Month: April 2019

Space Race part 5: The First Interplanetary Probes

Nowadays we’ve become accustomed to having unmanned, robotic space probes traversing interplanetary space and making important discoveries without there being any human within millions of kilometers. At the beginning of the space age however there were many, even respected scientists who doubted that automated mechanisms could carry out the complex maneuvers, over long periods of time, that would be required for missions to the Moon or nearby planets.

Science fiction movies of the 1920s through the 50s had always depicted the first landings on alien worlds being made by manned, piloted spaceships not robots. Robots after all could only do what they were programmed to do, they would never be able to deal with unforeseen events; they could never be adaptable enough to face the unknown.

In George Pal’s ‘Destination Moon’ the first landing on the Moon was Manned (Credit: George Pal Productions)

Nevertheless the cost of getting a man into orbit, let alone to another world was so great that manned flights to other planets were simply not possible. After all a person would require air throughout the mission, would require food and water, would have to be brought back! Robots on the other hand only needed electricity and it didn’t matter if they didn’t return to Earth, just so long as their data did!

So it was that the first man made object to leave Earth orbit, the first to completely escape from Earth’s gravity was a robotic probe. Launched on January 2nd, 1959 Luna 1 was another space first for the Soviet Union although the probe failed in its objective of crashing into the Moon. Think about that, with all of the complex maneuverings and operations that space probes carry out today the first deep space probe just had to hit the Moon, and it missed.

The Luna 1 probe was the first Man Made Object to leave Earth orbit. (Credit: Roscosmos)

So did the first American Lunar probe Pioneer 4, launched just two months later, Pioneers 1-3 all blew up on the launch pad. The first deep space probe to actually succeed was Luna 2 on September 13 of 1959.   A month later in October Luna 3 successfully passed behind the Moon, taking a picture that was radioed back to Earth giving humanity its first glimpse of the far side of the Lunar farside.

One of the Images of the Moon’s Farside sent back by Luna 3 (Credit: Roscosmos)
The Luna 3 Space Probe (Credit: Roscosmos)

Thanks to the power of their R-7 rocket the Soviet’s were also the first to attempt a mission to another planet. A pair of space probes called the U1 and U2 were launched on October 10th and 14th of 1960. The mission intended for the two probes was a fly-by of Mars but neither managed to even leave Earth orbit.

There were a lot of failures in those early days, launch failures, failures to leave Earth orbit, or failures where the probe would miss its target. And even if the spacecraft did make it to its intended destination there could be a loss of radio contact. It was beginning to look as if the nay Sayers were right, robotic space missions were simply too complicated, there were just too many unknowns for a mere machine to handle.

The US space probe Mariner 4 changed that. Launched from Cape Canaveral on November 28th of 1964 the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) built space probe successfully flew past the planet Mars on the 14th of July 1965. At its closest approach of 13,000 kilometers the Mariner probe took a series of 22 images of the surface of the Red Planet. These images were transmitted back to Earth over the next few days.

A Replica of Mariner 4 (Credit: JPL-NASA)

By today’s standards the images were poor, the last three missed the planet entirely while only a dozen are really clear enough to be useful. Those images were revolutionary however showing scores of craters spread across the Martian surface. The data sent back by Mariner 4 showed a Mars that resembled Earth’s Moon a great deal more than any astronomer had imagined. All of the speculation of Martian civilizations building a system of canals vanished in an instant. With a single successful mission the scientific value to science of robotic interplanetary probes had been demonstrated.

One of the Images of Mars sent back by Mariner 4 (Credit: JPL-NASA)
Perhaps the best image sent back by Mariner 4 (Credit: JPL-NASA)
The Location of the images taken by Mariner 4 on the surface of Mars (Credit: The Planetary Society)

It also so happened that following Mariner 4 robotic probes became more reliable, more successful. The engineers were learning from their mistakes designing probes that could survive the hostile environment of deep space.

The American Surveyor 1 and Lunar Orbiter 1 Moon probes became the first man made objects to respectively land softy on, and orbit another world. Meanwhile the Soviet Venera 3 became the first to impact on the planet Venus and Zond 5 circled around the Moon and became the first interplanetary probe to return to Earth.

The Surveyor Lunar Lander Space Probes (Credit: JPL-NASA)
The Zond 5 Space Probe after completing its mission of traveling around the Moon and returning to Earth (Credit: Roscosmos)

Since Mariner 4 success for automated space probes has become the norm. There are still failures on occasion, but by now every planet in our solar system, along with moons, comets and asteroids have all been visited by unmanned, robotic probes.

Paleontologists have discovered a fossil site that actually contains the remains of animals that died in the Asteroid strike that ended the reign of the dinosaurs.

Since the idea that an asteroid collision with the Earth was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs was first proposed over forty years ago by Walter Alvarez the evidence for such a catastrophe has accumulated slowly but surely. Alvarez based his original idea on evidence collected during his own examinations of the K-t boundary at numerous locations around the world. (The K-t boundary is the layer of rock strata that marks the end of the dinosaurs, below the boundary is the Cretaceous period rich in dinosaur fossils, above it is the Tertiary period with absolutely none! The K-t boundary is dated to some 66 million years ago.)

Walter Alvarez (r) standing with his Father Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Luis Alvarez (l). Walter has his hand on the rock layer that is the k-T boundary (Credit: Wikipedia)

What Alvarez found at the K-t was a very thin layer of rock rich in the element iridium, which is very rare of Earth but much more common on meteoroids. It was this thin layer that led him to speculate that an asteroid; perhaps 10 kilometers in diameter had struck the Earth triggering a worldwide extinction.

Then in 1978 the actual crater, now named Chicxulub, formed by that asteroid was identified centered just off shore of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Evidence from that crater confirmed that the amount of energy released by that collision was indeed sufficient to cause mass destruction around the world. Additionally, evidence of rocks distorted by high temperature and pressure and material thrown about by enormous tsunamis has been found throughout both North and South America. Still, some researchers have asked, if the dinosaurs, and many other creatures became extinct in such a violent episode, shouldn’t we be able to find a mass graveyard showing some unmistakable signs of such an event.

Location ans Size of the Crater caused by the Asteroid that killed the Dinosaurs (Credit: Kut.org)

Now a team of paleontologists from the University of Kansas has announced the discovery of a fossil site that provides just the smoking gun they were looking for. Led by paleontologist Robert DePalma the site is called Tanis and is located in the Hell Creek Formation in the southwestern corner of North Dakota.

Rock section of k-T boundary taken From Tanis Fossil Site. Thin middle layer contains 1000x as much Iridium as upper and lower layers. Credit: Wikipedia)

The fossils recovered from the site consist of a mashup of freshwater and saltwater animals and plants that appear to have all perished in a very short period of time. More telling however was that some of the fish were found to have small, glass like balls of compressed and heated rock imbedded in their gills as if they had breathed them in. These small rocky balls are known as tektites, a common product of volcanic activity or an asteroid strike. The fact that these tektites were found more than 3,000 kilometers from where the asteroid struck is a testament to the power that had been unleashed.

Some of the fossilized fish killed by the asteroid strike and uncovered at the Tanis fossil site (Credit: Science News)

 

Prepared Microscopic Slide from a fossil at the Tanis site showing tektites (Credit: Robert DePalma)

So complete and well defined are the remains from the Tanis site that the paleontologists believe that they can actually make out the sequence of the events that occurred there. It appears that first came a tremendous seismic surge, an earthquake of such power as to dwarf any in recorded history. This geologic upheaval began the mixing of fresh and saltwater environments that continued when a massive tsunami followed some 16-18 hours later. Finally, over a period of days or even months a thick layer of ash would have fallen from the skies covering the dead and dying animals, leaving them for us to uncover 66 million years later.

This photo taken and handout on March 29, 2019 by the University of Kansas,shows Robert DePalma(L)and field assistant Kylie Ruble(R) excavate fossil carcasses from the Tanis deposit.The site appears to date to the day 66 million years ago when a meteor hit Earth, killing nearly all life on the planet. (Photo by Robert DePalma / Kansas University / AFP)

It is true that no dinosaur fossils have been discovered at Tanis so far; the site appears to have been a shallow water environment. Still one may turn up whose body got washed into the area. If not sooner or later we’ll find another site that has dinosaurs, it’s only a matter of time, and time is one thing this old Earth has got plenty of.

 

Space News for April 2019

This past month there have been a number of successes and failures in space along with a story that reminds us that spaceflight can sometimes just be fun. So let’s get to it.

As usual I’ll start with Space X, doesn’t it seem to you as if Elon Musk’s company provides us with some news to discuss every month. On April 10th the Hawthorn California based Space X successfully flew its Falcon Heavy launch vehicle for the second time, and for the first time with a paying customer.

The Second Launch of a Space X Falcon Heavy on its first commercial mission (Credit: New Scientist)

The Falcon heavy not only succeeded in placing the Arabsat 6A into its proper geostationary transfer orbit but Space X succeeded in recovering all three booster engines and even the launch vehicle’s payload nose cone failings. The two side boosters landed safely back at Kennedy Space center while the central first stage was recovered by Space X’s drone recovery ship “Of course I still love You”.

The Falcon Heavy side boosters return to Cape Kennedy (Credit: Wikipedia)

Recovery of the nose cone, which costs about $6 million dollars for a pair, is something that Space X has attempted several times before now without success. The nose cone recovery therefore makes the April 10th launch represents the most complete recovery that Space X has ever carried out.

Unfortunately on the day after the nearly perfect launch choppy seas in the Atlantic Ocean caused the central first stage to tip over and crash onto the recovery ship as it was being brought back to port. This is the first time that a Falcon first stage has been loss after successfully landing on the recovery ship and Space X promises design changes to their method of securing the rocket during transit to prevent further such losses.

The Falcon Heavy first stage landed safely on its recovery ship but heavy seas the next day caused it to tip over (Credit: Michael Howard)

A little further out in space Israel was having considerably worse luck. Their Beresheet lunar lander would have made the small Middle Eastern nation only the fourth country to achieve the feat of soft landing a probe on the Moon but unfortunately the Beresheet landed much too hard and presently is considered a total loss.

The Israeli Beresheet Lunar Lander attempted a soft landing on the Moon (Credit: The Planetary Society)

Although developed by Israeli tech companies Beresheet is the first ever privately funded lunar lander. Launched aboard a Space X Falcon 9 rocket back in February the Beresheet entered a highly elliptical orbit around the Earth, slowly enlarging that orbit until the lunar probe broke free and headed for the Moon.

The Journey of the Beresheet Lunar Lander was a long and complicated one (Credit: Space Ref)

The probe did make a number of observations on its journey including a video of the Sun appearing from behind the Earth. Nevertheless the failure to land safely is a disappointment. The Israelis haven’t given up however; money is already being raised to begin construction of Beresheet 2.

Further out in space the Japanese were having better luck with their Hayabusa 2 space probe now in orbit around the asteroid Ryugu. After several months of surveying the asteroid for the best location from which to obtain samples of the asteroid’s interior the space probe deployed a projectile to strike the asteroid. The idea was for the Hayabusa 2 to fire a small copper plate referred to as an impactor at Ryugu and as it approached the surface a small explosive would detonate which would drive the plate into the asteroid forming a crater. After the crater was formed the spacecraft would then approach and collect the desired samples.

The Small Carry-On Impactor aboard the Hayabusa 2 (Credit: Spaceflight 101)

The operation went off perfectly on April 4th, see image of the impact below, with the impactor striking Ryugu at an estimated 7200 kph. Now Hayabusa’s controllers must gently lower the probe toward the asteroid in order to collect some samples. The Hayabusa 2 is scheduled to return to Earth with its asteroid pieces in December of 2020.

The strike of the Hayabusa Impactor (Credit: Space News)

My final story today is a reminder that even as humans traveled into space we took other creatures along with us. Indeed, Laika the dog preceded the first man into space by a couple of years. The use of test animals in space exploration has a long and interesting history.

Today on the International Space Station (ISS) there are several different experiments involving lab animals being conducted at all times. One of these uses lab mice to study the long-term effect of zero gravity and radiation.

The Rodent Habitat aboard the ISS (Credit: NASA, Dominic Hart)

“Since rodents develop and age much faster than humans, studying rodent model organisms allow scientists to study diseases that may take years of decades to develop in humans.” According to lead researcher April Ronca, a biologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. The space agency has even designed a special habitat for the test subjects. The habitat is large enough for the mice to be able exercise and even just play, and they certainly enjoy playing. Check out the video by clicking on the link provided below. They have certainly learned how to enjoy Zero gee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7lgj3aZ8dU

Astronomers succeed in taking first Picture of a Black Hole

First Picture of a Block Hole (Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration)

Yes it’s true; you can’t see a black hole. The glowing doughnut shape in the image above is actually the swirling mass of gas and dust that is falling into the black hole. Astronomers call that whirlpool an accretion disk and the energy released by that matter as it drops into the gravitational well of the black hole causes the disk to glow. Also, the actual image that you see above wasn’t really taken in visible light. Rather it’s a computer-generated image converted from measurements of radio emissions across the region around the black hole.

In fact it took eight radio telescopes and more than three hundred astronomers working together in a group known as the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration to collect the signals from the black hole needed to construct the image. The eight radio telescopes which make up the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) are spread around the half the world; see map below. By combining the received signals of those telescopes the astronomers succeeded in constructing a single radio telescope whose resolution was equivalent to a telescope that would be nearly the size of the Earth. (The resolution of a telescope is its ability to separate two objects that are both very far away and very close together.)

The Eight Radio Telescopes that were combined to produce the Black Hole Image Span half the World (Credit: EHT)

The technique used to combine the eight signals is know as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) and networks the telescopes by adding their signals together, allowing them to interfere with each other, remember these signals are waves, exactly as they would in a telescope as big as the distance between the telescopes. In order to add the signals together properly they must have been received at precisely the same time. This means that each radio telescope in the EHT must be governed by its own atomic clock, and all eight atomic clocks must have been synchronized before the first signals were received.

The Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) is just one of the eight telescopes that make up the Event Horizons Telescope (Credit: University of Chicago, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics)

That degree of precision was necessary because the black hole whose image was taken sits 55 million light-years away in the galaxy known as M87 or Virgo A and the size of the black hole is about the same as the orbit of Pluto while the size of the accretion disk is about eight times larger. In addition to producing the image the measurements made by the EVT allowed a more precise measurement of the black hole’s mass, a whopping 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun.

The Galaxy M87 which contains the first Black Hole ever Images (Credit: The Daily Galaxy)

All that work was certainly worth the effort. That one image confirms much of the theoretical work that has been conducted regarding black holes over the last thirty to forty years. The black hole’s event horizon, the energy emitted by the accretion disk as matter flows into the black hole, they’re all there, just as the models predicted.

What the Theories said a Black Hole looked like. Turned out they were Right! (Credit: Science)

The importance of the image is that it confirms one of the strangest predictions of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, the very existence of black holes. Now however, the researchers hope to use the EVTC to probe closer to the event horizons of black holes in order to test the limits of the General Theory. Even after one hundred years physicists have still been unable to integrate General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics, the other great theory of modern physics. The possibility that observations of black holes by the EVT may discover some clue leading to that unification is very enticing.

The astronomers also hope to learn more about the supermassive black holes that sit in the center of every galaxy. At the moment we don’t even know for certain which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole in its center but there are theories of galactic evolution that start in both directions. Maybe EVTC will find the evidence to answer that question.

As their next step the members of the EVTC are planning on trying to obtain images of the black hole that sits at the center of our own galaxy. Since our black hole is a lot closer, only 30,000 LY away you might wonder why the astronomers didn’t start with our black hole. You have to remember however, that to see the center of the Milky Way you have to look through most of the galaxy’s disk. In other words that black hole may be closer but there’s a lot more stuff in the way!

Looking towards the center of the Milky Way there’s a lot of other stuff between us and that Black Hole (Credit: Harvard CfA)

So the first image of a black hole that was taken by the EVT is really just a first step. There are many black holes to be studied out there, which means many more discoveries just waiting for the EVT to make.

 

Season Eight of “A Game of Thrones” Premiers tomorrow night on HBO.

(Note: This post mentions several incidents and characters from the first seven seasons of “Game of Thrones” so if you haven’t seen seasons 1-7 yet…well, in that case I doubt you’ll be watching season eight!)

Medieval human kingdom uses fire-breathing Dragons to fight army of ice zombies! If you think about it, that’s really the whole plot of George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Fire and Ice” the series of seven novels that became the basis for HBO’s long running series “A Game of Thrones”. Everything else has just been subplots and character arcs.

The Actual War for the Iron Throne is really just a Subplot in ‘A Game of Thrones’ (Credit: HBO)

But what subplots and character arcs. Let’s just take Daenerys Targaryen as an example. The daughter of a murdered king whose throne has been usurped, she starts the story by being married off by her brother to a barbarian chieftain. She receives three dragon eggs as a wedding present which she hatches to become ‘The Mother of Dragons”. Then she has to protect those baby dragons for about five years until they grow big enough for her to try to use them to regain her father’s throne. Except that she is then forced to make peace with the usurpers in order to fight the ice zombies.

The ‘Mother of Dragons’ with one of her babies! (Credit: HBO)
We Still don’t know what the Night King (King of the Zombies) wants? (Credit: HBO)

That’s a brief summary of about one tenth of everything that’s happened that’s happened to Daenerys so far! I could easily name another dozen characters whose story lines have been equally eventful. That is the characters who are still alive after seven seasons because Martin has justly acquired a reputation for seducing us into caring for a character only to abruptly kill them off.

Each of these Characters, and many others, has a well developed personality and history giving ‘Game of Thrones’ a realistic feeling even though it’s a fantasy! (Credit: HBO)

All of these different lives weave in and out to form the intricate tapestry that is “A Game of Thrones.” As a viewer you get caught up in the story of one or two characters and before you know it you’re sucked in to the entire saga, waiting breathlessly for the latest installment.

Part of the lure drawing you in is the detailed fantasy world that Martin has created in his setting of the nation of Westeros. Like many fantasy authors, Martin has started with a society similar to feudal Europe; the war over the iron throne has many parallels with the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses.

The Battle of the Bastards in ‘Game of Thrones’ clearly resembled a medieval battle (Credit: HBO)

Even some of the characters seem based on characters from medieval literature. For example I think Brienne of Tarth has to be a female version of Don Quixote. Think about it, she talks about chivalry and honour more than any other character in the saga and for the first several seasons in which she appears she’s unsuccessful at everything she tries to do! She’s even given a page who in many ways is just a younger Sancho Panza.

Brienne of Tarth or Don Quixote? You decide. (Credit: HBO)

To this feudal base Martin then adds in his fantasy elements. Some are tried and true like his dragons while others are wholly his own creation such as the three eyed raven or the disguises used by the assassins who serve the faceless god. Some of these magical plot devices work better than others.

As an example, in one episode Jorah Mormont was infected by the stonemen of Valyria and his body began turning to stone. After a little more than a season wandering around looking for a cure he finds Samwell Tarly the scholar who finds a possible cure in a library and just cures him. We never find out anything about the stonemen or Valyria, we don’t even get a good reason for why Jorah went there. I have a feeling Martin thought the stonemen were a great idea but then couldn’t figure out how to tie them into the rest of the story and since he need Jorah later on he decided to just get that whole subplot over with.

The Stonemen of Valeria was a plot device that just didn’t fit in to the rest of the story! (Credit: HBO)

Of course loose ends and subplots that don’t work are going to happen when you’re writing a huge epic with hundreds of characters spread over an entire world. So we shouldn’t be too hard on Martin if Bran Stark completely disappears for six episodes while just going from Winterfell to the wall. Martin had so many good ideas for things that could happen to other characters that Bran got lost for a while.

A bigger problem, at least for me is the unrelenting bloodshed, it really becomes depressing at some points in the story. Now I know that the historic Hundred Years War and War of the Roses were terribly violent but there are times when Martin just seems to be piling it on. Even in his most violent plays Shakespeare still managed to have a few light moments to momentarily relieve the gloom, check out the clowns in Act V, Scene i of Hamlet.

Even the most Dramatic of stories needs a little Comic Relief! (Credit: PD)

The epic “A Game of Thrones” has often been compared to J. R. R. Tolkein’s monumental “The Lord of the Rings”, even by George R. R. Martin himself. In my opinion “A Game of Thrones” has a good deal more diversity, both in types of characters and societies than “Lord of the Rings” while at the same time not being built around such a heavy Good versus Evil basis. On the other hand Tolkein’s deep history of his imagined world, especially the many languages Tolkein created make it the more elaborate tapestry.

‘Game of Thrones’ Author George R. R. Martin freely admits he was inspired by J. R. R. Tolkein’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ (Credit: Ballentine Books)

 

So that’s where we now are. The army of the dead is past the wall and moving south. Amongst the living there is still distrust, envy and a thirst for revenge. Will they unite in time? Winter has come, will humanity survive it. Season eight of “A Game of Thrones” is about to begin.

A newly discovered Fossil site in China may rival the famous Burgess Shale as a window into the beginnings of multi-cellular life.

If you make a visit to your local natural history museum you may notice that the fossil remains of ancient life on display invariably consist of the hard parts of the long-dead animals. Whether it be the bones of dinosaurs or the shells of ammonites, or even the carapaces of insects paleontologists usually have to figure out what the entire creature was like from just the hard parts. We shouldn’t complain, after a couple of million years, or a couple of hundred million years in some cases we’re actually lucky that anything remains. Those rare fossil sites where the soft anatomy of extinct animals are preserved are treated like gold mines and have been given the title ‘Lagerstätte’ which is German for place of storage.

The Solnhofen Site in Germany where the famous Archaeopteryx fossils come from is a example of a Lagerstatte (Credit: PD)

Paleontologists working in the Hubei province of China along the Qingjiang River have recently discovered a new Lagerstätte that is proving to be a treasure trove of exquisitely preserved fossils dated to about 520 million years ago. Since this is approximately the same geologic time period as the famous Burgess Shale these sites together provide a window into a very early geologic period known as the Cambrian.

Site along the Qingjiang River Where a Cambrian Lagerstatte has been Located (Credit: Phys.Org)

The Cambrian period is so important in understanding the history of life because prior to the Cambrian the evidence for multi-cellular life is very scarce, both in terms of numbers and diversity. However during the Cambrian hundreds of different types of living creatures burst onto the scene almost simultaneously. The causes of this ‘Cambrian Explosion’ are still being hotly debated and any new fossils that could help to shed light on what was happening during the Cambrian are extremely valuable.

And the fossils from Hubei could shed a lot of light. First of all there appears to simply be an enormous number of fossils to study, 30,000 have been collected so far. In addition the rock formation containing the fossils is widespread along the Qingjiang River meaning there could be several equally valuable sites waiting to be explored. That could mean a lot more fossils to come.

Just a few of the Fossils found at the Qingjiang site (Credit: Fu et al, Science)

So far half of the specimens from Qingjiang that have been examined by paleontologists belong to species that are entirely new to science giving us a much more complete look into this critical period in Earth’s history. Just as importantly the condition of the fossils is exquisite, even such fine appendages as antenna and the soft tentacles of jellyfish are preserved in detail. In some cases even internal organs can be discerned allowing a more detailed description of how the anatomy of these creatures worked.

Just Look at the incredible fine detail of the antenna on this Arthropod (Credit: Fu et al, Science)

The Qingjiang fossils also differ from those from the Burgess shale in one very interesting way. For some unknown reason the Burgess shale fossils are made up entirely of adults, no remains of larva or juvenals have been discovered there. The Qingjiang fossils however do contain juvenal specimens, which is very important for understanding the life cycle of many species that undergo metamorphosis or molting.

Some more Fossils from Qingjiang (Credit: Fu et al, Science)

The Cambrian explosion has been a puzzle to evolutionary biologists since the days of Charles Darwin. He regarded what he called ‘the lower Silurian layers’ (the name Cambrian hadn’t been established yet) as one of biggest problems with his theory of natural selection. With the discovery of the Qingjiang fossils we now have a lot more data to use in figuring out the solution to that problem.

 

Updates on some Previous Posts

The work of Science is never done; there is always more to learn. Not only that but it often happens that two or even more researchers can be working on the same subject and both make important new discoveries at almost the same time. This means that those of us who try to keep up to date on the latest science every so often need to update ourselves on topics we though we’d just read about.

Today I’m going to give updates on three of my previous posts starting with a quick update on the outbreak of Mumps at Temple University which I mentioned in my post of the 23rd of March of this year about Vaccines and childhood diseases. Well cases of the Mumps have now spread to other Universities and High Schools in the Philadelphia area while the total number of cases has risen to over 1,000.

However the news is not all bad because the rapid spread of the disease has spurred many young people to get vaccinated, Temple in fact planned to provide 1800 vaccine injections for free but after three days 4819 shots in fact had been administered. At the same time Rockland County in the State of New York is now prohibiting unvaccinated children from entering schools of even public places. Which may be a bit unfair, after all they’re not at fault, it’s their stupid parents who refused to get them vaccinated. Finally it appears as if social media will even begin to take steps against the blatant falsehoods being spread by the anti-vaccination conspiracists.

Temple Students waiting in Line to Get Vaccinated (Credit: Fox 29)

It seems as if humanity’s long held fear of disease is still strong enough to force society to enact common sense solutions. It’s just a shame that thousands of innocent children have to get sick before anyone is willing to do the right thing.

 

My second update deals concerns research related to developments I talked about in my post of 23 February 2019. In that post I discussed an effort at the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University’s Department of Engineering to use the Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool known as Deep Learning to give a robotic arm an awareness of its own capabilities, to give it a basic self-awareness.

Well the engineers at Columbia aren’t alone in their efforts because their Colleagues at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering are working on a similar project with a robotic leg. Now the group at Columbia first allowed their robotic arm to use trial and error to learn about itself before they deformed it and forced it to adjust to its new capabilities.

Robot Leg Developed at USC (Credit: Matthew Lin)

The group at USC however have developed a bio-inspired AI algorithm that enabled their leg to not only learn how to walk in about five minutes, but also how to right itself after being ‘tripped’, in much the same way that living creatures do. Both robotic limbs learn about their own capabilities by performing random motions, ‘motor babbling’ as it is known. In time the motions of both limbs became more coordinated, more purposeful, exactly like the motions that a baby makes as it is learns what it can do. This is important because one of the current problems with robots is that their movements must be entirely and precisely programmed. AI techniques that allow robots to learn how to move, even in unforeseen circumstances, will greatly increase the number of jobs they can accomplish.

The engineers at USC, led by doctorial candidate Ali Marjaninejad, hope to use their learning leg for more than just robots however. One of their goals is to apply their learning leg as an assistive technology for human prosthetics. According to co-author Valero-Cuevas, “Exoskeletons or assistive devices will need to naturally interpret your movements to accommodate what you need.” Sounds like just the thing the robot leg is built for!

Doctors Ali Marjaninejad and Valero Cuevas check out their Robotic Leg (Credit: Matthew Lin)

As my final update is to my post of 25 August of 2018 and concerns a somewhat larger subject, indeed there could hardly be a larger subject than whether or not there was anything before the Big Bang. In my earlier post I discussed the research of Roger Penrose of the Mathematical Institute in Oxford and V.G. Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia who described how it might be possible to observe echoes of the universe before the big bang in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), fossil remains of a bygone era if you will.

The CMB as measured by COBE (L), WMAP (C) and Planck (R) Satellites. The increased Precision allows new theories to be tested. (Credit: Le Figaro)

Now Xingang Chen, Abraham Loeb and Zhong-Zhi Xianyu of Harvard University have published a new model which predicts that the oscillation signals of ‘primordial clocks’ could have survived through the big bang itself. Like the model of Penrose and Yerevan the researchers at Harvard base their concept on a cyclic universe, that is a universe where the present expansion comes to a halt, followed by a contraction leading to a big crunch. In this scenario the big bang becomes more of a big bounce and the whole cycle repeats itself endlessly.

The Cyclic Universe Model (Credit: Researchgate.net)

The two models share much in common, particularly the conclusion that the fossil traces of time before the big bang will be imprinted onto the CMB and should be observable with the next generation of space telescopes and enhanced ground instruments. Perhaps within the next decade or so we may have our first glimpse of what our universe was like before the big bang.

Book Review: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for science fiction book of the year in 2016, ‘Children of Time’ is the first science fiction novel of fantasy author Adrian Tchaikovsky. Receiving an award like the Clarke first time out is quite an achievement so hopefully we’ll be reading a lot more from Mr. Tchaikovsky.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of ‘Children of Time’ (Credit: Adria’s News)

‘Children of Time’ begins at least a few hundred years from now. The exact time frame of the novel is never given but humanity has colonized most of the solar system and is starting to Terraform planets around nearby stars so its not in the near future. There is a heated debate however over just how to Terraform these new Earths. There are those who simply believe that Earth’s biosystem, human dominated of course, should be transferred to these new worlds. Others however, feel that these planets should be seeded with life but be allowed to evolve on their own.

Cover of ‘Children of Time’ (Credit: Amazon.com)

Doctor Avrana Kern belongs to the latter group of experimentalists; in fact she is the leader of one such project. The Green World, that’s all it’s ever called in ‘Children of Time’, around which her starship orbits now has a functioning ecology and is ready to receive a collection of primates, ‘monkeys’ who will evolve into the planet’s intelligent masters, or so Kern intends.

Kern has even cooked up a special ‘nanovirus’ that will speed up the evolution of the monkeys! This nanovirus (and aren’t all viruses kind of nano?) is the biggest ‘suspend your belief’ concept in ‘Children of Time’. Designed to work only on primates, not other vertebrates it quickly becomes a ‘deus ex machina’ to solve any plot problems Tchaikovsky encounters in the novel.

‘Deus ex Machina’ or ‘God from a Machine’ has been used to solve plot problems since the days of ancient Greece! (Credit: Writing.stackexchange.com)

Anyway, a mutiny on the starship by the conservatives leads to both the shipment of monkeys and even the ship itself being destroyed. To make matters worse a general war has broken out back on Earth obliterating civilization and leaving the Green World to evolve as it will.

At this point ‘Children of Time’ really breaks into two novels, and at 600 pages it is long enough for two complete novels. One story line involves the evolution of a race of intelligent spiders on the Green World, remember I said the nanovirus doesn’t work on vertebrates other than primates, it works quite well on arthropods however, especially spiders.

What is it about Spiders that People find so frightening? (Credit: Science Explorer)

The second storyline involves a group of the last human survivors from Earth. The planet is now so completed poisoned that the survivors’ only hope is a huge space ark, a sleeper ship with a cargo of thousands of humans in hibernation. The plan is to travel to one of the Terraformed worlds and try to rebuild civilization. Guess which world they’re heading for?

The space ark is involved in several mutinies, a maniac commander and has people popping in and out of hibernation more often than in any story I’ve ever seen. By the end of their several hundred year long journey the ark is barely in working shape, humanity’s only remaining hope is the Green World.

Hibernation is a common plot device in Science Fiction Stories (Credit: Newsnation.in)

The two storylines collide at this point and I’m sure you can guess what the climax consists of. That is the weakest part ‘Children of Time’, after reading one third on the novel you pretty much know how it’s going to end, at least in general terms. Another thing is that nanovirus, for me at least it was just a little too good to be true. It becomes a bit too integral to the development of spider civilization. Finally, after all of the problems that the ark ship encounters during its voyage you can hardly believe it’s working at all by the time it reaches the Green World. Space is a very hostile environment remember!

Still, ‘Children of Time’ was a very interesting read, it managed to keep my attention quite well through its entire 600 pages. I’ll be looking forward to seeing what other science fiction novels Mr. Tchaikovsky comes up with in the future.