News Feeds

A research team has made significant discoveries regarding the complex reaction mechanisms of carbon dioxide (CO2) in supercritical water. These findings are crucial for understanding the molecular mechanisms of CO2 mineralization and sequestration in nature and engineering, as well as the deep carbon cycle within the Earth's interior. This understanding will help pave the way for new directions in future carbon sequestration technologies.

Various methods are used to correct errors in quantum computers. Not all operations can be implemented equally well with different correction codes. Therefore, a research team has developed a method and implemented it experimentally for the first time, with which a quantum computer can switch back and forth between two correction codes and thus perform all computing operations protected against errors.

Various methods are used to correct errors in quantum computers. Not all operations can be implemented equally well with different correction codes. Therefore, a research team has developed a method and implemented it experimentally for the first time, with which a quantum computer can switch back and forth between two correction codes and thus perform all computing operations protected against errors.

The novel iron-based catalyst exhibits superior performance for ammonia (NH3) synthesis compared to a well-established, century-old counterpart. By designing this new catalyst with an inverse structure, they managed to boost the NH3 production rate per volume of catalyst beyond levels never reached by conventional catalysts. These findings could lead us to more efficient NH3 synthesis, which is crucial to the agricultural and chemical industries.

A scientific team looks at the progress and challenges in the research and development of brain implants. New achievements in the field of this technology are seen as a source of hope for many patients with neurological disorders and have been making headlines recently. As neural implants have an effect not only on a physical but also on a psychological level, researchers are calling for particular ethical and scientific care when conducting clinical trials.

A scientific team looks at the progress and challenges in the research and development of brain implants. New achievements in the field of this technology are seen as a source of hope for many patients with neurological disorders and have been making headlines recently. As neural implants have an effect not only on a physical but also on a psychological level, researchers are calling for particular ethical and scientific care when conducting clinical trials.

Large batteries for long-term storage of solar and wind power are key to integrating abundant and renewable energy sources into the U.S. power grid. However, there is a lack of safe and reliable battery technologies to support the push toward sustainable, clean energy. Now, researchers have designed a cost-effective and environment-friendly aluminum-ion (Al-ion) battery that could fit the bill.

Many people struggle to maintain a healthy weight, and choosing the optimal meals for weight loss can be challenging. A research team has developed a weight management program that helps individuals plan meals with the assistance of a web application and support from a registered dietitian. In a new study, they discuss the app's features, development, and implementation.

There might be a type of exoplanet without dry land. They’re called “Hycean” worlds, a portmanteau of ‘hydrogen’ and ‘ocean.’ They’re mostly or entirely covered in oceans and have thick hydrogen atmospheres.

They’re intriguing because their atmospheres keep them warm enough to have liquid water outside of the traditional habitable zones. If they do exist, scientists think they’re good candidates to support microbial life.

Hycean worlds are hypothetical, but there is some evidence that they exist. The Kepler mission detected many candidates and provided foundational evidence for their existence. However, it didn’t detect any with certainty.

More recently, JWST observations also supported the idea. The space telescope detected carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere of a candidate Hycean world called K2-18b. Both of those molecules can be biosignatures of microbial life under similar conditions as Earth’s oceans.

This infographic shows the chemicals the JWST detected in the atmosphere of K2-18b. In addition to the carbon-bearing molecules methane and carbon dioxide, it detected the potential biosignature dimethyl sulphide. Image Credit: JWST/STScI

New research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society examines the potential Hycean worlds hold for the evolution of life and how life might depend on these worlds’ thermodynamic conditions. It’s titled “Prospects for Biological Evolution on Hycean Worlds.” The authors are Emily G Mitchell and Nikku Madhusudhan, both from the University of Cambridge.

“The search for extraterrestrial life is one of the most fundamental quests in human history,” the authors write. “An important recent development in this direction is the possibility of Hycean worlds, which increase both the numbers of potentially habitable planets and the ability to detect biosignatures in their atmospheres.”

Research shows that Hycean Worlds can provide both the chemical and the thermodynamic conditions necessary for microbial life to persist in their oceans. In this research, the authors used the metabolic theory of ecology (MTE) to explore how simple life might evolve in Hycean Worlds under different temperature conditions. In simple terms, MTE says that an organism’s metabolic rate is fundamental to its ability to persist and thrive. It applies to individual processes and community and population processes. A key idea behind MTE is that temperature strongly influences metabolic rates.

Previous studies show that when temperatures in a habitable environment increase, biological activity increases up to a point. In this research, Mitchell and Madhusudhan investigate how ocean surface temperatures affect Earth-like single-celled life and how long it takes them to originate on Hycean Worlds. They also explore how different temperatures affect the detectability of biosignatures.

“This work, in turn, has observable consequences for prominent biosignatures on such planets, considering that unicellular phytoplankton are a major source of key biomarkers in the Earth’s atmosphere, such as dimethyl sulphide, which may be observable in Hycean atmospheres,” the researchers write in their paper.

Dimethyl sulphide is strongly linked to phytoplankton and has a unique spectral signature that the JWST can detect in exoplanet atmospheres.

The researchers focused on several key phytoplankton groups that are abundant on Earth and produce biosignature gases in its atmosphere. Among them are Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), Methanococccea (a methanogen), and diatoms, which generate as much as 50% of Earth’s oxygen each year. They paid special attention to Aquificota.

Aquificota is a phylum of bacteria named after an early genus in the group Aquifix. Its members are found in fresh water and oceans and can produce water by oxidizing hydrogen.

“In order to illustrate how evolutionary rates change with temperature over planetary timescales, we have calculated the evolutionary rates for an example organism (Aquifix) over the last 4.3 billion years,” the paper states. They used Aquifix because it’s a strong analogue for some of Earth’s first life.

The researchers showed that even marginal changes in Earth’s ocean surface temperature compared to the surface temperature over evolutionary timescales significantly change the origination time and evolutionary rates of important species of simple life. “For example, a 10 K increase relative to Earth
leads to evolutionary rates which are over twice as fast, while a decrease of 10 K halves them,” the authors explain.

They found that warmer oceans can accelerate the rate of evolution, allowing key unicellular groups like archaea and bacteria to appear as early as 1.3 billion years after the origin of life. This indicates that higher temperatures drive a faster progression to complex life. “This increased rate has a significant impact on the origination times of unicellular groups such that for an increase of 10K of surface temperature, all of the major groups will have originated by 1.19 Gyr post-Origin of Life (OlL) and all the key phytoplankton groups by 1.28 Gyr,” the authors write.

This figure from the research shows the effect of temperature on the origination times of major clades. The origination time on Earth of each group is marked with a forward arrow. Red indicates increased
temperature by +10 K, and blue indicates decreased temperature by -10 K. “We find that an increase in the surface temperature of 10K results in all the phytoplankton groups originating with 1.3 Gyr of the OoL,” the authors explain. Cyanobacteria appear particularly early, only 0.25 billion years after the Origin of Life. Image Credit: Mitchell and Madhusudhan 2025.

The reverse is also true. The researchers found that cooler temperatures delay the appearance of key lifeforms by up to several billion years. That could mean that complex life takes longer to appear. “In contrast, a decrease of 10K of median surface temperature severely limits the origination rates, such that by 4 Gyr post-OoL, only Bacteria and Archaea will have evolved but not oxygenic photosynthesis or Eukaryotes,” the authors write.

In that case, it would also affect the appearance of observable biosignatures, and their intensity and ease of detection.

One of their central findings is that only a marginal range of environmental conditions allows for a large range of evolutionary rates and origination times. “First, given the wide range of possible atmospheric conditions in Hycean worlds, an equally wide diversity in microbial life could be expected,” they write. “In particular, the origination of new clades in warm Hycean worlds can happen significantly faster than on Earth.”

If Hycean worlds exist, this research suggests that they could be “rippling with life,” as Carl Sagan put it, on shorter timescales than Earth.

An artist’s illustration of a Hycean World. Image Credit: By Pablo Carlos Budassi – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=135998139

The candidate Hycean worlds we know of are thought to have warmer oceans than Earth. So, by extension, the candidate Hycean World K2-18 b, which is only 2.4 billion years old, could have the conditions necessary for originating and sustaining key unicellular groups. That means that it, and others like it, are good targets in the search for biosignatures.

The authors offer a couple of caveats to their results. They considered only a fairly narrow range of temperature and physical conditions based on Earth. In reality, habitable extraterrestrial planets could exhibit a much wider range. “Future work in this direction could explore a range of other conditions, including the effect of gravity, pressure, larger temperature variations and other environmental factors,” the researchers write in their conclusion.

We don’t know if Hycean Worlds are real. Some scientists think that their hydrogen-rich atmospheres might be unstable. There are also concerns about radiation exposure inhibiting life and atmospheric chemistry working against biochemical processes. The formation pathways for these worlds are also unclear, as are the mechanisms for generating and sustaining their atmospheres.

However, if they do exist, this study makes one thing clear: For different surface temperatures, a warm planet could have a more complex biosphere at a relatively young age, and a cooler one could have a simpler biosphere at a later age.

In the end, we aren’t travelling to any of these worlds, so detecting biosignatures is the name of the game.

“Such biospheres with varied levels of complexity can impact the detectability of life on them, such that warmer planets have the potential to show strong atmospheric biosignatures,” the researchers conclude.

The post Could Ocean Worlds Support Life? appeared first on Universe Today.

When I wrote last week about the great guitar solo in Steely Dan’s son “Kid Charlemagne, a solo played by studio magician Larry Carlton, I forgot that Walter Becker, a regular member of the Dan, played a great solo on the enigmatic song “Bad Sneakers“. The song is from the Dan’s 1975 “Katy Lied” album. (There’s a rare live version here.)  I suppose I’ve read interpretations of the song’s lyrics (below), but it still doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m sure it made sense to Fagen when he wrote it, though. (You can hear one dubious interpretation here.)

The solo goes from 1:55 to 2:26; a 30-second work of genius. I love it when the keyboard and wailing guitar seem to go off on their own tempo with everything coming back together at the end.

And I’ll still argue against those who criticize Fagen’s voice; I think it’s perfect for the songs, even though he’s lost it in his dotage.

The opaque lyrics (I’d be delighted if anybody wanted to offer an interpretation!):

[Verse 1]
Five names that I can hardly stand to hear
Including yours and mine
And one more chimp who isn’t here
I can see the ladies talking
How the times are getting hard
And that fearsome excavation
On Magnolia Boulevard[Pre-Chorus]
Yes I’m going insane
And I’m laughing in the frozen rain
Well I’m so alone
Honey, when they gonna send me home?[Chorus]
Bad sneakers and a piña colada, my friend
Stompin’ on the avenue by Radio City with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend

[Verse 2]
You fellah, you tearin’ up the street
You wear that white tuxedo
How you gonna beat the heat?
Do you take me for a fool?
Do you think that I don’t see
That ditch out in the valley
That they’re digging just for me?

See rock shows near Chicago Get tickets as low as $50 You might also like Your Gold Teeth Steely Dan Push Ups Drake we can’t be friends (wait for your love) Ariana Grande [Pre-Chorus]
Yes I’m going insane
You know I’m laughing at the frozen rain
Well I feel like I’m so alone
Honey, when they gonna send me home?[Chorus]
Bad sneakers and piña colada, my friend
Stompin’ on the avenue by Radio City with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend[Instrumental Break]

[Pre-Chorus]
You know, going insane
Yes I’m laughing at the frozen rain
And I’m so alone
Honey, when they gonna send me home?

[Outro]
Bad sneakers and a piña colada, my friend
Stompin’ on the avenue by Radio City with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend

While some progress has been made in limiting greenhouse gas emissions, we are still on the path for high levels of global warming

Cryopreserved coral sperm could be used for future breeding programmes to restore damaged reefs

Do we really need the UN any more?  For a long time I’ve felt that some parts of it, including UNRWA and the International Court of Justice, both with their obsession against Israel, should be deep-sixed (UNRWA is the only UN refugee agency tasked with “refugees” in one area, and several countries, including the US, have defunded it). Seriously, how much good does the UN really do?

If you need more evidence that parts of the UN are actually complicit in terrorism, have a look at the allegations of the three young Israeli women just released by Hamas.  Yep, they said they were held in a UNRWA-run “humanitarian camp”.  The article below also discusses claims that other hostages were held in Gazan hospitals, hospitals that were raided by the IDF to the loud objections of the rest of the world.  If you think the UNRWA people who ran the camp were totally unaware of the fact that it contained Israeli hostages, well, . . . . . that’s not the way it works in Gaza.

Click below. I’ll give an excerpt from each source (indented). The first is from the think tank FDD, which describes itself as nonpartisan but Wikipedia calls “neoconservative” and was founded as pro-Israeli. But it’s no matter: the three allegations below have appeared on several sites as well.

• Israeli Hostages Held in UN camp: The three female Israeli hostages released last weekend following the ceasefire in Gaza revealed on January 21 that they were incarcerated in a refugee camp operated by UNRWA — the United Nations agency catering exclusively to the descendants of Palestinian refugees — for part of their time in Hamas captivity, according to Israel’s Channel 13 network. Details as to which of the eight camps run by UNRWA in Gaza were used have not been made available. Following the October 7, 2023, atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel, in which several UNRWA employees participated, Israel accused the agency of actively colluding with the Iran-backed terrorist organization, passing legislation last October barring it from operating in the Jewish state.

• Trump Halts UNRWA Funding: Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump halted U.S. funding for UNRWA via an executive order on his first day in office on January 20. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, strongly criticized UNRWA and labeled the United Nations a “den of antisemitism” during her Senate confirmation hearing on January 21.

• Hamas Kept Hostages in Hospitals: According to an exclusive report from Fox News Digital, Hamas terrorists captured by Israel confessed that Israeli hostages had been imprisoned in the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza at different times during their ordeal. Anas Muhammad Faiz al-Sharif, one of the terrorists in Israeli custody, was quoted as describing the hospital — which was raided by IDF troops on December 28, resulting in the arrest of more than 200 terrorists — as “a safe haven for them because the [Israeli] military cannot directly target it.”

From the Jewish News Service (again, click to read). Note that the UN knows of these allegations and are taking them seriously (see video below).

An excerpt:

Reports that freed Israeli hostages had been held in U.N. shelters in the Gaza Strip amount to “a very serious allegation,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, told JNS on Wednesday.

“We call on those who have information on this to share it formally with UNRWA or other parts of the United Nations so that we can investigate it further,” Haq told JNS at the global body’s press conference in New York.

Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher, who were released on Sunday, said Hamas had held them in U.N. camps that the global body created during the war to protect Gazan civilians and to provide them with food and water.

It wasn’t clear from public records and reporting in which camps they were held, when and for how long. Israeli intelligence, taken from captured Hamas terrorists, assessed that several Israeli hostages were held at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, Fox News reported.

These are different hostages from the ones released the other day (four more will be released tomorrow), but of course when the IDF raided that hospital because of reports that Hamas was there, they were excoriated for raiding a hospital. The director of the hospital, now in an Israel jail, was a colonel in Hamas, tons of weapons were found, and several captured Palestinian terrorists admitted that the hospital held hostages at one time.

This, of course, needs to be investigated, as the UN official (Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General), says in the video below, but I wouldn’t lightly dismiss the allegations of all three recently-released women hostages that they were held in a UN camp. This video starts at the time when Haq is questioned about the hostages (22:45), and you need listen for only a couple of minutes.

And here’s a report (perhaps a bit superfluous) from Israeli “citizen spokeswoman” Ruth Wasserman Lande, discussing the hostages’ claim of being in an UNRWA,  The sensible thing is to simply dissolve UNRWA, which is, as Lande says, “a Hamas front”, and fold its mission into the existing single UN organization that deals with refugees.

Carbon removal schemes involving enhanced rock weathering should consider whether the rocks they use are lighter or darker than the soil, say researchers

A lithium battery patterned with holes is flexible, stretchable and allows more airflow than cotton, making it perfect for fitness tracking or medical monitoring wearables

I was quite surprised three days ago when I argued that Elon Musk’s “Hitler salute”  at the post-Inaugural rally simply seemed to be a gesture of exuberance made by an overexcited and awkward man and was not a Hitler or Mussolini salute. He said, when he made the “Sieg Heil”, that “My heart goes out to you,” and, indeed, touched his heart three times while extending his arm twice. See the video below, noting also his awkward dance moves when he also pumps and extends his arms:

It amazed me that this caused a fracas not only in the media, but on my own website, with a lot of people asserting unequivocally that it was Musk’s tribute to Hitler/white supremacy or that he was trolling the Left by doing something that would anger them. Musk himself has denied the allegations. From the BBC:

Some on X, the social medial platform he owns, likened the gesture to a Nazi salute, though others disagreed.

In response, the SpaceX and Tesla chief posted on X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

But of course to enraged “progressives” on the Left (and do I need to explain again that when I put that word in quotes, it’s perjorative?), Musk’s denial means absolutely nothing. He was lauding Nazis!

My interpretation of the “Hitler salute” explanation is that it is made by people who feel they must demonize their political opponents in the worst way possible, even though there’s a more charitable explanation. And we have to be more charitable in the future, including admitting when our opponents do things that are actually good.

Further, as the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that combats anti-Semitism) explains, people are touchy after Trump’s inauguration, and this explains why some could mistakenly interpret an “awkward gesture” as a Hitler salute. One would think that the ADL’s take would give people pause, but not wokesters like AOC, who, in what some called “Jewsplaining”, tells the ADL that they were actually defending a Hitler salute:

Just to be clear, you are defending a Heil Hitler salute that was performed and repeated for emphasis and clarity.

People can officially stop listening to you as any sort of reputable source of information now. You work for them. Thank you for making that crystal clear to all. https://t.co/0gLdMCU3UV

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 21, 2025

This leads to the second issue with the Hitler take: it makes Leftists look loony, ready to demonize their opponents and lose their heads over something that at worst is dubious and at best (and most likely) is simply an “awkward gesture.”  Even the ADL realizes that the Hitler take is not going to reduce antisemitism and, in my view, it simply reduces the credibility of the Left in general.  Surely ludicrous interpretations of gestures as Hitleresque bespeaks a mindset that helped cost us the last election.  So, like Helen Pluckrose in her website post below, I agree that people have to stop this nonsense.  Even if you don’t like Musk, he was not giving fealty to Hitler.  If Democrats don’t regroup and get sensible, we’ll keep on losing elections.

So I’ll quote Pluckrose in extenso, and if you don’t like what she says, take it up with her.  I’m not arguing any more about this issue; I’ve pondered the Hitler argument, dismissed it as a misguided and kneejerk overreaction (Pluckrose calls it “deranged”) and I’ll move on.  But click below to read.

Pluckrose is no fan of Musk, but calls for a thoughtful rather than a reactive rebuttal of his views. Quotes from her piece are indented.

This makes it especially important that those who are concerned about his influence over the policies of the most powerful country in the world and the largest forum for public political discourse, and the impact the combination of these factors can have on the rest of the world conduct themselves as serious and responsible adults in their critiques of him.

Admirers and supporters of Mr. Musk who believe these concerns to be unfounded range from thoughtful, well-informed politically engaged people who support his general views and overall aims and believe that the benefits his expertise, his stances and his influence bring outweigh any personal foibles to utter lunatics, wedded to ideological narratives divorced from reality and engaging in tactics common to both the woke left and the woke right. It is important that his thoughtful and serious critics engage in good faith with his thoughtful and serious supporters and address the reality of his influence in ways that focus on what is true, what is significant and what has real impact on the world.

It is already the case that Musk’s least thoughtful and serious supporters on the woke right typically shut down any criticism of him by claiming it to be a symptom of “Musk Derangement Syndrome” (MDS). This accusation, when made spuriously, functions in a very similar way to the woke left’s use of the DiAngelo style concept of ‘whiteness’ (an unconscious drive to uphold the systems of white supremacy for one’s own political benefit). That is, it functions as a Kafka Trap in which any attempts to deny that one’s motivations in criticising Musk’s or DiAngelo’s ideas are caused by either of these pathologies are evidence of the pathologies. By formulating concepts of MDS or whiteness which contain within them the premise that any denial of them are evidence of the derangement or unconscious bias skewing the speaker’s judgement, it preemptively shuts down the possibility of any critique being legitimate. This kind of circular reasoning is not persuasive to reasonable, ethical people who care about what is true and share the stated aims of Musk to oppose censorship and dismantle governmental corruption or of DiAngelo to oppose racism and dismantle racial prejudice (my readers are likely to support both) but think that doing so in an evidence-based and consistently principled way is essential

Nevertheless, if one wishes to counter claims that any criticism of Musk is a manifestation of Musk Derangement Syndrome, it is important not to be deranged.

She gives a number of social-media examples of this “derangement”, and then analyzes interpretations of the gesture, all three of which followed my post:

. . . . even if there is a possibility that [Musk] was deliberately making a Nazi salute, mindreading him as doing so and responding in a hyperbolic and overwrought way is not remotely helpful whatever the motivations were. Consider the reasonable responses people are likely to make to such interpretations in any scenario.

1. Musk was simply illustrating his heart going out to the people he was speaking to.

People will see the woke left doing its “Everybody who disagrees with me is a Nazi” thing again and the perception that it should not be taken seriously is strengthened.

2. Musk was trolling with the gesture and trying to provoke this response in order to illustrate how deranged ‘the left’ is.

Well done. You played right into that and consequently reduced the credibility of left-wing critiques of Musk including from those of us who are not deranged.

3. Musk really does have sympathies with Nazi ideology and intended to convey that he will influence the Trump administration in that direction.

This would be highly alarming and indicate a need to seriously and carefully scrutinise his policy recommendations and shore up your credibility so that you are taken seriously should you find indications of it. The worst thing to do is shriek “Nazi” spuriously and increase the tendency of reasonable people to assume that somebody being accused of being a Nazi has simply said something considered problematic using the tortuous reasoning of the Critical Social Justice Left and ignore it rather than have a look to see if they have, in fact, expressed views compatible with a genocidal antisemitic and/or ethnonational ideology.

Stop it.

There is never a good time for hyperbolic, overwrought and, yes, deranged accusations of Nazism, fascism or far-right beliefs and intentions based on little to no evidence, but of all the times when this is a terrible idea, this is probably the worst. The Trump administration is in power, Elon Musk has significant influence on it, the power and influence of X as a platform for news has never been higher and policies that impact not only Americans but the rest of the world are already underway. This is a time to be serious grown ups and carefully, thoughtfully and honestly scrutinise both policy decisions influenced by Elon Musk and the impact of his social media platform on the state of political discourse and what everyday people who vote and influence culture believe to be true and ethical. It is a time to be particularly conscientious when evaluating the views and actions of Musk, give him credit for anything positive and beneficial he achieves in an ethical way, and present any concerns that arise in a serious, well-evidenced and well-reasoned way.

If there is reason to be concerned about the power, influence and character of Elon Musk (and I suspect there is), the people who will need to be convinced of this will be serious, ethical, thoughtful, American conservatives who care about what is true and what is morally right, who are currently of the view that Musk is beneficial to their great nation (and hopefully the world) and are absolutely sick of the authoritarian irrationality and spurious name-calling of the Critical Social Justice left.

I beg you, please stop being deranged.

Helen Pluckrose knows whereof she speaks, as she’s been a critic of “Critical Social Justice” for a long time, including her book with Lindsay, Cynical Theories (yes, Lindsay has gone a bit off the rails after the publication).  Her take on this whole kerfuffle is sensible and, I think, correct.

The best criticism is often satire, and here’s some: first a take from the Babylon Bee, and then a Musk interpretation of the often-used “Hitler goes nuts” scene from the 2004 movie Downfall:

HITLER REACTION SURFACES https://t.co/xRTNjzlTEK

— Adam Collett (@AdamCollettX) January 22, 2025

Mark Sturtevant is back with some lovely insect photos (and one gastropod). Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Hello, everybody. Here are pictures of insects (mostly insects) from where I live, which is in eastern Michigan. Let’s get started.

First up are pictures of Thynnid Wasps (Myzinum quinquecinctum), which are odd-looking wasps that grow up as parasites of soil dwelling beetle larvae.

Next is a small group of tiny Acrobat Ants (Crematogaster sp.) that are tending aphids for their honeydew secretions. Acrobat ants are easy to recognize by the distinctive joint that allows them to elbow their abdomen upward to release a venom at prey or at enemies.

Next up is a bug-eyed Mayfly which I think is in the genus Stenacron.

Every summer or two I try to spend time alongside a particular area of the Flint River, as it is a great spot to photograph American Rubyspot Damselflies (Hetaerina americana). A particular aim, as it is a challenge, is to hang over the edge of the riverbank to get pictures of the brilliantly colored males while they are back-lit from the late afternoon sun. So here you go.

Next up are some beetles. First up are a pair of Six-spotted Tiger Beetles (Cicindela sexguttata), which a species abundant along woodland trails. This is among the most alert species that I know so I seldom get pictures, but when mating they are a bit distracted.

During a narrow window in the summer, I will find many of these small dung beetles (Canthon sp.) in the place I call the Magic Field. People take dogs and horses into the field, and their droppings provides support for this population. I swear these do roll little balls of dung around (I often see them trundling across a trail with them), but they immediately stop when I approach, darn it.

Here is a terrestrial snail which I photographed because I liked the branching pattern under its shell. I am not a snail person, but through iNaturalist I was able to narrow it down to an Amber Snail (family Succineidae).

Late summer is my favorite time to go to the Magic Field. It abounds with many species of grasshoppers, and the air is crackling with them as they fly about. But by far the most common ones are the ubiquitous Carolina Grasshoppers (Dissosteira carolina), which probably everyone in the U.S. has seen. These are the grasshoppers with flashy black hind wings, as shown in the linked picture. Anyway, Carolina ‘Hopper mating season is in the late summer, and one sees the following scene quite often.

Early in the morning, sleeping bees and wasps are commonly seen on plants, so here is a sleeping Common Eastern Bumblebee (Bombus impatiens). I really like how this picture turned out.

But now we get to a kind of finale from the Magic Field. The Eastern Cicada Killer Wasp (Sphecius speciosus) is probably the largest wasp in our area, and they are certainly the largest by weight. As their name explains, the females hunt cicadas, which they paralyze and store in an underground burrow with eggs. The Magic Field has a large population of them in late summer, and then certain areas become landscaped with their large burrows and earthen mounds. You see one of their burrows in the first picture, complete with its characteristic landing strip trough and just look at all that soil which was dug out! There will be several chambers deep inside, each intended for a larva and cicadas.

The next picture shows one of the wasps as it was exiting its burrow. I was just as nuts about insects as a kid as I am now, but back then I was also rather jumpy around these impressively large wasps. But now I know that they are completely indifferent to us humans and all our tribulations, so getting very close with the macro lens is never a problem. They really just don’t care about us.

There were dozens of burrows in a small area, and so over a few days I managed to photograph several of the wasps as they landed by their burrow with a helpless Cicada, their arrivals being announced by the loud droning that they make while flying. I could only get maybe one or two pictures off before they disappeared down the hole with their prize.

And finally we have a mystery. There are many species of solitary wasps at the Magic Field, but during these sessions I noticed these little wasps (do you see it?) that showed an inordinate interest in me and in Cicada Killer Town. They would investigate my camera gear, scurry about the mounds of earth, and even venture down the C.K. tunnels (!) ceaselessly searching for … ?? Well, this made me curious, and my next post will reveal what I managed to learn about them. The investigation led to my most favorite picture of the entire season, so stay tuned!

Using a computer model of the retina, researchers have been able to trace the cause of the expanding hole illusion

Kepler was one of the most successful exoplanet-hunting missions so far. It discovered 2,600 confirmed exoplanets – almost half of the total – in its almost ten years of operation. However, most data analysis focused only on one of the 150,000 targets it “intended” to look at. While it was making those observations, there were a myriad of background stars that also had their light captured incidentally. John Bienias and Robert Szabó of Hungary’s Konkoly Observatory have spent a lot of time looking at those background stars and recently published a paper suggesting there might be seven more exoplanet candidates hiding in the data.

As with many space telescope missions, Kepler’s dataset is open to the public. NASA maintains a database with the raw data collected during the space telescope’s observations, and researchers are free to download it and analyze it as they see fit.

Plenty of interesting things are hiding in that data that were overlooked by the more than 3136 peer-reviewed scientific papers that have utilized Kepler’s data. In the past, the authors have published other documents using the same datasets that described eclipsing binary stars and RR Lyrae stars, a type of pulsating variable star already existing in the data.

Fraser discusses the end of Kepler’s mission.

But while looking for more data on another paper about longer-period versions of those phenomena, they came across several stars whose light curve variability indicated something different – a planet passing in front of them. These “transits”, as they are called, are one of the most common ways to identify exoplanet candidates, and have been used for decades, but this might be the first time they’ve been used on some of the 500,000 background stars in Kepler’s data.

That might be because the data is patchier, as the telescope was not focused on the stars in the background, making this resolution more difficult. However, difficult does not mean impossible, and plenty of software solutions have been developed in the six years since the end of Kepler’s primary mission to help facilitate crunching large sets of data to look for planets around other stars.

One such system that has been around for a while is the Lomb-Scargle algorithm, developed in the 1970s and 80s and designed to detect periodic signals within time-series data. This algorithm is a valuable step in finding both the eclipsing binaries the authors were initially looking for and the exoplanet candidates they recently described.

Fraser discusses Kepler’s newest successor – MAUVE.

Other, more modern tools, proved more finicky, such as PSFmachine. This software package is designed to “deblend” light curves in Kepler’s data. Light curves are critical to exoplanet hunting as they show how the brightness of an object changes over time. However, in Kepler’s background, multiple stars might be overlapping, causing a blending of their light curves. PSFmachine is designed to deal with that problem. However, the authors described several issues in using the software, including its inability to create any stand-alone curves in one case. This seemed to be due to the placement of the stars compared to Kepler’s aperture (i.e., they were in the background) and the relatively small variations seen in the data.

Another tool developed near the end of Kepler’s mission was Pytransit, a Python-based software package that estimates the transmit models of light curves, including period, sizes, and orbital eccentricity. Candidate stars were also cross-referenced with the dataset from Gaia, which is designed to capture data about stars. 

Utilizing all the tools, the authors identified seven exoplanet candidates. All were hot Jupiters, with sizes between .89 and 1.52 Jupiter’s radius and orbits between .04 and .07 AU. They also checked to see if any of those dips in light curves might have been caused by second planets orbiting the same star but came up empty-handed.

While seven additional candidate exoplanets might not seem like a lot compared to the 2,600 confirmed ones Kepler already found, combing over already released data shows how much more helpful context is sometimes publicly available if a researcher knows where and how to look. As more powerful software packages and analytical tools are developed, there will undoubtedly be more discoveries coming out of older data sets like Kepler’s for some time to come.

Learn More:
J Bienias & R Szabó – Background exoplanet candidates in the original Kepler field
UT – Old Data from Kepler Turns Up A System with Seven Planets
UT – This is Kepler’s Final Image
UT – It’s Over For Kepler. The Most Successful Planet Hunter Ever Built is Finally out of Fuel and Has Just Been Shut Down.

Lead Image:
Artist’s impression of Kepler
Credit – NASA Amex / JPL-Caltech/T Pyle

The post Even More Planets Were Hiding in Kepler’s Fields appeared first on Universe Today.

As the finale of the UK series approaches this evening, these are the best tactics to win the game of backstabbing and treachery, according to forensic psychology, game theory and evolutionary biology