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Cave Paintings discovered in Indonesia may be earliest known use of Art to illustrate a story.

Our desire for, and our ability to produce art is one of the characteristics that separates human beings from the other animals on this world. In fact many anthropologists and psychologists would assert that that the beginning of art history is actually the beginning of human history. After all art stems directly from the human imagination, which is perhaps the thing that most makes us human.

Among the most recognizable of human creations art has a way of reaching deep into our soul. (Credit: Quora.com)

The study of early art is therefore a critical part of the study of early humanity. Examples of Stone Age art are as rare as other Stone Age artifacts however so scientists greet each new discovery as if they had unearthed a gold mine, which to them it is.

Not all Stone Age art is cave paintings. Many carvings, such as this Stone Age Venus, have also been discovered. (Credit: Britannica.com)

One of the best known forms of early art is cave painting, drawings or engravings that are found on the walls and ceilings of caves. Examples of cave art were first discovered in France in the 1940s and soon hundreds of other such decorated caves were being found throughout the world. The artwork represented in these caves varies greatly but three main themes seem to dominate, drawings of the animals that early humans lived with, drawings of humans themselves and enigmatically, outlines of human hands. These were made by the artist placing their hand on the cave wall and blowing paint, probably through a tube of some sort, onto the hand leaving an outline of the hand on the cave wall.

A few of the Cave Paintings discovered in a cave at Lascaux France. (Credit: NoiseBreak)
Are these outlines of human hands our first attempts at making our mark on the world, of leaving a legacy? (Credit: Massive Science)

Determining the age of cave paintings can be enormously difficult however and so the question of which cave paintings are oldest, and therefore where cave painting originated, can generate a lot of controversy. Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia all have examples of cave art that have been dated to more than 40,000 years ago. Perhaps rather than competing to see in which area of the world humans first began to create art we should simply marvel at how long ago it was and at the skill that even those early artists showed.

Now a series of pictograms from a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi just to the east of Borneo have been discovered that may represent the oldest known attempt to tell a story with art. The images painted are familiar in some ways, figures of animals that can be identified as local species along with clearly human figures. Looking at the first image below the large image is that of species of small buffalo known as an Anoa that inhabits the island. The second image shows a local species of swine called the Sulawesi Warty Pig.

Image of an Anoa from a cave on the island of Sulawesi. (Credit: BBC)
Image of a Sulawesi Warty Pig from the same cave. (Credit: BBC)

Both animals are accompanied by human-like figures arranged in a manner that suggests a hunt. That suggestion is further strengthen by the fact that some of the humans are carrying items that could be spears or rope. If that is the case then the cave art in Sulawesi may be the earliest attempt that we know of to use art in order to illustrate a story.

However there are also several other figures that have really piqued the interest of archaeologists. These small figures appear to combine human and animal characteristics. The image below illustrates this with human-like creatures that also seem to possess a tail or snout. Such human animal hybrids, technically known as therianthropes are very common in later mythology, hey we still talk about werewolves and mermaids. To have evidence of such supernatural beings from so long ago is astounding however.

One of the strange, half human, half animal figures found in the Sulawesi Cave. (Credit: Phys.org)

As to the age of the paintings in the Sulawesi cave the archaeologists were able to conclude that some of the images date to as long ago as 43,900 years. They did this by radioactive measurements of the calcite deposits that have built up on top of the images. Since the calcite is on top it must have formed after the images were made, measuring the ratios of Uranium to Thorium in the calcite then tells you old it is and the images beneath can only be older.

The cave where these new paintings were discovered is just the latest of 242 similar caves with artwork found in them on just the island of Sulawesi. How many more caves remain to be discovered only time will tell. Cave art is teaching us a great deal about the growth of the early human imagination, the thing that truly sets us apart from the other animals.

NSA releases the first results from the Parker Solar Probe.

Without our Sun life here on Earth would be impossible, we all know that. The Sun’s light not only keeps our planet warm but through the process of photosynthesis generates the food we need to survive. Recognizing this importance for centuries now scientists have examined the Sun with every instrument in their possession. However the very energy that the Sun produces can make it difficult to study. After all, if you get too close you could suffer the same fate as Icarus.

Right now our Sun is going through Solar minimum in its 11 year sunspot cycle. We have had 271 days with NO observable sunspots so far this year. (Credit: Spaceweather.com)

NASA’s Parker Solar probe is the space agency’s latest attempt to get up close and personal with our parent star. Launched back on August 12th of 2018, see my posts of 7 June 2017, 5 September 2018 and 3 November 2018, Parker is designed with a special ‘heat shield’ to protect its delicate instruments from being destroyed by the Sun’s heat. Nevertheless even Parker cannot remain too near the Sun for too long. Instead the probe has been placed in a highly elliptical orbit that takes it in as close as 24 million kilometers to the Sun before sending it back out to 100 million kilometers, a distance that will allow the that heat shield a chance to cool off.

The Parker Solar probe nearly completion. The heat reflector / shield at the top protects the delicate instruments beneath from the Sun’s intense radiation. (Credit: Axios.com)
The planned orbital plot for the Parker Solar Probe is the most complex set of maneuvers ever attempted for a spacecraft. (Credit: Sky and Telescope)

At its closest approach Parker actually flies within the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona, that glow around the Sun that can only be seen during a total eclipse. The question of why the corona is so hot, over a million degrees Kelvin, while the Sun’s surface is relatively cool, about 6,000 Kelvin, is one of the mysteries that Parker was built to study.

A picture I took of the solar eclipse back in August of 2017. At totality the Sun’s corona becomes visible. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

Learning more about the how the Sun generates the Solar wind, the steam of high-energy particles that among other thing causes auroras here on Earth, is another of the Parker Probe’s main missions. That particular mission is only appropriate since the spacecraft is named for Eugene Parker; the astrophysicist who back in the late 1950s first predicted the existence of the Solar wind. In fact Parker is the first NASA spacecraft to be named for a living scientist, a measure of the respect with which Eugene Parker is held in the space community.

Eugene Parker describing the Solar wind that he predicted. (Credit: CNN.com)

So far the Parker Solar probe has completed three of its planned 24 close passes and now NASA has released the first data dump of measurements taken by the probe. In a series of papers presented at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union on December 11th NASA scientists revealed new discoveries about how the Sun generates the Solar wind along with how the magnetic fields within the corona switch polarities on a period ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes.

The papers also detail how the density of dust particles in the atmosphere actually goes down as you get closer to the Sun. This phenomenon is probably due to the pressure of the light and sub-atomic particles being ejected by the Sun and of which the Solar wind is formed. During its most recent close approach back in November Parker was actually able to observe the effect of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) on the Solar wind revealing how a CME acts as a ‘snowplow’ pushing the wind ahead of it with increased energy.

A Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). (Credit: Flickr)

And the Parker probe’s mission is only beginning; NASA is planning on another 21 close approaches to the Sun. In fact just next month Parker is scheduled to use a gravity assist from the planet Venus which will send it on an orbit that takes it even closer to the Sun. Eventually the space probe is expected to come within a mere 6.16 million kilometers of the Sun and to reach speeds of 690,000 kilometers per hour, a wild ride indeed.

The Parker Solar probe’s mission is scheduled to last through 2025, who knows what secrets it will learn in that time about the star that is the very center of our Solar system.

A Puppy with a tail growing out of its forehead and a Deer with three antlers are two recent examples in the science of Teratology, the ‘Study of Monsters’.

Living creatures are the most complex structures known to science so its not surprising that mistakes can be made in their construction. Yes, those mistakes can certainly be tragic when you think about those children who are born with birth defects, but still it’s not surprising. The study of creatures who are born with a radical difference between them and other members of their species is formally known as Teratology which literally means ‘the study of monsters’. I suppose that says something about the social attitudes of even well educated scientists back about two hundred years ago.

Something as simple as a colour mutation is still considered a subject in the science of Teratology. (Credit: Isn’t That Interesting)

Back then teratology was one of the ways biologists could learn something about the way organisms grow. Sometimes you can learn more about a system from the way it breaks than you can from when it is working perfectly. For example, about a hundred years ago geneticists began raising fruit flies, drosophila melanogaster, as a way of studying inheritance. Fruit flies are easy to raise, have very short generations and importantly only four chromosomes so they are perfect for genetic studies.

Some of the reasons geneticists use fruit flies, Drosophila species, as subjects to study. (Credit: SlideServe)

The researchers noticed that once in a great while a fly would be hatched with a superfluous leg where one or both of its antennas should be. This happens because the antennas of insects are in fact modified legs! Mutations such as this are known as atavisms from the Latin for ancestor. In other words some defect has caused a body part to develop as it would have developed in an ancestral species rather than the way it should in the species today.

A common mutation in fruit flies is the replacement of an antenna with a leg. This is a form of Atavism. (Credit: Slideplayer.com)

The same phenomenon has been observed in horses whose hooves are just the middle finger of the original mammalian five digits. Sometimes however a horse is born with either digit two or four, or both showing. This is evidence that long ago the ancestors of horses had more toes than now, all the way back to the five digits of the first land dwelling vertebrates.

Image of a Horse with an extra hoof (left front) caused by an ancestral digit reappearing. (Credit: The Perfect Hoof)

Atavisms are one form of malformation, others include missing parts, a condition that can often be lethal, extra parts, such as a sixth finger, as well as parts in the wrong places. An example of that final category of malformations happened to make the news recently, Narwhal the puppy with a tail growing out of its forehead.

I don’t care if he does have a tail growing out of his forehead, that’s a cute puppy!!! (Credit: CNN)

Narwhal was found abandoned in Missouri and taken to Mac’s Mission, a non-profit animal shelter that specializes in special needs animals. When found Narwhal was an estimated 10 weeks old and is perfectly healthy except for that extra tail. He does have a normal tail where it’s supposed to be by the way. The extra tail is not causing Narwhal any pain or discomfort nor does he appear to have any control over it, it simply flops from side to side as Narwhal plays.

X-ray of Narwhal’s head showing no bones connecting his extra tail to his skull. (Credit: Irish Times)

Presently Narwhal is not eligible for adoption as the staff at Mac’s Mission would like to let him get a little older and make certain that his extra tail is not going to be a problem in any way. Narwhal has become an Internet sensation however with over 10,000 likes. A popularity that the staff at Mac’s Mission hope will bring attention to the important work that they are doing.

Then, just a day after the first news items about Narwhal was published another example of an animal with extra parts was discovered. In a forest on Michigan’s upper peninsula a hunter turned wildlife photographer named Steve Lindberg, who also happens to be a former state representative, discovered a three antlered deer. Looking at the image below you can see that the animal has a normal, five pointed antler on the left side of his head but two smaller antlers on the right side of his head.

Deer with three antlers spotted on Michigan’s upper peninsula. (Credit: Detroit Free Press)

Mr. Lindberg was able to observe the ‘One in a Million’ deer for several hours and the animal appeared to not be suffering in any way from its extra antler. Unlike Narwhal, who has been thoroughly examined by a vet, scientists have only Mr. Lindberg’s images with which to study the deer. Based on those photos naturalists cannot be certain whether the malformation is caused by a normal antler that split in two, each half continuing to grow, or is the third antler a true mutation.

If the extra antler is due to a mutation, Narwhal’s extra tail almost certainly is, then there is a possibility that their offspring could inherit their extra body part. That means that a few years from now more three horned deer might be seen on Michigan’s upper peninsula.

As for Narwhal, exotic pets are very popular right now and a dog with an extra tail in its forehead is certainly exotic. It’s actually possible that Narwhal could father an entirely new breed of dog, an example of what Darwin called ‘Artificial Selection’ and discussed at length in ‘The Origin of Species’.

In the long run of course evolution depends on the birth of individuals who differ in some way from all of their ancestors. Mutations are the raw material that natural selection uses to create new species. They don’t give superpowers nor are they anything to be afraid of. They are just a part of the way life works.

This is not the way mutations actually work. (Credit: Nerdist)

When, where and how did humans first domesticate the wolf and turn them into dogs? Newly discovered remains from Siberia may help to answer those questions.

We’ve all heard stories about how the frozen remains of Wholly Mammoths are sometimes found in near perfect condition in the cold artic tundra of Siberia. Well its not just Mammoths that have been discovered, reindeer, bears even artic hares and foxes are occasionally found there.

37,000 Year Old baby Mammoth found in the Siberian tundra. (Credit: Telegraph)

Now a new and potentially very important find has been made along the Indigirka River, northeast of Yakutsk, considered the world’s coldest city. The find made by Doctor Sergey Fedorov of the Institute of Applied Ecology at Russia’s North-Eastern Federal University is that of the frozen corpse of a puppy and the biggest new may be that so far scientists can’t decide whether it’s a dog or a wolf. The remains have been given the name Dogor which in the local Yakut language means ‘friend’ but the English pun of ‘Dog or ?’ was intentional.

Dogor the 18,000 year old puppy found frozen in Siberia. (Credit: The New York Times)
Dogor’s preservation is so good that even his teeth are in perfect condition. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

From an initial examination Dogor was a male and appears to have been about two months old when he died. When samples of Dogor were radiocarbon dated they were found to be 18,000 years old but after DNA sequencing was performed at Sweden’s Centre for Palaeogenetics the scientists were unable to decide whether Dogor was a dog or a wolf. That is despite the centre having Europe’s largest bank of DNA samples of canines from around the world to use as comparisons.

Of course the most exciting result would be if Dogor turned out to be neither a wolf nor a dog but a transition between them. We all know that wolves were the first animals to be domesticated by humans, becoming dogs in the process, and if Dogor is an example of that transition then he may be able to tell us quite a bit about how humans first came to domesticate wild animals.

Which begs the question, what do we know about when, where and how humans turned wolves into dogs?

Dogs have been our companions for so long we’ve forgotten where, when and how we first brought them into our lives. (Credit: Thinglink)

I remember fifty or more years ago the leading theory for wolf-dog domestication was that about 20,000 years ago, probably somewhere around the Ural Mountains in Russian, a band of hunter gatherers killed some adult wolves and then came upon the wolves’ now orphaned pups. Rather than killing the pups the humans decided to make pets of them and when the pups grew up the humans practiced selective breeding, that is only allowing those pups we liked to breed. After several generations the wolves would have become tame, the first step in becoming a dog.

European cave painting of a man with a dog. Obviously we’ve been together a long time. (Credit: Kamloops this Week)

The problem with that scenario is that wolves are wild animals and even if raised from pups when they grow up they will be much too difficult to handle. This same thing is true of chimpanzees; people often buy baby chimps as pets only to have to get rid of them when they grow up because adult chimpanzees are just too big and strong and wild to be a good pet!

Making a pet of a baby wild animal may seem like a good idea but when they grow up it definitely isn’t. (Credit: The Dodo)

So how did wolves ever become tame enough so that humans would ever even consider taking them in as pets? The current thinking goes something like this. Twenty thousand years ago or so, as groups of hunter gatherers feasted on their kills and other foods they would throw their waste onto nearby garbage piles, paleoarcheologists have found the remains of some of these garbage dumps by the way. Those garbage piles attracted scavengers, wolves among them and those wolves who were the least afraid of humans got the most of the leftover food scraps.

In time some wolves might even begin to follow the humans as they moved from one campsite to another, hunter gatherers are nomadic after all. Over several generations the wolves would become more dependent on humans, and the humans would become used to having the wolves around, perhaps even using the wolves as proto-watchdogs. How long this process may have taken is unknown but there is evidence that it actually may not have taken very long.

That evidence comes from an experiment that began in 1959 in the old Soviet Union. In Russia the breeding of animals for their fur is a big industry and zoologist Dmitry Belyayev thought that he could use a farm for raising foxes as a place to study the process of domestication by selective breeding.

Dmitry Belyayev with some of his domesticated foxes. (Credit: BBC)

Doctor Belyayev proceeded by separating the foxes on the farm into three classes. Those foxes that either fled from humans or behaved aggressively were placed in Class III while those in Class II neither avoided nor encouraged human contact. Class I was reserved for those foxes that showed signs of friendliness towards their handlers. The animals in Class I were then only allowed to breed with other Class I animals.

By the sixth generation Belyayev was forced to create another category, Class I Elite for those animals that actively sought human contact. What’s more the ways in which the Class Ie animals tried to attract their handlers was remarkable similar to a dog’s behavior, tail wagging, whining and licking hands and faces.

There were also actual changes in the fox’s physical morphology, their snouts became shorter and rounder, their skulls became wider. Even their ears changed, becoming floppy like a dog’s instead of pointing stiffly upward like a wild fox’s, and a wolf’s.

As Belyayev’s foxes became tame they also began to take on the physical characteristics of dogs, including floppy ears. (Credit: Noellembrooks.com)

Doctor Belyayev’s experiment is still continuing although it is now being conducted by Doctor Lyudmilia Trut of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk. Doctor Trut was a graduate student of Doctor Belyayev and the two worked together for many years.

Thanks to the work of researchers like Doctors Belyayev and Trut along with the discoveries of Doctor Fedorov and the scientists at Sweden’s Centre for Palaeogenetics we are learning a lot more about where, when and how the dog first became man’s best friend.

Movie Review: Ford versus Ferrari

Let’s face it; good movies about engineering are few and far between. Hollywood seems to be convinced that any movie that doesn’t have fights or romance can’t succeed while solving problems with logic and technical skill is just so boring.

That’s why I’m so pleased that this year we have two, ‘The Current War’ earlier this year, see my post of the 30th of October, and now ‘Ford versus Ferrari’.  Like most stories that are based on history ‘Ford versus Ferrari’ needs a little background information at the start.

Poster for ‘Ford versus Ferrari’ from 20th Century Fox Pictures. (Credit: Galleria.com.mt)

At the dawn of the 1960s Ford Motor Corporation was running a distant second to its huge rival General Motors in car manufacturing. Ford’s chairman, Henry Ford the second, the grandson of it’s famous founder was looking for some way to get his company out of the doldrums it was in, enter Lee Iacocca, played by Jon Bernthal.

The Real Lee Iacocca with his brainchild, the Mustang. (Credit: Fortune.com)

Iacocca recognized that the baby boomers were growing up, with driver’s licenses and money in their pockets and they were looking for something sexy to drive. Historically Iacocca’s biggest achievement was his design of the Mustang, which was definitely the car boomers wanted to drive. I’ve owned five of them!

Another idea that Iacocca had to make Ford cars seem sexy was for the company to join the international racing circuit by buying the small Racing car company Ferrari, famous for it’s victories at the 24 hours at Le Mans. Enzo Ferrari, owner of Ferrari motors, turned down Ford’s offer however. More than that, Ferrari insulted both Ford cars and Henry Ford II himself. Henry Ford now wanted revenge and he had the money to buy it, enter Carroll Shelby.

Shelby, played by Matt Damon is the center of ‘Ford versus Ferrari’, an engineer, auto designer and racecar driver who has retired from driving for health reasons. To do the actual driving Shelby hires Ken Miles, played by Christian Bale.

Matt Damon (l) plays Carroll Shelby while Christian Bale (r) plays Ken Miles. (Credit: Rolling Stone)

Together Shelby and Miles take on Ferrari, the bureaucrats at Ford and occasionally each other in their effort to build the GT40 MkII. Their chief opponent during much of the movie is not Ferrari but rather Ford Executive Vice President Leo Beebe who just sees Miles as an unreliable, non-team player.

A Ford GT40 Mk II. (Credit: Robb Report)

It should be noted that the families of both Leo Beebe and Henry Ford II have criticized the portrayal of their relatives and refused to cooperate with the filming of ‘Ford versus Ferrari’ as did Ford Motor Corporation itself. That’s one of the problems with Hollywood in general. Sometimes, in an effort to increase the dramatic tension in a story real people can become nothing more than cardboard villains for the ‘good guys’ to fight.

As they develop the GT40 MkII, the Ford team participates in several races including the Daytona 500 but the climax of the movie is the 24hrs at Le Mans in 1966. The racing sequences in ‘Ford versus Ferrari’ are exceptionally well done giving the movie a degree of excitement rare in historic films where the outcome is an established fact.

Racing scene from ‘Ford versus Ferrari’. (Credit: 20th Century Fox)

As to the performances, all of the actors do a good job, Caitriona Balfe as Ken Miles’ wife Mollie in particular deserves a special mention. Nevertheless it is Matt Damon and Christian Bale who dominate the movie, both of their performances receiving mention as having Oscar potential.

All in all the entire production of ‘Ford versus Ferrari’ is top notch with real sets and real cars and a minimum of CGI. One thing that I found remarkable as well as amusing was the enormous number of classic early 60s cars they managed to find just to use in the background of various scenes.

One of the best parts of ‘Ford versus Ferrari’ was the way they managed to evoke a real feeling of the 1960s. Caitriona Balfe as Mollie Miles. (Credit: Collider)

‘Ford versus Ferrari’, along with ‘The Current War’ is the sort of movie I’d like to see more of, a movie about people who succeed because they known what they’re doing rather than just because they can beat up somebody else. So if you get the chance go see ‘Ford versus Ferrari’, it’s a wild ride.

Lasers, what are they and how do they work?

Earlier this year I celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Moon landing of Apollo 11 by publishing a series of eight articles about the ‘Space Race’ of the 1960s. I enjoyed that task so much that I decided to write a few more posts about some of the other cool technologies that made the news during that decade; I hope you’ve been enjoying them.

In this post I’ll be talking about lasers, those intense beams of light that can not only cut through steel but also read the data off of DVDs, print our documents, are used to measure distances with extreme accuracy and are even used in medical surgery, especially eye surgery. Most people know that the word LASER is an acronym standing for ‘Light Amplification through Simulated Emission of Radiation’ and many have heard that the property that makes a laser beam different is something called ‘coherence’.

In the 1960s Lasers were devilish weapons the bad guys used to threaten James Bond! (Credit: Pinterest)

This coherence actually comes in two forms, spatial and temporal. In spatial coherence the photons, the particles of light are emitted in very precisely the same direction resulting in the very narrow beam that lasers are best known for. Temporal coherence means that those photons all have very precisely the same frequency. It also allows laser pulses to be very accurately timed, On and Off along with the amount of time a pulse lasts.

The property that makes a laser beam different from ordinary light is called Coherence. (Credit: Sciencewise.info)

The phenomenon that produces Laser light is a purely quantum mechanical effect that was first recognized by Albert Einstein in 1917. Einstein was working on the problem of how an atom with its electrons in the minimum energy or ‘ground state’ can be excited into higher energy state by absorbing a photon of just the right energy. At the same time an atom that is in an excited state can also decay back into its ground state by emitting a photon with the exact same energy.

Einstein was calculating the probabilities of a Atom absorbing or emitting a photon when he discovered the possibility of Stimulated Emission. (Credit: Sciencewise.info)

As he calculated the probability per unit time of that decay process occurring Einstein also noticed that the probability increased a lot if another photon of just the right energy happened to be near the excited atom. The photon stimulated the decay of the atom and the emission of a second photon identical to the first!

For the next several decades simulated emission remained nothing more than an interesting possibility. It wasn’t until 1928 that Rudolf W. Ladenberg even confirmed its existence but the idea of a practical usage of the phenomenon seemed almost impossible. That would require a material that had the majority of its atoms in the excited state, at condition called a population inversion and which was thought to never occur in nature.

It wasn’t until 1951 that Joseph Weber suggested that a microwave cavity could be used to produce a population inversion, by confining the atoms and pumping in energy the atoms could be ‘supercharged’. A small microwave signal could then simulate all of the excited atoms to decay greatly amplifying that small initial signal. The device was first build two years later and called a Maser for Microwave Amplification through Simulated Emission of Radiation. Masers are still used today by radio astronomers to amplify the extremely weak signals they study.

Charles Townes and the first MASER, a radio version of a laser that was actually invented first! (Credit: IEEE Spectrum)

With the Maser showing how it could be done the hunt was on for a material that could create a population inversion at optical wavelengths. As often happens nowadays there were several teams of researchers who came close, Bell Labs and Columbia University among others. It was Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories who produced the first laser by employing a synthetic ruby crystal pumped by a flashlamp to produce a pulse of red laser light at a wavelength of 694 nanometers.

Theodore Maiman holding the parts of the first Laser. (Credit: SciHi Blog)

It wasn’t long before continuous lasers were also developed using helium or neon as the lasing material. Then in 1970 Zhores Alferov in the USSR along with Izuo Hayashi and Morton Panish at Bell Labs demonstrated that semiconductor material could also be employed as a lasing material. Before long lasers were being manufactured cheaply and in mass quantities.

The workings of a semiconductor laser. (Credit: Google Sites)

Today lasers are everywhere; they are in the checkout scanners at supermarkets, our DVD and CD players and laser printers and if you get your TV signal on optical fiber it’s a laser that transmits the signal going through the fiber. Research into new types of lasers is ongoing and laser manufacturing is a big industry. The non-semiconductor laser industry is today valued at more than $2 billion dollars while semiconductor lasers total more than $3 billion.

Today Lasers are so cheap you can buy one for just a few bucks! (Credit: Thorlabs)

Lasers seemed almost magical back in the 1960s, a symbol of how far our science and technology had come in its control of nature. Today we pretty much take them for granted. That’s progress I suppose.

Are scientists on the verge of putting human beings into Suspended Animation?

Suspended Animation is defined as is an extreme slowing, or even stopping of the physiological processes of a living creature for a period of time and then fully resuscitating that creature back to its normal life. During suspended animation the heartbeat, breathing, even the metabolic processes of individual cells are slowed if not halted entirely.

Suspended Animation as imagined in Science Fiction. (Credit: Outer Places)

Also commonly known as hibernation, in nature suspended animation is used by many creatures to ‘sleep’ their way through periods of scarce resources. The classic example is of course that of bears hibernating through the winter when there is little food for them to eat but there are also creatures who suspend their life processes during times of drought or extreme heat.

Female Bears even give birth to their cubs while hibernating. (Credit: Country Life)

In science fiction suspended animation has played a key role in many SF stories, novels and movies. In those stories suspended animation allows human beings to undertake long space missions without expending the resources, food, water and air that such long voyages would otherwise require. Some of the most famous SF stories employ suspended animation for this purpose including ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, ‘Alien’, the ‘Space Seed’ episode of the original Star Trek, I could go on and on.

Here’s the reason why space scientists are interested in Suspended Animation. (Credit: Animalsake)
In the ‘Space Seed’ episode of ‘Star Trek’ Khan and his companions escaped the 20th Century by using Suspended Animation. (Credit: Paramount)

And make no mistake NASA is keenly interested in the possibilities that suspended animation could bring to their goal of exploring space. Problem is however, unlike bears human beings don’t hibernate, even when we sleep our metabolism hardly changes from its normal rate.

Medical doctors are also very interested in the possible uses of suspended animation in treating patients suffering from traumatic injuries. Surgery is very stressful and surgeons often need to hurry through an operation so that the patient won’t die on the operating table while they are trying to save them. The ability to place the patient into suspended animation would allow surgeons to just take their time and do a more through and careful job.

Surgeons often have to rush through operations if they are to have any chance of saving a patient’s life. Suspended Animation could give them more time in which to do a better job. (Credit Getty Images)

Based upon our knowledge of other mammals that do hibernate the key to suspended animation is hypothermia or a chilling of the body’s temperature. You see our brain cells begin to die after just five minutes without oxygen and even muscle cells will start to die after an hour. If the temperature of the cells can be reduced however their oxygen requirement is also reduced and they can survive much longer.

Cooling the body temperature is a key part of suspended animation because it greatly reduces the metabolic rate. (Credit: FutureTimeline.net)

There are plenty of examples people who have actually survived cardiac arrest for long periods of time because their bodies were kept cold. Unfortunately none of these occurrences happened under labouratory conditions so they provide only anecdotal information.

In order to obtain actual measurements of how suspended animation works scientists have been forced to do experiments with animals. A 2005 study was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh’s Safar Center for Resuscitation Research. In this series of experiments dogs were placed into suspended animation by draining the blood out of their systems and replacing it with a low temperature solution. The animals were clinically dead for a period of three hours but when the blood was returned to their circulatory systems and an electric shock employed to restart their hearts the dogs were revived, most without any evidence of brain damage.

A similar experiment was carried out the next year at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In this study pigs were used as the test animals. In the experiment the pigs were first anaesthetized and then given a severe injury comparable to one that a shooting or car crash victim might receive.

When half of the animal’s blood was lost it was replaced by a chilled saline solution and the pig’s body kept at a temperature of about 10ºC. While the animal was in suspended animation the injuries were repaired after which the lost blood was replaced and the pig brought back to life.

In the Boston experiment a success rate of 90% was achieved. What the researchers found most important was the way that suspended animation allowed them the time they needed to operate on the test animals.

Now for the first time this technique is being used on human beings, not chosen test subjects but the actual victims of car crashes or shootings. Emergency room surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore are attempting to employ suspended animation to prolong the life of car crash or shooting victims who have gone into cardiac arrest and whose chance of survival is only 5% due to the severity of their wounds.

Emergency room patients whose injuries are severe and who have gone into cardiac arrest generally have less than a 5% chance of surviving. (Credit: Wikipedia)

As in the earlier animal studies the victim’s blood is replaced with a chilled saline solution and the body’s temperature is brought down to around 10ºC. The surgeons then have two hours to repair the victim’s injuries before the blood is replaced, their body warmed up and the heart restarted.

The plan is for a trial of the technique with 10 people, the results will then be compared to those for 10 people who have been treated with standard emergency room procedures. The final comparison will then be published, hopefully early next year.

Now the purpose of this study is not to develop suspended animation as a means of enabling humans to explore the Solar System. As lead surgeon Samuel Tisherman wants everyone to know, “We’re not trying to send people off to Saturn. We’re just trying to buy ourselves more time to save lives.”

Nevertheless you can bet that NASA is paying attention to the study. If suspended animation works in the operating room there will be further experiments designed to increase the time that a human being can be kept in hibernation. Suspended animation would be a real game changer in human exploration of space, the question is, how long will it be before we are ready to employ it?

Space News for November 2019.

Some good news coming this month from space, successes with both manned and unmanned programs along with an interesting new concept for a future space probe. Let’s get started.

First up I’d like to talk about Japan’s Hayabusa 2 space probe that has been studying the asteroid Ryugu, see my posts of 6 January 2018, 30 June 2018, 20 April 2019 and 3 June 2019. Since arriving at the asteroid back in mid 2018 Hayabusa has photographed the asteroid, send down two landers to its surface and even fired a bullet and cannonball at it in order to blast holes that would reveal the asteroid’s internal material. Hayabusa then touched down briefly on Ryugu in order to collect some material from one of the blasted holes.

The asteroid Ryugu that was visited by Japan’s Hayabusa2 space probe. The arrow marks the spot at which Hayabusa fired its projectile. (Credit: Universe Today)
Artists impression of Hayabusa2 collecting samples of Ryugu from the crater its projectile made. (Credit: Universe Today)

Now Hayabusa has left Ryugu and is on its way back to Earth. In late 2020 the spacecraft will release a canister containing the samples collected from Ryugu that will hopefully enter the atmosphere and touch down in the outback of Australia. Once recovered the material from the asteroid will be studied to reveal some of the secrets of how our Solar System was born.

As for the Hayabusa 2 probe itself, well it will pass by our planet and make an escape maneuver that will send it back out into the Solar System where it may continue to send back data for years to come. Let’s all wish it well.

Another recent event was the successful completion of a pad abort test by Space X’s crewed version of their Dragon capsule. This test is designed to verify the capsule’s ability to quickly yank the astronauts away from the launch pad in the event of a potentially deadly problem with the booster rocket.

The Space X crew Dragon capsule undergoing its pad abort test. (Credit: CollectSpace)

You may recall that back in April a Dragon capsule spectacularly failed this very test, the solid fuel rockets intended to pull the capsule safely away instead triggering a massive fire. This failure led to months of investigation as to the cause of the ‘anomaly’ along with a major redesign of the capsule’s abort system.

The April failure of the crew Dragon in its pad abort test. (Credit: AmericaSpace)

That redesign must have done the trick because this time the abort test went off without any problems. That leaves Space X with only the in-flight abort test to pass before a manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS) can be scheduled, hopefully early next year. The competition between Space X and their rival, Boeing’s Starliner capsule is coming down to the wire, which will be the first commercial company to launch astronauts into space? I’ll let you know.

Boeing’s Starliner capsule undergoing its pad abort test. (Credit: NASA)

Meanwhile NASA is continuing its ongoing effort to design new space probes for the continued exploration of our Solar System. One place the planetary scientists are very anxious to study is Saturn’s moon Titan. Titan is the only moon in the Solar System to possess a thick atmosphere and although its surface is extremely cold it still has bodies of liquid, liquid methane that is.

In fact Titan has so many different terrains and environments that a single robotic lander of the kind that have been so successful on the Moon or Mars would only be able study one particular type of the environments of Titan. On the other hand sending multiple probes to do a comprehensive study would be far too expensive, so what can the space agency do? Be innovative!

Engineers from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program have teamed with both Stanford and Cornell Universities in an effort to develop a ‘shape shifting’ robot that can alter its configuration that will allow it to walk on land, or float on liquid methane or even fly through the air. The current design rolls along the ground like a drum but when required the upper half can separate itself and fly on internal propellers. See image below.

Breadboard model of a shape shifting robot space probe being evaluated by NASA (Credit: JPL-NASA)

Now the engineers do have one big advantage, Titan itself. You see the atmosphere on Titan is thicker than Earth’s even though the gravity on Titan is less than a third that on our planet. These two conditions will actually make flying easier on Titan.

On the other hand floating on a sea of oily liquid may be a little more difficult. Nevertheless the engineers are hard at work on the problem. The final design will be a modular concept, see image below, with each of its various sections being capable of independent action.

Artists impression of the completed shape shifting space probe. (Credit: JPL-NASA)

The current schedule calls for a Titan probe to be launched in 2026 with its arrival in 2034 so the engineers at NIAC still have some time to work on their designs. The concept of a shape-shifting robot is only one of the advanced ideas NASA is considering for the space probes of the future, each one more amazing than the last.

One last little item before I go. You should recall that back in January the New Horizons space craft, which had already made the first ever flyby of Pluto in July 2015, successfully made another flyby of the furthest ever object visited by a man made probe. See my posts of 3 January 2019 and 30 January 2019.

The Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69 visited by the New Horizons space probe. (Credit: NASA)

Officially known as 2014 MU69 NASA had given the Kuiper belt object the nickname of Ultima Thule, an ancient Latin name for a mythical far northern land. Now however 2014 MU69 has had that nickname taken away from it for reasons that have nothing to do with science or astronomy.

You see Ultima Thule is also the name that the Nazi gave to their fictitious homeland for the Aryan ‘Master Race’. Just to make things worse, even today there are racist, white supremacists who continue to use that name to support their hate filled rhetoric.

The new name chosen by NASA is Arrokoth, which means sky in the Native American Powhatan language. Arrokoth is certainly a good name, perfect for an object in our Solar System and if it had been the first name chosen for 2014 MU69 I would have applauded the choice. But Ultima Thule is also a good name, a name with an ancient, honourable history. To my mind this is another example of how a small group of horrible people have succeeded in perverting something wonderful into something dark and ugly.  

‘Soft Robots’ inspired by living creatures are becoming the new frontier in automation.

The image we all have of robots, provided courtesy of sci-fi movies of course, is that of a hard metallic body and limbs with a basically human shape. After all humans have been using metals for a long time and of course we’re quite familiar with how to use our own body shape and limbs in order to get things done. So it’s understandable that the industrial robots that have been developed over the last few decades would resemble metal and plastic versions of our own body parts.

Robby the Robot from ‘Forbidden Planet’. (Credit: IMDB)
The reality of Robots in our world today. (Credit: Technavio)

Other creatures have other ways of doing things however and quite often their way is better than ours. Robotic engineers have started to realize the advantages that these alternate ways of moving and manipulating can provide to their designs. At the same time they are also beginning to employ different materials in the construction of their robots. Together these new technologies are known as soft robots or biohybrid robots and they’re gaining a lot of attention as they begin to accomplish tasks that other robots found to be difficult or even impossible.

Swimming is one activity that we all realize that humans aren’t really designed for, so the idea of designed a swimming robot to resemble a fish makes a lot of sense. It’s not surprising then that researchers at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering are developing a robot based upon the anatomy of one of the ocean’s fastest and most efficient swimmers, they call it Tunabot.

Tunabot. (Credit: University of Virginia)

Led by Professor Hilary Bart-Smith Tunabot has been funded by the U. S. Navy with the goal to not only design and develop a robot that mimics the swimming behavior of a yellowfin tuna but to use that robot as a platform to better understand alternative forms of propulsion. Tunabot itself is an eyeless, tailfin only model some 25cm in length whose swimming prowess can be measured in a test tank at the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UVA. With its tail beating at the same rate as a yellowfin does in the wild Tunabot is capable of producing a propulsive force nearly equivalent to that of its natural counterpart.

Tunabot in action. (Credit: Tech Xplore)

The development of Tunabot is only the start of the research program however. “We don’t assume that biology has evolved the best solution.” Professor Bart-Smith says. “Our Ultimate goal is to surpass biology. How can we build something that looks like biology but swims faster than anything you see out there in the Ocean?”

Another team of researchers at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania are also developing a robotic fish as their test platform for a radical new technique that can both power and propel their robot, ‘artificial blood’. You see the robot, which is designed to resemble a lionfish, see image below and my post of the 18th of April 2019, uses a pressurized fluid to activate motors in its tail and pectoral fins that enable it to move through the water.

Sift Robot Lionfish is powered by artificial blood! (Credit: Cornell Chronicle)

Such hydraulic systems are quite common in robots but here its only half the story because the fluid is also an ionized electrolyte solution that stores the energy needed to power the robot. As the electrolyte flows around the robot it passes through electric cells that use the ions to produce a voltage that powers the pumps that keep the fluid pressurized! This whole integrated approach is very similar to how our blood does provide the energy that enables our muscles to move.

The internal working of the soft lionfish robot. (Credit: Cornell Chronicle)

At the present time the robot lionfish moves rather slowly but it can keep moving for 36 hours. The engineers, led by Cornell Professor Robert Shepard, are hard at work on increasing the energy density of the system that will increase the robots speed. One advantage of the technique is that since their battery is a fluid it can easily be fitted into any spare space in the design increasing the total amount of energy contained within the robot.

Even though this technology is in its infancy the integration of energy storage and hydraulic force into a single fluid offers a great deal of promise. Living creatures have evolved over billions of years to make multiple uses of their body parts and now it seems that engineers are learning to follow the same paradigm.

Another ocean dweller whose lifestyle is so different from ours that engineers are intrigued by the possibility of it teaching them new ways to manipulate objects is the octopus. These intelligent invertebrates are well known for both the strength and delicacy of their many tentacles, attributes that engineers would like to emulate.

Cecilia Laschi at the Sant’Anna School for Advanced studies in Pisa Italy has succeeded in constructing a robotic octopus’s tentacle capable of behaving in a very lifelike fashion, undulating, elongating, curling and stiffening as required. The tentacle’s movements are created by an array of springs and metal cables; some composed of shaped memory alloys that will return to a predetermined shape when heated.

Doctor Laschi’s robotic octopus arm in action. (Credit: IEEE)
Doctor Laschi with her completed octopus soft robot. (Credit: IEEE)

Laschi is currently developing a compete robot octopus and has already developed a propulsion system based on the octopus’s jet. “When I started with the octopus, people asked me what it was for,” Laschi says. “I don’t know, but I’m sure if it succeeds there could be many applications.” Soft robots in general are finding more and more applications as engineers look more and more to nature for inspiration for innovation designs.

With the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) astronomers and physicists hope to learn something about the nature of the mysterious Dark Energy.

If you ask any astronomer or physicist what is the biggest, the most critical question, the biggest mystery in science today they will immediately reply, “What is dark Energy?” You see our observations tell us that the Universe is expanding while our theories of Gravity tell us that the expansion should be slowing down. But instead what we see is that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Something, some pressure is pushing the Universe ever farther apart and that ‘Dark Energy’ actually accounts for some 80-85% of all the energy in the Universe.

After the Big Bang Gravity should have caused the expansion of the Universe to at least slow down but instead something is causing to accelerate! Dark Energy! (Credit: NASA Science Mission Directorate)

The idea that we know so little about 80-85% of the Universe is more than just a bit embarrassing because since Dark Energy is the dominate part of the Universe it will obviously have the dominant effect to the eventual fate of the Universe. To understand why that is so I’m going to take a step back and review the history of the ‘Big Bang Model’ of the Universe.

One hundred years ago astronomers thought that the Universe was pretty static, neither expanding nor contracting. Physicists however didn’t like that picture because without something acting to keep the galaxies apart the force of gravity should pull everything together into a ‘Big Crunch’. Everybody was relieved therefore when the astronomer Carl Hubble found that the galaxies were in fact moving away from each other, the Universe was expanding.

The Famous image of Andromeda taken by Carl Hubble that allowed him to measure the distance and proving Andromeda was another Galaxy. (Credit: Space and Astronomy News Daily)

This was the start of the Big Bang Model where billions of years ago an incredibly dense, hot Universe expanded rapidly, cooled and then formed the galaxies we see today. The question then became whether gravity was strong enough to eventually bring the expansion to a halt, or had the Universe reached ‘escape velocity’ and the expansion would go on forever. In the first case once the Universe stopped expanding gravity would begin to cause it to contract leading to a Big Crunch. This was a known as a closed Universe. The alternative was an open Universe that would fly apart forever.

The difference between an open and closed Universe id the first expands forever while the second ends in a Big Crunch. (Credit: Astronomy Today)

The measurements needed to determine which model was correct were very difficult to make, so difficult in fact that it wasn’t until the 1990s that everyone was shocked to discover that the Universe was actually expanding faster. Something was pushing it apart and for lack of a better name that something was called Dark Energy. So we then had the biggest problem in science, what is Dark Energy?

The first thing that scientists would like to learn about Dark Energy is whether or not it is even a constant force or does it’s strength change with time? You see when Einstein formulated the equation of Gravity in his theory of general relativity, see equation below; he realized that mathematically the equation could have a constant added to it. Einstein gave that constant the symbol λ, and he calculated that the effect of that constant would look a lot like the Dark Energy we now see.

Einstein’s full equation for gravity with the cosmological constant lambda. The left hand side is the geometry of the Universe while the right hand side is the energy of the Universe. (Credit: WordPress.com)

Now if Dark Energy is just this ‘cosmological constant’ as Einstein pictured it then the expansion of the Universe will continue forever. If the strength of Dark Energy varies however, maybe even reverses itself to an attraction, then the ultimate fate of the Universe is still unknown.

However the measurements needed to determine whether the strength of Dark Energy varies with time are far more difficult to make than the measurements that discovered it in the first place. Still, astronomers have learned quite a bit in the last 25 years and advances in technology have made their instruments vastly more precise and sophisticated. It is with this improved technology that the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument or DESI has been designed and constructed.

The setup of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). New detectors and computer controlled fiber optics have been installed on the Mayall Telescope making it the most sensitive instrument for studying Dark Energy. (Credit: Spiedigitallibrary)

Retrofitted into the Mayall telescope at Kit Peak observatory outside of Tucson Arizona the DESI detector consists of a bundle of 5000 fiber optic cables, each with its own computer controlled positioning mechanism. The fiber optic cables lead to an array of 5000 spectrographs so that the combined telescope / detector will allow astronomers to accurately measure the position, magnitude and redshift of 5000 galaxies at a time. 

The DESI instrument, black object upper right, installed on the Mayall telescope. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

First light for the DESI instrument came in September of 2019 and the ambitious five-year observation program is now well underway. Once completed the DESI will have obtained the position and redshift of 35 million galaxies allowing scientists to produce a 3D model of a large section of the Universe. This model will then provide the data needed to answer the question of whether the strength of Dark Energy has varied with time.

And there are other instruments that will soon be coming online that will compliment the observations of DESI. The 4MOST telescope at the European Southern Observatory is similar to DESI while the Euclid space telescope will also be observing galactic redshift versus distance from orbit.

The Euclid space telescope will also study the nature of Dark Energy. (Credit: Wikipedia)

 Now it is true that DESI will only tell physicists how Dark Energy changes with time nevertheless that information will be enough to enable them to eliminate many of the competing theories about its nature. So the theorists are anxiously awaiting the results of DESI and its companions, hoping that they give them direction in their effort to describe the entire Universe.

We’ve learned a great deal in the last 100 years about the structure and evolution of our Universe. I’ve little doubt that the next 100 years will bring just as many exciting discoveries.