashioned one-partner-at-a-time person, even though you think that for political, personal, or progressive reasons you really ought to be trying the alternatives? Are you enjoying your many affairs when others all around you are claiming that women aren’t designed for infidelity, that you’re merely capitulating to the Playboy standard, that you’re repressing the trauma of all those impersonal adventures, that you’re just a dupe and victim of hardwired male sexual preferences? Like a call-and-response in music or church, whichever view is ascendant will call for its inevitable antithetical response. Sex writers are always pouncing on a new hook, even when today’s new is yesterday’s old.

Today’s hook is this: if it’s good to be sex-positive, how come so many women are having sex-negative experiences? Why so much unwanted sex, harassments, miserable hookups, drunken episodes? Why the eternal difficulties in communication? Why do many women feel obliged to “consent,” when they’d rather go home and play with the dog? A spate of recent books locates the answers in the failure of feminism and the “unfinished” sexual revolution to make women’s sexual lives a thing of beauty and a joy forever. These include

To her credit, Nona Willis Aronowitz does not write an analysis of women’s continuing search for sexual ecstasy, satisfaction, and thoughtful male partners as if no one had done so before. That would have been a challenge, given that her own mother, the brilliant feminist Ellen Willis, tackled these questions a generation earlier, and her daughter interweaves her mother’s writings and experiences, along with those of other feminists of that era, with her own stories. But whereas her mother’s generation (and mine) emphasized that the personal is political, Willis Aronowitz’s mantra is the political is personal.

Personal? TMI is an understatement. Indeed, readers may forgiven for asking, What bad sex? The book is a litany of the many orgasms she’s had, hours and hours of cunnilingus with this lover and that one, anal oral sideways multiples, the fantastic lovers, the terrible lovers, how she loves dick, experiments with other women, passionate weekends. The “bad sex” of the title is mostly “bad relationships”—hookups with men who were selfish or otherwise unlikeable, or, in the case of the partner she leaves at the outset of her story, relationships that had become sexually boring. Here it all is again, yet another woman trying to find the blissful balance between committed sex and casual sex—open relationships being necessary for anyone who believes that monogamy is death to being a fully sexually liberated person. Calling Dr. Ester Perel and the innumerable marriage counselors who study the shapeshifting patterns of intimacy, passion, and desire over the course of life and love.

As I read this book, I wondered how the same narrative would sound if written by a man:

“I left my otherwise loving partner, whom I loved, because I got bored with her and our sex life, and I didn’t like her off-putting smell that ruined our sexual chemistry. I’m happy to report other intimate details about her that annoyed me, but I won’t bother you with her perspective on me. I will tell you about my many lovers so you will understand how desirable I am, including that amazing afternoon in which I received one blow job after another. I confess that certain body shapes and sizes turn me on. Unfortunately, along with the hot women I couldn’t get enough of, at least until I tired of them, I hooked up with some awful women too—demanding, rude, noncommunicative about their desires, egocentric. Wait: one of those impersonal hookups was a very nice person.”

In the latest chapter of “The Mystery of the Lunar Swirls,” planetary scientists have a new theory to explain these odd markings on the Moon’s surface. It invokes underground magmas and strange magnetic anomalies.

Lunar swirls are sinuous features that appear much lighter than the surrounding landscape. They extend for hundreds of kilometers and nobody’s quite sure why they exist. No astronaut has visited one of these weird regions, but that hasn’t stopped scientists from speculating based on images and magnetic field measurements. “Impacts could cause these types of magnetic anomalies,” said Michael J. Krawczynski, an associate professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Krawczynski points out that meteorites supply iron-rich material to areas on the Moon’s surface. However, these swirls exist in regions that aren’t necessarily disturbed by meteorites. So, what else could explain the swirls?

“Another theory is that you have lavas underground, cooling slowly in a magnetic field and creating the magnetic anomaly,” said Krawczynski, who, along with post-doctoral student Yuanyuan Liang, designed experiments to test this explanation. They measured the effects of different atmospheric chemistries and magmatic cooling rates on a mineral called ilmenite and found that under certain conditions, cooling subsurface lavas could be causing the ghostly lunar swirls.

Using Earth-based Geological Principles to Understand Lunar Swirls

Despite the fact that more than a dozen people have walked on the Moon, nobody visited a lunar swirl or picked up samples of their dust. That left Earth-bound planetary scientists to use Earth analogs for Moon rocks to understand lunar magnetism. “Earth rocks are very easily magnetized because they often have tiny bits of magnetite in them, which is a magnetic mineral,” Krawczynski said. “A lot of the terrestrial studies that have focused on things with magnetite are not applicable to the Moon, where you don’t have this hyper-magnetic mineral.”

So, the research team turned to ilmenite as their test material. It’s a titanium-oxide mineral with a weak magnetic signal. Ilmenite exists all over the Moon. It readily reacts to form magnetizable iron metal particles. “The smaller grains that we were working with seemed to create stronger magnetic fields because the surface area to volume ratio is larger for the smaller grains compared to the larger grains,” Liang said. “With more exposed surface area, it is easier for the smaller grains to undergo the reduction reaction.”

A sample of ilmenite found in Norway. This is the mineral tested to simulate subsurface magma on the Moon. CC-BY-SA 3.0 Rob Lavinsky, iRocks.com

Interestingly, planetary scientists have seen a similar reaction creating iron metal in lunar meteorites in samples from the Apollo missions. The difference, however, is that those samples came from surface lava flows. Krawczynski and Liang’s study focused on the types of magma that cooled underground.

“Our analog experiments showed that at lunar conditions, we could create the magnetizable material that we needed. So, it’s plausible that these swirls are caused by subsurface magma,” said Krawczynski. “If you’re going to make magnetic anomalies by the methods we studied, then the underground magma needs to have high titanium.”

Why Study Swirls on the Moon?

Those mysterious dust patterns aren’t just there by accident. They contain clues to the processes that shaped the lunar surface. In addition, if magnetism is involved in their formation, that says something about magnetism on the Moon as a whole.

Until astronauts can get to the Moon to study these swirls for themselves, the ilmenite experiment offers a good way to test the underground magma idea from afar, according to Krawczynski. Of course, it would be nice to get actual samples of underground rocks on the Moon, but that’s going to have to wait. “If we could just drill down, we could see if this reaction was happening,” he said. “That would be great, but it’s not possible yet. Right now, we’re stuck with the surface.”

Artist’s impression of the Lunar Vertex rover on the surface of the Moon. The rover is about 14 inches (35 centimeters) tall; the cylinder on top is the mast for the APL-built magnetometer. Credit: Johns Hopkins APL/Lunar Outpost/Ben Smith

Studies like Krawczynski and Liang’s will be quite useful when NASA sends future lunar missions to the surface. There’s a whole rover project, part of a mission called Lunar Vertex, planned to study Reiner Gamma. That’s one of the Moon’s better-known swirls. Vertex should launch this year and is a predecessor to the larger return to the Moon NASA plans for later this decade. That mission could confirm whether or not swirls are magnetic field-related. If not, then there’s something else going on at Reiner Gamma and other swirl sites.

For More Information

Moon “Swirls” Could be Magnetized by Unseen Magmas
Possibility of Lunar Crustal Magmatism Producing Strong Crustal Magnetism
Lunar Vertex Mission

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