Science

Near Space Labs’s autonomous balloon fleet is already taking high-resolution images of the ground, and its range will expand to the entire continental US early next year

Want to protect your young plants from the ravages of slugs and snails? A classic gardening tip is to use crushed eggshells to discourage them. Shame it doesn't work, says James Wong

The climate crisis is shriveling lush oases in the desert, threatening precious ecosystems and ways of life

Murder in space, a sexbot, a dystopian vision of the future: our science fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson picks her top five reads of 2024

John "Bud" Benson Wilbur isn't often remembered today, but his ideas about what the distant-future world of 1977 would look like are inspirational, says Annalee Newitz

As two "feral and not trained" emus go on the lam in South Carolina, Feedback suggests that authorities read up on the war fought against wild emus by the Australians in 1932. They lost – but there may be some tips

The long history of robotics should teach us to be more sceptical when it comes to autonomous humanoid robots, says Nicole Kobie

From a scientific take on screen time to nuclear war, a look at why we age to the future of our oceans, our writers pick their favourite popular science books of the year

Recent developments in AI and neurological research may prompt concern. However, placing outright bans on such research is unlikely to be the best solution - and may hold us back

Russia’s new ballistic missile flies on a high arc out of Earth’s atmosphere and releases multiple high-speed projectiles, making it challenging but not impossible to intercept

We all know about Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, who left the journal (most likely under duress) after she published a rant on Bluesky on the night Trump was elected (see here here, and and here if you haven’t follow this kerfuffle).  And of course I’ve spent several years calling out the magazine’s missteps, attributable largely to the Helmuth’s “progressive ideology” (see here, for example).

In general, I think Helmuth’s departure will be good for the magazine so long as the owners find a decent replacement—one not infused with an ideology that will bleed into the magazine. As for Helmuth, I feel bad for her but see the rupture of her own making. Still, I hope she finds a job where her talents at science writing, sans polemics, will be useful.

The article below by investigative journalist Paul Thacker on his site The DisInformation Chronicle (click headline to read) is a bit harsh and even a tad mean, but still makes many of the points that Michael Shermer and I have been making about the magazine for a long time—points that others also noted independently. I won’t review them, because I want to concentrate on one part of the article: the part where Thacker says that science writers “circled the wagons” around Helmuth after she left, arguing that she did a very good job at the magazine. I’ve posted one example of this: John Horgan’s blog piece defending Helmuth: “Scientific American loses its bold leader.” It turns out that Horgan wasn’t alone.  Thacker gives several examples, and says that this wagon-circling is bad for science journalism as well as bad for science.

Click to read:

Some excerpts giving Thackar’s view that the journalistic praise harmful.  First, the conclusions:

Helmuth tweets on Bluesky have long served as a political water cooler for members of the scicomm community and when she announced that she was leaving Scientific American, several prominent voices in the science writers rushed to praise Helmuth, not condemn her for awful behavior and her grim tenure as editor-in-chief.

It’s important for science writers that no lessons be learned.

. . .As you can see, nothing is likely to change because the science writers in Laura Helmuth’s world fail to understand that she did anything wrong. Science writers report for, not on science, as I explained in an extensive critique of the profession.

Helmuth will be fine and will likely announce her latest gig in the coming months. She may have betrayed the journalism profession, but her actions certify her work as an inspiration to science writers.

And Thacker’s examples, with his comments indented:

Adam Rogers is a senior tech correspondent at Business Insider, covering science and technology.

Maryn McKenna is a contributing editor at Scientific American who teaches science writing at Emory University.

Tanya Lewis and Clara Moskowitz both work at Scientific American and reported to Laura Helmuth, before she was shoved out the door last week.

Maggie Fox is health and science writer and formerly at CNN. Two years back, I reported how Maggie Fox broke the news at CNN that Pfizer’s COVID vaccine was 95% effective, a story she wrote by copy/pasting Pfizer’s press release into her CNN story.

I’m not sure what are the “coming battles” to which Fox refers, but presumably they involve fights between Trump and his minions on one hand and science on the other.

More:

Dan Fagan teaches science writing at NYU and Deborah Blum is the Director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. Like Helmuth, Blum is a former president of the National Association of Science Writers.

According to her bio on X, Amy Cooter is a sociologist and expert in contemporary US militias. If you have any clue why Helmuth had this type of person write an article on citizen militias for a science magazine, please explain in the comments.

Lila Guterman and Jake Yeston both work at Science Magazine and are colleagues of Jon “Crooked Cohen”.

Brendan Maher and Alexandre Witze both work for Nature Magazine, which has been exposed for financial ties to China and formerly employed Amy Maxmen.

This sounds like simple smearing, for surely not everybody who works for Nature can be tarred for having financial ties with China.

Note first that at least four of these journalists wrote for Scientific American and their praise thus can’t be counted as coming from someone outside Helmuth’s ambit.

Further, perhaps science journalists who are critics of the magazine or of Helmuth’s work didn’t call attention her departure because it wouldn’t help your reputation to denigrate a colleague in public. Thus counting tweets of praise doesn’t give an idea of the tenor of the science-writer community.

I asked one well-known science writer/journalist about the DisInformation piece, and got thius reply, reproduced with permission.

I’d say many science writers are staying out of it because there’s no possible way to know whether she quit, was fired. and if fired, whether she violated company policy in any way. Of course some of her colleagues rushed to her defense but there are hundreds of people in the profession. It’s remotely possible I’m the only one among those hundreds busy working on articles and ignoring her plight but I wouldn’t bet on it. 

And so the saga of Scientific American and its now departed editor-in-chief comes to an end in these pages, at least for the time being.  We’ll see if the magazine is able to recover its reputation. I’m not betting on it, as the many readers who canceled their subscriptions are unlikely to give the venue another look.

We’ve known for a while that complex chemistry occurs in space. Organic molecules have been detected in cold molecular clouds, and we have even found sugars and amino acids, the so-called “building blocks of life,” within several asteroids. The raw ingredients of terrestrial life are common in the Universe, and meteorites and comets may have even seeded Earth with those ingredients. This idea isn’t controversial. But there is a more radical idea that Earth was seeded not just with the building blocks of life but life itself. It’s known as panspermia, and a recent study has brought the idea back to popular science headlines. But the study is more subtle and interesting than some headlines suggest.

Panspermia became popular in the 1800s and 1900s when it became clear that life arose surprisingly early on Earth. On a geologic scale, cellular life appears almost as soon as Earth cooled enough to support it. Given the complexity of DNA and living cells, how could such a thing have evolved so quickly? In the panspermia model, life evolved either in space or on some distant world, and was carried to Earth within asteroids or comets. We know that some living things can survive the harsh vacuum of space, so perhaps we have some alien, extraterrestrial origin.

But there are reasons to be skeptical. For one, the transition from organic to biological chemistry may be remarkably adaptive. While life appears to have appeared suddenly on Earth, that may be precisely what you’d expect. Without an example of extraterrestrial life, we simply don’t know. And while life can survive in space for a limited time, it’s not likely to survive for the millions of years it would take for an asteroid to traverse the solar system, much less the billions of years it would take to travel between star systems. Still, one step toward proving panspermia would be to gather material from an asteroid and find out it has life, and that’s exactly what this latest study found.

The Hayabusa2 mission, launched in 2014, landed on a small asteroid named Ryugu in 2018 and returned a sample of material to Earth in 2020. The sample was kept sterile the whole time, hermetically sealed for the journey back, and only opened in a pure nitrogen clean room using sterilized equipment. The sample was as clean and uncontaminated as we could get. When the team prepared a sample and looked at it under an electron microscope, they found rods and filaments of organic matter consistent with microbial life. In other words, the team found life on an asteroid.

Except they likely didn’t.

The size distribution is consistent with terrestrial life. Credit: Genge, et al

One thing to keep in mind is that microbial life is incredibly robust. It exists everywhere and spreads rapidly. You can find the stuff in the cores of nuclear power plants, in hot thermal vents, and in the cleanest clean room. And even if you sterilize something, microbial life will find a way. When the team found life on their sample, the first thing they did was to look for evidence of contamination, and there was plenty of evidence to be found. To begin with, the size distribution of the organic rods and filaments found in the sample is consistent with those commonly deposited by terrestrial life. Their data also found evidence of a growth and decline period of about five days, which is also consistent with Earth life. If the Ryugu samples had truly evolved beyond Earth, they would be genetically separated from us by millions or billions of years. Their size and growth rate wouldn’t match those of our common microbes. So the best explanation is that the sample became contaminated despite our best efforts.

While the study doesn’t support the panspermia model, it does tell us two important things. The first is that our sterilization procedures are likely inadequate. We may have already spread life to the Moon and Mars inadvertently. The second is that asteroids have organic materials that could sustain terrestrial life. That’s good news if we want to establish ourselves elsewhere in the solar system. Earth life may not have begun in space, but it could very well end up there.

Reference: Genge, Matthew J., et al. “Rapid colonization of a space?returned Ryugu sample by terrestrial microorganisms.” Meteoritics & Planetary Science (2024).

The post Asteroid Samples Returned to Earth Were Immediately Colonized by Bacteria appeared first on Universe Today.

An analysis of hundreds of bromalites – fossilised faeces and vomit – shows how changes in diet enabled dinosaurs to take over the world in the early Jurassic

Physicists have long wondered why particles can only have an electric charge of +1, -2 or any whole number. Now we increasingly suspect that, actually, that's not true after all

Researchers have used lasers to encode information in diamonds, demonstrating record-breaking data density in an ultra-stable and long-lasting system

Chemists unravel how bicarbonate can protect cells from oxidative stress in a study that challenges how cell damage has been studied for decades.

A team of researchers has developed an innovative imaging platform that promises to improve our understanding of cellular structures at the nanoscale. This platform, called soTILT3D for single-objective tilted light sheet with 3D point spread functions (PSFs), offers significant advancements in super-resolution microscopy, enabling fast and precise 3D imaging of multiple cellular structures while the extracellular environment can be controlled and flexibly adjusted.

A team of researchers has developed an innovative imaging platform that promises to improve our understanding of cellular structures at the nanoscale. This platform, called soTILT3D for single-objective tilted light sheet with 3D point spread functions (PSFs), offers significant advancements in super-resolution microscopy, enabling fast and precise 3D imaging of multiple cellular structures while the extracellular environment can be controlled and flexibly adjusted.

Our local star the Sun has been the source of many studies from ground based telescopes to space based observatories. The ESA Solar Orbiter has been approaching the Sun, capturing images along the way in unprecedented detail. It arrived at its halfway point in March last year and captured a series of 25 images. They have now been stitched together to reveal an astonishingly high resolution image. You can even zoom in to see individual granules in the solar photosphere. 

In comparison to Earth, the Sun is massive but in when it comes to other stars, it’s pretty average. It provides energy to sustain life through the process of nuclear fusion deep in its core.  The hydrogen atoms are fused into helium generating so much energy that heat and light bathes our planet. Like all other stars, the Sun is a great big ball of electrically charged gas with a visible surface temperature of about 5,500°C. It measures a staggering 1.39 million km across and lies at an average distance of 150 million km from us. It accounts for 99% of the mass of the Solar System and it is this which is responsible for its immense gravitational pull which has kept planets, asteroids and comets in orbit for the last 4.6 billion years!

The Sun on November 1, 2023 with the eQuinox 2 telescope by Unistellar and Smart Solar Filter. Credit: Nancy Atkinson.

Without a doubt it is the most prominent astronomical object to grace our skies and so it is no surprise it has been the target of many, many studies. ESA’s Solar Orbiter is one of those space based observatories that has started to unveil some of the mysteries of our nearest star. It was launched in February 2020 and was designed to capture images of the Sun’s poles along with measuring its magnetic fields and the solar wind. The orbit followed by Solar Orbiter is very specific following an elliptical orbit that takes it to within 42 million km of the Sun. 

Solar Orbiter

On board Solar Orbiter are instruments to probe the dynamics of the Sun. The most exciting of these are those designed to observe the Sun directly and includes the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) and the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) which when combined can with other on board instruments can create some fabulously high resolution images. With Solar Orbiter already half way to the Sun ESA have released a stunning new image of our nearest star derived from data from both EUI and PHI.

At the time the images were taken, Solar Orbiter was 74 million km away from the Sun (Mercury is approximately 50 million km away) and was too close to be able to capture one image of the whole Sun. Instead, 25 images were taken over a few hours and then stitched together to create the mosaic that has just been released. The finished result can be seen here and has a resolution of around 175 km per pixel. Previous observations have gone deeper for example the Gregor Solar Telescope on Tenerife has achieved a resolution of just 50 km per pixel but this was only ever of a small section of the Sun.

Large mosaics were never possible due to the turbulence in the atmosphere making it impossible to stitch sufficient images together.  The image is stunning. If you zoom in you can see the pattern of granulation all over the Sun’s photosphere and even a few sunspots in super high resolution. 

Source : The Solar Fire Up Close

The post An Insanely High-Resolution Image of the Sun appeared first on Universe Today.

On November 18th, 2022, shortly before midnight, the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) in Arizona and other observatories worldwide detected a small object (now designated 2022 WJ1) heading toward Earth. For the next three hours, the CSS and the Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN) at the University of Western Ontario monitored the object before it entered Earth’s atmosphere above Southern Ontario. At 03:26 a.m. EST (12:26 a.m. PST) on November 19th, the object appeared as a bright fireball that scattered meteorite fragments across the Niagara region.

This event triggered an international collaboration to hunt down the fragments for analysis, but none have been found yet. In a recent study led by Western University and Lowell Observatory, an international team of scientists described a new approach for studying near-Earth asteroids (NEA) based largely on 2022 WJ1. The study is significant in that the team determined the NEA’s composition—the smallest asteroid characterized to date—and established a new and integrated methodology for studying other NEAs that may impact Earth someday.

The study was led by Dr. Theodore Kareta, a Postdoctoral Researcher from the Lowell Observatory. He was joined by researchers from the University of Western Ontario, the ESA’s Planetary Defense Office (PDO), the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) at Curtin University (Australia), the University of Zagreb (Croatia), the Astronomical Society Istra Pula, the Višnjan Science and Education Center, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The study that describes their technique, “Telescope-to-Fireball Characterization of Earth Impactor 2022 WJ1,” was published on November 22nd in The Planetary Science Journal.

The detection of 2022 WJ1 (WJ1) before it entered the atmosphere was a fortuitous event since it gave astronomers just enough time for scientists to telescopically observe it and gather precise information on its position and motion – which were used to refine its orbit. These factors also allowed astronomers to determine that the asteroid would enter Earth’s atmosphere above the Great Lakes region. The impact location was also fortuitous since it landed in the middle of Western’s network of meteor-observing cameras.

The three hours it took for WJ1 to enter the atmosphere also allowed several members of the Western Meteor Physics Group and Western’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration (IESE) to watch the object streak through the sky. This was the first time in history that observers were alerted of a natural fireball ahead of time and knew exactly where it would be visible. Paul Wiegert, a professor of physics and astronomy at Western and a study co-author, witnessed the fireball at 3:30 a.m.

“I watched from Brescia Hill on the Western campus,” he said in a recent Western News press release. “Though cold and windy, the hill had a clear view to the east, where I expected to see only a distant flash. Then, the fireball suddenly appeared, passing almost overhead. It was easily visible between broken clouds and noticeably orange-red.” The Lowell Discovery Telescope‘s (LDT) capacity for rapid and stable tracking made it the ideal instrument for observing WJ1, allowing it to keep up with the small and fast-moving NEA.

Teddy Kareta, a postdoctoral associate at Lowell Observatory, observed the asteroid with his team for about one hour before it was lost in the shadow of Earth. As he indicated:

“At the time that we lost the asteroid – when it got too dim to be seen in our images – we had the telescope moving at five degrees per second to try to keep up with it. That’s fast enough that most other telescopes would have had to give up considerably earlier. It’s tremendously fortuitous that this asteroid happened to fly over Arizona’s dark skies at night before burning up over Western’s excellent camera network. It’s hard to imagine better circumstances to do this kind of research.”

By comparing the Arizona-based observations to footage of the meteor acquired by the SOMN, the team determined the size and composition of 2022 WJ1 (WJ1). The size was determined thanks to observations made by the LDT, which detected a silica-rich surface that gave the object a relatively high albedo (reflectivity). By measuring this reflected light, the team calculated the diameter at 40 to 60 cm (16 to 27 inches), making it the smallest asteroid on record.

The combined telescopic and fireball camera data suggest that WJ1 is rich in silica, placing it in the S-chondrite category. They are among the oldest bodies in the Solar System and the most common type of meteorite to hit Earth. “This is only the sixth asteroid discovered before impact,” said Denis Vida, an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at Western. “Our new approach, discovering an asteroid through space observation and then subsequently observing it with cameras from the ground, allowed us to confirm that our estimates match well to estimates derived using a completely different approach.”

“This is only the second time that an asteroid has been meaningfully characterized with telescopes prior to it impacting the Earth,” said Kareta. “It’s a testament to our good luck and preparation, but it’s also due to the community that cares about keeping the Earth safe from these impactors learning to work together better. This first-ever comparison between telescopic and fireball camera data is extremely exciting and means we’ll be able to characterize the next asteroid to impact the Earth in even better detail.”

While no fragments have been found in the Niagara region, and no further official searches are planned, there are still people in the area who are searching and know what to look for. While much of the fragments were predicted to fall into Lake Ontario, some are hopeful that a fragment or two could turn up in the near future.

Further Reading: Western News

The post Scientists Reveal a New Way to Study Near-Earth Asteroids appeared first on Universe Today.