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An international team of scientists has studied the causes of religious conflict using a modeling system based on cognitive psychology.

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Credit: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts

Religion is often said to be at the root of the world’s conflicts, but what if mankind were simply naturally violent? How might we begin to understand the circumstances that trigger spasms of religious violence in the first place?

Artificial intelligence has emerged as one method for doing so.

In a first-of-its-kind research study published this week, scientists unveiled a newly developed AI system that combines computer modeling and cognitive psychology to simulate the phenomenon of human religiosity on a large scale. The goal of the system is to help social scientists better understand the conditions and triggers that lead to religious violence — and perhaps even prevent it.

Appearing in The Journal for Artificial Societies and Social Stimulation, the study was designed by an international team of computer scientists and sociologists from the University of Oxford, Boston University, and the University of Agder in Norway.

The research team created a virtual society populated with millions of sims — human model agents that were programmed to react and behave as real humans, using core principles of cognitive psychology. The sims were assigned different ages, races, and ethnicities, along with sets of core beliefs, identity characteristics, and “sacred values.”

RELATED: How Does Religion Manifest in Your Brain?


Previous studies have taken a similar route to modeling human behavior and ethics on a large scale, but this AI system introduces a new element. Rather than employ the usual machine-learning algorithms that power typical AI systems, the study incorporates “psychological AI” systems to mimic how human beings actually think and process information.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

“Ultimately, to use AI to study religion or culture, we have to look at modeling human psychology, because our psychology is the foundation for religion and culture,” said researcher Justin E. Laned in a statement. “The root causes of things like religious violence rest in how our minds process the information that our world presents it.”

The team programmed rules for cognitive interaction within the AI simulation to show how an individual’s beliefs match up with a group situation. Some of the AI human models were programmed to have had positive experiences with people from other faiths, while others had negative or neutral encounters.

The researchers then set about running the simulation through various scenarios using groups of human sims in various group sizes involving hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people. The simulated environments generated probabilities that the sims would encounter various environmental hazards, such as natural disasters and disease — and at some point, each other.

RELATED: Artificial Intelligence Is Mapping the Pacific Ocean’s Secret Soundscape

The study found that people are generally peaceful, working together when faced with disasters, but also revealed that long periods of mutually escalating xenophobic tension occur when outgroup members deny another group’s core beliefs or sacred values.

“Religious violence is not our default behavior — in fact, it is pretty rare in our history,” said study co-author Justin Lane.

“It is only when people’s core belief systems are challenged, or they feel that their commitment to their own beliefs is questioned, that anxiety and agitations occur,” says the study’s accompanying materials. “However, this anxiety only led to violence in 20 percent of the scenarios created — all of which were triggered by people from either outside of the group, or within, going against the group’s core beliefs and identity.”

The AI system was informed by two historical periods of religious violence: A Northern Ireland conflict that claimed the lives of more than 3,500 people, which is commonly known as “the Troubles”; and the 2002 Gujurat riots in India in which Hindus clashed with Muslims, killing at least 1,000 people, most of them Muslims.

The ultimate goal of the AI system, researchers said, is to provide a digital model of society — one in which social scientists can study the escalation of violence over time, and how to best manage such crises. This would potentially equip governments with a tool that could offer guidance on how to respond to problems before they escalate.


New data from the European Space Agency explains why some stars are going the wrong way, galactically speaking.

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Credit: Getty Images

The Milky Way has a dark secret.

According to new data beamed in from European research spacecraft, our Milky Way galaxy encountered and devoured another nearby galaxy around 10 billion years ago.

More precisely, the Milky Way collided with the second galaxy, absorbing many of its stars and spiraling out a chaotic tangle of stellar matter — birthing new stars, altering the orbits of others, and sending some in the opposite direction of the Milky Way's own rotation.

That last bit provided the first clue to astronomers, who have long observed that some stars in our home galaxy are essentially going the wrong way, moving against the trailing arms of the galaxy. Other stars have been observed to spin in strange clusters, bolstering the theory that the Milky Way is actually the result of a number of previous mergers and meals.

New research published in the journal Nature confirms that a good number of these rogue stars have a common origin — a deceased galaxy dubbed Gaia-Enceladus. It also suggests that our galaxy was largely formed by a few big collisions, rather than a lot of smaller ones, which helps answer a question that has occupied astronomers for years.

Credit: ESA

The discovery was made by an international team of researchers led by Amina Helmi, an astronomer with the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Helmi has spent most of her career studying the Milky Way for “fossil stars” that provide clues to the ultimate origin of our galaxy. She has pioneered a specific approach to the mystery by combining analysis of the stars’ placement, trajectory, and chemical compositions.

RELATED:  A Survey of the Milky Way Is Searching for the Sun’s Stray Siblings


The new research provides hard evidence for previous theories concerning the ancient galactic collisions. That evidence comes largely from data sent by the Gaia satellite mission, a major initiative from the European Space Agency.

The Gaia satellite, launched in 2013, recently beamed back a colossal chunk of new data detailing the position, brightness, and motion of more than 1.3 billion stars in the Milky Way. Helmi and her team have been crunching the numbers since April.

Credit: ESA

In materials issued with the new research, Helmi said that the chemical signature of many wrong-way stars was demonstrably different than “native” Milky Way stars.

“And they are a fairly homogeneous group, which indicates they share a common origin,” she said. “The youngest stars from Gaia-Enceladus are actually younger than the native Milky Way stars in what is now the thick disk region. This means that the progenitor of this thick disk was already present when the fusion happened, and Gaia-Enceladus, because of its large size, shook it and puffed it up.”


RELATED: Thousands of Black Holes Occupy the Center of the Milky Way

Size is a tricky concept when working on the galactic scale, but Helmi’s team estimate that Gaia-Enceladus, the dearly departed galaxy, was slightly more massive than the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMG), a dwarf galaxy with a total solar mass about one percent of the Milky Way. (By the way, the Milky Way is slowly eating the SMG, too.)

An interesting final note: When Helmi finally pieced together all the data from the Gaia info dump, she discovered that the numbers looked awfully familiar. They reminded Helmi of simulations performed by a former Ph.D. student more than ten years ago. The student’s simulations of the merging of a large disc-shaped galaxy with the young Milky Way produced results that were totally in line with the Gaia data.

“It was amazing to look at the new Gaia data,” Helmi said, “and realize that I had seen it before.”
 

The space-age alternative energy source may be on the verge of a breakthrough.

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Credit: Ken Filar

Anyone looking for a bright side in the climate crisis may want to learn about a potentially revolutionary research project that could help redefine energy as we know it.

Researchers are gathering at a meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics in Portland, Oregon, this week to deliver a kind of state-of-the-science report on fusion energy, the space-age technology that promises essentially infinite and carbon-free electrical power.

Scientists from MIT and the privately funded energy company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) are presenting critical updates on their SPARC project, an effort to manufacture the world’s first fusion power generator. If successful, the accomplishment could, like the Wright brothers’ first flights at Kitty Hawk, change everything.

Fusion energy is a form of power generation in which energy is produced through controlled nuclear fusion reactions, which is essentially the same process that powers the sun and other stars. Fusion occurs when the nuclei of small atoms bind together (or fuse) into a single, larger atom, releasing colossal amounts of energy in the process.

For terrestrial utility purposes, that energy can then be harnessed to provide the heat required for various kinds of electricity generation. A fusion energy plant could potentially operate entirely carbon-free and issue very little waste material, while at the same time offering ridiculously powerful energy yields. Theoretically, it would be the ultimate alternative energy source, deriving power from the same process that lights up the cosmos.

RELATED: How Close Are We to Fusion Energy?

But generating fusion energy on Earth presents some daunting challenges. The process requires superheating a dense plasma of subatomic particles inside a fusion device called a tokamak at extremely high temperatures — like, inside-of-a-star kind of temperatures, millions of degrees Fahrenheit, which is too intense for solid materials to contain.

Small fusion reactions, isolated from ordinary matter within magnetic fields, have been produced in labs. But so far, the conditions for net energy gain haven’t been achieved.


Credit: MIT/PSFC

The trick, scientists hope, is to strengthen those magnetic fields. In the initial three-year phase of their collaboration, SPARC researchers are trying to build the world’s most powerful superconducting magnet, which in turn could make possible the world’s first viable fusion generator by increasing its effectiveness while reducing its volume and cost.

“By putting the magnet development up front, we think that this gives you a really solid answer in three years,” said Dennis Whyte, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, in March, “and gives you a great amount of confidence moving forward that you’re giving yourself the best possible chance of answering the key question, which is: Can you make net energy from a magnetically confined plasma?”

The building of magnets at the necessary scale will require a new class of high-temperature superconductors — and the big news is that the SPARC has figured this out. Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity with absolutely no electrical resistance, so no energy is lost. The catch is that in order for them to do so, superconductors need to be very cold, maintaining a temperature below a critical threshold.

The SPARC team says that it has found a way to manufacture breakthrough high-temperature superconductors in the form of “tapes” or “ribbons” that will enable fusion at scale. But they have yet to be incorporated into appropriately sized magnets and aren’t suited to existing fusion machines.

RELATED: ‘Star in a Jar’ Fusion Reactor Works and Promises Infinite Energy

After creating a superconducting magnet with unprecedented performance, the next step will be to design and construct the long-anticipated SPARC fusion reactor, which will aim to produce more energy than it consumes. The MIT and CFS researchers expect that SPARC will be running by 2025, with a modest output of between 50MW and 100MW, which is roughly enough to power a small city.

But SPARC is just an experiment. The idea is that its demonstration will lead to the building of a net-electricity producing fusion pilot plant and, in turn, a new class of commercial fusion power plants.

Other experimental reactors of this type are already in development around the world, but with climate change troubles approaching fast, the SPARC crew is working to dramatically speed up development on their iteration of the technology.

According to MIT’s online project page, a successful run of the SPARC reactor “will demonstrate that fusion energy can be developed in time to provide carbon-free power to combat climate change.”

The billion-dollar question, of course, is when. MIT scientists believe that a viable fusion pilot plant could be built and plugged into the grid in about 15 years.

The discovery provides greater evidence for rocky worlds in our galaxy.

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Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

A team of astronomers has found strong indications of a cold super-Earth orbiting Barnard’s Star, the second-closest star system to our sun.

The frozen world is at least 3.2 times the mass of Earth and is only six light-years away, according to a study based on the research that was published in Nature.

It’s a find of special significance, following the recent detection of an Earth-mass planet orbiting the closest star to us, Proxima Centauri. The two discoveries show greater evidence for rocky worlds in our galactic neighborhood.

“We have recently learned from the Kepler space telescope that small planets appear to be common, but Kepler surveyed a small patch of sky, and found planets around stars [that are] hundreds if not thousands of times farther away than Barnard’s star,” said co-author Johanna Teske, a postdoctoral exoplanetary scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

“So we are still to some extent left wondering, how common are small planets much closer to home? This result, on the heels of the Proxima Centauri b discovery, adds evidence to small planets being common everywhere in the galaxy, including around the nearest stars to us.”

RELATED: This Rocky Exoplanet Is the Most Likely to Support Life

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

While Barnard’s Star is large and bright in telescopes, finding this world in the star’s orbit was a significant challenge. Scientists identified the planet by tracking the motion of the star as it moved closer and farther from Earth. Fortunately, there are many observational sets for Barnard’s Star, using state-of-the-art planet-seeking instruments. Past surveys had found hints of a planet, but astronomers were interested in finding some really solid data.

The solution was to use the CARMENES instrument, which analyzes light to such sensitivity that it detected wobbles in Barnard’s Star as small as human walking speed. (CARMENES stands for a complicated set of words — Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Échelle Spectrographs — which basically refer to looking for small, Earth-sized planets near red dwarf stars.)

CARMENES is installed at the 3.5m telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain, and it’s a new entry to planet-seeking instruments, having only seen “first light” in 2016. But the researchers were able to use it for a lengthy observing campaign between 2016 and 2017. Once they added in the work from CARMENES to the other data sets, Teske said, the researchers saw enough validity in the data to publish the results.

RELATED: Proxima Centauri's Origins Could Mean Its Exoplanet Really Is Habitable

“This discovery was very challenging — the velocity of the signal detected is similar if not slower than the average human walking speed — and required the collaboration between independent groups to combine many data sets that spanned tens of years,” Teske explained. “So, I think this discovery points towards the power and necessity of collaborating across teams, as well as intense observing campaigns like that of CARMENES.”

Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2 Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin

Now that this planet appears to be a real world, Teske says that there are many unanswered questions she hopes to resolve quickly, such as what the surface is made of, or if it has an atmosphere. One thing astronomers are confident about, though, is that this new planet is not habitable. It orbits too far from its parent star to get enough warmth for liquid water on its surface.

These questions could be answered by a future instrument that could take direct images of close-up planets, such as NASA’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) telescope, which is slated to launch in the 2020s. (The project is in some flux since the Trump administration requested its cancellation in NASA’s 2019 budget, but the telescope work continues under a spending bill.)

Teske said that there are hints that there might be another planet around Barnard’s Star, although it’s difficult to determine if the signal that investigators saw is from the star itself or from another planet. The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission could eventually shed light on this question, since the spacecraft is designed to precisely track the movements of stars.

Finding a planet near Barnard’s Star shows the value of combining a bunch of datasets on planet searching, something that is already ongoing with the Red Dots campaign, whose goal is to find terrestrial planets at stars nearby our own sun.

“I hope we can contribute to more discoveries like this — small planets around nearby stars,” Teske said, “to ultimately help answer the question, how unique is Earth?”

The OSIRIS-Rex mission is preparing to retrieve material from the asteroid Bennu using a special robotic arm.

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Credit: NASA

NASA has an asteroid hunter ready to snag precious cargo from the surface of a space rock. Named after an Egyptian deity of the afterlife, OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) will make its first approach by asteroid Bennu on Dec. 3.

Riding onboard is a special robotic arm built by Lockheed Martin that will collect samples from the asteroid in mid-2020. The ultimate goal is to gather 60 grams of material through a special scoop-and-stoop procedure that will see the spacecraft passing just above the asteroid with its arm extended toward the ground.

Scientists are very interested in asteroids because these space rocks represent what the solar system used to look like, before planets and moons grew from the accumulated dust and gas scattered around our solar system. With 60 grams of material available, the plan is to give out some of it to scientists in different labs, affording diverse views of the asteroid material.

The inspiration for the arm first came to Lockheed flight system design engineer Jim Harris, who built the arm prototype in his garage a decade ago and tested it by picking up gravel on his driveway. From there, the prototype evolved into a sophisticated instrument that is already flexing its muscles in space as it approaches Bennu.

RELATED: 
Hayabusa2 Eyes Difficult Landing on Asteroid Ryugu’s Rocky Surface

OSIRIS-REx, which was also built by Lockheed Martin, will spend more than a year carefully mapping Bennu. Scientists will learn about the asteroid’s gravity and topography through pictures and lidar, a sort of radar that uses laser ranging or imaging. After surveying the asteroid, the landing team will select a touchdown site for the arm to scoop up material.

“We’re looking for something like a sandy beach with pebbles on it, something without large obstructions or large boulders,” said Estelle Church, Lockheed Martin’s deputy led of the spacecraft arm, which is called TAGSAM (Touch and Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism).

The ideal landing site will have a clear zone at least 25 meters (82 feet) in radius, with rocks no more than two centimeters (0.7 inches) in diameter.

“We need a fairly large TAGSAM site because we don’t know exactly where we’re going to land in it, and we need to have rocks that are the right size for the sample,” Church explained in an interview with Seeker.

RELATED: An Ancient Asteroid Beyond Neptune Sheds Light on the Early Universe

When the time is right, the spacecraft will make its approach to Bennu with the arm extended. As the arm touches the surface, a nitrogen gas mechanism will fire to kick up dust. Dust should then stick to a sample “head” that’s attached to the arm. The arm includes a pogo-stick mechanism that will push the spacecraft away from Bennu rapidly, similarly to how floating astronauts use their arms or legs to push away from a wall.

The spacecraft will execute three of these touch-and-go procedures before locking up the sample and heading back to Earth, arriving sometime in 2023. It’s a little different from how Japan’s Hayabusa2 will pick up asteroid material at Itokawa in 2020. That mission will use a sampling horn that picks up material after the spacecraft fires a bullet into the surface to stir up the particles, Church said.

While TAGSAM’s starring role won’t come for a couple of years, Church’s team wants to make sure that the arm is ready. In late October, it successfully tried moving the arm for the first time in space. The next big step is scheduled for Wednesday (Nov. 14), when the arm’s full capabilities for motion and imaging will be tested.

Church called the test “a very significant and exciting milestone for Lockheed Martin.” Of course, if the arm works as planned, it will also be an important milestone for NASA. This mission is the first time the agency will have its own asteroid sample material to examine on Earth.

Researchers have developed a new class of propeller-shaped nanorobots that can swim through the eyeball's dense tissue.

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Credit: Getty Images

You know those little motes or floaters you that you sometimes see moving in your vision? Well, someday very soon, those could be robots.

An international team of medical researchers has unveiled a new class of medical nanobots that can “swim” through the thick vitreous tissue of the eyeball. The propeller-shaped robots are designed to deliver medicine to precise locations in the eye.

The nanobots have so far only been tested in model systems and dissected animal eyeballs, but the plan is to eventually deploy the technology in clinics, giving doctors a new way to treat a variety of ophthalmological ailments.

The new robots were developed at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, with input from researchers in Denmark and China. Details on the emerging technology were recently published in the journal Science Advances under the rather evocative title, “A swarm of slippery micropropellers penetrates the vitreous body of the eye.”

While similar nanobots have been developed for moving though other parts of the body — the bloodstream and the gastrointestinal tract, say — the Planck bots are the first to be designed specifically for the human eyeball. The project is part of a larger initiative to design extremely small robots that can achieve targeted drug delivery inside of dense biological tissue.

RELATED: Corkscrew Nanobots Drill Though Blocked Arteries

The eyebots are definitely small — microscopic, in fact. At about 500 nanometers wide, they’re around 200 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. That’s smaller than most bacteria, researchers say, and it’s just the right size for sliding around in the complex molecular matrix of the eyeball.

Credit: Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

One of the major design challenges was to find a way to keep the bots, which move like a corkscrew, from getting entangled in the eyeball’s mesh of biological molecules. The solution involved adding a kind of non-stick coating. Oddly enough, the Planck team turned to the world of plants to solve that problem.

“For the coating we look to nature for inspiration,” said Zhiguang Wu, first author on the study, in a statement. “We applied a liquid layer found on the carnivorous pitcher plant, which has a slippery surface to catch insects.”

Wu said that the synthetic non-stick layer is similar to the Teflon coating of a frying pan.

“This slippery coating is crucial for the efficient propulsion of our robots inside the eye,” he said, “as it minimizes the adhesion between the biological protein network in the vitreous and the surface of our nanorobots.”

RELATED: DNA Robots Sort and Carry Molecular Cargo

For movement, the eyebots rely on a standard system used by other kinds of medical nanobots: magnets. Each of the bots has propeller-shaped elements that are seeded with tiny metal particles. Those particles respond to an external magnetic field, controlled by the doctor, which ultimately guides the robot to the desired location in the eye.

To test the new technology, the Planck team carried out a series of experiments using dissected pig eyeballs. Using a small needle, the team injected tens of thousands of the bots into the eyeball’s vitreous humor. They then used the magnetic fields to rotate each bot’s individual nanopropeller, guiding the entire swarm to the retina.

The next step in the research is to load the nanobots with cargo and test out different kinds of drugs and medicines. The idea is to deploy a nanobot eyeball swarm — savor that phrase for a moment — to deliver treatments within the eye without the need for surgery or other invasive techniques.

“We want to be able to use our nanopropellers as tools in the minimally-invasive treatment of all kinds of diseases,” said co-author Tian Qiu, “where the problematic area is hard to reach and surrounded by dense tissue.”

MIT engineers achieved sustained flight with an aircraft that uses no fossil fuels, no turbines, and no propellers.

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Credit: MIT

Every now and again, a technological development transforms a classic sci-fi trope from science fiction into science fact. Think orbital space stationsflying cars, and tractor beams.

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology added to that growing list this week with the unveiling of an ion-powered aircraft that can fly with absolutely no moving parts.

Inspired in part by the technology of Star Trek, the MIT aircraft is powered by a relatively obscure principle known as ion propulsion or electroaerodynamic thrust. With ion propulsion, nanoscale particles move invisibly and silently between two sets of adjacent electrodes, generating a reaction force as per Newton's third law. Cranked up with enough voltage, the “ionic wind” system can produce enough thrust to propel a small aircraft in steady and sustained flight.

“This is the first-ever sustained flight of a plane with no moving parts in the propulsion system,” said Steven Barrett, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, in a statement. “This has potentially opened new and unexplored possibilities for aircraft which are quieter, mechanically simpler, and do not emit combustion emissions.”

RELATED: Airbikes, Hexcopters, and Rotorcraft: The Future of Personal Flying Machines

According to details published this week in the journal Nature, the current MIT prototype aircraft is a lightweight glider that weighs in at about five pounds and has a five-foot wingspan. The fuselage carries a series of lithium-polymer batteries and a power converter that can generate up to 40,000 volts of electricity.

The voltage is pumped into an array of thin wires that are strung along and beneath the front end of the glider wings. A similar set of thicker wires is strung along the back of the wings. Once the front wires are powered up, they attract surrounding air molecules and strip away negatively charged electrons — that's the ionization part.

The remaining molecules, now ionized, are attracted to the negatively charged electrodes in the wires at the back of the wing. As the ions rush toward the wires, they sweep adjacent air molecules with them, generating thrust. That's the ionic wind, and it's essentially the same kind of force generated by a turbine or propeller.

In a series of indoor tests, the MIT team was able to fly the five-pound glider in sustained 60-meter short hops multiple times. That was all the room they had to work with in the testing facility, but it's enough to generate significant hope for the basic design strategy.

"This was the simplest possible plane we could design that could prove the concept that an ion plane could fly," Barrett said. "It's still some way away from an aircraft that could perform a useful mission. It needs to be more efficient, fly for longer, and fly outside."

Near-term applications for the technology could include the development of a new class of silent drone aircraft. Down the line, the team hopes to combine ion propulsion with traditional thrust systems to create larger hybrid aircraft, potentially even cargo and passenger planes.

RELATED: This Space Age-Looking Flying Car Actually Flies

The basic principle of ion propulsion was first discovered in the 1920s, and it's been a popular area for flight hobbyists who create ultralight model aircraft wired to a voltage source. You can often find these kinds of ionocraft projects at science fairs and aeronautic events.

Barrett said that inspiration for the MIT plane came from this tradition, with a little push from the Star Trek sci-fi series. Barrett was a fan as a kid, and was particularly interested in the landing shuttles that appeared to move through space (or planetary atmosphere) with no apparent moving parts.

“This made me think, in the long-term future, planes shouldn't have propellers and turbines,” Barrett said. “They should be more like the shuttles in Star Trek, that have just a blue glow and silently glide.”

Barrett started noodling with the concept of an ion propulsion systems about nine years ago.

“It was a sleepless night in a hotel when I was jet-lagged, and I was thinking about this and started searching for ways it could be done,” he said. “I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and found that, yes, it might become a viable propulsion system. It turned out it needed many years of work to get from that to a first test flight.”

Going forward, Barrett's team is hoping to increase the efficiency of their design by figuring out a way to generate more thrust with less voltage. Barrett said he's also interested in finding out out whether ion propulsion could lead to a different kind of aircraft, such as fixed-wing fliers with no visible propulsion system or controls surfaces such as rudders and elevators.

“It took a long time to get here,” Barrett said. “Now the possibilities for this kind of propulsion system are viable.”

Ben and Crew Confront the End of Historic World Record Attempt but Remain Determined to Capture Valuable Scientific Data in Uncharted Ocean Corridor

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Ben Lecomte is nearing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - but, after facing unprecedented storms in the Pacific, the boat’s mainsail suffered irreparable damages. The broken sail is a devastating blow to Ben’s record effort, yet he and the crew are determined to gather unique ocean data from the garbage patch and entry corridor.

Ben started his journey in Choshi, Japan on June 5, 2018 en route to San Francisco, CA in an effort to be the first person to swim across the Pacific Ocean and to help raise awareness about the health of our oceans. The broken sail has forced the crew to reevaluate the viability of the journey. To date, Ben has swam an average of eight hours a day for the last five months and covered a total of 1,500 nautical miles to reach a tributary of what’s commonly referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- the world’s largest accumulation zone of ocean plastic. This has been a challenging endeavor as Ben has encountered an unexpected amount of garbage and plastic pollution, unprecedented typhoons and severe storms and technical challenges.

“The Swim has been challenging for us as we’ve continued to face treacherous winds and ocean swells. Unfortunately our sail suffered irreparable damages, forcing us to alter our course and timing,” said Ben Lecomte. “Safety is our number one priority, and at this point, the team is exploring all options in an effort to continue into the gateway of the Garbage Patch.”

“Ben and the team have risked their lives to deepen our understanding of the Pacific Ocean and demonstrate the consequences of pollution,” said Seeker’s Chief Content Officer, Caroline Smith. “Reaching this unique area of the Pacific is a significant milestone that will allow us to better understand the impact that humans have had on the health of the oceans. Seeker is incredibly proud to partner with Ben to share his extraordinary experiences and scientific findings with our audiences around the world."

Negotiating unprecedented weather conditions during the Western Pacific’s typhoon season, the crew departed from Choshi, Japan on June 5, 2018 for Ben’s 5000-mile world record breaking attempt to swim across the Pacific. After swimming more than 500 nautical miles, the team was forced to pause The Swim and retreat back to the Japanese coast due to the life-threatening storms and typhoons, which were on a direct path to collide with the team. Digital-first science publisher Seeker and Nomadica Films have been with him from the beginning allowing viewers from around the world to watch and follow Ben and his crew as they make history and explore the world’s largest ocean and the impacts of man-made pollution on its waters.

More than just a swim, “The Swim” is the first citizen science expedition of its kind. In collaboration with 27 science institutions including NASA and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Ben and his crew have already collected nearly 1100 samples along the way in an effort to learn more about plastic pollution, mammal migrations, extreme endurance and even long term spaceflight. Ben and his crew will highlight the actions of their NGO partners, including Ocean Voyages Institute and Algalita Marine Research Foundation, and raise awareness of plastic pollution and climate change.

RELATED: Head to seeker.com/the-swim for more information


A nonprofit called Adventure Scientists has put outdoor enthusiasts to work in a global effort to trace plastic pollution.

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Credit: Getty Images

Scientists who are monitoring the spread of tiny pieces of plastic throughout the environment are getting help from a small army of citizen volunteers — and they’re finding bits of polymer in some of the most remote parts of North America.

Crowdsourcing water samples and cataloging debris found on beaches extends the reach of researchers who are trying to assess the extent of the microplastic problem and the growing concerns about the health risks it may pose.

“As much as I would love to fly around the world collecting bottled water and tap water samples, that’s not really feasible given my funding and obligations,” Sherri Mason, a chemist at the State University of New York at Fredonia who has studied plastic contamination in the Great Lakes and in water systems worldwide, told Seeker.

That’s where the citizen scientists come in. A Montana-based nonprofit organization called Adventure Scientists has put outdoor enthusiasts to work in a worldwide effort to trace plastic pollution from highland waterways to the oceans.

“Those are people who are getting back into the deep woods and hard-to-access places in the world,” said Katie Christiansen, the organization’s microplastics manager.

RELATED: Are You Seasoning Your Food With Microplastics? (You Totally Are)

“We work with people who are traveling to glaciers, who are getting to the poles,” she went on. “People who are accessing Alpine lakes and hard-to-reach access points of rivers. We equip them with a water bottle and some training, so they can do collection for us while they’re out there recreating.”

Credit: Getty Images

Over time, this effort has produced one of the largest global datasets to date, analyzing nearly 2,700 samples over four years — including a more systematic survey of the Gallatin River watershed that includes the organization’s Bozeman headquarters. It found that 89 percent of seawater and 51 percent of freshwater samples contained plastic, mostly pieces or fibers smaller than 5 mm (3/16 of an inch).

Some of the cleanest spots recorded were in the western mountains, in places like the Rockies or the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest. But other parts of the high country weren’t immune from tiny chips of plastic or strands of synthetic fiber.

“It was surprising to find any pollution at some of these Alpine backcountry locations,” Christiansen noted.

RELATED: These 10 Rivers Are Responsible for 90 Percent of the Plastic in the Oceans
 
Some particles may be carried by atmospheric currents, while hikers or campers could be shedding bits of plastic or fiber from their gear. Even the Gallatin, with its headwaters in Yellowstone National Park and much of its course running through national forests, averaged about 1.2 pieces of microplastic per liter.

“That’s the drinking water for people who live in this area,” she said.  

In a widely publicized study released in 2017, Mason and her colleagues found microplastics — nearly all of it tiny fibers — in 83 percent of tap water samples collected worldwide.

A recent follow-up study found more than
9 out of 10 bottled water samples also contained plastics, much of it likely to have happened in the bottling process. The study relied heavily on volunteers who were sent instructions about how to take and send in samples.


Some scientists are “kind of snobby” about citizen scientists, Mason said, “because you don’t really have control over what people are doing or how they’re doing it.” Volunteers may tend to collect water samples someplace where they already have spotted some floating plastic, for example, rather than randomly sampling a stream or river.

“But I think there is definitely a role to play,” she added, “because they have better access and can get you more data.”

Mason’s previous studies of the Great Lakes found levels of contamination that rival the most contaminated parts of the world’s oceans — especially in Lake Superior, the largest lake in the chain, and Lake Erie, which has the most people living on its shores. Microplastics have made it into beer brewed with water from the lakes, and from sea salt originating in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Mason said that the biggest source of these plastics is unintentional litter that’s accidentally left behind from single-use plastic packaging. These items “literally are used for minutes, but are made out of a material that lasts for centuries,” she said.

And since inland waterways drain to the ocean, much of that litter ends up scattered across the seas and in accumulation zones like the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which is popularly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

Credit: Kevin Krejci

Plastics don’t decay in the environment like organic material; they just break up into smaller and smaller pieces. And those pieces are turning up in the bodies of shellfish, seabirds, and terrestrial animals like earthworms. And a small pilot study led by an Austrian researcher recently found bits of plastic in every sample of feces from the eight people from around the world who took part in it. 

This has raised concerns about human health as well. Harmful chemicals known as persistent organic pollutants such as dioxins, PCBs, and DDT can bind to plastics.

RELATED: There's Plastic in Your Poop: Microplastics Invade the Human Body

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has called the human health risk “negligible,” since people remove the digestive tracts from most fish before eating them. But some species of shellfish or small fish like sardines are eaten whole. And Dave Love, an environmental scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future in Baltimore, points out that there are many unanswered questions about microplastics.

“We don’t really know enough to understand the implications for human health,” Love told Seeker. “We need to do a lot more work around human exposure.”

The risks may be “quite low” for people, he said, but it will take scientists some time to know that for sure — and in the meantime, they’re still harmful to wildlife like birds and turtles.

“Most of the work has been done on an individual organism level, and there hasn’t been a lot of work understanding the impacts on population, such as a school of fish,” Love said.

He recently co-authored a paper that laid out a list of these unanswered questions concerning the sources of microplastics, their chemical properties, how they degrade in the environment, their impact on ecosystems, and their toxicity to humans.

When it comes to plastics, the biggest contribution citizens can make to help mitigate the pollution crisis is to make sure that their plastic materials are properly disposed of or recycled — and to use less of it in the first place.

“After writing this paper, when I go grocery shopping, I specifically look for foods that don’t have a whole lot of packaging because I know that will end up in a landfill,” Love remarked. “I try to get low packaging, and if I can, compostable or recyclable packaging.”

Take a stand against plastic pollution by curbing your plastic usage.

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Take a stand against plastic pollution by entering Seeker’s “Join The Swim” Sweepstakes.

Rules for Entry: Post a photo or video of yourself showing how you are reducing plastic usage, and use the hashtags #JoinTheSwim and #Sweepstakes.

Sweepstakes Dates: 12/3/18-12/9/18

Seeker will select the winner by 11:59 PM PST on December 12, 2018.


NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. To enter and for full rules, visit www.seeker.com/join-the-swim-sweepstakes-rules. 

Starts Monday, December 3, 2018 at 12:01 AM PST and ends 11:59 PM PST on Sunday, December 9, 2018. Open to legal residents of the 50 United States/D.C. 18 years of age or older, except employees of Sponsor, their immediate families, and those living in the same household. Odds of winning depend on the number of entries received. Void outside the 50 United States/D.C. and where prohibited. A.R.V. of prize or prizes:
 $47.
 

Sponsor: Group Nine Media, Inc.


New research suggests that tiny pieces of plastic are making their way into marine organisms and seafood.

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Credit: Getty Images

If you’re ordering seafood these days, you may be getting a side of plastics, whether you want it or not.

New research funded by the U.K.’s Natural Environment Research Council has found that tiny particles of plastic called microplastics or nanoplastics are accumulating within the intestines and other organs of the great scallop, a commercially important species harvested for food.

Although the new research used laboratory conditions to track the absorption of nanoplastics, it points to current ocean pollution issues and a growing concern over microplastics and marine organisms.

The study, which was led by the University of Plymouth in England and published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, is the first to investigate the uptake of nanoplastics in “predicted environmentally relevant conditions.” In other words, the laboratory experiments were designed to approximate current levels of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.

RELATED: It’s Not Just an Ocean Problem. Microplastics Pollute Rivers, Lakes, and Land, Too.

The results were alarming. Tests found that after only six hours of exposure in the laboratory, billions of particles of nanoplastics had accumulated within the scallops’ intestines. The particles found in the intestines are very small indeed, measuring around 250 nanometers. For comparison, consider that a strand of human hair is about 100,000 nanometers in thickness.

Even more concerning, the research team found that still smaller particles of plastic — approximately 20 nanometers around — were found elsewhere in the body, including in the kidneys, gills, muscles, and other organs.

“The results of the study show for the first time that nanoparticles can be rapidly taken up by a marine organism, and that in just a few hours they become distributed across most of the major organs,” said project leader Maya Al Sid Cheikh, in a statement.

Credit: University of Plymouth

Further tests confirmed that the plastic particles tend to remain in the system even after the scallops are moved into clean water. The smaller 20 nm particles were still detectable after 14 days, while the larger 250 nm particles took over 48 days to be fully flushed from the system.

Richard Thompson, head of the university’s International Marine Litter Research Unit, called the study groundbreaking in terms of both the scientific approach and the findings.

RELATED: There’s Plastic in Your Poop: Microplastics Invade the Human Body

“We only exposed the scallops to nanoparticles for a few hours and, despite them being transferred to clean conditions, traces were still present several weeks later,” he said. “Understanding the dynamics of nanoparticle uptake and release, as well as their distribution in body tissues, is essential if we are to understand any potential effects on organisms.”

The study also involved scientists from the Charles River Laboratories in Elphinstone, Scotland; the Institute Maurice la Montagne in Canada; and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.

While the new research does not directly address the issue of plastics making their way into the human food supply, Ted Henry, professor of environmental toxicology at Heriot-Watt University, said the work is a critical first step.

“Understanding whether plastic particles are absorbed across biological membranes and accumulate within internal organs is critical for assessing the risk these particles pose to both organism and human health,” he said.

The unique digestive system of wood-eating gribbles could solve a major renewable energy problem.

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Credit: Auguste Le Roux

It's always in the last place you look.

For several decades now, energy scientists have been working hard to crack a challenging puzzle: How to turn wood into an efficient and sustainable biofuel source, similar to corn or soy. A team of researchers from the UK may have just found the solution by turning away from the forests and studying the sea.

New research published this week in the journal Nature Communications suggests that the key to viable biofuel may be found in the tiny wood-eating crustacean known as the gribble, or Limnoria quadripunctata.

The creepy-crawly crustaceans have evolved to serve an important ecological role by eating the driftwood that washes into the sea from rivers and estuaries. Gribbles have also been a perennial headache for boat owners and marine professionals, since they like to chew on the wood of boats and piers.

But that very evolutionary adaptation may provide a critical guidepost for our species. The digestive system of the gribble is remarkably effective at breaking down lignin, a tough coating that surrounds the sugar polymers inside of wood. Those sugars are ultimately the fuel in biofuel, and if we can figure out a better way to extract them, then wood could potentially become a high-yield renewable energy biofuel like soy and corn.

Credit: Claire Steele-King and Katrin Besser, University of York

According to Neil Bruce, biologist with York University and co-author of the new research, the gribble’s unique digestive tract provides a potential biomimetic solution to a longstanding industrial dilemma.

“In the long term, this discovery may be useful in reducing the amount of energy required for pre-treating wood to convert it to biofuel,” Bruce said in a statement issued with the new research.

RELATED: Sewage Is Being Turned Into Biofuel to Renewably Power Cars and Utilities

For those of us who tend to nerd out on arcane alternative energy issues, the new insights offer some intriguing details. It appears that the gribble’s digestive tract uses a kind of protein called homocyanin to break down the lignin and extract the sugar polymers. If that term sounds familiar from eighth-grade science class, it’s because hemocyanins are related to hemoglobins, the protein responsible for transporting oxygen in us vertebrates.

Invertebrates like the gribble use hemocyanin for similar purposes, but the new study reveals that the protein also serves a second critical function. Because oxygen is a highly reactive chemical, the hemocyanin in gribble guts works to oxidize the lignin bonds that bind the wood together and lock up the desired sugar molecules.

The research reveals that treating wood with hemocyanin radically increases the amount of sugar that is released when processing a chunk of wood. In fact, the hemocyanin unlocks around the same amount that is released with expensive chemical processes currently used in industry.

RELATED: A Crazy Plan to Power Solar Panels With E. Coli

“The cellulase-enhancing effect of the hemocyanin was equivalent to that of thermochemical pre-treatments used in industry to allow biomass hydrolysis, suggesting new options for bio-based fuel and chemicals production,” Bruce said.

The researchers also note that woody plant biomass is by far the most abundant renewable carbon resource on the planet.  And unlike food crops that can be turned into biofuels — think corn and soy again — woody biomass doesn’t cut into food supplies when it’s harvested as biofuel.

So the future of renewable energy may lie within gribble guts. Who knew?

The maker of a plant-robot from MIT Media Labs has some radical ideas on the future of technology.

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Credit: Harpreet Sareen.

Harpreet Sareen thinks big. Cybernetic plants that move around on their own? That's just the beginning. How about an end to global warming?

Sareen, currently an assistant professor at the Parsons School of Design in New York City, lit up the Internet last week with his latest creation — a hybrid robot-plant system called Elowan that moves toward light when it wants to. The cybernetic plant translates tiny electrical impulses in the leaves to trigger the wheels on a robotic planter underneath. When the plant senses light, it rolls toward it.

Elowan, which Sareen developed with colleague Pattie Maes at MIT Media Lab, could lead to new kinds of organic interface designs and atmospheric sensors.

“Plants working as light sensors is exactly what Elowan was designed to convey — deep integration of technology with nature,” Sareen told Seeker. “This leads to applications such as sensing a surrounding environment through a plant or tree signals, or routing those signals through interactive devices.”

Practically speaking, such light-sensing biocomputing hybrids could be used as sensor platforms, detecting minute changes in the environment or monitoring the overall health of vast fields of crops. It's a bold vision in and of itself, and to hear Sareen tell it, it's only the beginning.

“Elowan was designed just for the light, but there's a possibility of taking things further,” he said.

Sareen is an inveterate tinkerer and a perpetually busy researcher. He's lived and worked in Austria, India, Japan, Singapore, and the U.S. His experience runs from corporate research wings to design studios, museums, and university research centers. He's previously worked at Google Creative Lab, Microsoft Research, MIT Media Lab, Ars Electronica Museum, the National University of Singapore, and Keio University.


Credit: Harpreet Sareen

Sareen keeps a lot of irons in a lot of fires, and his wandering houseplant is actually just one small part of a larger notional construct he calls Cyborg Botany. The idea, simply put, is to stop making computers from the vantage point of our species and start making computers from the vantage point of our planet and our ecosystem as a whole.

“Cyborg Botany is a new, convergent view of interaction design in nature,” Harpreet writes on the Elowan project page. “Our primary means of sensing and display interactions in the environment are through our artificial electronics. However, there are a plethora of such capabilities that already exist in nature.”


Take plants, for instance. Earth already has a global active signal network that is self-powered, self-fabricating, and self-regenerating in its plant life.

RELATED: Terrestrial Plants Emerged 100 Million Years Earlier Than Thought


“They have the best kind of capabilities that an electronic device could carry,” he goes on. “Instead of building completely discrete systems, the new paradigm points toward using the capabilities that exist in plants, and nature at large, and creating hybrids with our digital world.”

Asked to indulge in some reckless conjecture, Sareen said he's already envisioned some space-age applications for his theories.

“Consider this example,” he replied. “We are looking for life in space, but some planets do not have enough light on most of its surface. So there’s no energy gathering mechanisms in dark areas of these planets, and we think life is not possible there.”
 

Credit: Harpreet Sareen

But extrapolate Elowan's photosynthetic system all the way to the event horizon, and you get at least one interesting scenario.

“A merger of plants with photoelectronic components in this way would mean that one starts to replace the other,” Sareen explained. “In other words, it's possible to replace photosynthetic mechanisms of plants with our own electronics. Such electronics can gather light from bright areas of a planet back to the plant, making it survive in the dark, creating this new form of astrobiological possibility – and living plants in dark areas of such planets.”

Sareen concedes that we're probably a few centuries away from cultivating plants on the dark side of colonized planets, but that's the fun of thinking big. Meanwhile, we could keep busy with the ecosystems we already have. Sareen envisions a new twist on the Internet of Things in which we create an Internet of Living Things by selectively hybridizing certain intersections of nature and technology.

“I think we need a paradigm change in our thinking of sustainability and conservation,” he said. “If we start looking at capabilities already in the natural environment, we align ourselves with that development as opposed to being divergent from it.”

RELATED: Hacking Earth's Atmosphere Won't Protect Crops From Global Warming


Sareen calls this particularly twisty avenue of thinking convergent design, and he's got some specific ideas.

“In terms of climate change, there's a possibility of hybridizing plants with photoelectronic components,” he offered. “Plants are inefficient energy gatherers — roughly only converting 10 percent of the light to something useful.”

But, Sareen notes, we already have nanoscale electronic components that are smaller than the cells of plants.

“Consider that we create combinations of cells with these components that can gather more electrons, such that they have a higher electron activity inside the cells of plants,” he said. “This means they absorb more energy, become more efficient and in turn take in more CO2. And scale this up to the number of plants on the planet, and suddenly we're talking of climate change being balanced by such bioelectronic components.”

Sareen concedes that such far-future speculation is largely a thought experiment at this point. But with each new project, he finds that he's connecting more dots and banking more real-world results for a rainy day. Like a houseplant that can move itself toward a light source, for example.

“As a designer, I work with science and technology to bring out the possibilities for humans and nature,” he remarked. “Space-age far-future is where I thrive because it's so exciting — carrying a flashlight in dark but not knowing where to point it at.”
 

After repairing their boat, Ben Lecomte and the crew will return to the Pacific to collect data from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

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Credit: Seeker Media

The Swim may be over, but the cause for which Ben Lecomte tried to swim across the Pacific Ocean remains as important as ever.

Lecomte logged about 1,700 miles in the water, using the effort to bring attention to the growing problem of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. He and the crew had persevered in the face of rough weather systems, seasickness, and a steady stream of garbage. But a storm mid-voyage damaged the mainsail of their research vessel, Seeker, in November, forcing them to limp back to port in Hawaii.

“We had to stop the world record attempt, but throughout the time we kept collecting data and samples about plastic, microplastic, and fibers for all our research partners,” Lecomte said.

He waded ashore Monday on Oahu’s famous Waikiki Beach after jumping into the water to swim the last mile back. He was met on the beach with a lei and fresh pineapple and berries, which he’d been craving after nearly four months offshore.

Lecomte and Seeker’s crew of nine set sail from the Japanese port of Yokohama in June for what turned out to be an eventful six months at sea. They battled seasickness aboard the 20-meter boat, were chased back to port by typhoons, and had to dodge the occasional cargo ship.

Credit: Seeker Media

Nevertheless, Lecomte averaged about eight hours a day in the water, covering roughly 16 miles a day with a boost from the ocean current. By September, he had swum 1,000 nautical miles from land.

“I never had that movement when I said, ‘Oh man, can I make it? It’s so difficult….’ ” he said. “I managed my effort pretty well, and mentally also, to get in a good rhythm.”

RELATED: Ben Lecomte's Mainsail Is Irreparably Damaged, Halting ‘The Swim'


The expedition was scooping 2.4 plastic fragments out of the Pacific per minute using a special net, while geotagging and tracking larger pieces like discarded fishing nets that can trap sea life like porpoises or turtles.

Lecomte said he’s disappointed that he didn’t complete the trans-Pacific swim, but is glad that his bid to be the first person to swim across Earth’s largest ocean drew attention to the plastic crisis.

“It was very important for us to get that involvement of people, to get them interested in and engaged about plastic pollution,” he said. “Because that problem is not going away.”

Getting people engaged in the issue can be difficult because the problem seems so distant to most people, Lecomte added.

Credit: Seeker Media

“When we got the chance to get some feedback, people following us were saying, ‘Oh, because of what you’re doing I changed my habits. Now I don’t use a straw anymore,’ or something like that,” he said.

“It was an amazing feeling to know we had made an impact,” he went on. “That’s what it takes — one person at a time to make a change. And I hope that what we are doing and what we have been doing is helping, making some of the right changes.”

RELATED: There's Plastic in Your Poop: Microplastics Invade the Human Body

Tiny bits of plastic are turning up in the bodies of shellfish, seabirds, and terrestrial animals like earthworms — even human feces. They’re harming animals who eat them, and they raise concerns about human health, since harmful chemicals known as persistent organic pollutants such as dioxins and PCBs can bind to plastics. Experts say citizens can help tackle the problem by making sure their household materials are properly disposed of or recycled — or by using less of it in the first place.

The Swim crew also collected data on a variety of subjects for more than a dozen scientific institutions back on shore. They recorded sightings of giant phytoplankton, which cycle from shallow water to the depths to photosynthesize nutrients. They took readings of water temperatures, salinity, and pH, which is a bellwether of climate change, since the oceans are growing more acidic as they absorb more carbon dioxide from the air.

Seeker’s onboard medic Maks Romeijin kept tabs on Lecomte’s heart function, bone density, and vision as he spent much of each day in the water. Those records could help doctors at NASA learn more about the effects of long-term, low-gravity space missions on astronauts.

Credit: Seeker Media

The voyage’s end followed a storm in November that damaged the Seeker vessel, including wrecking its mainsail. This left the boat with only auxiliary engine power and limited fuel, forcing the crew to cut the trip short.

“It was not a happy moment,” Lecomte said. On the boat in those conditions, he explained, “Everything moves. You cannot do much. I would rather be in the water during that time, because I’m just a little cork going up and down, following the rhythm. When you’re on the boat, you’re being slammed against one wall or another.”

On the way back to Hawaii, he would get back into the water whenever we saw something interesting, or we needed to retrieve a piece of debris. But mainly we needed to go back to land as soon as possible.”

RELATED: 
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Is Not What You Think It Is​​​​​​

After a break for repairs and to sit out the winter, Seeker will return to the Pacific and resume course for California via the North Pacific Gyre, an accumulation zone that’s now commonly known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s a swirling dead end for the ocean’s currents, which have deposited an estimated 79,000 metric tons of floating plastics — everything from thick tangles of fishing line to tiny fragments of old soda bottles.

Lecomte said that he hopes to get a fish’s-eye view of the patch during that trip.

“The mission doesn’t stop here,” he said, “because we still want to fulfill that mission of collecting data from one part of the Pacific to the other.”

The spring-loaded mandibles of the ant with the coolest name move at speeds up to 200 mph.

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Credit: Adrian Smith

While there are no official rankings for these things, dispassionate observers will surely agree that Mystrium camillae, or the Dracula ant, has one of the coolest names in the insect kingdom.

According to newly published research from a team of admirably thorough entomologists, the Dracula ant can also claim a new crown — the fastest animal movement on record.

The researchers reveal that the mandibles of the Dracula ant can move at speeds of up to 90 meters per second, or a little more than 200 miles per hour. That’s around 5,000 times faster than you can blink your eye, and almost three times faster than the mandible speed of the previous record holder.

When all the numbers were crunched, researchers officially named the Mystrium camillae’s mandibles as the quickest moving animal appendages on record, with the fastest bite in the world.

“These ants are fascinating as their mandibles are very unusual,” said research co-author and University of Illinois entomology professor Andrew Suarez, in a statement.  “Even among ants that power-amplify their jaws, the Dracula ants are unique: Instead of using three different parts for the spring, latch and lever arm, all three are combined in the mandible.”

Credit: L. Brian Stauffer

This unique configuration gives the mandibles a kind of spring-loaded dynamic. When the Dracula ant wants to bite or grab, it presses the tips of its mandibles together, building up internal stresses. When the stress hits a critical point, the mandibles snap open and shut at an incredible speed.

RELATED: Ants Hold Secrets for Preventing Epidemics


The action is similar to how humans snap their fingers, Suarez said. It’s a fundamentally different process than the bite used by the trap-jaw ant, a previous speed record holder. Trap-jaw ants and other similar insects bite down with their mandibles starting in an open position.

In any case, hours of observational data indicated that the Dracula ant’s powerful jaws are made for fighting, Suarez said.

“The ants use this motion to smack other arthropods, likely stunning them, smashing them against a tunnel wall or pushing them away,” he said. “The prey is then transported back to the nest, where it is fed to the ants’ larvae,” Suarez said.

The research was published this week in the journal Royal Society Open Science, with funding from the National Science Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, and National Geographic Society.

RELATED: Insect-Inspired Turbine Blades Could Radicalize Renewable Wind Power

In a surprisingly intriguing video posted from the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, research co-authors Fred Larabee and Adrian Smith debate the new speed record, which is evidently a Very Big Deal in the entomological circles.

“This is the latest in a lineage of the fastest animal on Earth,” says Smith, head of the Evolutionary Biology & Behavior Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science. “At one point the trap-jaw ant had the fastest appendage movement, then I think they got overtaken by the termites. Officially, [the Dracula ant] is the fastest right now.”

But Larabee, postdoctoral research with the Smithsonian, advises caution, suggesting that the new record may not hold for long.

“There are a lot of other Mystrium species and there are a lot of other termites,” Larabee counters. “The work on snapping termites is just starting and there’s a lot to learn about how fast they are.”

To record the speed of the mandible snap, the research team used an array of high-tech equipment.

“Scientists have described many different spring-loading mechanisms in ants, but no one knew the relative speed of each of these mechanisms,” Larabee explained. “We had to use incredibly fast cameras to see the whole movement. We also used X-ray imaging technology to be able to see their anatomy in three dimensions, to better understand how the movement works.”

For anyone who wants to place money on the developing ants-versus-termites showdown, valuable handicapping information can be found in the full research report at the Royal Society website.


Vection is a VR experience that's helping scientists learn more about how astronauts estimate the size and motion of objects in space.

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Credit: NASA

Just a few days after Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques launched to the International Space Station on Dec. 3, the first-time space flyer faced a considerable challenge: learning how his perception is altered by spaceflight.

Scientists know that astronauts in microgravity often feel like they’re moving if they see another object moving, even when they’re immobile, which is a phenomenon that makes depth perception more difficult. This would especially be a problem when capturing a cargo spacecraft using the robotic Canadarm2. While the track record for successful astronaut captures is pretty much flawless, scientists are working on minimizing any complications. After all, crews need cargo to keep functioning in space.

This is where Saint-Jacques’ experimental challenge came in. Saint-Jacques spent a half hour participating in Vection, a virtual reality experience that will help scientists learn more about how astronauts estimate the size and motion of objects in space. He donned a VR headset and took part in three experiments: estimating the size of an object, “moving” in the virtual world to where he thought the object was placed in a hallway, and determining how he perceives tilt and visual acceleration.

The results of the experiment could be used to enhance the safety of operations aboard the ISS, and also help future astronaut crews working on the moon or on Mars.

RELATED: This Special Training Keeps Astronauts From Vomiting Everywhere

“By understanding errors in self-motion and distance perception, and how they may change during time in space, we may be able to inform tasks that involve either of these judgments,” explained principal investigator Laurence Harris, of Toronto’s York University, in an email to Seeker.

When using Vection, the astronauts are guided through three tasks via a head-mounted display. In the first, they are accelerated “sideways” along a virtual corridor, triggering a sense of motion even though in reality they remain still.

“We then assess whether any of that visual acceleration may be interpreted as acceleration due to gravity by asking them to indicate the new angle of the floor, which should appear tilted if they regard their previous direction of motion as ‘up’,” Harris said.

RELATED: Brain Changes in Space Could Be Linked to Vision Problems in Astronauts

In the second experiment, astronauts view a target in the same corridor. The target disappears as the astronauts virtually “move” along the corridor, and they press a button when they reach the position where they think that the target was situated.

“This tells us about how powerful visual motion is in space: how far visual motion makes you feel you have moved,” Harris explained.

The third experiment asks astronauts to compare the size of an object in the virtual corridor with a reference object they have in their hands. “The only way they can assess an object’s size is by knowing how far away it is and therefore this allows us to measure their perceived depth,” Harris added.

This work not only has implications for the ISS, but any future spaceflight activity – including NASA’s desire to establish the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway space station near the moon in the 2020s, and to move crews to Mars in the decades that follow. Knowing depth perception in space can help astronauts improve their ability to reach emergency hatches, dock a spacecraft, or control robotics platforms.


RELATED: NASA Is Trying to Keep These Five Things From Killing Astronauts

Credit: York University

There are applications on Earth as well, such as better controlling moving vehicles or assisting people who have trouble with balance, such as the elderly.

“A major aim is to understand how our brains process self-motion cues in general,” Harris noted, “and to provide a quantitative model for how sensory information is combined together to do this.”

Each participating astronaut will be tested five times. Saint-Jacques has already gone through two tests – one on the ground, and another one in the days after his arrival on the ISS. His next three measurements will happen when he’s fully adapted to space (between days 80 and 100), when he’s adjusting to life back on Earth (four to six days after landing), and when he has made a full recovery from space (50 to 70 days after landing).

But we’ll have to be patient while awaiting results from the Vection experiment. There are only small crews on the ISS, and at least seven astronauts need to participate. A final report summarizing the data is expected to be published by 2023, just a year before the scheduled completion of the space station program.

test 1233 dont publish

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Selena Gomez got droll on this spiky pop song that swipes a sample of the bass line from the Talking Heads classic "Psycho Killer." On that track, singer David Byrne mapped his own anxiety in a state of violent panic; Gomez sounds more laid-back in her vocal delivery here, but if you parse the lyrics, it's clear she's similarly paralyzed by her own neurosis. "I was walking down the street the other day," she sings. "Trying to distract myself/But then I see your face/Oh wait, that's someone else." Romantic obsession rarely sounds this twitchy and hypnotic.  

3.
No song on this list prompts a physical response quite like "Bodak Yellow," a thundering, blood-covered testament to the power of making money moves. When the beat kicks in, the body activates and motion becomes inevitable. There's no "secret" that explains the song's success. It all comes down to Cardi B, the former stripper and reality TV star who powers this track, and the way she uses her voice to command respect. "If you a pussy you get popped, you a goofy, you a cop," she raps in the second verse. "Don't you come around my way, you can't hang around my block." It's an exclusionary warning that also plays as an invitation: This is a club you want to be a member of.

Few artists do earnest self-reflection quite like Jason Isbell, the former Drive-By-Truckers member turned solo country everyman. On "Hope the High Road," the first single from The Nashville Sound, the 38-year-old songwriter pens a thoughtful op-ed about empathy, identity, and blame in the Trump-era. "I've heard enough of the white man's blues," he sings. "I've sang enough about myself/So if you're looking for some bad news/You can find it somewhere else." Instead, he's looking for real connections and real solutions. Here's to hoping he finds them.

5.Syd, the 25-year-old songwriter and producer, got her start in music as a member of the roving hip-hop collective Odd Future before breaking out as the singer of the neo-soul outfit The Internet. Her first solo album, Fin, is clearly the work of an artist who understands the aesthetic lane she excels in, but also wants to push the boundaries a bit. Fittingly, the lean, muscular single "All About Me" is a brash expression of individuality from a gifted team player. You can't look away. 



"Sorry Not Sorry," Demi Lovato's comeback single after announcing last year that she was taking a break from the spotlight, is like a flipped bird emoji reaching through your phone to poke your eye. The track was produced by Warren "Oak" Felder, who worked on Kehlani's SweetSexySavage -- still the year's best R&B record -- and it's got some of the same strike-a-match-and-watch-the-world-burn energy that's powered countless kiss-off anthems by artists like Sia and Pink. What makes this one special? The combination of flippancy and playfulness Lovato brings to lines like "I'm out here looking like revenge." It's a good look for her.

"I hate the headlines and the weather," sings Lorde in the first verse of "Perfect Places." "I'm 19 and I'm on fire." Like Bruce Springsteen or Johnny Cash, she's on fire -- songwriting doesn't get much more direct than that. Over a bleary synth and chugging drum machine, the 20-year-old singer describes a search for a state of perfection that she's wise enough to know might not exist. This song, the final track from her excellent Melodrama album, is the comedown to the exhilarating rush of "Green Light," the harsh sliver of light peeking through the blinds after a night of adventure. 
"Sorry Not Sorry," Demi Lovato's comeback single after announcing last year that she was taking a break from the spotlight, is like a flipped bird emoji reaching through your phone to poke your eye. The track was produced by Warren "Oak" Felder, who worked on Kehlani's SweetSexySavage -- still the year's best R&B record -- and it's got some of the same strike-a-match-and-watch-the-world-burn energy that's powered countless kiss-off anthems by artists like Sia and Pink. What makes this one special? The combination of flippancy and playfulness Lovato brings to lines like "I'm out here looking like revenge." It's a good look for her.

7.The R&B of Kelela's debut studio album, Take Me Apart, pulsates with life. Though it's possible to interpret an icy, careening song like "LMK" as a missive received from a distant planet, the vocals keep the track from feeling like a song that would play in a Blade Runner-themed nightclub. It's rooted in deft psychological observations and the subtleties of modern communication. ("You don't read between the lines," she sings. "'Bout to leave, can you read my mind?") You've got to read the signals.

"Sorry Not Sorry," Demi Lovato's comeback single after announcing last year that she was taking a break from the spotlight, is like a flipped bird emoji reaching through your phone to poke your eye. The track was produced by Warren "Oak" Felder, who worked on Kehlani's SweetSexySavage -- still the year's best R&B record -- and it's got some of the same strike-a-match-and-watch-the-world-burn energy that's powered countless kiss-off anthems by artists like Sia and Pink. What makes this one special? The combination of flippancy and playfulness Lovato brings to lines like "I'm out here looking like revenge." It's a good look for her.
"Sorry Not Sorry," Demi Lovato's comeback single after announcing last year that she was taking a break from the spotlight, is like a flipped bird emoji reaching through your phone to poke your eye. The track was produced by Warren "Oak" Felder, who worked on Kehlani's SweetSexySavage -- still the year's best R&B record -- and it's got some of the same strike-a-match-and-watch-the-world-burn energy that's powered countless kiss-off anthems by artists like Sia and Pink. What makes this one special? The combination of flippancy and playfulness Lovato brings to lines like "I'm out here looking like revenge." It's a good look for her.

The spacecraft flew by a distant little world dubbed “Ultima Thule” that looks like a red snowman.

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Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Far out in the solar system, just as Earth was ringing in the New Year, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by a distant little world that looks a red snowman.

This city-sized world is 2014 MU69, a resident of the Kuiper Belt of icy objects far beyond Pluto. It took New Horizons an astounding 3.5 years to cross the gap between Pluto and this tiny, dumbbell-shaped object — a distance of roughly 14 “astronomical units” (Earth-sun distances). MU69 is about 44 AU from the sun, and Pluto a little less than 30 AU on average.

Just 36 hours after its flyby of MU69, the first of New Horizons’ new images are on Earth, with many more to follow in the coming months.

Mission principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute said that he was astounded by the new imagery, particularly given that we didn’t even know of the existence of MU69 until four years ago. MU69 was one of two semi-finalists selected for a New Horizons flyby after Pluto; efficient fuel use was one of the main factors behind MU69's selection.

“I’m surprised that in picking one object out of the hat we picked such a winner,” Stern remarked during a televised press conference on Jan. 2 at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

In the early hours of science on MU69, there are already a wealth of mysteries to consider.

What is that red stuff on its surface? It looks a lot like the red stuff New Horizons found at the poles of Charon, Pluto’s moon. Investigators suggest that in both places, volatiles — delicate elements that evaporate at room temperatures — got irradiated over time, producing the red. But we know that Charon’s redness comes from Pluto particles; the origin of the red stuff on MU69 is still being investigated.

“The process by which [MU69] got red is similar chemically [to Charon], but it doesn't mean the essence of the volatiles is the same,” explained SWRI’s Carly Howett at the press conference. Her expertise involves using remote sensing data to look at the surfaces of small, icy worlds.

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Another nagging question is, what does the dumbbell shape of MU69 mean for the early solar system’s history? MU69 is the first “pristine” object ever observed with a bi-lobe shape, although dumbbell forms are commonly seen among dusty, eroded comets such as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which Rosetta visited between 2013 and 2014.

New Horizons co-investigator Jeff Moore, also of SWRI, called these cometary cores “fried and crinkled and crunched by the sun… badly damaged examples of former Kuiper Belt objects.”


Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

The shape of MU69, as he and others explained, came from two larger objects that slowly spiraled in closer over time, finally touching each other at a speed of perhaps 1 mile (1.6 km) per hour. Are such shapes common in the Kuiper Belt?

Luckily for science, New Horizons itself may provide those answers. The spacecraft is remarkably healthy given that it’s been flying in space for 13 years, Stern noted. It probably has more than a decade of life remaining. In the summer of 2020, the New Horizons team has a scheduled opportunity to offer NASA a new science mission for the spacecraft. That mission might be flying by yet another Kuiper Belt object, or observing several targets from a distance using a telescope.

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While the successful New Horizons flyby dominated planetary news in late 2018 and early 2019, that flyby was attached with some controversy. As is common with new objects, the New Horizons team picked a temporary name for MU69 until the International Astronomical Union (the official arbitrator of astronomy names) can make a final decision.

MU69’s moniker — “Ultima Thule,” a Latin phrase that refers to a distant place beyond known borders — has ancient origins, as well as some unfortunate Nazi connotations after it was co-opted to refer to a mythological Aryan homeland. Pointing out that the phrase dates back well over a millennium, Stern stood firm in the decision to use it for the mission. 

“It’s a wonderful meme for exploration, and that's why we chose it,” he said at the press conference. “Obviously, just because some bad guys once liked that term, we’re not going to let them hijack it.”

More results from New Horizons are expected soon based on stereo images and data that will probably show the composition of MU69, hints of an atmosphere, and whether there are any craters on its surface.

The early images were taken with the sun right behind New Horizons’ metaphorical back, making it too difficult to see much elevation on the surface. More terrain may show up as New Horizons moves around to the side of MU69. Shadows there will throw the ancient dirt into relief and reveal any hills, gullies, or craters.

It will take 20 months to receive all of the spacecraft's data on the distant world, which could offer insights into the formation of our solar system.

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Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

A special delivery of data from deep in the solar system arrived on Earth this week, as details begin trickling in about a little world known as MU69. The early-stage images show no moons and no definitive craters on the surface, but this could all change in the coming weeks as a stream of information comes through.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made a New Year’s flyby of this snowman-shaped asteroid, which the team nicknamed “Ultima Thule,” a Latin phrase that refers to a distant place beyond known borders. (The International Astronomical Union will formally determine an official name at a later date.)

MU69 is located a vast 44 astronomical units (Earth-sun distances) away from Earth — about two-thirds farther away than Pluto, which the spacecraft flew by 3.5 years ago. The new data from New Horizons is fresh, low-resolution, and only a fraction of the information that is stored on board the spacecraft’s hard drive.

It will take 20 months to receive all of the data. 


“Those of us on the science team can’t wait to begin to start digging into that treasure trove,” principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute remarked at a press briefing on Thursday. He cautioned journalists not to read too much into what we see so far — or what we don’t yet see, for that matter.

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Moons would be little surprise in the Kuiper Belt, a string of icy objects that lies far beyond Pluto, because so many dwarf planets and asteroids are known to have them. So the team did a large-scale search for moons before and during the flyby, and several more observations are planned in the coming weeks and months. The team hasn’t yet spotted any object within 100 miles of MU69 or as far out as 500 miles.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

The team will keep looking, because finding a moon would be advantageous. Satellites are a common way for scientists to learn about the mass and density of the worlds they orbit, which can reveal important details about their composition and interior.

Moons would also give credence to the favored origin story for MU69. It’s a two-lobed, dumbbell-shaped world with two circular-shaped objects just barely touching each other – a formation that astronomers call a “contact binary.” As the story goes, MU69 formed in a cloud of debris. Over time, a mass of dust came together and grew into pebbles, then rocks. The largest two objects eventually spiraled in toward one another and collided. But where the rest of the debris lies remains a mystery.

Team members are also looking hard for craters, but the geometry is against them right now. New Horizons imaged MU69 in full sunlight, making it hard to see anything but vague shapes of ridges. Fresh stereo pictures downloaded to Earth in the past day do show divots on the surface of MU69, but Stern pointed out that there aren’t enough shadows to see if there are craters for sure.

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“I'm going to trust in my stereo experts that say that at this phase angle, you cannot trust the topography,” he remarked at the press conference.

New Horizons will disappear behind the sun (from Earth’s perspective) for much of the coming week, so data downloading will need to pause for five days. Better images will start filtering down to Earth before mid-month, allowing scientists to look for not only moons and craters, but also an atmosphere.

While the flyby is over, the work for New Horizons in the Kuiper Belt continues. The spacecraft will scan other objects from a distance with its telescope to learn more about this vast region of icy bodies. And team members plan a new mission proposal to NASA next year that could include another flyby, as long as funds allow for it. The spacecraft will be in good shape for at least a decade and probably much longer, Stern noted, and there’s ample fuel to spare.

China is the first to successfully land an explorer on the side of the moon that never faces Earth.

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After making history by becoming the first nation to land on the far side of the moon, China’s new spacecraft  transmitted haunting pictures back to Earth of this mysterious lunar landscape as its rover began to explore the surface. And then the rover took a nap. 

The spacecraft includes a lander called Chang’e-4 and a rover called Yutu-2. The ground mission has gone well so far, the China National Space Administration reported, with the successful deployment of instruments to analyze radiation and low-frequency radio waves, as well as some stunning snapshots using the onboard cameras.

While other spacecraft orbiting the moon have observed the half of it that never faces Earth, China is the first to have successfully landed an explorer on the surface for close inspection. The photos released by the China National Space Administration show the rover exiting the lander to begin its expedition.

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Though sometimes characterized as the moon’s “dark side,” the far side actually receives as much light as the opposite hemisphere: two weeks of sunlight followed by two weeks of darkness.

As Chang’e-4 continues performing tests, Yutu-2 has entered standby mode for a few days to avoid “high noon,” a period where the sun gets high in the sky above the moon, sending temperatures on the surface soaring beyond the boiling point of water on Earth — 260 degrees Fahrenheit or 127 degrees Celsius. It is expected to emerge from their slumber on Jan. 10.


Credit: CNSA

It’s an exciting moment for China, which executed the unprecedented landing in early January. Because the far side of the moon permanently faces space opposite to Earth, scientists would hear nothing from the surface unless they could use a relay satellite to send signals home from the moon. China is sending back its data with such a satellite, called Queqiao.

Also riding aboard the rover is a Swedish instrument called Advanced Small Analyzer for Neutrals (ASAN). It’s designed to look at how the solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles emanating from the sun — may change the lunar surface and produce water. Solar particles carry radiation to the moon’s surface, which may explain why the lunar dust looks so weathered.

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“The lunar surface is covered by a fine-grained material, regolith,” wrote Martin Wieser, the principal investigator for ASAN, in an email to Seeker.

He explained that the regolith shows wear and tear when protons, or positively charged particles, hit the surface after emanating from the sun. Unlike Earth, the moon lacks a magnetic shield, called a magnetosphere, to stop the radiation from reaching the surface. This means that the regolith receives and then absorbs the radiation. The radiation sets off a chain reaction in the regolith that could produce water, scientists suppose, but ASAN will help show that for sure.

Credit: CNSA

The Yutu-2 rover follows on from the successful Indian Chandrayann-1 mission, which was among the first spacecraft to show evidence of water on the moon after mapping the surface between 2008 and 2009. An instrument from Sweden called SARA (which bears the complicated acronym “Sub KeV Atom Reflecting Analyzer”) mapped this radiation flux from the surface. Scientists got a sense of how the radiation operates around the moon, Wieser said, but what’s missing are calibrations from the surface to validate the measurements from orbit.

The far side is exciting for another reason, Wieser explained.

“The far side of the moon is much more exposed to the solar wind than the near side for geometrical reasons,” he wrote. “When the near side is illuminated by the sun, then the moon is inside the Earth’s magnetosphere, where the solar wind is screened away.”

In other words, the far side of the moon receives more radiation than the near side because the far side is less shielded.

Yutu-2 operates in a strange magnetic environment courtesy of its landing site, the South Pole-Aitken basin. The basin includes one of the largest craters in the entire solar system. The basin also has a local strong magnetic field, which influences how the solar wind interacts with the surface. But exactly how it influences this interaction is something Swedish scientists want to know — and for that reason, they want Yutu-2 to last as long as it can. (Its current estimated lifetime is a year.)

Sweden is very active in the field of space radiation, including on the European Bepi-Colombo mission that recently launched to Mercury. Mercury, like the moon, is an “airless” world that is full of regolith and craters. So studying the two worlds will give scientists some comparisons to see how similarly (or differently) the radiation environment works on the moon and on Mercury.

Chang’e-4 is the latest in a series of Chinese missions to explore the moon. The last took place in 2013, when Chang’e-3 and its rover, Yutu, made the first successful lunar rover excursion in a generation.

“The science is advancing fast, and that may surprise a lot of people.”

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Credit: Getty Images

As the effects of climate change become increasingly apparent, improvements in data collection and technology are enabling scientists to be more forward-leaning about the impact it has had on extreme weather.

Previously, climate researchers were generally very hesitant to discuss the influence of climate change in connection to a particular weather event. The standard explanation was that a warming world couldn’t be blamed for a specific storm or heat wave, though the likelihood of either instance increases with every notch on the thermometer.

But this is changing now that researchers have more information and more experience studying it.

“The science is advancing fast, and that may surprise a lot of people,” Jeff Rosenfeld, editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, told Seeker.

The Bulletin just published its latest look at the issue, with 17 studies examining the fingerprints of climate change on extreme events worldwide in 2017. They range from a drought that wilted crops and fueled wildfires across the northern Great Plains to dense cloud cover over Japan, from African droughts to flooding in Peru and Uruguay.

Scientists can’t yet say that a specific storm or event was the direct result of climate change. They still couch their conclusions in the language of risk and odds. Or they say that climate change made a particular disaster worse, such as the flooding that followed Hurricane Florence in October or the sudden rainstorm that devastated Baton Rouge, La., in 2016.

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But they’re now ingesting streams of data from land, sea, and satellite instruments, and are equipped with advanced processors and more sophisticated computer models with which to analyze it all. And they’re learning more about how to assess this impact and frame their findings, Rosenfeld noted.

Credit: Getty Images

“When you go to the doctor and the doctor sees a pack of cigarettes in your pocket, he or she isn’t going to say, ‘You’re going to die of lung cancer,’ ” he said. “But the doctor can say, ‘I see you’re smoking cigarettes. I can tell you that’s going to raise the odds of lung cancer, and I can tell you how much it’s going to raise the odds of lung cancer.’ ”

It’s easier to find the fingerprint of climate change in some events, such as the 
oceanic heat waves that have damaged fisheries and coral reefs worldwide in recent years.


“The increase in odds has been so great, you could almost say this would not happen without climate change,” Richard Black, director of the London-based Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, told Seeker.

But in the past year, researchers have published the results of 43 studies looking into the weather-climate connection and found evidence of that link in 32 of them, Black’s nonprofit research firm reports. And they’re able to produce those conclusions faster, sometimes while a longer-running event like a heat wave or a drought is still going on.

“I think that makes a massive difference in terms of public awareness,” Black said. “You’re getting the analysis out there while the event is still very fresh in the public memory.”

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When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just put out its annual Arctic Report Card, it found that temperatures in the far North are going up at twice the average rate of the rest of the world. This was, the report said, “driving broad change in the environmental system in predicted and, also, unexpected ways.”

The effect that warming appears to be having on weather in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere is also under close scrutiny. Much of that weather is driven by the jet stream, an atmospheric current driven by the temperature difference between the Arctic and the warm air of the lower latitudes. When the temperature difference between those regions shrinks, the jet stream gets weaker — and a weaker current tends to meander. It flows in slow waves, bringing blasts of cold Arctic air southward behind it while drawing warm air northward.

Credit: Getty Images

This effect was seen in North American cities like Boston and New York, where shirtsleeve temperatures occurred in the middle of last winter, while Europe was plunged into a deep freeze that brought snow as far south as Rome.

Researchers are increasingly confident of that connection. But the details are still being worked out, and different effects may be seen in assorted locations and seasons, and with such variables as ocean temperature fluctuations.

“The uptick in extreme weather events — especially those related to persistent patterns — is certainly consistent with our expectations for the impacts of increasing Arctic amplification,” Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist who wrote the NOAA report’s chapter on the subject, told Seeker. “But given the relatively short time period of actual observations since the Arctic started warming rapidly, the signal is still hard to tease out of all the noise.”

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“We have learned a lot in recent years, but there’s still much we still don’t know because the climate system is so complicated and noisy,” she added.

That improved attribution is likely to have effects beyond your daily weather report. It could affect business decisions like banks or insurance companies, which often hold the fate of a big project in their hands.

“The world is built on understanding risks, pricing it for one another and passing it along to investors or insurers or health care providers or government,” Rosenfeld said. “All of these things depend on understanding very well what the risks are of extreme events, not just the day-to-day stuff.”

Global average temperatures now run about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the 1880s, when people started keeping widespread temperature records. Nearly all countries have agreed to try to rein in the carbon emissions that are fueling this warming enough to limit climate change to somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees C by the end of the century — the point beyond which scientists say warming will produce catastrophic change.

But emissions have started going up again after remaining relatively stable for three years running, adding to the potential for more extreme weather patterns to come.

 

New research suggests that ocean warming due to climate change is equivalent to one atomic bomb per second.

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Credit: Getty Images

Math can be scary, but if you’re in the market for some really terrifying mathematics, a major new study puts hard numbers to the rate at which oceans are heating up due to global warming. Hold on to your exponential functions.

According to research published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the world’s oceans are absorbing around 90 percent of the excess energy caused by greenhouse gas emissions. That’s to say that the bulk of global warming is sinking into the world’s oceans, increasing temperatures and triggering sea level rise worldwide.

The compiled estimates suggest that global warming of the oceans from 1871 to the present adds up to about 436 x 1021 Joules. Unless you speak math, that might not mean much, so researchers have provided some context. The excess heat absorbed by the oceans in that time frame is around 1,000 times the annual energy use of the entire population of Earth.

For a more vivid analogy, the science team at The Guardian crunched the numbers with a different metric in mind. Global warming, it concluded, has heated the oceans by the equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years.

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Bracing analogy, isn’t it? The Guardian editors checked their calculations with the lead author of the study, Laure Zanna of the University of Oxford, and got no argument from the veteran climate physicist. 

“I try not to make this type of calculation, simply because I find it worrisome,” Zanna told The Guardian. “We usually try to compare the heating to [human] energy use, to make it less scary.”

Hoo boy.

Compiled by an international group of scientists, the new study employed techniques from an array of disciplines, including physics, mathematics, earth science, and climatology. The basic approach was to take the combined worldwide measurements of ocean temperatures since 1871, then run that data through the latest computer models of ocean circulation patterns to find where all the heat has gone.

Developed by researcher Samar Khatiwala, the technique uses blunt force mathematics to assess global ocean warming down to the seabed.

“Our approach is akin to ‘painting’ different bits of the ocean surface with dyes of different colors and monitoring how they spread into the interior over time,” Khatiwala said in a statement issued with the new research. “If we know what the sea surface temperature anomaly was in 1870 in the North Atlantic Ocean we can figure out how much it contributes to the warming in, say, the deep Indian Ocean in 2018.”

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The distressing upshot is that, according to the research team, these new estimates support evidence that the oceans are absorbing most of the excess energy in the climate system, which is produced from greenhouse gases emitted by human activities.

The really important part, for those of us who live in threatened coastal areas, is that warmer oceans mean rising sea levels that are compounded by the physical expansion of water as it gets warmer. In other words, those melting ice caps are only part of the problem.

The new research should help scientists make more accurate predictions in the years to come of where and when sea levels will rise. Presumably, this will be useful to us survivors paddling around in the floating city of New Topeka.


The space agency confirmed the delay after Elon Musk tweeted that it was "about a month away."

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Credit: NASA/SpaceX

NASA has confirmed that the first test flight of SpaceX’s human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft won’t take place in January, announcing on Thursday that the launch would occur “no earlier than February.” The space agency said that more time was needed “to complete hardware testing and joint reviews.”

The uncrewed test flight, named Demo-1, was originally set to launch on Jan. 17, but SpaceX founder Elon Musk recently tweeted that it would be pushed back by at least a few weeks. No official date has been rescheduled.

“About a month away from the first orbital test flight of crew Dragon,” Musk tweeted on Jan. 5.

He added that the first flight is expected to be a challenge. “Yes, will be extremely intense,” he wrote. “Early flights are especially dangerous, as there’s a lot of new hardware.”

It’s a crucial moment for SpaceX, which received a contract valued at $2.6 billion back in 2014 to complete the development of its commercial crew vehicle. Boeing is also working on its own human-rated spacecraft, called CST-100 Starliner, under a 2014 contract worth up to $4.2 billion. (Boeing hasn’t released a test date yet for its spacecraft, but it’s bound to be close as NASA has already announced the first few Boeing and SpaceX crews.)

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NASA wants to have U.S. spacecraft available again as soon as possible in order to reduce its dependence on the Russian Soyuz — the only spacecraft now capable of flying humans up to the International Space Station.
 

A Soyuz flight with two astronauts on board underwent an aborted launch on Oct. 11 due to a deformed rocket sensor, sending the crew hurtling (safely) back to Earth. Russia quickly resolved the problem and subsequently launched the Expedition 58 crew on Dec. 3, but the incident shows the value of having an independent set of spacecraft to bring astronauts up to the space station. Even if one spacecraft type is grounded, launches may continue.

Developing new spacecraft is always difficult. But with human-rated flight, there are additional challenges to consider. Just ask the people behind the space shuttle, who contended with a system that shed re-entry tiles after each flight.

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Former NASA chief historian Roger Launius told Seeker that there is no firm metric defining what a “human-rated” spacecraft is. The Federal Aviation Administration has an objective set of rules for aircraft, but spacecraft remain more difficult to define as astronaut-friendly, he noted. And sometimes even the space agencies get it wrong.

“NASA said that the shuttle was going to be safed for ‘four nines,’ or 99.99% of the time it would be safe, and that’s great,” Launius said. “Well, it wasn’t. They lost two shuttles in 135 flights.”

Credit: NASA

The causes of both of NASA’s shuttle disasters are complex — so complex that the agency took about two years to run flights again after fatal disasters in 1986 and 2003. Investigation boards pointed to a range of technical factors or failures in the shuttle systems. There also were human factors; examples included rushing launch dates, or managers deciding to “normalize deviance” (meaning, if a small failure happens often enough without an issue, mission managers accept that as the norm).

“[NASA] also said at one point that [the shuttle] was going to be as safe as an airline, which it never approached even close to,” Launius added. “Two airplane crashes out of 100 flights would be unacceptable in the aviation world.”

An infinite amount of money to spend on spacecraft development might help ensure human safety, but that’s not possible. So space agencies and their spacecraft manufacturers must make clever calculations: running statistics to see how often components will fail, testing as many individual components as possible, and implementing redundant systems, among many other measures.

NASA is working very closely with SpaceX to ensure that the contractor is doing everything possible to meet safety and reliability for astronauts in order to reliably transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Failure isn’t an option.

“It’s one thing to lose a payload that isn’t alive,” Launius remarked, “but it’s another thing to lose humans.”

While NASA and SpaceX have expressed hope that a human crew might fly in 2019, Launius suggested that the safety checks could likely push a crewed launch date back further.

“I could see this thing stretching out for a year or more,” he said.
 

Global warming is likely to increasingly disrupt American farming with extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and heavy downpours.

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Credit: Getty Images

As climate change’s influence on extreme weather events and deadly wildfire outbreaks becomes increasingly apparent, it’s also forcing farmers to change how they grow the food that destined for your dinner table.

One of the loudest farm alarms recently came from the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment, which found that climate change was likely to “increasingly disrupt” American farming with extreme heat, drought, wildfires and heavy downpours. In short, a warmer climate will be harder on animals, crops, and the people who work the fields.

“Projected increases in extreme heat conditions are expected to lead to further heat stress for livestock, which can result in large economic losses for producers,” said the report, which was released late last year. “Climate change is also expected to lead to large-scale shifts in the availability and prices of many agricultural products across the world, with corresponding impacts on U.S. agricultural producers and the U.S. economy. These changes threaten future gains in commodity crop production and put rural livelihoods at risk.”

Vara Prasad, an agronomist at Kansas State University whose work was among the various studies cited in the climate report, told Seeker that warmer temperatures and more erratic rainfall are already affecting where and when crops are being planted in the central U.S.

Kansas farmers are seeing earlier spring-like weather, more heat waves, longer gaps between rainfall, and heavier downpours when the rain does arrive.

“We go on a drought for two or three weeks, and then we have pouring rain for a couple of days,” said Prasad.

Credit: Don Graham

In the summers, when farmers are growing crops like corn and soybeans, those swings often coincide with heat waves that can damage crops. Meanwhile, in the winter, when farmers are growing wheat, false starts to spring present another hazard.

“We get a couple of days or one week of early spring weather, which is warmer than usual,” Prasad said. “The wheat that’s been planted starts to grow, and then we get hit by a cold snap and it kills the wheat.”

Josette Lewis, who leads sustainable agriculture programs at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, noted that farmers will likely face new pests or plant diseases that are moving to newly hospitable parts of the globe. And changes to how they grow their crops could lead to fights between urban and rural areas over water rights and water quality.

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Will Nuclear Fusion Energy Arrive in Time to Mitigate Climate Change?

“Farmers are going to have to think about larger-scale changes in the types of crops they grow with respect to their access to water, or finding more creative solutions that go beyond the farm level,” Lewis said.

The natural ranges of crops are shifting generally northward in response to warmer temperatures — a pattern that can be seen worldwide — while in Kansas, Prasad said, more drought-tolerant plants are shifting toward the drier west and those that need more water are moving east.


“In some of the places [where] you’re able to grow corn, we will have to move to less water-using crops like milo or sorghum,” he said.

That may mean trying to produce new hybrid species or cultivate variations of crops like wheat or soybeans that stand up to hotter, drier conditions. Corn is already widely adapted to conditions from the tropics to the plains of western Canada, and researchers are working on producing hybrids that can thrive in the conditions that scientists expect from climate change.

“There’s a lot of genetic diversity,” Lewis said. “The multinational seed companies, as well as public researchers, have an expanding range of tools to address those.”

RELATED: Extreme Weather’s Link to Climate Change Is Becoming Clearer

But until such breakthroughs happen, farmers may need to change their practices in order to maintain the quality of their soil. Tilling less often conserves water, while rotating crops like beans or oats with wheat and corn between seasons — or adding non-traditional crops like chickpeas or lentils — can increase a farm’s output of more traditional staples.

Other recent research forecasts that global warming is likely to boost crop yields in higher-latitude nations like Russia and Canada. But it would 
cause devastating declines in harvests in some of the world’s poorest regions, including sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia.


The study, led by the Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, found that these effects are bigger with a global average warming of 2 degrees C (3.6 F) over pre-industrial times — the upper goal of the Paris climate accord that was signed in 2015 — than at the pact’s more ambitious target of limiting warming to 1.5 C.

Credit: Getty Images

While carbon dioxide is what plants crave, it may also affect how nutritious those crops will be for humans. Studies by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health have found that crops grown in CO2-enriched environments have less protein and important minerals like iron and zinc. 

But while farmers can change crops or livestock, there has to be a market for them. That may require changes in consumer choice that aren’t likely to appear overnight. That’s especially true for livestock, which consume the biggest chunk of the U.S. corn harvest.

RELATED: Our Oceans Are Going ‘Nuclear' Because of Climate Change

“The amount of water to produce a pound of meat versus a pound of legumes or a pound of eggs or milk is huge,” Prasad noted. “It’s 10, 15, or even sometimes a 50-fold difference in the amount of water that’s utilized.”

“I’m not suggesting we don’t eat meat at all,” he added. But moving away from daily consumption of meat every day can help ease the effects of climate change, he said. “If consumers don’t change in terms of their diet preferences, it will be very tough.” 

Lewis pointed out that such shifts have occurred in the past, especially as global trade has created new opportunities for farmers.

“We didn’t have quinoa when I was growing up. I still remember when kiwi started to become a fruit in the grocery store,” she said. But there’s less of a connection between farm and supermarket than you may think. “A relatively small portion of the dollar a food consumer spends goes back to the farmer.”

But Lewis added that when the Environmental Defense Fund worked with the giant pork producer Smithfield Foods to incorporate more wheat into its mix of feed, farmers responded by growing more.


“It took a clear market signal from Smithfield to take some land out of corn production and put in some wheat,” she said. “Those are probably areas where less the consumer and more the food companies will play a role in helping farmers diversify their crop rotations and adapt to climate change.”
 

A new astronomical study is the first to find direct evidence of aging white dwarf stars solidifying into crystals.

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Credit: Getty Images

When the sun dies, it’s going to turn into crystal.

A study recently published in Nature shows that in 10 billion years, after the sun runs out of fuel to burn, its core will become a white dwarf star made up of crystal — metallic oxygen and carbon.

And the sun won’t be alone. Roughly 97% of stars in our sky will also turn into crystals when they die. This makes our universe precious indeed, all thanks to a special cooling process inside each star that turns them to crystal at high temperatures, similar to how water turns into ice here on Earth.

“This is a relatively simple chemical experiment, like looking at the temperature of water ice when put into a freezer, but for white dwarfs the time scale is the full history of the universe,” wrote lead author Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom in an email to Seeker.

Astronomers love white dwarfs already, not just because of their precious interiors, but because they are some of the oldest objects in the universe. White dwarfs evolve in a predictable pattern, allowing scientists to use these stars as a sort of “cosmic clock” to estimate how old nearby stars are.

RELATED: We Found the Universe’s First Stars, and They’re Not What We Expected


Credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick

The team made their special find after looking at 15,000 white dwarf candidates with the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, which precisely tracks the ages, types, and positions of stars.

Gaia discovered an abundance of stars that couldn't be grouped by age or mass, which astronomers like to do to classify stellar objects. A closer look showed that these strange stars are cooling down more slowly than expected, because heat is being released to a large degree.

So in other words, the stars are aging more slowly, all due to the growth of crystals. Some stars may stay Peter Pan-like for two billion years — a good chunk of the 13.7 billion-year-old history of our universe so far.


RELATED: Black Hole Found Clutching a White Dwarf in the Closest Such Orbit Ever Seen

Astronomers theorized about this process for decades, but this is the first time a spacecraft picked up direct evidence of aging slowing down as white dwarfs solidify into crystals. But there’s still more work to be done.

Tremblay said that he and his research team need to beef up their plasma and nuclear physics models to better explain how the transformation takes place.

“This would help us to learn about the actual internal composition of white dwarfs — the carbon-oxygen fraction — and nuclear reaction rates, which should give us even more precise ages and insight about stellar evolution,” he said. “Some of these advances could be made with pulsating white dwarfs, that are also in the process of crystallizing.”

While the crystal phase of white dwarfs is fascinating, they won’t stay that way forever. Eventually, the white dwarf will keep cooling and losing its remaining traces of atmosphere. The ultimate fate will be a “fully solid black dwarf,” Tremblay said, which would float unlit for at least a thousand years until the dwarf disintegrates — or until the expansion of space itself tears it apart.
 

Researchers have created neural network technology to analyze and interpret rodent vocalizations.

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Credit: Getty Images

In what is somehow the cutest science story of the new year so far, scientists at the University of Washington have announced a new artificial intelligence system for decoding mouse squeaks.

Dubbed DeepSqueak, the software program can analyze rodent vocalizations and then pattern-match the audio to behaviors observed in laboratory settings. As such, the software can be used to partially decode the language of mice and other rodents. Researchers hope that the technology will be helpful in developing a broad range of medical and psychological studies.

Published this week in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, the study is based around a novel use of sonogram technology, which transforms an audio signal into an image or series of graphs.

The DeepSqueak program turns recordings of mouse chatter into visual output, which is then analyzed using advanced machine learning algorithms. In fact, the A.I. algorithms are in the same family as those used by self-driving cars to “see” their environment. The technology represents the first use of deep learning neural networks in rodent vocalization research, said study co-author Russell Marx in a statement.

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One critical advantage to the DeepSqueak system is that it can “hear” vocalizations that are otherwise inaudible to human ears.

“As it turns out, rats and mice have this rich vocal communication, but it's way above our hearing range, so it's been really hard to detect and analyze these calls,” Russell says in a project demo video. “Our software allows us to visualize all those calls, look at their shape and structure and categorize them.

Marx and DeepSqueak co-creator Kevin Coffey, who both study addiction and psychology issues at University of Washington School of Medicine, have already made some interesting discoveries. Their initial efforts have focused on discerning calls of happiness or distress when working with mice in addiction experiments.

“The animals have a rich repertoire of calls, around 20 kinds,” said Coffey. “With drugs of abuse, you see both positive and negative calls.”

RELATED: Mice Resolve Conflicts by Following the Golden Rule

The mice appear to be happiest when they are anticipating a reward such as sugar, Coffey noted, but they also make happy calls in certain social situations. The researchers also observed that male mice make the same calls over and over when they’ re around other males, but switch to more complex vocalizations when females are nearby.

There’ s probably an entire shelf full of future sociological research in that one observation, but for now the team’s goal is to use the new technology for advancing addiction research.

John Neumaier, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the UW School of Medicine and associate director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute, said that DeepSqueak should help his lab make better and faster progress in the field by making vocalization analysis convenient, efficient, and affordable.

“If scientists can understand better how drugs change brain activity to cause pleasure or unpleasant feelings,” he said, “we could devise better treatments for addiction.”
 

Space is tough on an astronaut's bones, muscles, blood flow and much more.

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Credit: Getty Images: Eugen Wais/EyeEm

Flying in space can be a bit like growing old, because without exercise and proper nutrition astronauts on weeks- or months-long missions would come back to Earth with difficulties staying balanced, with weaker bones and muscles, and with other health problems that are usually confined to seniors or those with disease.

To help better understand these effects, a new investigation on the International Space Station (ISS) will study aging and how the age of mice living in microgravity affects the progression of symptoms that mimic some human diseases. Rodent research in space has been performed many times on the space shuttle and more recently on the ISS to better understand the effects of microgravity on astronaut health. The mice in this experiment will stay in space for over 30 days to provide a better idea how spaceflight effects on their health can inform us about human health on Earth.

This is the ninth Rodent Research mission launched to the ISS since 2014. Each mission has specific science goals,and studied different responses of the mice to spaceflight or therapeutic drugs (or sometimes, both at the same time). While it is possible to make some comparisons between spaceflights, it can be a challenge when mice of different genetic types or genetic backgrounds fly on different missions.

This situation makes it difficult to predict how the genetic background of a particular type of mouse may influence the effects of microgravity in other genetic backgrounds of mice. (Similar things happens with humans; certain genes predispose people to certain types of diseases, such as cancer.) So Rodent Research-8 aims to examine genetic influences more closely.

"This mission is different from previous missions as it is the first reference mission where young and old mice of the same genetic strain are flown together during the same mission," said co-investigator Gretchen Kusek, the associate director of scientific services at private company Taconic Biosciences, in an e-mail to Seeker.


The researchers are from several institutions and will run their own investigations to test how spaceflight and the aging process affect certain organ systems in mammals, especially those effects that might be comparable to human diseases such as osteoporosis, muscle wasting and immune dysfunction, said principal investigator Michael Roberts, deputy chief scientist at the U.S. National Laboratory (which is also sponsoring the investigation).

"These research questions will be addressed by observing the activity levels of the younger and older mice and different measures of activity and function in their genes and major organ systems," he said in an e-mail to Seeker.

While mice and rats are not human subjects, Roberts says they are good models for probing the effects of spaceflight on mammalian systems – such as cardiovascular or reproductive systems – that humans share. Rodents are also prone to many human-type diseases, including diabetes, osteoporosis and even cancer. Another advantage of rodents is they have shorter lifespans and breed more quickly than humans, allowing researchers to quickly see the effects of aging in a single generation exposed to microgravity for a few weeks.

"Our mission at the ISS National Lab is to enable research in space that benefits Earth. The NASA Human Research Program has the mission to identify and mitigate risks to astronauts.  This experiment directly addresses both missions by seeking to improve our understanding of the effects of spaceflight on human physiology using an animal model, to reveal how these effects may be exacerbated or attenuated by age and how faithfully these molecular and physiological changes mimic disease," Roberts said.

"The data collected will be used to inform those of us on Earth about new, early-stage biomarkers of disease. For those working in space, these biomarkers will be used to inform physicians and engineers about effectiveness of current and planned countermeasures to combat physiological changes associated with extended spaceflight," he added.

Waiting for results will still take a while, because analyses on the data take at least a year or more to perform after the mice and associated biospecimens (such as blood samples) return to Earth. It's not as though mice can easily catch a ride home; they have to wait for a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to come to the station, which only happens a few times a year at best.

Future rodent missions may focus on the effects of spaceflight on males and females, and how their sex alters disease onset and progression, Roberts said.

You can read more about the experiment at this NASA web page.

It's an exciting find given the planet is only six light-years away from Earth, making it one of closest worlds outside of our solar system.

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Credit: Getty Images: Ron Miller/Stocktrek Images

Primitive life might exist on a large, rocky planet that is relatively nearby Earth, according to a team of scientists who presented their work at an astronomy conference last week.

The team says that the planet – known as Barnard b or GJ 699 b – might have microbes or other simple life in its environment as long as there is a lot of thermal activity within the planet itself. This would theoretically provide enough energy for life to survive.

It's an exciting find given that the planet is only six light-years away from Earth, making it one of closest worlds outside of our solar system. There is another potentially habitable planet at Proxima Centauri roughly four light-years away from us, which is also coming under scrutiny. (A light-year is the distance light travels in year, or 5.88 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

The planet orbits Barnard's star, a red dwarf star that is slightly smaller and cooler than our sun. Like many stars of its type, Barnard's star puts out a lot of X-ray and ultraviolet radiation that could hurt any nascent life on the planet. However, the planet lies a little outside of the worst of the radiation, providing hope that life could indeed survive as long as it is hardy.

The planet is probably a super-Earth, roughly three times the mass of our own planet. Scientists suspect super-Earths like this one have a large, hot iron core with higher geothermal energy compared with Earth. This geothermal energy could heat the planet's environment using vents or plumes, similar to what happens in ocean environments on Earth – even in cold areas like Antarctica.


In their presentation, the researchers jokingly compared the planet to Hoth – the icy planet made famous in one of the "Star Wars" movies, when Luke Skywalker's steed (a fictional lizard species called a Tauntaun) dies and he must stay warm by burrowing into its intestines.

But the challenge for the team is proving life may exist on the newly discovered planet, which was first announced in November in a Nature publication. There's no telescope powerful enough yet to look at the planet's atmosphere for biologically friendly molecules, such as oxygen or methane. That would require – at the least – the launch of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which is set to go to space no earlier than 2021. Or it may require an even more powerful telescope in the future.

"Directly imaging the planet would be able to tell us its precise brightness, and we could gather more information about temperature and properties such as albedo [reflectivity]," said Villanova Unviersity astrophysicist Scott Engle to Seeker; he participated in the research along with fellow Villanova astrophysicist Edward Guinan. Guinan provided a copy of their presentation to Seeker.


Albedo is helpful in part because it can tell astronomers if the surface is made of highly reflective materials, such as ice, or less reflective materials, such as rock. Since life as we know it prefers water, a planet with water or water ice on its surface would have a stronger argument for habitability.

The study of life on other worlds is still in its infancy and few spacecraft have looked for life directly. NASA is working on a mission called Europa Clipper that could look for habitable conditions at Jupiter's icy moon, Europa. Europa has a liquid ocean under its ice because the tidal energy from strong Jupiter keeps the ocean from freezing over. 

"Getting more data on Europa would be very impactful," Engle said. "Currently we are left with theories and a few Earth-based examples of subsurface oceans such as Lake Vostok in Antarctica. Studies at icy moons, the Holy Grail of which would be something like the Europa Clipper, would finally advance us beyond the boundaries of terrestrial examples like Lake Vostok ... which would be huge."

While the astronomers wait for these datasets to become available, they still have other ways of gathering information; they will examine the star's wobble to see if they can learn any more properties about the planet, and to search for any planetary companions. The team will monitor the variations in the star's light to pin down the star's rotation, and also to look for sunspots – just like on the sun.

They also are looking at alternative techniques to take images of the planet. They have a couple of early ideas already. Perhaps they will use a set of telescopes on the Earth working together as an interferometer, or use extremely sensitive adaptive optics that could help the telescope deform its mirror to counteract atmospheric turbulence that blurs out the sky.

The researchers presented their work at a Jan. 10 press conference held at the 233rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

A team analyzing bacteria on the ISS discovered different genes in space bacteria than similar bacteria on Earth.

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Credit: Getty Images: Science Photo Library - SCIEPRO

While harsh radiation and a "weightless" environment make International Space Station microbes mutate, there's no danger of them turning into superbugs resistant to antibiotics, a new study shows.

A team analyzing bacteria on the space station discovered different genes in the space bacteria than similar bacteria on Earth. The space genes, however, won't hurt the astronauts.

"We were looking for different kinds of genes to see if the same genes were present in the bacteria in both places," said principal investigator Erica Marie Hartmann, an environmental engineer at Northwestern University, in an e-mail to Seeker.

The researchers looked at several types of common and harmless microbes, such as Staphylococcus aureus, which normally lives on human skin. On Earth, the investigators collected the staph directly from human skin, but on the space station, they asked astronauts to pick up the staph on different space station surfaces. This was to remove the possibility of variation from human to human.

"We can thus attribute any differences we see in the types of genes they have to the environment in which they were living: on the human skin, or the building surface," Hartmann said. She added that so far, the investigators don't have an idea about how fast the microbes evolve in space compared to on Earth, but she termed the query "an interesting question."

It's not the first time space microbes attracted researcher attention. Back in November, strains of the bacteria Enterobacter were found on the ISS, as announced in the journal BMC Microbiology. On Earth, this bacteria is usually found in hospitals; a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory press release at the time described it as an "opportunistic infectious organism". The research team (led by JPL microbiology researcher Nitin Singh) called for better monitoring of these microbes on the space station, for human health concerns. The team emphasized, however, there was no immediate threat to the astronauts.

"Our findings are also similar," said Hartmann of her team's new study. "This is reassuring because obviously we don’t want to be sending people up to space in tightly sealed bubbles full of pathogens or pathogens-to-be. The caveat is that there is a huge amount of bacterial diversity, so we can’t say even from looking at these three types of bacteria how all bacteria will respond. We should absolutely keep monitoring and keep doing research to understand how different types of bacteria respond to different built environment conditions, whether that’s in your home on Earth, in the ISS, or on a spacecraft off to Mars."

Luckily for astronauts, analysis of tiny living creatures is getting easier in orbit. In 2017, NASA astronauts sequenced the DNA of microbes entirely on the space station, as part of the Genes in Space-3 experiment; it was the first time orbiting astronauts sequenced and helped identify microbes without needing to send the samples back to Earth. The two species found were Staphylococcus capitis and Staphylococcus hominis, benign microbes that had been captured on the space station before.

"Sarah Wallace, who worked on that study, also helped us out with this study," Hartmann said. "What they’re doing by sequencing bacteria on the ISS helps us immensely. They're generating the genomes that we can then use to compare to genomes of Earth-based bacteria."

Hartmann and her team will not stop with this study; they plan to expand their analysis to different types of bacteria, when more genomes from Genes in Space-3 become available through NASA. The team is also conducting studies in buildings on Earth to "make sure that we’re not inadvertently creating superbugs," she said.

While the idea of little creatures living all around us might make you feel itchy, Hartmann emphasized a certain number of bacteria and microbes are normal in the environment.

"We take our bacteria with us everywhere we go, and we always will," she said. "We need to accept that we need our bacterial partners; the vast majority of bacteria are not harmful to humans and can in fact be very helpful. By researching how bacteria respond to different conditions within buildings, we can be smarter about how we're designing and operating buildings and what kinds of products we use in them."

Hartmann's study was recently published in the journal mSystems.


A virus that has killed half the people it's infected causes worldwide concern. Continue reading →

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A virus that has killed half of the people it's known to have infected could pose "a threat to the entire world," director-general of the United Nations' World Health Organization Margaret Chan said at the 66th World Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.

What is a novel coronavirus?

The coronavirus family encompasses viruses of varying severity, causing illnesses from the common cold to SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome).

VIDEO: Is a Killer Virus Out There?

This strain, now being called the Middle East respiratory symptom coronavirus, or MERS-CoV, "is different from any other coronavirus previously found in people," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Symptoms include fever, cough and shortness of breath, leading to pneumonia in some cases. Health officials are still trying to pin down how it infects humans. Although the CDC says there is "clear evidence" of human-to-human transmission, it doesn't appear to spread as quickly and easily as SARS did in 2003. Since then, monitoring techniques have improved so that more viruses are being detected - most of which, experts have said, will not pose any grave threats.

NEWS: New SARS-like Bug: Pandemic Potential?

Still, "we understand too little about this virus when viewed against the magnitude of its potential threat," CNN quotes Chan as saying. "We do not know where the virus hides in nature. We do not know how people are getting infected. Until we answer these questions, we are empty-handed when it comes to prevention. These are alarm bells. And we must respond," she said.

The WHO is monitoring infections worldwide: The current tally has 44 reported cases of infection since September 2012 and 22 deaths.

Photo: Celeste Romero Cano/Getty Images





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