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Engineers and biochemists have brought their skills together to make it possible for untrained users to confirm contamination in fluids using a biogel test that changes color in the presence of such bacteria as E. coli, listeria and other frequent testing targets.

Researchers share a mathematical model created to capture the nonlinear relationships between CO2, temperature, human population, and crop growth. Increasing evidence of chaotic and complex dynamics within ecological systems led them to use both autonomous and nonautonomous models to gain a deeper understanding of seasonal variations and potential mitigation strategies, such as developing temperature-tolerant crops.

Food in the US has a bad rap thanks to outbreaks caused by bacteria, plus processing, additives and food dyes, but the food supply is actually much less risky than people think

Today's huge AI models are composed of several billion numbers known as weights and changing just one of them can destroy their ability to function, leading to “gibberish” output

Inflatable space modules are not a new concept, NASA have been exploring the possibility since the 1960’s. The Chinese Space Agency is now getting in on the act and is testing its new inflatable module which is part of its Shijian-19 satellite launch. To get it into orbit the capsule was compressed and folded and then inflated once in orbit. Following completion of the tests, it re-entered the atmosphere, landing in the Gobi Desert on 10th October. The goal is for this to be used to extend its space station in the same way NASA have been exploring expansion of ISS. 

The idea of inflatable space capsules offers a lightweight solution which simplifies the launch process. Their development began back in the 1960’s but real progress was seen with projects like TransHub that looked at new advanced materials. Even though TransHub was cancelled it was a precursor to ventures like the Bigelow Aerospace module known as BEAM. It was tested in 2016 on the ISS and proved the concept could work making them an invaluable part of the future of space exploration. 

This computer rendering shows the Bigelow Expanded Activity Module in its fully expanded configuration. Image: NASA

The Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) has now started experimentation with inflatable modules. They have been a major player on the global space stage since it was founded in 1993. Among their successes have been the Chang’e lunar missions and the Tianwen-1 Mars explorers. Since 2021, the Tiangong space station has been in orbit high above the Earth and there are now plans for crewed lunar missions. 

A recovery team member checks the Chang’e-6 probe’s sample return capsule after its landing in Inner Mongolia. (Credit: CGTN / CNSA)

On 27th September, the CNSA launched their Shijian-19 retrievable satellite from Jiuquan in China. A test inflatable module was developed and manufactured by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) as a landmark step in getting an inflatable module in orbit. They confirmed that the inflatable flexible sealed module completed a successful orbital test. The module is a sealed structure made from composite materials much like the Bigelow Aerospace BEAM module. 

Launch is completed by compressing and folding the module and then inflating upon reaching orbit. The technique makes construction relatively cheap and the launch process far more efficient. Following on from the successful test, CAST promise that larger-scale modules are the next step marking an important step forward in sealed module technology. To arrive at this stage in the development of inflatable technology, CAST completed ground based tests that confirmed they were air tight, could deal with extreme pressures and vibrations and would be capable of with standing impact from space debris. 

A rendering of the Chinese Tiangong space station. Credit: CMSA

The CNSA have confirmed they plan to expand their Tiangong space station and are now exploring the possibility of using inflatable modules as part of their plans. The next likely module to be added is likely to be a multifunctional capsule that will allow other modules to be added. The success of the inflatable module opens up a number of possibilities and opportunities for the Chinese agency, not just for Tiangong but for other space exploration habitats. 

Source : China’s inflatable space capsule passes in-orbit test

The post China Tests a Reusable Inflatable Module in Space appeared first on Universe Today.

I can guarantee that nearly everyone reading this post is using way too much toothpaste when they brush their teeth. In fact, you’re probably using at least four times the amount you need, and thus you’re paying four times what you should be paying for toothpaste. Not only that, but you may be getting too much fluoride if you are, like most people, using a fluoridated toothpaste. (RFK Jr. may get rid of those!)

How much toothpaste do you need? Several hygienists have told me “the amount about the size of a pea”, and I have verified that from several sites (for example, here, here, and here). Nobody weighs their toothpaste, but this amount is roughly 0.25 grams of paste. That means that a small three-ounce tube should last about six months if you brush twice a day.

And here are photos showing the proper amount of toothpaste to use for both small children and those more than three years old (that includes us):

Source

If you’re dispensing a ribbon of toothpaste that extends the length of the bristles, you’re using (and spending) way too much. STOP IT!

About 40 years ago, researchers noticed a population of orcas had begun swimming around with dead fish on their heads, and now the craze is back

The Chronicle of Higher Education is regarded as the most reputable site for news and opinion about American higher education. Not that you’ll agree with everything in it, but the article below, by William Deresiewicz, an author and critic who taught English at Yale for ten years, seems to me the most accurate and eloquent indictment about where American academia has failed in its mission. (Deresiewicz also wrote Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, an indictment of Ivy League and other “elite” colleges.)

Nearly all the explanations for Trump’s victory over Harris involve in part a rejection of American elitism and wokeness (they’re connected, of course), and to Deresiewicz, the results of the November 5 election not only show that “the politics of the academy have been defeated”, along with “its ideas, its assumptions [and] its policies and practices,” but also that the rejection of Harris is connected with the public’s rejection of woke academia. As I said yesterday, the public’s respect for and confidence in higher education has dropped in recent years, and dropped quite sharply.

Below is figure from a recent Gallup poll.  If you lump together those Americans who have a “great deal of confidence” in higher education with those having “quite a lot of confidence”, the composite percentage dropped from 57% in 2018 to 36% last year. That’s a substantial fall!  And I agree with Deresiewicz’s view that the reason for this fall is connected with the defeat of Kamala Harris. Despite Harris’s conscious decision to look more centrist after her nomination, it was too late: the Democrats had already established themselves as the Party of Wokeness, with the center of gravity of the party, and Biden) having moved towards extreme Leftist “progressivism”:

Click the headline below to read Deresiewicz’s take:

There are some telling data in the second paragraph, and I’ve bolded the part giving evidence that the wokeness pervading the Democratic party and American universities, whose faculty are overwhelmingly Democratic, played a role in the election:

Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.

“Among swing voters, it ranked first”! They didn’t ask about the view that “sex in humans is a spectrum,” something codified into law by the Biden administration but not mentioned by Harris, but many voters who rejected the Democrats surely knew about this, too.

Here’s Deresiewicz’s view on how the teachings of elite colleges trickled down to the public, who rejected them on November 5:

Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.

It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.

People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. . . [The author recounts the story a woman, a black graduate of Berkeley, who called into an NPR station on the air, saying that black people were fed up with being called “racists” when they simply opposed Biden’s policy of nearly open borders.]

Deresiewicz explains why academia (and the Left in general] has become more extreme. The leftward and largely unhinged shift has, he says, been spearheaded by “studies” department and other departments “not answerable to reality”. But as I’ve written frequently, science too, is being colonized by the “progressive” ideology that most Americans reject:

How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.

He calls these fields “intellectually corrupt”, and while that may seem extreme, the corruption is ubiquitous.  Yesterday one of my colleagues in an elite college went to a talk on “fat studies”, a talk sponsored by Gender Studies. The point the speaker made was that being obese was not a cause of morbidity and mortality, and the data supporting that was a claim that fat is “protective” in rats. But fat rats die more often than normal ones, just like humans. And in humans, if you simply Google “obesity and mortality”, you find a gazillion references about how being too fat can cause considerable health problems and death.  But the Fat Studies speaker simply denied this, saying that science is one of the impediments to fat acceptance. The speaker claimed instead that health problems with human obesity are the result of dieting, not being overweight!

This flat denial of reality—a reality everyone knows—in the cause of ideology is one reason for the intellectual corruption of “studies”. While such a thesis advanced before a biology department would meet with derision, I’m not so sure that the inhabitants would also soundly reject the claim that “there are only two sexes in humans.”

Here’s Deresieeticz’s argument about the disconnect between reality and “studies” programs, which he also lumps with “social sciences exclusive of economics” and “the schools of education and social work”:

The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.

These disciplines could be answerable to reality, as instantiated by the claims of the Fatness Studies speaker, but when data contradict their ideological underpinnings, they simply deny the data.

This piece is particularly well written, and I’ll add just two more bits to show that. Do read it if you have any interest in academia and the outcome of this month’s election:

[Academics] might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.

. . . Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.

Deresiewicz says that the solution is for academics to “entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things, and for a long time,” but considers that this is unlikely compared to academics “staying the course”, which of course means becoming woker and woker. If you’re fighting against this at a university, as many of us are, you know that while there are some hopeful signs, like the decline of DEI (a decline that will become steeper under Trump), there is little to stop the slide towards denial of the truth in the service of ideology. Since one of the purposes of academia is to discover and promulgate the truth, this will ultimately lead to academics becoming a mockery in the public eye. It’s already halfway there.

Swapping classrooms for the woods doesn't appear to improve most children's mental health, but they may still enjoy it

Reperfusion technologies that can reanimate human brains are raising the possibility that death could be a reversible condition, even hours after a cardiac arrest

Getting a mission to the point of officially being accepted for launch is an ordeal. However, even when they aren’t selected for implementation, their ideas, and in some cases, their technologies, can live on in other missions. That was the case for the Oversize Kite-craft for Exploration and AstroNautics in the Outer Solar system (OKEANOS) project, originally planned as a Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission. Despite not receiving funding to complete its entire mission, the project team released a paper that details the original plan for the mission, and some of those plans were incorporated into other missions that are still under development.

OKEANOS sought to build on JAXA’s success in returning samples from asteroids to Earth. Its most well-known mission in that regard was Hayabusa-2, which returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020 and has been the subject of dozens of scientific papers since. Ryugu is a near-earth asteroid, which means its origins in the solar system are dramatically different from those of other asteroids farther out from the Sun, which is where OKEANOS came in.

The original plan for OKEANOS was to launch a sample return mission to one of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that sit in the Lagrange points in front of and behind Juptier and its orbital path. Scientists believe these asteroids originated outside of Neptune’s orbit in the Kuiper belt but were brought closer to the Sun due to gravitational fluctuations caused by the migration of the gas giant planets. Since they would hold clues to the early solar system, astronomers are interested in their composition, and some space exploration enthusiasts are interested in the materials they hold for in-situ resource utilization purposes. But so far, no missions have visited them yet.

A solar panel, like the one shown in the video, would have been a key component of the OKEANOS missions.
Credit – The Japan Times YouTube Channel

That is about to change, though, with Lucy, a NASA mission that launched in 2021 to visit them. However, Lucy will simply do remote observations and lacks the equipment to sample them directly, let alone return a sample back to Earth. The project team had hoped OKEANOS would do just that.

Several novel technologies would be used to enable OKEANOS’ scientific objectives. One of the most interesting was a combination solar sail and ion drive known as a solar power sail. A solar power sail combines the solar pushing power of a solar sail with flexible photovoltaic solar collectors that can collect a significant amount of energy while deployed in a sail-like configuration. JAXA has also successfully tested a similar system with its IKAROS mission, demonstrating the technology in 2010.

Since solar sails have tiny thrust out near Jupiter, OKEANOS relies entirely on an ion engine and simply deploys its “sails” to deploy the solar panels that collect energy to power the ion drive. But once it reached its destination, it would utilize its second interesting technology—a lander.

Fraser talks about Lucy, the first mission to explore the Trojan asteroids.

The two main asteroid sample return missions – OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa-2 – directly touched down on the surface of their respective asteroids. However, there have been deployed landers that have at least attempted to land on an asteroid before – Philae, the lander that accompanied ESA’s Rosetta mission, is probably the most famous. But never before has a mission attempted to land a lander, collect a sample, and return it to a “mothership” that would then transport that sample back to Earth. Doing so out at the Trojan asteroids would add a new difficulty level of having significant communications lag time, making it difficult to troubleshoot any problems with the mission.

Given JAXA’s track record, it seemed likely that they could pull off that technical challenge. However, the mission was never fully funded due to a “cost issue,” according to the paper. JAXA selected a project known as LiteBIRD to study the cosmic microwave background as its large-class mission for this decade instead. Despite that, the technical details of some of the instrumentation have been described in other papers, and the project team feels confident that future asteroid sample return missions will adopt at least some of them. We’ll be sure to see more of those in the future as interest grows in understanding the roots of our solar system and how we might utilize the readily available resources on asteroids.

Learn More:
Takao et al. – Sample return system of OKEANOS—the solar power sail for Jupiter Trojan exploration
UT – Lucy Adds Another Asteroid to its Flyby List
UT – Separation Camera Takes Full Images and ‘Movie’ of IKAROS Solar Sail
UT – Tiny Fragments of a 4-Billion Year Old Asteroid Reveal Its History

Lead Image:
Concept images of the OKEANOS mission.
Credit – Takao et al.

The post OKEANOS – A Mission That Would Have Retrurned Samples From the Trojan Asteroids appeared first on Universe Today.

Space-time may not be continuous but instead made up of many discrete bits – and we may be able to see their effects near the edges of unusually bright black holes

NGC 4594 is an unusual galaxy. It was discovered in 1781 by Pierre Méchain, and is striking because of a symmetrical ring of dust that encircles the visible halo of the galaxy. Images taken of the galaxy in 2003 show this dusty ring in detail, where it almost resembles the brim of a large hat. So it’s understandable that NGC 4594 is more commonly known as the Sombrero Galaxy. Now the James Webb Space Telescope has captured an amazingly sharp image of the galaxy, and it’s revealing some interesting surprises.

The famous Sombrero galaxy. The prominent dust lane and halo of stars and globular clusters give this galaxy its name. Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Although Hubble’s view of the Sombrero Galaxy is stunning, it is bound by the limits of the optical spectrum. In the Hubble image, the thick dust ring obscures any stars that may be forming within it, and the brilliance of the active black hole at the heart of the galaxy outshines any details at the center of the galaxy. Given what we know about galaxies and star formation, it was thought that the dust ring could hide stellar nurseries where new stars are being born. And the central region of the galaxy likely held a bulge of stars similar to that of other galaxies.

The JWST image reveals a very different story. This particular image was captured by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which can peer through much of the galaxy’s dust. It reveals clumps of warm molecular gas within the brim of the galaxy, but surprisingly few young stars. It appears that the dust ring is not a significant source of star formation. The image also unveils the central region of the galaxy. Rather than a halo of stars surrounding the black hole, there is a flat disk. While the central black hole is active, it is a low luminosity galactic nucleus, which is again surprising given that it does produce jets of plasma like more active galactic nuclei.

Overall, the Sombrero Galaxy is much more unusual than we expected, and while these are only the first detailed images from the Webb, they already promise to yield a wealth of data. Future observations will likely focus on the globular clusters of the galaxy. There are about 2,000 globular clusters within the Sombrero Galaxy, which is unusually high for a galaxy of its size. This could help explain why NGC 4594 is so different from other galaxies.

You can find more images of the Sombrero Galaxy on the Webb Space Telescope website.

The post Fantastic New Image of the Sombrero Galaxy From Webb appeared first on Universe Today.

Today we have some lovely people photos, featuring parents and their kids, by reader Joe Routon.  Joe’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

People are my favorite thing to photograph. I like to capture feelings and emotions, and mothers’ and children’s relationships are some of the strongest, most beautiful. Here are a mother and her child in the flower section of a market in Peru:

Here’s my photo of a busker, a street musician, who’s exposing her child to music while earning tips for performing on the street:

Another mother and child in Peru. We were waiting in line at a train station, getting ready to ride to Machu Picchu, when I saw this mother turn to kiss her child:

A tender moment between a father and his son:

Another mother and child in Peru:

In Bagan, Burma (Myanmar), this mother carries her child in a basket:

The world of science communication has changed dramatically over the last two decades, and it’s useful to think about those changes, both for people who generate and consume science communication. The big change, of course, is social media, which has disrupted journalism and communication in general.

Prior to this disruption the dominant model was that most science communication was done by science journalists backed up by science editors. Thrown into the mix was the occasional scientist who crossed over into public communication, people like Carl Sagan. Science journalists generally were not scientists, but would have a range of science backgrounds. The number one rule for such science journalists is to communicate the consensus of expert opinion, not substitute their own opinion.

Science journalists are essentially a bridge between scientists and the public. They understand enough about science, and should have a fairly high degree of science literacy, that they can communicate directly with scientists and understand what they have to say. They then repackage that communication for the general public.

This can get tricky when dealing with controversial subjects. This is one of the challenges for good science journalists, they must fairly represent the controversy without making it seem more or less than it is, and without giving unbalanced attention to fringe or minority opinions. They need to speak to enough experts to put the controversy into a proper context.

Now let’s transition to the post-social media world. One of the best things about social media is that it makes it much easier for scientists to communicate directly to the public – for scientists to become journalists. While I think this has created a lot of fantastic content, of which I am an enthusiastic consumer and producer, it has created its own challenges.

The big challenge for science journalists who are not scientists is getting the science right. The big challenge for science journalists who are not journalists is getting the journalism right. Part of the challenge is that scientist science journalist blur the lines between of expertise. This is because expertise itself is a fuzzy concept, and is more of a continuum. Expertise, in fact, is more of a pyramid.

At the base of this pyramid we have all scientists, who have some level of expertise in science itself – scientific principles and practices, and basic concepts like hypothesis, theory, experiment, and data. They should also have some knowledge of statistics and how they are used in science. So any scientist is in a good position to discuss any science to the general public. But “scientist” is also a broad and fuzzy concept. Are engineers scientists? Are clinicians? These are often considered applied sciences, but they may or may not be researchers.

A scientist also has topic expertise in their particular field. So they are especially well positioned to discuss topics within their field of expertise. But “field of expertise” is also a continuum. Using myself as an example, I am a medical doctor, so I have some level of expertise in science itself, a higher level of expertise in medicine, and then a specialty in neuroscience. Within neuroscience there are different subspecialties, and I have fellowship level training in neuromuscular disease and also am certified in headache medicine. So I am more able to comment on these areas than Multiple Sclerosis, for example.

At what point am I considered an “expert”? This is obviously not a binary. I have high level training in biological concepts, in medicine in general, but have a higher level of expertise in clinical neurology and even higher in my subspecialties. So when I am communicating about such topics, am I communicating as a scientist or as a journalist? The big difference is that scientists, when commenting without their field of expertise, can exercise their own scientific judgement and include their own opinions. Non-scientist journalists should never do this. The scientist journalists have a spectrum of expertise – so where is the line for when they can start to weave in their own scientific opinions?

There is no right or wrong answer here, only judgement calls. Within academia – when communicating with other scientists – the general rule is that you should only communicate from a position of maximal expertise. When communicating to the public, however, there is no such rule (nor would it be practical). Scientist journalists, therefore, have to constantly be shifting their approach to a topic depending on their relative level of expertise, and this can be tricky.

For me, I do my best to understand what the consensus of scientific expert opinion is on a topic and to align my communication with that consensus. I try to be humble and to avoid substituting my own relatively less expert opinion for those with more expertise than me. I leverage my expertise, when I have it, to helping understand the topic as a whole and to put it into a helpful context.

There is also another layer to my science communication – I am a scientific skeptic, and I think it is reasonable to consider myself an expert in pseudoscience, science denial, conspiracy thinking, and critical thinking. I often am communicating science through this skeptical lens. This is a type of expertise that is orthogonal to topic expertise. It’s like being a statistician – you are an expert in statistics regardless of the field of science to which they are applied.

There is yet another layer here which can be extremely helpful – we are not all just individual scientist communicators. We are part of a community. This means that we can check in with other scientist communicators with different topic expertise to check our understanding of a topic outside our expertise. This is one of the best things about the SGU podcast – I interview other scientists and ask them questions about the consensus of opinion within their area of expertise. I also have access to lots of colleagues in different fields so I can check my understanding of various topics.

Sometimes this also means that different fields of expertise have a different perspective on a topic that spans multiple fields. In the recent discussion of biological sex, for example, there is clearly a different approach for evolutionary biologists, developmental biologists, neuroscientists, and medical experts. All these views are legitimate, but they contain different perspectives. Again, as a scientist communicator it’s important not to confuse your perspective with the correct perspective.

This can all strengthen our community – if we are all individually willing to be humble, understand and explore the limits of our expertise, listen to our colleagues, and be open to different perspectives. We can also discuss the meta-lessons of how to be better science communicators.

The post Science Communication About Controversial Issues first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

With lithium in short supply, sodium-ion batteries might offer cheap energy storage with less environmental impact

Skeptoid corrects another round of errors in previous episodes.

A new computer model can be used to detect and measure interior oceans on the ice covered moons of Uranus. The model works by analyzing orbital wobbles that would be visible from a passing spacecraft. The research gives engineers and scientists a slide-rule to help them design NASA's upcoming Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission.

When Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune 40 years ago, astronomers were surprised that it detected no global dipole magnetic fields, like Earth's. The explanation: the ice giants are layered and unmixed, which prevents large scale convection to create a dipole field. But what substances would remain immiscible? A scientist modeled the interiors and found that water-rich and hydrocarbon-rich layers naturally form at extreme pressure and temperature, and they do not mix.

Researchers have clarified the conditions under which large numbers of 'squishy' grains, which can change their shape in response to external forces, transition from acting like a solid to acting like a liquid. Similar transitions occur in many biological processes, including the development of an embryo: cells are 'squishy' biological 'grains' that form solid tissues and sometimes flow to form different organs. Thus, the experimental and theoretical framework elaborated here will help separate the roles of mechanical and biochemical processes, a critical challenge in biology.