Science – Page 39 – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

Space News for March 2019.

There’s been quite a bit of news about space the past month so let’s get to it!

The big news of course in the successful launch of Space X’s manned version of their Dragon space capsule and its arrival at the International Space Station (ISS). Although in this final test the Dragon capsule is unmanned nevertheless this launch represents the first time that a human capable spacecraft has taken off from American soil since the last Shuttle flight back in 2011. Since that time all American astronauts have had to pay for a ride on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in order to get to the ISS.

Launch of Space X’s Crew Dragon Capsule (Credit: Press TV)

The test schedule now calls for the Dragon capsule to remain docked with the ISS for several days before returning to Earth. When, and if the capsule reenters the atmosphere and splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean safely NASA and Space X will review the data from the mission before scheduling an actual manned mission later this year. Hopefully by early next year there will be regularly scheduled flights leaving Cape Canaveral for the ISS. Oh, I forgot to mention that once again Space X succeeded in recovering the rocket’s first stage so that it can be used again

The Dragon Capsule Docked at the ISS (Credit: NASA)

Astronauts about the ISS enter the Dragon Capsule (Credit: NASA)

And Space X isn’t alone in this effort; Boeing Corporation also has a human capable space capsule called the Starliner that is scheduled to conduct its unmanned test sometime in April. Both of these companies’ efforts are a part of NASA’s commercial crew program whose intention is to ‘hand off’ the transportation of cargo and personnel up to Low Earth Orbit (LOE) so that NASA can concentrate its efforts on human exploration beyond Earth orbit.

Boeing’s Starliner Capsule being readied from it’s test launch (Credit: Boeing)

With NASA helping to fund the development of both the Dragon and Starliner capsules the two commercial companies hope to find other customers as well. The possibilities of taking patrons to space hotels along with small countries who would like the recognition of putting an astronaut into orbit without the cost of building an entire launch system could be quite profitable. In the long term the commercialization of LOE could jumpstart space travel by lowering cost while increasing access.

Of course there’s some other space news as well. Staying with NASA for the moment the space agency has announced its plan for a return to a manned lunar landing by the year 2028. The first part of this plan will be to use the Space Launch System (SLS), now nearing completion, to construct a space station called Gateway in Lunar orbit. One piece of news is the announcement by the nation of Canada that it intends to participate in the construction of Gateway, to the tune of $150 million Canadian dollars per year.

Illustration of the Space Launch System (Credit: NASA)

The Gateway Lunar Orbiting Platform (Credit: Wikipedia)

During the time that Gateway is being built in Lunar orbit a reusable lander module will be developed. That way the Gateway station can serve as a ‘parking garage’ for the lander module with the SLS taking astronauts back and forth to Gateway.

For the moment NASA is asking for bids for a robotic Lunar Lander. Nine companies have been asked to submit bids under the new Commercial Lunar Payload Services or CLPS program. These unmanned landers will be designed to carry a number of different payloads, perhaps one day including supplies to a manned Moon base.

Draper Corp. proposed Lunar Lander for NASA’s CLPS program (Credit: Space News)

Finally, further out in space the Japanese probe Hayabusa 2 has successfully touched down on the asteroid Ryugu, you can’t call it a landing the asteroid’s gravity is too low. The asteroid is currently about 270 million kilometers from the Earth. The image below shows the shadow of Hayabusa 2 on the surface on Ryugu as it made it’s final approach.

Shadow of the Hayabusa 2 Probe against the surface of Ryugu (Credit: Universe Today)

Before making contact the probe shot a pinball-sized object at the asteroid in order to kick up a little dust for the space probe to study. Now the probe is on the surface and is preparing to take its first samples of the asteroid’s surface materials.

Artist’s Impression of Hayabusa 2 hovering above Ryugu (Credit: Astronomy.Com)

Two more landings, and sample collections are planned for Hayabusa before it begins its return trip in December of this year (2019). The material collected by Hayabusa is scheduled to arrive back at Earth just a year later in December 2020.

Can Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) be used to fight infectious Diseases?

All of the infectious diseases that afflict us have one problem in common that they must solve, how to pass from an infected individual to an uninfected one. Some take the shortest path and move from person to person by touch. Our skin is actually pretty tough however so without a cut or other wound allowing the germs to get inside infection rarely takes place. Some microbes get themselves sprayed into the air by a cough or sneeze in order to be breathed in by their victim, but that’s very much hit or miss with most of the germs left hanging out in space.

A Sneeze can release millions of disease germs ready to infect a healthy person. (Credit: India Today)

Then there are some that actually use another living creature to literally take them from a sick person to new victims. A couple of well known examples of this type of disease are malaria, which uses the mosquito Anopheles gambiae to transmit the bacteria and bubonic plague which uses fleas that are themselves transported by rats. These organisms that pass on diseases from one person to another are referred to a ‘vector’ by epidemiologists and controlling the spread of the vectors, the rats and mosquitoes has often proved to be the most effective way to fight the diseases they spread.

The Anopheles Mosquito carries Malaria one one person to another. (Credit: ZME Science)

Now some biologists are actually trying to use the technology of gene editing to modify the DNA of the vector organisms in an effort to make those species unable to spread the diseases! See my posts of 5Aug17, 1Sept18, 1Dec18 and 12Jan19 for information on gene editing. Two such projects are now reaching the stage where field-testing could soon begin!

I mentioned the disease malaria above, a disease that most epidemiologists believe is responsible for the death of half of all the human beings who have ever lived. Think of that, half of all the people who have ever died were killed by the single disease malaria. Even today malaria is a terrible scourge in many parts of the world killing an estimated million people yearly while 300-400 million suffer from the disease.

It’s easy to understand therefore that many efforts are underway to fight this deadly disease. One of these efforts involves the use of gene editing techniques to control the population of the Anopheles gambiae mosquito that transports the malaria germ.

Using the gene-editing tool CRISPR a high security lab in Terni Italy has produced a modified form of female mosquito whose mouth parts resemble those of the males. You see it’s only the female mosquitoes who actually bite, sucking the blood of warm blooded animals in which they incubate their eggs. Females with male mouth parts would be unable to bite, unable to breed in the wild.

GMO Mosquito feeding off of Cow’s Blood (Credit: Pierre Kattar, NPR)

The idea is to artificially breed large numbers of male mosquitoes with the modified gene and release them into the wild. There they will breed and all of their female offspring will be sterile while the male offspring will continue to propagate the edited gene. It is hoped that this will cause the local population to crash, reducing the occurrence of malaria.

The problem, as it always is with gene editing, is unintended consequences. Both genetics and ecology are extremely complex matters that we still know very little about and releasing GMO mosquitoes into the wild will almost certainly alter the environment in unexpected ways. If nothing less, the crash of the Anopheles gambiae population in an area could lead to another species of mosquito, possibly carrying a different disease such as yellow fever to move in to the empty ecological niche.

GMO Mosquitoes are kept tightly controlled at High Security Lab in Terni (Credit: Pierre Kattar, NPR)

The scientists at Terni, led by lab director Ruth Mueller, are aware of the possible dangers, that’s why they’re doing the experiments in a high security lab in order to make certain none of the GMO mosquitoes escape prematurely. To further reduce the danger the mosquitoes will be subjected to long term studies prior to any actual release.

That means that there’s a long way to go and a lot of work still to go on this project but any advance that helps in the fight against malaria would represent a tremendous victory.

The second project I’ll discuss involves combating Lyme disease by modifying the DNA of mice. You see the spread of Lyme disease involves a complex back and forth between mice, fleas and deer; it’s really a disease of deer more than it is of humans. Both the mice and fleas are born uninfected but once a mouse is bitten by an infected flea it becomes a carrier and any fleas that subsequently bite the mouse also becomes carriers, and can then pass the disease to a deer, or a human.

Deer Tick infecting someone with Lyme Disease (Credit: AFMC)

Some mice however appear to be immune to Lyme disease and according to MIT evolutionary biologist Kevin Esvelt that presents an opportunity. Dr. Esvelt has been experimenting with the mice, identifying the genes that provide the immunity. Dr. Esvelt now plans to use the gene-editing tool CRISPR to insert the immunity genes into the reproductive cells of the mice so that all of their offspring are born immune to Lyme disease.

Can altering the genes of Mice help to fight Lyme Disease? (Credit: NPR)

For field testing Dr. Esvelt has proposed releasing thousands of GMO mice onto some of the uninhabited islands off of Nantucket Island in the State of Massachusetts. It happens that Lyme disease is an epidemic on Nantucket; over 40% of the human population there has been infected, so the people of the island are more than ready to at least listen to Dr. Esvelt’s plan.

Now Dr. Esvelt is well aware of the possibility of unintended consequences, genetics and ecology are both very complex subjects after all. That’s what makes trying the plan on a small, uninhabited island first so attractive; the GMO mice will be confined until all of the ramifications have been studied. Only then, when not only Dr. Esvelt but all of the people of Nantucket are satisfied will the experiment move on to phase 2, releasing the mice onto Nantucket itself.

Plan for using GMO Mice to battle Lyme Disease on Nantucket (Credit: nMagazine.com)

In other words this is also a project that will take years before it can be called a success. Still, if the genetically modified mice do help to eradicate Lyme disease from the islands of Massachusetts then we will have another potent weapon in our fight against infections like Lyme disease.

Archaeologists succeed in locating the exact Quarry from which the Bluestones at Stonehenge Came.

The stone circle known as Stonehenge is an icon of prehistoric Europe and Britain in particular. Stonehenge is certainly not the only stone circle in the British Isles; there are over 900 of them. Nor is it the largest, in terms of area the circle at Avebury, 25 kilometers to the north is so large there is a town inside it. In fact it’s not even the best preserved, the nearby Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire or Long Meg and her Daughters in Cumberland are in much better condition. Still Stonehenge was without doubt the most complex and sophisticated of all of the Late Stone / early Bronze Age structures in Britain.

The Rollright Stones are another Stone Circle in the British Isles (Credit: Megalithic Portal)

Long Meg and her Daughter Stone Circle (Credit: Ancient Origins)

One of the reasons for the complex, almost bewildering structure at Stonehenge is due to the simple fact that the monument was built and then rebuilt time and again over a period of nearly 1500 years. Trying to determine which stones were put where when and which were moved to where they are now, and from where, is a very difficult task that archaeologists have been working on now for centuries. The consensus is that Stonehenge was constructed in three basic stages beginning about 3100BCE, that’s 500 years before the first Egyptian Pyramid:

Stonehenge 1: in 3100BCE: The first construction at the site of Stonehenge consisted of a circular ditch and mound with two entrances at the Northeast and South. The mound was built from the material removed to make the ditch and just inside the ditch a further ring of 56 holes were dug. The purpose of these holes appears to have been to erect either timber posts or perhaps an initial set of bluestones. If bluestones were used at this stage Stonehenge would have resembled many of the other stone circles such as the Rollright Stones.

Stonehenge as it would have appeared in Stage 1. (Credit: Stone-Circles.org.uk)

Stonehenge 2: 3000BCE: The evidence from this period indicates that several wooden structures were erected, one at the Northeast entrance and a larger one within the enclosure. There is other evidence that during this time Stonehenge became a repository for the cremated remains of many individuals.

Stonehenge 3: Starting 2600BCE (About the same time as the Great Pyramids). It was during this stage, which experts divide into 5 phases, that the familiar stone ring of sarsen stones and the 5 huge Trilithons, also made of sarsen were erected. Also during this time the arrangement of the bluestones was altered, bringing most of them inside the sarsen stone ring.

Stonehenge as it would have looked at the completion of Stage 3 (Credit: Stone-Circles.org.uk)

The above is only a brief, very brief description of the construction of Stonehenge but just as amazing are the details of how the stones ever got to Stonehenge! The huge sarsen stones, some weighing nearly 50,000 kg, came from a quarry on the Marlborough Downs about 40km to the north while the bluestones can only have come from the western part of Whales, an estimated 240km away from Stonehenge!

In a recent paper a team of archaeologists led by Mike Parker Pearson of the University College of London’s Institute of Archaeology have now claimed to have identified the actual quarries in the Preseli Hills of western Whales from which the bluestones came. Of the 43 bluestone pillars at Stonehenge, 27 are a type known as ‘spotted dolerite’ due to white specks of material throughout the stone. Using chemical analysis, along with a lot of legwork, the team has identified a location known as Carn Goedog as the likely source of the spotted dolerite stones. The remaining bluestones, technically known as rhyolite, were also traced to another nearby quarry called Craig Rhos-Y-felin.

Location in Whales from where the Stonehenge Bluestones came (Credit: The Daily Mail)

Having identified the probable quarries from which the bluestones came the archaeologists then proceeded to carry out excavations to see if any artifacts could be found after all these millennia. They soon discovered large numbers of stone hammers and wedges all of which dated to the same time period as the first construction at Stonehenge. Interestingly, the stone tools were made of a material known as mudstone which is considerably softer than the bluestones they were quarrying. The implication is that the ancient Britains were more worried about any damage to the bluestones than they were to their tools. Also excavated were the remains of manmade platforms to aid in lowering the stones and loading them into sledges for transport.

Excavation at the Bluestone Quarry (Credit: UCL)

Transporting the massive stones all the way to Stonehenge must have been a tremendous effort for the primitive technology of the time. It has always been assumed that the bluestones were pulled to the nearby shoreline and then rafted along the southern coast of Whales, up the River Severn and all the way to within a few kilometers of Stonehenge. However they were transported the fact remains that stone age tribes hundreds of miles apart must have cooperated in mining them, moving them and erecting them.

Possible Theories about the Routes the Bluestones may have taken to Stonehenge (Credit: Sarsen.org)

Which leaves the question why? Why did those Stone Age Britains put so much effort into building Stonehenge and the other megalithic structures that dot the countryside? Was their function religious, astronomical, both? That will have to wait for another post.

If you’d like to learn more about Stonehenge and the other stone circles of the British Isles check out the links below.

https://www.odysseyadventures.ca/articles/stone-circles/article_stonecircles.htm

http://www.stone-circles.org.uk/

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge/history-and-stories/history/

The Robots are Coming, and becoming more like Living Creatures Everyday

This is the fifth post in a series discussing the advances scientists and engineers have been making in automation and robotics and the possible effects they could have on human society. (See posts of 2Sept16, 12Feb17, 17Jun17 and 8Sept18)

Now just to remind everyone, I’m very much in favour of having robots take over the monotonous drudgery that wastes so much human life. At the same time however I’m fully aware that in the short term many people lose their jobs and are left destitute by automation. It’s a shame that our political leaders are so blinded by their own infighting that they seem to be completely aware of these changes in the society it is their task to govern.

I have three, very different items related to robotics to discuss and I think I’ll start with a little robot who has learned how to navigate autonomously the same way that desert ants do. The little six legged robot, see image below, is called AntBot and it has been developed by a team of scientists and engineers at Aix-Marseille University in France.

In order to find food ant colonies have certain members called foragers who lay down a chemical trail that not only allows them to find their way home but also enables other colony members to find any food source the forager has located. In the hot, dry Sahara desert however that chemical trail is quickly burned away by the Sun leaving the forager without a way to get home before it too is burned away by the Sun.

The ant species Cataglyphis fortis has evolved to use the Sun itself to solve that problem. Because of the scattering of sunlight by the atmosphere the light in the sky becomes more polarized the further away from the Sun you look, reaching a maximum at an angle of 90º. The ant’s eyes allow it to see something we humans cannot, the degree of linear polarization (DoLP) of the light across the sky. This information gives the ant a heading as to where it going and by counting its steps the ant knows where it is in relation to its home. Thanks to that knowledge, the ant is able to zigzag across the ground on its search for food and still make a beeline for home when it needs to, see image below.

Typical Searching Path by real Ant (Very wiggly line) and Path Home (Straight line) (Credit: Dupeyroux et al)

AntBot is designed to navigate in the same way. Two UV sensitive sensors are mounted at its top beneath polarizing material, see image below. This gives AntBot the same heading information as the desert ant enabling it to replicate the ant’s navigational skill, see second image below.

The UV sensors used by Ant-Bot to give it a Heading (Credit: Dupeyroux et al)

Typical Path for Ant-Bot (Credit: Dupeyroux et al)

The researchers at Aix-Marseille University hope to use their navigational system as both a backup for GPS as well as a navigational system for other autonomous robots. Another example of how robots are gaining an ever greater sensory idea of the world around them.

Over the last decade or so scientists and engineers have succeeded in developing a series of software protocols that have enabled computers to actually learn from experience, or data supplied to them. These machine learning techniques, collectively known as Artificial Intelligence or AI employ a trial and error approach with the accuracy of the computer’s guesses improving each time they learn what not to do.

Despite these advances however computers still fail in one aspect of intelligence that only the most advanced of animals possess, self awareness. That is, an ability to understand themselves, to imagine themselves doing something before they actually do it in order to compare the actual results to those they had imagined, which is the beginning of experimentation.

Now researchers at the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University’s Department of Engineering have taken the first steps in robotic self awareness. Led by Professor Hod Lipson the team used a mechanical arm that possessed 4 degrees of freedom, four joints if you will, see image below. Starting with absolutely no prior knowledge of what the arm can do the computer controlling the arm uses the AI tool known as Deep Learning, along with a lot of trial and error, to determine what its arm was capable of. See image below. In other words the robot is learning about itself!

Robot Arm used in the Self Awareness Experiments (Credit: Robert Kwiatkowski, Columbia Engineering)

At first the arm’s movements were random and aimless, “babbling” as described by Professor Lipson. After some 35 hours of playing however the robot had developed an accurate enough model of itself that it could carry out simple ‘pick and place’ tasks with 100% success.

The researchers went on to experiment with the robots ability to detect ‘damage’ to itself. What they did was to replace a part of the mechanical arm with a ‘deformed’ part. See image below. The robot quickly realized that its movements no longer matched up with its model and soon adjusted to a new self model.

Robot Arm with ‘Deformed’ Part (Credit: Robert Kwiatkowski, Columbia Engineering)

Speaking of the study Lipson remarked. “This is perhaps what a newborn child does in its crib, as it learns what it is…While our robot’s ability to imagine itself is still crude compared to humans, we believe that this ability is on the path to machine self-awareness.” Will the combination of AI and self aware technology result in the creation of a true robot straight out of science fiction? We may learn the answer to that question sooner than we think!

So if robots and computers do become self aware could they then ever develop emotions like those humans have? Well a recent news item has actually convinced me that they will some day develop emotions that, while those emotions may be similar to ours they will undoubtedly differ in many details.

You may have heard that NASA’s Mars rover named Opportunity has officially been declared lost as of 13 February 2019. The space agency’s last contact with Opportunity was actually back on 10 June 2018 when a large dust storm engulfed the rover’s location blocking the sunlight from its solar arrays. NASA’s greatest fear was that the dust might coat the surface of Opportunity’s solar arrays, leaving the rover permanently without power.

NASA has lost contact with its Opportunity Rover (Credit: NASA, JPL)

After 10 months and over a thousand attempts at trying to reestablish contact with the rover it appears that those worst fears have come to pass and Opportunity is now lost. Even as it declared the mission over NASA released the final message sent back by opportunity as it hunkered down to try to survive the storm.

“My batteries are low and it’s getting dark!”

O’k sure, Opportunity didn’t actually send those words. In fact the last message from the rover was just data, just numbers that indicated its status, that its battery power was low and the level of ambient light was dropping rapidly. The solitary little robot had no clear idea of the danger it was facing; it’s just a robot after all.

Still, you have to admit, it’s hard to say to say those words without feeling just a trace of fear. And as we learn how to give our creations the sensors that can detect situations that are dangerous, as they become more aware of the consequences of those situations to them…well couldn’t that actually be called fear?

The Space Race: Yuri Gagarin and the First Men in Space.

This is the second installment of what I plan as 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 first installment I discussed how the Soviet Union had surprised the USA by successfully launching the first artificial satellite just months before America had planned on doing so. Then when America’s Vanguard satellite blew up on the launch pad in front of the entire world the US was left playing catch up even though the satellite they finally launched, Explorer 1, made the first important discovery of the space age, the van Allen radiation belts encircling the planet.

So with the first satellites launched into orbit the race was now on to see which country could be the first to put a man into space. Once again the Americans conducted their preparations in the full blaze of publicity. With considerable fanfare the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced project Mercury and on April 9th 1959 the world was introduced to the Mercury Seven Astronauts, see image below. The Mercury astronauts were all military jet pilots who were considered to be the best suited to undergo the rigors of space travel.

The Mercury Seven Astronauts (Credit: PD)

Once again the Soviets carried out their preparation in total silence, not even publicly admitting that they were working on a manned space program. Indeed the very name of the chief engineer of the Russian space program, Sergei Korolev, the designer of their huge R-7 rocket, was kept an absolute secret. Like the Americans the Soviets choose military pilots to be their cosmonauts, twenty men were selected during late 1959.

The First Soviet Cosmonaut Squad. Korolev is seated in the middle of the first with Gagarin to his right (Credit: Space Safety Magazine)

While the training that all these men underwent was arguably the most exhaustive in human history the medical examinations were actually far worse. No one knew how the human body would react to the environment of space, in particular zero-gravity. There were in fact many well recognized medical experts who maintained that zero-gee would kill within minutes, a person’s heart would race uncontrollably or you would be unable to swallow and the build up of saliva would choke you. Both manned space programs were determined that if any human being could survive in space their astronauts could.

A Small Part of the Training for Project Mercury (Credit: Stellarviews.com)

NASA chose to progress cautiously, step by step. They began with unmanned launches of their Mercury capsule before then proceeding to the launch of a young chimpanzee named Ham. All before considering a manned flight.

Ham the Astronaut (Credit: National Air an Space Museum)

The Mercury capsule was designed as the smallest possible system that could support a single human being for one day’s time. Basically conic in shape the capsule was 3.3 m in height and 1.8 m wide at its base with a mass of less than 1400kg. The astronaut lay inside facing the top, which was found to be the best position for withstanding the high-gee forces of launch. See image below.

Cutaway of the Mercury Capsule (credit: PD)

The bottom of the vehicle was fitted with retro-rockets to bring the craft out of orbit along with an ablative heat shield to remove the heat caused by the fiction of re-entering the atmosphere. Once friction had eliminated most of the Spacecraft’s velocity parachutes would open to bring the capsule to a landing in the ocean.

Meanwhile the Soviet chief designer was working on the plans for his Vostok space capsule. Sergei Korolev had a big advantage in that his R-7 rocket was simply capable of putting more mass into orbit than anything the Americans had or would have until the mid-1960s. This allowed him to follow typical Russian engineering practice and develop a simple, strong and sturdy spacecraft.

The Vostok spacecraft consisted of two modules, a spherical crew compartment 2.3 m in diameter weighing 2400kg along with a service module about a half a meter wide by 2.3m in diameter weighing 2300kg. With its larger size the Vostok capsule was capable of sustaining a cosmonaut in space for a longer period of time, up to five days.

Cutaway of the Vostok Capsule (Credit: PD)

The entire surface of the Vostok crew capsule was covered in ablative material for re-entry. An unusual feature of the capsule was that, as it descended on parachutes to a landing on land, the cosmonaut was expected to leave the capsule and parachute separately to the ground.

Once again it was the Russians who succeeded first, launching Yuri Gagarin into a single orbit flight lasting about ninety minutes on the 12th of April in 1961. Once again the USSR had scored a space first just days before the US was ready for their flight. Alan Shepard became the first American in space just three weeks later on the 5th of May on a suborbital flight lasting about 15 minutes.

The First Man in Space Yuri Gagarin (Credit: PD)

Not only had the Soviet’s succeeded first but they had placed a man into orbit while the American’s were not only second but were still conducting suborbital flights. It would be another eight months before John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20th of 1962.

In the end both the Vostok and Mercury programs carried out six successful manned launches. Between them the two programs demonstrated that human beings could survive, and even carry out some tasks in space.

America was still in second place, and there seemed little that NASA could do in the short term to take the lead. It was as much to distract his countrymen from their current subordinate position that President John F. Kennedy decided to challenge NASA with a long-term goal that would tax American science and industry to their fullest.

On May 25 1961, before a joint session of both houses of congress Kennedy declared. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

John F. Kennedy before Congress (Credit:PD)

The space race now had a finish line. Only time would tell which nation, if either, would get there first.

Paleontology News for February 2019.

There are several items of interest from the world of paleontology for this month; several newly discovered species of early life to discuss. I think I’ll start with the most ancient and work my way forward in time.

250 million years ago life on Earth suffered its greatest mass extinction event. The Permian extinction as it’s known wiped out more than 90% of the species of plants and animals, far more than were killed by the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Paleontologists are intensively interested not only in what caused the Permian extinction, there are many theories, but also how quickly did the Earth’s ecology recover from such a terrible blow.

Today Antarctica may be mostly an icy desert but 250 million years ago it was a warm, lush forest and a new species of reptile from Antarctica is now providing us with a glimpse into that period of recovery. The creature has been given the name Antarctanax shackletoni, the first name means Antarctic King in Greek while the second honours the Antarctic explorer Ernst Shackleton. A shackletoni was a kind of reptile known as an archosaur, a group who are considered to be the ancestor to both the dinosaurs and the crocodiles. About the size of a modern iguana, A shackletoni probably fed on insects and other small prey.

Artists Impression of Antacrtanax shackletoni (Credit: Sci-News.com)

The remains of A shackletoni were discovered in rocks dating to only 2 million years after the Permian extinction indicating that life recovered more quickly than had been previously thought. One theory that is being discussed amongst paleontologists is the idea that extinction events may actually open up ecological niches, spurring evolution to generate entirely new types of living creatures. As an ancestor to both the dinosaurs and crocodiles A shackletoni is strong evidence for that theory.

Fossil Remains of A shackletoni (Credit: Bobr Times)

My second story deals with the discovery of a new species of dinosaur proper, although a very strange looking one. We’re all familiar with the largest of the dinosaurs, the long necked, long tailed sauropods along with the stegosaurs, those dinosaurs who had bony plates along their back for protection. See images below.

The Sauropod Dinosaur Diplodocus (Credit: NicePNG.com)

A Typical Stegosaurus (Credit: Cmstudio)

Well how would you like a sauropod with a set of sharp spikes running down its back? That’s just what a team of paleontologists working in the Patagonia region of Argentina has discovered. It’s being called Bajadasaurus pronuspinax; the name means downhill lizard with bent over forward spines and it lived during the lower early Cretaceous period some 140 million years ago. See image below.

Artists impression of Bajadasaurus pronuspinax (Credit: Jorge A. Gonzalez)

Judging from its skull B pronuspinax resembled the more familiar Diplodocus but based on the size of the discovered skeleton B pronuspinax was only some ten meters in length, less than half the size of its enormous relative. According to Pablo Gallina of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina and lead author of the paper the bony spines must have been reinforced in some fashion, “We think that had they just been bone structures or covered only by skin, they could have been easily broken or fractured…they probably were covered by a keratin sheath, in a similar way to the horns of mammals such as antelopes.” Either way I’m sure that B pronuspinax would have been a fascinating creature to see.

The Actual Fossil Spines of B pronuspinax (credit: Science Alert)

For my final story I’d like to discuss a type of animal that still exists and with which we are all quite familiar, the kangaroo and when did it evolve its distinctive hop. Now researchers studying fossils of kangaroo ancestors have concluded that 20 million years ago those ancestors could hop, walk on four legs and even climb trees!

Ancestors of the Kangaroos (Credit: Peter Shouten)

The fossils that led to this conclusion come from the northwest region of the state of Queensland near the town of Riversleigh. Most importantly the finds include very rare specimens of the feet of the kangaroo ancestors, see image below, giving clear evidence of their mode of locomotion.

Foot Bones of the 20 Million Year Old Kangaroo Nambaroo gillespieae (Credit: Benjamin Kear)

The long held view was that the hopping motion of kangaroos occurred in the more recent past as a change in climate led to widespread grasslands typical of modern Australia. However these new fossil finds indicate that kangaroo ancestors were hopping very efficiently while most of Australia was still forested. According to Dr. Benjamin Kear of Uppsala University in Sweden and a member of the study, “It all points to an extremely successful animal, that’s superbly adapted to its environment and a whole range of ecosystems and it’s why kangaroos are so successful today.”

So there we have it, three more examples of the fascinating diversity of life here on Earth!

Slowly but surely Scientists are learning the Secrets of how Animals in Flocks or Schools coordinate Their Group Behavior.

We’re all familiar with the group behavior of animals. Whether it be a big herd of Bison, a large flock of birds or a huge school of fish we’ve all wondered how so many individuals without the ability to talk to one another can coordinate their movements so precisely that the group can sometimes seem like a single living thing.

School of Fish Turning Left in one Coordinated Movement (Credit: Modern Survival Blog)

Geese Are know for Flying in a Vee Formation! (Credit: Flickriver)

Scientists have been studying this phenomenon for a very long time, even the ancient Greeks thought about the problem. We’ve succeeded in learning a great deal in the past few decades but some of the mystery still remains.

There are several reasons why a large group of animals, almost always of the same species and often of the same size and age, would come together to form a herd, flock or school, henceforth I’m just going to call it a group if you don’t mind. Increased success in both foraging and finding a mate are two reasons but predator avoidance is probably the chief reason.

You see first of all being in a large group means that there are just more eyes keeping watch for predators so there’s much less chance of bring surprised by one. Then, when a predator does attack having a score or more prey scatter in every direction overloads the predator’s senses, confusing it so that it is more likely to miss completely.

A School of Fish Scatters from a Predator Attack (Credit: Daily Mail)

So once a large number of animals decide to become a group how do they actually do it. Well back in 1986 a biologist named Craig Reynolds was able to model much of group behavior by assuming the animals in the group obey three simple rules.

Move in the same direction as your neighbor.
Remain close to your neighbors.
To avoid collisions don’t get too close to your neighbors.

Fish in a school want Company but a little space as Well. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Just what close and too close mean depends on the species and remember these rules have been imprinted onto the individuals by evolution. In other words they’re not thinking about it they just feel happier with some company but also a little room as well.

O’k, so now everybody’s moving in a group, so who now decides in which direction the group is going to go? Well since many of the species that form large groups are migratory on a large scale everybody instinctively knows the general direction to go! It’s spring so everybody knows that they’re supposed to go north, or the leaves are falling so aren’t we all supposed to fly south.

Of course that doesn’t help when it’s dinnertime and hopefully somebody knows where to find some food around here. In that case the more experienced members of the group seem to take charge and lead the way to food sources that the group used on the last migration, some such resources have been used for thousands of migrations. There is also a controversial idea that it is the hungrier members of the group who take charge after a long days travel.

Once a few members of the group start to head in a certain direction the others employ a simple quorum rule to ‘follow the leader’ until everybody is heading the same way. Usually this decision making process results in the correct choice for the group but occasionally it can cascade into exactly the wrong choice, we’ve all heard of beached whales and lemmings after all.

Sometimes Group Behavior isn’t such a Good idea! (Credit: The Verge)

These decision making processes are called collective intelligence and in many ways it is the speed with which the group coordinates its actions that seems almost magical. Such speed obviously requires each individual to have fairly accurate idea of where at least its nearest neighbors are.

Vision of course is an important means of knowing where everybody else is. Now however a team of researchers at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Science has published a paper detailing that for fish and birds the ability to sense the wake left behind by the leaders also plays an vital role. “Air or water flows naturally generated during flight or swimming can prevent collisions and separations, allowing even individuals with different flapping motions to travel together.” According to Joel Newbolt, lead author of the study.

The study used a robotic ‘school’ of two hydrofoils that flap up and down and swim forward, see image below.

Test Instrument developed by Team at NYU (Credit: NYU, Joel Newbolt)

What they found was that the trailing flap could most efficiently swim along if it ‘surfed’ in the wake of the lead flap, maintaining just the right distance between them. This is similar to the way geese fly in a Vee formation so that trailing birds get a boost from the air currents produced by the birds ahead of them only now the wake is being used to keep the right distance between individuals.

We still have a lot to learn when it comes to the phenomenon of collective intelligence in herding animals but we are making progress in our understanding of how some species have evolved to act together for the good of everybody. If only we humans could learn that lesson!

What if Human Beings could Regenerate Lost Limbs the way some Animals do?

We all learned back in high school biology how some animals, the lower animals we were usually told, were capable of regenerating a significant portion of their body if they should happen to lose it. A Starfish who had lost one of its arms and regrew it was often used as an example of this power of regeneration. All living creatures possess some ability to regenerate tissue to some degree, after all, if you trip and skin your knee on the sidewalk doesn’t your skin heal itself in time.

Examples of Regeneration in Invertebrates (Credit: Memorial University of Newfoundland)

Other species of invertebrates are also known for seemingly amazing powers of regeneration. Animals like the hydra and flatworms can literally be cut in half and regenerate into two complete individuals. Among the arthropods those species that can regenerate most easily are those that continually molt like the crustaceans. I know this for a fact because I once had a crawfish in my fish tank who got into an argument with a catfish and completely lost one of its claws. It took two molts but eventually the crawfish was completely healed!

Here’s a Maine Lobster Regenerating it’s lost right claw (Credit:Good Morning Gloucester.org )

Regeneration among the vertebrates is more limited but there are many species of lizard that can lose their tail, usually to an attacking predator, and regrow a brand new one. The group of vertebrates that possess the greatest power of regeneration however are the amphibian salamanders and newts. One species in particular that have long been studied are the axolotl, a threatened species whose only habitat is a lake near Mexico City. The axolotl in fact can completely regenerate not only their tails but entire limbs, their jaw, the retina of their eyes and even a portion of their heart!

A Gecko can Regenerate its Tail (Credit: Feast or Famine)

Axolotls are fascinating creatures not only because of their regenerative abilities but also because unlike other amphibians they never completely metamorphose into an air breathing creature but retain their water breathing gills throughout their lives. This retention of juvenal characteristics into maturity is technically known as neoteny and scientists would very much like to know is whether the two curious characteristics of neoteny and regeneration could actually be related.

The Axolotl is a Species of Salamander that never Looses its Gills! (Credit: Quanta Magazine)

In an effort to learn the axolotl’s secrets Doctor Randal Voss at the University of Kentucky has succeeded in mapping the animal’s entire DNA genome. Now many species of animals have had their DNA sequenced over the last few years but the axolotl is once again remarkable in possessing 32 billion base pairs split into 14 chromosomes. That’s fully ten times as many DNA pairs as is in the human genome and getting all of those genes in the correct order is a very complicated task.

Even though Dr. Voss and his co-author Jeramiah Smith are still assembling the axolotl’s genome they hope to soon begin the work of identifying which specific genes are responsible for the animal’s remarkable tissue regeneration abilities. While the day when human beings can regenerate body parts lost in accidents or due to disease may be years away thanks to the complete sequencing of the axolotl’s genome we can now actually see the road ahead.

There’s a lot that We’d like to learn from the Axolotl (Credit: YouTube)

Quick Post Script: Free Science Fiction!!!

I just came across a very interesting website that is offering a free collection of science fiction stories, all in electronic format ready for download. The collection is called “Everything Change Volume II” and is being offered by Arizona State University. The collection comes with a forward by noted SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson, whose novel 2312 I reviewed in my post of 26 September 2018. Click on the link below to be taken to the website.

https://climateimagination.asu.edu/everything-change-vol-2/

Cover of ‘Everything Change Vol II (Credit: Arizona State University)

All of the stories in the collection follow the theme of the effect of climate change on future societies, a theme that is central to many of Kim Stanley Robinson’s own works. The stories themselves are written by new authors but the chance to acquire some free science fiction is certainly something worth looking into!

Are Neuroscientists on the verge of developing actual Brain-to-Brain communication? Will science actually invent telepathy?

The idea of telepathy, of one human mind being able to read the thoughts of another directly without requiring speech or hand signals or body language or other forms of communication has long been a part of mythology and fantasy. In the modern age telepathy has become an even more integral part of Science Fiction where aliens like Mr. Spock or mutants like Professor Francis Xavier always seem to be able to read minds. Entire novels have been written whose plots center around the idea of telepathy such as Robert Silverberg’s ‘Dying Inside’.

Mister Spock Mind Melding on Star Trek (Credit: Paramount Pictures)

The term telepathy was coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic W. H. Myers, a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research. In the years since then there have been many serious, although often amateurishly conducted experiments to ‘prove’ the existence of telepathy. These tests usually consisted of one test subject ‘sending’ his thought transmissions to a second test subject, the ‘receiver’, the success of the experiment being judged by how accurately the receiver can pick up the thoughts of the sender.

As an example, during the 1950s and 60s a popular technique of testing for telepathy used a deck of cards known as Zener Cards. Each card in a Zener deck contained one of five symbols, see image below. The sender would select a card at random and concentrate on the symbol. The receiver would then telepathically receive the symbol and state what symbol it was. Now with five different symbols there was always a 20% chance of just guessing the right answer so you need to score significantly higher than 20% to indicate evidence of telepathy.

The Five Symbols of Zener Cards (Credit: Wikipedia)

Problem was that there are so many ways to cheat, even unintentionally! The biggest problem is simply allowing the receiver to see the sender so that they can pick up non-verbal clues from the sender’s expression. This can even be totally unconscious if the two subjects are very well acquainted; and a lot of telepathy tests were conducted on identical twins!

At the same time however there were a number of cases of outright fraud conducted by either the test subjects or even the researcher. Because of these deceptions today the study of telepathy is regarded as a psuedo-science. The United States National Research Council is of the opinion that “despite a 130-year record of scientific research on such matters, our committee could find no scientific justification for the existence of phenomena such as extrasensory perception, mental telepathy or ‘mind over matter’ exercises”.

Still there are plenty of people who ‘believe’ in telepathy and that’s really the problem. If you firmly believe something exists you will find evidence to support that belief no matter how incredulous, even fraudulent your evidence may be.

Now however scientists may be on the verge of inventing a technology that will enable one human being to read the thoughts of another, they are working to invent telepathy if you will. Research underway at Cornell University is taking the first steps toward the development of the world’s first brain-to-brain interface that the scientists are referring to as BrainNet, that’s right BrainNet!

What BrainNet does is use the technology of electroencephalography to record both brain signals, often called brain waves along with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), see image below. These signals are then transmitted via the normal Internet and inserted into another brain by magnetic stimulation of the occipital cortex.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (Credit: Psych Scene Hub)

The first successful tests consisted of having the ‘sender’ play a Tetris like game and the decision about how to rotate the blocks is the thought to be transmitted to the ‘receiver’. In tests of five groups of players the receiver’s ability to perform the task shows an average success rate of 81.3%.

Similar experiments are being carried out at University of Washington where neuroimaging and neurostimulation technologies are being employed to transmit neural content from one subject to another in a corroborative game of 20 questions. Both of these two projects soon hope to be able to construct a ‘social network’ of human brains capable of solving problems in a cooperative fashion.

Using An Electroencephalogram (EEC) (Credit: Health Management Org)

And just to show what a fast moving field of research this is while I was composing this post I came across a third team of scientists who are working to measure, decipher and convert into ordinary sound the electrical signals in our brain. Doctor Nima Mesgarani of Columbia University’s Department of Electrical Engineering has teamed up with Doctor Ashesh D. Mehta of Hofstra University’s school of medicine to created a technique for actually capturing a person’s brain waves and converting them to common English spoken by a computer.

It was Dr. Mesgarani and his team at Columbia who assembled the instrumentation that succeeded in capturing and analyzing the patterns of brain activity that occurs when a person even thinks about talking. When those patterns were fed into a voice synthesizer however the result was unintelligible.

The Brain Computer Interface (Credit: Reuters, Jason Lee)

It was at this stage that Dr. Mesgarani contacted Dr. Mehta who suggested employing the same computer algorithm that enables Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s Siri to understand human speech. Starting by recording the brain waves of volunteers saying the numbers one through ten the researchers developed a system that can ‘read’ the mind of a person thinking a number and then say it with 75% accuracy of understanding. Drs. Mesgarani and Mehta hope that before long their system will be capable of providing a means for people whose speech is impaired by paralysis or who suffer from diseases such as ALS to communicate better with the world around them.

If these experiments are successful, if it becomes possible for the neural signals, the thoughts of one person’s brain to be picked up by electronic sensors and transmitted, perhaps over great distances and then implanted into another person’s brain then scientists will have truly invented telepathy!

Space News for January 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boeing Starliner Capsule (Credit: Boeing)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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