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Breaking oxygen out of a water molecule is a relatively simple process, at least chemically. Even so, it does require components, one of the most important of which is a catalyst. Catalysts enable reactions and are linearly scalable, so if you want more reactions quickly, you need a bigger catalyst. In space exploration, bigger means heavier, which translates into more expensive. So, when humanity is looking for a catalyst to split water into oxygen and hydrogen on Mars, creating one from local Martian materials would be worthwhile. That is precisely what a team from Hefei, China, did by using what they called an “AI Chemist.”

Unfortunately, the name “AIChemist” didn’t stick, though that joke might vary depending on the font you read it in. Whatever its name, the team’s work was some serious science. It specifically applied machine learning algorithms that have become all the rage lately to selecting an effective catalyst for an “oxygen evolution reaction” by utilizing materials native to Mars. 

To say it only chose the catalyst isn’t giving the system the full credit it’s due, though. It accomplished a series of steps, including developing a catalyst formula, pretreating the ore to create the catalyst, synthesizing it, and testing it once it was complete. The authors estimate that the automated process saved over 2,000 years of human labor by completing all of these tasks and point to the exceptional results of the testing to prove it.

Depiction of the process the AI Chemist went through to create the test catalyst.
Credit – Zhu et al.

Before we get to that, though, let’s start with the “initial conditions.” The team developed an “all-in-one” robotic AI chemist capable of performing all these tasks. It was initially based on work done by more limited AI chemists who could read synthetic chemistry literature and estimate the efficacy of different chemical compounds for different tasks. After they built the model, they needed to feed it with some data.

For that data, they selected five different common rocks from the surface of Mars. They estimated that there would be 3,764,376 possible combinations to come out of the elements present in those rocks, depending on how the combinations were manufactured. So, the first task of the AI Chemist was to select one that could act as a catalyst for splitting off oxygen. Part of that dataset was built with 30,000 other theoretical datasets and the results of 243 experiments. The result is a “polymetallic” material composed of manganese, iron, nickel, magnesium, aluminum, and calcium. 

Next, a sample of the catalyst would be manufactured for testing. The AI is equipped with a robot arm that took physical samples of meteorites that had been dissolved in hydrochloric acid and attempted to synthesize the suggested catalyst out of those materials. This process involved pretty extreme processes like centrifuging the samples at 7,500g for 5 minutes to separate out the necessary materials and drying out the resultant material. Impressively, all of this was seemingly done without human intervention.

Fraser goes into detail about how a potential mission to Mars will happen in the near future – including creating oxygen using catalysts.

After some of the material had been synthesized, the research team tested it by actually performing the reduction process it was designed to do. More importantly, they did so under Martian ambient conditions. The material performed admirably, similar to existing catalysts already used.

So, effectively, an AI just developed and tested a catalyst for use on Mars using local materials. And potentially saved over 2,000 years of intensive human labor in doing so. That is a testament to how effective AI is at finding patterns in existing data and extrapolating them using new data. It remains to be seen, though, if this catalyst will ever see the light of day on Mars, as the catalyst itself must be integrated with the rest of the system to perform the reduction reaction to split oxygen from water effectively. Given the complexity of the process used to create that catalyst, it might be easier for us to ship one directly from Earth, even if it doesn’t use Martian materials.

Learn More:
Zhu et al. – Automated synthesis of oxygen-producing catalysts from Martian meteorites by a robotic AI chemist
UT – A Single Robot Could Provide a Mission To Mars With Enough Water and Oxygen
UT – What is ISRU, and How Will it Help Human Space Exploration?
UT – A new way to Make Oxygen on Mars: Using Plasma

Lead Image:
Series of images of the robotic arm used in the experiments running the catalyst synthesis process.
Credit – Zhu et al.

The post An AI Chemist Made A Catalyst to Make Oxygen On Mars Using Local Materials appeared first on Universe Today.

Rising carbon dioxide levels are driving an increase in the ocean’s acidity – and this change is sinking deeper as emissions increase, putting even more marine organisms at risk

A research team has found a way to make more efficient the desorption of water-adsorption polymers used in atmospheric water harvesting and desiccant air conditioning.

Large language models, a type of AI that analyses text, can predict the results of proposed neuroscience studies more accurately than human experts, finds a new study. The findings demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) trained on vast datasets of text can distil patterns from scientific literature, enabling them to forecast scientific outcomes with superhuman accuracy. The researchers say this highlights their potential as powerful tools for accelerating research, going far beyond just knowledge retrieval.

Researchers have investigated how cationic polymers organize on a molecular level when transporting RNA drugs.

A team of physics educators is focusing on a new approach to teaching quantum physics in schools. Traditional classroom teaching has tended to focus on presenting the history of the origins of quantum physics, which often poses problems for learners. Using the quantum measurement process as an example, the researchers have now published their first empirical findings on learning quantum physics -- based on two-state systems.

A team of physics educators is focusing on a new approach to teaching quantum physics in schools. Traditional classroom teaching has tended to focus on presenting the history of the origins of quantum physics, which often poses problems for learners. Using the quantum measurement process as an example, the researchers have now published their first empirical findings on learning quantum physics -- based on two-state systems.

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

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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