January 2019 – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

Space News for January 2019

I’ve already discussed two very important events in space exploration that happened earlier this month. These are the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of the object Ultima Thule at the outer edge of our solar system along with the Chang’e 4’s successful landing on the far side of the Moon, (See posts of 2 January and 5 January 2019). Nevertheless there have also been several other news stories worthy of mention so I’ll take care of them now.

Perhaps most significant was the successful test firing of the main engines of Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket carrying their crew Dragon Capsule. This represents the first time that a man capable spacecraft has fired its engines on American soil in eight years, since the last mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis. See image below.

Test Firing of the Falcon 9 Rocket in Preparation for the first Launch of Space X Crew Dragon (Credit: Space X)

The crew Dragon is currently scheduled for an unmanned test launch on the 23rd of February but has already been delayed several times. The mission will replicate a typical crew transfer mission to the International Space Station (ISS) with the exception of any crew to transfer. If the unmanned test is successful then a manned mission is planned for sometime in the second half of 2019.

The Space X Crew Dragon being Prepared for its first Flight (Credit: Space X)

Both the Space X Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner man capable capsules are part of NASA’s commercial crew program whose intent is to allow NASA to concentrate on pushing the frontiers of space outward while private companies like Space X and Boeing take over the now routine task of getting personnel and cargo to and from low Earth orbit (LEO).

Boeing Starliner Capsule (Credit: Boeing)

The Starliner’s first unmanned test flight is now scheduled for sometime in March with a first manned mission before the end of the year. NASA is depending on one of these two systems to be successful, their current contact with the Russians to take American’s to the ISS runs out at the end of this year.

And speaking of space stations the ISS may have a companion in just a few years, a privately owned space station. A California company named Orion Span had just released detailed interior views of their proposed Aurora Space Station, which the company plans on launching into an LEO sometime in 2021, and be ready to receive occupants the following year.

Now Orion Span is advertising the Aurora station as a space hotel where guests will be able to enjoy both zero gravity and the sight of 16 sunrises and sunsets every day. Despite the fairly cramped quarters, the Aurora measures 13.2 m in length with a diameter of 4.2 m with a pressurized cabin space of 157 m³, the station will support four guests along with two crewmembers.

The Interior of the Aurora Space Hotel (Credit: Orion Span)

What Life will be like inside the Aurora Space Station (Credit: Orion Span)

At a price of $9.5 million USD for a 12-day stay, price not including getting to and from the ‘hotel’, only the very rich will be vacationing there. However Orion Span also expects to welcome astronauts from small nations seeking to start a manned space program of their own, at a reasonable cost. According to Frank Bunger, founder and current CEO of Orion Span “We will support zero gravity research, as well as space manufacturing.”

Present plans for the Aurora station are modular in design to make assembly in orbit simple as well as to allow for further growth in time. And only time will tell whether or not the Aurora space station is actually placed into orbit in 2021, or indeed ever.

Longer Range Plans for the Aurora Space Station (Credit: Orion Span)

Before I go I would like to give a brief update on my Post of the 2nd of January about the New Horizons space probe’s flyby of the Kuiper belt object named Ultima Thule. The probe is still sending back the data it gathered during its New Year’s Day encounter, and will be doing so for almost the next two years.

However last week New Horizons did send back a much sharper image of Ultima Thule, see below.

Latest High Resolution Image of Ultima Thule from the New Horizons Probe (Credit: NASA)

The planetary scientists are The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are going to be very busy analyzing the data as it comes back from the edge of the solar system, and I’m certain they’ll be enjoying every minute of it.

We’re all doomed!!! The Milky Way Galaxy is going to collide with the Large Magellanic Cloud! In about two Billion Years!

Why is it that journalists reporting on a science story so often feel compelled to generate a headline that exaggerates if not actually fabricates a catastrophe that we cannot avoid and will be lucky to survive. Then when you read the story you find out that the danger is something that may not happen for the next thousand or more years, or maybe not at all! The worst part is that the story itself may be very interesting, you just feel cheated because of the alarmist headline.

The latest such doomsday inexorably coming towards us is a collision between our Milky Way galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the Milky Way’s largest and best known satellite galaxy, see image below. A recent paper from Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology indicates that the LMC is loosing energy as it orbits the Milky Way and it is only a matter of time before the cloud is devoured by the larger galaxy.

The Large Magellanic Cloud, a Satellite Galaxy to our Milky Way (Credit: ESO.Org)

Because the it can only be seen from the southern hemisphere the LMC isn’t as well known as some of the constellations seen in the northern hemisphere such as the Big Dipper, Orion or Cassiopeia. In fact the LMC is a much larger object about 14,000 Light-years in size and having a mass of some 10 billion times the mass of the Sun, making it about 1/100th the mass of the Milky Way!

Now the news articles go on to describe in chilling details the destruction that could result from the collision including entire solar systems, maybe even ours, being hurled into the emptiness of intergalactic space. And those that remain behind won’t be spared either, for the supermassive black hole at the center the Milky Way will be reawakened as an active galactic nuclei, better known as a quasar, spewing extremely powerful jets of radiation into space.

A Quasar seen from a distance of over a Billion Light Years (Credit: ESA-Hubble)

How the Supermassive Black Hole at the center of a Galaxy generates a Quasar (Credit: NASA)

Now before you panic the Milky Way is really big, about 100,000 light years across. This means that light itself would take 100,000 years to cross it so any other event, like a collision with the Large Magellanic Cloud, is going to take many thousands if not millions of years to have any actual effect. In fact the authors of the study, Carlos Frenk and Marius Cautun estimate that the collision between the LMC and our galaxy will not even occur for another two billion years!

More interesting is the idea that such collisions are actually common occurrences throughout the universe, astronomers have observed many of them with their telescopes, see image below. In fact there are several different theories of galactic evolution that assume that mergers and adsorptions are the driving force of change generating the different types of galaxies we see.

A Typical Galactic Collision (Credit: NASA)

In fact it is probably such collisions that produce the well known spiral arms that many galaxies possess. Looking at the image below of the famous Whirlpool Galaxy you might think that the galaxy must be rotating in a counterclockwise direction because of the way the spiral arms curve. Actually the spiral arms have no bearing on the direction of rotation of the galaxy. They are in fact pressure waves set up by a collision with a smaller galaxy that appears as a bright blob on the right hand side outside the whirlpool proper. In a sense the collision has caused to whirlpool galaxy to ring like a bell!

Collisions between galaxies are actually some of the most titanic events in the entire universe, involving hundreds of billions of stars but they also take place very slowly, over billions of years. Because of this they can hardly be considered dangerous to creatures as short lived as we poor humans, no matter how hard some reporters might try to make that seem!

Before I go I’d like to take a moment to update a story I discussed in my post of only a week ago ( see post of 19 January 2019). One of the stories in that post concerned scientists who had learned the secret of the massively expanding slime balls produced by hagfish as a defensive mechanism. Then, just a few days ago I came across another story about the best ever preserved fossil of a hagfish that been found by paleontologists at the University of Chicago. See image below.

The 100 Million Year Old Fossil of a Hagfish (Credit: Phys.org)

Hagfish rarely fossilize because instead of true bones their skeleton is made of softer cartilage. The fossil of the hagfish was positively identified by the chemical traces of keratin around the fossil. Keratin is a major component of the hagfish’s slime.

Of course it’s just a coincidence that the two, unrelated stories should occur within a couple of weeks of each other. Nevertheless it does illustrate how science serves as a framework to link and support the work of scientists around the world as they seek to learn the secrets of the universe.

Sputnik and Explorer, how the Space Race Began.

In July of this year we shall celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first time human beings set foot on the Moon. July 21st 1969 is a milestone in human history and so to commemorate the event Science and Science Fiction will publish a series of posts, one each month detailing significant incidents in the Space Race that ended with Neil Armstrong stepping off the ladder of the Lunar Module and making the first footprints in the Moon’s dust.

For this first installment I’ve decided to discuss the launching of the world’s first artificial satellites, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik and the American Explorer. It was the launching of these two space probes that not only triggered the space race but set the pattern of how the first half of the race would develop.

It all started with the International Geophysical Year or IGY. What’s the IGY you ask? Well in 1956 the cold war between east and west had quieted down a little bit, enough that scientists in the soviet bloc were allowed to attend scientific conferences and actually talk to western scientists. To try to strengthen this period of cooperation it was decided that during the period from July 1st 1957 to December 31st 1958, you’ll notice that’s actually a year and a half, scientists across the world would work together to study the planet Earth. The subjects that would be covered included the aurora, cosmic rays, the planet’s magnetic field, meteorology, oceanography and seismology. As a part of the IGY the United States announced that it would attempt to launch the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit.

Symbol of the International Geophysical Year (Credit: PD)

The Soviet Union beat them to it, launching Sputnik, which means fellow traveler, on October 4th 1957. The Soviet’s chief rocket engineer, Sergei Korolev had succeeded in developing the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), a monster rocket called the R-7. The R-7 was much larger than anything the Americans had and gave the Russians a huge initial advantage. In fact the R-7 is still the basic design of the rocket the Russians use today to launch their Soyuz manned spacecraft.

The R-7 Family of Rockets, right up to today’s Soyuz launcher (Credit: Wikipedia)

Sputnik itself was a very simple satellite, a sphere 58cm in diameter with a mass of 83.6 kg. Sputnik carried no scientific instruments of any kind but only a radio transmitter broadcasting on 20 Mega-Hertz (MHz) and 40MHz. This allowed it to be picked up by radio amateurs around the world as it circled the Earth every 98 minutes. Sputnik completed some 1400 orbits before January 4th 1958 before it reentered the atmosphere and burned up.

The Sputnik Satellite (Credit: National Geographic)

Now the US intelligence agencies, i.e. the CIA, were aware that the USSR was working on large rockets so they were surprised but not shocked by Sputnik. President Eisenhower in particular was unimpressed. The American public however was thrown into a panic to think that the Soviet’s were ahead of them, that the Russians had rockets that could reach US soil.

Following Sputnik the US effort to place a satellite in orbit started to receive a lot more press coverage, a trend that would continue right up to the Moon Landing. What had been a scientific experiment now become America’s effort to show that they weren’t behind.

The satellite America intended to launch was called Vanguard and would have been a much more sophisticated. The Vanguard satellite would be powered by solar cells and in addition to a radio transmitter it carried a temperature sensitive crystal to perform measurements in out space. The Vanguard program had been chosen over the US Army’s competing Explorer program mainly because the rocket that would launch it was a civilian designed sounding rocket not intended for military use.

Unlike the Russians, who only announced a launch after it was a success, there was live TV coverage for the launch of Vanguard on December 6th 1957. The rocket rose only a few meters before the engine cut off and the whole thing came crashing back to Earth in an enormous fireball. Watching the explosion the panic within the US public really took off.

America’s Vanguard Rocket and Satellite Explode at Launch (Credit: PD)

Meanwhile the Russians had launched Sputnik 2, with a live animal on board, a little stray dog from the streets of Moscow which was given the name Laika. According to Soviet press at the time Laika lived for a week in space. It wasn’t until the collapse of the USSR that the truth came out. Sputnik 2’s cooling system immediately malfunctioned and Laika had died within a half an hour of launch. Still, the second Sputnik only increased America’s feeling of impotence.

Laika about to be placed in Sputnik 2 (Credit: PD)

With the failure of Vanguard the US Army was quickly told to go forward with Explorer. This decision pleased Werner von Braun, the German rocket engineer who had developed the V-2 rocket. Coming to America after the war von Braun had worked for the US Army developing the Jupiter Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) from the V-2 design. von Braun had actually been ready to launch a satellite for several years but political considerations had caused the US to proceed with Vanguard.

The satellite for the Explorer program had been developed by Doctor James van Allen at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and consisted of a cylinder 205 cm in length by a little over 15 cm in diameter with a mass of 14 kg. Despite being smaller and less massive than Sputnik, Explorer was loaded with instruments including a radiation detector, five temperature sensors and two micrometeorite detectors. The reason Explorer was able to cram more science into a smaller volume than Sputnik was that it employed a brand new technology, 29 Germanium transistors made up a large part of the satellite’s electronic circuitry. The data from the instruments aboard Explorer were then relayed to Earth by a radio operating on 108 MHz.

Explorer was launched on the 31st of January in 1958 to the relief of the American people. It was the instruments onboard Explorer 1 that made the first actual discovery of the new space age as Doctor van Allen used the measurements of the radiation detector to recognize that there was a cloud of radiation surrounding the Earth. Later it was realized that there were several such bands of radiation which were christened the van Allen belts.

As I mentioned above the launch of both Sputnik and Explorer set a pattern that lasted throughout the first half of the space race. During the period 1957 to 1964 the Soviets scored a number of firsts in space but they never announced their missions until they were successfully launched. Their failures, which did occur, were simply never mentioned.

The Americans always seemed to be playing catch up and their failures were on display for the entire world to witness. Nevertheless the Americans always seemed to be able to do more with less, launching smaller satellites that made more discoveries.

The space race was on, at the moment it didn’t even have a finish line but it did have two very determined contestants.

Three Interesting Stories from the Field of Zoology.

I’ve come across three stories recently that illustrate nicely not only the wide diversity of life here on Earth but how much more there is for us to learn about it!

I’ll start with what is probably the most familiar type of animal, and location, salamanders in Texas. A team of naturalists led by Tom Devitt, an environmental scientist with the City of Austin’s watershed protection department, has recently discovered three new species of salamander.

Now most of Texas is dry and rocky, not the sort of environment you think of when you consider amphibians. However running through the south central portion of the state is the Pedernales River and the porous limestone bedrock of that region is crisscrossed with a network of caves and flooded channels known as the Edwards-Trinity aquifer system.

This system is the home of a wide variety of subterranean aquatic species. Many of these creatures are the descendants of ocean living creatures that inhabited the region in the cretaceous period when Texas lay at the bottom of a vast inland sea that stretched as far as the Canadian border. See map below.

The USA during the Cretaceous Period, 85 MYA. Note Texas is mostly underwater. (Credit: The Armchair Explorer)

Like many types of cave dwelling animals the salamanders discovered by the naturalists are very pale in colouration, lack eyes and possess flattened heads. Searching the twists and turns of these caves and channels isn’t easy so it understandable that these three small animals could have remained unknown for so long. Indeed it is quite likely that other species are still there waiting to be found.

Two of the newly Discovered Species of Salamander from Texas. (Credit: KUT)

The creature in our second story is probably not as familiar to most people as salamanders are. They are known as Hagfish and are one of the most primitive forms of vertebrates. Hagfish are such ancient creatures that their skeletons aren’t even made of bone but like sharks and rays they are composed of cartilage. Unlike sharks however, hagfish don’t even possess jaws but instead rely on a raspy tongue to scrape away at their food.

Hagfish may not have Jaws but they do have Teeth! (Credit: Scoopnest)

Hagfish are best known for possessing a remarkable defense mechanism that protects them from large predatory fish like sharks. Any creature that tries to take a bite out of a hagfish gets a little ball of mucus in their mouths that in less than a second expands about 10,000 times in volume, choking the hagfish’s attacker and allowing the hagfish to escape!

Hagfish Slime (Credit: The Journal of Experimental Biology)

Scientists have been interested in the hagfish’s mucus for a long time, any material that can expand so much so quickly will certainly attract a good deal of attention. What scientists learned was that the most active part of the mucus is a very large number, many thousands of tightly coiled threads called skeins. See image below.

Thousands of Skeins in Hagfish Slime (Credit: Chaudhary, Ewoldt and Thiffeault)

An individual skein measures only about 100 μm in diameter but once the thread is unraveled it can measure as much as 10cm in length, which accounts for the great increase in size of the mucus. See image below. Despite all that scientists had learned however the speed with which the threads unraveled remained unexplained. Speculation was that some unknown chemical reaction was responsible.

Hagfish Slime Skein Unraveling ( Credit: Chaudhary, Ewoldt and Tiffeault)

Now however Gaurav Chaudhary and Randy H. Ewoldt at the University of Illinois’ department of Mechanical Science and Engineering along with Jean-Luc Thiffeault at the University of Wisconsin’ department of Mathematics have determined that the hydrodynamic motion of the water itself is sufficient to uncoil the skein without the need of any chemicals.

Doctors Chaudhary and Ewoldt began by undertaking a detailed and precise examination of how the skein unravels while Doctor Thiffeault concentrated on the mathematics of the interactions between the uncoiling skein and the agitation of the water. Computer simulations indicate that nothing more than turbulence can result in the full expansion of the mucus.

Understanding the mechanics of a material that can expand thousands of times in volume could be of great importance in many engineering problems. The future will show if the hagfish’ defense mechanism can be reproduced and applied by human engineers.

My final story deals with a very common, yet small and largely unfamiliar creature formally known as Chaetognaths (The word means Bristle Jaw) but more commonly referred to as Arrow Worms. See image below. Living in environments ranging from brackish water to the floor of the ocean depths Chaetognaths comprise some 120 living species of predatory worm ranging in size from 2 to 120 mm.

Chaetognath or Arrow Worm (Credit: Wikipedia)

Biologists have long been puzzled by Chaetognaths, unable to decide exactly where on the tree of life their small branch lies. Traditionally arrow worms had been placed near the flatworms, segmented worms and molluscs but in fact there was even debate as to which supergroup of animals the Chaetognaths belonged, the protostomes or the deuterostomes.

Now both protostomes and the deuterostomes share a common body plan with a single intestinal system running through them. The difference lies in which opening forms first, in protostomes the mouth forms before the anus while in deuterostomes it is the anus that forms first. Vertebrates are protostomes by the way while insects are deuterostomes.

Protostome versus Deuterostome (Credit: Slideshow.net)

To clear up the mystery a group of biologists from around the world led by Ferdinand Marle’taz of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) Molecular Genetics Unit have completed a detailed studied of ten species of arrow worm and compared them to other animals.

The results of the study clearly showed that Chaetognaths belonged with in protostomes but were not closely related to the other worms or molluscs. The closest relatives to arrow worms appear to be the tiny, often microscopic freshwater animals known as rotifers. See image below.

While the study by Doctor Marle’taz and his colleagues appears to have resolved some of the mystery of arrow worms there remain plenty of other questions to be answered as we learn more and more about the other creatures with which we share our world.

The North Magnetic Pole is moving at an Alarming Rate, does it signal a switch in Earth’s Magnetic Field?

For the past three centuries both physicists and geologists have been studying the Earth’s magnetic field trying to learn its secrets, and to be honest there’s still a great deal that they don’t know. They do know that the field is generated by the rotation of our planet’s liquid core, although precisely how is fuzzy. They also know that the magnetic poles swap positions every 200,000 to 400,000 years although why is still a mystery. Now let’s be fair though, it isn’t easy to study a phenomenon that is hidden from you by 2,000 kilometers of solid rock!

The Earth’s Magnetic Poles do not quite line up with the Physical Poles (Credit: Happy World)

I’ve spoken before about the possibility that the magnetic poles may be in the initial stages of flipping; see my post of 8Feb2017. Now there is further evidence that the process may be starting. The location on Earth’s surface where the North Magnetic Pole pops out of the ground is moving at an accelerated speed and in an unpredictable direction.

For more than a century the North magnetic pole had been firmly positioned in northern Canada, a full 700-800 km from the physical North Pole. Now it’s been long known that the magnetic poles move slightly, a kilometer or two every year, but in the last 40 years the speed of that movement has been increasing year by year. Researchers estimate that the speed of the north magnetic pole has reached 55km per year, see map below.

The Movement of the Earth’s North Magnetic Pole (Credit: Nature)

As you can see from the map the north magnetic pole has in the last 20 years actually been getting much closer to the real North Pole, although if it keeps moving in its current direction it will soon start to pull away again. If the magnetic pole continues to move in its present direction it will enter the Siberian region of Russia within several decades.

Theorists are speculating that a high-speed jet of liquid iron deep beneath Canada may be causing the rapid movement. Another idea is that there are two jets, one each beneath Canada and Siberia and a tug of war between them is to blame for the increased speed with which the magnetic pole is moving. In either case the movement is starting to interfere with worldwide navigation systems.

We All Played with a Compass as a Child (credit: University of Melbourne)

Think about it, humans have used magnetic compasses for centuries as an aid to navigation and even today’s advanced GPS location networks still depend on knowing just where the north magnetic pole is. By the way in case you didn’t know it you smartphone contains a magnetometer for detecting the Earth’s magnetic field, your map app wouldn’t work without it.

In order for these computerized navigational systems to work accurately every five years scientists have been updating the ‘World’s Magnetic Model’ with the latest, precise location for the north magnetic pole. This model has been maintained by both the US Nation Oceanographic and Atmospherics Administration (NOAA) and the British Geological Survey. The next update is due in 2020 but because the north magnetic pole is moving so fast that update is needed right now.

The US/UK World Magnetic Model (Credit: Inverse)

There’s a problem however, because of the government shutdown in the US brought on by the fight over Donald Trump’s border wall the scientists at NOAA who work on the world’s magnetic model aren’t working on anything. They’ve been put on furlough until the impasse ends, whenever that may be. Meanwhile the navigational systems that our modern society depends on are slowly becoming more inaccurate as the North Magnetic Pole continues to move.

Genetically Modified Foods (GMOs) are they the technology we need to feed our Growing Population? Or are they a Frankenstein Monster waiting to strike? Two stories that Illustrate the Promise and the Peril.

You hear about Genetically Modified Organisms every now and then on the news. Usually referred to as GMOs they are generating a great deal of excitement among biochemists and the food industry while causing just as much fear in some parts of the general population.

In a sense we have been modifying living creatures for 10,000 years. Starting with wolves we selectively bred them to enhance the characteristics we desired until we got man’s best friend the dog. Using the same techniques human beings have selectively bred hundreds of species of plant and animal to give us pretty much all of the food we, and our selectively bred pets, eat!

Selective breeding is genetic modification from the outside however. It’s only over the last 30-40 years that biochemists have been able to go straight to a living creature’s DNA and directly modify it. And it’s only in the past five years that scientists have possessed the precise and efficient gene-modifying tool known as CRISPR. (See my Posts of 5Aug17, 1Sept18 and 1Dec18 to learn more about CRISPR and how this gene-editing tool works).

How CRISPR Works (Credit: Genetic Literacy Project)

Using CRISPR biochemists hope to modify the plants and animals we eat in order to make them to grow larger more quickly, while requiring less fertilizer or feed. This would of course make food both cheaper and more abundant and in a world where more than 10% of the population goes to bed hungry that has to be a good thing.

One study could be a real game changer in the effort to produce more nourishing food. Researchers at the University of Illinois have been able to genetically modify the biochemical factories of plants in order to dramatically increase the efficiency of photosynthesis itself.

Production of Glucose by Photosynthesis (Credit: 19.eap-ing.de)

You’ll recall that photosynthesis is the chemical process by which plants use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars. In fact photosynthesis is the basic chemical reaction by which all of the world’s food is produced! Photosynthesis is rather inefficient however; it is chemically unable to distinguish between a carbon dioxide and oxygen molecules. According to plant biologist Donald Ort, the study’s senior author, “This is essentially anti-photosynthesis, and the plant produces a toxic compound that it has to recycle and detoxify.”

The researchers modified the DNA of Tobacco plants to simplify and speed up that detoxifying process resulting in plants that grew larger much more quickly, see image below. Dr. Ort and his team choose tobacco plants as a test subject because tobacco grows quickly and possesses genes that are easy to manipulate. The results are certainly impressive with tobacco plants that are 40% larger than ordinary plants.

Increased Growth of Tobacco Plants Achieved by Gene Editing (Credit: Clair Benjamin)

Having demonstrated the advantages of their approach the biochemists are now applying their technique to more useful plants like potatoes and soybeans. If this enhanced photosynthesis can be applied to other vegetable crops the resulting increase in food production could go a long way to helping feed the hungry nations of the world.

Some scientists are using gene editing to be a little more creative. One group wants to develop a spicy, peppery tomato. Now it turns out that tomatoes and peppers are pretty closely related, having split apart only about 20 million years ago. This means that the genes to produce Capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers spicy, are still there inside a tomato’s DNA but according to co-author Agustin Zsögön they “are just not active.” Dr. Zsögön hopes to reactivate those genes allowing the humble tomato the ability to be as hot as any chilli pepper.

Can Gene Editing Produce a Spicy Tomato (Credit: Healthy Eating)

So why would scientists be so keen on developing a spicy tomato. Well the chemical capsaicin does more than just make your food taste spicy. Research has shown that capsaicin compounds are high in antioxidants; help the body fight cancerous tumors while aiding in both weight and pain management.

Right now the challenge is in determining which genes within the tomato to either turn back on, or turn off in order to get tomatoes to start producing capsaicin. Still, in a few years you may not need that habanero pepper in order to put some heat in your recipe for enchilada sauce!

Whether we use gene editing to greatly increase food production or just put a little more spice in our meals there are going to be people who are concerned about what other, unintentional chemicals we may be putting in what we eat. The workings of DNA, and the processes by which it controls the growth of cells are still largely unknown. The fear is that by modifying the genes of organisms to make them produce more food, we may also cause them to produce poisons or other deadly chemicals.

The scientists working on gene editing techniques are aware of this problem. As Dr. Ort says, “…any enhanced crops would undergo rigorous testing before they are ever consumed by humans.” Scientists like Dr. Ort may be determined to go slowly and test completely but what about large food corporations who are determined to both keep costs down and get their new products on the market before their competitors do. And not all the scientists are as trustworthy as Dr. Ort. Remember Chinese scientist He Jiankui who just two months ago revealed that he had used CRISPR on human embryos!

Dr. He defends his Research at the Genome Summit (Credit: BBC)

Like every advance in science gene editing can either benefit the world or harm it. It’s up to us, all of us to decide which it will be.

Attempts to Cleanup the Great Pacific Garbage Patch run into Problems. Well, We sort of knew this wasn’t going to be Easy!

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch doesn’t get very much press coverage so you may not have heard about it. Simply put; the trash we are continuously dumping into the world’s oceans is drifting along in the currents and finally accumulating in calm areas generating massive trash heaps just floating out there. See images below for some close up views of the situation.

A Sample of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Credit: National Geographic)

The Rubbish looks even worse from Beneath (Credit: Padi)

The present size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is estimated at an area greater than that of the nation of Germany but it is only the largest of many the trash dumps that are growing near of the middle of every ocean. In fact the Atlantic and Pacific oceans both have two, one each in the northern and southern hemispheres. See image below.

Worldwide Distribution of Garbage Patches (Credit: St. Louis Earth Day)

Now the vast majority of the waste filling up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is plastic simply because plastic floats quite nicely and because it is so inert that it can easily float in the ocean for decades, or even longer, slowly building up more and more trash. Seriously, the amount of plastic products that human beings just toss away in monumental. For example every day the human race simply tosses away about one and a half billion plastic straws and plastic bags, each! And it isn’t just straws and bags; plastic items from pill bottles to huge commercial fishing nets are a large part of the problem as well.

So isn’t it a good thing then that all of that rubbish is gathering by itself into empty regions of the oceans? Where we don’t have to worry about it.

Well of course the creatures of the oceans who live there have to worry, or rather simply die because of our refusal to clean up our own mess. The images below show just a few of the millions of animals who die every year by plastic. However the biggest problem is one you can’t easily see because as this layer of plastic floats on the ocean surface it prevents oxygen from getting into the water beneath, turning a large part of the ocean into a lifeless desert!

Even If I didn’t like Turtles This Picture would be Heartrending (Credit: Stefan Leijon)

Another Victim of our Careless Disposing of Plastic Waste (Credit: Mashable.com)

Still thinking that doesn’t bother you! Well how about this. While plastic is very inert chemically, as I said above it can float in the ocean for decades, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be mechanically broken down into smaller pieces. Research has shown that after 5, 10, 20 years in the ocean wave action can turn a plastic bag into thousands of plastic micro-particles just the right size to get mixed in with the algae that is the food for small fish like sardines and anchovies. Those small fish get the micro-particles into them and then they are eaten by bigger fish like salmon and tuna. The upshot of all this is that if you like seafood you probably already have some plastic micro-particles inside of you!

So what can we do about these mountains of plastic trash that are suffocating the oceans. Well a young inventor named Boyan Slat came up with an interesting idea about 7 years ago when he was just 17. Organizing a non-profit called ‘The Ocean Cleanup’ Slat succeeded in raising enough money to get his invention built. Slat’s invention was towed out of San Francisco back in September and deployed into the area of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. See image below.

Boyan Slat’s Ocean Cleanup Barrier Being Towed out of San Francisco (Credit: Scuba News)

Basically the cleanup device consists of a 700-meter long barrier made of plastic tubes shaped like a big “U” see image below. The idea is for the barrier to float in the currents gathering the plastic trash into its mouth. Whenever the U becomes full a ship is dispatched to remove the rubbish so that it can be disposed of properly.

How The Ocean Cleanup Barrier is intended to Work (Credit: BBC)

Even if the invention worked perfectly it still wasn’t the total solution. While Slat maintained that sealife would be able to swim under the barrier to escape ocean biologists feel that many of the smallest creatures, like the algae I mentioned above, will be killed. Also it would take thousands of such barriers to have any real impact, along with the ships needed to empty them and all that will cost a lot!

And of course the prototype is having some problems, I know from experience that prototypes usually do. For one thing the U simply isn’t gathering up as much trash as was hoped, Slat feels that the barrier isn’t moving fast enough through the water to keep the plastic inside the U. He is already working on improvements to increase the speed. Then just this past week a 20-meter long section of the barrier broke off requiring major repair. Which may actually allow time for some of the upgrades to be installed!

So Slat’s barrier has some way to go before it can really show what it can do. I wish him good luck and hope his invention will prove to be a part of the solution to this growing problem.

Still Slat’s barrier is only treating the symptoms of our disposable society’s love affair with plastic! We need a more fundamental approach to just using less plastic along with reusing more of what we do produce!

So how about this. The next time you’re at a restaurant and you order a soda tell the waitress you don’t need a straw, oh and get yourself a nice cloth bag and take it with you the next time you go shopping for groceries!

China’s Chang’e4 Probe becomes first spacecraft to land on the Far Side of the Moon.

Don’t call it the dark side! Just because the Moon keeps the same face towards the Earth doesn’t mean the other side is dark. In fact the side of the Moon we can’t see gets just as much sunlight as the side we can see. Still the Lunar Farside has always been a land of mystery.

We do have photographs of the farside, taken by the lunar orbiter series of space probes that made detailed images of the entire Moon’s surface in preparation for the Apollo landing, see image below. However, even during the heyday of Apollo NASA never considered landing a probe on the surface of farside let alone a manned landing. NASA’s reason for avoiding the farside is quite simple, if you go behind the Moon in order to visit the farside you’re not only out of sight, you’re out of radio contact, so an unmanned probe couldn’t get its data back to Earth anyway! Because of this the Moon’s farside remained untouched for almost 50 years after Apollo.

The Farside of the Moon as compiled from Lunar Orbiter Photos (Credit: NASA)

Now however China’s National Space Agency (CNSA) has succeeded in landing the Chang’e 4, a sophisticated robotic probe that even carries a small rover, onto the Moon’s farside. So how did the Chinese resolve the problem of communicating with the Chang’e 4 as it landed in Aitken Basin, the Moon’s largest and oldest impact crater. Well they did so by first putting a relay satellite named Queqiao into lunar orbit. In this way Chang’e 4 will remain in constant contact with its command center back on Earth. See image below.

The Queqiao Relay Satellite keeps the Chang’e 4 Lander in contact with Earth (CNSA)

The Chang’e 4 was launched aboard a Long March 3B carrier rocket back on December 7th and went into lunar orbit on December 12th, see image below. As is usually the case with Chinese space missions there was no public statement of exactly when the Chang’e 4 would land, the announcement came only after Chang’e 4 was safely on the ground.

Launch of the Chang’e 4 Lander (Credit: CNSA)

But Chang’e 4 did land safety and has already begun to send back close up images from the surface of farside, see image below. Then after about a day to check out all of the lander’s systems the Chinese ordered Chang’e 4 to deploy it’s 6-wheeled rover named Yutu. See images below of the Yutu rover descending from the Chang’e 4 main lander.

Ground level Image of the Farside of the Moon (Credit: CNSA)

The Yutu Rover at the bottom of its ramp (Credit: CNSA)

The Yutu Rover making the first Tracks on the Farside of the Moon (Credit: CNSA)

In addition to experiments dealing with lunar geology and interactions of the solar wind on the lunar surface the Chang’e 4 will be carrying out some simple low frequency radio astronomy observations. You see here on Earth all of the electronic devices that are a part of modern society interfere with all of the low frequency signals coming from outer space, and more and more the high frequency ones as well. But on the farside of the Moon Chang’e 4 will be shielded from all of mankind’s artificial signals allowing it to see those from astronomical sources only. Radio astronomers hope that one day the farside of the Moon will serve as a platform for huge radio telescopes with which they can see the Universe without worrying about artificial interference.

Chang’e 4 represents another major step forward in China’s space program. Having become only the third nation to launch humans into space China is currently developing its own, small space station and is moving forward with robotic lunar and interplanetary probes. Taking a slow but steady approach as opposed to NASA’s herky jerky bursts in different directions China hopes to put a man on the Moon sometime in the mid to late 2020s, the same time frame as NASA (see my post of 31Dec2018). In that case we are in another space race back to the Moon, if a quieter one. I wonder who will win this time!

Before I go; with all of the excitement of New Horizons exploring Ultima Thule and Chang’e 4 landing on the Moon’s farside it was easy to miss the news that the Osiris-REX spacecraft has gone into orbit around the asteroid Bennu, the smallest, least massive object which a space probe has ever orbited. Now Osiris-REX will take a few months to study Bennu in order to determine a suitable landing spot from which it will obtain a sample of the asteroid for return to Earth.

Close up view of the asteroid Bennu as seen by the Osiris-Rex space probe (Credit: Earth Sky)

New Horizons Space Probe gets Science off to a good start in the year 2019 with a Flyby of the most distant world ever visited.

Just 33 minutes past midnight on January the first here on the US East Coast NASA’s New Horizons space probe made it’s closest approach to the Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69 better known by it’s unofficial nickname Ultima Thule. The Ultima Thule flyby comes three and a half years after New Horizons hugely successful mission to Pluto back in 2015 and was actually added on to the original Pluto mission because New Horizons was in such good shape that a flyby of Ultima Thule seemed possible.

The New Horizons Space Probe Swept Past Pluto back in 2015 (Credit: NASA)

In fact Ultima Thule was not even discovered until 2014, eight years after New Horizons had been launched back in January of 2006 so the flyby represents the first time that a space probe has visited a world that wasn’t discovered until after the probe was launched.

Ultima Thule is so far away, 6.5 Billion kilometers, that even traveling at the speed of light it wasn’t until 10:30 the next morning that the scientists at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL, which manages the space probe for NASA) received the signals telling them that New Horizons had successfully carried out the mission. At that distance the rate at which New Horizons’ transmitter can send back the data it collected is also very low, only 1 kilobyte per second. In fact it will take 20 months for New Horizons to send all of its discoveries back to Earth.

However, knowing how anxious the public was to see some results the scientists at APL quickly published a rough first image; see below, which showed an obviously bilobed object some 30 km by 15 km. It wasn’t until a press conference the next day (January 2nd and which I just finished watching) that we started getting some real information about just what kind of world Ultima Thule is.

First, Rough Picture of Ultima Thule from New Horizon. (Credit: Sky News)

Looking at the first Hi-Resolution image below it is apparent that Ultima Thule is actually two roughly spherical objects that have come together very gently, with no sign of anything like a collision. The team at APL has decided to name the larger, lower ball Ultima and the smaller upper ball Thule.

First Hi-Res Image of Ultima Thule from New Horizons (Credit: APL, NASA)

The physical configuration of Ultima Thule has indicated to APL scientists, led by program manager Alan Stern, to suggest that Ultima Thule formed 4.5 billion years ago exactly as we see it today. Indeed it is thought that back when the solar system was forming there were literally million of small objects very similar to Ultima Thule all the way from where Mercury is now to beyond where Ultima Thule. In the inner solar system those ‘planetoids’ came together to form the planets. Beyond Pluto however the planetoids were so few and the distance between them so great that many remained just as they were, as Ultima Thule is now. The basic idea of how Ultima Thule formed is show in the image below.

Suggested Formation Scheme of Ultima Thule (Credit: APL, NASA)

The first Hi-Res pictures are capable of resolving features on Ultima Thule down to a size of about 150 m but with more data coming in the scientists hope to be able to increase the resolution down to about 40 m or maybe even a little smaller. Nevertheless there are already some features that are clearly seen in the first images, see below. The scientists at APL are especially interest in the ring around where the two lobes meet. By the way the new Hi-Res images have also enabled the scientists to determine that Ultima Thule rotates about once every 15+1 hours.

Features see in Hi-Res Image of Ultima Thule (Credit: APL, NASA)

Now the Hi-Resolution camera on board New Horizons is strictly black and white but we can produce a colour image of Ultima Thule because the data from a low-resolution colour camera can be used to colourize the Hi-Res picture. The image below illustrates how this is done and it turns out that Ultima Thule is reddish in colour.

How the Scientists Colourize the Hi-Res Image of Ultima Thule (Credit: APL, NASA)

In the days to come we’ll be learning more about Ultima Thule as more and more of the data from New Horizons comes in. The probe itself is of course still going, heading out of the solar system following a path set out by the Pioneer and especially the Voyager space probes. The scientists at APL hope that like the Voyagers New Horizons will continue to send back data for 20 or more years, teaching us even more about what is beyond our solar system. See image below.

Future Course of New Horizons, and other Probes beyond the Solar System (Credit: APL, NASA)

Before I go, since this is my first post of 2019 I’ll like to take just a moment to recapitulate 2018 for Science and Science Fiction. There were 102 published posts in all, that’s nearly two every week. 87 posts dealt with science while 14 dealt with SF and there was one post that dealt with the blog itself.

The visitor statistics for Science and Science Fiction improved steadily throughout 2018, thank you all very much. Starting at a little under 500 visits per day in January by December the number of daily visitors had risen to 1400, an increase of about 280%!!

The number of registered subscribers also rose to a total of 8,952. And the people who come to visit or subscribe live throughout the world. Seriously everyday I get comments from places like China or Germany or Hungary or just about any country you’d care to name.

All I can say is that I appreciate all of you who come to my blog in order to learn more about Science and Science Fiction! Thanks again!