Science

How does the Earth generate its magnetic field? While the basic mechanisms seem to be understood, many details remain unresolved. A team of researchers has introduced a simulation method that promises new insights into the Earth's core. The method simulates not only the behavior of atoms, but also the magnetic properties of materials. The approach is significant for geophysics, but could also support the development of future technologies such as neuromorphic computing -- an innovative approach to more efficient AI systems.

How can we ensure that as many households as possible adopt not only solar panels, but also their own battery to store solar energy, a heat pump, and an electric car? Researchers have looked into just this question.

Scientists have developed a new blood test that could screen cancer patients to help make their treatment safer and more effective.

A study is the first-of-its-kind to recognize American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet gestures using computer vision. Researchers developed a custom dataset of 29,820 static images of ASL hand gestures. Each image was annotated with 21 key landmarks on the hand, providing detailed spatial information about its structure and position. Combining MediaPipe and YOLOv8, a deep learning method they trained, with fine-tuning hyperparameters for the best accuracy, represents a groundbreaking and innovative approach that hasn't been explored in previous research.

Anthropologists argue physical artifacts of human exploration on Mars deserve cataloging, preservation and care in order to chronicle humanity's first attempts at interplanetary exploration.

This WaPo article below (click headline to read, or find the piece archived here), discusses the new case about gender transitioning being adjudicated by the Supreme Court. It’s judging the constitutionality of a Tennessee law that, according to the paper, “bans the use of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-transition treatments in minors on the grounds that it unlawfully discriminates based on sex.” (23 other states have similar laws). I’m not sure how a ban on blockers can discriminate on the basis of sex if the hormones are banned in both males and females, but I’ll leave that up to the lawyers.

What’s important here is that the dispute about the blockers is now being discussed openly, in an Editorial Board op-ed in the Washington Post, while previously such discussion was taboo. Even questioning the use of such “affirmative treatments” was seen as “transphobic,” though there wasn’t good clinical evidence that they had good outcomes. They could even have been harmful, and in light of a lack of efficacy, they’re now banned in the UK and regarded as experimental treatments in much of Europe.

What we need, as the paper says, are “gold standard” studies: large controlled studies (double blind ones would be impractical given that the drugs have easily discernible effects) over a fairly long period of time.

Read below, and I’ll give some quotes (indented):

This unresolved dispute is why Tennessee has a colorable claim before the court; it would be ludicrous to suggest that patients have a civil right to be harmed by ineffective medical interventions — and, likewise, unconscionable for Tennessee to deny a treatment that improves patient lives, even if the state did so with majestic impartiality. The issue is subject to legal dispute in part because the medical questions have not been properly resolved.

Multiple European health authorities have reviewed the available evidence and concluded that it was “very low certainty,” “lacking” and “limited by methodological weaknesses.” Last week, Britain banned the use of puberty blockers indefinitely due to safety concerns.

“Children’s healthcare must always be evidence-led,” British Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said in a press release. “The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.”

An early Dutch study of blockers showed “promising results”, but the sample was too small to give definitive results, and wasn’t replicable:

Yet as other doctors began copying the Dutch, clinical practice outraced the research, especially as treatment protocols rapidly evolved. A British study attempting to replicate the Dutch researchers’ success with puberty blockers “identified no changes in psychological function” among those treated.

Some clinicians appear reluctant to publish findings that don’t show strong benefits. The British lackluster results were published nine years after the study began, after Britain’s High Court ruled that children younger than 16 were unlikely to be able to form informed consent to such treatments.

And here is the unconscionable censorship on the part of both the American government and the WPATH organization that I haven’t yet written about:

Internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health [WPATH] suggest that the group tried to interfere with a review commissioned from a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University

Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, told the New York Times that a government-funded study of puberty blockers she helped conduct, which started in 2015, had not found mental health improvements, and those results hadn’t been published because more time was needed to ensure the research wouldn’t be “weaponized.” Medical progress is impossible unless null or negative results are published as promptly as positive ones.

Weaponized?  WEAPONIZED? The study is done, but the results aren’t ideologically pleasing to gender activists, and so the study languishes, unpublished. That is unethical, for whether or not one uses blockers can have permanent effects on the well being and future fertility of adolescents.

And so we have one more example of science being suppressed because it didn’t give the results activists wanted. But this story isn’t over. As the Post recommends, Congress should fund larger and wlll-conducted trials of blockers with followups on adults who have gone on to estrogen or testosterone therapy. Given the increasing number of people who want to transition, such studies are imperative. But now we lack evidence, and without that the use of blockers should, I think, be stopped. Anecdotal evidence is not enough.

A cheap method for forming the tiny components of chips, such as transistors and diodes, harnesses simple fluid physics to make the electronics self-assembling

The age of the rings that encircle Saturn is under dispute thanks to calculations that show they could have been formed billions – rather than millions – of years ago

The past 12 months have been packed for the world’s wealthiest person as he has juggled Tesla, X, Neuralink, SpaceX and relations with Donald Trump – has it been a success?

Researchers have discovered proteins with emulsifying action that can be readily released from yeast cell walls. One of them exhibited emulsifying activity comparable to that of casein, a milk-derived emulsifier.

This past year saw some significant solar activity. This was especially true during the month of May, which saw more than 350 solar storms, solar flares, and geomagnetic storms. This included the strongest solar storm in 20 years that produced aurorae at far lower latitudes than usual and the strongest solar flare observed since December 2019. Given the threat they pose to radio communications, power grids, navigation systems, and spacecraft and astronauts, numerous agencies actively monitor the Sun’s behavior to learn more about its long-term behavior.

However, astronomers have not yet determined whether the Sun can produce “superflares” or how often they might occur. While tree rings and samples of millennia-old glacial ice are effective at records of the most powerful superflares, they are not effective ways to determine their frequency, and direct measurements of solar activity have only been available since the Space Age. In a recent study, an international team of researchers adopted a new approach. By analyzing Kepler data on tens of thousands of Sun-like stars, they estimate that stars like ours produce superflares about once a century.

The study was conducted by reseMax-Planck-Institut for Solar System Research (MPS), the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (SGO) and the Space Physics and Astronomy Research unit at the University of Oulu, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCF), the National Solar Observatory (NSO), the Commissariat of Atomic and Alternative Energies of Paris-Saclay and the University of Paris-Cité, and multiple universities. The paper that addresses their research recently appeared in the journal Science.

Superflares are notable for the intense amount of radiation they emit, about 1032 erg, or 6.2444 electron volts (eV). For comparison, consider the Carrington Event of 1859, one of the most violent solar storms of the past 200 years. While this solar flare caused widespread disruption, leading to the collapse of telegraph networks in northern Europe and North America, it released only a hundredth of the energy of a superflare. While tree rings and glacial samples have recorded powerful events in the past, the ability to observe thousands of stars at a time is teaching astronomers a lot about how often the most powerful flares occur.

This is certainly true of the Kepler Space Telescope, which monitored about 100,000 main-sequence stars continuously for years for signs of periodic dips indicating the presence of exoplanets. These same observations recorded countless solar flares, which appeared in the observational data as short, pronounced peaks in brightness. As Prof. Dr. Sami Solanki, a Director at the MPS and a co-author of the paper, explained in a MPS press release:

“We cannot observe the Sun over thousands of years. Instead, however, we can monitor the behavior of thousands of stars very similar to the Sun over short periods of time. This helps us to estimate how frequently superflares occur.”

For their study, the team analyzed data obtained by Kepler from 56,450 Sun-like stars between 2009 and 2013. This consisted of carefully analyzing the images for signs of potential superflares, which were only a few pixels in size. The team was also careful in their selection of stars, taking into account only those whose surface temperature and brightness were similar to the Sun’s. The researchers also ruled out potential sources of error, including cosmic radiation, transient phenomena (asteroids or comets), and other types of stars flaring up near a Sun-like star.

In total, the Kepler data provided the team with evidence of 220,000 years of stellar activity. From this, they were able to identify 2,889 superflares from 2,527 of the observed stars, producing an average of one superflare per star per century. While previous surveys have found average intervals of a thousand or even ten thousand years, these studies could not determine the exact source of the observed flares. They also had to limit themselves to stars without any close neighbors, making this latest study the most precise and sensitive to date.

Nevertheless, previous studies that considered indirect evidence and observations made in the past few decades have yielded longer intervals between superflares. Whenever the Sun has released a high level of energetic particles that reached Earth’s atmosphere in the past, the interaction produced a detectable amount of radioactive carbon-14 (C14). This isotope will remain in tree and glacial samples over thousands of years of slow decay, allowing astronomers to identify powerful solar events and how long ago they occurred.

This method has allowed researchers to identify five extreme solar particle events and three candidates within the past twelve thousand years – suggesting an average rate of one superflare per 1,500 years. However, the team acknowledges that it is possible that more violent solar particle events and superflares occurred in the past. “It is unclear whether gigantic flares are always accompanied by coronal mass ejections and what is the relationship between superflares and extreme solar particle events,” said co-author Prof. Dr. Ilya Usoskin from the University of Oulu. “This requires further investigation.”

While the new study does not reveal when the Sun will experience its next superflare, the results urge caution. “The new data are a stark reminder that even the most extreme solar events are part of the Sun’s natural repertoire,” said co-author Dr. Natalie Krivova from the MPS. In the meantime, the best way to stay prepared is to monitor the Sun regularly to ensure reliable forecasting and advanced warning. By 2031, these efforts will be bolstered by the ESA’s Vigil probe, which the MPS is assisting through the development of its Polarimetric and Magnetic Imager (PHI) instrument.

Further Reading: MPS, Science

The post New Research Indicates the Sun may be More Prone to Flares Than we Thought appeared first on Universe Today.

At least 37 men, woman and children were brutally murdered in the largest massacre known in Bronze Age Britain, possibly in a performance of ritualistic violence

The Greater Mekong region of Asia hosts a wealth of rare and unstudied species – 173 new species of plants, 26 reptiles, 17 amphibians, 15 fish and three mammals were described last year. Here are six of them

Over at the Heterodox STEM site, Anna Krylov (a Professor of Chemistry at USC) just posted a recent 40-minute lecture she gave about the ongoing erosion of the concept of merit in science (the alternative to merit, of course, is “equity”).  Because the original video was poor, Anna went ahead and re-recorded the lecture slide for slide and word for word. You can see the new version of the lecture at the video below, and read transcript by clicking on the headline just below.

The video:

Her lecture begins by citing a paper that many of us collaborated on, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” finally published in Peter Singer’s Journal of Controversial Ideas. Let me just put down a short excerpt about the paper from Anna’s talk, referring to its rejection from the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science:

Ben Gibran writes: “It’s crazy enough that an article entitled “In Defense of Merit in Science” needs publishing; it’s mind-blowing that it’s published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. What next, “In Defense of Not Drinking Battery Fluid”?

But PNAS editors had a different opinion.

Here is the feedback we received following our initial inquiry. The board was concerned with the word MERIT in the title of the paper. They wrote: “The problem is that the concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as implemented…” They finish with an advice: “If the authors could use a different term, I would encourage that.”

We considered to change the title to this: “In Defense of M**** in Science,” but ultimately we were not able to address all editorial concerns. So this is how we ended up in the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

And, in a bit of self-aggrandizement, but one that’s relevant, Anna and I wrote an editorial about this mishigass in the Wall Street Journal (click to read, or, if you don’t subscribe, find the article archived here):

A year before last September, I spent three weeks in Israel, visiting Tel Aviv for a week and Jerusalem for two weeks. I also got two one-day tours, one to Masada and the Dead Sea for sightseeing, and the other a “security tour” of the defensive environs of Jerusalem given by the head of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). While there, I deliberately looked for signs of apartheid within Israel: signs of Israeli Arabs being treated as inferiors by Israeli Jews. I didn’t see any: Arabs and Jews seemed to mix completely in restaurants, trains, and trams. But of course my visit was short, superficial, and there might have been discrimination that I simply didn’t see. In light of that, all I can say is that “I didn’t see any apartheid, but my visit to Israel was short and superficial.”

Unfortunately, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose visit to Israel and Palestine was much shorter than mine (10 days total) does not refrain from making sweeping pronouncements. And that is because he clearly went to the area (sponsored and guided by anti-Israeli groups) with a preconception: he wanted to show that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is closely analogous to American’s treatment of blacks, even during slavery.  His visit was thus tendentious and what he wrote about it (the last of four essays in the book below) is incomplete, misguided, and, to be honest, shameful.

Below is Coates’s new the book of essays; click on it to go to the Amazon site.  I read only the last (but most talked-about) essay, “The Gigantic Dream,” 117 pages long.  If you know anything about the situation in Israel and Palestine, and the history thereof, you will spot immediately how tendentious, erroneous, and damaging to Israel Coates’s essay is. And some reviewers have called him out for it, though of course the Israel-haters defend him.

Using the four categories of lies that Francis Collins lays out in his own new book The Road to Wisdom, I would say that Coates’s dilations on Israel fall between “delusions” and “bullshit.” That is, he is not intentionally lying, but I think his view is warped by his immersion in American racism, and I believe he knows that there is far more to the story than he’s telling. In fact, he has been corrected by both interviewers and reviewers about his distortions, but he hasn’t changed his mind.

The theme of his book could be summarized by saying, à la Orwell, “Israel bad, Palestine good.”  To arrive at this theme, he has to completely neglect anything bad ever done by the Palestinians and anything good ever done by Israel. But I’m getting ahead of myself:

There are the usual accusations of genocide and apartheid on Israel’s part (the apartheid is supposed to occur within Israel, with Jews oppressing Israeli Arabs), but the most obvious omissions are those of Palestinian terrorism and of Israel’s repeated offers of a state to Palestine.

What, for example, do you make of Coates’s repeated beefing about having to wait for long periods at checkpoints, or about Israeli soldiers at those checkpoints glaring at him?  Could the plethora of checkpoints have something to do with Palestinian terrorism and an attempt to keep murderers out of Israel? You won’t hear that from Coates. Nor does he mention the First and Second Intifada.  Will you hear that Palestine won’t allow a single Jew to live in Gaza or the Palestinian-controlled parts of the West Bank (areas A and B)? Isn’t that apartheid? If not, why not? Remember that fully 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs, like the one in the first video below.

If you didn’t know about the Palestinian terrorism that’s killed Israelis ever since the seventh century (with two big pogroms in 1929 and 1936), you wouldn’t realize the context of much of Coates’s complaints. But he has a point to make: the treatment of Israel towards Palestinians—or, indeed, of its own Arab citizens—is precisely analogous to Americans’ treatment of slaves and the subsequent Jim Crow laws.  But you’d have to squint pretty hard to see Israel doing anything in Israeli that resembles even slightly the purchase and use of slaves, or of forcing Israeli Arabs to bow and kowtow to Israeli Jews.

Coates mentions the two-state solution, floated by one person he met, but he doesn’t mention that such a solution has been offered to the Israelis four or five times, and every time it has been rejected—by the Palestinians.  If there is apartheid and genocide to be seen, simply look at the first charter of Hamas, as well as its behavior and the statements of Iran, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and many other Arab groups sworn to extirpate Israel. There is of course no mention of the events of October 7, 2023, but the book came out on October 1, 2024, and perhaps, given that there’s about a year’s lead time on publishing many books, Coates couldn’t fit that event in. But I don’t believe Coates would have mentioned it anyway (not even one inserted footnote?), for the butchery of that day spoils his narrative. Would Coates admit now the truth that Hamas, proud of that day, has sworn to repeat it over and over again? Remember, Coates says not one word about Palestinian terrorism.

Coates dwells heavily on the nakba, or “catastrophe,” originally seen as the humiliation suffered by five Arab armies (and volunteers from two other Arab states) who invaded Israel right after independence but was routed by a lowly army of Jews.  The nakba was subsequently reconceived by Arafat to mean the “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel” after the invasion.  Coates implies repeatedly that, without provocation, the Jewish military simply slaughtered Arabs wholesale after their invasion.  This is not the case: many Arabs fled because they were frightened, many other because Arab countries ordered them to leave so the Jews could be destroyed before Arabs could return, and some fled because they started trying to kill Jews and were driven out militarily or destroyed.

The Arab invasion of Israel, beginning on its day of independence in 1948, was certainly not a genocide of Palestinians. Coates discusses the “massacre” by Israeli soldiers of the Arab village of Deir Yassin (an event badly distorted by Wikipedia, which repeatedly mentions rapes that never happened), but he doesn’t note that the attack was prompted by the infiltration of the village by Arabs who fired on Israelis. About hundred people died and, unfortunately, some non-combatants were bystanders in the line of fire.

To see another view of this battle (one that Coates, not interested in hearing all sides, neglects), read The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (and a review of that book in the Middle East Quarterly).

As for Coates’s writing, one petulant reviewer (the reviews are mixed) called Coates a “narcissist”. When I saw that after reading the essay myself, I said, “Precisely right.” Not only is there Coates’s hubris of assessing a messy, complex, and historically convoluted conflict after only a ten-day visit, but his writing is deeply self-absorbed. Coates is far more interested in his own reactions than in talking to people on both sides. A soldier glares at him, and he’s off to the races.

But Coates’s mission is not to talk to Israelis and Palestinians, but to show that Israel’s racism parallels that of America’s. It’s as if he needs to fill in a jigsaw puzzle, and is looking for just the right pieces to unite Israel and American segregationism.  I won’t dwell on the folly of such comparisons, except to say that Coates has a bill to sell. He seems to have been prompted in this solipsism by the success of his famous Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations”—a good piece of writing—an article that he brings up repeatedly.

And since Coates is tendentious, let me just give the other side, but in the words of other people.  First, how is Israel enacting apartheid against its own people? (I am construing this accusation as one of intra-Israel apartheid, not the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine.) I have tried to find laws in which Arab Israelis are discriminated against by Jewish Israelis. I could find only one discriminatory law, and it discriminates in favor of Arabs: they are not required to serve three years in the IDF unless they want to. There are also laws that discriminate among Jews themselves, with—until recently—Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews being exempt from military service as well, though that is supposed to end in a few years.  It is curious that those who level accusations of apartheid against Israel Israeli Arabs never come up with tangible examples.

If you want to dig deeper into the apartheid accusation, here are two videos, one long and one short. In the first short one (ten minutes), an Israeli Arab who served in the IDF fields a number of hard questions about whether he experienced discrimination. The answer was “no”:

. . . and here is the stupendous Natasha Hausdorff discussing the “apartheid” accusation with an American professor Professor Orde Kittrie from Arizona State. Kittrie is a specialist in international and criminal law, and, as I’m presenting this as a palliative to the ignorance of Coates. You will hear Kittrie’s opinion that the apartheid accusation is baseless. (At 31 minutes in, Natasha gives some viewers’ questions—and some of her own—that Kittrie answers.)

Here are the YouTube notes:

Chair: Natasha Hausdorff

A new UN Commission of Inquiry of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is poised to accuse Israel of apartheid.

Professor Kittrie discusses this Inquiry and its mandate, and the potential relationship with prosecutions by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The mandate’s reference to apartheid was apparently inspired by a lengthy report, accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid, published by Human Rights Watch (HRW). However this report is based on a definition of “apartheid” which is not found in the ICC’s Statute or the International Convention on Apartheid. Professor Kittrie discusses the different definitions of apartheid, reasons why the apartheid charge is wrong even under HRW’s definition, and options for responding.

Finally, here’s an article from Fathom taking apart Amnesty International’s 2022 accusation that Israel was an “apartheid state.”   Click to read:

Read, watch, and judge for yourself. In my view, Coates, while his writings on American racism may be good (I’ve read only the Atlantic article), his piece on Israel and Palestine is reprehensible, misguided, full of distortions, and, in the end, is pretty much racist, if not antisemitic. If you read it, please do so with some knowledge of the politics and history of the region.

h/t: Malgorzata

Several people sent batches of photographs in, and many thanks to them. We have enough for about a week.

Today’s Sunday, which means that we have photos from biologist John Avise, who has moved from birds to lepidopterans. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:

Butterflies in North America, Part 2 

This week continues the series on butterflies that I have photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.

Atala (Eumaeus atala), underwing:

Atlantis Fritillary (Speyeria atlantis):

Baltimore Checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton):

Baltimore Checkerspot, underwing:

Barred Sulphur (Phoebis philea) underwing:

Behr’s Metalmark (Apodemia virgulti), topwing:

Behr’s Metalmark underwing:

Bernadino (square-spotted) Blue (Euphilotes allyni), male topwing:

Bernardino Blue, female:

Bernardino Blue, underwing:

Eastern Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes), male:

Black Swallowtail, underwing:

In 2018, NASA mission planners selected the Jezero Crater as the future landing site of the Perseverance rover. This crater was a natural choice, as it was once an ancient lake bed, as evidenced by the delta fan at its western edge. On Earth, these features form in the presence of flowing water that gradually deposits sediment over time. Combined with the fact that the Jezero Crater’s delta feature is rich in clays, this makes the region a prime target to search for biosignatures – evidence of past (and maybe present) life on Mars!

In recent news, NASA announced that the Perseverance rover had reached the top of Jezero Crater’s rim at a location the science team calls “Lookout Hill.” The rover spent the previous three and a half months climbing the rim, covering a distance of 500 vertical meters (1,640 vertical feet) and making science observations along the way. Now that it has crested the rim, Perseverance can begin what the mission team calls its “Northern Rim” campaign. Over the next year, the rover is expected to drive 6.4 km (4 mi) and visit up to four sites of interest where it will obtain geological samples.

Since it landed in the Jezero Crater in February 2021, Perseverance has completed four science campaigns. This includes the “Crater Floor,” “Fan Front,” “Upper Fan,” and “Margin Unit” based on where the rover was obtaining samples from. During the first campaign, the rover visited features around its landing site – like the Máaz formation – where it obtained several rock and atmospheric samples, and some witness samples for contamination assessment. The two campaigns that followed saw the rover explore different sections of Jezero’s delta fan and obtain samples of rock and clay.

The fourth campaign, meanwhile, consisted of the rover examining marginal carbonate rocks that circle the upper edge of the Jezero Crater. The science team calls Perseverance’s fifth campaign the “Northern Rim” because its route covers the northern part of the southwestern section of Jezero’s rim. The site was selected so that the rover could explore a region of Mars, unlike anything it has investigated before. Ken Farley, a project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech, explained in a NASA press release:

“The Northern Rim campaign brings us completely new scientific riches as Perseverance roves into fundamentally new geology. It marks our transition from rocks that partially filled Jezero Crater when it was formed by a massive impact about 3.9 billion years ago to rocks from deep down inside Mars that were thrown upward to form the crater rim after impact. These rocks represent pieces of early Martian crust and are among the oldest rocks found anywhere in the solar system. Investigating them could help us understand what Mars — and our own planet — may have looked like in the beginning.”

Now that Perseverance has crested and moved on from Lookout Hill, the rover is heading to a rocky outcrop about 450 m (1,500 feet) on the other side of the rim known as “Witch Hazel Hill.” Said Candice Bedford, a Perseverance scientist from Purdue University:

“The campaign starts off with a bang because Witch Hazel Hill represents over 330 feet [~100 m] of layered outcrop, where each layer is like a page in the book of Martian history. As we drive down the hill, we will be going back in time, investigating the ancient environments of Mars recorded in the crater rim. Then, after a steep descent, we take our first turns of the wheel away from the crater rim toward ‘Lac de Charmes,’ about 2 miles [3.2 km] south.”

Located on the plains beyond the rim, the Lac de Charmes region is of interest to the mission team because it is less likely to have been affected by the impact that led to the Jezero Crater. Beyond that, the rover will travel about 1.6 km (1 mi) back up the rim to investigate an outcropping of blocks (megabreccia) that may be the remains of ancient bedrock broken by another impact. This was the Isidis impact, which occurred 3.9 billion years ago and led to the formation of the Isidis Planitia basin in the Northern Lowlands.

The route NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took (in blue) as it climbed the western rim of Jezero Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Investigating this site could provide valuable insight into a major surface-reshaping event that took place during the Noachian Period on Mars. This geological epoch saw extensive erosion by flowing water, as indicated by the many river valley networks dated to the period. It is also during the Noachian that the Tharsis Bulge is believed to have formed, indicating that Mars was still geologically active. As always, the ultimate goal is to find biosignatures from this “warmer, wetter” period that indicate that Mars could have had life (similar to Earth at the time).

The Perseverance science team also shared information on the rover, their science operations, and future plans at a media briefing on Thursday, December 12th, during the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington. As Steven Lee, the deputy project manager for the Perseverance mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said during the briefing:

“During the Jezero Crater rim climb, our rover drivers have done an amazing job negotiating some of the toughest terrain we’ve encountered since landing. They developed innovative approaches to overcome these challenges — even tried driving backward to see if it would help — and the rover has come through it all like a champ. Perseverance is ‘go’ for everything the science team wants to throw at it during this next science campaign.”

Further Reading: NASA

The post NASA’s Perseverance Rover Reaches the Top Rim of the Jezero Crater appeared first on Universe Today.

Reader Debra says “Farbsy is a comedian on Instagram who pretends to run a customer service line for cats.” That is, the animals call in to beef.

Click the picture or here to see the video on Instagram, and sound up:

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There’s a new cat movie called “Flow”, made in Latvia, which gets an unheard-of rating for both critics and audience on Rotten Tomatoes:

And the NYT review, archived here, is also excellent, especially if you’re an ailurophile:

“Flow,” an animated adventure film with a touch of magical realism, is a welcome entrant in the cat-movie canon, exuding a profound affection for our four-legged friends.

Its hero, a plucky black cat with round, expressive eyes, doesn’t speak a word of dialogue, and acts more or less like a domestic house cat, but under the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s doting gaze, he’s as well-developed as Atticus Finch, a noble character you can’t help but root for. Purring, scratching and scrabbling up walls, this cat virtually leaps off the screen.

“Flow,” written by Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza, concerns the cat’s survival during a flood of almost biblical proportions. The story, simple but compelling, unfolds as a kind of feline picaresque, as he clambers aboard a passing sailboat that drifts from one scenic exploit to another. He soon encounters other stranded animals, including a guileless Labrador retriever and a benevolent secretary bird, who tag along to form what eventually resembles a charming, ragtag menagerie. Their adventures together range from hair raising, as when a thunderstorm threatens to capsize their ship, to endearingly mundane, like when a rotund capybara helps a lemur gather a collection of knickknacks.

It sounds saccharine, but Zilbalodis largely avoids the sort of whimsy and sentimentality that might plague, say, a Disney movie with the same premise. The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.

The trailer:

The film also has a Wikipedia entry (it also summarizes the plot, which you may want to avoid before you see it), and it details the movie’s encomiums:

Flow (Latvian: Straume) is a 2024 animated fantasy adventure film directed by Gints Zilbalodis and written by Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža. The film is notable for containing no dialogue.

Upon premiering at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the film received critical acclaim and won numerous film and animation awards, including the Best Animated Film awards at the European Film Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and the National Board of Review Awards.  The film was selected as the Latvian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.

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And here’s a five-minute video compilation of cats in the snow:

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h/t: Laura, Jez

Getting places in space quickly has been the goal of propulsion research for a long time. Rockets, our most common means of doing so, are great for providing lots of force but extraordinarily inefficient. Other options like electric propulsion and solar sailing are efficient but offer measly amounts of force, albeit for a long time. So scientists have long dreamed of a third method of propulsion – one that could provide enough force over a long enough time to power a crewed mission to another star in a single human lifetime. And that could theoretically happen using one of the rarest substances in the universe – antimatter.

A new paper from Sawsan Ammar Omira and Abdel Hamid I. Mourad at the United Arab Emirates University looks at the possibilities of developing a space drive using antimatter and what makes it so hard to create. Antimatter was initially discovered in 1932 when physicist Carl David Anderson observed positrons – the antimatter form of an electron – in cosmic rays by passing them through a cloud chamber. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1936 for his discovery. It took 20 years to create it artificially for the first time.

Since then, antimatter has been poked and prodded in as many ways as scientists could think of – including literally, but that causes the thing that antimatter is most famous for – self-annihilation. When an antimatter proton comes into contact with protons or neutrons of normal matter, they annihilate one another and release a combination of energy (typically in the form of gamma rays) and also high-energy short-lived particles, known as pion and kaon, which happen to be traveling at relativistic speeds.

So, in theory, a ship could contain enough antimatter to intentionally create this annihilation explosion, using the relativistic particles as a form of thrust and potentially using the gamma rays as a source of power. The overall amount of energy released from a gram of antiprotons being annihilated is 1.8×1014, 11 orders of magnitude more energy than rocket fuel and even 100 times greater energy density than a nuclear fission or fusion reactor. As the paper puts it, “one gram of antihydrogen could ideally power 23 space shuttles.”

All this begs the question – why don’t we have these awesome propulsions systems yet? The simple answer is that antimatter is tricky to work with. Since it will self-annihilate with anything it touches, it must be suspended in an advanced electromagnetic containment field. The longest scientists have been able to do that was for about 16 minutes at CERN in 2016, and even that was only on the order of a few atoms – not the grams or kilograms needed to support an interstellar propulsion system.

Additionally, it takes absurd amounts of energy to create antimatter, which makes it expensive. The Antiproton Decelerator, a massive particle accelerator at CERN, makes about ten nanograms of antiprotons a year at a cost of several million dollars. Extrapolating that out, producing one gram of antimatter would require something like 25 million kWh of energy—enough to power a small city for a year. It would also cost over $4M at average electricity rates, making it one of the most expensive substances on Earth.

Fraser discusses techniques to protect relativistic ships (such as those powered by antimatter) from dust in the interstellar medium.

Given this expense and the massive scale of the infrastructure needed to do it, antimatter research is relatively limited. Around 100-125 papers per year are produced on the subject, dramatically increasing from around 25 in 2000. However, that compares to around 1000 papers per year on large language models, one of the more popular forms of algorithms powering the current AI boom. In other words, the overall expense and relative long-term horizon over any payout limit the amount of funding and, therefore, advancements in antimatter creation and storage.

That means it will probably be quite some time before we end up with an antimatter ship drive. We might even need to create some preliminary energy-producing technologies like fusion that could significantly lower the cost of energy and even enable the research that would eventually get us there. However, the possibility of traveling at near-relativistic speeds and potentially getting actual humans to another star within a single lifetime is an ambitious goal that space and exploration enthusiasts everywhere will continue to pursue, no matter how long it takes.

Learn More:
Sawsan Ammar Omira & Abdel Hamid I. Mourad – Future of Antimatter Production, Storage, Control, and Annihilation Applications in Propulsion Technologies
UT – It’s Official, Antimatter Falls Down in Gravity, Not Up
UT – Are There Antimatter Galaxies?
UT – Spectrum of Antimatter Observed for First Time

Lead Image:
Artist’s conception of an antimatter rocket system.
Credit – NASA/MFSC

The post Antimatter Propulsion Is Still Far Away, But It Could Change Everything appeared first on Universe Today.

Exomoons are a hot topic in the science community, as none have been confirmed with astronomers finding new and creative ways to identify them. But while astronomers have searched for exomoons orbiting exoplanets around single stars like our Sun, could exomoons exist around exoplanets orbiting binary stars? This is what a recent study submitted to The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers from Tufts University investigated the statistical likelihood of exomoons orbiting exoplanets with two stars, also known as circumbinary planets (CBPs). This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand methods needed for identifying exomoons in a variety of exoplanetary systems.

Here, Universe Today discusses this incredible research with Benjamin R. Gordon, who is a Master of Science student in Astrophysics at Tufts University and lead author of the study, regarding the motivation behind the study, significant results, potential follow-up studies, the importance of finding exomoons orbiting CBPs, and which known systems are the most promising for identifying exomoons? Therefore, what was the motivation behind this study?

Gordon tells Universe Today, “We were motivated at the start by a couple of ideas, but my biggest source of inspiration was the idea that circumbinary planets are thought to have a farther minimum distance than single star planets, meaning that more circumbinary planets would be likely to lie within the “habitable zone”. Thus, any moon of these circumbinary planets that may have the potential to form life, as they may be similar in size to Earth if a planet is very large. It’s not a trivial question to ask if moons in these chaotic systems of 2 stars and a planet would be stable, so we were eager to find an answer!”

For the study, the researchers used computer models to simulate how exomoons could orbit CBPs under a variety of exoplanetary systems conditions, specifically what’s known as a planet’s hill radius, which is its threshold to have exomoons orbiting them. The researchers conducted the simulations on two populations of CBPs and exomoons: Population 1, which had an unlimited planetary radius to have exomoons; and Population 2, which had a planetary radius between 3x the Earth and the size of the corresponding exoplanet, which have been identified as all gas giants orbiting binary stars. The researchers then conducted 390 computer simulations of the Population 1 planets and 484 computer simulations of the Population 2 planets. So, what were the most significant results from the study?

“One of the main findings is that there is a section of the parameter space of the initial conditions of our system that always results in stable exomoons of circumbinary planets,” Gordon tells Universe Today. “We also found that 30-40% of stable moons are in the habitable zone, which is a very significant fraction. We also show that the disk-driven migration scenario for a circumbinary planet-moon system is a possible formation pathway for long-period circumbinary planets as well as planetary mass objects that float freely through space.”

The goal of exoplanet hunting is to find an Earth-like world whose size, distance from its star, and atmospheric composition could have the right conditions to support life as we know it. Unfortunately, of the 5,806 confirmed exoplanets, only 210 are rocky worlds like our own, with more than half of those confirmed exoplanets being gas giants. Therefore, identifying exomoons orbiting CBPs within their star’s habitable zone could hold promise for potentially identifying Earth-sized exomoons orbiting gas giants larger than Jupiter. So, what follow-up studies are currently in the works and what are Gordon’s thoughts on the importance of potentially finding exomoons orbiting CBPs?

“It would be interesting to investigate the stability of these moons including the effects of inclination and multi-planet systems,” Gordon tells Universe Today. “I am also hoping to apply for telescope time with future missions such as the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope to follow-up on circumbinary systems that are similar to those we see in our simulations with stable exomoons. Currently, there have been no confirmed exomoons, so finding one in general would be remarkable! If we find one specifically orbiting a circumbinary planet, this may be a tremendous candidate for follow up searches for life via JWST.”

As noted, no exomoons have been confirmed to exist, but there are currently almost two dozen exomoon candidates, with two recently being debunked due to exoplanet transit data but those findings were subsequently refuted only a few months later as likely candidates (Kepler 1625b and Kepler 1708b), along with two potentially being volcanically-active exomoons each orbiting a “hot Jupiter” (WASP-49b and HD 189733b). Of those four, HD 189733b resides in a binary star system with the primary star hypothesized to be an orange dwarf star—which HD 189733b orbits—and the secondary star hypothesized to be a red dwarf star.

With this, the question then becomes what about habitable exomoons, since several moons within our solar system exhibit evidence for containing the building blocks for life as we know it, specifically Europa, Titan, and Enceladus, and all of which orbit gas giants, though far outside of our Sun’s habitable zone. If worlds like these exist within our own solar system, then similar exomoons could orbit gas giants in other solar systems, as well. Then the question becomes could we find exomoons orbiting within their star’s respective habitable zone? For instance, could a gas giant that orbits within its star’s habitable zone possess exomoons similar to Earth? Therefore, according to Gordon, which known systems are the most promising for identifying exomoons?

Artist’s illustration of an Earth-like exomoon orbiting a gas giant exoplanet in a star’s habitable zone. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

“In my opinion, I do think that single star systems would be the easiest to confirm an exomoon,” Gordon tells Universe Today. “This is because the data used for various proposed detection methods is much more complex for binary systems than for single stars, as an extra star provides another source of dynamical interactions. For example, there is already an issue with finding circumbinary planets using the transit method, as the transits do not phase fold due to transit timing variations from interactions with the binary.”

Gordon continues by telling Universe Today, “Trying to find a moon on a circumbinary planet light-curve would make a hard problem even more difficult, whereas a single star exoplanetary light-curve would provide a cleaner starting point where each of the candidates so far have been spotted (Kepler-1625b and Kepler-1708b). For circumbinary exomoons, our research shows that it would be best to search in systems that have a wide binary separation, as stable moons were able to orbit at up to 10% of their planet’s hill radius (for context, our moon orbits at around 26% of the Earth’s hill radius).”

As astronomers continue searching the heavens for definitive evidence of an exomoon potentially orbiting an exoplanet or CBP, the technology and techniques used to search for exomoons will only improve in the future, specifically with the aforementioned Nancy Grace Roman Telescope (commonly referred to as Roman), which is due to launch between Fall 2026 and May 2027. Along with searching for exoplanets using the gravitational microlensing method, Roman will also study cosmic structures, dark energy, general relativity, and the space-time curvature, all while being stationed in a Sun-Earth L2 orbit, which is located on the opposite side of the Earth’s orbit from the Sun.

How many exomoons orbiting circumbinary planets will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

The post Could Planets Orbiting Two Stars Have Moons? appeared first on Universe Today.