Science – Page 38 – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

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.

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.

Space Race: The Gemini and Soyuz Programs. America takes the Lead.

This is the Fourth installment of a series of articles leading up to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and humanity’s first landing on the Moon. In these articles I will reminisce about some of the most important milestones on the journey that led to Apollo 11, some of the best known events in the Space Race.

In the third installment I discussed how despite initially lagging behind Soviet Union in rocket power the United States scored some very important early successes in the development of communications satellites such as the revolutionary Telstar satellite. I described how it was the United States’ superiority in electronics, especially in the use of solid-state transistors, which allowed the US to ‘do more with less’.

In this post I will return to my discussion of manned spaceflight and the first spacecraft to carry more than one person at a time. Of course it was the Russians who went first with their Voskhod spacecraft.

The Voskhod capsule, see image below, was simply a modification of the earlier Vostok single man spacecraft that had launched Yuri Gagarin as the first man into space. Now modifying any complex machine to do twice the job it was designed for it a risky business but Voskhod 1, launched on 12 October 1964, may very well have been the most dangerous manned mission in history. Not only did the capsule carry three men but because of the cabin’s space was so cramped the cosmonauts couldn’t even wear spacesuits!

The Voskhod 1 Spacecraft being prepared for launch (Credit: Roscosmos)

Launched on March 18th 1965, Voskhod 2 was hardly any safer. It may have only carried a crew of two but it also had to find room for an airlock, see image below, so that cosmonaut Alexi Leonov could become the first human being to perform an Extra-Vehicular Activity or EVA, often known as taking a spacewalk.

Voskhod 2 with its inflatable airlock extended and Cosmonaut preforming an EVA (Credit: Capcom Espace)

Alexi Leonov Performs the First Spacewalk outside the Voskhod 2 (Credit: Roscosmos)

Walking in space was to be the last time the Soviet Union would score a space first for the United States was about to begin its Gemini program. Although similar in concept to the Mercury capsule unlike Voskhod the Gemini spacecraft was a completely new design intended for more than simply carrying multiple passengers.

You see NASA was thinking ahead to the activities that astronauts would be required to conduct for its planned Moon mission. Three critical abilities had been identified as essential for the success of that undertaking:

1: The ability to survive a long duration spaceflight, 10 days at least.

2: The ability to perform EVAs and carry out useful work during them, after all you’re not going to go all the way to the Moon and then stay in your spaceship are you.

3: The ability to locate another spacecraft in orbit and then rendezvous and dock with it, NASA’s plan for the Moon mission involved using a separate Lunar Module for the actual landing while the main Apollo Command and Service Modules remained in Lunar orbit.

The entire Gemini program was planned with the intention of determining if those activities were even possible in the environment of space.

The first Gemini launch, Gemini 3 came on 23 March 1965, just five days after Russia’s Voskhod 2, and 10 Gemini missions were carried out over the next 20 months. Gemini 4’s co-pilot Ed White carried out the first American EVA while Buzz Aldren on Gemini 12 proved that astronauts could perform useful work while outside their ship.

Astronaut Ed White making first American space walk, 120 miles above the Pacific Ocean. (Credit: NASA)

The crew of Gemini 7 undertook the longest duration mission of the program, 14 days, a record that stood for the next five years. Meanwhile Gemini 6 succeeded in the first orbital rendezvous by using Gemini 7 as its target, see image below.

Gemini 7 as seen from Gemini 6 (Credit: NASA)

It was Neil Armstrong and Gene Scott in Gemini 8 who succeeded in the first rendezvous and docking of two spacecraft in orbit using an unmanned Agena booster as their target. See image below.

Gemini 8. The First Space Docking is only Moments away! (Credit: NASA)

By the completion of the Gemini program American astronauts had both accomplished and refined all of the essential activities they would need to complete a lunar mission. The men of NASA were ready, now they had only to wait for their spacecraft.

Meanwhile, as the US was carrying out the entire Gemini program the Russians launched no manned spacecraft. Their Chief Designer Sergei Korolev had pushed his basic Vostok-R7 design as far as it could go and so a totally new design that would become the Soyuz spacecraft was developed.

The first flight of Soyuz came on 23 April 1967 and ended in catastrophe as Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died during the spacecraft’s landing. Because of this disaster Soviet cosmonauts would not conduct a successful rendezvous and docking of two spacecraft until January of 1969, only 6 months before America would land on the Moon.

A failure of its Parachutes led to a deadly crash land of the Soyuz 1 spacecraft (Credit: Roscosmos)

Perhaps an even worse disaster for the Russians however may have been the death on 14 January 1966 of the chief designer himself. Sergei Korolev, whose health had never really recovered from 6 years labouring in a prison camp due to Stalin’s paranoia, had finally worked himself to death.

The Death of Sergei Korolev in 1967 had a major impact on the Soviet Space Program (credit: Roscosmos)

The Gemini program had given the United States a lead in the space race but only time would tell if the hardware for the Apollo program could be delivered in time and be capable of completing the mission.

Donald Trump and his 2020 (lack of a) Science Budget

The President’s requested budget for the US Federal government for the fiscal year 2020 has been released and, to put it mildly it’s a punch in the gut to the advancement of science in this country. The good news is that it is the US Congress who actually has the power to pass a budget and the President’s funding request is really just a suggestion. However the proposed budget does illustrate how appropriate funding for science, and the direct relation of science to our nation’s security and prosperity are being lost in the partisan bickering that has become what we call government.

Now the US government, instead of having a single department of science, splits the funding for scientific programs into several different departments. These include some of the government’s best known agencies such as NASA and the National Institute of Health (NIH) along the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Three Federal Agencies most involved in the Advancement of Science (Credit:, NASA, NSF, NIH)

Then there are other agencies which conduct scientific activities in addition to their other work such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In these agencies determining what work can be considered advancing science and what is regulatory or dealing with national defense can be tricky so I’ll examine the two groups separately.

Starting with NASA the chart below shows a breakdown of the proposed 2020 budget. Now I admit the chart has a lot in it and it’s difficult to really understand what going on but remember we are only concerned with the two columns 2019 (this year) and 2020 (the proposed budget) and we’ll look at one line item at a time. By the way the blue lines are major budget areas with the white lines beneath them efforts broken out from the major area above.

President Trump’s Proposed 2020 Budget for NASA (Credit: NASA)

Starting at the top the ‘Deep Space Exploration Systems’ is the Space Launch System (SLS) and other programs for human exploration beyond Earth orbit. Comparing the numbers for 2019, $5.05 billion and 2020, $5.021 Billion, you can see that about $29 million is going to be taken away from this effort. That’s a reduction of only 0.5% so it’s not too bad. Still considering all the delays and budget problems the SLS has had over the last few years adding yet one more difficulty can’t really be a good thing.

The Space Launch System has already been delayed several times by budget concerns. (Credit: Boeing)

Let’s drop down to the line called ‘LEO and Spaceflight Operations’. Now LEO stands for Low Earth Orbit and this line item includes manning and maintaining the International Space Station (ISS) along with getting astronauts back and forth to the ISS. We see that the proposed 2020 funding is $4.285 billion, a reduction of 9.2% from the 2019 funding of $4.639 Billion. That’s a substantial reduction and illustrates NASA’s growing desire to step back from its commitment to the ISS and turn over space efforts in LEO to commercial companies like Boeing, Space X along with others such as Bigelow aerospace.

Continuing down the next blue line we come to the Science line item which includes both interplanetary probes as well as those satellites that are studying the Earth from orbit. The cutbacks here are also very large, from $6.905 Billion in 2019 to only $6.303 Billion in 2020, a reduction of 9.1%. Once again the implication is that the Trump administration, insofar as it cares about space at all, cares only about manned spaceflight.

The Cassini Probe to Saturn is only one of the robotic missions that have taught us so much about our solar system (Credit: NASA)

The Upcoming Psyche Spaceprobe could be delayed or even canceled due to Trump’s Budget Cuts. (Credit: NASA / JPL)

Before moving on to the other departments in our government I’d just like to point out one small line item, STEM engagement. As many of you may know STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math and STEM engagement is NASA’s efforts to help promote STEM education in our schools. Obviously the Trump administration doesn’t approve of trying to encourage our young people to aspire to careers in STEM because the entire line item has been cut from the 2020 budget, a 100% reduction!

So now let’s move on to proposed budget for the National Institute of Heath, which is an agency with the Department of Health and Human Services. Now you’d think that with the current problems the US is having with such medical issues as opioid abuse and suicide along with traditional diseases like cancer and heart disease that the NIH would at the very least be receiving a small increase in budget. And let’s not forget that recent statistics have shown that life expectancy in the US is actually going down for the first time in over a hundred years. Obviously there’s a lot of work for our health care professionals to do right now but apparently the Trump Administration doesn’t feel that way. The 2020 proposed budget cuts spending on the NIH by 4.5 billion or 11%.

The National Science Foundation, which funds so much of the pure research carried out in this country also takes a major hit in the proposed budget. The proposed budget is $7.1 Billion in 2020, a decrease of $1 Billion or 12% from 2019. This cutback clearly illustrates the shortsighted ignorance of those to prefer ‘practical’, ‘useful’ science as opposed to basic research without recognizing that ‘practical’ science cannot even begin without the foundation provided by basic research.

Much of the Basic Science carried out in the USA is funded by the National Science Foundation (Credit: Illinois College)

I’ve saved the worst for last, because what the Trump administration has proposed for the Environmental Protection Agency is nothing less than a deliberate abandonment of any and all responsibility for how we treat our planet. The 2020 budget request of $6.1 billion represents fully a 31% cut from the EPA’s funding for 2019.

With all of the pollution we’ve dumping into the Environment only a madman would cut the budget for the EPA! (Credit: Kiwi Report)

This lack of concern for the health of the planet on which we live is very much is keeping with Trump’s attitude we can do whatever we want to the environment without suffering any consequences. The reality is however that every day we see more and more evidence that we are already suffering for our mismanagement of the Earth and the consequences are only going to increase in both magnitude and quantity if we don’t wake up and start behaving responsibly.

And that’s the real danger of the Trump administration’s proposed 2020 budget for science, because without science we won’t have the knowledge we need in order to know how to behave responsibly. After all science is just the Latin word for knowledge.

Trump however has throughout his life always chosen to exploit the ignorance and greed of those around him so the cutbacks in science make perfect sense, to him. For the rest of us however, an America without a commitment to science is an America that has lost its greatness.

Which is real, the Dangers of Vaccines or the Dangers of Measles and other childhood Diseases?

Nowadays you often hear people say something like, “I had measles and all those other childhood diseases when I was a kid. They don’t do any real harm and aren’t those vaccines even more dangerous. Besides, I just don’t trust those drug companies.”

Let’s take those assertions, because that’s what they are, assertions without any supporting evidence, one at a time. Measles, mumps and rubella, also known as German measles, are considered childhood diseases only because they are so infectious and widespread that nearly everyone is exposed and infected at a young age. Still, if you manage to avoid exposure as a child you can catch any of them as an adult. Right now here in Philadelphia there is an outbreak of mumps amongst the 18-21 year old students at Temple University.

When someone is infected with Measles it’s not too heard to spot (Credit: CBS News)

Mumps is also pretty easy to diagnose (Credit: West Chester County Department of Health)

As far as childhood diseases causing no real harm, well I can tell you personally that’s a load of bleep. I am practically deaf in my right ear thanks to the mumps I had as a child but compared to many people I was actually lucky. You see statistically about 1 out of every 500 people who contract measles will die due to complications, that’s about 73,000 people worldwide every year. Mumps are less deadly; only one person in 10,000 will die, but still is it worth running the risk if you don’t have to?

That’s because there is absolutely no reason to take the risk. The MMR vaccine (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) is so effective, greater than 95%, that if an entire population gets vaccinated the three diseases simply cannot take hold and spread. Another few statistics will illustrate how true that is. Before the first measles vaccine vaccine was introduced in 1963 the number of US citizens who contacted the disease each year was in the hundreds of thousands! That means more then a thousand dying each year! After the MMR vaccine was introduced that number quickly dropped to only 66 reported cases in 2005 with no reported deaths at all.

Number of cases of Measles in the US before and after introduction of Measles Vaccine (Credit: Wikipedia)

So why are we still talking about this? Why do I even have to write a blog post describing the dangers of measles, mumps and rubella? Aren’t people intelligent enough to realize the threat of these diseases and how easy it is to protect themselves with a simple vaccine? You have to wonder why any sensible person would refuse to be vaccinated, why they would choose to risk their children’s health by refusing to have them vaccinated.

Recently of course there has been a large increase in the number of people who oppose vaccination because of misinformation and all too often downright lies. Much of this propaganda campaign began back in 1998 when a British medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a paper in which he linked the MMR vaccine to both Colitis and Autism in children. Even though there was criticism from other researchers almost immediately the article was widely discussed in the media and the seeds planted for what would become a global conspiracy theory.

In fact the paper was worse then simply bad science. An investigative journalist named Brian Deer soon uncovered evidence that Wakefield had received over £400,000 from several attorneys who were actively suing the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine and that several of the cases mentioned in the paper were clients of those attorneys. Not only that but Wakefield himself was trying to patent a rival vaccine to MMR.

So it’s hardly surprising that Wakefield was later found to have manipulated his patient’s data committing what has been called “perhaps the most damaging medical hoax in the last 100 years.” The original paper has been completely withdrawn by the journal that published it and Wakefield’s license to practice medicine in the UK has been revoked.

The Scandal over the anti-vaccine “Study” has made headlines around the World (Credit: The Sunday Times)

That’s all just a big conspiracy; say those people who see conspiracies everywhere. The big drug companies are suppressing the truth in order to preserve their big profits! (Actually drug companies don’t make much money off of vaccines that people only take once. The vast majority of drug profits come from people with chronic conditions like high cholesterol who have to take a pill every day for the rest of their lives.)

In addition there are those people whose children are autistic and who feel the very human need to find something, or someone to blame. If your child is ill and you don’t know why, the causes of autism are still largely unknown; it’s easy to accuse people who appear to be better off than you are.

All of which has led to a growing number of parents, often well-educated and genuinely concerned about their children, deciding that the danger of measles is less than the risk of the vaccines. It’s all a position driven by fear and once fear enters an argument logic and evidence are powerless to fight against it.

Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin admits he exposed his unvaccinated children to Chicken Pox, a relative of Small Pox(!!!) because he believes vaccines are harmful to children! I consider that evidence of how harmful parents can be to children! (Credit: New York Post)

And so we now have outbreaks of an easily preventable disease in nearly all developed countries. Real children are becoming sick by a real disease in order to protect them from an imagined danger. In the long run enough people will get sick, and some people will die, so that we become reminded of the very real threat of diseases like measles. When that happens vaccine rates will go back up, but in the meantime, what a waste of human life!

Anthropologists have discovered an entirely new Chimpanzee Culture and I’ll bet you didn’t even know that Chimps had Culture.

Sixty years ago the very idea of that Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, living in different areas of Africa could have different cultures seemed simply ridiculous. After all in order to even have a culture requires either the production of manufactured items that can differ from one group to another or complex social interactions, like a language, that again can show differences between groups. Chimpanzees, so the thinking went, neither made things nor did their various hoots and growls amount to anything more than simple alarums or warnings.

We’ve learned a lot since then and it all began when Jane Goodall was the first to observe a chimpanzee using a twig to get termites out of a nest in order to eat them. (See my posts of 11Nov17 and 21Mar18). This was the first ever observation of tool use by Chimpanzees but was quickly followed by numerous other observations of them using a range of tools. However, because Goodall concentrated all of her observations on a single-family group of chimpanzees she missed the fact that chimpanzees do things differently in different parts of Africa, that P troglodytes possessed culture.

The First Use of Tools by Chimpanzees was using a stick to ‘fish’ for termites (Credit: Seeker)

For example only the chimpanzees of West Africa use stone and wood as hammers in order to crack nuts while in central Africa chimps have been observed to use clubs to open up beehives. Other cultural differences include different styles of nest construction, chimpanzees make a new bed of leaves every night, along with behaviors such as stone piling and algae scooping.

Chimpanzee using a rock to break open a nut (Credit: Phys.Org)

In order to maintain a Culture of course you have to teach it to your Children (Credit: Earth in Transition)

Now researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) and the University of Warsaw have discovered a new ‘behavioral realm’, a new cultural unit located in the Bili-Uĕrĕ region of northern Democratic Republic of Congo. The area encompassed in this new ‘behavioral realm’ is estimated at some 50,000 square kilometers but could extend further. The announcement, in a paper published in the journal Folia Primatologica is the result of twelve years of study in the field; some discoveries take a long time and require a careful examination of the evidence.

The Area of the DR Congo where the New Chimpanzee Culture was discovered (Credit: Thurston C. Hicks et al)

Some of the differences are striking, such as whereas most chimp populations use twigs to ‘fish’ for the common termite Macrotermes muelleri, the Bili-Uĕrĕ chimps prefer to use stones and clubs to pound open the nests of the species Thoracotermes macrothorax. In fact the Bili-Uĕrĕ chimps seem to prefer pounding things in general, such as using stones on snail shells and even tortoises, behavior never before observed in chimpanzees. The scientists hope that by learning more about how chimpanzees develop their different cultures they may succeed in better understanding how it was that the first human cultures came into being.

Chimpanzees use a variety of different tolls for different jobs (Credit: Discover Magazine)

As exciting as this new discovery is there’s a danger here that has nothing whatsoever to do with the study of anthropology. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is currently mired in a bitter civil war that has taken the lives of tens of thousands of people. Yet even while the bloodshed continues there is a destructive exploitation of the jungle underway that threatens to exterminate the chimpanzees in Bili-Uĕrĕ even as their distinctive culture is being studied.

As co-author and director of the Department of Primatology at MPI-EVA Christophe Boesch put it. “It is great to have found these fascinating behavioral traits in this population. We simply hope that the many threats they face won’t wipe out these chimpanzees just as we are learning more about their uniqueness.”

Post Script: I’d like to update a story from just last week about the test mission of the Space X crew Dragon capsule. After five days attached to the International Space Station (ISS) the Dragon capsule undocked from the ISS and reentered Earth’s atmosphere, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean about 450 km from the Cape Canaveral launch pad from which it had taken off six days earlier. While the reentry and splashdown appeared to go flawlessly NASA and Space X will still review all of the data over the next few months. Currently the plan is for the first actual manned mission to the ISS for the Dragon to take place in July. I’ll keep you up to date!

Splashdown of the Space X Crew Dragon Capsule (Credit: NASA)

Telstar and the Revolution brought about by Communications Satellites.

This is the third installment of a series of articles leading up to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and humanity’s first landing on the Moon. In these articles I will reminisce about some of the most important milestones on the journey that led to Apollo 11, some of the best known events in the Space Race.

In the second installment I discussed how the Soviet Union and the USA had successfully launched the first astronauts into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) demonstrating that human beings could live and work in space. I also mentioned how a challenge from the US President Kennedy to ‘land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth” had given the new ‘Space Race’ a measurable finish line.

In this post I’d like to discuss the first series of experiments in what has undoubtedly become the most commercially valuable sector of the space industry, communication satellites or Comsats. Now I should warn you, I spent a good part of my career designing and developing the equipment for communications satellites and their associated ground stations so I trust that you’ll forgive me if I become a bit enthusiastic on the subject.

The very idea of using man made satellites in orbit above the Earth as relay stations passing radio messages across the oceans from one continent to another was the brain child of the well known science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke’s article ‘Extraterrestrial Relays’ in the October 1945 issue of the radio technology journal ‘Wireless World’. Such relays, Clarke maintained, could relay thousands of telephone calls and perhaps even TV signals across the world.

The First Page of Extra-Terrestrial Relays by Arthur C. Clarke (Credit: Wireless World)

Below is a PDF of the entire article.

Extra-Terrestrial Relays2

Clarke’s idea was for a series of satellites at a distance of 35,700 km above Earth’s equator. This orbit is now known at Geostationary because at that distance and location the satellite would orbit the Earth exactly once everyday and appear to always remain at the same point in the sky. So important has this orbit become that it is often referred to as the Clarke orbit!

Some of the Satellites currently in the Geostationary (Clark) Orbit (Credit: Space Exploration Stack Exchange)

The first attempt at using a satellite to relay a radio signal was by the United States with their Pioneer 1 Lunar spacecraft, launched on 11October 1958. Pioneer 1failed in its mission to reach the Moon but it did achieve a high enough orbit for NASA to use it to relay a radio signal from Cape Canaveral to Manchester England. However Pioneer 1 could only relay one simple radio signal at a time, nowhere near the thousands of messages that Clarke envisioned.

On August 12th 1960 NASA launched the experimental Echo 1 Comsat. Echo was really nothing more than a 30m diameter aluminized balloon that would simply reflect radio signals aimed at it back to receiving stations in other parts of the World, hence the name Echo. Being so large and reflective Echo was easily visible in the night sky and was actually the first satellite I ever saw moving across the night’s sky.

Inflation Test of the Echo Satellite (Credit: NASA)

These first attempts at communications satellites may have taught the scientists and engineers a great deal but the equipment on those early satellites simply did not have the power and capacity to make a real impact in the way the world communicated. That all changed with Telstar.

For one thing Telstar was designed and funded by a consortium of communications companies including AT&T and Bell Telephone in the US along with GPO in the United Kingdom and PTT in France. In fact Telstar was the first object to be put into space owned and operated by private companies, even the launch was privately funded.

Telstar 1 communications satellite, 1962 (replica). Made by Bell Systems. (Credit: Space Museum Group Collection)

The shape of Telstar, see image above, was basically a globe some 87 cm in diameter and the satellite spun in order to maintain stability. The surface of the globe was covered in solar cells that provided 16 watts of electrical power but around the equator were two rows of small ‘horn’ antennas. The larger horns were tuned to a frequency of 4 Giga-Hertz (GHz), which is 4 billion cycles per second, while the small horns were tuned to 6 GHz.

Weighing just 77kg Telstar was crammed full of the latest technology of the time including an innovative electronic subsystem called a ‘transponder’. The transponder was an assembly that carried out several radio operations in a single device. The transponder received signals from the 6Ghz horns, down-converted those signals to 4Ghz, amplified those signals using an electronic device known as a Traveling Wave Tube (TWT) before transmitting it out of the 4Ghz horn antennas. Today Comsats are often judged by the capacity of their transponder(s) and Telstar’s transponder allowed it to relay either 2,000 telephone calls or one television channel.

Because it had to operate all of its equipment off of only 16 watts the signals coming back down from the satellite were very weak and required large, specially built antennas. The US antenna for Telstar was built at Andover Maine; see below, while the British antenna was at Goonhilly Downs in Southwest England and the French built theirs at Pleumeur-Bodou in Northwestern France.

Telstar Ground Antenna at Andover Maine (Credit: Bell Systems)

Telstar I was launched from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962 and the very next day the first ever transoceanic TV picture, an American Flag outside the Andover site, was transmitted as a test signal. This was a non-public test of Telstar’s equipment however and it wasn’t until two weeks later on July 23rd that Europa and North America shared the first live TV program to be spread across half of the world. Then a month later in August Telstar was use to synchronize the official clocks in Europe and America to within 1 milli-second.

Now you might have noticed that I haven’t even mentioned anything so far about The Soviet Union’s efforts to develop communications satellites. Well that’s because the use of satellites to relay radio signals around the world was the one section of the early space race where America led the way right from the very start. You see, despite the advantage that the USSR had with their larger rockets, which were capable of putting larger spacecraft into orbit, it was the American advantage in electronics that mattered in the design and development of Comsats.

In addition the Soviets were not so concerned with the commercial benefits of communications satellites. So it was that their first series of Comsats, christened Molniya or lightning in Russian, were designed for military communications only. The first successful Molniya satellite was not launched until April 23rd of 1965, nearly three years after Telstar. This backwardness in technology continues to this very day with Russian presently buying its Comsats from western, primarily American aerospace companies.

The Soviet Molniya Communications Satellite (Credit: Astroautix)

Although Telstar I and its sister Telstar II demonstrated all of the possible benefits that Comsats could bring the fact that it had not been placed in Clarke’s geostationary orbit meant that it could only be used for 20 minutes out of every 2-hour orbit. It was only later, as more powerful communications satellites were installed 35,700 km above the equator that the communications revolution we are now living in became possible. Nevertheless it was Telstar that led the way.

NASA Scientists set up Experiment into the Origins of Life.

We humans have been obsessed with the question of the origin of life on Earth at least as long as recorded history, probably much longer. In ancient times the gods, of one variety or another always got the credit. And let’s be honest, the difference between living and non-living things is so enormous, so mysterious that it really seems as if some sort of supernatural ‘spirit’ must be involved.

Modern science however seeks more natural causes and in the last few hundred years considerable progress has been made. In the 1950s there was the famous Miller-Urey experiment that recreated Earth’s early atmosphere of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia and used an electric spark to generate amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. (If you’re not familiar with the Miller-Urey experiment check out my post of 11Nov17 or look for ‘Miller-Urey experiment’ on Youtube). The basic result of the Miller-Urey experiment was that in the chemical rich soup of Earth’s early atmosphere all that was needed was a source of energy, lightning for example, to begin the process of generating life.

Setup of the Miller-Urey Experiment (Credit: Krishna.org)

Many experts now feel that one of the possible sources of that energy may have been the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the planet’s ancient oceans. Now if you’re not familiar with hydrothermal vents they are hot springs of superheated water located near underwater volcanoes, like the hot springs around land volcanoes. The superheated water pouring out of those vents is chemical rich and various types of bacteria thrive in conditions that would boil most living things. Larger animals then feed off of the bacteria and an entire, unique ecology exists just around these vents.

Some of the Living Things around a Hydrothermal Vent (Credit: EMTV Online)

To study the role that these hydrothermal vents may have played in the early Earth NASA scientists working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have recreated the environment around a hydrothermal vent as it would have been some 4 billion years ago. The team, led by astrobiologist Laurie Barge, mixed a chemical solution of ammonia and pyruvate in water, both chemicals are commonly found near hydrothermal vents, in a glass container. By heating the solution to 70º C and decreasing the oxygen content the container became a modern day reproduction of the primordial ocean.

Researchers Laurie Barge (L) and Erika Flores (R) in their Lab (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Time Lapse recreation of a Hydrothermal vent in a Lab (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

It wasn’t long before amino acids began to form just as in the Miller-Urey experiment, clearly demonstrating that there were multiple locations on the early Earth where life could have begun. Biologists and chemists studying the origin of life still have a few more steps in the process that need to be discovered. However the results of the work at JPL do highlight how broad a set of conditions can trigger the initial steps in that process.

And not just here on Earth! You may have noticed how I mentioned that the team leader Laurie Barge is an astrobiologist, someone interested in life in outer space, and life on other worlds is a big part of the JPL experiment.

You see planetary scientists are quite certain that two of the moons in our Solar System have oceans of liquid water with hydrothermal vents very similar to those here on Earth. Both Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus are covered with a sheet of ice but there is evidence that beneath the ice there are oceans of liquid water, and keeping that water in a liquid state is the heat from hydrothermal vents, just like those here on Earth.

Are there Hydrothermal vents beneath Europa’s icy surface? (Credit: NASA)

Enceladus is another possible location for Hydrothermal vents (Credit: NASA)

So Dr. Barge and her colleagues weren’t just studying the origins of life here on Earth but the possibility of life on Europa and Enceladus as well. Right now NASA is preparing robotic missions to both of these moons and it is hoped that the results of the JPL experiment may give those mission planners a better idea of how to go about looking for life on those alien worlds!