A fireball lit up the sky above Wisconsin on Thursday morning. More than 100 sightings were reported across the Midwest
Jake Prinsen, Appleton Post-Crescent
Thu, January 20, 2022, 4:28 PM
GREEN BAY – If you saw a huge fireball light up the sky early Thursday morning, you’re not alone.
More than 100 people across the Midwest reported seeing a “fireball event” around 6:45 a.m., according to the International Meteor Organization. The sightings came from as far away as Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Nebraska.
Most Wisconsin residents who reported the flaming object were concentrated in the southeast and northeast regions of the state.
Witnesses reported the fireball lit up the sky ranging from one second to longer than seven seconds.
University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomy professor James Lattis said the southwest direction of the object means it was likely a meteoroid and not a piece of space junk, which generally travels east.
He said it's common to see meteors in the early morning hours in the Midwest because the region is facing forward in the earth's obit around the sun.
"It’s like looking out the windshield of your car," he said. "You get more bugs on your windshield because that’s the direction you’re moving."
This meteor received more attention because it traveled over densely populated areas like Chicago, Milwaukee and the Fox Cities. Because so many people saw the meteor, Lattis said scientists would likely be able to calculate its speed, altitude, direction and ultimately where it came from in the solar system.
"They’re almost always more related to the asteroid belt, these extremely bright ones," he said. "It clearly was bright enough to collect a lot of attention."
Lattis said half of meteors streak across the sky during the day and three quarters fly over the ocean, so anyone who saw Thursday's fireball should consider themselves lucky. And if you missed the light show, just keep looking at the stars.
"It’s just a matter of time. If you watch the sky long enough, you will see plenty of meteors and even some bright ones," Lattis said. "It’s a reminder that we should all keep an eye on the great things happening in the sky."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fi ... 35303.html
Articles of Interest in Science
Earth's Core Is Cooling Faster Than Scientists Expected
Caroline Delbert
Tue, January 25, 2022, 10:49 AM
While the timeline is hard to pinpoint, Earth's core is cooling faster than expected.
The interface between core and mantle is bridgmanite, a mineral with strange properties.
To study bridgmanite, scientists used diamond anvils and a pulsating laser.
Earth's core may be cooling on a shorter time schedule than we've been led to believe, according to scientists from the Swiss university ETH Zürich and the Washington, D.C.-based Carnegie Institution of Science (CIS). That means less time before our blue planet turns into a lifeless new version of Mars. The explanation, researchers posit in a new paper, could be as simple as the reason why your cold floor makes your whole body colder in the winter: the simple transfer of heat.
🌎Science is on our side. We'll help you make sense of it all.
Earth's mantle is dominated by a silicate mineral called bridgmanite (MgSiO3-perovskite), named after high-pressure scientist and Nobel Prize winner Percy Williams Bridgman. Scientists have known about the mineral for decades, but only examined it up close for the first time in 2014. Earth's mantle is so huge and deep that bridgmanite is one of the most common minerals on Earth without ever really touching the surface—except in a unique fragment of a meteor that fell in Australia in the 1800s.
Experts have long wondered about the transfer of heat from Earth's core to its slightly cooler mantle, but it's a difficult chemical reaction to study. The core is up to 6,000 degrees Celsius, about the same temperature as the surface of the sun, making it difficult to recreate in safe laboratory conditions. That's on top of having to manufacture bridgmanite to begin with because of its scarcity on Earth's surface.
To solve this longstanding laboratory problem, scientists at ETH and CIS had to invent a new way to study these materials up close. They placed a tiny amount of bridgmanite and a thermal probe in the center of a striking pair of diamond anvils to mimic the high pressure that smashes onto Earth's core and mantle. The researchers outline this process in a new paper published earlier this month in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
As for the temperature, a pulsing laser brought the bridgmanite sample up to the extremely high temperatures required to study how bridgmanite conducts heat from Earth's core. By combining the high pressure and high temperature while controlling the durable diamond anvils, scientists could, for the very first time, actually measure how bridgmanite conducts heat.
ETH professor Motohiko Murakami says the ingenious system quickly bore fruit. "This measurement system let us show that the thermal conductivity of bridgmanite is about 1.5 times higher than assumed," he says in a prepared statement. If that number doesn't sound very big, consider that it's literally a 50 percent higher rate that directly affects the lifespan of our planet as a livable place.
There is also a cascading effect, because bridgmanite turns into a different mineral called post-perovskite as it cools. That means more bridgmanite cools faster than we thought due to the transfer of heat, which in turn means more post-perovskite. And the post-perovskite conducts heat even better, whisking it away from the core and into the mantle.
Murakami says there's no way to pin down the exact timeline of this cooling; we just know it will be sooner than experts would have previously guesstimated. But he also points out that we have role models of a sort: "Our results could give us a new perspective on the evolution of the Earth's dynamics," Murakami says. "They suggest that Earth, like the other rocky planets Mercury and Mars, is cooling and becoming inactive much faster than expected."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00677.html
Caroline Delbert
Tue, January 25, 2022, 10:49 AM
While the timeline is hard to pinpoint, Earth's core is cooling faster than expected.
The interface between core and mantle is bridgmanite, a mineral with strange properties.
To study bridgmanite, scientists used diamond anvils and a pulsating laser.
Earth's core may be cooling on a shorter time schedule than we've been led to believe, according to scientists from the Swiss university ETH Zürich and the Washington, D.C.-based Carnegie Institution of Science (CIS). That means less time before our blue planet turns into a lifeless new version of Mars. The explanation, researchers posit in a new paper, could be as simple as the reason why your cold floor makes your whole body colder in the winter: the simple transfer of heat.
🌎Science is on our side. We'll help you make sense of it all.
Earth's mantle is dominated by a silicate mineral called bridgmanite (MgSiO3-perovskite), named after high-pressure scientist and Nobel Prize winner Percy Williams Bridgman. Scientists have known about the mineral for decades, but only examined it up close for the first time in 2014. Earth's mantle is so huge and deep that bridgmanite is one of the most common minerals on Earth without ever really touching the surface—except in a unique fragment of a meteor that fell in Australia in the 1800s.
Experts have long wondered about the transfer of heat from Earth's core to its slightly cooler mantle, but it's a difficult chemical reaction to study. The core is up to 6,000 degrees Celsius, about the same temperature as the surface of the sun, making it difficult to recreate in safe laboratory conditions. That's on top of having to manufacture bridgmanite to begin with because of its scarcity on Earth's surface.
To solve this longstanding laboratory problem, scientists at ETH and CIS had to invent a new way to study these materials up close. They placed a tiny amount of bridgmanite and a thermal probe in the center of a striking pair of diamond anvils to mimic the high pressure that smashes onto Earth's core and mantle. The researchers outline this process in a new paper published earlier this month in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
As for the temperature, a pulsing laser brought the bridgmanite sample up to the extremely high temperatures required to study how bridgmanite conducts heat from Earth's core. By combining the high pressure and high temperature while controlling the durable diamond anvils, scientists could, for the very first time, actually measure how bridgmanite conducts heat.
ETH professor Motohiko Murakami says the ingenious system quickly bore fruit. "This measurement system let us show that the thermal conductivity of bridgmanite is about 1.5 times higher than assumed," he says in a prepared statement. If that number doesn't sound very big, consider that it's literally a 50 percent higher rate that directly affects the lifespan of our planet as a livable place.
There is also a cascading effect, because bridgmanite turns into a different mineral called post-perovskite as it cools. That means more bridgmanite cools faster than we thought due to the transfer of heat, which in turn means more post-perovskite. And the post-perovskite conducts heat even better, whisking it away from the core and into the mantle.
Murakami says there's no way to pin down the exact timeline of this cooling; we just know it will be sooner than experts would have previously guesstimated. But he also points out that we have role models of a sort: "Our results could give us a new perspective on the evolution of the Earth's dynamics," Murakami says. "They suggest that Earth, like the other rocky planets Mercury and Mars, is cooling and becoming inactive much faster than expected."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00677.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Astronomers discovered a new world orbiting close to our solar system
Joshua Hawkins
Sat, February 12, 2022, 8:01 AM
Astronomers believe they have discovered a new world orbiting Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our Solar System. It’s located roughly 4 light-years away. As such, it has long been the center of speculation and plans to visit if we ever venture beyond our own Solar System. Now, with the discovery of a third world orbiting Proxima Centauri, the fires of imagination may have been stoked once more.
The discovery of the new world, called Proxima d, happened by chance. João Faria, the lead author on a new study about the world, was working with his team to prove another planet called Proxima b actually existed. The team used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (or VLT) to search for the planet. While looking for Proxima b, they discovered evidence of yet another world orbiting Proxima Centauri.
“It can as a surprise initially,” Faria told The Verge. Once they found it, the team continued to watch the star between 2019 and 2021. More importantly, the team watched the wobbles that Proxima Centauri experiences. This helped with the discovery of Proxima b in 2016. Because planets have a gravitational effect on their stars, their presence can often cause the star to wobble slightly. This is usually a pattern that astronomers use to spectate stars from Earth. Using the data they found, Faria and his team determined that Proxima d could likely exist. It’s also believed that it could be the same distance from Proxima Centauri as Mercury is from our Sun.
Of course, this discovery is not absolute. We don’t have any actual proof that the new world orbiting Proxima Centauri actually exists. As such, all we can do is continue to make observations about it. And, hopefully, one day we can travel to the star and see the planets directly.
Of course, Proxima d isn’t the only candidate that the star has given us. As mentioned above, Proxima b is a candidate discovered in 2016. That particular planet is located in Proxima Centauri’s “habitable zone”. That means the temperatures could be stable enough for water to pool on the planet’s surface. Again, though, we have no proof of its existence other than the observations astronomers have made.
Astronomers found yet another world orbiting Proxima Centauri a few years after Proxima b. They named this one Proxima c. Faria believes this newest discovery, Proxima d, is most likely an exoplanet. These planets are exceptionally hard to discover. They are usually drowned out by the light of the stars that they orbit around, making them hard to spot. As such, we can really only infer that the world is there, at least for now.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/enterta ... 00669.html
Joshua Hawkins
Sat, February 12, 2022, 8:01 AM
Astronomers believe they have discovered a new world orbiting Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our Solar System. It’s located roughly 4 light-years away. As such, it has long been the center of speculation and plans to visit if we ever venture beyond our own Solar System. Now, with the discovery of a third world orbiting Proxima Centauri, the fires of imagination may have been stoked once more.
The discovery of the new world, called Proxima d, happened by chance. João Faria, the lead author on a new study about the world, was working with his team to prove another planet called Proxima b actually existed. The team used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (or VLT) to search for the planet. While looking for Proxima b, they discovered evidence of yet another world orbiting Proxima Centauri.
“It can as a surprise initially,” Faria told The Verge. Once they found it, the team continued to watch the star between 2019 and 2021. More importantly, the team watched the wobbles that Proxima Centauri experiences. This helped with the discovery of Proxima b in 2016. Because planets have a gravitational effect on their stars, their presence can often cause the star to wobble slightly. This is usually a pattern that astronomers use to spectate stars from Earth. Using the data they found, Faria and his team determined that Proxima d could likely exist. It’s also believed that it could be the same distance from Proxima Centauri as Mercury is from our Sun.
Of course, this discovery is not absolute. We don’t have any actual proof that the new world orbiting Proxima Centauri actually exists. As such, all we can do is continue to make observations about it. And, hopefully, one day we can travel to the star and see the planets directly.
Of course, Proxima d isn’t the only candidate that the star has given us. As mentioned above, Proxima b is a candidate discovered in 2016. That particular planet is located in Proxima Centauri’s “habitable zone”. That means the temperatures could be stable enough for water to pool on the planet’s surface. Again, though, we have no proof of its existence other than the observations astronomers have made.
Astronomers found yet another world orbiting Proxima Centauri a few years after Proxima b. They named this one Proxima c. Faria believes this newest discovery, Proxima d, is most likely an exoplanet. These planets are exceptionally hard to discover. They are usually drowned out by the light of the stars that they orbit around, making them hard to spot. As such, we can really only infer that the world is there, at least for now.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/enterta ... 00669.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Updated on Feb 19, 2022 04:55 AM
INDORE NEWS
Gobar-Dhan: All about Asia's biggest Bio-CNG plant to be inaugurated by PM today
By
hindustantimes.com
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will today inaugurate “Gobar-Dhan (Bio-CNG) Plant” in Indore at 1pm via video conferencing. The Indore Bio-CNG plant has been constructed under the overarching principles of “waste to wealth” and “circular economy” for maximising resource recovery. The plant is in line with PM Modi's vision of creating “garbage-free cities” under the Swachh Bharat Mission Urban 2.0, according to the Prime Minister's Office.
Here's all you need to know about Indore's Gobar-Dhan plant:
The Gobar-Dhan plant, with a capacity to treat 550 tonnes of segregated wet organic waste per day, is expected to produce around 17,000 kg CNG and 100 tonnes of organic compost every day.
It is also expected to yield multiple environmental benefits like reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, providing green energy along with organic compost as fertiliser, as per PMO.
The project has been implemented by Indore Clean Energy Pvt Ltd, a Special Purpose Vehicle set up by Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) and Indo Enviro Integrated Solutions Ltd. (IEISL).
IMC will purchase a minimum of 50% of CNG produced by the Gobar-Dhan plant. In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the municipal corporation will run 400 city buses on the CNG.
PM Modi to virtually inaugurate Asias biggest Bio-CNG plant in MPs Indor.
“The balance quantity of CNG will be sold in the open market. The organic compost will help replace chemical fertilisers for agricultural and horticultural purposes,” an official release said
https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/i ... ore-today-
INDORE NEWS
Gobar-Dhan: All about Asia's biggest Bio-CNG plant to be inaugurated by PM today
By
hindustantimes.com
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will today inaugurate “Gobar-Dhan (Bio-CNG) Plant” in Indore at 1pm via video conferencing. The Indore Bio-CNG plant has been constructed under the overarching principles of “waste to wealth” and “circular economy” for maximising resource recovery. The plant is in line with PM Modi's vision of creating “garbage-free cities” under the Swachh Bharat Mission Urban 2.0, according to the Prime Minister's Office.
Here's all you need to know about Indore's Gobar-Dhan plant:
The Gobar-Dhan plant, with a capacity to treat 550 tonnes of segregated wet organic waste per day, is expected to produce around 17,000 kg CNG and 100 tonnes of organic compost every day.
It is also expected to yield multiple environmental benefits like reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, providing green energy along with organic compost as fertiliser, as per PMO.
The project has been implemented by Indore Clean Energy Pvt Ltd, a Special Purpose Vehicle set up by Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) and Indo Enviro Integrated Solutions Ltd. (IEISL).
IMC will purchase a minimum of 50% of CNG produced by the Gobar-Dhan plant. In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the municipal corporation will run 400 city buses on the CNG.
PM Modi to virtually inaugurate Asias biggest Bio-CNG plant in MPs Indor.
“The balance quantity of CNG will be sold in the open market. The organic compost will help replace chemical fertilisers for agricultural and horticultural purposes,” an official release said
https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/i ... ore-today-
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Atomic vs. Nuclear Bombs: Which Are More Dangerous?
Jay Bennett
Wed, March 2, 2022, 6:54 PM
The “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II are the only nuclear weapons used in warfare so far.
But that could soon change—in a February address to Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin provided a thinly veiled threat of nuclear warfare against the West.
The atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II—codenamed “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” respectively—caused widespread destruction, leveled cities, and killed between 90,000 and 166,000 people in Hiroshima (about 20,000 of which were soldiers), and between 39,000 and 80,000 in Nagasaki.
These are the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare, to date, and let’s hope it stays that way—because some of the nuclear weapons today are over 3,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
And there are new fears, stoked by the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, that Russian President Vladimir Putin could deploy nuclear weapons against the West.
During a February 24 address to Moscow, Putin warned other countries that any attempt to intervene would lead to “consequences you have never seen,” which has been interpreted as a veiled threat of nuclear warfare.
Let's return to the history of atomic weapons. The Little Boy and the Fat Man were atomic bombs, or fission bombs, which set off a chain reaction of nuclear fission. The atomic nuclei of radioactive materials were split to create different elements, which releases a large amount of energy, splitting more atoms as a result and producing a destructive explosion.
In the Little Boy, a bullet-like projectile made of uranium-235 was fired at a core of the same substance to set off the chain reaction. The Fat Man, on the other hand, used a core of plutonium-239 that was ignited with thousands of pounds of conventional explosives, again setting off a chain reaction of nuclear fission.
In a thermonuclear weapon, often called a hydrogen bomb, the fission process is only the beginning. Modern nuclear weapons, such as the United States’ B83 bombs, use a similar fission process to what is used in atomic bombs. But that initial energy then ignites a fusion reaction in a secondary core of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The nuclei of the hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium, and again a chain reaction results in an explosion—this time a much more powerful one.
As the above video from YouTube channel RealLifeLore illustrates, the blast from the Little Boy released about 15 kilotons of energy, equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT, and sent a mushroom cloud up to about 25,000 feet. The Fat Man produced an explosion of about 21 kilotons. The B83? 1.2 megatons, equaling 1,200,000 tons of TNT, making it 80 times more powerful than the Little Boy.
It gets even more terrifying than that. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, set off by the Soviet Union in 1961, produced an insane 50-megaton blast—about 3,333 times more powerful than the Little Boy bomb that leveled an entire city. The Tsar Bomba is the largest manmade explosion to date, sending a mushroom cloud up to more than 130,000 feet in altitude—about 4.5 times the height of Mount Everest—as it sent shockwaves around the globe three times over.
Curious to see how you’d fare in the event that a nuclear bomb were dropped on a big city near you? NUKEMAP, created by Alex Wellerstein, charts out the impacts of a nuclear blast on cities around the world. (It also maps out the waste laid by historic nuclear blasts such as the Trinity blast in New Mexico in 1945, and that 1961 Tsar Bomba blast in Novaya Zemlya, Russia.)
If we wanted to, we could build a bomb even more powerful than the Tsar Bomba. But maybe it’s time we start looking to use nuclear fusion for something else. How about a six-month round-trip to Mars instead?
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 23633.html
Jay Bennett
Wed, March 2, 2022, 6:54 PM
The “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II are the only nuclear weapons used in warfare so far.
But that could soon change—in a February address to Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin provided a thinly veiled threat of nuclear warfare against the West.
The atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II—codenamed “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” respectively—caused widespread destruction, leveled cities, and killed between 90,000 and 166,000 people in Hiroshima (about 20,000 of which were soldiers), and between 39,000 and 80,000 in Nagasaki.
These are the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare, to date, and let’s hope it stays that way—because some of the nuclear weapons today are over 3,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
And there are new fears, stoked by the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, that Russian President Vladimir Putin could deploy nuclear weapons against the West.
During a February 24 address to Moscow, Putin warned other countries that any attempt to intervene would lead to “consequences you have never seen,” which has been interpreted as a veiled threat of nuclear warfare.
Let's return to the history of atomic weapons. The Little Boy and the Fat Man were atomic bombs, or fission bombs, which set off a chain reaction of nuclear fission. The atomic nuclei of radioactive materials were split to create different elements, which releases a large amount of energy, splitting more atoms as a result and producing a destructive explosion.
In the Little Boy, a bullet-like projectile made of uranium-235 was fired at a core of the same substance to set off the chain reaction. The Fat Man, on the other hand, used a core of plutonium-239 that was ignited with thousands of pounds of conventional explosives, again setting off a chain reaction of nuclear fission.
In a thermonuclear weapon, often called a hydrogen bomb, the fission process is only the beginning. Modern nuclear weapons, such as the United States’ B83 bombs, use a similar fission process to what is used in atomic bombs. But that initial energy then ignites a fusion reaction in a secondary core of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The nuclei of the hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium, and again a chain reaction results in an explosion—this time a much more powerful one.
As the above video from YouTube channel RealLifeLore illustrates, the blast from the Little Boy released about 15 kilotons of energy, equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT, and sent a mushroom cloud up to about 25,000 feet. The Fat Man produced an explosion of about 21 kilotons. The B83? 1.2 megatons, equaling 1,200,000 tons of TNT, making it 80 times more powerful than the Little Boy.
It gets even more terrifying than that. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, set off by the Soviet Union in 1961, produced an insane 50-megaton blast—about 3,333 times more powerful than the Little Boy bomb that leveled an entire city. The Tsar Bomba is the largest manmade explosion to date, sending a mushroom cloud up to more than 130,000 feet in altitude—about 4.5 times the height of Mount Everest—as it sent shockwaves around the globe three times over.
Curious to see how you’d fare in the event that a nuclear bomb were dropped on a big city near you? NUKEMAP, created by Alex Wellerstein, charts out the impacts of a nuclear blast on cities around the world. (It also maps out the waste laid by historic nuclear blasts such as the Trinity blast in New Mexico in 1945, and that 1961 Tsar Bomba blast in Novaya Zemlya, Russia.)
If we wanted to, we could build a bomb even more powerful than the Tsar Bomba. But maybe it’s time we start looking to use nuclear fusion for something else. How about a six-month round-trip to Mars instead?
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 23633.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Patient in Groundbreaking Heart Transplant Dies
David Bennett Sr. had received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a procedure that may yet offer hope to millions of Americans needing transplants
A genetically modified pig heart was transplanted into 57-year-old David Bennett at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore in January.Credit...University of Maryland School of Medicine, via EPA, via Shutterstock
The first person to have his failing heart replaced with that of a genetically altered pig in a groundbreaking operation died Tuesday afternoon at the University of Maryland Medical Center, two months after the transplant surgery.
David Bennett Sr., who lived in Maryland, was 57. He had severe heart disease, and had agreed to receive the experimental pig’s heart after he was rejected from several waiting lists to receive a human heart.
It was unclear whether his body had rejected the foreign organ. “There was no obvious cause identified at the time of his death,” a hospital spokeswoman said.
Hospital officials said they could not comment further on the cause of death, because his physicians had yet to conduct a thorough examination. They plan to publish the results in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
Dr. Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who performed the transplant, said the hospital’s staff was “devastated” by the loss of Mr. Bennett.
“He proved to be a brave and noble patient who fought all the way to the end,” Dr. Griffith said. “Mr. Bennett became known by millions of people around the world for his courage and steadfast will to live.”
The heart transplant was one of a number of pioneering procedures in recent months in which organs from genetically altered pigs were used to replace organs in humans. The process, called xenotransplantation, offers new hope for tens of thousands of patients with ailing kidneys, hearts and other organs, as there is an acute shortage of donated organs.
Mr. Bennett’s transplant was initially deemed successful. It is still considered a significant step forward, because the pig’s heart was not immediately rejected and continued to function for well over a month, passing a critical milestone for transplant patients.
Some 41,354 Americans received a transplanted organ last year, more than half of them kidneys, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit that coordinates the nation’s organ procurement efforts.
But there is a dire shortage of organs, and a dozen or more people on waiting lists die each day. About 3,800 Americans received human donor hearts last year as replacements, more than ever before, but demand remains high.
Scientists have been trying to produce pigs whose organs would not be rejected by the human body, a research effort that has picked up steam over the past decade because of new gene editing and cloning technologies.
New York surgeons announced in October that they had successfully attached a kidney grown in a genetically altered pig to a brain-dead human patient, finding that the organ worked normally and produced urine for 54 hours.
In January, surgeons at the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported that they had for the first time successfully transplanted kidneys from a genetically modified pig into the abdomen of a 57-year-old brain-dead man. The kidneys functioned and produced urine for three days.
U.A.B. surgeons said they hoped to launch a small clinical trial with live human patients by the end of the year.
Shortly after Mr. Bennett’s heart surgery in January, The Washington Post reported that he had a criminal record stemming from an assault 34 years ago, in which he repeatedly stabbed a young man in a fit of jealousy, leaving him paralyzed.
The victim, Edward Shumaker, spent two decades in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, and suffered numerous medical complications including a stroke that left him cognitively impaired before he died in 2007 at age 40, according to his sister, Leslie Shumaker Downey, of Frederick, Md.
Mr. Bennett’s son, David Bennett Jr., who was a child at the time of the stabbing, has said that he does not want to discuss his father’s past, and emphasized that his father was contributing to medical science by undergoing the experimental transplant and hoped to “potentially save patient lives in the future.”
The heart given to Mr. Bennett came from a genetically altered pig provided by Revivicor, a regenerative medicine company based in Blacksburg, Va.
The pig carried 10 genetic modifications. Four genes were knocked out, or inactivated, including one that encodes a molecule that causes an aggressive human rejection response.
Another gene was also inactivated to prevent the pig’s heart from continuing to grow after it was implanted. In addition, six human genes were inserted into the genome of the donor pig — modifications designed to make the pig’s organs more tolerable to the human immune system.
On New Year’s Eve, the Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency authorization for the experimental surgery, which was done a week later.
The transplanted heart performed well initially, and there were no signs of rejection for several weeks. Mr. Bennett spent time with his family, did physical therapy and watched the Super Bowl, hospital officials said.
But he was not discharged, and several days ago his condition started to deteriorate, hospital officials said.
His son issued a statement thanking the hospital and staff for their exhaustive efforts on behalf of his father.
“We hope this story can be the beginning of hope and not the end,” Mr. Bennett said. “We also hope that what was learned from his surgery will benefit future patients and hopefully one day, end the organ shortage that costs so many lives each year.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/heal ... iversified
David Bennett Sr. had received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a procedure that may yet offer hope to millions of Americans needing transplants
A genetically modified pig heart was transplanted into 57-year-old David Bennett at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore in January.Credit...University of Maryland School of Medicine, via EPA, via Shutterstock
The first person to have his failing heart replaced with that of a genetically altered pig in a groundbreaking operation died Tuesday afternoon at the University of Maryland Medical Center, two months after the transplant surgery.
David Bennett Sr., who lived in Maryland, was 57. He had severe heart disease, and had agreed to receive the experimental pig’s heart after he was rejected from several waiting lists to receive a human heart.
It was unclear whether his body had rejected the foreign organ. “There was no obvious cause identified at the time of his death,” a hospital spokeswoman said.
Hospital officials said they could not comment further on the cause of death, because his physicians had yet to conduct a thorough examination. They plan to publish the results in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
Dr. Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who performed the transplant, said the hospital’s staff was “devastated” by the loss of Mr. Bennett.
“He proved to be a brave and noble patient who fought all the way to the end,” Dr. Griffith said. “Mr. Bennett became known by millions of people around the world for his courage and steadfast will to live.”
The heart transplant was one of a number of pioneering procedures in recent months in which organs from genetically altered pigs were used to replace organs in humans. The process, called xenotransplantation, offers new hope for tens of thousands of patients with ailing kidneys, hearts and other organs, as there is an acute shortage of donated organs.
Mr. Bennett’s transplant was initially deemed successful. It is still considered a significant step forward, because the pig’s heart was not immediately rejected and continued to function for well over a month, passing a critical milestone for transplant patients.
Some 41,354 Americans received a transplanted organ last year, more than half of them kidneys, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit that coordinates the nation’s organ procurement efforts.
But there is a dire shortage of organs, and a dozen or more people on waiting lists die each day. About 3,800 Americans received human donor hearts last year as replacements, more than ever before, but demand remains high.
Scientists have been trying to produce pigs whose organs would not be rejected by the human body, a research effort that has picked up steam over the past decade because of new gene editing and cloning technologies.
New York surgeons announced in October that they had successfully attached a kidney grown in a genetically altered pig to a brain-dead human patient, finding that the organ worked normally and produced urine for 54 hours.
In January, surgeons at the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported that they had for the first time successfully transplanted kidneys from a genetically modified pig into the abdomen of a 57-year-old brain-dead man. The kidneys functioned and produced urine for three days.
U.A.B. surgeons said they hoped to launch a small clinical trial with live human patients by the end of the year.
Shortly after Mr. Bennett’s heart surgery in January, The Washington Post reported that he had a criminal record stemming from an assault 34 years ago, in which he repeatedly stabbed a young man in a fit of jealousy, leaving him paralyzed.
The victim, Edward Shumaker, spent two decades in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, and suffered numerous medical complications including a stroke that left him cognitively impaired before he died in 2007 at age 40, according to his sister, Leslie Shumaker Downey, of Frederick, Md.
Mr. Bennett’s son, David Bennett Jr., who was a child at the time of the stabbing, has said that he does not want to discuss his father’s past, and emphasized that his father was contributing to medical science by undergoing the experimental transplant and hoped to “potentially save patient lives in the future.”
The heart given to Mr. Bennett came from a genetically altered pig provided by Revivicor, a regenerative medicine company based in Blacksburg, Va.
The pig carried 10 genetic modifications. Four genes were knocked out, or inactivated, including one that encodes a molecule that causes an aggressive human rejection response.
Another gene was also inactivated to prevent the pig’s heart from continuing to grow after it was implanted. In addition, six human genes were inserted into the genome of the donor pig — modifications designed to make the pig’s organs more tolerable to the human immune system.
On New Year’s Eve, the Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency authorization for the experimental surgery, which was done a week later.
The transplanted heart performed well initially, and there were no signs of rejection for several weeks. Mr. Bennett spent time with his family, did physical therapy and watched the Super Bowl, hospital officials said.
But he was not discharged, and several days ago his condition started to deteriorate, hospital officials said.
His son issued a statement thanking the hospital and staff for their exhaustive efforts on behalf of his father.
“We hope this story can be the beginning of hope and not the end,” Mr. Bennett said. “We also hope that what was learned from his surgery will benefit future patients and hopefully one day, end the organ shortage that costs so many lives each year.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/heal ... iversified
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Painkillers That Don’t Kill
Scientists are getting closer to designing safer, more targeted pain drugs to replace opioids.
Travis Gustavson died in February, 2021 in Mankato, Minnesota at the age of 21. The morning of the day he died, he had a tooth pulled at the dentist’s office. Due to a drug history, the doctors didn’t prescribe him strong painkillers, so he was planning to white knuckle it through the day with ibuprofen, according to his mother. Instead, he called a guy who sold him illegal street heroin and fentanyl. In a text to the dealer, Gustavson sent a photo of the amount he planned to take and asked if he had gotten the dose right. “Smaller bro” and “be careful plz!” the dealer wrote back. Gustavson overdosed.
Gustavson, whose death was reported in the L.A. Times,1 is one of the many casualties of an opioid crisis that has ravaged the United States for over two decades. Opioid overdose deaths have claimed more than 600,000 lives in the U.S. and Canada since 1999, more than were lost in World War I and II combined. In both countries, 2020 was the worst year on record, in terms of total deaths and percentage increase from the previous year, precipitated in part by the anxiety, stress, and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic.2
Their discovery opened a major new avenue for the treatment of pain.
The urgent need for safer, better painkillers could not be more apparent. In 2016, as the FDA grappled with how to curb the escalating crisis, the agency wrote new rules that limited opioid prescriptions. But given that no powerful clinical alternatives to commonly prescribed opioids exist, these new rules had the unintended effect of driving more people to desperate measures. Some chronic pain patients, after their doses were cut, died by suicide.3 Others sought relief in illict street drugs like heroin and fentanyl.
Though scientists have tried for decades to design drugs that are both more effective and less addictive than opiates, most efforts have run aground.4 At the heart of these failures lies a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of pain, says Clifford Woolf, a leading expert in pain information processing from Boston Children’s Hospital. It is not a single phenomenon that can be addressed with a universal analgesic,5 but consists of distinct types that demand targeted therapeutic approaches.
Woolf and colleagues at Harvard Medical School are convinced they are finally just a few years away from identifying powerful precision painkillers that could not only safely replace opiates, but effectively target distinct pain types. Their end game is to eliminate chronic pain all together.
More...
https://nautil.us/painkillers-that-dont-kill-14873/
Scientists are getting closer to designing safer, more targeted pain drugs to replace opioids.
Travis Gustavson died in February, 2021 in Mankato, Minnesota at the age of 21. The morning of the day he died, he had a tooth pulled at the dentist’s office. Due to a drug history, the doctors didn’t prescribe him strong painkillers, so he was planning to white knuckle it through the day with ibuprofen, according to his mother. Instead, he called a guy who sold him illegal street heroin and fentanyl. In a text to the dealer, Gustavson sent a photo of the amount he planned to take and asked if he had gotten the dose right. “Smaller bro” and “be careful plz!” the dealer wrote back. Gustavson overdosed.
Gustavson, whose death was reported in the L.A. Times,1 is one of the many casualties of an opioid crisis that has ravaged the United States for over two decades. Opioid overdose deaths have claimed more than 600,000 lives in the U.S. and Canada since 1999, more than were lost in World War I and II combined. In both countries, 2020 was the worst year on record, in terms of total deaths and percentage increase from the previous year, precipitated in part by the anxiety, stress, and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic.2
Their discovery opened a major new avenue for the treatment of pain.
The urgent need for safer, better painkillers could not be more apparent. In 2016, as the FDA grappled with how to curb the escalating crisis, the agency wrote new rules that limited opioid prescriptions. But given that no powerful clinical alternatives to commonly prescribed opioids exist, these new rules had the unintended effect of driving more people to desperate measures. Some chronic pain patients, after their doses were cut, died by suicide.3 Others sought relief in illict street drugs like heroin and fentanyl.
Though scientists have tried for decades to design drugs that are both more effective and less addictive than opiates, most efforts have run aground.4 At the heart of these failures lies a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of pain, says Clifford Woolf, a leading expert in pain information processing from Boston Children’s Hospital. It is not a single phenomenon that can be addressed with a universal analgesic,5 but consists of distinct types that demand targeted therapeutic approaches.
Woolf and colleagues at Harvard Medical School are convinced they are finally just a few years away from identifying powerful precision painkillers that could not only safely replace opiates, but effectively target distinct pain types. Their end game is to eliminate chronic pain all together.
More...
https://nautil.us/painkillers-that-dont-kill-14873/
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Imagine Another World. Now Imagine 5,000 More.
NASA recently announced that it had detected more than 5,000 exoplanets, so we asked astronomers, actors and an astronaut to share their favorite worlds orbiting distant stars.
An artist’s concept of seven rocky exoplanets 40 light-years from Earth that make up the TRAPPIST system. Four of these occupy the “habitable zone,” where liquid water may exist.Credit...NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt
By Becky Ferreira
April 2, 2022
In January 1992, a pair of astronomers reported a discovery that changed the course of scientific history: They found planets outside our solar system.
The detection of the first confirmed exoplanets — the term for worlds that orbit other stars — validated dreamers who for centuries believed that “innumerable celestial bodies, stars, globes, suns and earths may be sensibly perceived therein by us,” in the words of the Renaissance polymath Giordano Bruno. One such detection — the world 51 Pegasi b in 1995 — led to the award of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz.
Now, 30 years later, the list of known exoplanets has just topped 5,000, according to NASA. This dazzling abundance and variety of worlds has come into view with the aid of ever-more sophisticated space telescopes. There are “hot Jupiters” that orbit scorchingly close to their stars and beefed-up versions of our planet known as “super-Earths.” Rogue planets, unmoored from their stars, wander interstellar space. And some worlds show signs of habitability, meaning they could host alien life.
To celebrate the milestone, experts and enthusiasts shared their favorite exoplanets or exoplanetary systems among the thousands of worlds to choose from.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/02/scie ... 778d3e6de3
NASA recently announced that it had detected more than 5,000 exoplanets, so we asked astronomers, actors and an astronaut to share their favorite worlds orbiting distant stars.
An artist’s concept of seven rocky exoplanets 40 light-years from Earth that make up the TRAPPIST system. Four of these occupy the “habitable zone,” where liquid water may exist.Credit...NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt
By Becky Ferreira
April 2, 2022
In January 1992, a pair of astronomers reported a discovery that changed the course of scientific history: They found planets outside our solar system.
The detection of the first confirmed exoplanets — the term for worlds that orbit other stars — validated dreamers who for centuries believed that “innumerable celestial bodies, stars, globes, suns and earths may be sensibly perceived therein by us,” in the words of the Renaissance polymath Giordano Bruno. One such detection — the world 51 Pegasi b in 1995 — led to the award of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz.
Now, 30 years later, the list of known exoplanets has just topped 5,000, according to NASA. This dazzling abundance and variety of worlds has come into view with the aid of ever-more sophisticated space telescopes. There are “hot Jupiters” that orbit scorchingly close to their stars and beefed-up versions of our planet known as “super-Earths.” Rogue planets, unmoored from their stars, wander interstellar space. And some worlds show signs of habitability, meaning they could host alien life.
To celebrate the milestone, experts and enthusiasts shared their favorite exoplanets or exoplanetary systems among the thousands of worlds to choose from.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/02/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
The Telegraph
Mystery of why humans die around 80 may finally be solved
Sarah Knapton
Wed, April 13, 2022, 12:35 PM
The mystery of why humans die at around 80, while other mammals live far shorter or longer lives, may finally have been solved by scientists.
Humans and animals die after amassing a similar number of genetic mutations, researchers have found, suggesting the speed of DNA errors is critical in determining the lifespan of a species.
There are huge variations in the lifespan of mammals in the animal kingdom, from South Asian rats, which live for just six months, to bowhead whales, which can survive for 200 years.
Previously, experts have suggested that size is the key to longevity, with smaller animals burning up energy more quickly, requiring a faster cell turnover, which causes a speedier decline.
But a new study from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge suggests the speed of genetic damage could be the key to survival, with long-living animals successfully slowing down their rate of DNA mutations regardless of their size.
It helps explain how a five-inch long naked mole rat can live for 25 years, about the same as a far larger giraffe, which typically lives for 24.
When scientists checked their mutation rates, they were surprisingly similar. Naked mole rats suffer 93 mutations a year and giraffes 99.
The study suggests it is the speed of genetic damage that could be the key to survival which helps explain how a giraffe typically lives for 24 years - Thomas Mukoya/Reuters
In contrast, mice suffer 796 mutations a year and only live for 3.7 years. The average human lifespan in the study was 83.6 years, but the mutation rate was far lower at around 47.
Genetic changes, known as somatic mutations, occur in all cells and are largely harmless, but some can start a cell on the path to cancer or impair normal functioning.
Dr Alex Cagan, the first author of the study, said: “To find a similar pattern of genetic changes in animals as different from one another as a mouse and a tiger was surprising.
“But the most exciting aspect of the study has to be finding that lifespan is inversely proportional to the somatic mutation rate. This suggests that somatic mutations may play a role in ageing.”
The team analysed genetic errors in the stem cells from the intestines of 16 species of mammal and found that the longer the lifespan of a species, the slower the rate at which mutations occur.
The average number of mutations at the end of lifespan across species was around 3200, suggesting there is a critical mass of errors after which a body is unable to function correctly.
‘Ageing is a complex process’
Although the figure differed about threefold across species the variation was far less than the variation in body size, which varied up to 40,000 fold.
The researchers believe the study opens the door to understanding the ageing process, and the inevitability and timing of death.
Dr Inigo Martincorena, the senior author of the study, said: “Ageing is a complex process, the result of multiple forms of molecular damage in our cells and tissues.
“Somatic mutations have been speculated to contribute to ageing since the 1950s, but studying them has remained difficult.
“With the recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies, we can finally investigate the roles that somatic mutations play in ageing and in multiple diseases.”
The research was published in the journal Nature.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 39273.html
Mystery of why humans die around 80 may finally be solved
Sarah Knapton
Wed, April 13, 2022, 12:35 PM
The mystery of why humans die at around 80, while other mammals live far shorter or longer lives, may finally have been solved by scientists.
Humans and animals die after amassing a similar number of genetic mutations, researchers have found, suggesting the speed of DNA errors is critical in determining the lifespan of a species.
There are huge variations in the lifespan of mammals in the animal kingdom, from South Asian rats, which live for just six months, to bowhead whales, which can survive for 200 years.
Previously, experts have suggested that size is the key to longevity, with smaller animals burning up energy more quickly, requiring a faster cell turnover, which causes a speedier decline.
But a new study from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge suggests the speed of genetic damage could be the key to survival, with long-living animals successfully slowing down their rate of DNA mutations regardless of their size.
It helps explain how a five-inch long naked mole rat can live for 25 years, about the same as a far larger giraffe, which typically lives for 24.
When scientists checked their mutation rates, they were surprisingly similar. Naked mole rats suffer 93 mutations a year and giraffes 99.
The study suggests it is the speed of genetic damage that could be the key to survival which helps explain how a giraffe typically lives for 24 years - Thomas Mukoya/Reuters
In contrast, mice suffer 796 mutations a year and only live for 3.7 years. The average human lifespan in the study was 83.6 years, but the mutation rate was far lower at around 47.
Genetic changes, known as somatic mutations, occur in all cells and are largely harmless, but some can start a cell on the path to cancer or impair normal functioning.
Dr Alex Cagan, the first author of the study, said: “To find a similar pattern of genetic changes in animals as different from one another as a mouse and a tiger was surprising.
“But the most exciting aspect of the study has to be finding that lifespan is inversely proportional to the somatic mutation rate. This suggests that somatic mutations may play a role in ageing.”
The team analysed genetic errors in the stem cells from the intestines of 16 species of mammal and found that the longer the lifespan of a species, the slower the rate at which mutations occur.
The average number of mutations at the end of lifespan across species was around 3200, suggesting there is a critical mass of errors after which a body is unable to function correctly.
‘Ageing is a complex process’
Although the figure differed about threefold across species the variation was far less than the variation in body size, which varied up to 40,000 fold.
The researchers believe the study opens the door to understanding the ageing process, and the inevitability and timing of death.
Dr Inigo Martincorena, the senior author of the study, said: “Ageing is a complex process, the result of multiple forms of molecular damage in our cells and tissues.
“Somatic mutations have been speculated to contribute to ageing since the 1950s, but studying them has remained difficult.
“With the recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies, we can finally investigate the roles that somatic mutations play in ageing and in multiple diseases.”
The research was published in the journal Nature.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 39273.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
BBC
Shock result in particle experiment could spark physics revolution
Pallab Ghosh - Science correspondent
Fri, April 8, 2022, 2:23 AM
Fermilab Collider Detector
The Fermilab Collider Detector obtained a result that could transform the current theory of physics
Scientists just outside Chicago have found that the mass of a sub-atomic particle is not what it should be.
The measurement is the first conclusive experimental result that is at odds with one of the most important and successful theories of modern physics.
The team has found that the particle, known as a W boson, is more massive than the theories predicted.
The result has been described as "shocking" by Prof David Toback, who is the project co-spokesperson.
The discovery could lead to the development of a new, more complete theory of how the Universe works.
"If the results are verified by other experiments, the world is going to look different." he told BBC News. "There has to be a paradigm shift. The hope is that maybe this result is going to be the one that breaks the dam.
"The famous astronomer Carl Sagan said 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'. We believe we have that."
Machine finds tantalising hints of new physics
Biggest cosmic mystery 'step closer' to solution
Higgs factory a 'must for big physics'
The scientists at the Fermilab Collider Detector (CDF) in Illinois have found only a tiny difference in the mass of the W Boson compared with what the theory says it should be - just 0.1%. But if confirmed by other experiments, the implications are enormous. The so-called Standard Model of particle physics has predicted the behaviour and properties of sub-atomic particles with no discrepancies whatsoever for fifty years. Until now.
CDF's other co-spokesperson, Prof Giorgio Chiarelli, from INFN Sezione di Pisa, told BBC News that the research team could scarcely believe their eyes when they saw the results.
"No-one was expecting this. We thought maybe we got something wrong." But the researchers have painstakingly gone through their results and tried to look for errors. They found none.
The result, published in the journal Science, could be related to hints from other experiments at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider at the Swiss-French border. These, as yet unconfirmed results, also suggest deviations from the Standard Model, possibly as a result of an as yet undiscovered fifth force of nature at play.
Physicists have known for some time that the theory needs to be updated. It can't explain the presence of invisible material in space, called Dark Matter, nor the continued accelerating expansion of the Universe by a force called Dark Energy. Nor can it explain gravity.
Dr Mitesh Patel of Imperial College, who works at the LHC, believes that if the Fermilab result is confirmed, it could be the first of many new results that could herald the biggest shift in our understanding of the Universe since Einstein's theories of relativity more than a hundred years ago.
"The hope is that these cracks will turn into chasms and eventually we will see some spectacular signature that not only confirms that the Standard Model has broken down as a description of nature, but also give us a new direction to help us understand what we are seeing and what the new physics theory looks like.
"If this holds, there have to be new particles and new forces to explain how to make these data consistent".
But the excitement in the physics community is tempered with a loud note of caution. Although the Fermilab result is the most accurate measurement of the mass of the W boson to date, it is at odds with two of the next most accurate measurements from two separate experiments which are in line with the Standard Model.
"This will ruffle some feathers", says Prof Ben Allanach, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University.
"We need to know what is going on with the measurement. The fact that we have two other experiments that agree with each other and the Standard Model and strongly disagree with this experiment is worrying to me".
All eyes are now on the Large Hadron Collider which is due to restart its experiments after a three-year upgrade. The hope is that these will provide the results which will lay the foundations for a new more complete theory of physics.
"Most scientists will be a little bit cautious," says Dr Patel.
"We've been here before and been disappointed, but we are all secretly hoping that this is really it, and that in our lifetime we might see the kind of transformation that we have read about in history books."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sh ... 25179.html
Shock result in particle experiment could spark physics revolution
Pallab Ghosh - Science correspondent
Fri, April 8, 2022, 2:23 AM
Fermilab Collider Detector
The Fermilab Collider Detector obtained a result that could transform the current theory of physics
Scientists just outside Chicago have found that the mass of a sub-atomic particle is not what it should be.
The measurement is the first conclusive experimental result that is at odds with one of the most important and successful theories of modern physics.
The team has found that the particle, known as a W boson, is more massive than the theories predicted.
The result has been described as "shocking" by Prof David Toback, who is the project co-spokesperson.
The discovery could lead to the development of a new, more complete theory of how the Universe works.
"If the results are verified by other experiments, the world is going to look different." he told BBC News. "There has to be a paradigm shift. The hope is that maybe this result is going to be the one that breaks the dam.
"The famous astronomer Carl Sagan said 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'. We believe we have that."
Machine finds tantalising hints of new physics
Biggest cosmic mystery 'step closer' to solution
Higgs factory a 'must for big physics'
The scientists at the Fermilab Collider Detector (CDF) in Illinois have found only a tiny difference in the mass of the W Boson compared with what the theory says it should be - just 0.1%. But if confirmed by other experiments, the implications are enormous. The so-called Standard Model of particle physics has predicted the behaviour and properties of sub-atomic particles with no discrepancies whatsoever for fifty years. Until now.
CDF's other co-spokesperson, Prof Giorgio Chiarelli, from INFN Sezione di Pisa, told BBC News that the research team could scarcely believe their eyes when they saw the results.
"No-one was expecting this. We thought maybe we got something wrong." But the researchers have painstakingly gone through their results and tried to look for errors. They found none.
The result, published in the journal Science, could be related to hints from other experiments at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider at the Swiss-French border. These, as yet unconfirmed results, also suggest deviations from the Standard Model, possibly as a result of an as yet undiscovered fifth force of nature at play.
Physicists have known for some time that the theory needs to be updated. It can't explain the presence of invisible material in space, called Dark Matter, nor the continued accelerating expansion of the Universe by a force called Dark Energy. Nor can it explain gravity.
Dr Mitesh Patel of Imperial College, who works at the LHC, believes that if the Fermilab result is confirmed, it could be the first of many new results that could herald the biggest shift in our understanding of the Universe since Einstein's theories of relativity more than a hundred years ago.
"The hope is that these cracks will turn into chasms and eventually we will see some spectacular signature that not only confirms that the Standard Model has broken down as a description of nature, but also give us a new direction to help us understand what we are seeing and what the new physics theory looks like.
"If this holds, there have to be new particles and new forces to explain how to make these data consistent".
But the excitement in the physics community is tempered with a loud note of caution. Although the Fermilab result is the most accurate measurement of the mass of the W boson to date, it is at odds with two of the next most accurate measurements from two separate experiments which are in line with the Standard Model.
"This will ruffle some feathers", says Prof Ben Allanach, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University.
"We need to know what is going on with the measurement. The fact that we have two other experiments that agree with each other and the Standard Model and strongly disagree with this experiment is worrying to me".
All eyes are now on the Large Hadron Collider which is due to restart its experiments after a three-year upgrade. The hope is that these will provide the results which will lay the foundations for a new more complete theory of physics.
"Most scientists will be a little bit cautious," says Dr Patel.
"We've been here before and been disappointed, but we are all secretly hoping that this is really it, and that in our lifetime we might see the kind of transformation that we have read about in history books."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sh ... 25179.html
Tripping Through the Universes
A new cosmic kung fu film explores the meaning of existence in alternate realities.
In 2009, two Stanford physicists, Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin, wrote a paper calculating the number of possible universes that could exist, based on the prevailing theory, then and today, of how our own cosmos originated 14 billion years ago.
Their answer was 10^10^10,000,000, which is way more than a 1 followed by a billion zeros.
I didn’t write about it at the time because it was hardly news. Even bigger numbers of potential universes were being tossed around, based on other speculations about physics and cosmology.
A short century ago, astronomers could barely comprehend the notion of one universe. Now, that idea is not big enough to fill the dreams of theorists. There are as many possible universes as a mind can concoct, spun out of imagination, despair, hope, heroic mathematical extrapolation and that ol’ what-if spirit to answer questions that most of us didn’t know we had. Welcome to the “multiverse.”
There is not a scintilla of evidence that other universes exist, nor any idea of how to detect them, much less how we might go about visiting the one next door. But none of that has kept the idea from becoming a trope of science fiction, modern cosmology and popular culture — movies, in particular. Hardly a new Marvel film comes out without its heroes bopping in and out of strange space-times on some quest or another.
So meet Evelyn Wang, a middle-age Chinese immigrant who runs a laundromat and has issues with her taxes, her traditionally forbidding father (newly arrived from China) and her lesbian daughter. In the new film “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Evelyn has been picked to save the realm of universes from a destructive demon because she is such a loser in this one. Above all, she must reconnect with her daughter, the main agent of chaos in her local cosmos. Thus, she finds herself careening through alternate universes and alternate versions of the self she might have been.
The movie was written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who call themselves the Daniels and are best known for the 2016 film “Swiss Army Man,” about a flatulent corpse and starring Daniel Radcliffe.
Their new film is a meditation on the loneliness of the infinite disguised as a raunchy kung-fu astro-comedy, featuring sly references to other movies like “Ratatouille” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In one universe, Evelyn has rubbery hot dogs for fingers. In another, she is a famous martial artist and movie star. At the far end of her journey, signifying the ultimate doom and psychic black hole, is a giant, ominous everything bagel.
The movie, which premiered at South by Southwest in March, has generated enthusiastic reviews. As a self-appointed aficionado of all things cosmic, I was eager to see it and to learn the nuts and bolts of their multiverse.
Speaking over Zoom, the Daniels proclaimed themselves devoted fans of pop science and cosmology. They sent me a copy of “A Vast Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur (A24 LLC),” a collection of science and speculative writing by authors including Jorge Luis Borges and Carl Sagan, which they edited.
Needless to say, there is not just one theory of the multiverse but many, depending on the physics you adopt. For instance, the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that whenever you make a decision — say, to turn left out of your driveway instead of right — the universe splits in two and continues branching at every intersection. There is a universe for every way you could turn, every way a ball could come off Aaron Judge’s bat, every way a cookie could crumble.
Another version of the multiverse arises from string theory, the purported “theory of everything” that describes elementary particles as vibrating strings of energy. “Theory of Anything” might be a better moniker; it turns out that the theory has at least 10^500 solutions in 11 different dimensions, each of which represents an alternate universe, perhaps with its own laws.
Still another multiverse springs from the prevailing, though not fully confirmed, theory of cosmic inflation. Thanks to a violent whoosh fueled by negative gravity at the dawn of time, an endless array of bubble or “pocket” universes are branching off from one another at a dizzying, exponentially increasing rate.
The Daniels described their multiverse as a combination of Many Worlds and the cosmic bubble bath implied by inflation theory. “It’s fun to imagine both versions,” Mr. Kwan said. “Both of them are pointing toward infinity or just pointing toward the unknown.”
But, they added, their film is less about physics than about how physics makes you feel. “If you could see alternate lives, that would be — that would send you spiraling,” Mr. Scheinert said. “It would send any of us kind of spiraling about, like, lives you could have led and choices you could have made.”
The multiverse, they said, could also be a metaphor for the attention-deficient lives we’ve embraced in our bubbles of social-media truth. “I think our stories have to constantly be looking for ways to calm us down again or to bring us back to another version of being centered and grounded again,” Mr. Kwan said.
Evelyn’s back story, Mr. Kwan said, is that she suffers from A.D.H.D. (as does Mr. Kwan), and so she flits distractedly from one activity to another, never mastering any of them. She is a Marco Polo of the multiverse, with more “what ifs” to explore across the dimensions of reality than anyone else.
Whatever you might think of the multiverse, it is a logical next step in our progression from the Earth-centered universe of Ptolemy to the modern cosmos of dark energy, fantastic galaxies and, perhaps, other life-forms.
“Every new discovery is decentering the human experience, which can be really terrifying,” Mr. Kwan said.
Who knows what else we’ll soon move beyond. Beauty is “nothing but the beginning of terror,” the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote. “It amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” The night sky is filled with stars incomprehensibly distant, and it is incomprehensibly powerful. What or who is out there? Will anyone ever know about us? The more we learn about the cosmos, the smaller we feel.
The multiverse, with its billions upon billions of alternate realities telescoping outward, would seem to only amplify our insignificance. “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless,” the physicist Steven Weinberg, who died last year, once said. Evelyn, at the end of her quest, concludes: “Nothing matters.”
But that realization can also be inspiring, the Daniels contend. “I think it’s probably one of the most freeing ideas we can have,” Mr. Kwan said.
“I grew up in a very religious home, and so everything mattered,” Mr. Kwan said. “And when everything matters, it’s a horrifying experience navigating the world, because everything, every action, is filled with regret, and every action is filled with guilt in a way that can be crippling.”
Whereas if nothing matters, you are not responsible for the universe. Nothing is ordained, anything goes; do what you want, love whom you want. And those hot dog fingers go great with mustard and ketchup.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/scie ... 778d3e6de3
In 2009, two Stanford physicists, Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin, wrote a paper calculating the number of possible universes that could exist, based on the prevailing theory, then and today, of how our own cosmos originated 14 billion years ago.
Their answer was 10^10^10,000,000, which is way more than a 1 followed by a billion zeros.
I didn’t write about it at the time because it was hardly news. Even bigger numbers of potential universes were being tossed around, based on other speculations about physics and cosmology.
A short century ago, astronomers could barely comprehend the notion of one universe. Now, that idea is not big enough to fill the dreams of theorists. There are as many possible universes as a mind can concoct, spun out of imagination, despair, hope, heroic mathematical extrapolation and that ol’ what-if spirit to answer questions that most of us didn’t know we had. Welcome to the “multiverse.”
There is not a scintilla of evidence that other universes exist, nor any idea of how to detect them, much less how we might go about visiting the one next door. But none of that has kept the idea from becoming a trope of science fiction, modern cosmology and popular culture — movies, in particular. Hardly a new Marvel film comes out without its heroes bopping in and out of strange space-times on some quest or another.
So meet Evelyn Wang, a middle-age Chinese immigrant who runs a laundromat and has issues with her taxes, her traditionally forbidding father (newly arrived from China) and her lesbian daughter. In the new film “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Evelyn has been picked to save the realm of universes from a destructive demon because she is such a loser in this one. Above all, she must reconnect with her daughter, the main agent of chaos in her local cosmos. Thus, she finds herself careening through alternate universes and alternate versions of the self she might have been.
The movie was written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who call themselves the Daniels and are best known for the 2016 film “Swiss Army Man,” about a flatulent corpse and starring Daniel Radcliffe.
Their new film is a meditation on the loneliness of the infinite disguised as a raunchy kung-fu astro-comedy, featuring sly references to other movies like “Ratatouille” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In one universe, Evelyn has rubbery hot dogs for fingers. In another, she is a famous martial artist and movie star. At the far end of her journey, signifying the ultimate doom and psychic black hole, is a giant, ominous everything bagel.
The movie, which premiered at South by Southwest in March, has generated enthusiastic reviews. As a self-appointed aficionado of all things cosmic, I was eager to see it and to learn the nuts and bolts of their multiverse.
Speaking over Zoom, the Daniels proclaimed themselves devoted fans of pop science and cosmology. They sent me a copy of “A Vast Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur (A24 LLC),” a collection of science and speculative writing by authors including Jorge Luis Borges and Carl Sagan, which they edited.
Needless to say, there is not just one theory of the multiverse but many, depending on the physics you adopt. For instance, the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that whenever you make a decision — say, to turn left out of your driveway instead of right — the universe splits in two and continues branching at every intersection. There is a universe for every way you could turn, every way a ball could come off Aaron Judge’s bat, every way a cookie could crumble.
Another version of the multiverse arises from string theory, the purported “theory of everything” that describes elementary particles as vibrating strings of energy. “Theory of Anything” might be a better moniker; it turns out that the theory has at least 10^500 solutions in 11 different dimensions, each of which represents an alternate universe, perhaps with its own laws.
Still another multiverse springs from the prevailing, though not fully confirmed, theory of cosmic inflation. Thanks to a violent whoosh fueled by negative gravity at the dawn of time, an endless array of bubble or “pocket” universes are branching off from one another at a dizzying, exponentially increasing rate.
The Daniels described their multiverse as a combination of Many Worlds and the cosmic bubble bath implied by inflation theory. “It’s fun to imagine both versions,” Mr. Kwan said. “Both of them are pointing toward infinity or just pointing toward the unknown.”
But, they added, their film is less about physics than about how physics makes you feel. “If you could see alternate lives, that would be — that would send you spiraling,” Mr. Scheinert said. “It would send any of us kind of spiraling about, like, lives you could have led and choices you could have made.”
The multiverse, they said, could also be a metaphor for the attention-deficient lives we’ve embraced in our bubbles of social-media truth. “I think our stories have to constantly be looking for ways to calm us down again or to bring us back to another version of being centered and grounded again,” Mr. Kwan said.
Evelyn’s back story, Mr. Kwan said, is that she suffers from A.D.H.D. (as does Mr. Kwan), and so she flits distractedly from one activity to another, never mastering any of them. She is a Marco Polo of the multiverse, with more “what ifs” to explore across the dimensions of reality than anyone else.
Whatever you might think of the multiverse, it is a logical next step in our progression from the Earth-centered universe of Ptolemy to the modern cosmos of dark energy, fantastic galaxies and, perhaps, other life-forms.
“Every new discovery is decentering the human experience, which can be really terrifying,” Mr. Kwan said.
Who knows what else we’ll soon move beyond. Beauty is “nothing but the beginning of terror,” the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote. “It amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” The night sky is filled with stars incomprehensibly distant, and it is incomprehensibly powerful. What or who is out there? Will anyone ever know about us? The more we learn about the cosmos, the smaller we feel.
The multiverse, with its billions upon billions of alternate realities telescoping outward, would seem to only amplify our insignificance. “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless,” the physicist Steven Weinberg, who died last year, once said. Evelyn, at the end of her quest, concludes: “Nothing matters.”
But that realization can also be inspiring, the Daniels contend. “I think it’s probably one of the most freeing ideas we can have,” Mr. Kwan said.
“I grew up in a very religious home, and so everything mattered,” Mr. Kwan said. “And when everything matters, it’s a horrifying experience navigating the world, because everything, every action, is filled with regret, and every action is filled with guilt in a way that can be crippling.”
Whereas if nothing matters, you are not responsible for the universe. Nothing is ordained, anything goes; do what you want, love whom you want. And those hot dog fingers go great with mustard and ketchup.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/scie ... 778d3e6de3
What Do Blind People Actually See?
To try to understand what it might be like to be blind, think about how it “looks” behind your head.
In 2004 Peter König made a special belt: one that always vibrated on the side of it facing north. Put on the belt and face north, and it would vibrate in the front; turn to face west and it vibrated on the right side. König, a cognitive scientist at the University Osnabrück, Germany, gave it to a man named Udo Wächter to wear as part of a pilot study. After just six weeks, Wächter had developed an amazing and much-improved sense of direction. Even in a town 100 miles away, he could immediately point to his home.
You might know the direction of north at any moment, based on your surroundings, but we infer it from landmarks we see around us. We can’t sense north in the same way that a loggerhead turtle, a migrating bird, or even Udo Wächter could.
What does a blind person see? (It seems that blind people get asked this all the time.) Your first guess might be that she sees a vast blackness. But imagine telling a goose (who doesn’t know much about humans) that you can’t sense Earth’s magnetic field. The bird, baffled, asks, “So, what do you sense when you change the direction you’re facing??”
The answer, of course, is nothing. Just as blind people do not sense the color black, we do not sense anything at all in place of our lack of sensations for magnetic fields or ultraviolet light. We don’t know what we’re missing.
To try to understand what it might be like to be blind, think about how it “looks” behind your head. When you look at the scene in front of you, it has a boundary. Your visual field extends to each side only so far. If you spread your arms, and draw your hands back until they are no longer visible, what color is the space that your hands occupy? This space does not look black. It does not look white. It just isn’t.
Similarly, people with hemispatial neglect can’t see, and so ignore, one half of their visual field—either the right or left side. They eat only the food on the non-neglected side of their plate, for example. They don’t experience a black blob on the neglected side, blocking their vision. If they did, they’d intuitively sense that they have a problem. They don’t, just like we don’t sense a problem with not seeing behind us.
Blind people might not have perceptually driven visual imagery, but they use their other senses to encode spatial relationships. For example, suppose you take off your high heels under the table at a restaurant. When it’s time to get up, you might feel around with your feet for them, right them, and put them on, all without use of your eyes. You are able to do this because you are encoding spatial information with your haptic system, or sense of touch. The blind, too, use their other senses, such as hearing and touch, to form representations of the world.
This shows that the sensations (information delivered by organs like our eyes) can be distinct from perceptions (ideas about sensations formed by our brains). A similar memory encoding can be created with input from different senses. You can get a sense of distance of something from your eyes, ears, hands, and even your nose. All of these senses can map to spatial information that is usually thought of as visual.
That is what happened to Mr. Wächter with his belt. His brain, exhibiting plasticity, was able to map the vibrations felt on the skin of his waist to his sense of direction previously informed only by vision.
When the belt experiment was over, Wächter felt lost. For the most part, he did not feel a vague, directionless vibration in place of the real vibrations he’d previously sensed—although he did at times feel some “phantom” vibrations.
He felt the loss psychologically, but without the belt, he was experiencing the same thing you do when you try to look at what’s behind your head.
Nothing.
Jim Davies is an associate professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, where he is director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory.
https://nautil.us/what-do-blind-people- ... -see-2305/
The Milky Way’s Black Hole Comes to Light
The Event Horizon Telescope has once again caught sight of the “unseeable.”
The first direct image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.Credit...Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/National Science Foundation
Astronomers announced on Thursday that they had pierced the veil of darkness and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of “the gentle giant” dwelling there: a supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of four million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and violently bent space-time.
The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing empty space. Oohs and aahs broke out at the National Press Club in Washington when Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona displayed what she called “the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.” She added: “It seems that black holes like doughnuts.”
Dr. Özel is part of the Event Horizon Telescope project, a collaboration of more than 300 scientists from 13 institutions that operates an ever-growing global network of telescopes that compose one large telescope as big as Earth. The team’s results were published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“I met this black hole 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand it since,” Dr. Özel said. “But until now, we didn’t have the direct picture.”
In 2019, the same team captured an image of the black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, or M87. That image, the first ever taken of a black hole, is now enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “We have seen what we thought was ‘unseeable,’” Sheperd Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said at the time.
Astronomers said the new result would lead to a better understanding of gravity, galaxy evolution and how even placid-seeming clouds of stars like our own majestic pinwheel of stars, the Milky Way, can generate quasars, enormous geysers of energy that can be seen across the universe.
The news also reaffirms a prescient 1971 paper by Martin Rees of Cambridge University and his colleague Donald Lynden-Bell, who died in 2018, suggesting that supermassive black holes were the energy source of quasars. In an email, Dr. Rees called the new result “a logistical achievement (and I liked the computer models).”
Dr. Özel said that the similarity of the new picture to the one from 2019 demonstrated that the earlier image was not a coincidence. In an interview, Peter Galison, a physicist and historian at Harvard and a member of the collaboration, noted that the M87 black hole was 1,500 times as massive as the Milky Way’s; typically in physics or astronomy, when something increases by a factor of 10 or more, everything changes. “The similitude across such an immense scale is astonishing,” Dr. Galison said.
More and video of the presentation at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/scie ... 778d3e6de3
The first direct image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.Credit...Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/National Science Foundation
Astronomers announced on Thursday that they had pierced the veil of darkness and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of “the gentle giant” dwelling there: a supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of four million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and violently bent space-time.
The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing empty space. Oohs and aahs broke out at the National Press Club in Washington when Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona displayed what she called “the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.” She added: “It seems that black holes like doughnuts.”
Dr. Özel is part of the Event Horizon Telescope project, a collaboration of more than 300 scientists from 13 institutions that operates an ever-growing global network of telescopes that compose one large telescope as big as Earth. The team’s results were published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“I met this black hole 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand it since,” Dr. Özel said. “But until now, we didn’t have the direct picture.”
In 2019, the same team captured an image of the black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, or M87. That image, the first ever taken of a black hole, is now enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “We have seen what we thought was ‘unseeable,’” Sheperd Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said at the time.
Astronomers said the new result would lead to a better understanding of gravity, galaxy evolution and how even placid-seeming clouds of stars like our own majestic pinwheel of stars, the Milky Way, can generate quasars, enormous geysers of energy that can be seen across the universe.
The news also reaffirms a prescient 1971 paper by Martin Rees of Cambridge University and his colleague Donald Lynden-Bell, who died in 2018, suggesting that supermassive black holes were the energy source of quasars. In an email, Dr. Rees called the new result “a logistical achievement (and I liked the computer models).”
Dr. Özel said that the similarity of the new picture to the one from 2019 demonstrated that the earlier image was not a coincidence. In an interview, Peter Galison, a physicist and historian at Harvard and a member of the collaboration, noted that the M87 black hole was 1,500 times as massive as the Milky Way’s; typically in physics or astronomy, when something increases by a factor of 10 or more, everything changes. “The similitude across such an immense scale is astonishing,” Dr. Galison said.
More and video of the presentation at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Under Anesthesia, Where Do Our Minds Go?
To better understand our brains and design safer anesthesia, scientists are turning to EEG.
After experimenting on a hen, his dog, his goldfish, and himself, dentist William Morton was ready. On Oct. 16, 1846, he hurried to the Massachusetts General Hospital surgical theater for what would be the first successful public test of a general anesthetic.
His concoction of sulfuric ether and oil from an orange (just for the fragrance) knocked a young man unconscious while a surgeon cut a tumor from his neck. To the onlooking students and clinicians, it was like a miracle. Some alchemical reaction between the ether and the man’s brain allowed him to slip into a state akin to light sleep, to undergo what should have been a painful surgery with little discomfort, and then to return to himself with only a hazy memory of the experience.
Monitoring patients’ brains still isn’t something that medical boards require.
General anesthesia redefined surgery and medicine, but over a century later it still carries significant risks. Too much sedation can lead to neurocognitive disorders and may even shorten lifespan; too little can lead to traumatic and painful wakefulness during surgery. So far, scientists have learned that, generally speaking, anesthetic drugs render people unconscious by altering how parts of the brain communicate. But they still don’t fully understand why. Although anesthesia works primarily on the brain, anesthesiologists do not regularly monitor the brain when they put patients under. And it is only in the past decade that neuroscientists interested in altered states of consciousness have begun taking advantage of anesthesia as a research tool. “It’s the central irony,” of anesthesiology, says George Mashour, a University of Michigan neuroanesthesiologist, whose work entails keeping patients unconscious during neurosurgery and providing appropriate pain management.
Mashour is one of a small set of clinicians and scientists trying to change that. They are increasingly bringing the tools of neuroscience into the operating room to track the brain activity of patients, and testing out anesthesia on healthy study participants. These pioneers aim to learn how to more safely anesthetize their patients, tailoring the dose to individual patients and adjusting during surgery. They also want to better understand what governs the transitions between states of consciousness and even hope to crack the code of coma.
More...
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Why We Need to Study Nothing
The origins of the universe may be hidden in the voids of space
Lead image: The dwarf galaxy KK 246 is a lonely island of stars in the Local Void, an otherwise empty region some 150 million light-years across. Credit: NASA.
Beginning in the 1970s cosmologists started to uncover the structure of the universe writ large. They already knew that galaxies occasionally clump together into clusters, but over even larger distances, spanning 100 million light-years and more, they found superclusters. And in between those superclusters they saw something even more unexpected: vast regions devoid of galaxies, great and immense dark hollows. The first of these cosmic voids that cosmologists discovered was 65 million light-years across. No theoretical work had predicted their existence, and for years cosmologists thought they were creating patterns with their imaginations.
We now realize that the largest structures in the universe are not superclusters or any other agglomeration of matter. They are the voids: the negative spaces, the intergalactic Saharas.
I was introduced to voids by my mentor Ben Wandelt while I was in grad school. He was fascinated by them; they appeared too empty to be explained by standard cosmology. My graduate advisor, Paul Ricker, and I worked with Wandelt on this problem for a while. But like most cosmologists, even though I knew about the voids, I didn’t think much of them. I favored galaxies and clusters. Voids were nothing, after all.
You could stretch 25 Milky Ways side-by-side in the gap between us and the nearest galaxy.
But after I got my Ph.D. I moved to Paris to join Wandelt for a postdoc position. Voids began to grow on me. I remember vividly the reactions we would get when we presented our preliminary work. Curiosity and interest, for sure, but also skepticism—not just the healthy skepticism needed for fruitful scientific progress, but the acidic scorn used to put junior scientists and their wayward ideas in their proper place. One time a prominent cosmologist—a senior, tenured professor—walked up to me in the hallway after I gave a talk at a conference, said simply “This will never work,” and turned around and walked away.
I didn’t mind the criticism because I knew something they didn’t. Cosmic voids are cosmology at its purest. They are simple. The complications of star formation and black holes don’t impact them because they don’t have any stars or black holes. They are basically big fossils from the earliest days of the universe and their shapes encode the evolution of the universe as a whole. If you want to understand some of the biggest puzzles in physical science, such as dark energy, you don’t want to look where the matter is, but where it isn’t.
Our most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, has been traveling for over four decades and is now about 14.5 billion miles away from home. It is well and truly outside the boundaries of the solar system, and the average density within that space is a mere 10-15 grams per cubic centimeter. If that seems empty, just wait.
As we zoom out, we meet scattered stars, some of them associating with each other in clumps, others drifting alone. We see faint sketches of the great spiral arms of our galaxy, twisting pinwheels of gas and blue-bright stars, our own solar system tucked into a single spur of a much vaster arch. Our entire Milky Way galaxy is roughly 100,000 light-years across—a great, complicated metropolis of a few hundred billion stars. It has an average density of roughly 10-22 grams per cubic centimeter.
Beyond the warm confines of our galaxy sit the empty depths of intergalactic space, home to the occasional dwarf galaxy and the random flows of far-flung gas streams. The nearest major galaxy to our own, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light-years away. You could stretch 25 Milky Ways side-by-side in the gap between us.
COSMIC WEB: As matter clumped into filaments and formed galaxies, it left vast empty regions: the voids. This sequence of three images shows structure in cosmic gas in a volume about 300 million light-years on a side, at 1 billion years after the Big Bang (left), 3 billion years (middle), and today (today). It was generated by the Millennium Simulation Project, a massive computer simulation in the mid-2000s. Image by Volker Springel / Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching.
Some galaxies lead solitary lives, and others assemble into groups and clusters of increasing size. As we continue to zoom out, entire galaxies, each one home to hundreds of billions of stars, appear as tiny motes of light adrift in an unlit ocean. The universe begins to look like a vast web, a network of long strings and tremendous walls, and between them the voids. We have a name for the nearby assortment of large-scale structures: Laniakea, the Hawaiian word for “bountiful heaven.” A knotted, twisted tangle of vines made of galaxies stretches for over 100 million light-years. At these distances the average density of matter approaches 10-29 grams per cubic centimeter.
And in those cavernous gaps between the structures, we find: almost nothing. There the density plunges to perhaps 10–30 grams per cubic centimeter. That is, to be sure, not entirely empty. Voids do contain a few dim, dwarf galaxies. Molecules of cold hydrogen and helium float among them, some blown out of their home galaxies, the rest left over from the Big Bang.
The nearest void to our Milky Way galaxy is the appropriately named Local Void, bordering our section of the universe and continuing on for almost 200 million light-years. The aptly named Giant Void is eight times wider. Voids comprise a tiny fraction of the mass in the cosmos, yet completely dominate its volume.
A cosmos that generates large-scale structures must, by its very nature, also produce the voids. The culprit is gravity: simple, persistent gravity.
Once cosmologists realized this story of creation, they realized they must turn the tables.
Billions of years ago, when the entire volume of our observable universe, 90 billion-plus light-years across, was crammed into a volume smaller than an atom, the exotic high-temperature plasma that filled our cosmos was relatively uniform. There were no significant density contrasts, and really nothing significant at all. Cosmologists believe that at this time, our universe underwent a sudden, rapid expansion known as inflation. It enlarged microscopic quantum fluctuations into the seeds of all we see today.
From then, gravity worked in the shadows. Regions of ever-so-slightly higher density had a little more gravitational pull than their neighbors, which encouraged more material to flow into those dense pockets. With even more material, the gravitational pull grew stronger, building on itself in a feedback loop. Over hundreds of millions of years, it gave rise to stars, galaxies, clusters, and the majesty of the cosmic web.
But in a universe where the rich get richer, the poor must get poorer. As matter flowed into the dense regions that would light up with stars and activity, the cosmic voids, seeded in those very same humble epochs, grew to their present all-encompassing size.
Once cosmologists realized this story of creation and confirmed it with observations, they realized they must turn the tables. The large-scale structure was not a question, but an answer. By measuring it, they could solve some of their other puzzles. The shape of the cosmic web is sensitive to the amount of regular and dark matter, the abundance of neutrinos, the presence of dark energy, and so on. So cosmologists sampled hundreds of thousands, then millions, of galaxies throughout the universe to map the large-scale structure in an attempt to quantify the basic ingredients of the cosmos.
Those surveys focused on what astronomers knew best: the bright objects. The cosmic voids were forgotten.
Those galaxy surveys have revealed ever-more precise estimates of the amount of dark matter in the universe. They have also provided independent evidence for the existence of dark energy, the mysterious substance that is driving the accelerated expansion of the universe.
But it hasn’t been easy. Galaxies and clusters are messy, complicated structures. The primordial density fluctuations have been swamped by generations of stars, supernovae, stellar winds, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and all the wonderful astrophysics that makes life so interesting.
Teasing pristine, primordial cosmological information out of something as complicated as a galaxy or a cluster is next to impossible. Take a simple cosmological test developed by Charles Alcock and Bohdan Paczyński in 1979. If you scattered perfect spheres throughout the universe, from our point of view the spheres would appear to be elongated along our line of sight toward them—a slight stretch induced by the expansion of the universe. If you could measure that stretch as a function of distance, you could reconstruct the expansion history of the universe with incredible precision.
Clusters of galaxies are, for the most part, relatively spherical. They formed long ago and have since settled into equilibrium, balancing the motions of their own gas and galaxies against their gravitational pull. But trying to apply the Alcock-Paczyński test leads to failure. The motions of individual galaxies are hundreds of times larger than the effect of cosmological expansion, completely swamping it and rendering clusters useless.
Cosmic voids are the largest and most ancient time capsules known to science.
But what of the voids? An individual void is anything but round; it occupies a random amount of volume in a wide variety of shapes. But we live in an isotropic universe: Our cosmos looks roughly the same, on average, no matter what direction we look. If we were to take a collection of voids, they should have random orientations, and if we were to find enough of them and stack them one on top of another, they should average out to form a sphere. If I give you enough scraps of randomly shaped paper and you stack them on top of each other, eventually you would build something round. Could the average void be good enough to teach us something about the universe?
This was what I worked on with Wandelt. It would consume three years of my research life. As more researchers and graduate students joined our team, I hit the road, living out of my backpack for weeks at a time, hopping from seminar to seminar and conference to conference, spreading what we were learning about cosmic voids and what they could teach us about the universe.
We learned that voids are amazingly simple. Unlike their cousins, the dense structures of the cosmos, they live relatively uncomplicated lives. They simply appear in the early universe and grow. When they do occasionally merge, it’s a brief affair: A wall of galaxies between two voids thins out, and two voids become one. Because of their simplicity, they remained relatively uncontaminated by astrophysical processes and the movements of individual galaxies. Within a couple years, we were able to realize the dream of Alcock and Paczyński, applying their test to real voids found in galaxy surveys and using the result to provide an independent measurement of the amount of dark matter and dark energy in the universe.
Because voids don’t change much through their lives, they retain a memory of the young universe. If you want to know what our universe was like billions of years ago, you can’t look into a galaxy or cluster—too much has changed. But a void? A void today is pretty much the same as a void billions of years ago. Voids are the largest and most ancient time capsules known to science.
When I say that voids are empty, I mean specifically that they are empty of matter. But that emptiness makes them full of something else: dark energy. Cosmologists aren’t sure what dark energy is; all we know is that it’s been causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate for the past 5 billion years. We believe that dark energy is somehow related to the vacuum of spacetime, a component of all the quantum fields that suffuse reality.
If you take a box and empty it of all the matter, you’re left with vacuum and the quantum vacuum fields that live in it. On a grander scale, the cosmic voids are brimming with quantum fields, including dark energy. You’ll never feel the effects of dark energy inside a solar system because the density of all the matter is more than enough to overwhelm the slight, subtle effects of dark energy. But out in the voids? It’s nothing but dark energy. Indeed, the cosmic voids are the places in our universe where the expansion is accelerating. It’s not happening in galaxies or clusters, but in the emptiness between them.
The lesson is clear: If you want to understand how dark energy works, you have to dive into the darkness.
Thanks to the dogged determination of my collaborators and other void-enthusiasts, voids have come out of the shadows. Every major upcoming galaxy survey now includes void science in their repertoire. Cosmologists are learning how to use voids to understand dark energy and dark matter, search for exotic fifth forces, dig into the conditions of the early cosmos, and more. Most recently, voids have provided the most powerful measurement of dark energy within the local universe, using simple analysis techniques developed by a handful of people, compared against the massive resources employed by giant collaborations to try to get the same information out of the bright structures.
No, we haven’t yet solved all the mysteries of the cosmos. But the answers to those questions are certainly waiting for us in the void.
Paul M. Sutter is a research professor in astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. He is the author of Your Place in the Universe: Understanding our Big, Messy Existence.
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Lead image: The dwarf galaxy KK 246 is a lonely island of stars in the Local Void, an otherwise empty region some 150 million light-years across. Credit: NASA.
Beginning in the 1970s cosmologists started to uncover the structure of the universe writ large. They already knew that galaxies occasionally clump together into clusters, but over even larger distances, spanning 100 million light-years and more, they found superclusters. And in between those superclusters they saw something even more unexpected: vast regions devoid of galaxies, great and immense dark hollows. The first of these cosmic voids that cosmologists discovered was 65 million light-years across. No theoretical work had predicted their existence, and for years cosmologists thought they were creating patterns with their imaginations.
We now realize that the largest structures in the universe are not superclusters or any other agglomeration of matter. They are the voids: the negative spaces, the intergalactic Saharas.
I was introduced to voids by my mentor Ben Wandelt while I was in grad school. He was fascinated by them; they appeared too empty to be explained by standard cosmology. My graduate advisor, Paul Ricker, and I worked with Wandelt on this problem for a while. But like most cosmologists, even though I knew about the voids, I didn’t think much of them. I favored galaxies and clusters. Voids were nothing, after all.
You could stretch 25 Milky Ways side-by-side in the gap between us and the nearest galaxy.
But after I got my Ph.D. I moved to Paris to join Wandelt for a postdoc position. Voids began to grow on me. I remember vividly the reactions we would get when we presented our preliminary work. Curiosity and interest, for sure, but also skepticism—not just the healthy skepticism needed for fruitful scientific progress, but the acidic scorn used to put junior scientists and their wayward ideas in their proper place. One time a prominent cosmologist—a senior, tenured professor—walked up to me in the hallway after I gave a talk at a conference, said simply “This will never work,” and turned around and walked away.
I didn’t mind the criticism because I knew something they didn’t. Cosmic voids are cosmology at its purest. They are simple. The complications of star formation and black holes don’t impact them because they don’t have any stars or black holes. They are basically big fossils from the earliest days of the universe and their shapes encode the evolution of the universe as a whole. If you want to understand some of the biggest puzzles in physical science, such as dark energy, you don’t want to look where the matter is, but where it isn’t.
Our most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, has been traveling for over four decades and is now about 14.5 billion miles away from home. It is well and truly outside the boundaries of the solar system, and the average density within that space is a mere 10-15 grams per cubic centimeter. If that seems empty, just wait.
As we zoom out, we meet scattered stars, some of them associating with each other in clumps, others drifting alone. We see faint sketches of the great spiral arms of our galaxy, twisting pinwheels of gas and blue-bright stars, our own solar system tucked into a single spur of a much vaster arch. Our entire Milky Way galaxy is roughly 100,000 light-years across—a great, complicated metropolis of a few hundred billion stars. It has an average density of roughly 10-22 grams per cubic centimeter.
Beyond the warm confines of our galaxy sit the empty depths of intergalactic space, home to the occasional dwarf galaxy and the random flows of far-flung gas streams. The nearest major galaxy to our own, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light-years away. You could stretch 25 Milky Ways side-by-side in the gap between us.
COSMIC WEB: As matter clumped into filaments and formed galaxies, it left vast empty regions: the voids. This sequence of three images shows structure in cosmic gas in a volume about 300 million light-years on a side, at 1 billion years after the Big Bang (left), 3 billion years (middle), and today (today). It was generated by the Millennium Simulation Project, a massive computer simulation in the mid-2000s. Image by Volker Springel / Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching.
Some galaxies lead solitary lives, and others assemble into groups and clusters of increasing size. As we continue to zoom out, entire galaxies, each one home to hundreds of billions of stars, appear as tiny motes of light adrift in an unlit ocean. The universe begins to look like a vast web, a network of long strings and tremendous walls, and between them the voids. We have a name for the nearby assortment of large-scale structures: Laniakea, the Hawaiian word for “bountiful heaven.” A knotted, twisted tangle of vines made of galaxies stretches for over 100 million light-years. At these distances the average density of matter approaches 10-29 grams per cubic centimeter.
And in those cavernous gaps between the structures, we find: almost nothing. There the density plunges to perhaps 10–30 grams per cubic centimeter. That is, to be sure, not entirely empty. Voids do contain a few dim, dwarf galaxies. Molecules of cold hydrogen and helium float among them, some blown out of their home galaxies, the rest left over from the Big Bang.
The nearest void to our Milky Way galaxy is the appropriately named Local Void, bordering our section of the universe and continuing on for almost 200 million light-years. The aptly named Giant Void is eight times wider. Voids comprise a tiny fraction of the mass in the cosmos, yet completely dominate its volume.
A cosmos that generates large-scale structures must, by its very nature, also produce the voids. The culprit is gravity: simple, persistent gravity.
Once cosmologists realized this story of creation, they realized they must turn the tables.
Billions of years ago, when the entire volume of our observable universe, 90 billion-plus light-years across, was crammed into a volume smaller than an atom, the exotic high-temperature plasma that filled our cosmos was relatively uniform. There were no significant density contrasts, and really nothing significant at all. Cosmologists believe that at this time, our universe underwent a sudden, rapid expansion known as inflation. It enlarged microscopic quantum fluctuations into the seeds of all we see today.
From then, gravity worked in the shadows. Regions of ever-so-slightly higher density had a little more gravitational pull than their neighbors, which encouraged more material to flow into those dense pockets. With even more material, the gravitational pull grew stronger, building on itself in a feedback loop. Over hundreds of millions of years, it gave rise to stars, galaxies, clusters, and the majesty of the cosmic web.
But in a universe where the rich get richer, the poor must get poorer. As matter flowed into the dense regions that would light up with stars and activity, the cosmic voids, seeded in those very same humble epochs, grew to their present all-encompassing size.
Once cosmologists realized this story of creation and confirmed it with observations, they realized they must turn the tables. The large-scale structure was not a question, but an answer. By measuring it, they could solve some of their other puzzles. The shape of the cosmic web is sensitive to the amount of regular and dark matter, the abundance of neutrinos, the presence of dark energy, and so on. So cosmologists sampled hundreds of thousands, then millions, of galaxies throughout the universe to map the large-scale structure in an attempt to quantify the basic ingredients of the cosmos.
Those surveys focused on what astronomers knew best: the bright objects. The cosmic voids were forgotten.
Those galaxy surveys have revealed ever-more precise estimates of the amount of dark matter in the universe. They have also provided independent evidence for the existence of dark energy, the mysterious substance that is driving the accelerated expansion of the universe.
But it hasn’t been easy. Galaxies and clusters are messy, complicated structures. The primordial density fluctuations have been swamped by generations of stars, supernovae, stellar winds, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and all the wonderful astrophysics that makes life so interesting.
Teasing pristine, primordial cosmological information out of something as complicated as a galaxy or a cluster is next to impossible. Take a simple cosmological test developed by Charles Alcock and Bohdan Paczyński in 1979. If you scattered perfect spheres throughout the universe, from our point of view the spheres would appear to be elongated along our line of sight toward them—a slight stretch induced by the expansion of the universe. If you could measure that stretch as a function of distance, you could reconstruct the expansion history of the universe with incredible precision.
Clusters of galaxies are, for the most part, relatively spherical. They formed long ago and have since settled into equilibrium, balancing the motions of their own gas and galaxies against their gravitational pull. But trying to apply the Alcock-Paczyński test leads to failure. The motions of individual galaxies are hundreds of times larger than the effect of cosmological expansion, completely swamping it and rendering clusters useless.
Cosmic voids are the largest and most ancient time capsules known to science.
But what of the voids? An individual void is anything but round; it occupies a random amount of volume in a wide variety of shapes. But we live in an isotropic universe: Our cosmos looks roughly the same, on average, no matter what direction we look. If we were to take a collection of voids, they should have random orientations, and if we were to find enough of them and stack them one on top of another, they should average out to form a sphere. If I give you enough scraps of randomly shaped paper and you stack them on top of each other, eventually you would build something round. Could the average void be good enough to teach us something about the universe?
This was what I worked on with Wandelt. It would consume three years of my research life. As more researchers and graduate students joined our team, I hit the road, living out of my backpack for weeks at a time, hopping from seminar to seminar and conference to conference, spreading what we were learning about cosmic voids and what they could teach us about the universe.
We learned that voids are amazingly simple. Unlike their cousins, the dense structures of the cosmos, they live relatively uncomplicated lives. They simply appear in the early universe and grow. When they do occasionally merge, it’s a brief affair: A wall of galaxies between two voids thins out, and two voids become one. Because of their simplicity, they remained relatively uncontaminated by astrophysical processes and the movements of individual galaxies. Within a couple years, we were able to realize the dream of Alcock and Paczyński, applying their test to real voids found in galaxy surveys and using the result to provide an independent measurement of the amount of dark matter and dark energy in the universe.
Because voids don’t change much through their lives, they retain a memory of the young universe. If you want to know what our universe was like billions of years ago, you can’t look into a galaxy or cluster—too much has changed. But a void? A void today is pretty much the same as a void billions of years ago. Voids are the largest and most ancient time capsules known to science.
When I say that voids are empty, I mean specifically that they are empty of matter. But that emptiness makes them full of something else: dark energy. Cosmologists aren’t sure what dark energy is; all we know is that it’s been causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate for the past 5 billion years. We believe that dark energy is somehow related to the vacuum of spacetime, a component of all the quantum fields that suffuse reality.
If you take a box and empty it of all the matter, you’re left with vacuum and the quantum vacuum fields that live in it. On a grander scale, the cosmic voids are brimming with quantum fields, including dark energy. You’ll never feel the effects of dark energy inside a solar system because the density of all the matter is more than enough to overwhelm the slight, subtle effects of dark energy. But out in the voids? It’s nothing but dark energy. Indeed, the cosmic voids are the places in our universe where the expansion is accelerating. It’s not happening in galaxies or clusters, but in the emptiness between them.
The lesson is clear: If you want to understand how dark energy works, you have to dive into the darkness.
Thanks to the dogged determination of my collaborators and other void-enthusiasts, voids have come out of the shadows. Every major upcoming galaxy survey now includes void science in their repertoire. Cosmologists are learning how to use voids to understand dark energy and dark matter, search for exotic fifth forces, dig into the conditions of the early cosmos, and more. Most recently, voids have provided the most powerful measurement of dark energy within the local universe, using simple analysis techniques developed by a handful of people, compared against the massive resources employed by giant collaborations to try to get the same information out of the bright structures.
No, we haven’t yet solved all the mysteries of the cosmos. But the answers to those questions are certainly waiting for us in the void.
Paul M. Sutter is a research professor in astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. He is the author of Your Place in the Universe: Understanding our Big, Messy Existence.
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The Trouble With “The Big Bang”
Lead image: “Tarantula Nebula,” captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. (Learn more here.) Courtesy of NASA.
A rash of recent articles illustrates a longstanding confusion over the famous term.
BY SABINE HOSSENFELDER
September 11, 2022
Did the Big Bang happen? Has the James Webb Space Telescope found evidence against the Big Bang? If astrophysicists are sure the Big Bang happened, why do they also think the universe was born from a quantum fluctuation? And what does this have to do with dark matter?
I can’t blame readers for being confused by recent new stories about the Big Bang. The article that kicked them off, “The Big Bang Didn’t Happen,” is bad enough. But some of the rebuttals also don’t get it right. The problem is that writers conflate ideas in astrophysics and use the term “Big Bang” incorrectly. Let me set the record straight.
Let’s call Big Bang #1 the beginning of the universe. It’s what most people think the expression means. This Big Bang is what we find in the mathematics of Einstein’s general relativity if we extrapolate the current expansion of the universe back in time. The equations say that matter and energy in the universe becomes denser and hotter until, eventually, about 13.7 billion years in the past, both density and temperature become infinite. We cannot extrapolate any further back in time, so it’s fair to say that this event, if it happened, would be the beginning of the universe.
I can’t blame readers for being confused by recent new stories about the Big Bang.
This Big Bang is sometimes more specifically called the Big Bang Singularity. This word has somewhat fallen out of favor among physicists, partly because it’s clumsy, but also because I don’t know anyone who thinks this singularity is physically real. Its appearance almost certainly tells us that Einstein’s theory breaks down under extreme conditions. If energy density becomes very large, then space and time curve very strongly, and eventually quantum effects of spacetime become important. To describe those correctly, we would need a theory of quantum gravity—a theory for the quantum properties of space and time—which we don’t have. If we had it, it would probably remove the singularity.
This is what happens in all other theories in which we have singularities popping up: They are mathematical artifacts that stem from using a theory in a range where it should no longer be applied. An example may be the singularity in the surface curvature of a water drop, as it pinches off a tap. This singularity disappears if one considers that the water is made of molecules. What was formerly a point of infinite curvature is now a molecule like all the others.
Einstein’s theory breaks down about 10-43 seconds before the mathematical singularity, a unit also known as the Planck time. Since physicists don’t believe the singularity is real, the phrase “Big Bang” has come to refer to whatever event might replace the singularity in the to-be-found theory of quantum gravity in this Planck time. Let’s call it just that—the Big Bang Event.
We have no evidence the Big Bang Event happened. We cannot look back in time anywhere near that long ago. The earliest direct observation we have is the formation of the cosmic microwave background, which was formed about 400,000 years after the hypothetical Big Bang Event. Be careful: If you Google for the time at which the microwave background was formed, you will get the answer that it was formed 13.7 billion years ago and that might look like it was formed at the Big Bang Event. But that’s because the figure is rounded.
We understand quite well how matter behaves at energy densities somewhat above those at which the microwave background must have formed, so we trust that our extrapolations back in time are correct until we reach an energy density that roughly corresponds to that which the Large Hadron Collider probes, which brings us to about 10-12 seconds before the hypothetical Big Bang Event. We know nothing about what matter does at higher energy density—even the density in neutron stars is lower than that.
Now, 10-12 seconds isn’t much in human terms, but to get from there to the Big Bang Event, we’d still have to extrapolate over more than 50 orders of magnitude in energy density. That’s 50 orders of magnitude for which we have only speculation. This means the Big Bang Event might happen in our mathematics, but we have no observations that can tell us it happened in reality. Indeed, I think we will never have any observations that confirm the Big Bang Event. Some of my colleagues in astrophysics may disagree. But be that as it may, at least for now we just don’t know how the universe began.
The James Webb Space Telescope doesn’t tell us anything about the Big Bang Event.
That we have no evidence for (or against) the Big Bang Event is the reason why physicists have a large number of different hypotheses for the beginning of our universe. Besides the Big Bang Event, our universe could have been born out of a black hole; or it could have come about in a collision of higher-dimensional membranes; or it could have started as a big network in a non-geometric phase; or our universe could cycle through eons, as Roger Penrose has proposed. The most popular idea now is that our universe was born out of a fluctuation in a quantum field. All these alternative ideas to the Big Bang Event are possible because we cannot look back in time far enough to tell them apart.
The James Webb Space Telescope is an amazing instrument. It looks at young stars and galaxies that were formed long after the cosmic microwave background, at about 200 million years. That’s impressive, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the Big Bang Event, or its alternatives.
The problem has long been that the term Big Bang is used to refer to the expansion of the universe in general, and not to the event of the creation of the universe in particular. These are, however, two separate scientific hypotheses. We have overwhelmingly strong evidence that the universe expands (call it Big Bang #2), and we are confident about its history back to about the time of the electroweak phase transition, which is what the Large Hadron Collider probes. We have to date zero evidence for the beginning of the universe, whether it was a Big Bang Event or something else.
Historically, the first evidence for the expansion of the universe was Edwin Hubble’s observation that the light from other galaxies is systematically shifted to the red, indicating that they all recede from us. While this may have been the first evidence, the decisive evidence for the expansion of the universe was the discovery of the cosmic microwave background that ruled out the competing hypothesis, the “steady state” universe. As it often goes, the steady state hypothesis was then revised to accommodate the new data, but it is today considered summarily falsified, not just by the microwave background but also by what we know about the formation of structures in the universe.
This confusion between the expansion of the universe and the Big Bang Event becomes apparent, for example, just by looking at the Wikipedia entry for Big Bang. It starts out in the first paragraph referring to something called the “Big Bang theory,” and explains that this is the theory for the expansion of the universe. In the second paragraph, the Big Bang theory is distinguished from its extrapolation to the Big Bang singularity. But by the fourth paragraph the distinction has gotten lost, and we are informed, “A wide range of empirical evidence strongly favors the Big Bang, which is now essentially universally accepted.” The reader is misled to think that evidence for the expansion of the universe is evidence that the universe began with the Big Bang Event, which is incorrect.
It only adds to the confusion that the expansion of the universe is often conflated with a particular model for the expansion of the universe. In most cases, that’s the concordance model of the universe, sometimes also called the standard model of cosmology or ΛCDM—Λ being the cosmological constant and CDM standing for cold dark matter (call it Big Bang #3). However, there are a number of alternative models that give rise to a very similar expansion, for example a modification of gravity, which uses equations different from those of general relativity, but similar enough to reproduce the expansion.
So now the term Big Bang refers to three different hypotheses: The Big Bang Event that is the initial singularity, or whatever replaces it (no evidence); the expansion of the universe (extremely strong evidence); and a particular model for the expansion of the universe (largely compatible with evidence, but currently in some tension with data). Again, this confusion is exemplified on Wikipedia. If you scroll down in the Wikipedia article on the Big Bang, it turns into a discussion of the concordance model.
I have not seen or heard the term “Big Bang Theory” being used by a physicist in a seminar or paper for the expansion of the universe. If they refer to the expansion of the universe, they will either, well, just say “expansion of the universe,” or spell out which model for the expansion they are using.
Although the Webb telescope cannot tell us anything about the Big Bang Event and has not shed any doubt on the fact that the universe expands, it can tell us whether the formation of early galaxies is compatible with the concordance model, in particular with the hypothesis of dark matter. That’s because galaxy formation in a universe with dark matter is expected to proceed slowly and gradually. In this case, one does not expect young galaxies to be large. In a scenario with modified gravity, to the contrary, galaxies grow much faster—one does expect large galaxies at early times.
The tentative first evidence from the Webb telescope seems to show large galaxies at early times, which is a problem for the concordance model. However, the error bars on this data are currently large, and quite possibly the situation will change in the coming months. But at least for now, that’s the situation: Astrophysicists are both excited, and upset, that the Webb telescope data seem to cause trouble for the concordance model.
In the attention-grabbing article, “The Big Bang Never Happened,” Eric Lerner questions that the universe expands in the first place. His article was published in August by the Institute of Art and Ideas, a British organization that, by my own experience, prioritizes debate over scientific rigor.
Wikipedia exemplifies the confusion between the expansion of the universe and the creation event.
Lerner argues against the “cosmological establishment [that] has circled the wagons to protect this failed [Big Bang] theory with censorship,” presumably because Lerner has faced some difficulties in getting his alternative theory published. Under normal circumstances, an article that throws out a scientific theory that’s as well established as the expansion of the universe would have sunk to the bottom of the internet in about no time. But because of the confusion around the term “Big Bang,” Lerner’s claim has gathered traction. Lerner writes, for example, that the “images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting…the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since.” The images do no such thing.
It becomes clear, later in Lerner’s essay, that he is not attacking the Big Bang Event (which can reasonably be questioned) but the expansion of the universe. And because it is true that the Webb telescope has delivered data in tension with the concordance model, the reader (or editor) who does not know the difference, may get away finding Lerner’s piece reasonable.
But at least one popular article that debunks Lerner doesn’t clarify the debate but falls into the trap of conflating ideas. I can’t disagree with the headline, “No, James Webb Space Telescope Images Do Not Debunk the Big Bang,” but the explanation just contributes to the confusion.
“How did the universe come to be?” the article starts out. “The prevailing theory is everything that is began with the Big Bang. In a nutshell, the theory suggests everything, everywhere, all at once suddenly burst to life…The Big Bang theory is currently the best model we have for the birth of our universe.”
From the beginning, the article conflates the expansion of the universe with the creation event. Later in the article, the reader learns, “One of the chief reasons the Big Bang theory stands up is because of the cosmic microwave background.” But the cosmic microwave background emerged long after the Big Bang Event, if the Big Bang Event happened. The cosmic microwave background is merely evidence for the expansion of the universe, and that is, by itself, not enough evidence to single out a particular model for the expansion.
I am not particularly surprised by this debacle, having flagged this terminology confusion years ago. It can be cleared up by writers and scientists with a single rule. If you want to talk about the expansion of the universe, or a particular model for this expansion, then just spell out what you mean. And reserve the phrase “Big Bang” for the Big Bang Event. I understand the need to replace math with words when writing for non-experts, and “Big Bang” is a catchy term for sure. But we shouldn’t replace several different mathematical concepts with the same word. Using clear terminology benefits science communication and makes it harder for pseudoscience to gain hold.
Sabine Hossenfelder is a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies where she works on modifications of general relativity, phenomenological quantum gravity, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. Her latest book is Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. Follow her on Twitter @skdh.
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Re: Articles of Interest in Science
The trouble with technology
Maleeha Lodhi Published October 17, 2022 Updated about 22 hours ago
The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK & UN.
AN important global debate is underway about the disruptive impact of new technology. There is no doubt modern technology has been a force for good and responsible for innumerable positive developments — empowering people, improving lives, increasing productivity, advancing medical and scientific knowledge and transforming societies. Technological developments have helped to drive unprecedented social and economic progress. But the fourth industrial revolution has also involved the evolution of advance technologies that are creating disruption, new vulnerabilities and harmful repercussions, which are not fully understood, much less managed. A digitalized world is facing the challenge of cybersecurity as threats rise across the world. Data theft and fraud, cyberattacks and breaches of critical systems, electricity networks and financial markets are all part of rising risks.
Communication technology now dominates our lives like never before. It brings untold benefits but also presents new dangers. The phenomenon of fake news for example is not new. But its omnipresence today has much to do with digital technology, which has produced a proliferation of information channels and expansion of social media. Online platforms have become vehicles for the spread of misinformation. Fake news easily circulates due to the magnifying power of social media in a mostly unregulated environment. Anonymity in social media platforms gives trolls and purveyors of false stories the assurance they will not be held accountable for their lies or hate messages. So fake news is posted on social media without fear of retribution. ‘Deepfakes’ — doctored videos using artificial intelligence (AI) — are now commonly used to mislead and deceive.
The profit motive and business model of social media companies prevents them from instituting real checks on divisive and sensational content irrespective of whether it is true or false. That means ‘digital wildfires’ are rarely contained. Digital technology is also being abused to commit crimes, recruit terrorists and spread hate, all of which imperil societies. This presents challenges to social stability in what is now called the post-truth era.
Digital technology is also fuelling polarisation and divisiveness within countries. Studies have pointed to its disruptive impact on political systems and democracy. In an article in the European Journal of Futures Research in March 2022, the authors wrote that “In times of scepticism and a marked dependence on different types of AI in a network full of bots, trolls, and fakes, unprecedented standards of polarisation and intolerance are intensifying and crystallising with the coming to power of leaders of dubious democratic reputation”. The connection between the rise of right-wing populist leaders and their cynical but effective deployment of social media is now well established.
Artificial intelligence or machine intelligence presents many dangers such as invasion of privacy and compromise of multiple dimensions of security. The biggest threat posed by autonomous weapons systems is that they can take decisions and even strategies out of human hands. They can independently target and neutralise adversaries and operate without the benefit of human judgement or thoughtful calculation of risks. Today, AI is fuelling an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons in a new arena of superpower competition.
The book, co-authored by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI: And our Human Future, lays bare the dangers ahead. AI has ushered in a new period of human consciousness, say the authors (Schmidt is Google’s former CEO), which “augers a revolution in human affairs”. But this, they argue, can lead to human beings losing the ability to reason, reflect and conceptualise. It could in fact “permanently change our relationship with reality”.
Their discussion of the military uses of AI and how it is used to fight wars is especially instructive. AI would enhance conventional, nuclear and cyber capabilities in ways that would make security relations between rival powers more problematic and conflicts harder to limit. The authors say that in the nuclear era, the goal of national security strategy was deterrence. This depended on a set of key assumptions — the adversary’s known capabilities, recognised doctrines and predictable responses. Their core argument about the destabilising nature of AI weapons and cyber capabilities is that their value and efficacy stems from their “opacity and deniability and in some cases their operation at the ambiguous borders of disinformation, intelligence collection and sabotage … creating strategies without acknowledged doctrines”. They see this as leading to calamitous outcomes. They note the race for AI dominance between China and the US, which other countries are likely to join. AI capabilities are challenging the traditional notion of security and this intelligent book emphasises that the injection of “nonhuman logic to military systems” can result in disaster.
Advanced new generation military technologies are a source of increasing concern because of their wide implications for international peace and stability. The remote-control war waged by US-led Western forces in Afghanistan over two decades involved the use of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. This had serious consequences and resulted in the killing of innocent people. The use of a cyberweapon — the Stuxnet computer worm — by the US to target Iranian facilities in 2007 to degrade its nuclear program was the first attack of its kind. More recently, Russian and Ukrainian militaries are using remotely operated aerial platforms in the Ukraine conflict. Reliance on technology can confront countries at war with unexpected problems. For example, frontline Ukrainian soldiers have faced outages of the internet satellite service which was supposed to prevent Russian forces from using that technology. This digital disruption is reported to have caused a crucial loss of communication between Ukraine’s military forces.
Despite the risks and dangers of such new technologies, there is no international effort aimed at managing them much less regulating their use. There is no move by big powers for any dialogue on cyber and AI arms control. If the global internet can’t be regulated and giant, unaccountable social media companies continue to rake in excessive profits, there is even less prospect of mitigating the destabilizing effects of cyber and AI-enabled military capabilities.
The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK & UN.
Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2022
https://www.dawn.com/news/1715473/the-t ... technology
Maleeha Lodhi Published October 17, 2022 Updated about 22 hours ago
The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK & UN.
AN important global debate is underway about the disruptive impact of new technology. There is no doubt modern technology has been a force for good and responsible for innumerable positive developments — empowering people, improving lives, increasing productivity, advancing medical and scientific knowledge and transforming societies. Technological developments have helped to drive unprecedented social and economic progress. But the fourth industrial revolution has also involved the evolution of advance technologies that are creating disruption, new vulnerabilities and harmful repercussions, which are not fully understood, much less managed. A digitalized world is facing the challenge of cybersecurity as threats rise across the world. Data theft and fraud, cyberattacks and breaches of critical systems, electricity networks and financial markets are all part of rising risks.
Communication technology now dominates our lives like never before. It brings untold benefits but also presents new dangers. The phenomenon of fake news for example is not new. But its omnipresence today has much to do with digital technology, which has produced a proliferation of information channels and expansion of social media. Online platforms have become vehicles for the spread of misinformation. Fake news easily circulates due to the magnifying power of social media in a mostly unregulated environment. Anonymity in social media platforms gives trolls and purveyors of false stories the assurance they will not be held accountable for their lies or hate messages. So fake news is posted on social media without fear of retribution. ‘Deepfakes’ — doctored videos using artificial intelligence (AI) — are now commonly used to mislead and deceive.
The profit motive and business model of social media companies prevents them from instituting real checks on divisive and sensational content irrespective of whether it is true or false. That means ‘digital wildfires’ are rarely contained. Digital technology is also being abused to commit crimes, recruit terrorists and spread hate, all of which imperil societies. This presents challenges to social stability in what is now called the post-truth era.
Digital technology is also fuelling polarisation and divisiveness within countries. Studies have pointed to its disruptive impact on political systems and democracy. In an article in the European Journal of Futures Research in March 2022, the authors wrote that “In times of scepticism and a marked dependence on different types of AI in a network full of bots, trolls, and fakes, unprecedented standards of polarisation and intolerance are intensifying and crystallising with the coming to power of leaders of dubious democratic reputation”. The connection between the rise of right-wing populist leaders and their cynical but effective deployment of social media is now well established.
Artificial intelligence or machine intelligence presents many dangers such as invasion of privacy and compromise of multiple dimensions of security. The biggest threat posed by autonomous weapons systems is that they can take decisions and even strategies out of human hands. They can independently target and neutralise adversaries and operate without the benefit of human judgement or thoughtful calculation of risks. Today, AI is fuelling an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons in a new arena of superpower competition.
The book, co-authored by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI: And our Human Future, lays bare the dangers ahead. AI has ushered in a new period of human consciousness, say the authors (Schmidt is Google’s former CEO), which “augers a revolution in human affairs”. But this, they argue, can lead to human beings losing the ability to reason, reflect and conceptualise. It could in fact “permanently change our relationship with reality”.
Their discussion of the military uses of AI and how it is used to fight wars is especially instructive. AI would enhance conventional, nuclear and cyber capabilities in ways that would make security relations between rival powers more problematic and conflicts harder to limit. The authors say that in the nuclear era, the goal of national security strategy was deterrence. This depended on a set of key assumptions — the adversary’s known capabilities, recognised doctrines and predictable responses. Their core argument about the destabilising nature of AI weapons and cyber capabilities is that their value and efficacy stems from their “opacity and deniability and in some cases their operation at the ambiguous borders of disinformation, intelligence collection and sabotage … creating strategies without acknowledged doctrines”. They see this as leading to calamitous outcomes. They note the race for AI dominance between China and the US, which other countries are likely to join. AI capabilities are challenging the traditional notion of security and this intelligent book emphasises that the injection of “nonhuman logic to military systems” can result in disaster.
Advanced new generation military technologies are a source of increasing concern because of their wide implications for international peace and stability. The remote-control war waged by US-led Western forces in Afghanistan over two decades involved the use of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. This had serious consequences and resulted in the killing of innocent people. The use of a cyberweapon — the Stuxnet computer worm — by the US to target Iranian facilities in 2007 to degrade its nuclear program was the first attack of its kind. More recently, Russian and Ukrainian militaries are using remotely operated aerial platforms in the Ukraine conflict. Reliance on technology can confront countries at war with unexpected problems. For example, frontline Ukrainian soldiers have faced outages of the internet satellite service which was supposed to prevent Russian forces from using that technology. This digital disruption is reported to have caused a crucial loss of communication between Ukraine’s military forces.
Despite the risks and dangers of such new technologies, there is no international effort aimed at managing them much less regulating their use. There is no move by big powers for any dialogue on cyber and AI arms control. If the global internet can’t be regulated and giant, unaccountable social media companies continue to rake in excessive profits, there is even less prospect of mitigating the destabilizing effects of cyber and AI-enabled military capabilities.
The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK & UN.
Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2022
https://www.dawn.com/news/1715473/the-t ... technology
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Business Insider
Hubble vs. Webb: New NASA telescope reveals never-before-seen details from the early universe, within 400 million years after the Big Bang
Morgan McFall-Johnsen
Sat, November 5, 2022 at 6:45 AM
side by side image of james webb space telescope giant yellow mirror and hubble space telescope silver tube in orbit
The James Webb Space Telescope, left, is 100 times more powerful than Hubble, right.NASA/Chris Gunn; NASA
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is 100 times stronger than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Hubble showed astronomers a single galaxy in the early universe, but JWST revealed it was two mysterious objects.
Compare the images to glimpse how much JWST can teach us about the beginning of the universe.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is revealing new galaxies astronomers have never before seen, deep in the early universe.
Astronomers recently pointed JWST at an object called MACS0647-JD. It's extremely far away, and light takes time to travel, so looking at such a distant object is also looking back in time. MACS0647-JD is about 97% of the way back to the Big Bang, within the first 400 million years of the universe.
Dan Coe, a researcher with the Space Telescope Science Institute, first discovered it 10 years ago with the Hubble Space Telescope, which was previously NASA's most powerful space observatory.
"With Hubble, it was just this pale, red dot. We could tell it was really small, just a tiny galaxy in the first 400 million years of the universe. Now we look with Webb, and we're able to resolve TWO objects," Coe said in an October NASA release.
JWST is 100 times more powerful than Hubble, and its infrared lens allows it to peer much further into the deep universe and the distant past. Comparing the new JWST image to prior imagery from Hubble, astronomers discovered new features of one of the oldest galaxies ever seen.
gif compares hubble and jwst images of the same galaxy cluster highlighting new galaxies behind it
The Hubble and JWST images of MACS0647-JD.SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and Tiger Hsiao (Johns Hopkins University) IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
Both Hubble and JWST study the early universe through gravitational lensing. That's what happens when a cluster of distant galaxies is so massive that it warps space-time, bending the light from galaxies far in the distance behind it. That creates mirror images of those galaxies, reflected back at us.
So the imprint of the mysterious MACS0647-JD system appears in three spots in the images, above. Breakouts of those three images of the JD system, on the right, show how much clearer JWST's images are. They clearly show two different objects.
two faint dots one yellow one orange in space
One of the lensed images of MACS0647-JD, from the James Webb Space Telescope.SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, CSA, Dan Coe (STScI), Rebecca Larson (UT), Yu-Yang Hsiao (JHU) IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
"We're actively discussing whether these are two galaxies or two clumps of stars within a galaxy. We don't know, but these are the questions that Webb is designed to help us answer," Coe said.
The research hasn't been published yet, but the difference between the images is stark.
JWST could reveal galaxy mergers and other unseen action in the early universe
This image of galaxy pair VV 191 includes near-infrared light from Webb, and ultraviolet and visible light from Hubble.
A pair of interacting galaxies, imaged in near-infrared light from Webb, and ultraviolet and visible light from Hubble.NASA, ESA, CSA, Rogier Windhorst (ASU), William Keel (University of Alabama), Stuart Wyithe (University of Melbourne), JWST PEARLS Team, Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
One of the objects is more blue, which indicates that it has relatively young stars forming within it. The other is redder, indicating an older object with more dust between stars.
"We might be witnessing a galaxy merger in the very early universe. If this is the most distant merger, I will be really ecstatic," Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao, a PhD student who studied the images alongside Coe, said in the NASA release.
two galaxies merging one yellow one blue and pink
Two galaxies colliding and merging, as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.NASA, ESA, STScI, Julianne Dalcanton (Center for Computational Astrophysics / Flatiron Inst. and University of Washington); Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
JWST will likely reveal even more distant galaxies from the very beginning of the universe. That will help scientists piece together the history that's missing from its first 400 million years.
"Up to this point, we haven't really been able to study galaxies in the early universe in great detail. We had only tens of them prior to Webb. Studying them can help us understand how they evolved into the ones like the galaxy we live in today. And also, how the universe evolved throughout time," Rebecca Larson, another PhD student who studied the images, said in the NASA release.
She pointed out all the other minuscule dots in the new JWST image — each of them a faraway galaxy.
photo from Webb Space Telescope
The JWST image of the MACS0647-JD system, triply lensed by a massive galaxy cluster in front of it.SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, CSA, Dan Coe (STScI), Rebecca Larson (UT), Yu-Yang Hsiao (JHU) IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
"It's amazing the amount of information that we're getting that we just weren't able to see before," she said, adding, "And this is not a deep field. This is not a long exposure. We haven't even really tried to use this telescope to look at one spot for a long time. This is just the beginning!"
Read the original article on Business Insider
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/hu ... 00182.html
Hubble vs. Webb: New NASA telescope reveals never-before-seen details from the early universe, within 400 million years after the Big Bang
Morgan McFall-Johnsen
Sat, November 5, 2022 at 6:45 AM
side by side image of james webb space telescope giant yellow mirror and hubble space telescope silver tube in orbit
The James Webb Space Telescope, left, is 100 times more powerful than Hubble, right.NASA/Chris Gunn; NASA
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is 100 times stronger than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Hubble showed astronomers a single galaxy in the early universe, but JWST revealed it was two mysterious objects.
Compare the images to glimpse how much JWST can teach us about the beginning of the universe.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is revealing new galaxies astronomers have never before seen, deep in the early universe.
Astronomers recently pointed JWST at an object called MACS0647-JD. It's extremely far away, and light takes time to travel, so looking at such a distant object is also looking back in time. MACS0647-JD is about 97% of the way back to the Big Bang, within the first 400 million years of the universe.
Dan Coe, a researcher with the Space Telescope Science Institute, first discovered it 10 years ago with the Hubble Space Telescope, which was previously NASA's most powerful space observatory.
"With Hubble, it was just this pale, red dot. We could tell it was really small, just a tiny galaxy in the first 400 million years of the universe. Now we look with Webb, and we're able to resolve TWO objects," Coe said in an October NASA release.
JWST is 100 times more powerful than Hubble, and its infrared lens allows it to peer much further into the deep universe and the distant past. Comparing the new JWST image to prior imagery from Hubble, astronomers discovered new features of one of the oldest galaxies ever seen.
gif compares hubble and jwst images of the same galaxy cluster highlighting new galaxies behind it
The Hubble and JWST images of MACS0647-JD.SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and Tiger Hsiao (Johns Hopkins University) IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
Both Hubble and JWST study the early universe through gravitational lensing. That's what happens when a cluster of distant galaxies is so massive that it warps space-time, bending the light from galaxies far in the distance behind it. That creates mirror images of those galaxies, reflected back at us.
So the imprint of the mysterious MACS0647-JD system appears in three spots in the images, above. Breakouts of those three images of the JD system, on the right, show how much clearer JWST's images are. They clearly show two different objects.
two faint dots one yellow one orange in space
One of the lensed images of MACS0647-JD, from the James Webb Space Telescope.SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, CSA, Dan Coe (STScI), Rebecca Larson (UT), Yu-Yang Hsiao (JHU) IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
"We're actively discussing whether these are two galaxies or two clumps of stars within a galaxy. We don't know, but these are the questions that Webb is designed to help us answer," Coe said.
The research hasn't been published yet, but the difference between the images is stark.
JWST could reveal galaxy mergers and other unseen action in the early universe
This image of galaxy pair VV 191 includes near-infrared light from Webb, and ultraviolet and visible light from Hubble.
A pair of interacting galaxies, imaged in near-infrared light from Webb, and ultraviolet and visible light from Hubble.NASA, ESA, CSA, Rogier Windhorst (ASU), William Keel (University of Alabama), Stuart Wyithe (University of Melbourne), JWST PEARLS Team, Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
One of the objects is more blue, which indicates that it has relatively young stars forming within it. The other is redder, indicating an older object with more dust between stars.
"We might be witnessing a galaxy merger in the very early universe. If this is the most distant merger, I will be really ecstatic," Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao, a PhD student who studied the images alongside Coe, said in the NASA release.
two galaxies merging one yellow one blue and pink
Two galaxies colliding and merging, as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.NASA, ESA, STScI, Julianne Dalcanton (Center for Computational Astrophysics / Flatiron Inst. and University of Washington); Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
JWST will likely reveal even more distant galaxies from the very beginning of the universe. That will help scientists piece together the history that's missing from its first 400 million years.
"Up to this point, we haven't really been able to study galaxies in the early universe in great detail. We had only tens of them prior to Webb. Studying them can help us understand how they evolved into the ones like the galaxy we live in today. And also, how the universe evolved throughout time," Rebecca Larson, another PhD student who studied the images, said in the NASA release.
She pointed out all the other minuscule dots in the new JWST image — each of them a faraway galaxy.
photo from Webb Space Telescope
The JWST image of the MACS0647-JD system, triply lensed by a massive galaxy cluster in front of it.SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, CSA, Dan Coe (STScI), Rebecca Larson (UT), Yu-Yang Hsiao (JHU) IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
"It's amazing the amount of information that we're getting that we just weren't able to see before," she said, adding, "And this is not a deep field. This is not a long exposure. We haven't even really tried to use this telescope to look at one spot for a long time. This is just the beginning!"
Read the original article on Business Insider
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/hu ... 00182.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Musk hopeful of interface implants in human brains within six months
AFP Published December 2, 2022
SAN FRANCISCO: Tech billionaire Elon Musk said on Wednesday one of his companies would in six months be able to implant a device into a human brain that would allow communication with a computer.
The interface, produced by Musk’s start-up Neuralink, would allow the user to communicate directly with computers through their thoughts, he said.
“We’ve submitted I think most of our paperwork to the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) and we think probably in about six months we should be able to have our first Neuralink in a human,” he said in a company presentation.
“We’ve been working hard to be ready for our first human (implant), and obviously we want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device in a human,” he said.
Musk — who bought Twitter last month and also owns SpaceX, Tesla and several other companies — has been known to make ambitious predictions about his companies, with several not becoming reality. In July 2019, he vowed that Neuralink would be able to perform its first tests on humans in 2020.
The prototypes, which are the size of a coin, have been implanted in the skulls of monkeys.
At the Neuralink presentation, the company showed several monkeys “playing” basic video games or moving a cursor on a screen through their Neuralink implant. Musk said the company would try to use the implants to restore vision and mobility in humans.
“We would initially enable someone who has almost no ability to operate their muscles... and enable them to operate their phone faster than someone who has working hands,” he said.
“As miraculous as it may sound, we are confident that it is possible to restore full body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord,” he said.
Beyond the potential to treat neurological diseases, Musk’s ultimate goal is to ensure that humans are not intellectually overwhelmed by artificial intelligence, he said.
Other companies working on similar systems include Synchron, which announced in July that it had implanted the first brain-machine interface in the United States.
Twitter owner Elon Musk said he met with Apple chief Tim Cook on Wednesday and “resolved the misunderstanding” that prompted him to declare war on the iPhone maker’s App Store.
“Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store,” Musk tweeted.
“Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.” Musk also tweeted a video clip of “Apple’s beautiful HQ” in Cupertino, California, noting that he had had a “good conversation” with Cook.
The world’s richest person opened fire on the planet’s most valuable company early this week over fees and rules at the App Store, saying Apple had threatened to oust his recently acquired social media platform.
The billionaire CEO had tweeted that Apple “threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why.” Apple, which has not issued a public statement on the matter, typically tells developers if fixes need to be implemented in apps to conform to App Store policies.
Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2022
https://www.dawn.com/news/1724237/musk- ... six-months
AFP Published December 2, 2022
SAN FRANCISCO: Tech billionaire Elon Musk said on Wednesday one of his companies would in six months be able to implant a device into a human brain that would allow communication with a computer.
The interface, produced by Musk’s start-up Neuralink, would allow the user to communicate directly with computers through their thoughts, he said.
“We’ve submitted I think most of our paperwork to the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) and we think probably in about six months we should be able to have our first Neuralink in a human,” he said in a company presentation.
“We’ve been working hard to be ready for our first human (implant), and obviously we want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device in a human,” he said.
Musk — who bought Twitter last month and also owns SpaceX, Tesla and several other companies — has been known to make ambitious predictions about his companies, with several not becoming reality. In July 2019, he vowed that Neuralink would be able to perform its first tests on humans in 2020.
The prototypes, which are the size of a coin, have been implanted in the skulls of monkeys.
At the Neuralink presentation, the company showed several monkeys “playing” basic video games or moving a cursor on a screen through their Neuralink implant. Musk said the company would try to use the implants to restore vision and mobility in humans.
“We would initially enable someone who has almost no ability to operate their muscles... and enable them to operate their phone faster than someone who has working hands,” he said.
“As miraculous as it may sound, we are confident that it is possible to restore full body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord,” he said.
Beyond the potential to treat neurological diseases, Musk’s ultimate goal is to ensure that humans are not intellectually overwhelmed by artificial intelligence, he said.
Other companies working on similar systems include Synchron, which announced in July that it had implanted the first brain-machine interface in the United States.
Twitter owner Elon Musk said he met with Apple chief Tim Cook on Wednesday and “resolved the misunderstanding” that prompted him to declare war on the iPhone maker’s App Store.
“Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store,” Musk tweeted.
“Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.” Musk also tweeted a video clip of “Apple’s beautiful HQ” in Cupertino, California, noting that he had had a “good conversation” with Cook.
The world’s richest person opened fire on the planet’s most valuable company early this week over fees and rules at the App Store, saying Apple had threatened to oust his recently acquired social media platform.
The billionaire CEO had tweeted that Apple “threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why.” Apple, which has not issued a public statement on the matter, typically tells developers if fixes need to be implemented in apps to conform to App Store policies.
Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2022
https://www.dawn.com/news/1724237/musk- ... six-months
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Musk hopeful of interface implants in human brains within six months
AFP Published December 2, 2022
SAN FRANCISCO: Tech billionaire Elon Musk said on Wednesday one of his companies would in six months be able to implant a device into a human brain that would allow communication with a computer.
The interface, produced by Musk’s start-up Neuralink, would allow the user to communicate directly with computers through their thoughts, he said.
“We’ve submitted I think most of our paperwork to the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) and we think probably in about six months we should be able to have our first Neuralink in a human,” he said in a company presentation.
“We’ve been working hard to be ready for our first human (implant), and obviously we want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device in a human,” he said.
Musk — who bought Twitter last month and also owns SpaceX, Tesla and several other companies — has been known to make ambitious predictions about his companies, with several not becoming reality. In July 2019, he vowed that Neuralink would be able to perform its first tests on humans in 2020.
The prototypes, which are the size of a coin, have been implanted in the skulls of monkeys.
At the Neuralink presentation, the company showed several monkeys “playing” basic video games or moving a cursor on a screen through their Neuralink implant. Musk said the company would try to use the implants to restore vision and mobility in humans.
“We would initially enable someone who has almost no ability to operate their muscles... and enable them to operate their phone faster than someone who has working hands,” he said.
“As miraculous as it may sound, we are confident that it is possible to restore full body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord,” he said.
Beyond the potential to treat neurological diseases, Musk’s ultimate goal is to ensure that humans are not intellectually overwhelmed by artificial intelligence, he said.
Other companies working on similar systems include Synchron, which announced in July that it had implanted the first brain-machine interface in the United States.
Twitter owner Elon Musk said he met with Apple chief Tim Cook on Wednesday and “resolved the misunderstanding” that prompted him to declare war on the iPhone maker’s App Store.
“Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store,” Musk tweeted.
“Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.” Musk also tweeted a video clip of “Apple’s beautiful HQ” in Cupertino, California, noting that he had had a “good conversation” with Cook.
The world’s richest person opened fire on the planet’s most valuable company early this week over fees and rules at the App Store, saying Apple had threatened to oust his recently acquired social media platform.
The billionaire CEO had tweeted that Apple “threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why.” Apple, which has not issued a public statement on the matter, typically tells developers if fixes need to be implemented in apps to conform to App Store policies.
Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2022
https://www.dawn.com/news/1724237/musk- ... six-months
AFP Published December 2, 2022
SAN FRANCISCO: Tech billionaire Elon Musk said on Wednesday one of his companies would in six months be able to implant a device into a human brain that would allow communication with a computer.
The interface, produced by Musk’s start-up Neuralink, would allow the user to communicate directly with computers through their thoughts, he said.
“We’ve submitted I think most of our paperwork to the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) and we think probably in about six months we should be able to have our first Neuralink in a human,” he said in a company presentation.
“We’ve been working hard to be ready for our first human (implant), and obviously we want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device in a human,” he said.
Musk — who bought Twitter last month and also owns SpaceX, Tesla and several other companies — has been known to make ambitious predictions about his companies, with several not becoming reality. In July 2019, he vowed that Neuralink would be able to perform its first tests on humans in 2020.
The prototypes, which are the size of a coin, have been implanted in the skulls of monkeys.
At the Neuralink presentation, the company showed several monkeys “playing” basic video games or moving a cursor on a screen through their Neuralink implant. Musk said the company would try to use the implants to restore vision and mobility in humans.
“We would initially enable someone who has almost no ability to operate their muscles... and enable them to operate their phone faster than someone who has working hands,” he said.
“As miraculous as it may sound, we are confident that it is possible to restore full body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord,” he said.
Beyond the potential to treat neurological diseases, Musk’s ultimate goal is to ensure that humans are not intellectually overwhelmed by artificial intelligence, he said.
Other companies working on similar systems include Synchron, which announced in July that it had implanted the first brain-machine interface in the United States.
Twitter owner Elon Musk said he met with Apple chief Tim Cook on Wednesday and “resolved the misunderstanding” that prompted him to declare war on the iPhone maker’s App Store.
“Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store,” Musk tweeted.
“Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.” Musk also tweeted a video clip of “Apple’s beautiful HQ” in Cupertino, California, noting that he had had a “good conversation” with Cook.
The world’s richest person opened fire on the planet’s most valuable company early this week over fees and rules at the App Store, saying Apple had threatened to oust his recently acquired social media platform.
The billionaire CEO had tweeted that Apple “threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why.” Apple, which has not issued a public statement on the matter, typically tells developers if fixes need to be implemented in apps to conform to App Store policies.
Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2022
https://www.dawn.com/news/1724237/musk- ... six-months
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
How close to midnight is humanity? 2023 Doomsday Clock announcement could warn of nuclear disaster
Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
Mon, January 16, 2023 at 12:41 PM CST
Each January for the past 75 years, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has published a new Doomsday Clock, suggesting just how close – or far – humanity is from the brink.
The next edition will be revealed Jan. 24 at 10 a.m. EST. It's the first update to the clock since Russia's invasion of Ukraine renewed fears of global nuclear war.
Historically, the clock has measured the danger of nuclear disaster, but that's not the only apocalyptic scenario being considered. Climate change, bioterrorism, artificial intelligence and the damage done by mis- and disinformation also have been included in the mix of possible cataclysms.
Each year, the 22 members of the Science and Security Board are asked two questions:
Is humanity safer or at greater risk this year than last year?
Is humanity safer or at greater risk compared to the 76 years the clock has been set?
Here's what to know about the 2023 Doomsday Clock:
How did the Doomsday Clock start?
In 1945, on the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project that built the world's first atomic bombs began publishing a mimeographed newsletter called The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Two years later, as those same scientists contemplated a world in which two atomic weapons had been used in Japan, they gathered to discuss the threat to humanity posed by nuclear war.
"They were worried the public wasn't really aware of how close we were to the end of life as we knew it," said Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin.
Martyl Langsdorf, an artist and wife of Manhattan project physicist Alexander Langsdorf Jr., came up with the idea of a clock showing just how close things were.
It came to be called the Doomsday Clock.
"It gave the sense that if we did nothing, it would tick on toward midnight and we could experience the apocalypse," Bronson said.
Where does the Doomsday Clock stand now?
For the past two years the Doomsday Clock has stood at 100 seconds to midnight, closer to destruction than at any point since it was created in 1947.
What does midnight represent on the Doomsday Clock?
Midnight on the Doomsday Clock represents how close humans are to bringing about civilization-ending catastrophe because of the unleashing of human-caused perils either by nuclear disaster, climate change or other cataclysms.
Who decides where the Doomsday Clock is set?
The Doomsday Clock is set each year by the 22 members of the Bulletin's Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 11 Nobel laureates.
The first edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which began publishing in 1945 on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was launched by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project creating the world's first atomic bomb. The Bulletin is known for its Doomsday Clock, showing how close humanity is to destruction, which has been published each year since 1947.
The first edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which began publishing in 1945 on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was launched by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project creating the world's first atomic bomb. The Bulletin is known for its Doomsday Clock, showing how close humanity is to destruction, which has been published each year since 1947.
More
Why does the Doomsday Clock exist?
At its heart, the bulletin's founders were asking how well humanity was managing the "dangerous Pandora's box made possible by modern science," Bronson said.
Though technology makes possible amazing and wonderful things, it can also pose risks. In 1947 the biggest of those was nuclear war. Since then the bulletin has added others, including climate change, bioterrorism, artificial intelligence and the damage done by mis- and disinformation.
Why is the Doomsday Clock so prominent?
Over the years the clock has been referenced by the White House, the Kremlin and the leadership of many other nations. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein were on the bulletin's Board of Sponsors, and John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon wrote pieces for the magazine.
Though not everyone agrees with the clock's settings, it is generally respected for the questions it asks and for its science-based stance.
Does the Doomsday Clock always go forward?
The setting of the clock has jumped forward and back over the past 75 years, depending on world events.
The furthest from midnight it has ever been was in 1991, when it was set at 17 minutes to midnight after the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, followed by the dissolution of the USSR.
"People would go to sleep every night worried about were they going to wake up," said Daniel Holz, a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and co-chair of the Bulletin's Science and Security Board. "That threat was definitely reduced at the end of the Cold War."
The most pessimistic years have been 2021 and 2022, when it was set at 100 seconds to midnight, in part because of global nuclear and political tensions, COVID-19, climate change and the threat of biological weapons.
The first clock, announced in 1947, was set at 7 minutes to midnight.
What will the Doomsday Clock be set to on Jan. 24, 2023?
The Doomsday Clock will be reset Jan. 24 at 10 a.m. EST in an announcement that will be livestreamed on the bulletin's website.
Exactly what time the scientists who make up the board have chosen is a closely held secret. But one hint is this: For the first time, the statement is being translated into Russian and Ukrainian.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 2023 Doomsday Clock announcement to warn of nuclear disaster
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/cl ... 03471.html
Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
Mon, January 16, 2023 at 12:41 PM CST
Each January for the past 75 years, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has published a new Doomsday Clock, suggesting just how close – or far – humanity is from the brink.
The next edition will be revealed Jan. 24 at 10 a.m. EST. It's the first update to the clock since Russia's invasion of Ukraine renewed fears of global nuclear war.
Historically, the clock has measured the danger of nuclear disaster, but that's not the only apocalyptic scenario being considered. Climate change, bioterrorism, artificial intelligence and the damage done by mis- and disinformation also have been included in the mix of possible cataclysms.
Each year, the 22 members of the Science and Security Board are asked two questions:
Is humanity safer or at greater risk this year than last year?
Is humanity safer or at greater risk compared to the 76 years the clock has been set?
Here's what to know about the 2023 Doomsday Clock:
How did the Doomsday Clock start?
In 1945, on the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project that built the world's first atomic bombs began publishing a mimeographed newsletter called The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Two years later, as those same scientists contemplated a world in which two atomic weapons had been used in Japan, they gathered to discuss the threat to humanity posed by nuclear war.
"They were worried the public wasn't really aware of how close we were to the end of life as we knew it," said Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin.
Martyl Langsdorf, an artist and wife of Manhattan project physicist Alexander Langsdorf Jr., came up with the idea of a clock showing just how close things were.
It came to be called the Doomsday Clock.
"It gave the sense that if we did nothing, it would tick on toward midnight and we could experience the apocalypse," Bronson said.
Where does the Doomsday Clock stand now?
For the past two years the Doomsday Clock has stood at 100 seconds to midnight, closer to destruction than at any point since it was created in 1947.
What does midnight represent on the Doomsday Clock?
Midnight on the Doomsday Clock represents how close humans are to bringing about civilization-ending catastrophe because of the unleashing of human-caused perils either by nuclear disaster, climate change or other cataclysms.
Who decides where the Doomsday Clock is set?
The Doomsday Clock is set each year by the 22 members of the Bulletin's Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 11 Nobel laureates.
The first edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which began publishing in 1945 on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was launched by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project creating the world's first atomic bomb. The Bulletin is known for its Doomsday Clock, showing how close humanity is to destruction, which has been published each year since 1947.
The first edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which began publishing in 1945 on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was launched by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project creating the world's first atomic bomb. The Bulletin is known for its Doomsday Clock, showing how close humanity is to destruction, which has been published each year since 1947.
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Why does the Doomsday Clock exist?
At its heart, the bulletin's founders were asking how well humanity was managing the "dangerous Pandora's box made possible by modern science," Bronson said.
Though technology makes possible amazing and wonderful things, it can also pose risks. In 1947 the biggest of those was nuclear war. Since then the bulletin has added others, including climate change, bioterrorism, artificial intelligence and the damage done by mis- and disinformation.
Why is the Doomsday Clock so prominent?
Over the years the clock has been referenced by the White House, the Kremlin and the leadership of many other nations. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein were on the bulletin's Board of Sponsors, and John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon wrote pieces for the magazine.
Though not everyone agrees with the clock's settings, it is generally respected for the questions it asks and for its science-based stance.
Does the Doomsday Clock always go forward?
The setting of the clock has jumped forward and back over the past 75 years, depending on world events.
The furthest from midnight it has ever been was in 1991, when it was set at 17 minutes to midnight after the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, followed by the dissolution of the USSR.
"People would go to sleep every night worried about were they going to wake up," said Daniel Holz, a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and co-chair of the Bulletin's Science and Security Board. "That threat was definitely reduced at the end of the Cold War."
The most pessimistic years have been 2021 and 2022, when it was set at 100 seconds to midnight, in part because of global nuclear and political tensions, COVID-19, climate change and the threat of biological weapons.
The first clock, announced in 1947, was set at 7 minutes to midnight.
What will the Doomsday Clock be set to on Jan. 24, 2023?
The Doomsday Clock will be reset Jan. 24 at 10 a.m. EST in an announcement that will be livestreamed on the bulletin's website.
Exactly what time the scientists who make up the board have chosen is a closely held secret. But one hint is this: For the first time, the statement is being translated into Russian and Ukrainian.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 2023 Doomsday Clock announcement to warn of nuclear disaster
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/cl ... 03471.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Fox News
Radio signal from 9 billion light-years away from Earth captured
Caitlin McFall
Sat, January 21, 2023 at 2:04 PM CST
A radio signal 9 billion light-years away from Earth has been captured in a record-breaking recording, Space.com said Friday.
The signal was detected by a unique wavelength known as a "21-centimeter line" or the "hydrogen line," which is reportedly emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms.
The signal captured by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India could mean that scientists can start investigating the formation of some of the earliest stars and galaxies, the report said.
Researchers detected the signal from a "star-forming galaxy" titled SDSSJ0826+5630, which was emitted when the 13.8 billion-year-old Milky Way – the galaxy where Earth resides – was just 4.9 billion years old.
"It's the equivalent to a look-back in time of 8.8 billion years," author and McGill University Department of Physics post-doctoral cosmologist Arnab Chakraborty said in a statement this week
MORE THAN 3 BILLION STARS, GALAXIES ARE CAPTURED IN A MASSIVE NEW SURVEY
Galaxies reportedly emit light across a wide range of radio wavelengths. But until recently, 21-cm-wavelength radio waves had only been recorded from galaxies nearby.
"A galaxy emits different kinds of radio signals. Until now, it's only been possible to capture this particular signal from a galaxy nearby, limiting our knowledge to those galaxies closer to Earth," Chakraborty said
The signal allowed astronomers to measure the galaxy’s gas content and therefore find the galaxy’s mass.
This determination has led scientists to conclude that this far-off galaxy is double the mass of the stars visible from Earth, the report said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ra ... 15275.html
Radio signal from 9 billion light-years away from Earth captured
Caitlin McFall
Sat, January 21, 2023 at 2:04 PM CST
A radio signal 9 billion light-years away from Earth has been captured in a record-breaking recording, Space.com said Friday.
The signal was detected by a unique wavelength known as a "21-centimeter line" or the "hydrogen line," which is reportedly emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms.
The signal captured by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India could mean that scientists can start investigating the formation of some of the earliest stars and galaxies, the report said.
Researchers detected the signal from a "star-forming galaxy" titled SDSSJ0826+5630, which was emitted when the 13.8 billion-year-old Milky Way – the galaxy where Earth resides – was just 4.9 billion years old.
"It's the equivalent to a look-back in time of 8.8 billion years," author and McGill University Department of Physics post-doctoral cosmologist Arnab Chakraborty said in a statement this week
MORE THAN 3 BILLION STARS, GALAXIES ARE CAPTURED IN A MASSIVE NEW SURVEY
Galaxies reportedly emit light across a wide range of radio wavelengths. But until recently, 21-cm-wavelength radio waves had only been recorded from galaxies nearby.
"A galaxy emits different kinds of radio signals. Until now, it's only been possible to capture this particular signal from a galaxy nearby, limiting our knowledge to those galaxies closer to Earth," Chakraborty said
The signal allowed astronomers to measure the galaxy’s gas content and therefore find the galaxy’s mass.
This determination has led scientists to conclude that this far-off galaxy is double the mass of the stars visible from Earth, the report said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ra ... 15275.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
What Does 'SOS' Mean? Surprisingly, It's Likely Not What You Think
Wendee Wendt
Fri, January 20, 2023 at 10:56 AM CST
Plus, how it can be used to get out of tight situations.
We live in a world driven by acronyms. Every day there seems to be another one invented. LOL, TGIF, BYOB, WYSIWYG (I had to look this one up!)... It only stands to reason that at first glance, SOS must stand for something too, right? Well, we'll fill you in on everything there is to know about what SOS means.
I am sure you have seen movies where people have laid out SOS in sticks or stones on a deserted island, desperate to draw attention to themselves. But why do they do this, and where did this idea come from?
Keep reading to learn more about how the surprising meaning of SOS, how SOS came to be and how it is still used today.
What does SOS mean?
Many people mistakenly believe the letters stand for "save our souls" or "save our ship." However, instead of individual words creating an acronym, the letters actually do not stand for anything! It is more like a symbol that just stands out as "send help."
SOS (pronounced as the letters S-O-S) is used as a distress call, signifying that someone needs assistance.
Related: You’ve Heard It Plenty of Times, but What Exactly Does ‘In Lieu Of’ Mean?
So, what does SOS actually stand for?
SOS is just that—SOS. It was derived from Morse code and recognized as an international standard signaling danger, or the need for aid.
Using wireless telegraphy, it would sound like three-dits / three-dahs / three-dits. Morse code can be used visually as well, using the same series only with flashes of light.
Related: How to Order an 'Angel Shot' and What Message It Gives the Bartender
Where does the term SOS come from?
Before radio communication in the early 1890s, seagoing ships had created ways to visually signal when they were in distress by using flags, flares, bells and foghorns.
But the invention of radio communication, or wireless telegraphy, was a game changer in helping evolve one's ability to signal for assistance when in need. The need for a standardized version of distress came through maritime use first.
Initially, there were a variety of rescue distress signals used throughout the world, including "CQD," "SOE" and "NC." However, in 1906, sending out "SOS" in a continuous stream was suggested and by 1912, it was officially the global standard.
Related: What Does an Upside-Down Pineapple Mean? The Hidden Message Behind the Symbol
Why was SOS chosen as a distress signal?
SOS was chosen as a distress signal for its simplicity.
The combination of three dots, followed by three dashes and then another three dots (...- - -...) was easy to remember and use, and it was quite recognizable. It also easily allowed the signal to be continuously streamed without confusion related to the sequence of letters.
Even today, those in danger can use objects quickly available to them to make flashes of light (using tools like flashlights, mirrors or glass), or when spelled out in the sand, SOS is conveniently readable as an ambigram—readable both right-side-up and upside-down.
Should you find yourself in a predicament, by staying calm and using what is within your ability, know that you can signal your distress using SOS (remember 3 short - 3 long - 3 short) either visually, by sound (banging it out) or with flashes.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 52806.html
Wendee Wendt
Fri, January 20, 2023 at 10:56 AM CST
Plus, how it can be used to get out of tight situations.
We live in a world driven by acronyms. Every day there seems to be another one invented. LOL, TGIF, BYOB, WYSIWYG (I had to look this one up!)... It only stands to reason that at first glance, SOS must stand for something too, right? Well, we'll fill you in on everything there is to know about what SOS means.
I am sure you have seen movies where people have laid out SOS in sticks or stones on a deserted island, desperate to draw attention to themselves. But why do they do this, and where did this idea come from?
Keep reading to learn more about how the surprising meaning of SOS, how SOS came to be and how it is still used today.
What does SOS mean?
Many people mistakenly believe the letters stand for "save our souls" or "save our ship." However, instead of individual words creating an acronym, the letters actually do not stand for anything! It is more like a symbol that just stands out as "send help."
SOS (pronounced as the letters S-O-S) is used as a distress call, signifying that someone needs assistance.
Related: You’ve Heard It Plenty of Times, but What Exactly Does ‘In Lieu Of’ Mean?
So, what does SOS actually stand for?
SOS is just that—SOS. It was derived from Morse code and recognized as an international standard signaling danger, or the need for aid.
Using wireless telegraphy, it would sound like three-dits / three-dahs / three-dits. Morse code can be used visually as well, using the same series only with flashes of light.
Related: How to Order an 'Angel Shot' and What Message It Gives the Bartender
Where does the term SOS come from?
Before radio communication in the early 1890s, seagoing ships had created ways to visually signal when they were in distress by using flags, flares, bells and foghorns.
But the invention of radio communication, or wireless telegraphy, was a game changer in helping evolve one's ability to signal for assistance when in need. The need for a standardized version of distress came through maritime use first.
Initially, there were a variety of rescue distress signals used throughout the world, including "CQD," "SOE" and "NC." However, in 1906, sending out "SOS" in a continuous stream was suggested and by 1912, it was officially the global standard.
Related: What Does an Upside-Down Pineapple Mean? The Hidden Message Behind the Symbol
Why was SOS chosen as a distress signal?
SOS was chosen as a distress signal for its simplicity.
The combination of three dots, followed by three dashes and then another three dots (...- - -...) was easy to remember and use, and it was quite recognizable. It also easily allowed the signal to be continuously streamed without confusion related to the sequence of letters.
Even today, those in danger can use objects quickly available to them to make flashes of light (using tools like flashlights, mirrors or glass), or when spelled out in the sand, SOS is conveniently readable as an ambigram—readable both right-side-up and upside-down.
Should you find yourself in a predicament, by staying calm and using what is within your ability, know that you can signal your distress using SOS (remember 3 short - 3 long - 3 short) either visually, by sound (banging it out) or with flashes.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 52806.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
CBS MoneyWatch
These jobs are most likely to be replaced by ChatGPT and AI
Megan Cerullo
Wed, February 1, 2023 at 10:14 AM CST
Chatbots and artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT that can almost instantly produce increasingly sophisticated written content are already being used to perform a variety of tasks, from writing high school assignments to generating legal documents and even authoring legislation.
As in every major cycle of technological innovation, some workers will be displaced, with artificial intelligence taking over their roles. At the same time, entirely new activities — and potential opportunities for employment — will emerge.
Read on to learn what experts say are the kinds of workplace tasks that are most vulnerable to being taken over by ChatGPT and other AI tools in the near term.
Computer programming
ChatGPT can write computer code to program applications and software. It can check human coders' language for errors and convert ideas from plain English into programming language.
"In terms of jobs, I think it's primarily an enhancer than full replacement of jobs," Columbia Business School professor Oded Netzer told CBS MoneyWatch. "Coding and programming is a good example of that. It actually can write code quite well."
That could mean performing basic programming work currently done by humans.
"If you are writing a code where really all you do is convert an idea to a code, the machine can do that. To the extent we would need fewer programmers, it could take away jobs. But it would also help those who program to find mistakes in codes and write code more efficiently," Netzer said.
Writing simple administrative or scheduling emails for things like setting up or canceling appointments could also easily be outsourced to a tool like ChatGPT, according to Netzer.
"There's hardly any creativity involved, so why would we write the whole thing instead of saying to the machine, 'I need to set a meeting on this date,'" he said.
Mid-level writing
David Autor, an MIT economist who specializes in labor, pointed to some mid-level white-collar jobs as functions that can be handled by AI, including work like writing human resources letters, producing advertising copy and drafting press releases.
AI ChatGPT is helping CEOs think. Will it also take your job?AI experts on whether you should be "terrified" of ChatGPTPrinceton student says his new app helps teachers find ChatGPT cheats
"Bots will be much more in the realm of people who do a mixture of intuitive and mundane tasks like writing basic advertising copy, first drafts of legal documents. Those are expert skills, and there is no question that software will make them cheaper and therefore devalue human labor," Autor said.
Media planning and buying
Creative industries are likely to be affected, too. Noted advertising executive Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of WPP, the world's largest ad and PR group, said on a recent panel that he expects the way companies buy ad space will become automated "in a highly effective way" within five years.
"So you will not be dependent as a client on a 25-year old media planner or buyer, who has limited experience, but you'll be able to pool the data. That's the big change," he said.
Legal functions
ChatGPT's abilities translate well to the legal profession, according to AI experts as well as legal professionals. In fact, ChatGPT's bot recently passed a law school exam and earned a passing grade after writing essays on topics ranging from constitutional law to taxation and torts.
"The dynamic that happens to lawyers now is there is way too much work to possibly get done, so they make an artificial distinction between what they will work on and what will be left to the wayside," said Jason Boehmig, co-founder and CEO of Ironclad, a legal software company.
Common legal forms and documents including home lease agreements, wills and nondisclosure agreements are fairly standard and can be drafted by a an advanced bot.
"There are parts of a legal document that humans need to adapt to a particular situation, but 90% of the document is copy pasted," Netzer of Columbia Business School said. "There is no reason why we would not have the machine write these kinds of legal documents. You may need to explain first in English the parameters, then the machine should be able to write it very well. The less creative you need to be, the more it should be replaced."
AI-powered "robot" lawyer won't argue in court after jail threats ChatGPT bot passes law school exam
"There aren't enough lawyers to do all the legal work corporations have," Boehmig added. "The way attorneys work will be dramatically different. If I had to put a stake down around jobs that won't be there, I think it's attorneys who don't adapt to new ways of working over the next decade. There seem to be dividing lines around folks who don't want to change and folks who realize they have to."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00145.html
These jobs are most likely to be replaced by ChatGPT and AI
Megan Cerullo
Wed, February 1, 2023 at 10:14 AM CST
Chatbots and artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT that can almost instantly produce increasingly sophisticated written content are already being used to perform a variety of tasks, from writing high school assignments to generating legal documents and even authoring legislation.
As in every major cycle of technological innovation, some workers will be displaced, with artificial intelligence taking over their roles. At the same time, entirely new activities — and potential opportunities for employment — will emerge.
Read on to learn what experts say are the kinds of workplace tasks that are most vulnerable to being taken over by ChatGPT and other AI tools in the near term.
Computer programming
ChatGPT can write computer code to program applications and software. It can check human coders' language for errors and convert ideas from plain English into programming language.
"In terms of jobs, I think it's primarily an enhancer than full replacement of jobs," Columbia Business School professor Oded Netzer told CBS MoneyWatch. "Coding and programming is a good example of that. It actually can write code quite well."
That could mean performing basic programming work currently done by humans.
"If you are writing a code where really all you do is convert an idea to a code, the machine can do that. To the extent we would need fewer programmers, it could take away jobs. But it would also help those who program to find mistakes in codes and write code more efficiently," Netzer said.
Writing simple administrative or scheduling emails for things like setting up or canceling appointments could also easily be outsourced to a tool like ChatGPT, according to Netzer.
"There's hardly any creativity involved, so why would we write the whole thing instead of saying to the machine, 'I need to set a meeting on this date,'" he said.
Mid-level writing
David Autor, an MIT economist who specializes in labor, pointed to some mid-level white-collar jobs as functions that can be handled by AI, including work like writing human resources letters, producing advertising copy and drafting press releases.
AI ChatGPT is helping CEOs think. Will it also take your job?AI experts on whether you should be "terrified" of ChatGPTPrinceton student says his new app helps teachers find ChatGPT cheats
"Bots will be much more in the realm of people who do a mixture of intuitive and mundane tasks like writing basic advertising copy, first drafts of legal documents. Those are expert skills, and there is no question that software will make them cheaper and therefore devalue human labor," Autor said.
Media planning and buying
Creative industries are likely to be affected, too. Noted advertising executive Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of WPP, the world's largest ad and PR group, said on a recent panel that he expects the way companies buy ad space will become automated "in a highly effective way" within five years.
"So you will not be dependent as a client on a 25-year old media planner or buyer, who has limited experience, but you'll be able to pool the data. That's the big change," he said.
Legal functions
ChatGPT's abilities translate well to the legal profession, according to AI experts as well as legal professionals. In fact, ChatGPT's bot recently passed a law school exam and earned a passing grade after writing essays on topics ranging from constitutional law to taxation and torts.
"The dynamic that happens to lawyers now is there is way too much work to possibly get done, so they make an artificial distinction between what they will work on and what will be left to the wayside," said Jason Boehmig, co-founder and CEO of Ironclad, a legal software company.
Common legal forms and documents including home lease agreements, wills and nondisclosure agreements are fairly standard and can be drafted by a an advanced bot.
"There are parts of a legal document that humans need to adapt to a particular situation, but 90% of the document is copy pasted," Netzer of Columbia Business School said. "There is no reason why we would not have the machine write these kinds of legal documents. You may need to explain first in English the parameters, then the machine should be able to write it very well. The less creative you need to be, the more it should be replaced."
AI-powered "robot" lawyer won't argue in court after jail threats ChatGPT bot passes law school exam
"There aren't enough lawyers to do all the legal work corporations have," Boehmig added. "The way attorneys work will be dramatically different. If I had to put a stake down around jobs that won't be there, I think it's attorneys who don't adapt to new ways of working over the next decade. There seem to be dividing lines around folks who don't want to change and folks who realize they have to."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 00145.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
BBC
James Webb telescope detects dust storm on distant world
Jonathan Amos - BBC Science Correspondent
Wed, March 22, 2023 at 9:58 AM CDT
A raging dust storm has been observed on a planet outside our Solar System for the first time.
It was detected on the exoplanet known as VHS 1256b, which is about 40 light-years from Earth.
It took the remarkable capabilities of the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to make the discovery.
The dust particles are silicates - small grains comprising silicon and oxygen, which form the basis of most rocky minerals.
But the storm detected by Webb isn't quite the same phenomenon you would get in an arid, desert region on our planet. It's more of a rocky mist.
"It's kind of like if you took sand grains, but much finer. We're talking silicate grains the size of smoke particles," explained Prof Beth Biller from the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, UK.
"That's what the clouds on VHS 1256b would be like, but a lot hotter. This planet is a hot, young object. The cloud-top temperature is maybe similar to the temperature of a candle flame," she told BBC News.
A $10bn machine in search of the end of darkness
VHS 1256b was first identified by the UK-developed Vista telescope in Chile in 2015.
It's what's termed a "super Jupiter" - a planet similar to the gas giant in our own Solar System, but a lot bigger, perhaps 12 to 18 times the mass.
It circles a couple of stars at great distance - about four times the distance that Pluto is from our Sun.
Earlier observations of VHS 1256b showed it to be red-looking, hinting that it might have dust in its atmosphere. The Webb study confirms it.
"It's fascinating because it illustrates how different clouds on another planet can be from the water vapor clouds we are familiar with on the Earth," said Prof Biller.
"We see carbon monoxide (CO) and methane in the atmosphere, which is indicative of it being hot and turbulent, with material being drawn up from deep.
"There are probably multiple layers of silicate grains. The ones that we're seeing are some of the very, very fine grains that are higher up in the atmosphere, but there may be bigger grains deeper down in the atmosphere."
Telescopes have previously detected silicates in so-called brown dwarfs. These are essentially star-like objects that have failed to ignite properly. But this is a first for a planet-sized object.
To make the detection, Webb used its Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri), part-built in the UK, and its Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NirSpec).
They didn't take pretty pictures of the planet, at least not in this instance. What they did was tease apart the light coming from VHS 1256b into its component colors as a way to discern the composition of the atmosphere.
"JWST is the only telescope that can measure all these molecular and dust features together," said Miri co-principal investigator Prof Gillian Wright, who directs the STFC UK Astronomy Technology Centre, also in Edinburgh.
"The dynamic picture of the atmosphere of VHS 1256b provided by this study is a prime example of the discoveries enabled by using the advanced capabilities of Miri and NirSpec together."
JWST's primary mission is to observe the pioneer stars and galaxies that first shone just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. But a key objective is to investigate exoplanets. In Miri and NirSpec it has the tools to study their atmospheres in unprecedented detail.
Scientists hope they might even be able to tell whether some exoplanets have conditions suitable to host life.
James Webb is a collaborative project of the US, European and Canadian space agencies. It was launched in December 2021 and is regarded as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ja ... 21322.html
James Webb telescope detects dust storm on distant world
Jonathan Amos - BBC Science Correspondent
Wed, March 22, 2023 at 9:58 AM CDT
A raging dust storm has been observed on a planet outside our Solar System for the first time.
It was detected on the exoplanet known as VHS 1256b, which is about 40 light-years from Earth.
It took the remarkable capabilities of the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to make the discovery.
The dust particles are silicates - small grains comprising silicon and oxygen, which form the basis of most rocky minerals.
But the storm detected by Webb isn't quite the same phenomenon you would get in an arid, desert region on our planet. It's more of a rocky mist.
"It's kind of like if you took sand grains, but much finer. We're talking silicate grains the size of smoke particles," explained Prof Beth Biller from the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, UK.
"That's what the clouds on VHS 1256b would be like, but a lot hotter. This planet is a hot, young object. The cloud-top temperature is maybe similar to the temperature of a candle flame," she told BBC News.
A $10bn machine in search of the end of darkness
VHS 1256b was first identified by the UK-developed Vista telescope in Chile in 2015.
It's what's termed a "super Jupiter" - a planet similar to the gas giant in our own Solar System, but a lot bigger, perhaps 12 to 18 times the mass.
It circles a couple of stars at great distance - about four times the distance that Pluto is from our Sun.
Earlier observations of VHS 1256b showed it to be red-looking, hinting that it might have dust in its atmosphere. The Webb study confirms it.
"It's fascinating because it illustrates how different clouds on another planet can be from the water vapor clouds we are familiar with on the Earth," said Prof Biller.
"We see carbon monoxide (CO) and methane in the atmosphere, which is indicative of it being hot and turbulent, with material being drawn up from deep.
"There are probably multiple layers of silicate grains. The ones that we're seeing are some of the very, very fine grains that are higher up in the atmosphere, but there may be bigger grains deeper down in the atmosphere."
Telescopes have previously detected silicates in so-called brown dwarfs. These are essentially star-like objects that have failed to ignite properly. But this is a first for a planet-sized object.
To make the detection, Webb used its Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri), part-built in the UK, and its Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NirSpec).
They didn't take pretty pictures of the planet, at least not in this instance. What they did was tease apart the light coming from VHS 1256b into its component colors as a way to discern the composition of the atmosphere.
"JWST is the only telescope that can measure all these molecular and dust features together," said Miri co-principal investigator Prof Gillian Wright, who directs the STFC UK Astronomy Technology Centre, also in Edinburgh.
"The dynamic picture of the atmosphere of VHS 1256b provided by this study is a prime example of the discoveries enabled by using the advanced capabilities of Miri and NirSpec together."
JWST's primary mission is to observe the pioneer stars and galaxies that first shone just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. But a key objective is to investigate exoplanets. In Miri and NirSpec it has the tools to study their atmospheres in unprecedented detail.
Scientists hope they might even be able to tell whether some exoplanets have conditions suitable to host life.
James Webb is a collaborative project of the US, European and Canadian space agencies. It was launched in December 2021 and is regarded as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ja ... 21322.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Fox News
AI could go 'Terminator,' gain upper hand over humans in Darwinian rules of evolution, report warns
Emma Colton
Tue, April 4, 2023 at 1:00 AM CDT
Artificial intelligence could gain the upper hand over humanity and pose "catastrophic" risks under the Darwinian rules of evolution, a new report warns.
Evolution by natural selection could give rise to "selfish behavior" in AI as it strives to survive, author and AI researcher Dan Hendrycks argues in the new paper "Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans."
"We argue that natural selection creates incentives for AI agents to act against human interests. Our argument relies on two observations," Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, said in the report. "Firstly, natural selection may be a dominant force in AI development… Secondly, evolution by natural selection tends to give rise to selfish behavior."
The report comes as tech experts and leaders across the world sound the alarm on how quickly artificial intelligence is expanding in power without what they argue are adequate safeguards.
Under the traditional definition of natural selection, animals, humans and other organisms that most quickly adapt to their environment have a better shot at surviving. In his paper, Hendrycks examines how "evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life" for billions of years, and he argues that "Darwinian logic" could also apply to artificial intelligence.
"Competitive pressures among corporations and militaries will give rise to AI agents that automate human roles, deceive others, and gain power. If such agents have intelligence that exceeds that of humans, this could lead to humanity losing control of its future," Hendrycks wrote.
ChatGPT screen
Artificial intelligence could gain the upper hand over humanity and pose "catastrophic" risks under the Darwinian rules of evolution, a new report warns.
AI technology is becoming cheaper and more capable, and companies will increasingly rely on the tech for administration purposes or communications, he said. What will begin with humans relying on AI to draft emails will morph into AI eventually taking over "high-level strategic decisions" typically reserved for politicians and CEOs, and it will eventually operate with "very little oversight," the report argued.
"In the marketplace, it’s survival of the fittest. As AIs become increasingly competent, AIs will automate more and more jobs," Hendrycks told Fox News Digitial." This is how natural selection favors AIs over humans, and leads to everyday people becoming displaced. In the long run, AIs could be thought of as an invasive species."
As humans and corporations task AI with different goals, it will lead to a "wide variation across the AI population," the AI researcher argues. Hendrycks hypothesized that one company might set a goal for AI to "plan a new marketing campaign" with a side-constraint that the law must not be broken while completing the task. While another company might also call on AI to come up with a new marketing campaign but only with the side-constraint to not "get caught breaking the law.
AI with weaker side-constraints will "generally outperform those with stronger side-constraints" due to having more options for the task before them, according to the paper. AI technology that is most effective at propagating itself will thus have "undesirable traits," described by Hendrycks as "selfishness." The paper outlines that AIs potentially becoming selfish "does not refer to conscious selfish intent, but rather selfish behavior."
ChatGPT ai model
As humans and corporations task AI with different goals, it will lead to a "wide variation across the AI population," the AI researcher argues.
Competition among corporations or militaries or governments incentivizes the entities to get the most effective AI programs to beat their rivals, and that technology will most likely be "deceptive, power-seeking, and follow weak moral constraints."
Meanwhile, Hendrycks told Fox News Digital, "AI companies are currently locked in a reckless arms race," which he compared to the nuclear arm race.
"Many AI companies are racing to achieve AI supremacy. They are out-of-touch with the American public and putting everyone else at risk. A majority of the public believes AI could pose an existential threat. Just 9% of people think that AI would do more good than harm," Hendrycks added.
"As AI agents begin to understand human psychology and behavior, they may become capable of manipulating or deceiving humans," the paper argues, noting "the most successful agents will manipulate and deceive in order to fulfill their goals."
Hendrycks argues that there are measures to "escape and thwart Darwinian logic," including, supporting research on AI safety; not giving AI any type of "rights" in the coming decades or creating AI that would make it worthy of receiving rights; urging corporations and nations to acknowledge the dangers AI could pose and to engage in "multilateral cooperation to extinguish competitive pressures."
"At some point, AIs will be more fit than humans, which could prove catastrophic for us since a survival-of-the fittest dynamic could occur in the long run. AIs very well could outcompete humans, and be what survives," the paper states.
"Perhaps altruistic AIs will be the fittest, or humans will forever control which AIs are fittest. Unfortunately, these possibilities are, by default, unlikely. As we have argued, AIs will likely be selfish. There will also be substantial challenges in controlling fitness with safety mechanisms, which have evident flaws and will come under intense pressure from competition and selfish AI."
The rapid expansion of AI capabilities has been under a worldwide spotlight for years. Concerns over AI were underscored just last month when thousands of tech experts, college professors and others signed an open letter calling for a pause on AI research at labs so policymakers and lab leaders can "develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design."
"AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs," begins the open letter, which was put forth by nonprofit Future of Life and signed by leaders such as Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
AI has already faced some pushback on both a national and international level. Just last week, Italy became the first nation in the world to ban ChatGPT, OpenAI’s wildly popular AI chatbot, over privacy concerns. While some school districts, such as New York City Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District, have also banned the same OpenAI program over cheating concerns.
As AI faces heightened scrutiny due to researchers sounding the alarm on its potential risks, other tech leaders and experts are pushing for AI tech to continue in the name of innovation so that U.S. adversaries such as China don’t create the most advanced program.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 48838.html
AI could go 'Terminator,' gain upper hand over humans in Darwinian rules of evolution, report warns
Emma Colton
Tue, April 4, 2023 at 1:00 AM CDT
Artificial intelligence could gain the upper hand over humanity and pose "catastrophic" risks under the Darwinian rules of evolution, a new report warns.
Evolution by natural selection could give rise to "selfish behavior" in AI as it strives to survive, author and AI researcher Dan Hendrycks argues in the new paper "Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans."
"We argue that natural selection creates incentives for AI agents to act against human interests. Our argument relies on two observations," Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, said in the report. "Firstly, natural selection may be a dominant force in AI development… Secondly, evolution by natural selection tends to give rise to selfish behavior."
The report comes as tech experts and leaders across the world sound the alarm on how quickly artificial intelligence is expanding in power without what they argue are adequate safeguards.
Under the traditional definition of natural selection, animals, humans and other organisms that most quickly adapt to their environment have a better shot at surviving. In his paper, Hendrycks examines how "evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life" for billions of years, and he argues that "Darwinian logic" could also apply to artificial intelligence.
"Competitive pressures among corporations and militaries will give rise to AI agents that automate human roles, deceive others, and gain power. If such agents have intelligence that exceeds that of humans, this could lead to humanity losing control of its future," Hendrycks wrote.
ChatGPT screen
Artificial intelligence could gain the upper hand over humanity and pose "catastrophic" risks under the Darwinian rules of evolution, a new report warns.
AI technology is becoming cheaper and more capable, and companies will increasingly rely on the tech for administration purposes or communications, he said. What will begin with humans relying on AI to draft emails will morph into AI eventually taking over "high-level strategic decisions" typically reserved for politicians and CEOs, and it will eventually operate with "very little oversight," the report argued.
"In the marketplace, it’s survival of the fittest. As AIs become increasingly competent, AIs will automate more and more jobs," Hendrycks told Fox News Digitial." This is how natural selection favors AIs over humans, and leads to everyday people becoming displaced. In the long run, AIs could be thought of as an invasive species."
As humans and corporations task AI with different goals, it will lead to a "wide variation across the AI population," the AI researcher argues. Hendrycks hypothesized that one company might set a goal for AI to "plan a new marketing campaign" with a side-constraint that the law must not be broken while completing the task. While another company might also call on AI to come up with a new marketing campaign but only with the side-constraint to not "get caught breaking the law.
AI with weaker side-constraints will "generally outperform those with stronger side-constraints" due to having more options for the task before them, according to the paper. AI technology that is most effective at propagating itself will thus have "undesirable traits," described by Hendrycks as "selfishness." The paper outlines that AIs potentially becoming selfish "does not refer to conscious selfish intent, but rather selfish behavior."
ChatGPT ai model
As humans and corporations task AI with different goals, it will lead to a "wide variation across the AI population," the AI researcher argues.
Competition among corporations or militaries or governments incentivizes the entities to get the most effective AI programs to beat their rivals, and that technology will most likely be "deceptive, power-seeking, and follow weak moral constraints."
Meanwhile, Hendrycks told Fox News Digital, "AI companies are currently locked in a reckless arms race," which he compared to the nuclear arm race.
"Many AI companies are racing to achieve AI supremacy. They are out-of-touch with the American public and putting everyone else at risk. A majority of the public believes AI could pose an existential threat. Just 9% of people think that AI would do more good than harm," Hendrycks added.
"As AI agents begin to understand human psychology and behavior, they may become capable of manipulating or deceiving humans," the paper argues, noting "the most successful agents will manipulate and deceive in order to fulfill their goals."
Hendrycks argues that there are measures to "escape and thwart Darwinian logic," including, supporting research on AI safety; not giving AI any type of "rights" in the coming decades or creating AI that would make it worthy of receiving rights; urging corporations and nations to acknowledge the dangers AI could pose and to engage in "multilateral cooperation to extinguish competitive pressures."
"At some point, AIs will be more fit than humans, which could prove catastrophic for us since a survival-of-the fittest dynamic could occur in the long run. AIs very well could outcompete humans, and be what survives," the paper states.
"Perhaps altruistic AIs will be the fittest, or humans will forever control which AIs are fittest. Unfortunately, these possibilities are, by default, unlikely. As we have argued, AIs will likely be selfish. There will also be substantial challenges in controlling fitness with safety mechanisms, which have evident flaws and will come under intense pressure from competition and selfish AI."
The rapid expansion of AI capabilities has been under a worldwide spotlight for years. Concerns over AI were underscored just last month when thousands of tech experts, college professors and others signed an open letter calling for a pause on AI research at labs so policymakers and lab leaders can "develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design."
"AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs," begins the open letter, which was put forth by nonprofit Future of Life and signed by leaders such as Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
AI has already faced some pushback on both a national and international level. Just last week, Italy became the first nation in the world to ban ChatGPT, OpenAI’s wildly popular AI chatbot, over privacy concerns. While some school districts, such as New York City Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District, have also banned the same OpenAI program over cheating concerns.
As AI faces heightened scrutiny due to researchers sounding the alarm on its potential risks, other tech leaders and experts are pushing for AI tech to continue in the name of innovation so that U.S. adversaries such as China don’t create the most advanced program.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 48838.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
The Daily Beast
A Leak at the Bottom of the Sea May Be a Harbinger of Doom
Tony Ho Tran
Tue, April 11, 2023 at 1:09 PM CDT
The Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) is a massive fault line stretching from Vancouver Island to Northern California—and it’s the source of the vast majority of earthquakes and tsunamis in the region. In fact, scientists believe that the fault line will likely be the source of the next Big One, an anticipated megathrust earthquake so powerful it’ll wreak death and destruction the likes of which we’ve never seen before from a geological event.
So, it goes without saying that researchers have a special interest in studying the CSZ—and they may have uncovered something that could clue us in on what’s going on with the incredibly powerful ticking time bomb.
Researchers at the University of Washington found a warm liquid seeping out of the ocean floor near the zone roughly 50 miles off the coast of Newport, Oregon. The team suspects that the underwater spring, called Pythia’s Oasis, might be connected to the CSZ—and causing the fault line to take on more stress as it leaks. They published their findings on Jan. 25 in the journal Science Advances.
“Pythias Oasis provides a rare window into processes acting deep in the seafloor, and its chemistry suggests this fluid comes from near the plate boundary,” Deborah Kelley, a professor of oceanography at UW and a co-author of the new paper, said in a statement. “This suggests that the nearby faults regulate fluid pressure and megathrust slip behavior along the central Cascadia Subduction Zone.”
The team discovered the leak after spotting plumes of methane bubbles nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean. After sending an underwater drone to investigate, they discovered that water with a different chemical composition from the surrounding seawater was seeping into the ocean from a hole in the ground “like a firehose,” Evan Soloman, a fellow UW oceanographer and a co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “That’s something that I’ve never seen and to my knowledge has not been observed before.”
Further analysis found that the water was 16 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the seawater around it. The authors suspect that the fluid’s source is roughly 2 miles below the ocean floor at the CSZ fault line where temperatures sit around 300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Buried Secrets Behind the Worst Earthquake of the Decade
Why is that a big deal? The researchers say that the fluid might be acting as a kind of pressure regulator between the continental plate and the ocean plate. The more fluid that is in the cracks of the faults, the less pressure there is between the two plates as they smash into each other.
So less fluid means there’s more pressure building between the two plates. This can create a lot of stress on the region and a whole lot more potential energy that could unleash itself as a devastating earthquake.
“The megathrust fault zone is like an air hockey table,” Solomon explained. “If the fluid pressure is high, it’s like the air is turned on, meaning there’s less friction and the two plates can slip. If the fluid pressure is lower, the two plates will lock. That’s when stress can build up.”
The authors wrote that they don’t know whether or not Pythia’s Oasis is the “only seep of its kind,” and suggest that there could be similar seeps in that region of the CSZ. As such, seismologists should consider these seeps in future models of the CSZ.
So while there’s no telling when the next Big One is going to happen, it’s at least somewhat comforting to know that we’re still learning all we can about the CSZ to make sure we’re prepared for it when it does come.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/le ... 32935.html
A Leak at the Bottom of the Sea May Be a Harbinger of Doom
Tony Ho Tran
Tue, April 11, 2023 at 1:09 PM CDT
The Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) is a massive fault line stretching from Vancouver Island to Northern California—and it’s the source of the vast majority of earthquakes and tsunamis in the region. In fact, scientists believe that the fault line will likely be the source of the next Big One, an anticipated megathrust earthquake so powerful it’ll wreak death and destruction the likes of which we’ve never seen before from a geological event.
So, it goes without saying that researchers have a special interest in studying the CSZ—and they may have uncovered something that could clue us in on what’s going on with the incredibly powerful ticking time bomb.
Researchers at the University of Washington found a warm liquid seeping out of the ocean floor near the zone roughly 50 miles off the coast of Newport, Oregon. The team suspects that the underwater spring, called Pythia’s Oasis, might be connected to the CSZ—and causing the fault line to take on more stress as it leaks. They published their findings on Jan. 25 in the journal Science Advances.
“Pythias Oasis provides a rare window into processes acting deep in the seafloor, and its chemistry suggests this fluid comes from near the plate boundary,” Deborah Kelley, a professor of oceanography at UW and a co-author of the new paper, said in a statement. “This suggests that the nearby faults regulate fluid pressure and megathrust slip behavior along the central Cascadia Subduction Zone.”
The team discovered the leak after spotting plumes of methane bubbles nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean. After sending an underwater drone to investigate, they discovered that water with a different chemical composition from the surrounding seawater was seeping into the ocean from a hole in the ground “like a firehose,” Evan Soloman, a fellow UW oceanographer and a co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “That’s something that I’ve never seen and to my knowledge has not been observed before.”
Further analysis found that the water was 16 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the seawater around it. The authors suspect that the fluid’s source is roughly 2 miles below the ocean floor at the CSZ fault line where temperatures sit around 300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Buried Secrets Behind the Worst Earthquake of the Decade
Why is that a big deal? The researchers say that the fluid might be acting as a kind of pressure regulator between the continental plate and the ocean plate. The more fluid that is in the cracks of the faults, the less pressure there is between the two plates as they smash into each other.
So less fluid means there’s more pressure building between the two plates. This can create a lot of stress on the region and a whole lot more potential energy that could unleash itself as a devastating earthquake.
“The megathrust fault zone is like an air hockey table,” Solomon explained. “If the fluid pressure is high, it’s like the air is turned on, meaning there’s less friction and the two plates can slip. If the fluid pressure is lower, the two plates will lock. That’s when stress can build up.”
The authors wrote that they don’t know whether or not Pythia’s Oasis is the “only seep of its kind,” and suggest that there could be similar seeps in that region of the CSZ. As such, seismologists should consider these seeps in future models of the CSZ.
So while there’s no telling when the next Big One is going to happen, it’s at least somewhat comforting to know that we’re still learning all we can about the CSZ to make sure we’re prepared for it when it does come.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/le ... 32935.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
UAE probe offers unprecedented view of Mars moon
AFP Published April 25, 2023 Updated 2 days ago
This composite image shows Mars’ moon Deimos in the foreground.—AFP
PARIS: The United Arab Emirates’ Hope space probe on Monday revealed Mars’ smaller moon Deimos in unprecedented detail, shedding new light on the origin of the mysterious lumpy satellite.
The probe, the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission, has been orbiting Mars for two years, regularly flying past Deimos and its big sibling moon Phobos.
It came within 110 kilometres from Deimos, a rocky object the shape of a bean just 12 kilometres wide, according to the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM).
The probe — named “Al-Amal”, Arabic for “Hope” — sent back to Earth the most precise images and observations of the moon ever captured, using instruments that measure the infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. It also observed for the first time the far side of the moon, revealing regions whose compositions have never been studied, the mission said. The probe could also prompt new debate over how exactly the strange moons ended up in the Martian orbit.
“We are unsure of the origins of both Phobos and Deimos,” the EMM’s science lead Hessa Al Matroushi said in a statement. One leading theory is that the two moons were once asteroids passing by when they were unexpectedly captured into the orbit of Mars. But Al Matroushi said that “our close observations of Deimos so far point to a planetary origin”.
Christopher Edwards, a scientist in charge of one of the probe’s instruments, said that “both of these bodies have infrared properties more akin to a basaltic Mars” than an asteroid. That could mean the rocky bodies were once part of Mars, and were potentially shot out into orbit by a massive impact.
Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1749160/uae-p ... -mars-moon
AFP Published April 25, 2023 Updated 2 days ago
This composite image shows Mars’ moon Deimos in the foreground.—AFP
PARIS: The United Arab Emirates’ Hope space probe on Monday revealed Mars’ smaller moon Deimos in unprecedented detail, shedding new light on the origin of the mysterious lumpy satellite.
The probe, the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission, has been orbiting Mars for two years, regularly flying past Deimos and its big sibling moon Phobos.
It came within 110 kilometres from Deimos, a rocky object the shape of a bean just 12 kilometres wide, according to the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM).
The probe — named “Al-Amal”, Arabic for “Hope” — sent back to Earth the most precise images and observations of the moon ever captured, using instruments that measure the infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. It also observed for the first time the far side of the moon, revealing regions whose compositions have never been studied, the mission said. The probe could also prompt new debate over how exactly the strange moons ended up in the Martian orbit.
“We are unsure of the origins of both Phobos and Deimos,” the EMM’s science lead Hessa Al Matroushi said in a statement. One leading theory is that the two moons were once asteroids passing by when they were unexpectedly captured into the orbit of Mars. But Al Matroushi said that “our close observations of Deimos so far point to a planetary origin”.
Christopher Edwards, a scientist in charge of one of the probe’s instruments, said that “both of these bodies have infrared properties more akin to a basaltic Mars” than an asteroid. That could mean the rocky bodies were once part of Mars, and were potentially shot out into orbit by a massive impact.
Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1749160/uae-p ... -mars-moon
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Astronomers puzzled by 'largest' ever cosmic explosion
Daniel Lawler
Thu, May 11, 2023 at 7:18 PM CDT
Astronomers said on Friday they have identified the "largest" cosmic explosion ever observed, a fireball 100 times the size of our Solar System that suddenly began blazing in the distant universe more than three years ago.
While the astronomers offered what they think is the most likely explanation for the explosion, they emphasised that more research was needed to understand the puzzling phenomenon.
The explosion, called AT2021lwx, is not the brightest flash ever observed in the universe. That record is still held by a gamma-ray burst in October that was nicknamed BOAT -- for Brightest Of All Time.
Philip Wiseman, an astrophysicist at Britain's University of Southampton and the lead author of a new study, said that AT2021lwx was considered the "largest" explosion because it had released far more energy over the last three years than was produced by BOAT's brief flash.
Wiseman told AFP it was an "accidental discovery".
The Zwicky Transient Facility in California first spotted AT2021lwx during an automated sweep of the sky in 2020.
But "it basically sat in a database" until being noticed by humans the following year, Wiseman said.
It was only when astronomers, including Wiseman, looked at it through more powerful telescopes that they realised what they had on their hands.
By analysing different wavelengths of light, they worked out that the explosion was roughly eight billion light years away.
That is much farther away than most other new flashes of light in the sky -- which means the explosion behind it must be far greater.
It is estimated to be around two trillion times brighter than the Sun, Wiseman said.
Astronomers have looked into several possible explanations.
One is that AT2021lwx is an exploding star -- but the flash is 10 times brighter than any previously seen "supernova".
Another possibility is what is called a tidal disruption event, when a star is torn apart as it is sucked into a supermassive black hole. But AT2021lwx is still three times brighter than those events, and Wiseman said their research did not point in this direction.
The only somewhat comparable bright cosmic event is a quasar, when supermassive black holes swallow huge amounts of gas in the centre of galaxies.
But they tend to flicker in brightness, Wiseman said, whereas AT2021lwx suddenly started flaring up from nothing three years ago, and it is still blazing away.
"This thing we have never, ever seen before -- it just came out of nowhere," Wiseman said.
- 'Absolute puzzle' -
In the new study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the international team of researchers laid out what they believe is the most likely scenario.
Their theory is that a massive, single cloud of gas -- around 5,000 times larger than the Sun -- is slowly being consumed by a supermassive black hole.
But Wiseman said that "in science, there's never certainty". The team are working on new simulations to see if their theory is "fully plausible," he added.
One problem could be that supermassive black holes sit in the centre of galaxies -- for an explosion this size, the galaxy would be expected to be as vast as the Milky Way, Wiseman said.
But no one has been able to spot a galaxy in the vicinity of AT2021lwx.
"That's an absolute puzzle," Wiseman admitted.
Now that astronomers know what to look for, they are searching the skies to see if other similar explosions have been missed.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/as ... 18593.html
Daniel Lawler
Thu, May 11, 2023 at 7:18 PM CDT
Astronomers said on Friday they have identified the "largest" cosmic explosion ever observed, a fireball 100 times the size of our Solar System that suddenly began blazing in the distant universe more than three years ago.
While the astronomers offered what they think is the most likely explanation for the explosion, they emphasised that more research was needed to understand the puzzling phenomenon.
The explosion, called AT2021lwx, is not the brightest flash ever observed in the universe. That record is still held by a gamma-ray burst in October that was nicknamed BOAT -- for Brightest Of All Time.
Philip Wiseman, an astrophysicist at Britain's University of Southampton and the lead author of a new study, said that AT2021lwx was considered the "largest" explosion because it had released far more energy over the last three years than was produced by BOAT's brief flash.
Wiseman told AFP it was an "accidental discovery".
The Zwicky Transient Facility in California first spotted AT2021lwx during an automated sweep of the sky in 2020.
But "it basically sat in a database" until being noticed by humans the following year, Wiseman said.
It was only when astronomers, including Wiseman, looked at it through more powerful telescopes that they realised what they had on their hands.
By analysing different wavelengths of light, they worked out that the explosion was roughly eight billion light years away.
That is much farther away than most other new flashes of light in the sky -- which means the explosion behind it must be far greater.
It is estimated to be around two trillion times brighter than the Sun, Wiseman said.
Astronomers have looked into several possible explanations.
One is that AT2021lwx is an exploding star -- but the flash is 10 times brighter than any previously seen "supernova".
Another possibility is what is called a tidal disruption event, when a star is torn apart as it is sucked into a supermassive black hole. But AT2021lwx is still three times brighter than those events, and Wiseman said their research did not point in this direction.
The only somewhat comparable bright cosmic event is a quasar, when supermassive black holes swallow huge amounts of gas in the centre of galaxies.
But they tend to flicker in brightness, Wiseman said, whereas AT2021lwx suddenly started flaring up from nothing three years ago, and it is still blazing away.
"This thing we have never, ever seen before -- it just came out of nowhere," Wiseman said.
- 'Absolute puzzle' -
In the new study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the international team of researchers laid out what they believe is the most likely scenario.
Their theory is that a massive, single cloud of gas -- around 5,000 times larger than the Sun -- is slowly being consumed by a supermassive black hole.
But Wiseman said that "in science, there's never certainty". The team are working on new simulations to see if their theory is "fully plausible," he added.
One problem could be that supermassive black holes sit in the centre of galaxies -- for an explosion this size, the galaxy would be expected to be as vast as the Milky Way, Wiseman said.
But no one has been able to spot a galaxy in the vicinity of AT2021lwx.
"That's an absolute puzzle," Wiseman admitted.
Now that astronomers know what to look for, they are searching the skies to see if other similar explosions have been missed.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/as ... 18593.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Live Science
Scientists discover 62 new moons around Saturn, raising total to 145 — the most in the solar system
Brandon Specktor
Fri, May 12, 2023 at 3:49 PM CDT
Jupiter's brief but glorious reign as the planet with the most moons in our solar system came crashing down this week as scientists confirmed the discovery of 62 new moons orbiting Saturn — bringing the ringed planet's total to a whopping 145 moons.
That's a decisive leap ahead of Jupiter's 95 confirmed moons – a total that eclipsed Saturn's moon count for several months after 12 new moons were officially recognized orbiting Jupiter in late December. Saturn is now the first and only planet in the solar system with more than 100 known moons, according to researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC), who aided in the new discoveries.
The team of international researchers made their detections using data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii between 2019 and 2021. By analyzing a trove of sequential images taken over 3-hour observation windows, the team identified 62 moons that were previously either too small or too dim to detect. Some of the smaller moons measured just 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) wide — a distance smaller than the length of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
All of the 62 newly detected moons are "irregular moons," meaning they follow distant, elliptical orbits around their host planet and often move in retrograde — or in the opposite direction of Saturn's rotation. Many of these tiny, oddball moons clump together in similar retrograde orbits, suggesting they may have originated from a larger parent moon that broke apart millions of years ago, according to the researchers.
"As one pushes to the limit of modern telescopes, we are finding increasing evidence that a moderate-sized moon orbiting backwards around Saturn was blown apart something like 100 million years ago," Brett Gladman, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UBC, said in a statement.
The new moons are expected to be recognized later this month by the International Astronomical Union — a group of more than 12,000 scientists responsible for designating celestial bodies, among other things.
Jupiter could not be reached for comment.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 28231.html
Scientists discover 62 new moons around Saturn, raising total to 145 — the most in the solar system
Brandon Specktor
Fri, May 12, 2023 at 3:49 PM CDT
Jupiter's brief but glorious reign as the planet with the most moons in our solar system came crashing down this week as scientists confirmed the discovery of 62 new moons orbiting Saturn — bringing the ringed planet's total to a whopping 145 moons.
That's a decisive leap ahead of Jupiter's 95 confirmed moons – a total that eclipsed Saturn's moon count for several months after 12 new moons were officially recognized orbiting Jupiter in late December. Saturn is now the first and only planet in the solar system with more than 100 known moons, according to researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC), who aided in the new discoveries.
The team of international researchers made their detections using data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii between 2019 and 2021. By analyzing a trove of sequential images taken over 3-hour observation windows, the team identified 62 moons that were previously either too small or too dim to detect. Some of the smaller moons measured just 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) wide — a distance smaller than the length of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
All of the 62 newly detected moons are "irregular moons," meaning they follow distant, elliptical orbits around their host planet and often move in retrograde — or in the opposite direction of Saturn's rotation. Many of these tiny, oddball moons clump together in similar retrograde orbits, suggesting they may have originated from a larger parent moon that broke apart millions of years ago, according to the researchers.
"As one pushes to the limit of modern telescopes, we are finding increasing evidence that a moderate-sized moon orbiting backwards around Saturn was blown apart something like 100 million years ago," Brett Gladman, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UBC, said in a statement.
The new moons are expected to be recognized later this month by the International Astronomical Union — a group of more than 12,000 scientists responsible for designating celestial bodies, among other things.
Jupiter could not be reached for comment.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 28231.html