Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler – Page 37 – Discussions of Topics Related to Science and Science Fiction

Scientists have three new instruments which will enable them to observe the Sun in greater detail than ever before.

Our Sun plays such an important role in our very existence that the study of this single celestial object is a separate branch of astronomy unto itself. In ancient times the positions on the horizon where the Sun rose and set each day of the year were carefully plotted and recorded, as were the patterns of Solar eclipses. It is thought that some of the world’s ancient monuments, like Stonehenge and Maya temples, were used as primitive Solar observatories.

When viewed from the center of Stonehenge the Sun rises directly behind the Heel Stone on the summer solstice. (Credit: Earthsky)

The Sun was one of the first objects that Galileo turned his early telescope towards, discovering sunspots in the process. Ever since then scientists have kept an almost daily record of those dark spots on the Sun’s face. Every time a new kind of scientific instrument was invented it usually wasn’t long before that instrument would be turned on the Sun. In fact the element helium was discovered when the newly invented spectrograph was used to study the light from the Sun.

Using his newly invented telescope Galileo was the first person to observe and record sunspots. (Credit: The Galileo Project)

Spectral Lines in the light coming from the Sum allows astronomers to determine the chemical composition of the Sun. (Credit: FlatEarth Debunkers)

Now Solar astronomers have three powerful new instruments with which to probe the star at the center of our Solar System. One of these is NASA’s Parker Solar probe which I’ve written about several times now, see posts of 7June2017, 6January2018, 5September2018, 3November 2018 and 18December2019. So here I will only give a brief update to the spacecraft’s mission.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is already the closest man made object to the Sun but over the next few years it is going to get even closer. (Credit: University of Arizona)

After a flyby of the planet Venus back in December 2019, Parker used the tug of Venus’ gravity to put it on an orbit that sent it even closer to the Sun. The closest approach by Parker, breaking its own previous record from just last year, occurred on January 29th 2020 at a distance of only 18.6 million kilometers. That distance is only about 12% of Earth’s distance from the Sun which means that the sunlight hitting Parker was more than 60 times as strong it ever gets here on our planet.

And in order to get so close to the Sun and its gravity Parker has to be moving very fast, faster than any object ever built by mankind, again breaking its own record. The probe’s speed on the 29th hit a maximum of 393,044 km/h, fast enough to go from the Earth to the Moon in only one hour!

The scientists are still processing the data obtained by Parker on this close flyby so we will have to wait to hear if any new discoveries were made. Over the next four years Parker is scheduled to get even closer to the Sun, eventually getting as close as 6.9 million kilometers.

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on the other hand isn’t going to be making any close approaches to the Sun; it’s permanently installed on the top of the Haleakalā volcano in Hawaii. However the new Solar telescope, with a main mirror of about four meters in diameter, is now giving astronomers the highest resolution, highest definition images of the Sun’s surface ever. See images below.

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope. (Credit: Maui Now)

Closest ever view of the surface of our Sun, as provided by DKIST. (Credit: Devdiscourse)

The kernel shaped objects that you see in the image are fountains or geysers of hot gas upwelling from deep beneath the surface of the Sun. Each of those geysers by the way, is about the size of the state of Texas! These initial images are already telling astronomers a great deal about how the Sun’s energy gets from it’s core where fusion occurs to the photosphere, the part of the Sun that we see.

In the next few months additional instruments are to be incorporated into DKIST that it is hoped will enable it to study the magnetic fields around sunspots, revealing some of the secrets of those mysterious objects. In any case the DKIST telescope has many more years of useful work ahead of it so at the moment we can only guess at what discoveries it will make.

And there is one more Solar instrument that will soon be adding to what we know about our home star. The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter has just been launched last night, the 9th of February and is beginning a 7 year mission to study the Sun. The planned orbit for the spacecraft will not take it as close to the Sun as the Parker probe however, closest approach distance for Solar Orbiter will be about 45 million kilometers. However it is planned for the probe to be placed into an orbit that will carry it 35º above the plane of the ecliptic, giving scientists their first clear, close up look at the Sun’s poles. This is important because many of our theories about the Sun’s 11 year sunspot cycle make predictions about conditions near the Sun’s poles that so far we’ve been unable to check because from our viewpoint the poles are at a very slanted angle, making it difficult to observe any of their details.

The Solar Orbiter space probe isn’t going to get as close to the Sun as Parker will, but it’s going to get our first good view of the Sun’s polar regions. (Credit: NASA)

The Launch of Solar Orbiter. The probe has a two year journey to reach its proper orbit before its seven year mission. (Credit: Spaceflight Now)

Together these three instruments may inaugurate a new era in the study of our Sun. Over the next decade the wonders that could be discovered…well I guess we’ll just have to wait and see won’t we.

Two new Neutrino experiments enable Physicists to measure the heat being generated in the Earth’s core and may have discovered a new particle and new physics beyond the Standard Model.

I’ve written about neutrinos several times now in this blog. (See posts of 30July2017, 2December 2017 and 6June2018.) Neutrinos are known as ghost elementary particles because they interact so rarely, so weakly with other particles. In fact, although billions of neutrinos are passing through your body every second you’ll be lucky if a single neutrino interacts with you during your entire life.

Fusion reaction that powers the Sun. Two neutrinos are released in the process, the particles shown as white balls.. (Credit: Quora)

Most of those neutrinos come from the fusion processes that produce the energy of our Sun but there are also anti-neutrinos whizzing about that mostly come from the decay of radioactive elements in the ground along with the fission reactions in nuclear reactors. I’ve often considered it amusing that fusion, which takes lighter elements and combines them into heavier elements, produces a lot of neutrinos while fission and nuclear decay, which break down heavy elements, produce mainly anti-neutrinos.

Beta decay of the Carbon 14 nucleus produces a Nitrogen nucleus while emitting an electron and an anti-neutrino. (Credit: Radiation Dosimetry)

For almost fifty years now scientists have been using neutrinos in order to study our Sun, and learned a great deal about neutrinos in the process. Neutrino detectors consist of large containers of water that capture the neutrinos while photomultiplier tubes that line the inner walls of the container detect the faint light produced by those captures. The detectors themselves are buried deep within mine shafts in order to minimize the interference caused by cosmic rays. These ‘neutrino telescopes’ detect no more than a handful of neutrinos a day but those few particles have lead to many important discoveries.

The walls of neutrino telescopes are covered with photomultiplier tubes that collect the light emitted by neutrino captures. (Credit: Sci-news.com)

Now another neutrino observatory is using anti-neutrinos, known as geoneutrinos to study the interior of the Earth. The Borexino detector, located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy and containing some 1000 metric tons of water has been in operation now since 2007. Buried 1400 meters beneath the Earth’s surface in the Gran Sasso massif near Rome, Borexino has succeeded in capturing 53 geoneutrino events. (It’s worth noting that during that time the detector was also capturing Solar neutrinos.)

The design of the Borexino neutrino telescope. (Credit: ScienceDirect.com)

And those 53 anti-neutrinos were enough to allow the theoreticians to answer a question that has long perplexed geologists and geophysicists, how much of the Earth’s internal heat is being generated by the decay of radioactive elements? Thanks to the data provided by Borexino we now know, with an 85% confidence level, that just about half of the heat in our planet’s core comes from nuclear decay. In fact the data obtained by Borexino has even allowed physicists to estimate the amounts of the radioactive elements Uranium and Thorium remaining inside the Earth.

Thanks to Borexino we now have actually measured the amount of heat being generated in Earth’s core by radioactive decay! (Credit: NBC News)

Borexino will continue to capture geoneutrinos, and each new detection will increase the accuracy of the results. There are also plans to build a larger detector at Gran Sasso so in the years to come geoneutrinos may tell us even more about the makeup of the interior of the Earth.

Now if you think that calculating the energy generated in the Earth’s core based on just 53 detections of elementary particles is pretty amazing well there are a group of physicists attached to the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment in Antarctica who think that the detection of three particles could overturn the standard model of particle physics.

ANITA is a completely different sort of neutrino detector than Borexino, but one that is only sensitive to the very highest energy neutrinos, those with energies far greater than that of neutrinos coming from either the Earth or Sun. ANITA is intended to study the neutrinos associated with high-energy cosmic rays from quasars or black holes or supernovas.

The way ANITA detects these high-energy neutrinos is that while in space the neutrinos are moving at almost, but not quite the speed of light in a vacuum as they pass through the Antarctic ice they are actually moving faster than the speed of light in ice! Such particles will give off a kind of radiation known as Askaryan radiation until their speed is reduced below that of light, or they leave the ice. The radiation that these high-energy neutrinos give off happens to be in the microwave region of the electro-magnetic spectrum, a type of radiation that we humans are very good at detecting. Your cellphones operate in the microwave region for example.

The ANITA detectors are lifted into the stratosphere by a helium balloon. (Credit: The Scientific Community on Antarctic Research)

The ANITA Experiment catches EM waves giving off by ultra-high energy neutrinos as they skim through the Antarctic ice sheet. (Credit: ResearchGate)

Funded by NASA, the ANITA experiment therefore consists of an array of 40 microwave antennas that are lifted into the stratosphere over the Antarctic by a helium balloon in order to maximize their coverage area. Operating on an every other year basis ANITA has now flown four times and detected numerous signals associated with high-energy neutrinos that have taught physicists a great deal about the neutrino component of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR).

Launch of the ANITA Experiment. The detector will remain aloft for about four months during the Antarctic summer. (Credit: Jeff Filippini)

Three of those detections however seem to come directly up from beneath the detector, as if they’ve come through the entire Earth, something high-energy neutrinos should not be able to do. Remember the whole time that they’re passing through solid material the neutrinos are giving off Askaryan radiation.

So if these three particles weren’t the sort of neutrinos that physicists are familiar with, what were they? Some new form of neutrino? Or an entirely new type of particle beyond the Standard Model? Three detections do not give enough evidence for a definitive answer but ANITA is only one of a number of experiments that are giving indications of physics beyond the Standard Model.

Further flights with ANITA are planned, as are other experiments designed to give a clearer picture of what these strange particles might be. Physicists have never been happy with the Standard Model, which fails to answer as many questions as it does answer. How long it will take to understand what is beyond the Standard Model, and what experiment will finally succeed in making the breakthrough is anybodies guess. You can be certain however that physicists will keep on looking until they find those answers.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), what is it like to have one, how do the work and what do they do?

MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Images) are becoming an increasingly common tool used by doctors to aid them in diagnosing the medical condition of their patients. I’ve just had my third MRI taken this morning so I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about how MRIs work and why they are such useful tools for doctors.

Patient being prepared for an MRI. (Credit: Northwest Radiology)

For those who have never received an MRI I’ll start with a short description of the experience. First and foremost, no metal of any kind can be placed within or even near an MRI machine. MRI machines produce intense magnetic fields, so intense that magnetic materials like iron can be hurled across the room while even non-magnetic metals like copper or aluminum can be inductively heated to dangerous temperatures. Patients being examined must remove all wristwatches, rings etc. while people with metal implants in their bodies, say a steel rod to strengthen a broken bone, simply cannot have an MRI because it would be extremely dangerous for them.

The magnetic field at the center of an MRI machine can be 30,000 times as powerful as Earth’s magnetic field. (Credit: Magnetic Resonance Imaging)

There are two basic designs of MRI machines, open and closed. Closed are the original and still more common type, if only because they cost less. A closed MRI machine consists of a doughnut shaped solenoid, barely large enough to fit a slab that a person can lay on through the doughnut hole. The portion of the patient’s body being examined is kept motionless in the center of the doughnut solenoid, which produces the intense magnetic fields required for the resonance imaging.

Because the opening of the doughnut in a closed MRI machine is so small many people get a strong feeling of claustrophobia while being examined. So open MRI machines were developed with larger, more open volumes of intense magnetic field. Of course, since generating a intense magnetic is costly; generating a larger volume of intense magnetic field is even more expensive. Therefore open MRIs are less common than the smaller, less costly closed version.

Typical Open MRI machine. The extra space can make patients feel better but costs a fair penny! (Credit: Medical Imaging)

MRIs are also very noisy. If you’ve ever walked past an electric power sub-station you will have heard the 60 hertz hum of the transformers, a sound I know all too well. That sound is caused by the alternating current flowing around the magnetic core of the transformers literally causing them to vibrate. Well the magnetic fields generated during an MRI exam are even stronger, turn on and off frequently and consist of many different frequencies. All that causes the MRI machine to bleep and chirp and buzz at very loud volumes, and remember the patient is stuck right in the middle of the noise. Most states, perhaps all of them by now, require MRI patients to wear ear protection in order to prevent any damage to their hearing from the noise.

So much for the experience of having an MRI. How do MRIs work and what makes them different from say, having an X-ray taken?

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is a purely quantum mechanical phenomena dealing with those atoms whose nuclei possess an odd number of either protons or neutrons. Such nuclei have a sum magnetic moment of one Bohr magnetron to them and when placed into a strong external magnetic field they will align that magnetic moment with the external field. (Actually each proton and neutron have their own magnetic moment but in a stable nucleus the protons and neutrons arrange themselves so the entire nucleus has a total magnetic moment of no more than one.)

Now if a second, oscillating magnetic field is applied perpendicular to the stable field at just the right, resonant frequency the nucleus will begin to precess like a top that is losing its spin. That resonate frequency is determined by the properties of the nuclei and the strength of the stable magnetic field. That precession then causes the nucleus to radiate electro-magnetic waves in the 60-1000 million Hertz range (MHz), almost the same frequencies as broadcast television. Frequencies that radio engineers know very well how to detect and measure.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance is caused by the precession of the nucleus of an atom. (Credit: www.jeol.co.jp)

By observing those EM waves physicists have been able to learn a great deal about the internal structure of many different nuclei with devices known as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrographs. As far as medical diagnostics is concerned however only the simple nucleus of a hydrogen atom, just a single proton, is used. You see with all of the water in our bodies, and every molecule of water having two hydrogen atoms medical MRI machines can scan our entire bodies using only hydrogen. This concentration on a single type of nucleus helps make a very expensive machine a little bit less costly.

A Nuclear Magnetic resonance Spectrograph is an instrument that physicists use to study the nuclei of various atoms. (Credit: www.the-scientist.com)

This is how an MRI machine can see inside our bodies, measuring the variations in the moisture level of our different organs by the intensity of EM radiation given off by the hydrogen nuclei in that organ. That is what makes MRIs more sensitive to things like tumors, lesions, tears and other abnormalities than X-rays. That is why more and more doctors are prescribing MRI examinations in order to help diagnose their patients medical problems, despite their high cost.

When I tore the rotator cuff in my right shoulder the Doctor diagnosed the condition using MRI. (Credit: Centeno-Schultz Clinic)

An MRI of a human brain. Images like this are teaching us so much about how the human body works. (Credit: kxci.org)

Over the last century we humans have been developing ever more powerful and sensitive drugs, treatments and instruments for dealing with our diseases and other aliments. MRI is one of the more remarkable of those developments, allowing doctors to see inside the human body with a clarity never before possible.

Building things from living tissue. Two scientific projects highlight the advances being made in using life as a construction material.

It’s built into the language that we use, we build with non-living materials and we grow living things. Those time-honoured definitions are starting to get a little blurry however as scientists and engineers develop ever more complicated and sophisticated machines that behave almost like living things. Meanwhile there are biologists and biochemists who are working to develop techniques by which we can build things with living tissue. In this post I’m going to talk about two projects that are making considerable progress in the latter category.

As Children we quickly learn the difference between living and non-living things. Thanks to scientists today that difference is steadily shrinking. (Credit: Pinterest)

The first group, working at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, has literally discovered a method to construct a living brick, as in a brick for building your house. The bricks are manufactured by incorporating the bacteria Synechococcus cyanobacteria into a solution of sand, gelatin and a bit of water. As the bacteria metabolize the gelatin, absorbing CO2 from that air in the process, it becomes the mineral calcium carbonate, a cement that holds the sand together as in concrete.

Living bricks growing at the lab at the University of Colorado. (Credit: C4ISRNET)

These ‘living bricks’ have several advantages over the bricks that humans have made for thousands of years. As I’ve already mentioned the bacteria absorb CO2 from the air in order to convert the gelatin into cement, and in today’s world getting rid of some CO2 is definitely a good thing.

The life cycle of living bricks! (Credit: SlashGear)

However the main advantages of the living brick are twofold. First of all instead of manufacturing the bricks one at a time since they use a bacteria to bind them together you can actually grow them. So long as you have a starter brick you can produce as many bricks as you need just by adding sand and gelatin, almost like having a starter yeast in bread making. The second advantage is that when damaged, say a crack forms in the brick for some reason; the living bricks can actually repair themselves to a degree, just like a cut on your arm healing.

There are still several problems remain to be overcome, for one the gelatin is made from animal collagen and is fairly expensive in large quantities. Nevertheless it is hoped that the living brick could soon be useful in construction projects in remote locations, like perhaps Mars!

The second development project is even more ambitious, attempting to create a ‘living robot’ from stem cells, those cells in the body that have yet to be turned into muscle cells or stomach cells or brain cells. The team of scientists from the University of Vermont, Tufts University in Maine and Harvard University used the stem cells in frogs to fabricate a small living creature made up of several hundred cells living cells. The actual species of frog whose stem cells were used was the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis and the tiny machines made from their stem cells are called xenobots. The xenobot’s outside was made of skin cells to give it shape while inside were heart muscle cells to enable it to move.

The African clawed frog, Xenopus Iaevis. Stem cells from this critter were used to manufacture the first living machine. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Introducing the Xenobot, a robot ‘manufactured from living cells. (Credit: MIT Technology Review)

But something that simply moves isn’t a robot, robots are specifically designed to execute instructions, to perform a task and the researchers have actually succeeded in ‘evolving’ their creatures to carry out simple commands. They did this by employing a computer algorithm that ‘reproduced’ inside the algorithm those xenobots that came closer to behaving in a desired manner while eliminating from the program those that did not.

A computer algorithm was used to determine where to put skin cells (green) and where to put muscle cells (red) in order to make the xenobots perform desired functions. (University of Vermont)

After several generations the researchers had developed an entirely new form of living creature that would carry out simple tasks. The researchers hope that in time xenobots could be used to help remove toxic or even radioactive material from spills, collecting microplastic particles and perhaps even removing plaque from inside our arteries or delivering drugs to areas inside the bodies.

One day perhaps xenobots will be employed in our bloodstreams to deliver drugs or even remove blockages! (Credit: European Pharmaceutical Review)

There’s a lot of work still to be done but xenobots are something entirely new, neither machine nor living creature they are a new kind of tool for us to use. Who knows what kind of jobs they’ll enable us to do one day?

Scientists make crucial discover that extends the lifespan of a worm by a factor of five! Could that discovery lead to techniques that would extend the Human lifespan?

Ever wanted to live forever? O’k maybe that’s a bit too much but how does living five times as long sound? Interested? Who wouldn’t be?

Throughout history we humans have searched for ways to extend our lifespans. We’ve tried various potions, prayers and exercise regiments without any success. The medieval alchemists actually believed that the same process that could turn lead to gold, called the Philosopher’s stone by them, would make humans immortal. I’ve never been able to figure that one out.

Recipe for a Philosopher’s Stone. I can’t figure it out but maybe you can. Do you believe there are still people peddling this nonsense? (Credit: Evolveconsciousness.org)

All of which begs the question, why do we age anyway? As children the cells of our body reproduce at a rate that actually causes us to grow, in fact some animals never stop growing no matter how old they get. Then during our twenties our cells reproduce at a rate that replaces lost cells, so that we neither grow nor decay. As we enter middle age however the reproduction of our cells drops off, our bodies don’t replace them as fast as needed, we age. So the question then becomes, what is happening inside our cells that causes the process of aging?

Some animals. like lobsters, actually don’t age at all! They just keep on growing until something kills them! (Credit: Pinterest)

It’s only been within the last few decades however that we have learned any of the details of aging at the cellular level. Surprisingly enough much of the research into the causes of aging has been conducted using a primitive nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans. Geneticists have several reasons for using C elegans as their test subject. First of all we share many of the genes that regulate metabolism within our cells with C elegans. Also the lifespan of C elegans is so short, only about a month, that it allows geneticists to quickly determine the results of their experiments.

C elegans, image (top) and drawing illustrating internal anatomy. (Credit: Research Gate)

Using C elegans what biologists have discovered is that much of the process that we call aging comes from a failure of the cell’s mitochondria to properly regulate their energy production. The mitochondria within the cells of our bodies are the powerhouse of cell metabolism, breaking down sugars and fats to release their energy. In fact mitochondria are so complex that they are almost cells with cells, even having their own DNA.

Cell structure with enlarged mitochondria. (Credit: Science Learning hub)

Now researchers Jarod A. Rollins at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbour Maine and Jianfeng Lan at Nanjing University in China have achieved some startling results in extending the lifespan of C elegans through two mutations affecting the stress response within the mitochondria. The first mutation boosts the efficiency of the Insulin Signaling (IIS) pathway and by itself has been shown to increase the life span of C elegans by 100%. The second mutation affects the TOR pathway and increases the lifespan of C elegans by 30%.

Jarod Rollings in his lab at MDIBL. (Credit: MDIslander)

Now you’re probably guessing that a double mutation that alters both pathways would increase the lifespan by 130% or so, which would still be a major result. You’d be wrong however, biological systems don’t work in such a nice linear fashion. In fact when the researchers performed the experiment they found that the lifespans of their test subjects were increased by 500%, the equivalent of a human being living to 400-500 years! Such a reaction to a combination of changes is technically known as a synergistic interaction, where a combination of therapies produces a far greater result then any single therapy.

The best news is that, since both of these pathways are also inside our mitochondria it could be possible to develop drugs that that can produce the same results inside our cells. Such drugs and other therapies are now under development and animal trials could begin soon. While it is not expected that these drugs, even in combination, will extend human lifespan by 500%, humans are a much more complex organism than a nematode worm after all, it is hoped that these therapies could help us live a healthier, more vigorous life much longer.

Imagine 80 or 90 year olds running marathons! (Credit: Pinterest)

Think of that for just a moment, not just more people living into their 80s, 90s and beyond but people in their 80s or 90s running marathons, people in their 100s who are still physically and mentally healthy. All this could be possible by proper regulation of the mitochondria in our cells.

Space News for January 2020: Space X clinches the final test of its Crew Dragon capsule before manned launches can begin.

The big news this month is of course the successful completion of the In Flight Abort (IFA) test by Space X’s Crew Dragon capsule. The test, which was conducted with an unmanned capsule, was designed to simulate a major failure of the Falcon 9 booster rocket in order to demonstrate that the Dragon capsule is capable of separating itself from its boosters in flight and returning its crew safely back to the ground. The simulated failure was scheduled to occur about one and a half minutes into the fight, the moment at which both the spacecraft and its launch system are exposed to the maximum aerodynamic pressure, making it the most hazardous time of the launch. If you’d like to watch the actual flight, it takes about six minutes, click on the link below to be taken to a YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkd5PNyRLng

Liftoff of the Space X Crew Dragon capsule on its In Flight Abort Test . (Credit: WTOP.com)

To complete the test the Dragon capsule had to separate from its boosters and deploy parachutes in order to safely splashdown in the Atlantic. Separation was accomplished by firing solid rocket engines aboard the Dragon capsule, pulling it away from the launch vehicle seconds before the first two stages were intentionally destroyed.

Firing of the Dragon capsule’s solid fuel abort engines, at top. (Credit: True Median)

The IFA test is a critical part of the checkout of the final safety system of any manned spacecraft. The importance of the in-flight abort system was demonstrated back in October of 2018 when a Soyuz rocket carrying the American astronaut Nick Hague along with Russian Cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin failed just after launch and the Soyuz capsule’s in-flight abort system saved the lives of the two space travelers.

Failure of a Soyuz rocket back in October 2018. The crew was saved by the capsule’s abort system. (Credit: NPR)

The Space X IFA test had been originally scheduled to take place at 8AM Eastern Standard Time on the 18th of January but was delayed until the 19th because of high winds at the launch area along with choppy seas in the recovery zone. Even on the 19th the launch had to be delayed until 10:30 AM to allow clouds to disperse.

Despite the less than optimal weather the test flight itself went perfectly with the Falcon 9 rocket lifting off smoothly from launch pad 39A at Cape Kennedy. This was the fourth launch for the first stage of the Falcon 9, an example of Space X’s commitment to reducing the cost of space travel by reusing every part of the launch system that it possibly can.

For the next minute and a half minute everything appeared just like a normal launch until exactly on schedule the Dragon Capsule was yanked away from its boosters by the solid fuel rockets. Seconds later the Falcon 9 booster was detonated on command while the capsule began dropping back to Earth.

Destruction of the Space X Falcon 9 booster rocket during the IFA test. The capsule got safely away. (Credit: Space News)

As the capsule entered the denser part of the atmosphere drogue parachutes were deployed in order to stabilize the capsule’s orientation. About a minute later the four main ‘chutes deployed slowing the capsule’s descent until it landed softly in the ocean.

Seen from inside the Dragon capsule the four main parachutes are a beautiful sight. (Credit: CNBC.com)

Immediately small recovery boats headed toward the capsule, a practice run for how they would rescue the crew of any aborted manned mission. A large recovery vessel later rendezvoused with and lifted the capsule out of the ocean. Less than twelve hours after it had lifted off the Dragon capsule would be returned to Cape Kennedy, mission accomplished.

The Dragon capsule returning to the Cape less than twelve hours after completing its IFA test. (Credit: Spaceflight Now)

Now the finer details of the test still have to be reviewed by NASA and Space X engineers, but nevertheless the Dragon capsule’s IFA test was clearly a success. If the test had been a real launch failure of a manned mission the astronauts on board would have survived the failure without any serious injury.

With the IFA test accomplished Space X can now prepare for their first actual manned launch, which company CEO Elon Musk has stated will take place sometime within a April to June time frame. So the next time a Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon capsule lifts off from the Cape it will be the first time in nine years, since the end of NASA’s shuttle program, that American astronauts will fly into space aboard an American rocket from American soil.

The first astronauts to ride a Dragon capsule into space will be Bob Behknen (r) and Doug Hurley (l). (Credit: Electrek)

A Quick Update on an Earlier Post:

Just a week ago, on the 18th of January I posted an article about the observation that the red giant star Betelgeuse has been rapidly dimming in brightness and could be in the early stages of exploding as a Type 2 Supernova (SN2). Since that time the massive star has continued to dim, its brightness is now less than at any time since astronomers first began taking accurate measurements of its luminosity back in the 1920s. See graph below.

Betelgeuse is a variable star but recently its brightness has dimmed more than ever seen before. (Credit: AAVSO)

Our theories about SN2 tell us that Betelgeuse will go nova sometime in the next 100,000 years or so, but is that time now? Astronomers think that’s unlikely but you can bet that they will be keeping a close eye on Betelgeuse in the near future.

Paleontologists discover possible oldest fossil intestines. These fossils could help show a path from the earliest multi-cellular life to the more familiar lifeforms of today.

Trying to understand the evolution of life on Earth is a bit like trying to figure out the picture on a jigsaw puzzle when you only have a dozen or so of the puzzle’s pieces. Obviously only a very few of the animals who ever lived have made fossils and of the few that have it’s usually only the hard part of the animal that fossilizes, bones and teeth for vertebrates, shells or exoskeletons for invertebrates. It’s a good question, how many species of animals with no hard parts existed in the past about whom we known absolutely nothing?

Fossils of Jellyfish are extremely rare because there’s almost nothing to fossilize. (Credit: Technology Networks)

The first multi-cellular animals, from about 600 million years ago, had no hard parts, and the very few impressions of them that paleontologists have found are so different from today’s species that it is hard to tell just what kind of animal they are. Known as the Ediacaran biota they have been described as quilt like, frond like or even balloon like in structure and whether or not they bare any relationship to the animals of today is a subject of hot debate. See images below.

Dicksonia costata is one of the stranger of the Ediacaran creatures. Is it even an animal? (Credit: Wikipedia)

Charnia is another Ediacaran creature. The fossil almost seems to indicate that the animal was quilted in structure. (Credit: Verisimilus at English Wikipedia)

Spriggina at least definitely looks like an animal that has a definite front and back and obviously moves in some fashion. (Credit: Pinterest)

Then, less than 60 million years later during the Cambrian period a very different assemblage of animals appeared as if from nowhere. These animals, best known from the famous Burgess shale fossils, are in most cases recognizable members of the modern major taxonomic groupings. The questions then arise, how did all these different groups arise at the same time, and what is their relation, if any, to the earlier Ediacaran animals.

The animals of the Cambrian, like this trilobite Olenoides, though strange are recognizably related to modern arthropods. (Credit: Trilobites.info)

Even the ‘wierd wonders’ of the Cambrian. like this artists impression of Opabinia, are still structured like modern animals. (Credit: Burgess Shale Science Foundation)

A recent discovery may provide the first definite link between an Ediacaran creature and a modern group of animals. As is happening more and more in paleontology the discovery wasn’t made by digging up a new fossil in the field but rather by looking at a fossil found years ago with a new instrument.

Tara Selly is a research assistant professor at the Department of Geological Sciences of the University of Missouri who was learning how to examine specimens using the university’s new X-ray microscope. For practice she grabbed a handy fossil, one that happened to come from Nye County in southern Nevada.

The fossil she chose was of a creature known as a cloudinomorph that dated to the end of the Ediacaran period, about 550 million years ago. Fossil cloudinomorphs are basically little tubes made of the material calcium carbonate and paleontologists have argued for years over whether the animal inside the tube was a relative of a coral medusa (technically an Anthozoan) or a tubeworm (Polychaete).

Cloudinomorphs were a well known but poorly understood Ediacaran fossil. (Credit: Tara Selly and James Schiffbauer)

When Doctor Selly looked at her cloudinomorph with the X-ray microscope she immediately saw a feature that was invisible under normal light, a tube running all the way through the fossil from one end to the other. If, as seemed likely, this tube was the intestine of the cloudinomorph that would immediate eliminate the possibility of the animals being related to a coral. You see corals and jellyfish have only one opening to their digestive system, which serves as both a mouth and an anus.

3D image of a cloudinomorph tube and the internal tube removed for inspection. The black line represents 2mm in length. (Credit: Tara Selly and James Schiffbauer)

Tara Selly shows grad student Brock Anderson how to prepare a specimen for viewing on the X-ray microscope. (Credit: Tara Selly and James Schiffbauer)

“A tube would tell us that it’s probably a worm,” according to James Schiffbauer the lead author of the study. “We can now say that their anatomical structure appears much more worm-like than coral-like.” If that is true is would establish the first firm link between an animal from the Ediacaran period and a modern group.

Possible reconstruction of the cloudinoporph animal. (Credit: New York Times)

In any case this is also the first evidence of any kind of complex internal structure, an internal organ of some kind inside an animal from the Ediacaran. That alone is important because it tells us that at least some of these early creatures were more than just balloons or quilts of undifferentiated cells. We may only have a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of life’s history but perhaps; thanks to Doctors Selly and Schiffbauer we may have just found a very important one.

Type 1 Supernovas, how do they differ from Type 2 Supernovas and how that makes them important to our understanding of the size and evolution of the Universe?

In my post of just two weeks ago, January 4th 2020, I talked about the possibility that the Red Giant star Betelgeuse might be about to explode as a Type 2 Supernova (SN2). At the end of that post I made an offhand remark about writing a post about Type 1 Supernovas (SN1) in order to clarify the difference between the two types. Well I recently came across a couple of papers concerning SN1s so I decided that now was as good a time as any to fulfill my promise.

The constellation of Orion. Betelgeuse has been acting strangely. Is it about to go Nova? (Credit: Sky and Telescope)

First of all I suppose I should start by describing how an astronomer distinguishes one type of supernova from the other when they observe one. They do this by breaking up the light from the Supernova into its spectral lines that show the elements giving off the light. In SN1s the spectral lines of hydrogen will be completely absent while in SN2s the spectra will indicate a fair amount of hydrogen. Other observational differences have been seen in a few individual Supernovas, ones near enough to observe additional details, but the presence or absence of Hydrogen is the consistent difference. Everything else is really just theory.

The Hydrogen absorption spectra. Seeing these lines in the light from a Supernova means that it is a Type 2 while the absence of these lines makes it a Type 1. (Credit: Slide Player)

So let’s examine the theories, SN2s first. As I discussed in my post about Betelgeuse, SN2s begin as stars that are ten times or more as massive as our Sun. Such stars race through their nuclear fuel very quickly, millions instead of billions of years. As the star begins to run out of its fuel it puffs up into a red giant like Betelgeuse is now. When that fuel is completely used up the star’s core collapses because of gravity but that collapse triggers an explosion of the star’s outer layers as a Supernova. Since the outermost layers of the star still possess some hydrogen, that element’s spectral lines are seen in the Supernova’s light letting astronomers know that it is an SN2.

The Type 2 Supernova SN1987a, before (r) and during (l) images. (Credit: “© Anglo-Australian Observatory” and (optionally) “Photograph by David Malin”)

SN1s could hardly be more different. For one thing a SN1 can only occur in a double star system. In addition one of the stars must have already gone completely through it’s energy production life span and is now a burnt out cinder known as a white dwarf. White dwarfs can be as massive as our Sun but are crushed down to the size of a planet like Earth. Because they are so dense, and under such immense gravitational force, the material of a white dwarf is not made up of normal atoms as here on Earth, with electrons orbiting around a nucleus. Instead the electrons are squeezed into their nuclei and all of the nuclei are pushed much closer together than in normal matter, because of this the spectra of a white dwarf shows no sign of the presence of hydrogen.

A white dwarf star can have the mass of our Sun but only be as large as our Earth! (Credit: Medium)

There’s another peculiarity about white dwarfs as well. White dwarfs can only be so massive, a value known as Chandrasekhar’s number, which is equal to about 1.4 times the mass of our Sun. Any heavier and the white dwarf will continue to collapse down into a neutron star or black hole. That collapse triggering its outer layers to explode as an SN1.

So where would an otherwise stable white dwarf star get the extra mass needed to make it exceed Chandrasekhar’s number and explode as a SN1? From its companion star that’s where, which is why SN1 only occur in binary star systems. Astronomers have in fact observed binary systems where a white dwarf’s intense gravity is pulling matter away from its companion, a situation that will eventually lead to a SN1.

A white dwarf star pulling material away from its companion. Eventually this dwarf will go Supernova. (Credit: www.cfa.harvard.edu)

And now astronomers Bradley E. Schaefer, Juhan Frank and Manos Chatzopoulos of the Department of Physic and Astronomy at Louisiana State University have used some very precise measurements of the faint star V Sagittae in the constellation Sagitta to actually predict that it will explode as a SN1 in or about the year 2083. In fact V Sagittae is already rapidly increasing in brightness, currently shining at 10x the brightness it did when it was first accurately measured back in 1907.

V Sigittae is currently too dim to be seen without a telescope but a new study predicts in 2083 it will be the brightest star in the sky, for a few weeks. (credit: Sky and Telescope)

This rapid increase is likely to continue over the next decades as the white dwarf devours its companion. Eventually the star, which currently cannot even be seen with the naked eye, will become as bright in our sky as the star Sirius, or perhaps even the planet Venus, but not for long. How accurate the prediction about when V Sagittae will go Nova remains to be seen but you can be certain that astronomers will be keeping a close eye upon it for many years to come.

Another interesting thing about SN1 is that since they only occur when a white dwarf’s mass goes above Chandrasekhar’s number then all SN1 should be pretty much the same. That is, each SN1 should release the same amount of energy. If that is true then a SN1 can be used as a ‘standard candle’ to accurately measure distances throughout the Universe.

You see the distance to an object in deep space is the most difficult thing there is to measure in astronomy. We have many theories about the Universe that cannot be either confirmed or falsified simply because we can’t measure distances accurately enough to really be certain we know exactly what is going on. But if we know precisely how much energy an object puts out no matter where it is in the Universe, like a SN1, then we can measure how bright it appears in our sky and a simple formula tells us how far away it is.

Using actual Luminosity (L in watts) and brightness (B in Watts /meter-squared) to find the distance to an astronomical object. (Credit: Ohio State University)

Astronomers did just that back in the 1990s, using SN1 to accurately measure the rate at which the Universe is expanding. It was those measurements that indicated that the expansion of the Universe was actually accelerating, that ‘Dark Energy’ was pushing the Universe apart faster. This was the first and still the best evidence for the existence of Dark Energy.

The original evidence for Dark Energy. Notice how the Type 1 Supernova measurements (Red balls) indicate that the Universe is expanding faster than the ‘Standard Model’. (Credit: University of Arizona)

Now a new study threatens to upend all of that. Astronomers from the Department of Astronomy at Yonsei University in South Korea along with the Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute have made highly detailed measurements from 60 SN1 events and have found that the absolute luminosity of an SN1 changes with the age of the Universe at which time the SN1 occurred. In other words SN1 have evolved over time. In fact if the changes in luminosity with time described in the paper are taken into account then the acceleration of the Universe simply disappears, there’s no such thing as Dark Energy!

The new evidence that SN1 have evolved over the age of the Universe. Does this mean that Dark Energy doesn’t even exist? (Credit: Phys.org)

If this study is true it would undo much of the Astronomy of the last 30 years, but other astronomers have to review it first, check the data, make some more measurements to be certain. Whether or not SN1 can be used as a ‘standard candle’ is an important matter for Astronomers but regardless of the answer to that question they are still an awesome example of the many different objects in our Universe.

Book Review: ‘Artificial You’ by Susan Schneider

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here! The world’s best chess players are now machines; the best Jeopardy player is a machine. We now have AIs like Alexia and Siri in our homes acting as our personal secretaries. AI controlled robots are doing more and more of the physical and repetitive labour in our societies. More and more people today are coming to recognize that it’s only a matter of time before we have succeeded in building AIs that are as smart, or smarter, or even much smarter than we are.

IBM’s Watson AI is now doing a lot more than just winning games of Jeopardy. (Credit: www.cio.com)

How many of us now have Amazon’s Alexa AI in our homes? (Credit: Beebom)

How should we treat these creations of ours, can we control them, should we? If they become conscious entities do they have rights, legal rights that is? Or should we avoid making machines that are conscious for those reasons? And how will we ever even know if our machines do become conscious?

Questions like those are just the starting point of the book ‘Artificial You’ by Susan Schneider. As the director of the AI, Mind and Society group at the University of Connecticut and following her two-year NASA funded project exploring superintelligent AI Doctor Schneider is uniquely qualified to consider those questions from both a technical as well as a philosophical perspective.

Cover of ‘Artificial You’ by Susan Schneider (Credit: Amazon)

In fact much of Doctor Schneider’s research has been concerned with the development of tests that would allow we humans to determine whether an AI has a mind, or whether it has simply been so skillfully programmed that it can behave as if it had a mind, as some of our AL systems are already starting to do. In order to do this Doctor Schneider first asks us to consider what are the qualities of our thought processes that are different from simple computations. Questions of this sort make up the first four chapter of ‘Artificial You’.

What is our mind anyway? Can a computer even have a mind and how would we know if one has? (Credit: Seychelles Truth Reconciliation)

The final four chapters along with the conclusion concern the even more esoteric question of whether it may someday be possible for a human mind to merge with an AI and thereby gain a computer’s speed, accuracy and expanded memory, and maybe even immortality. Doctor Schneider discusses two broad methods of how such a merger might be accomplished.

The first is bit by bit, where a human brain might get a neural lace implanted in it to enable a direct connection to a computer. Or perhaps the replacement of the brain’s hippocampus, which is essential for laying down new memories, by an artificial hippocampus. Both of these technologies are currently under development and other possible ‘chip’ enhancements to the brain are being studied. In time what began as a few ‘improvements’ to our brain could become a total replacement of it.

Wearing a neural lace in order to have direct connection to an AI is one thing, but would you ever have one implanted in your skull? (Credit: www.nrc.nl)

The world’s first prothesis for an injured part of the brain, an artificial hippocampus is being tested on monkeys. (Credit: Slideplayer.com)

The second technique involves a ‘mindscan’, a minute and detailed plotting of every connection between the neurons of the brain and a reproduction of those connections onto a silicon or other electronic substrate. By reproducing the exact pattern of a human mind in this way it is thought that the new mind so created would be an exact copy of that human mind but with all of the advantages of AI. Perhaps even including perhaps immortality?

At the moment a ‘Mindscan’ is only Science Fiction. How long will it stay that way? (Credit: Amazon)

These possibilities date back to at least the 1960s in Science Fiction such as ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘The Ultimate Computer’ episode of ‘Star Trek’ and Doctor Schneider considers them both at some length. This kind of thinking has become known as ‘Transhumanism’ and is a growing philosophy among cybernetic engineers and researchers. Although Doctor Schneider considers herself to be a ‘Transhumanist’ nevertheless she is skeptical about their more optimistic predictions.

Did becoming a cyborg give Robocop immortality or did it take away what made him human? (Credit: Den of Geek)

That’s the point of view that Doctor Schneider takes throughout ‘Artificial You’, skeptical, questioning, looking for the flaws in any argument while demanding evidence to back up any claims. Whatever your viewpoint on the issues of human / machine interactions you can benefit from Doctor Schneider’s clear-eyed analysis. ‘Artificial You’ is an important book and with future advances in AI it will only become more important.

Paleontologists are making progress in unlocking the secrets of two of the most events in the history of life here on Earth.

There have been many events in the long history of Earth that have shaped the course of the evolution of life for millions of years. Whether it be the rise of multi-cellular organisms or the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, life today would be very different if those events hadn’t happened, certainly we wouldn’t be here.

The history of life is a combination of gradual change and Earth-Shattering events. (Credit: www.seeker.com)

In today’s post I’ll be talking about recent progress that is being made in understanding two of these events. One of those events was the first time that an animal with an internal skeleton, a vertebrate left the ocean to walk on land but I’m going to start by discussing new revelations concerning the very origin of life itself.

Timeline of the history of our Planet. (Credit: Slideplayer.com)

Scientific speculation about the origin of life began even before Darwin published his ‘On the Origin of Species’ but for about a hundred years it was little more than speculation. Then in the 1950s the Miller-Urey experiment was performed showing how easily the gasses that made up our planet’s early atmosphere could be converted into complex organic molecules like amino acids. (For more information on the Miller-Urey experiment see my post of 9 March 2019.)

Setup of the Miller _ Urey experiment. (Credit: Big Picture)

For the last fifty years however real progress in determining the chemical path that led to the first living things ran into a roadblock, the chemical phosphorus. You see phosphorus is critical in many of the chemicals processes in living cells; Adenosine triphosphate is often referred to as the match that lights the chemical engine of cell metabolism while phospholipids make cell membranes stronger and more watertight. Perhaps most importantly phosphorus is an essential element in the formation of both the DNA and RNA molecules that form the genetic code of life.

The Chemical Structure of Adenosine triphosphate. The phosphorus atom on the far left contains a lot of easily usable energy. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Problem is that phosphorus doesn’t usually combine well with organic chemicals, combining more easily with calcium, an element that is abundant in the oceans. This leaves very little free phosphorus around with which to create the first living things. Biochemists were stumped, to build the first living creatures you need phosphorus, where did those, not yet living, complex organic compounds get it.

Jonathan D. Toner and David C. Catling of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington have recently suggested a solution to this problem. In their paper published in the ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Science’ they have suggested that carbonate rich lakes might be the locations where phosphorus was incorporated into organic chemistry. You see carbon bonds with calcium even more strongly than phosphorus does. So lakes that are rich in carbonates will use up all of the calcium leaving whatever phosphorus there is free to get incorporated into organic compounds.

Mono Lake in California. It may not look hospitable but there is plenty of primitive life here. (Credit: News Deeply)

The kind of lakes we’re talking about here is not the sort commonly considered hospitable to life. Lakes with little or no outlets where salts and other chemicals can build up. Mono Lake in California and Lake Magadi in Kenya would be a good examples. Although such environments are hostile to advanced forms of life they are often rich in primitive bacteria and algae.

Lake Magadi in Kenya is famous for the huge number of Flamingos that feed on the small crustaceans there. (Credit: Africa Dream Safaris)

Doctors Toner and Catling have even measured high levels of free phosphorus in many such lakes, see chart below, demonstrating that the more inorganic carbon in the water, the more free phosphorus there is as well. Other scientists will have to critique and challenge Toner and Catling’s theory before it’s accepted but it certainly looks as if they may have found the solution to a longstanding problem.

Phosphorus levels versus free carbonates in lakes examined by Toner and Catling. (Credit: SciTech Daily)

Another crucial event in the history of life occurred when the first vertebrate crawled out of the water and onto the land. From the paleontological record we know that this transition occurred during the late Devonian period some 3755 million years ago. While the actual species of fish that first succeeded in wiggling out of the water is a subject of debate one possibility is Tiktaalik rosa, see image below, discovered by Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and Edward Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Science here in Philadelphia.

Artists impression of Tiktaalik roseae. (Credit: Paleocast)

Proposed family tree of the fish who crawled out of the ocean. (Credit: Pinterest)

Looking at Tiktaalik it is immediately obvious that this animal is not a streamlined swimmer. In fact Doctors Shubin and Daeschler think that Tiktaalik crawled along the bottom of shallow, muddy lakes and ponds using its four fins more like legs than fins. Such an anatomy and lifestyle seems perfect for the first land walker but it also raises the question of how did the fins of a fish evolve into the proto-legs of Tiktaalik. Now Doctors Shubin and Daeschler, along with a few of their colleagues, have published a new paper comparing the limb-fin of Tiktaalik to those of related, and thought to be ancestral species, Sauripterus taylori and Eusthenopteron foordi.

First the researchers used CT scans of the fossil remains to construct 3-D models of not only the bones in the animals fins but also the cartilage and dermal (skin) rays. The 3-D model allowed the researchers to rotate and examine the entire skeletal structure bringing out details that are commonly lost in removing the bones from the rock encasing them.

Dermal rays of the pectoral fins of T roseae. (Credit: Thomas A. Stewart et. al.)

What the scientists discovered was that the evolution from the earlier species to Tiktaalik involved a reduction in the dermal rays of the fins. At the same time the top and bottom of the fin lost their symmetry, the top growing faster than the bottom leading to the formation of a ‘palm’ in the fin of Tiktaalik. Such a structure would have been able to act as a support base when Tiktaalik rested on the bottom of a pond, or on land.

The water to land transition was one of the most important events in the history of life. Thanks to the work of Doctors Daeschler and Shubin we are now filling in some of the minute details of the anatomical changes needed to make that transition. Bit by bit other paleontologists are filling in the details of other events as well giving us a clearer picture of how life evolved into all of the many the living things on Earth today.