A New Season of Doctor Who, and a Very New Doctor

Did you see it? Did you catch the season premier of Doctor Who? The first episode of the 2018-2019 season was simultaneously broadcast by the BBC around the world on Sunday October 7th at 1845 Hrs UTC time, that’s 1:45PM Eastern Daylight Time for me.

Doctor Who on the BBC (Credit: BBC)

Now every Doctor Who fan knows that the character of the Doctor is an alien scientist who travels throughout time and space in his Tardis (which stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space). The Tardis is a Time / Space machine that looks like a policeman’s box and is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!

The Tardis (Credit: All Posters)

Being an alien whenever the Doctor is badly wounded he doesn’t die but rather he regenerates. This regeneration has allowed the show to use twelve different actors in the role, and allowed Doctor Who to be the only scripted, dramatic show to last now for 55 years.

The first episode was broadcast way back on November 23, 1963! The original Doctor was portrayed by William Hartnell as an eccentric old man but over the years the Doctor has become younger and more athletic in order to better fit into his role as a heroic protagonist (and wouldn’t we all like to be able to do that).

The First Twelve Doctors (Credit: PPC Wiki)

This year’s season premier also brought a new Doctor, and the big news is that lucky number 13 is a woman, the actress Jodie Whittaker. Judging by the first episode she’s gonna be a good one, she seemed to fit right into the essential personality of the Doctor while already showing something of where she wants to take the role.

Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Number 13 (Credit: RTE)

You see, like every fictional hero The Doctor fights for justice and equality while defending the weak. Unlike most good guys however, The Doctor fights exclusively with his, and now her brains. This is the essential Doctor, the inner core values they all share. Around that core each actor playing the Doctor must fashion their own character, and in that way the show reincarnates itself with every new incarnation of The Doctor.

As you can probably tell, Doctor Who is the hero of the nerds of the world, their Superman or Rambo, or I suppose I should say our Superman or Rambo. Like Odysseus or Sherlock Holmes or Mister Spock the Doctor wins by brains not brawn, and in my opinion at least that is our best, our only hope.

This season’s premier also saw the introduction of a new species of enemy for the Doctor. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot but while the creature was sufficiently menacing it seemed a little bit too much of a takeoff on the alien from the ‘Predator’ series of movies. We only get to see a single bad alien however so maybe if the producers decide to use the species again they’ll flesh them out a bit.

Anyway, we have a new season of Doctor Who to look forward to, and a brand new Doctor. Man or Woman it really makes no difference, and maybe shows like Doctor Who are what we all need in order to make us realize that the differences between us are insignificant compared to all of the things we share.

Nobel Prizes for 2018, Medicine, Physics, Chemistry.

The first week of October is always an exciting time in the scientific community; it’s when the Nobel Prizes are announced. The order of announcement changes ever year and this year it went Medicine, then Physics and finally Chemistry so I’ll follow that order as well.

The two winners of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology are Doctors James P. Allison of the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University. The research conducted by the two scientists consisted in both understanding why our immune systems refuse to attack the cancer cells that are destroying our bodies along with discovering the first drugs that enable our immune systems to fight cancer.

2018 Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine. Tasuku Honjo (l) and James Allison (r) (credit: The Daily Star)

This has always been the biggest difficulty in fighting cancer, because cancer cells are actually our own cells gone berserk the white blood cells in our immune system won’t fight them. For decades scientists have searched for some way to alert those white blood to attack the cancer cells.

Drs. Allison and Honjo worked by studying the chemical ‘checkpoints’ that white blood cells use to recognize ‘friendly’ cells. Dr. Allison succeeded in identifying one such checkpoint that he called CTLA-4 while the checkpoint Dr. Honjo discovered he named PD-1. Once these two checkpoints were understood it became possible to develop drugs that inhibited their function. Without the correct recognition signal the white blood cells now attacked the cancer cells.

This new technique is not without its problems. For one thing it is expensive, the chemical checkpoints differ for every person. For another the drug sometime simply fail to work and rarely they can even cause the patients immune system to begin attacking healthy cells. Nevertheless, checkpoint inhibitors as the drugs are known, have brought miraculous recoveries in patients whose cancer had been deemed untreatable by other techniques. The work of Drs. Allison and Honjo has brought us a powerful new weapon into our fight against cancer.

 

The three winners for the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics are all pioneers in the use of Lasers in both biology and medicine. Doctor Arthur Askin of Bell Laboratories received his share of the prize for his development of lasers as ‘Optical Tweezers’. You see the particles of light do have momentum and a beam of light can direct ‘radiation pressure’ on an object it strikes. This allowed Dr. Askin to employ the intense light of lasers to actually to hold and even manipulate tiny objects such as individual cells and even down to single atoms.

2018 Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Donna Strickland (l), Gerard Mourou (c), and Arthur Askin (r) (Credit: The India Express)

The two other scientists sharing the physics prize are Doctor Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo and Gerard Mourou for their work in high intensity, short pulse duration lasers. The work of Drs. Strickland and Mourou has had extensive applications in industry and medicine and is perhaps best known for it use in Lasik eye surgery.

This years physics Nobel also garnered some attention because Dr. Strickland became the first woman in fifty-five years to receive the award, and only the third woman ever. The only comment I’ll make on that aspect of the award is that I hope the day soon comes when the sex or ethnicity of a Nobel Prize winner is a matter of no importance whatsoever.

 

Finally we have the 2018 recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry who are Francis H. Arnold of the California Institute of Technology along with George P. Smith of the University of Missouri and Sir Gregory P. Winter of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, UK. All of these scientists have worked in the field of organic chemistry with some of the most complex chemicals known to science.

Chemistry Nobel Laureates for 2018. Gregory P. Winter (l), Francis H. Arnold (c), and George P. Smith (Credit: NPR)

Doctor Arnold’s research has concentrated on “the directed evolution of enzymes” those organic catalysts that perform so many important functions in living creatures. Meanwhile Dr. Smith developed a technology known as ‘phage display’, using a virus that infects bacteria to develop new forms of proteins while Dr. Winter used phage display to direct the evolution of antibodies, thereby producing new pharmaceutical drugs. Many drugs are now being developed by this technique including some that neutralize toxins, combat rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and other autoimmune diseases.

The yearly choice of those scientists who receive the Nobel Prize is often the only time that the important work being carried out by scientists receives any publicity in the news media. Perhaps, given the acrimonious, contentious and partisan nature of so much of our news these days it might do us good if our nightly news programs spent a little more time on stories about the advances of science being made everyday. Stories like those about this year’s Nobel Prize recipients.

 

 

 

Have you ever seen the Spacestation with your own eyes as it orbits around the Earth; it’s actually really easy.

I know that I’ve probably mentioned the International Space Station (ISS) a hundred times in the posts of this blog. I also know that I’ve shown at least a score of pictures of the ISS, and of course you can easily find a thousand images of the ISS on the web. The image below is of the ISS.

The International Space Station as seen from Space (Credit: NASA)

But have you ever seen the Space Station itself, with your own eyes as it streaks across your sky shortly after sunset or shortly before dawn. Well with a little help from NASA it’s really pretty easy. I know because I’ve seen it myself close to fifty times by now.

Now the orbit of the ISS is inclined to the Earth’s equator at an angle of 51.56º so sooner or later it will pass over every point on Earth between latitudes 51.56ºN   and 51.56ºS. That means that the ISS regularly flies right over the head nearly 80% of the human race.

But you can’t see it during the daytime, the brightness of the Sun will simply drown it out. And you can’t see it in the middle of the night either because it will be in the Earth’s shadow and therefore not illuminated. You have to catch it during the short periods of time when you on the Earth’s surface are in darkness but 400 kilometers above you the station is still in the sunshine.

But don’t worry, NASA’s already done all of the work for you, and the right conditions happen fairly frequently. Before you go to NASA’s site however let me give you a few hints about seeing the station. First of all you’re going to need a clear sky, I hope that doesn’t surprise anyone. You’re also going to need to know the directions of the compass at your viewing place, that is you’ll need to know what direction is North, South, East and West. Another important thing to keep in mind is to try to get away from trees and buildings. You want to be able to see as much of the sky as you can!

Click on the link provided below to be taken to the space agency’s “Spot the Station” website.

https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/

Now when you get to the “Spot the Station” site at the top of the page in the middle you’ll see Spotting Opportunities”, click on that to be taken to another page with a map of the world. Successively clicking on your location will eventually get you to the calculated position closest to your home. For me that is Independence Hall in Philadelphia, see image below.

Information on Spotting the Space Station (Credit: NASA)

Looking at the table in the lower right of the image you can see that there are five columns. The first column is labeled Date, giving the date and time that the ISS will become visible where you are. You can see that for Philadelphia there are quite a few opportunities.

The second column is Visible, which tells you for how long the ISS will be visible.

The third column is Max Height: this tells you the maximum elevation, in degrees that the ISS will attain during that sighting. Now the horizon itself is 0º and 90º is straight up. Obviously the larger the Max Height the easier the ISS will be to spot but I have seen on occasion when it when it got no higher than 15º.

The fourth column is labeled Appears. This tells you both the compass heading and the height in degrees above the horizon of the point where the station will appear. As a good rule of thumb, your fist held at arms length is about 10º so if the station is going to appear 20º above the west lets say, that’s two fists above the horizon in the western sky.

The fifth and final column is Disappears, this is identical to Appears except that this is where the ISS will vanish

So what does the ISS look like as it passes overhead? Well to me it looks like a very bright, silvery star that moves quite fast across the sky. The glow of the ISS is steady, there’s no blinking lights as with an airplane.

If you have binoculars, and a steady hand, the ISS will become a definable object, small but no longer just a point. There are even amateur astronomers who have succeeded in photographing the ISS from the ground. I’ll leave you today with one such image of the station silhouetted against the Sun, and if you look close you can see that the space shuttle is docked there. Good luck in trying to catch the International Space Station.

ISS and Space Shuttle seen against the Sun (Credit: Wired)

Mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah claims that he has proven the Riemann hypothesis concerning the distribution of Prime Numbers.

Sir Michael Atiyah is considered to be one of the World’s leading mathematicians; he has already received two of the highest awards in the field, the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize. And the Riemann hypothesis, that an equation known as the Riemann zeta function can produce all of the Prime Numbers, has been called math’s most important unsolved problem. So when a top mathematician announces that he has solved the biggest problem its major news. The image below is Sir Michael.

Sir Michael Atiyah (Credit: Scientific American)

But that’s just what happened on the 24th of September on a stage at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. At that forum Sir Michael presented what he himself described as a “radically new approach.” Dr. Atiyah’s proof will still have to be reviewed by other mathematicians before it will be accepted but the very possibility of that this problem could be solved has riveted the math world.

Now I don’t pretend to completely understand Sir Michael’s proof, yet. I just downloaded a copy and am working my way through it, remember I’m a physicist not a mathematician specializing in number theory. However I hope that I can explain something about prime numbers and why the Riemann hypothesis is so important.

We’ve all heard of prime numbers, those numbers that are divisible only by the number one 1 themselves. For example, while the number 6 can be written as 2×3, the number 7 can only be written as 1×7, 7 is a prime number. The prime numbers below 100 are given below. (one is traditionally not considered prime).

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89 and 97.

Now take notice first of all that the number 2 is the only even prime number. That’s because all of the other even numbers can be divided by 2. You can also see how the distance between successive prime numbers is getting bigger, primes spread out as the numbers get bigger.

We’re not certain whether it was the Egyptians or Mesopotamians who first noticed that primes were different from other numbers but we do know that it was the Greeks, either Pythagoras or one of his students, who proved that there were an infinite number of primes. The proof is simple, and only takes three lines so what do you say. Shall we give it a try?

We will start by assuming that there is only a finite number of primes, let’s say p1, p2, p3, through  pn, that is we have n prime numbers total. Now we will demonstrate that that assumption is false. First we multiply all n of the prime numbers and add 1 to get, I’ll call it X.

X= (p1 x p2 x p3 x  …x pn) +1

Now, if we divide X by any of the primes, let’s say pi there will always be a remainder of the 1/pi. This means that either X must itself be prime, or evenly divided by some other prime not in our set of primes. In either case our assumption that we had all of the primes must be wrong, there are an infinite number of prime numbers.

O’k so how do we find those numbers that are prime? Is there some equation that will generate all of the primes for us?

Well, mathematicians searched for just such an equation for a very long time. Several partial equations, that is formulas that worked for a while, generating some primes were developed. One of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Bernhard Riemann worked for many years on prime number theory, his equation is known as the Riemann Zeta function. By the way Bernhard Riemann also developed the equations of geometry that Einstein used for his theory of gravity. The image below is Bernhard Riemann and beneath him is his Zeta function.

Bernhard Riemann (Credit: Famous Mathematicians)
The Riemann Zeta Function (credit: Public Domain)

Riemann published his zeta function back in 1859 and in the years since then it has been checked, and confirmed, for the first 10,000,000,000,000 (that’s ten trillion!) primes but that doesn’t mean that it will work for all primes. Remember there are an infinite number of primes so ten trillion is actually not very many!

Sir Michael Atiyah claims to have proven that the zeta function works for all primes and if he’s right that will be a tremendous achievement. Other mathematicians now get to try to pull the proof apart. We’ll see what happens.

 

Book Review: 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Cover of 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Credit: Audiobooks)

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction author best known for his Mars trilogy (Mars Red, Mars Green and Mars Blue) about the colonization of and terraforming of Mars. “2312” is a recent novel but Robinson is such a prolific writer that he already has a new novel “Aurora” just coming out so you’ll have to forgive me for being a bit behind.

Kim Stanley Robinson (Credit: Davis Enterprise)

As you can guess “2312” takes place three hundred years from now when the human race is well on its way to the complete colonization of the Solar System. Mars has been terraformed and the terraforming of Venus is underway. Meanwhile Mercury and Earth’s Moon along with three of Jupiter’s and two of Saturn’s moons all have substantial population. Not only that but numerous asteroids have been hollowed out and turned into small worldlets, each with its own particular ecosystem. The image below is an artists impression of the interior of such an asteroid.

The Interior of an Asteroid / Worldlet (Credit: Reddit.com)

Swan Er Hong is a citizen of Mercury, an artist and designer of some of the asteroid / worldlets whose grandmother Alex has recently died. In her grandmother’s will Swan is tasked with taking some vital information to several of Alex’s confidants out at Saturn. The information is very sensitive in nature and cannot be trusted to transmission by radio. In carrying out this task Swan becomes involved in a secret organization trying to defend humanity against a conspiracy that threatens the lives of millions.

It’s the actual fight against this conspiracy that is the weakest part of “2312”. Aside from an attack on Mercury’s only city, most of the population manages to escape; the bad guys don’t really do much. In fact it isn’t until you’re 7/8ths of the way through the novel that you can point at someone and say, he’s a bad guy. There’s a lot of theorizing about who the bad guys could be and what their motives are but nothing concrete until near the very end. In fact the motives of the bad guys are never made really clear. And the final defeat of the bad guys itself is rather anti-climatic, the interplanetary police just round them all up in about two pages.

The reason for reading “2312” is all of the descriptions, they are wondrous. In “2312” you get to visit every planet, yes even Pluto, and every one of them is a unique world unto itself. Between Sunwalking on Mercury or surfing the “F” ring of Saturn you’ll read about things you never imagined.

In fact some of the most interesting things are the asteroid / worldlets that I should also mention have been given engines so traveling from one planet to another usually involves jumping on an asteroid that’s going your way. Many of these asteroid / worldlets have ecologies that preserve one of Earth’s damaged ecosystems (Earth is in kinda bad shape). There are other, more interesting worldlets as well however, let’s just say Jurassic Asteroid! The image below shows what such an asteroid could look like from the outside.

An Asteroid Spaceship in 2312 (Credit: Regina Flores Mir)

The people of the early 24th century are also very different as humanity adapts to life in space. Although it’s not mentioned explicitly there must be some kind of gene editing going on. There certainly is with the dinosaurs and woolly mammoths.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a writer best known for his interests in ecology, culture and politics and that’s certainly what you get in “2312”. O’k the plot may be a little thin but think of “2312” as a roller coaster ride, you have a lot of fun so does it really matter if you don’t get very far?

“2312” is like a visit to the early 24th century, that’s something that it does very well.

Some Stories from the Animal Kingdom.

Over the last week or so there have been a number of small but nevertheless interesting stories concerning a wide assortment of different animals. Since none of them were extensive enough to warrant a post of their own I’ve decided to collect several of them into the same post.

Let’s start close to home, for me at least. For many years a species of Green Crab (Carcinus maemas) native to Europe has been causing a lot of destruction along the coasts off New England. The green crabs consume both juvenile clams and eelgrass, both of which are important for many of the seafoods that are collected in those waters. This is another example of an invasive species that hopped a ride on one of our ships and has now become a pest in the environment in which we accidentally placed it. The image below is a green crab.

European Green Crab Carcinus maenas (Credit: NRDC)

The story is now getting worse however, because a newer, larger and more aggressive variety of the green crab is moving south from the waters around Nova Scotia. Whereas the green crabs New Englanders had become familiar with are shy and try to hide from large creatures such as humans the Canadian crabs are so belligerent that researchers who try to collect specimens find themselves being attacked by the crabs. “Any time I went to grab one they went to get me instead,” said Louis Logan, a University of New England graduate student taking part in the research. In the labouratory a comparison of the destructive abilities of the two varieties clearly showed that the more aggressive species caused far more damage.

Since the green crabs originally came from Europe I guess it’s only fair that our next story should come from Europe. The small town of Aitoliko is sometimes known as the ‘Venice of Greece’ because of it’s many picturesque canals but over the past week Aitoliko has become famous for something much ickier. A vast carpet of spider webs is now covering Aitoliko, every tree and many of the buildings are completely enclosed within a layer of spider silk, see images below.

Spider Web in Aitoliko Greece (Credit: The Japan Times)
More Spider Webs (Credit: USA Today)

Now to produce such a monstrously huge blanket of webbing you’d think you would have to have a monstrously large spider but you’d be wrong, spiders of the Tetragnatha genus have a leg span usually less than two centimeters but can produce sheet-like coverings than serve as homes to thousands of individual spiders.

Spiders of this genus are known to often produce web systems similar to those now seen in Aitoliko although rarely are they this extensive. There’s no mystery, no mad doctor behind the enormous population surge in spiders however. The temperature this summer in Aitoliko has been just perfect for the breeding of the spider’s chief source of food, gnats. So with a lot of gnats breeding a lot more gnats you get a lot more spiders and a small Greek town covered in spider webs.

“It’s a simple prey-predator phenomenon,” according to Fotis Pergantis a Greek biologist. “…Once the temperatures begin to drop the gnat populations will die out, the spider population will decrease as well.”

 

Another story this week concerns another type of arthropod predator. The Praying Mantis is arguably the fiercest, most voracious killer for its size of any animal on Earth. The stick-like insect will literally devour anything it can grab, in fact female praying mantis are legendary for eating their mates during the act of mating. See image below.

A Female Praying Mantis eating her Mate (Credit: Australian Geographic)

Now, for the first time the praying mantis has been observed in the act of fishing. That’s right, if a small enough fish comes close enough to a praying mantis it’s dinner.

The observation was made in India, home to the giant Asian mantis, Hierodula tenuidentata, at a small artificial rooftop pool. The pool is stocked with the common freshwater fish the guppy and for five nights in March of 2017 the pool was visited by a male giant Asian mantis.

The mantis was observed to perch on one of the water lilies that grew in the pool and wait, a typical hunting strategy of mantises. Over the course of the five nights the mantis was seen to catch and eat nine of the guppies. See image below.

Fishing Praying Mantis (Credit: National Geographic)

As I said earlier, the praying mantis has a reputation of simply being one of the best hunters you will ever find. Now for the first time we know that they’re not too bad at fishing either.

 

Which brings me to my last story, which actually is about a robotic sea creature. You may recall my post of the 8th of September where I discussed several aquatic hunting robots that were being developed to help eradicate invasive species in the waters of Florida and The Great Barrier Reef, well this story is about another robotic sea creature, although a gentler one.

Engineers at Florida Atlantic University and the US Office for Naval Research have been working on the design and development of a robot jellyfish which is intended to serve as an instrument to monitor and study ocean environments such as coral reefs. The robot, see image below, is based upon the anatomy of the larval stage of the moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) and the first prototypes were made by 3-D printing.

Robot Jellyfish Swimming (credit: Jennifer Frame et al)

The development team hopes to soon incorporate a variety of sensors onto their robot jellyfish soon along with the ability to navigate through complex ocean terrain.

O’k so maybe a robot jellyfish isn’t an actual animal but it certainly is an example of how the lessons learned from the animal world are being incorporated into our robots even as we learn more and more about the many different ways animals have evolved in order to live in this world.

Psychologist Walter Mischel, originator of the famous, or infamous Marshmallow test, dies at the age of 88.

Doctor Walter Mischel, a leading researcher in the fields of personality theory and social psychology died on the 12th of September 2018 in New York City, aged 88. At the time of his death Dr. Mischel was Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Columbia University but it was at Stanford University back in the 1960s and 70s that Dr. Mischel conducted his most well known experiments, the Marshmallow test. The image below is of Walter Mischel.

Walter Mischel (Credit: AZ Quotes)

The Marshmallow test is simple enough on the surface. The test subjects were children who all attended Stanford’s Bing Nursery School, ages 4 to 6. The children were placed in a room with only a table and chair (child sized) where an adult tester gave each child a treat, a marshmallow or a cookie. The tester told the children that if they didn’t eat the treat until the tester returned they would be given a second treat. The tester then leaves the room, usually for fifteen minutes and the child was filmed during the entire test.

The test is a study of the psychology of delayed gratification, whether or not the test subject has the patience to wait for a greater reward. Dr. Mischel’s original intent was to discover at what age between 4 and 6 this patience developed but over the course of time the test unveiled a great many other secrets as well.

The Marshmallow Test (Credit: Performance Coach University)

As you might guess, the majority of the children simply eat their treat the moment the adult leaves the room. The most interesting initial discovery however was that those children who succeeded in waiting generally did so by distracting themselves, even if it was no more than just turning their chair around so that they couldn’t see the treat. Of the 600 children who took part in the original set of tests, just over a third waited and received their promised second treat.

In 1988 and 1990 Dr. Mischel conducted a follow up study of the children who had taken part in the test and were now teenagers preparing for college. What Dr. Mischel found was that those who had as children waited and gotten the second treat had statistically preformed much better in school, even had significantly higher scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAP) needed for admission to college. It was found that even the children’s parents considered them to be more mature, more reliable. The same psychological traits that had enabled them to succeed at the marshmallow test were now allowing them to succeed in later life.

Marshmallow Follow Up (Credit: Slideshow)

This is not to say that the results of the marshmallow test can be used to predict future success. Even Dr. Mischel strongly cautioned against any such assumptions, “The idea that your child is doomed if she chooses not to wait for her marshmallows is really a serious misinterpretation,” he said in an interview. In fact later studies would show that social and economic status were critical factors in determining whether or not a child would wait for the second treat.

Before I go it’s important to note in our current political climate that Doctor Walter Mischel was an Austrian Jew whose family fled the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938 and who entered the United States as a political refugee. Arriving in the United States at the age of eight with basically nothing Walter Mischel managed to get his Ph.D. from Ohio State University and taught at the University of Colorado and Harvard along with Stanford and Columbia. Another example of how the United States profited from someone that another country didn’t want because of blind racist hatred.

However Science can only take us so Far! (Army HEALTH)

 

Space news for September 2018.

Without doubt the biggest news in space recently has been the discovery of an air leak onboard the International Space Station (ISS) and even more disturbing, the possibility that the leak had been deliberately made “by human hand”! Indeed with the discovery of drill bit marks around the, too circular to be natural hole the idea that the leak had been caused by a micrometeorite has been officially ruled out. The image below is of the hole.

Hole discovered in the ISS (Credit: BGR.com)

The tracking down of the hole itself had taken nearly a week after the loss of air pressure due to the leak was first noticed. It was finally found inside the Russian Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft that had carried the three members of ISS crew 56 to the station. The image below shows the Soyuz spacecraft docked at the ISS.

Soyuz Spacecraft docked at the ISS (Credit: NBC News)

Now the crew 56 Soyuz capsule had been docked to the ISS since June 6th of 2018 so the fact that a leak was only discovered in September is strong evidence that the hole was not already in the spacecraft before it was launched. It seems very possible therefore that one of the six astronauts currently serving aboard the ISS made the hole with a hand drill; the perpetrator and his motive are as yet unknown.

So the Russians are crying sabotage while the Americans just want to stop the rumor mill and find out exactly what did really happen. With the political tensions growing between the two countries this is a serious development. Space has recently become the last area of cooperation between the US and Russia and if that is no longer true the future of the ISS is in grave doubt.

So much for the bad news, if you want some good news in space these days it seems that you can always rely on Space X Corporation. In the early morning hours of September 10th a Space X Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral carrying the Telstar 18 Vantage communications satellite, the 16th successful launch for Space X so far this year. The image below is of the Telstar satellite.

Telestar 18 Communications Satellite (Credit: YouTube)

With all of the reliability we’ve come to expect from Space X the Telstar satellite was delivered to its correct geostationary transfer orbit. Meanwhile the Falcon 9’s first stage successfully landed on Space X’s recovery drone ship so that it can be reused on some future mission. The image below shows the liftoff of the Falcon 9 carrying the Telstar satellite.

Launch of the Telestar 18 Satellite aboard a Falcon 9 Rocket (Credit: Advocator)

The block 5 Falcon 9 first stage variant is designed to be reflown 10 times with only minimal cleanup and maintenance between flights. After every 10 flights the rocket will undergo a major overhaul and it is hoped that eventually the first stages can be reused as many as 100 times.

 

Getting back aboard the ISS the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is preparing to launch it’s seventh Kounotori H-II supply capsule to the space station. Along with 6,000 kilos of food and equipment for the astronauts the Kounotori H-II will carry two ‘cubesats’ which may be small but who are going to conduct an experiment that could have huge consequences.

The two satellites measure only 10cm on each side and will be deployed outside the ISS. A 10-meter long steel tether will link the two cubesats together while a tiny motorized vehicle will attempt to move back and forth between them. The image below shows an artists illustration of the two cubesats.

Japanese Experimental CubeSats (Credit: JAXA)

This test is intended to be the first demonstration in outer space of technology that will be needed in order to build a space elevator, a staircase to the stars that is one of the favourite ideas in science fiction novels.

For those who haven’t heard of the space elevator it is literally a tower built all of the way up to geostationary orbit (That’s 36,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface). Elevators will then take passengers and cargo into space without the danger and expense of a rocket launch. It is thought that a space elevator could reduce the cost of going into space to as little as $100 / kilo. The image below shows a possible space elevator.

A Possible Space Elevator (Credit: Trendsderzukunft)

The theory behind the space elevator is sound. The problems may be numerous and difficult but do not require any radically new or unknown scientific knowledge. The technology that will be tested by the cubesats is relativity simple but even simple things sometimes behave strangely in space. The experiment will be a small first step to building a space elevator, but it will be the first step.

 

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer aboard The International Space Station and its search for an Anti-Atom.

It was some ninety years ago now that physicist Paul Dirac first suggested the existance of anti-matter and only a little more than a year later that another physicist, Carl Anderson observed anti-electrons (he called them positrons) in cosmic rays striking the Earth. In the years since then physicists have not only observed many different anti-particles but actually produced them using particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. We also know that the collisions of cosmic ray particles in outer space produce single anti-particles because we often observe them as well.

Anti-Matter differs from ordinary Matter by a switching of the charge. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

In fact all of the experiments we have performed with our particle accelerators, and all of the theories we have developed tell us that there should be exactly as much anti-matter in the Universe as there is matter. The big bang should have produced just as much anti-matter as matter. But there certainly aren’t large amounts of anti-matter, not anywhere around Earth at least.

The logic goes like this: The Earth is made of matter and since the solar wind is in contact with the Earth’s upper atmosphere without causing matter/anti-matter annihilation it must be made of matter as well, so the Sun is made of matter. Since the solar wind is also in contact with everything else in our solar system as well all of the planets; moons and etc must be made of matter just as the Earth is. (Let’s not forget that we have now landed probes on several other bodies so they certainly aren’t anti-matter)

Matter and Anti-Matter annihilate each other producing Energy (Credit: Fandom)

We can even go further because the solar wind reaches out into the interstellar medium where the gas and dust particles must be made of matter or again they would interact with the solar wind. Finally that means that, since all the solar winds from all of the other stars in our galaxy are also in contact with the interstellar medium all of the stars in our galaxy must be made of matter.

What about other galaxies? You may ask. Could there be entire anti-galaxies made of anti-matter out there? And if so, how would we know? That question has been the subject of much debate over the last half a century.

Again, here’s the logic: if anti-galaxies do exist then they must have anti-supernova that produce anti-cosmic ray nuclei just as normal cosmic ray nuclei are produced in our galaxy. Eventually a very few of those anti-cosmic ray nuclei will find their way to Earth and if our scientists could find a single undeniable anti-nucleus that would be strong evidence that there are anti-galaxies with anti-stars out somewhere out there.

That’s the goal of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) currently operating aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Launched into space by the space shuttle on the 16th of May in 2011 the AMS-02 has been observing cosmic ray particles above our atmosphere now for eight years.

The AMS-02 Mounted on the International Space Station (Credit: NASA)

(By the way, yes there was an APS-01, a Proof-of-Concept model that went into space with the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998.)

The AMS-02 operates in many ways like one of the detectors at CERN or one of the other high energy physics labs. First ignoring any particles that do not pass from the top to the bottom the AMS-02 measures the time each particle takes passing through, that gives particles velocity. At the bottom the particle then enters a calorimeter which measures the particles energy. Once you know the velocity and energy you can calculate the mass and together they tell you what kind of particle it is.

Breakdown of the Components of the AMS-02 (Credit: NASA)

Finally the whole detector is surrounded by a large permanent magnet. The magnetic field will bend the path of charged particles and if you know what kind of particle it is, and the direction it bends you know whether it’s matter or anti-matter.

AMS-02 has spent the last eight years searching for an anti-helium nucleus and so far found nothing. Physicists feel that this result puts a very strong constraint on the possibility of large amounts of anti-matter existing anywhere in the observable Universe. It really appears that for some reason still unknown the big bang produced only matter, even though much less powerful interactions since then have always produced matter and anti-matter in equal parts.

If you’d like to learn more about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) click on the link below to be taken to NASA’s webpage for AMS-02.

https://ams.nasa.gov/

There is obviously still a lot to be learned about how our Universe came into being.

The Robots are Coming: To Kill!!

This is my fourth post concerning the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI), and drone technology in activities that used to require human beings to accomplish (see posts of 2Sept2016, 12Feb2017 and 17Jun2017). I have talked about driverless cars, automated warehouse workers and other developments in robotics. Today I’m going to talk a bit about two independent efforts to develop automated drones that are actually intended to kill living creatures.

Now don’t panic, we’re not talking about some military funded program to build terminator type robot soldiers. In fact the animal targets in both programs, and we are talking about animals here, are invasive species that are doing great damage in the ecological systems into which they’ve been introduced. And as it happens both species are sea creatures.

The first robotic hunter I’ll talk about is being developed by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) to eliminate a species known as the Lionfish (Genus Pterois) from the coastal waters off Florida. See the image of a Lionfish below.

The Lionfish, Genus Pterois (Credit: Live Science)

The lionfish is a native of the Red Sea and eastern Indian Ocean and is considered as a prized possession among saltwater aquarium hobbyists, I’ve had several friends who have owned one. The long spines the animal sports are actually poisonous although the poison is usually not fatal in humans.

Several lionfish kept in aquaria must have been released into the waters off Florida and without their native predators their population has exploded much to the detriment of native species. The lionfish is itself an active predator and specimens have been dissected to find hundreds of juvenal native fish in their bellies. Over the past several years scuba divers in Florida have been actively hunting lionfish not only because of the damage to the ecosystem the fish is causing but also because lionfish are quite tasty and fetch a good price of up to $40 per kilo.

Human drivers can only do so much however, our time underwater is limited and lionfish are known to dive considerably deeper than is safe for the average scuba diver. So that’s where WPI’s robotic lionfish killer comes in, see image below.

Lionfish Hunting Robot being developed at WPI (Credit: Digital Trends)

On the left hand side of the robot can be seen the revolver-like carriage of eight spear tips with orange foam. The foam is intended to bring the spear to the surface so that it can be recovered and the fish harvested, it’s worth $40 per kilo remember. To the right of the spears are two small boxes containing cameras. Behind the upper camera is a chamber containing the electronics while behind the lower camera is a tank to control buoyancy.

“The goal is to be able to toss the robot over the side of the boat and have it go down to the reef, plot out a course, and begin its search (for lionfish),” according to Craig Putnam who is senior instructor in computer science and associate director of WPI’s Robotics Engineering Program.

On the other side of the world a similar solution is being developed to help protect the corals of the Great Barrier Reef off Australia. The enemy species here is not a fish but a species of invertebrate known as the Crown of Thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci), see image below.

Crown of thorns starfish (Credit: JSTOR Daily)

The crown of thorns moves slowly over the coral, ingesting the small polyps that make coral a living rock. The starfish have grown so numerous that large sections of the reef have been devoured, destroying the habitat of hundreds of species of fish and other creatures.

In the same way that WPI is developing a robot to hunt down lionfish here it is the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) who have developed the Crown-Of-Thorns-Starfish Robot (COTSbot) to help protect the reef. See image below.

COTSbot hunting Robot (Credit: Business Insider)

Unlike the lionfish the starfish is not desirable, and it moves much more slowly making the COTSbot’s job a good bit easier. In fact the COTSbot patrols the reef, spots a starfish with 99% accuracy and injects it with a poison to kill them.

The success of both of these two programs depends finally on the ability of computer systems, of AI to recognize their intended target. Whether such systems can be reliable enough to be trusted to act autonomously in a complex ecosystem is still a open question.

It’s true that both of these programs are intended to restore an out of balance ecology. It’s also true that neither program has any connection to the military so we’re not discussing anything like the Terminator. Or are we, after all these are computer controlled robots designed to kill living creatures without any human supervision. Anyway you put it that just doesn’t sound right to me. Or have I just been reading to much Science Fiction.