Category: Science

Paleontology News for December 2018.

There have been quite a few dino discoveries the past few weeks. I have four stories to cover so let’s get to it.

I’ll start with the discovery of a new species of ‘horned dinosaur’ formally known as a Ceratopsian and related to the well-known Triceratops. The new species, see image below, is named Crittendenceratops krzyzanowskii and is based on the re-evaluation of bones that were discovered almost 20 years ago in 73 million year old rocks southeast of Tucson Arizona. A team of researchers from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNH) carried out the re-examination finding “morphological features right away in the material of Crittendenceratops to establish a new species,” according to Sebastian Dalman the team leader.

Artists Impression of Crittendenceratops (Credit: Live Science)

According to the researchers, C krzyzanowskii was approximately 3-4 meters in length and likely weighted 700-800 kilos. The 73 million year age of Crittendenceratops puts it very close to the end Cretaceous period, making it probably one of the last species of ‘horned dinosaur’ to walk the Earth.

 

One of the big debates going on presently in the paleontological community concerns exactly when it was that the first feathers developed and how many different types of animals had them. Not too many years ago the very idea of a dinosaur having feathers would have been shocking. Now however it is well established that some dinosaurs worn feathers as insulation to help keep them warm. Perhaps even the mighty T rex himself was covered with a warm layer of fuzzy feathers.

Now an analysis of two fossils may push the origins of feathers back another 70 millions years and spread their occurrence to another entire group of extinct reptiles. A team of paleontologists from Nanjing University in China have found what they believe to be short, fuzzy, thread like structures on specimens of pterosaurs, the bat like flying reptiles that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, but which were not dinosaurs. The fact that many of these thread like structures, see image below, split at their ends in a fashion similar to the development of feathers leads the researchers, lead by Professor Baoyu Jiang, to conclude that they are in fact the earliest fossil evidence of feathers.

Feathers on Pteranodon Fossils. Splitting at the ends indicates they are Feathers rather than Hair (Credit: Michael Benton / Nature Ecology and Evolution)
Pteranodon with Feathers (Credit: Yuan Zhang / Nature Ecology and Evolution)

The spread of feathers 70 million years further backward in time and to another entire group of extinct reptiles not only illustrates how wondrous the past history of life truly is, but also how piece by piece we are slowly uncovering it.

 

The very first dinosaur specimens to be scientifically described came from the United Kingdom. In fact the very word Dinosaur (Terrible Lizard) was coined by the British naturalist Sir Richard Owen. The paleontology of the UK has been studied for so long, and so thoroughly that you might think that there couldn’t be much left to discover. Erosion can often be a paleontologist’s friend however, revealing treasures that were hidden beneath layers of uninteresting rock.

This is what has happened in the Ashdown Formation in the English county of East Sussex. In the sandstone cliffs along the shore 85 dinosaur footprints have been recently discovered. Not only that but the prints are from as many as 13 different species, giving scientists a glimpse into what the quiet English countryside was like 100-140 million years ago. See image of a print below.

Theropod Dinosaur Footprint from Sussex UK (Credit: University of Cambridge)

The prints include many from well known dinosaurs, the Iguanodon, the Ankylosaurus, a possible Stegosaur as well as several Sauropods and Theropods (Basically that’s all of the dinosaurs you learned about when you were a kid!). Some of the prints are so well preserved that the texture of the animals skin can easily be seen, and therefore studied. See image below. Finds like these give paleontologists a wealth of information about the ecology of the ancient world, showing us how different, and yet how similar the world was so long ago.

Impressions of the Dinosaur’s Skin on Footprint (Credit: University of Cambridge)

 

My final story today may not be the most important scientifically but it is almost certainly the most spectacular. At least it has the coolest picture, see image below.

Artist’s Impression of a Shark attacking a Pteranodon (Credit: Mark Witton)

Researchers at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum have been cleaning and preparing a well-preserved skeleton of a Pteranodon, a large species of those flying reptiles I mentioned above. As the researchers were cleaning the area of the fossil’s neck they noticed something stuck in between two vertebra, a shark’s tooth! See image below.

Shark’s Tooth, red arrow, Embedded in the neck of a Pteranodon Fossil (Credit: Stephanie Abramowicz, David Hone, Los Angeles County Natural History Museum)

Now the researchers do not believe that the shark, the tooth identifies it as a species known as Cretoxyrhina mantelli, leapt out of the water in order to attack the Pteranodon in mid flight. Rather they speculate that the flying reptile was floating on the surface of the ocean when the shark ambushed it from below. Even today sharks are known to attack seabirds in this manner, I’ve actually witnessed such an attack myself. So have sharks been feeding for millions of years off of flying animals who are foolish enough think that the ocean is a nice, quiet place to rest for a few minutes? By the way, this fossil Pteranodon was actually  discovered back in the 1960s. Another example of how a re-examination can make new finds.

The fossils found by the researchers in California give us a small window into a past event that is both dramatic and fascinating. With each such window we gain a better picture of the history of life on Earth.

An Update on Gun Violence in the USA, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) announces a large increase in Deaths Caused by Guns in 2017.

Back in February I published a two-part post looking at gun violence in the United States and how it compares to that in other countries. (See my posts of 21 and 24 February 2018) Now this last week the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has released their statistics for US gun violence in the year 2017 so I’d like to take a chance to look at the new figures.

Not surprisingly the number of Americans killed grew once again to a total of 39,773, up more than a thousand from 38,658 in 2016. Adjusting for age, in 2017 12 Americans out of every 100,000 died by firearm in 2017 the highest rate since 1979, 40 years ago. In fact if you look at the pie chart shown in the image below you’ll see that the United States had the second highest total of gun related deaths of any nation on Earth, behind only Brazil.

Gun Deaths around the World (Credit: CNN)

Now in a sense comparing total gun deaths isn’t fair since Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela and Guatemala all have smaller populations making their rate of deaths caused by guns much higher. Still, it’s an eerie thought that only six countries account for half of the gun deaths in the entire world, and they’re all in the Western Hemisphere!

Now while I was doing my analysis of gun violence back in February I freely admitted that I was shocked to discover that suicides outnumbered homicides by a wide margin. The data from 2017 continues that trend with 23,854 people killing themselves with a gun as opposed to 15,919 people being killed by someone else. 60% of the total gun deaths are in fact suicides.

If we take a closer look at the demographic breakdown of the suicides in the US, see image below, we quickly discover another shocking fact. The number of suicides among white men, 18,759 is more than three times the number, 5095, for all other demographic groups combined, 79% of the total. Now it is true that white men are a large demographic group here in the US making up 30% of the entire population but that still means that they are killing themselves at almost nine times the rate of the rest of the American population.

Suicides across Demographic Groups (Credit: CNN)

Now taking a look at the breakdown of the homicides, see image below, we find another shocker. Here it is black men who are by far the largest number of victims. Last year 7,661 black men were gunned down compared to 8,258 for all other groups combined, 48% of the total number. In 2017 a black male was approximately six times more likely to be murdered than someone from another demographic group.

Homicides across Demographic Groups (Credit: CNN)

Statistics like these cry out for explanation, demand that somebody do something. The obvious fact that our horribly high rates of suicide and murder are so concentrated in only two demographic groups means that there are social problems unique to those groups. Problems that, if they are found and studied can be reduced if not eliminated entirely. The suicide rate in particular is obviously a mental health issue that begs for a non-political solution.

At the present time however federal agencies like the CDC are legally being prevented from studying gun violence by lawmakers. These so-called leaders are supported by the gun industry and therefore refuse to even consider any sensible approach to reducing gun violence.

First and foremost we need to allow our nation’s best scientific minds to study the problem of gun violence in this country. Only then will we have any chance of giving the people of the United States freedom from gun violence.

A Comprehensive New Study finds that there are massive amounts of Microbial life deep within the interior of the Earth.

We always seem to think of life here on Earth as residing on the surface of our planet. After all life is dependent on the Sun for its energy so even if the depths of the oceans are populated by life certainly living things can’t survive very far below the actual surface of the planet. A new study challenges that idea, finding instead that single celled microbial forms of life live very happily many kilometers deep with the Earth’s interior.

The study is being conducted by the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), an international team from 52 counties of geologists, biologists, chemists and physicists. For the last ten years the scientists have been surveying deep mining operations as well as conducting drilling operations in order to get a statistical sample of the amount and kinds of life many kilometers beneath our feet. See image below of the sites worldwide that have been studied by the team.

Sites Around the World Studied by The Deep Carbon Observatory (Credit: DCO)
The DCO used vessels like the Japanese Survey Ship Chikyu to explore life deep UNDER the Oceans (Credit: JAMSTEC)

What they found is astounding, the current estimate of the mass of the life deep inside the Earth is between 245 and 385 times the mass of all the human beings on the surface, all 7 billion of us. More than that, the number of unknown species lying hidden beneath our feet must number in the tens if not hundreds of thousands or more. According to Karen Lloyd, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and member of the DCO team the study’s results “force us to reimagine what the boundaries are that life can exist in!” The images below show just a small sample of the kinds of life the team found deep underground.

Microbe Canadidatus Desulforudis found 2.8 km below surface in gold mine near Johannesburg S. Africa (Credit:Greg Wanger)
Methanobacterium found 2km below the Ocean floor off east coast of Japan (Credit: JAMSTEC)

The conditions under which these microbial creatures survive are also amazing. Temperatures as high as 130ºC, that’s 30 degrees above the boiling point of water, acidic sulfur infused water along with pressures 400 times greater than that at sea level, all in the complete absence of oxygen. Is it any wonder that space scientists are interested in the deep carbon study as it gives them so much information about the extreme environments that life can survive, conditions that could mirror those on other planets.

If you’ll allow me however I’m going to take a different tack. Because of course we also know that bacteria and other simple microbial life are all over that potion of the Earth we more naturally consider life’s domain as well. We’ve been told since childhood that almost every surface we touch is covered with bacteria. That’s why we need to wash our hands often. Worse than that, we also know that bacteria are living on our own skin, in our mouths and in our guts.

If fact a recent paper by Doctor Ron Sender of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel estimates that while the average human body contains 30 trillion cells it also plays host to an average of 39 trillion bacteria. Now a bacterium is much smaller than a human cell, see image below, but nevertheless Dr. Sender estimates than for a normal adult between 1 and 3 kilos of their body mass is made up of bacterial parasites.

General Human Cell with Bacteria for Comparison (Credit: Dreamstime)

The same is even truer of every animal, every plant we share our world with, to say nothing of all the blue-green algae in all of the world’s pond, lakes and oceans. And every farmer knows that the measure of the fertility of soil is the amount of living bacteria in it. I guess we simply have to face the fact that the world’s single celled microbial life not only greatly outnumber we so-called advanced forms of life, they probably outweigh us by several times as well.

Or to put it another way; two to three billion years ago all of the life on Earth consisted of simple, single celled microbial organisms and things really haven’t changed much since then!

Space News for December 2018.

A lot has been happening in space the last few weeks. I’ve got four different stories to talk about so let’s get to it!

I’d like to start with some really good news about the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. You may recall that back on October 11th a manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS) suffered a launch failure when the second stage of the Soyuz rocket failed to properly separate from the first stage. (See my post of 14Oct2018 for the full story) Fortunately the crew escaped without injury.

The Russian space agency Roscosmos quickly went to work and found the problem after only a few days. Just to be certain that the problem had been addressed two unmanned launches were conducted before attempting another manned launch. On December first, less than two months after the launch failure a Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts successfully took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and less than a day later docked at the ISS.

Two Months after a launch failure the Russian Soyuz rockets back to the ISS (Credit: South China Morning Post)

This quick reversal in the fortunes of Soyuz is extremely important of the operation for the ISS because presently the Russian Soyuz is the only launch system capable of taking astronauts to man the ISS. Immediately after the October failure the very real possibility of abandoning the ISS had been seriously discussed. Fortunately the December first launch of Soyuz has made such severe measures unnecessary.

Speaking of the ISS you may have heard about the station’s newest,   non-human resident. CIMON the robot (CIMON stands for Crew Interactive Mobile companioN) is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled terminal that is equipped with maneuvering air fans so that it can roam around the ISS and turn so that its video screen face is towards whichever human crewperson it is interacting with. See image of CIMON below.

CIMON and astronaut Gerst aboard the ISS (Credit: CNET)

CIMON is the brainchild of the European Space Agency (ESA) and is currently programmed to act as a ‘companion’ to ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst. Problem is, so far CIMON hasn’t proven to be a very genial companion.

After being delivered to the ISS on 15 November Astronaut Gerst turned on CIMON by saying “Wake up CIMON” to which the robot answered, “What can I do for you?”. Things went downhill pretty quickly from there starting from when Gerst asked CIMON to play his favourite song, “The Man-Machine by the German group Kraftwerk. After CIMON plays the song several times Gerst orders it to stop which the robot refused to do. Instead CIMON responded with comments like “Let’s sing along with those favourite hits”, “I love music you can dance to” and perhaps most disturbingly “Be nice please” and “Don’t you like it here with me?”

After only a short period of testing astronaut Gerst shut down the experimental crewmember and remarked dryly. “CIMON is a little sensitive today.” The robot’s developers actually considered the test a success. After all they wanted CIMON to show some personality, although perhaps not such a contrary one. A second test however is not currently scheduled.

Meanwhile, back at Space X, it seems like I talk about Space X at least every month doesn’t it. Anyway, the California based commercial space corporation has continued its string of space achievements with the third launch and recovery of the first stage of one of its Falcon 9 rockets. In a launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the first of December Space X also succeeded in recovering the nose cone fairings, which are put around the rocket’s payload in order to protect it during launch. Those things cost $6 million dollars a set, 10% of the cost of the entire rocket so recovering and reusing those could reduce the price of putting cargo into space even further.

Third Launch of a Space X Falcon 9 first stage. Both the first stage and the Nose Cone Fairings were recovered to be used again (credit: Spaceflight Now)

In another small cost reduction Space X has decided to cease repainting their first stages after a launch. So from now on reused Falcon 9 rockets will look a little singed and snooty before their trips back into space.

Space X did have one disappointment this month. In a different launch from Kennedy Space Center on the US east coast another Falcon 9 rocket successfully sent a Dragon supply capsule to the ISS but controllers were unable to recover the rocket’s first stage. A problem with a fuel pump caused the first stage to land in the waters off Kennedy not far from its intended landing pad. This was the first recovery failure in 26 launches for Space X so in a queer way the failure almost seems like a measure of success.

First stage of a Falcon 9 lands in the water off Kennedy Space Center (Credit: News 13)

For my final story I’m going to go a good bit further out into the Solar System. NASA’s Osiris-Rex probe has been slowly approaching its target of the Asteroid Bennu until on December 4th the spacecraft could reach out with its robotic arm and literally touch the asteroid. You can’t really say that Osiris-Rex landed on Bennu, the gravity of the asteroid is too low.

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

In addition to studying Bennu over the next several months, Osiris-Rex will use is robotic arm to collect at least 60 grams of material from the asteroid which is scheduled to be returned to Earth in 2023.

And even as I was writing this post another item of space news happened with the successful launch of China’s Chang’e 4 (or Jade Rabbit in English) lunar probe. The Chang’e 4 is intended to become the first rover on the dark side of the Moon in just about three days. I guess I’ll just have to write a post about it then!

Atlantis, the lost Continent has been discovered once again for about the 100th time in my Life.

A group of adventurers based in the UK has announced the ‘discovery of Atlantis’ in a national park along the Southwest coast of Spain. Hey, it’s outside of the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ (Better know today as the Straights of Gibraltar) and there are some stones there that look like they were worked by humans, so it has to be Atlantis, right? The fact that the ‘adventurers’ are already trying to sell a documentary about their discovery tells you something about their concern for rigorous science.

Now everybody knows that it was the ancient Greek Philosopher Plato who described the ‘Island of Atlas’ in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias in about the year 360 BCE. According to Plato he heard about Atlantis from a Greek Politician named Solon who heard about it himself while on a trip to Egypt almost 300 years earlier. In other words even Plato just heard about Atlantis from a friend who heard it from a friend…and so on.

Atlantis as imagined by Athanasius Kircher in 1664. Notice that north is at the bottom! (Credit: PD)

Most scholars who study Plato, his writings and his times are of the opinion that he created Atlantis as an allegory of a state that grew too rich and powerful and which was destroyed by the Gods for its sin of pride. Except for commenting on Plato’s work, no other Greek or Roman writer mentions Atlantis, Aristotle doesn’t, nor does Herodotus. And none of the ancient Egyptian writings that have ever been discovered and translated ever mention anything like the ancient civilization described by Plato. Aside from Plato no writer of the ancient world, that we know of, gives us any description of Atlantis.

Despite having only hearsay evidence however Plato does give a lot of details about Atlantis. As I said above Atlantis was an island that lay in the waters beyond the Pillars of Hercules, that’s why we call it the Atlantic Ocean after all. Also, the main city of Atlantis was built in three circular rings with canals between each ring and there was an enormous ‘Temple of Poseidon in the very center. See artist’s impression below. As I also mentioned above, the Gods destroyed Atlantis because of its pride some 9,000 years before the time of Plato. Which would put Atlantis back in the time of the Neolithic or new Stone Age.

Atlantis as described by Plato (Credit: John Uebersax)

While nearly all historians and archaeologists discount the existence of Atlantis exactly as described by Plato the possibility that another ancient civilization may have inspired the story of Atlantis has often been seriously considered. Many Bronze Age and Early Iron Age cultures have been proposed as the source of Plato’s tales.

The Bronze age Minoans have often been suggested as the ‘Inspiration’ for Atlantis (Credit: PD)

In my opinion the ancient Minoan civilization that flourished on the Island of Crete and other islands in the Aegean Sea just about 1,000 years before Plato is the best bet. O’k Crete isn’t in the Atlantic but the Minoan’s did possess a vibrant, technologically advanced society which, according to Greek legend, did dominate mainland Greece before the Greek Heroic Age. Also, the Minoan civilization suffered a great devastation from the eruption of the volcano on the island of Thera, modern day Santorini, a destruction which resembles the fate Plato described for Atlantis.

The Volcano Thera on the Isle of Santorini just north of Crete. (Credit: Canadian Museum of History)
Some of the Minoan ruins destroyed by the Volcano Thera (Credit: Santorini)

Still there are those, the pseudo-scientists and psychics who search for an Atlantis exactly as if Plato had visited it and knew it as well as he knew his native Athens. Atlantis has been ‘found’ in the Americas, in the Arctic, the Antarctic. The Nazi’s put it in Germany of course. The search for Atlantis has become a cottage industry. Find some remains of human habitation in a place not normally thought of as an ancient civilization, like southwestern Spain, and you can claim you’ve found Atlantis. Then you can make money off of a book or documentary about your ‘discovery’.

Donana Park in southwestern Spain (Credit: Shutterstock)
Location of Donana Park in Spain (Credit: Inquirer.net)

When searching for Atlantis it’s always a good idea to employ (misinterpret?) the latest technology. The UK group making the latest claim did just that, searching for Atlantis in images taken by the Landsat 5 and Landsat 8 satellites. So the UK group will release a documentary, most of which will consist of a rehash of the ‘history’ what Plato and other people have said about Atlantis. Then a year or two from now somebody else will ‘discover Atlantis’ outside of Toledo Ohio or who knows where and the whole process will begin again.

Meanwhile, real archaeologists are making real discoveries that very few people ever get to hear about. But you will, I promise I’ll write a post about some real archaeology very soon!

 

Chinese Scientist Claims to have modified the DNA of Twin Human Girls. Has the age of Designer Babies Begun?

On November 26th a major and disturbing announcement was made by a Chinese scientist just two days before the start on an international meeting on Genome Editing was to begin in Hong Kong. In a series of five YouTube Videos Doctor He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen China claimed that he had used the gene editing technique known as CRISPR to alter the DNA of two human embryos which had since been born as “healthy” twin girls. According to Dr. He, “Two beautiful Chinese girls, Lulu and Nana, came crying into the world as healthy as any other babies a few weeks ago.”

He Jiankui in his Lab (Credit: VOA News)

The response from the scientific community was an instantaneous and universal condemnation of Dr. He’s actions. Just two days after making this stunning announcement Dr. He spoke at the International Summit on Human Genome Editing and defended his actions but the crisis among scientists in the field of genetic research has only begun and could last for years.

The Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing (Credit: The Royal Society)

So what exactly did Dr. He do and why do so many scientists consider it to be such a violation of ethical conduct?

Well first of all, Dr. He experimented on human beings in secret, without even the knowledge of his own university and against the ethical regulations of his own country. (The Chinese government has joined in the condemnation by the way.) Second, Dr. He experimented using a gene editing technique called CRISPR that is relatively new and still being studied, in other words we still don’t know either how reliable CRISPR is or what possible side effects it may cause. Third, rather than publish his work in a peer reviewed journal so that other experts could study them and comment, or criticize, he announced his “success” in a video intended to draw in other customers for his gene editing business. (Yes! Dr. He appears to actually plan on doing this as a business!) Oh, and just to add insult to injury Dr. He’s video was released only a day after researchers at Southern University of Science and Technology, including Dr. He, had published their own recommended ethical guidelines for genetic experimentation. Guidelines that Dr. He had violated before he ever signed his name to them.

How CRISPR Works (Credit: MIT)

Scientifically what Dr. He did was to take a fertilized human egg cell and use the gene editing technique CRISPR to remove a section of the DNA of the fertilized egg. (SEE my posts of 5Aug2017 and 1Sept18 for more information on CRIPSR) The section of DNA Dr. He chose to remove was a gene known as CCR5. Now scientists know that CCR5 is a gene that codes for a particular protein that the HIV virus uses to enter human cells. In other words Dr. He hopes to make Lulu and Nana immune to the Aids virus by removing CCR5 but there could be two big potential problems with his plan. First, CRIPSR is sometimes known to remove more DNA than is intended so it is very possible that Lulu and Nana have also lost a very important part of their genetic makeup. Also, while CCR5 may be the weak link that HIV uses to attack us, we don’t currently know what benefits we may get from it! Either way there is a completely unknown risk that the experiment may have caused real harm to the girl’s by changing their DNA.

How the HIV Virus enters Cells to cause AIDS (Credit: MIT)

That makes Dr. He’s claim of “healthy” twin girls dubious at best. What if five years from now the girls develop childhood leukemia, or diabetes or any of a thousand other genetic disorders? Even if Dr. He’s experiment didn’t cause the disease, how would we know that and would people believe it? Could governments react to the horror of two sick little girls by eliminating funding for gene editing research if not banning it entirely?

CRISPR holds great promise for exactly the sort of outcome Dr. He is hoping for but the risk of something going wrong at our present level of knowledge simply outweighs the possible gains. Gene editing experiments like those that employ CRISPR need to be carried out a million times with fruit flies and guppies before being tried on humans.

American biologist David Baltimore at the opening of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the University of Hong Kong, on Tuesday. The Nobel Prize winner has had harsh words for a fellow scientist who claims he has gene-editing human embryo (Credit: WMOT)

Doctor He was allowed to defend his experiment at the Genome Editing Summit but his audience was in no mood to be forgiving. A closing statement signed by all of the organizers of the summit called Dr. He’s actions ‘unexpected and deeply disturbing’ due to ‘inadequate medical indication, a poorly designed study protocol, a failure to meet ethical standards for protecting the welfare of research subjects, and a lack of transparency in the development, review and conduct of the clinical procedures.’ Tough talk for a scientific announcement.

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

So it remains to be seen whether Dr. He’s experiment will make him famous, or infamous. The Chinese government has ordered Dr. He and his team to stop all further experiments but the gene-editing genie is out of the bottle. Only time will tell if the birth of the World’s first designer babies pushes the science of gene editing forward, or causes it to crash into a solid wall!

NASA’s Insight Lander Survives ‘Seven Minutes of Terror’ and Successfully lands on the Surface on Mars.

NASA has just scored another success in its long term goal of exploring the planet Mars. The Insight space probe survived its ‘Seven Minutes of Terror’ ride through the atmosphere of Mars to a successful landing at about 2:50PM EST or 1950 hours Astronomers Time (GMT) on the 26th November 2018. Unlike NASA’s best known missions to the Martian surface Insight is not a rover vehicle but instead a stationary platform for instruments which it is hoped will discover a great deal about the interior of the red planet.

Insight’s journey to Mars began back on May 5th 2018; see launch image below, and the spacecraft traveled nearly 500 million kilometers to reach its destination. Now Mars hasn’t exactly been easy on the probes we’ve sent to study it, more than half of all missions sent there have ended in failure. One of the big reasons for this is the Martian atmosphere which is too thin to bring a spacecraft to a full stop, the way we use Earth’s atmosphere, yet it is still much thicker than the Moon’s making it difficult to use rockets all the way down.

Launch of the Insight Mars Lander 5 May 2018 (Credit: NASA)

Another reason the scientists and engineers who built Insight at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory consider the actual landing to be so nerve wracking is that they have no way of controlling Insight during those dangerous seven minutes. All that the people at Mission Control can do is watch while the spacecraft either performs each of the steps programmed into it at just the right moment, or the whole mission fails.

You see, as the spacecraft enters Mars’ atmosphere the planet is about eight light-minutes distance from Earth. That means that it takes any signal from Insight eight minutes to reach Earth and be received. So if anything does go wrong by the time Mission Control knows about it, and a correction can be sent back to Insight 16 minutes will have passed and the spacecraft will be nothing more than a hole in the Martian surface.

Breakdown of the Insight Probe during its voyage to Mars (Credit: NASA)

The sequence of events actually begins just before Insight hits the atmosphere as the spacecraft’s cruise stage and backshell are discarded. These protected the lander during its voyage from earth while providing it with power, see image above. Entering the atmosphere at about 20,000 kilometers per hour air resistance caused the spacecraft’s heat shield temperature to rise to more than 5,000 degrees Celsius. Once the craft had been slowed to about 1,500 kph a parachute was deployed and the heat shield detached.

At this point the lander’s legs deployed and its onboard radar began to measure the remaining distance to the ground. When the radar measured the distance as 600 meters Insight released its parachute and used 12 small rockets to control its descent the rest of the way.

Artists Illustration of the Landing of Insight (Credit: NASA)

Now remember, because of the time delay in a radio signal traveling from Mars to Earth by the time Mission Control had received the signal that Insight had entered the atmosphere the lander was actually already safely on the ground. Think of that; imagine yourself in Mission Control watching as the telemetry comes in. Everything looks good but your information is eight minutes late. You have no idea if anything went wrong after the signals you’re looking at were sent. You can only hope for the best!

Insight did land safely however, the landing went flawlessly and five minutes after JPL received the signal that the landing was accomplished the probe sent back its first image, see below. The image is covered with dust because of particles kicked up by the landing but you can see the Marian sky at the top along with something of the ground around the lander. Once the protective lens cover was removed the second image is much clearer, also below.

The First Image sent back to Earth by the Insight Lander (Credit: NASA)
Insight’s First Clear Picture (Credit: NASA)

So Insight is on the Martian surface, its solar panels have been deployed to provide it with power, and soon it will be ready to deploy its instruments and begin its scientific mission. See image of lander below.

The Insight Lander (Credit: NASA)

That mission is to study what goes on beneath the surface of Mars and learn some of the secrets of the Martian interior. The lander’s instruments include a seismograph and a temperature probe that could drill down as far as five meters below the surface. Instruments such as these have before now only been deployed on the Earth and Moon, by the Apollo astronauts.

With the landing of the Insight probe the pace of Mars exploration seems to be gaining momentum, and not just on Mars. Here on Earth people are once again becoming excited by space travel. Whereas just a few years ago a space mission would barely get a mention on the news the Insight landing was covered live by both CNN and FOX. And there’s still more to come. On new years day of 2019 the New Horizons spacecraft, which has already visited Pluto, will pass by the Kuiper belt object Ultima Thule and mid next year astronauts will once again fly into space from America soil.

I’m sure the news media will be covering that!

Advanced new design of Photoelectric Cell converts 85% of Sunlight into Electricity.

We’re all familiar with Photoelectric or Solar Cells, those shiny black squares or rectangles that produce electricity whenever light falls on them. Many portable electronic devices such as radios, calculators and even traffic signals get their power from solar cells while if you cover the roof of a home or building with them they can provide most of the power that building uses. And let’s not forget all of the satellites in outer space that are powered by solar arrays, not to mention the International Space Station itself.

This Home must have a low Electric Bill with all of those Solar Cells on the Roof (Credit: New Atlas)
Solar Cells Power the Hubble Space Telescope (Credit: Astronomy Now)

The history of photoelectricity actually goes back to some of the earliest experiments with electricity. In 1873 Willoughby Smith described ‘The Effect of light on Selenium during the Passage of an Electric Current’ while in 1883 Charles Fritts built a solid-state photovoltaic cell by coating the semiconductor selenium with gold to act as the + terminals.

It was Albert Einstein who figured out what was going on. Light, Einstein realized, was made up of subatomic particles and like all particles they had some momentum to them. This momentum could knock electrons away from their atoms and start them moving in an electric current. This is the theory for which he actually won his Nobel Prize.

The Photoelectric Effect (Credit: Pinterest)

Starting around the 1960s people began to realize that the world’s oil supply wasn’t going to last forever and besides burning oil was causing all kinds of pollution that were damaging the Earth. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to get our power directly from sunlight by means of photoelectric cells?

Problem, or rather a trio of problems quickly became apparent. The first is that, while the power in all of the sunlight falling on Earth is tremendous it’s also rather spread out so you have to cover a large area with solar cells to get appreciable amounts of power. The second problem compounds the first because solar cells aren’t very efficient. Only 10-15% of the energy of the light was converted into electricity, meaning you needed to cover an even bigger area to get the power you needed. Finally the third problem was simply price, in the 1960s photoelectric cells were very expensive to manufacture, mainly because no one had ever tried to produce them in large quantities.

It was the third problem that was solved first. Looking at the chart below you can see how the price of solar cells, per watt of power produced had dropped from $76 dollars in 1977 to about $3 dollars in 2010. Much of this reduction in price came about from improvements in the semi-conductor industry in general. You may not know it but solar cells are manufactured with much the same equipment and in much the same way as the silicon chips running your computer as you read this! So the reductions in the price of integrated circuits over the last 40 years has helped to reduce the price of solar cells at the same time.

The Price of Solar Cells
in Dollars per Watt of Output Power (Credit: Wikipedia)

There has also been considerable improvement in efficiency over the last 45 years. Starting with efficiencies below 10% in 1975 new materials and new construction techniques have enabled researchers to make steady, incremental increases in efficiency until now efficiencies close to 50% are possible. The chart below, which details this progress is complicated but worth trying to understand.

The Improvements in Solar Cell Efficiency (Credit: Wikipedia)

Some new developments may improve the situation even more because a group of materials scientists have announced the development of a solar cell that converts 85% of the light that falls on it into electricity. The team is led by Professor Hiroaki Misawa of the Research Institute for Electronic Science at Hokkaido University and has produced a solar cell that consists of a sandwich of materials 30 nanometers thick. See diagram below.

The 85% Efficient Photoelectrode (Credit: Hiroaki Misawa)

Starting with a substrate of Silicon Dioxide (SiO2) on which is placed a layer of gold film. Next comes a layer of the semiconductor Titanium Dioxide (TiO2) and finally a smattering of gold nano-particles are placed on top. What happens is that light passes through the smattering of gold nano-particles; the TiO2 absorbs some while the full layer of gold reflects the rest back into the TiO2 which absorbs some more! The light continues to bounce back and forth with some more getting absorbed in each reflection.

The question right now is, can these new solar cells be produced cheaply enough, in large enough quantities. Maybe, or maybe other scientists will discover other arrangements of materials that produce the same efficiency. In either case we are getting closer to the goal of directly using the power of the Sun to produce the electricity our civilization becomes more dependent on every day.

 

Two Stories from the World of Physics.

Back on August the 17th of last year, 2017, the LIGO and Virgo gravity wave observatories not only succeeded in detecting an enormously powerful astronomical event but for the first time they were able to locate the position of the event in Earth’s sky so that other instruments, optical and radio telescopes could observe it as well. I talked about this combination of observations in my post of 22 October 2017 entitled “The Gravity Waves of 17Aug17 become the most Thoroughly Studied Astronomical Event Ever!”

Since then astronomers and astrophysicists have had a year to try and make sense of their observations and a new paper by Maurice van Putten of Sejong University in South Korea and Massimo Della Valle of Inst. Astrofisica de Andalucia in Grenada Spain has provided an almost milli-second by milli-second account of what happened. The event, which had been given the designation GW170817 (for Gravity Wave of 17 August 2017) was first detected by the gravity wave observatories as a powerful ‘chirp’ of ascending frequency as shown in the graph below.

Plot of the Measured Gravity Waves of GW170817 (Credit: Putten and Valle)

Later examination of the data found the ascending note, beneath and to the right of the upward pointing arrow, was immediately followed by a softer descending note, beneath and to the left of the downward pointing arrow. Then, just 1.7 seconds after the peak of the gravity wave the Fermi-Gamma Ray Burst satellite detected a sudden spike in gamma particles, see graph below.

The Gamma Ray Burst Detected by the Fermi Satellite (Credit: Putten and Valle)
The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope (Credit: Youtube)

By their detailed analysis of the data Doctors van Putter and Valle have concluded that GW170817 was the merger of two massive neutron stars that did not form a black hole as was originally thought. The descending note is the clincher for this, after all if nothing can escape a black hole then how did that descending frequency gravity wave pattern get out? Astronomers believe that the now combined neutron star could still collapse further and become a black hole. In that case LIGO and Virgo may detect further gravity waves coming from there.

Perhaps the best part of the event of 17Aug17 is that since this is the first time we’ve been able to combine the data from many different observations that means we’re probably going to get better with practice. No one knows what we’ll learn from future events but I know that I can’t wait to find out!

 

Our second story involves the initial plans for a next generation ‘Atom Smasher’ that will be four times the size, and more than four times as powerful as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and we may actually get two of them. It was several weeks ago that the scientists at CERN submitted their initial proposal to the European Union for a 100 km in circumference ‘Future Circular Collider’ to replace the LHC. Just this week however, the Chinese government has announced its plans to build an identically sized particle accelerator in their country.

In recent years China has been spending a lot of money on scientific research but this is the first attempt by the People’s Republic to take the lead in high-energy physics. Unlike the collider at CERN, which smashes protons into protons traveling in the opposite direction, the Chinese propose a Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) in which electrons will smash into anti-electrons. Both of the proposed accelerators would produce Higgs particles by the millions allowing a much more precise measurement of their properties.

Proposed Layout of China’s CEPC (Credit: CERN)

There are implications to the Chinese collider beyond physics however. The international physics community has for years been concerned about China’s human rights record including the way thousands of ordinary Chinese citizens have been forced out of their homes in order to make room for large scale project like the CEPC. There has also been concern about recent political developments in China such as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s removal of term limits, which will allow him to remain in power indefinitely. So the question is: How far should the International Scientific community go in cooperating with the People’s Republic?

China’s President Xi Jinping has extended his country’s power and influence but at the cost of Human Rights (Credit: PD)

That’s a question that’s going to be a lot harder to answer than most physics problems!

Back From the Field Night at The Academy of Natural Sciences.

Last night, 8November2018, I was privileged as a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philadelphia to attend their annual ‘Back From the Field’ night where the Academy’s scientists present an overview of their research accomplishments during the past year. The whole affair is informal however with scientists and members mingling together while discussing the scientific results. (See my post of 4February2017 for more about the Academy)

Logo of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (Credit: ANSP)

Since the Academy resides here in Philadelphia it’s not surprising that many of its scientists concentrate their work in an around the Delaware River valley, studying the health of our local environment and all of the species of life that call it home. At least an equal number however are world travelers, visiting lands as diverse as Cuba, the Philippines, Mongolia and even Antarctica.

The gathering was held in the Academy’s hall of dinosaurs which displays, along with other dino specimens, the bones of Hadrosaurus foulkii, the first dinosaur skeleton discovered in the western hemisphere. While many of the specimens on display last night were even older than the dinosaurs just as many were of species living today.

The First Dinosaur Skeleton Discovered in the USA, Hadrosaurus foulkii at the Academy (Credit: ANSP)

Doctor Dane Ward of Drexel University’s Department of Biodiversity even brought a special treat with him. You see Dr. Ward spent several months over the summer studying a species of small, sting less honeybee found only in Cuba. According to Dr. Ward the honey produced by this Cuban bee is far superior to that of the common European honeybee.

Dr. Ward gave a sample of this honey to the bartender so that he could make a mixed drink unknown out side of Cuba called the Canchanchara. Needless to say I had to give the canchanchara a try and it certainly was quite tasty.

Made with Honey from Cuban Bees the Canchanchara is quite tasty (Credit: Cubatrotter)

The amount of scientific research being carried out by these scientists was too large for me to give more than a brief mention here. There was a team of ichthyologists, scientists who study fish, who are using aerial drones to obtain a census of sea lamprey nests along the banks of the Delaware River. Then there was the team of entomologists; they study insects, who had discovered several new species of grasshopper.

The Sea Lamprey is an ancient, jawless fish that comes into Rivers to Spawn (credit: Holyoke Gas & Electric)

Still another team was studying snails in the Philippines. This research could prove to be very import because remember the Philippines are hundreds of islands. The distribution of snails across all of these islands is very complex with some species of snail inhabiting only a single island while another species can be spread across a dozen or more. The work of trying to work out that puzzle may tell us a great deal about exactly how the forces of evolution split single populations into separate species.

As you can see there was plenty of worth while science to sample but I don’t think that I’ll be surprising any of my regular readers if I tell you that I spent most of my time talking to the paleontologists. Both Doctors Ted Daeschler of Drexel University and Jason Downs of Delaware Valley University are doing their research on fishes of the Devonian. Dr. Downs has been searching for specimens in the cold northern reaches of Canada and has discovered two new species of ancient fish.

Bothriolepis rex is a new species of Ancient Fish discovered by Dr. Downs (Credit: Wikipedia)

Funny thing is though, that area in Canada was originally surveyed for fossils by a team that was co-lead by Dr. Daeschler, in fact it’s the same area where Dr. Daeschler discovered Tiktaalik, a ‘missing link’ between fish and land vertebrates. Dr. Daeschler may no longer be working in Canada but he must like cold weather because in three weeks time he’s headed for the Antarctic to conduct a more thorough survey of some Devonian outcrops he discovered just last year.

Tiktaalik, the ‘Missing Link’ between Fish and Land Vertebrates (Credit: NPR)

I hope that the things I’ve been discussing have served to whet your appetite for learning more about science. I know that here in Philadelphia I have access to a large number of different centers of science but every large city has its own science museums. O’k so maybe you don’t live in a large city, well many national wildlife refuges or state parks will have a nature center and the people who are working there to help save many threatened species would love to tell you all about it.

Learning about science, about how science is done and who are the people doing it is important for anyone who wants to be an informed citizen but more than that it just fun. That’s right, as far as I’m concerned learning about something new is just about the best time a person can have. What don’t you give it a try?  I leave you today with a link to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, take at look at what they have to offer!

https://www.ansp.org/