News Feeds

Driving at night might be a scary challenge for a new driver, but with hours of practice it soon becomes second nature. For self-driving cars, however, practice may not be enough because the lidar sensors that often act as these vehicles' 'eyes' have difficulty detecting dark-colored objects. New research describes a highly reflective black paint that could help these cars see dark objects and make autonomous driving safer.

Driving at night might be a scary challenge for a new driver, but with hours of practice it soon becomes second nature. For self-driving cars, however, practice may not be enough because the lidar sensors that often act as these vehicles' 'eyes' have difficulty detecting dark-colored objects. New research describes a highly reflective black paint that could help these cars see dark objects and make autonomous driving safer.

Artificial intelligence analysis of data gathered by acoustic recording devices is a promising new tool for monitoring the marbled murrelet and other secretive, hard-to-study species.

Researchers have developed a unique shape-tunable mirror that can change shape to optimally channel X-rays. It is composed of a single crystal of lithium niobate. This new technology offers the ability to correct aberration in the X-ray region, leading to improved spatial resolution.

Recent reports of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope finding signs of life on a distant planet understandably sparked excitement. A new study challenges this finding, but also outlines how the telescope might verify the presence of the life-produced gas.

Three days ago I reported that Northwestern University successfully bargained with the pro-Palestinian protestors who were encamped on its campus. As Zach Kessel reported in the National Review at that time:

After five days of anti-Israel demonstrators occupying Deering Meadow on Northwestern University’s campus, Northwestern president Michael Schill and the rest of the university’s leadership decided to accede to several of the protesters’ demands.

While not committing to divesting its endowment from companies that do business in Israel and ending partnerships with Israeli institutions, the university released a list of concessions in a celebratory statement Monday afternoon in exchange for the removal of the encampment on the lawn.

Most notable among those concessions is a promise to offer full-ride scholarships to Palestinian students and guaranteed faculty jobs for Palestinian academics.

“The University will support visiting Palestinian faculty and students at risk (funding two faculty per year for two years; and providing full cost of attendance for five Palestinian undergraduates to attend Northwestern for the duration of their undergraduate careers),” the document reads. “The University commits to fundraise to sustain this program beyond this current commitment.”

A pdf of these “concessions” can be found here. I find it sickening. What isn’t mentioned is that Northwestern also commits to this (“MENA students” are North African and Middle Eastern students):

• The University will provide immediate temporary space for MENA/Muslim students.
• The University will provide and renovate a house for MENA/Muslim students that is conductive to community building as soon as practicably possible upon completion of the Jacobs renovation (Expected 2026)

Now, as Kessel reports again, Northwestern’s promises may in fact be illegal, and there is already considerable pushback from Jewish organizations. The problem is that this is a concession to only one side of the controversy a concession designed simply to stop a disruptive protest, and it also earmarks both studentships and professorships for residents of a particular foreign territory. That’s a form of discrimination by nationality.

Click the link in first sentence of last paragraph, or go below to the archived version.

First, a chest-puffing announcement by Northwestern’s craven President, Michael Schill:

Schill released a video Tuesday in which he addressed the agreement with encampment organizers, saying he was “proud of our community for achieving what has been a challenge across the country: a sustainable de-escalated path forward.” He also noted the antisemitic posters, saying such messages should be “condemned by all of us.”

What he achieved was to give in to the pro-Palestinian students’ demands, while paying only lip service to anti-Semitism. Yes, Schill met the challenge by caving in to the protestors’ demands. But all is still not well, and for two reasons (Kessels’s words are indented):

The legal problem:

While Schill’s agreement with the encampment organizers has drawn condemnation, legal experts told NR that there is a great deal of uncertainty as to whether the measures to provide scholarships for Palestinian students and faculty positions for Palestinian academics are lawful.

Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told NR that, though Schill did not explain all the details of the press release, the scholarships and faculty positions may violate Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights act, respectively.

Title VI stipulates that entities receiving federal funding must not allow discrimination, exclusion, or denial of benefits on the basis of race, color, or national origin, while Title VII protects against employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.

“Even if they eventually paper the Palestinian scholarship in such a way that it purports to be something else, the fact that this is how they announced it will be very strong evidence of the intent behind the program,” Morenoff told NR. “And given that Title VI is primarily — or, as the Supreme Court has said, exclusively — a disparate-treatment statute focused on the intent of a program, it certainly looks like this is a violation.”

Morenoff said he could imagine the university arguing that Title VI applies to programs rather than scholarships but pointed to a 1994 United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruling stating otherwise.

On the Title VII issue, Morenoff said it is “very hard to see how having national origin-defined positions as part of this negotiation could be compliant.”

And the pushback:

In a joint statement published Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Brandeis Center, and StandWithUs urged Schill to step down from his leadership position.

“For days, protesters openly mocked and violated Northwestern’s codes of conduct and policies by erecting an encampment in which they fanned the flames of antisemitism and wreaked havoc on the entire university community,” the three organizations wrote. “Their goal was not to find peace, but to make Jewish students feel unsafe on campus. Rather than hold them accountable — as he pledged he would — President Schill gave them a seat at the table and normalized their hatred against Jewish students. It is clear from President Schill’s actions that he is unfit to lead Northwestern and must resign.”

The three groups wrote that if Schill does not resign, they expect the board of trustees to “step in as the leaders the University needs and remove him.”

Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) president Morton A. Klein went a step further, arguing in a Wednesday statement that Schill, provost Kathleen Hagerty, and vice president for student affairs Susan Davis should each be relieved of their duties.

“President Schill, Provost Hagerty, and VP Davis should be fired immediately for this disaster — and this dangerous agreement must be rescinded,” Klein wrote. “If a group of white supremacists took over Deering Meadow and chanted for the deaths of blacks, the white supremacists would be immediately removed from the campus — not rewarded with scholarships, professorships, buildings, power over vendors, and investment powers. The same standard should apply here. The Northwestern officials who negotiated and entered into this agreement must be fired, and their agreement must be thrown in the dustbin. The student and faculty trespassers and promoters of anti-Jewish violence should be arrested and expelled or fired.”

There is more in the article, but the archived link will give you the details.  Still, there’s one more looming threat for President Schill:

Meanwhile, a group of Northwestern students met with members of the House Education and Workforce Committee, including Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) and Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) in Washington, D.C., Wednesday afternoon.

A committee aide told NR that the agreement between Northwestern’s leadership and the encampment organizers poses several problems.

“This really represents a craven decision to cave to the students who were disrupting university policy, violating rules, harassing Jewish students, and we heard really appalling and egregious accounts of that harassment directly from Jewish students in a meeting today,” the aide said, adding that the provisions in the agreement “are of significant concern to us because — while we’re still getting more information and looking into this — they appear to be violations of the law.”

Stefanik! We all know what she does to craven or double-talking professors. Not that I’m on her political side, or agree with her views on the First Amendment, but Schill does need to be grilled publicly on this.

And Northwestern students have sued their school for breaching promises to them. It’s all described in the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern; click the headline below to or the link in this sentence to read:

The complaint:

Three plaintiffs brought a breach of contract lawsuit against Northwestern Wednesday, citing a “dystopic cesspool of hate” present at the pro-Palestinian encampment on Deering Meadow.

The lawsuit — brought by two graduate students and one first-year undergraduate student at NU — alleges that NU breached a “modest core promise” to students when it opted to allow the encampment to continue throughout the weekend despite demonstration policies stating such encampments are prohibited.

“Northwestern’s refusal to enforce its own policies is thus a breach of contract, in addition to being a total embarrassment to the broader Northwestern community,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit, filed in the Cook County Circuit Court, alleges the University allowed the encampment to become “increasingly hostile to Jews” and that “the encampment featured open support for Hamas.” The plaintiffs seek class certification for Jewish students at NU who did not participate in the encampment.

. . .“Rather than enforce its express and implied promises to Plaintiffs that Northwestern is a place of civility where free expression is governed by transparent, content-neutral codes of conduct, Northwestern twisted itself into a pretzel to accommodate the hostile and discriminatory encampment, legislate around it, and ultimately reward it,” the lawsuit reads.

This is what I think the administrators at the University of Chicago have not considered: that their allowing our encampment to remain, despite its palpable violations of the “time, place, and manner” of speech codes, despite the protestors’ repeated vandalism and removal of the banners of Jewish students, despite their erection of illegal blockages of access, and despite their placement of Palestinian flags all over the quad—all of this constitutes a violation of the free speech (and restriction of its disruption) code that is contractually promised to our students by the University.  The persistence of the encampment despite our administration’s admission that it violates university regulations is, I think, grounds for a lawsuit against the University of Chicago. They cannot on one hand laud our tradition of free speech and on the other hand allow palpable and copious violations of free speech and of the time, place, and manner of its emission.

Levels of protection measles provided by the MMR jab fall by a small amount every year, according to mathematical modelling

Are you sitting or lying down? Perhaps you’re moving around at a walking pace? I probably am. And yet, unless you live in the northeastern US or in southern South America, you and I are moving relative to each other at hundreds of miles per hour.

In Chapter 2 of the book “‘Waves in an Impossible Sea”, I remarked on the this fact. (See below for the relevant passage.) At first glance it might seem puzzling. After all, the distance between your town and my town is constant; it never changes. And yet our relative motion is comparable to or faster than a jet aircraft. How can both of these things be true?

And then there’s another question: if we’re all moving so fast relative to one another, why don’t we feel the motion?

The answer to the second question: It’s the principle of relativity at work. As for the first question: Such is life on a spinning Earth.

In the book, I tried to illustrate how this works using a picture (Figure 2.) But this is one of those cases where an animation is much clearer than a static image. On this new page, I’ve presented animations that I hope will clarify the issue, in case you’re having trouble visualizing it.

Here’s the relevant quote from the book’s Chapter 2, where the principle of relativity is first discussed.

We are oblivious to our own motion, and also to the relative motion between ourselves and our friends in other parts of the world. That relative motion isn’t slow. If people sitting in Boston were to measure carefully, they’d see people standing in Miami as moving at 215 miles (345 km) per hour; meanwhile, those in Miami would perceive their friends in Boston as moving at 215 miles per hour in the opposite direction.

But wait: The distance from Miami to Boston, 1,257 miles (2050 km), never changes, so how can there be relative motion between those two cities? It’s because Bostonians view Miami as moving in a daily circle, one that leaves the distance between the two cities always unchanged—and vice versa.

An analysis of the 2021 German federal elections has found that for every 200,000 times a politician's social media adverts were viewed, their vote share increased by 2.1 per cent - a potentially low-cost way of swinging elections

Bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, are the most abundant form of life on Earth. And yet we know comparatively little about them. But in recent years phage research has taken off with renewed interest. This is partly driven by the availability of CRISPR-based tools for studying genomes. Interestingly, CRISPR itself is a gene-editing tool that derives from bacteria and archaea, which evolved the system as a defense against viruses that infect them and alter their genome. Now we are using CRISPR to investigate those very viruses, and perhaps use that knowledge as a tool to fight bacterial infections. Bacteria may have handed us the tools to fight bacteria.

Most phage viruses are small, with genomes smaller than 200 kbp (kilo-base pairs). But a very few (93 so far) are larger than this, and known as jumbo phage viruses. The largest of these, Bacillus megaterium, is 497 kbp, which is only 87 kbp smaller than the smallest known bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium. So essentially these are viruses that are almost as big as bacteria.

The jumbo phage viruses have been especially difficult to study for various technical reasons. For one, the filters that separate viruses from bacteria tend to trap the jumbo phages also. The genome has also been difficult to get access to. But CRISPR is changing that, giving us new tools to investigate these viruses. Researchers have recently published some interesting findings.  When some jumbo viruses infect a bacterium they form a pseudonucleus that functions similar to the nucleus in eukaryotic cells, meaning that it is a walled-off section within the bacteria containing the viral genome. The purpose of forming this viral nucleus is to protect the genome from the bacterium, which will try to destroy or disable it before it can replicate.

This is part of what the researchers were studying – how does the jumbo phage virus protect its nucleus inside a bacterium. They have identified a key protein, “protein importer of Chimalliviruses A,” or PicA, that acts as a chaperone. It will allow useful cargo proteins across the nucleus barrier but not hostile bacterial proteins. It’s a mini-transport system, the smallest biological one known. Because jumbo phage viruses are larger than most phage viruses they have more genes which allow for more complex behavior, including setting up this nucleus and transport system.

Interest in jumbo phage viruses is more than academic. There are potentially huge applications. Downstream applications are often hard to predict, and usually take longer than we would like. I have found a good rule of thumb is that there is about 30 years between such basic-science discoveries and clinical applications. This time frame may be decreasing, however, as the pace of biological research accelerates. CRISPR and AI technology in particular have increased the speed of this type of research considerably. Translating to clinical applications, however, still takes a long time because of the safeguards in animal and human research.

Researchers are eyeing one particular application, which I referred to above – using phage viruses (jumbo or otherwise) to fight bacterial infections. Right now we are facing a real threat of antimicrobial resistance. Those pesky infectious bacteria won’t just let us kill them. They stubbornly insist on evolving ways to bypass and survive our antibiotics, known as antibiotic (or more broadly, antimicrobial) resistance. Antimicrobial resistance is already responsible for millions of deaths per year, and is a growing problem. Researchers are trying to develop new drugs with novel mechanisms of killing bacteria, but the concern is that this is ultimately a losing battle. Evolution will eventually win out.

As an aside, I think this remains to be seen. Part of the problem is overprescribing and misusing of antibiotics. Better regulation and enforcement can help, slowing the development of resistance. But this can only slow resistance, not stop it. Researching novel mechanisms also helps, but again this just kicks the can down the road. It will be interesting to see how this will ultimately play out. Can we develop enough different kinds of antibiotics that we can essentially use them in a rotation, taking certain drugs entirely off the market for a couple of decades to allow bacteria to lose resistance? Will that even work? And how quickly will they regain resistance once the antibiotics are reintroduced?

This is why there is so much interest in bacteriophages. They could provide not just another pharmaceutical option, but an entirely different approach to fighting clinical bacterial infections. Phages have been engaged in an evolutionary battle with bacteria for perhaps over a billion years, so we have a lot to learn from them. We could, theoretically, genetically engineer a bacteriophage to efficiently and safely infect and kill an infectious bacteria. Such viruses would likely not infect eukaryotic cells.

Another possibility is to use the bacteriophages, especially the jumbo phages, as drug-delivery systems. They target and get inside bacteria. Once there they could be engineered to then release an antibiotic, one that would not have been able to otherwise gain access to the bacteria. Or this approach could simply make antibiotics much more effective. This could also reduce the side effects and risks of antibiotics as they will be precisely delivered.

Phages can also have applications beyond fighting bacteria. They can be engineered and selected for specificity against cancer cells. These anti-cancer phages can then, again, be used to deliver drugs to their target, this time chemotherapy rather than antibiotics.

This all seems like a useful technology to develop. The more we learn about the basic science of bacteriophages, the better we will be able to then manipulate them for our own applications.

The post Understanding Jumbo Phage Viruses first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

The skull of Shanidar Z was found in the Shanidar cave in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and has been painstakingly put back together

The record-breaking heat of 2023 has seen a rare disagreement break out between climate scientists, with some saying it shows Earth may have entered a new period of warming

Come join the Skeptoid Adventures trip for 2024, a journey of exploration in Death Valley!

Corals can survive heat-related bleaching, but research from the Great Barrier Reef suggests a full recovery may take longer than we thought

Blake Crouch's riveting Dark Matter sees physics professor Jason wanting out of the multiverse, after being kidnapped and dumped there by another version of himself

Scientists have dramatically reduced the time and energy required to chill materials to temperatures near absolute zero. Their prototype refrigerator could prove a boon for the burgeoning quantum industry, which widely uses ultracold materials.

The Search for Life in our Solar System leads seekers to strange places. From our Earthbound viewpoint, an ice-covered moon orbiting a gas giant far from the Sun can seem like a strange place to search for life. But underneath all that ice sits a vast ocean. Despite the huge distance between the moon and the Sun and despite the thick ice cap, the water is warm.

Of course, we’re talking about Enceladus, and its warm, salty ocean—so similar to Earth’s in some respects—takes some of the strangeness away.

Enceladus is Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, and the Cassini spacecraft observed it during its mission to the Saturn system. Scientists discovered that plumes of water originating from Enceladus’ southern region are responsible for one of Saturn’s rings. They also discovered that the water is salty. Any place we find warm, salty water attracts our immediate attention, even when it’s covered by kilometres of ice and is 1.5 billion kilometres away from the life-giving Sun.

There’s lots of talk about a future mission to Enceladus to explore the moon and its potentially life-supporting ocean in more detail. But until then, scientists are working with their current data, and using models and simulations to understand the moon better.

Enceladus’ most defining surface features are its Tiger Stripes. They’re four parallel, linear depressions on the moon’s surface about 130 km long, 2 km wide, and 500 meters deep. They have higher temperatures than their surroundings, indicating that cryovolcanism is active. The stripes are the source of Enceladus’ plumes.

Geysers erupt from Enceladus’ Tiger Stripes in this image from the Cassini spacecraft. Image Credit: By NASA/JPL/SSI – http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia11688.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15592605

New research suggests that strike-slip faults at the moon’s prominent Tiger Stripe features allow plumes of water from Enceladus to escape into space. It’s published in Nature Geoscience and titled “Jet activity on Enceladus linked to tidally driven strike-slip motion along tiger stripes.” The lead author is Alexander Berne, a doctoral candidate in Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology.

The plumes above the Tiger Stripes aren’t stable and continuous. They wax and wane as the moon follows its 33-hour orbit around Saturn. Tidal heating keeps the moon’s water in liquid form, and according to the researchers, the same tidal forces are responsible for the intermittent plumes. Theory shows that tidal forces open and close faults at the Tiger Stripes like an elevator door, and that turns the plumes on and off.

However, those theories can’t accurately predict the timing of the plumes’ peak brightness. They also show that tidal forcing alone doesn’t provide enough energy to open and close the faults.

This research digs deeper into the question and provides an answer. The authors say that rather than acting like an elevator door, strike-slip faults at the Tiger Stripes open and close to regulate plume activity. This is similar to what happens on Earth in places like the San Andreas Fault. It’s a strike-slip fault where one side shears past the other, causing Earthquakes. The critical part of this is that strike-slip faults require less energy than the elevator opening and closing scenario.

Models are more effective as they’re fed more detailed and accurate data. Berne and his co-researchers built a numerical model that simulates the strike-skip faults on Enceladus. They included friction, compressional forces and shear forces. The numerical model showed the faults acting in concert with the changing plumes. This strongly suggests that Enceladus’ orbit and the tidal forces acting on the moon cause the strike-slip faults to open and close.

This illustration from the research explains how strike-slip faults are responsible for the plumes erupting from Enceladus’ Tiger Stripes. As the moon orbits Saturn, tidal forces open and close the faults. Image Credit: Berne et al. 2024.

The Tiger Stripes have bent sections that pull apart under strain. Since they’re bent, an opening appears as they slide. The plumes come from these openings.

The research team’s work and previous research into the Tiger Stripes by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory both support the idea that the plumes come from these strike-slip faults.

“We now appear to have both geologic and geophysical reasons to suspect that jet activity occurs at pull-aparts along Enceladus’s tiger stripes,” said lead author Berne.

This figure from the research shows the degree of displacement and slip at the Tiger Stripe faults at two different points in Enceladus’ orbit. Image Credit: Berne et al. 2024.

Enceladus gets most of its attention because of its potential to support life. The plumes themselves aren’t part of what life needs, but they’re a window into the moon’s potential habitability.

“For life to evolve, the conditions for habitability have to be right for a long time, not just an instant,” said study co-author Mark Simons, Professor of Geophysics at Caltech. “On Enceladus, you need a long-lived ocean. Geophysical and geological observations can provide key constraints on the dynamics of the core and the crust as well as the extent to which these processes have been active over time.”

There’s a lot more work to be done to understand Enceladus. On Earth, satellites can monitor the movement at strike-slip faults and use it to better understand Earthquakes. Once we get a spacecraft to Enceladus, it could do the same.

“Detailed measurements of motion along the tiger stripes are needed to confirm the hypotheses laid out in our work,” Berne says. “For instance, we now have the capacity to image fault slip, such as earthquakes, on Earth using radar measurements from satellites in orbit. Applying these methods at Enceladus should allow us to better understand the transport of material from the ocean to the surface, the thickness of the ice crust, and the long-term conditions which may enable life to form and evolve on Enceladus.”

When we get a spacecraft to Enceladus, it can monitor the faults and jets over multiple orbits. That will allow researchers to test their predictions.

“These observations could provide key constraints on the mechanical nature of the crust, tidal controls on jet activity and the evolution of the south polar terrain,” the authors conclude.

The post Enceladus’s Fault Lines are Responsible for its Plumes appeared first on Universe Today.

Few things in life are certain. But it seems highly probable that people will explore the lunar surface over the next decade or so, staying there for weeks, perhaps months, at a time. That fact bumps up against something we are certain about. When human beings spend time in low-gravity environments, it takes a toll on their bodies.

What can be done?

Scientists have studied the effects of microgravity and low gravity on the human body. Several problems crop up, like muscle atrophy and bone demineralization. Cardiovascular conditioning suffers, as does neural control of body posture and movement. But while researchers are learning more and more about the effects, solutions are lagging behind.

A new paper published in Royal Society Open Science suggests a novel, low-tech solution for these problems. Its title is “Horizontal running inside circular walls of Moon settlements: a comprehensive countermeasure for low-gravity deconditioning?” The lead author is Alberto Minetti, a Physiology Professor at the University of Milan.

Minetti and his co-authors point out that specific exercises for specific problems may not be the best approach. Instead, whole-body exercise could be a powerful tool for supporting astronaut health. “Rather than training selected muscle groups only, ‘whole-body’ activities such as locomotion seem better candidates,” they explain. However, there’s a problem with that. “But at Moon gravity, both ‘pendular’ walking and bouncing gaits like running exhibit abnormal dynamics at faster speeds,” they write.

The abnormal dynamics mean that astronauts don’t benefit much from that type of exercise. It’s hindered by an ” … imbalance between the kinetic and potential energy of the body centre of mass,” the authors write. That means it can’t be used to get the same kind of exercise it would provide on the Earth. “Additionally, the metabolic demands of bouncing gaits are reduced at Moon gravity, limiting their potential stimulus for cardiorespiratory fitness,” the authors explain.

There are some potential solutions out there to help lunar astronauts maintain their health in low gravity. One is a centrifuge, where the rotating motion simulates gravity, encouraging the body to maintain muscle and bone mass. But they’re energy-intensive and impractical.

The authors are proposing a novel solution. Have you ever seen a Wall of Death?

A stuntman riding on a Wall of Death. Friction and centripetal force allow him to ride on the wall’s vertical surface. Image Credit: By SeaDave from Fairlie, Scotland – Owner of the Wall of Death, in his family for 80 years.Uploaded by MaybeMaybeMaybe, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22817835

“Here, we propose a novel solution: lunar inhabitants could engage in running on the inside of vertical circular walls, hence running parallel to the Moon’s surface,” the authors write. Exercising in a Wall of Death (WoD) would help maintain muscle mass, bone density, cardiovascular fitness, and neural control.

On Earth, the gravity is too strong for humans to run around the sides of a WoD. Only motorized vehicles and bicycles can do it. But on the Moon, the weaker gravity makes them practical.

The researchers simulated a lunar WoD and tested the performance of subjects running in it. They hired a WoD for one day and used a harness of bungee cords to reduce participants’ body weight, simulating the Moon’s lower gravity.

The researchers removed the roof from the WoD and used a crane to support the harness. The middle inset image is unrelated to the research and illustrates the peculiar upward leaning posture of someone in the WoD. Image Credit: Minetti et al. 2024.

Two participants took part in the tests: a 36-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman. The bungees were tuned so each participant weighed one-sixth of their body weight. The harness unloaded one side of the subjects’ bodies to further mimic lunar conditions. Each participant’s data from the WoD was combined with treadmill data to give robust results.

Once inside the WoD and connected to the harness, this is what the experiment looked like.

In this image, the 33-year-old female subject is connected to the harness and running around the inside of the Wall of Death. Image Credit: Minetti et al. 2024.

The participants quickly got the hang of the unusual motion required to run horizontally inside the WoD. “This process required only 5–8 attempts and allowed them to start running with no assistance,” the authors write. The participants “… ended their performance by safely slowing down their pace and descending from the horizontal posture on the wall down to the upright one on the WoD floor, with no injuries,” they explained.

via GIPHY

The authors say they’ve successfully demonstrated the basics of using a WoD to support lunar astronaut health. “We have demonstrated for the first time that humans can safely run horizontally in low gravity conditions inside a cylinder, sized as a terrestrial ‘WoD’, through a speed-driven, self-generated higher artificial gravity,” they explain.

The researchers are confident that the Wall of Death idea can help lunar astronauts deal with the chronic effects of lunar gravity. At the same time, they’re cognizant of their small sample size and the study’s other limitations.

“In conclusion, while being aware of the small sample size, of the crudeness of kinematics acquisition in such a peculiar field experiment, and that dedicated bed rest studies will be needed to refine this topic, we are confident in our findings,” they write in their conclusion.

Though normal running on the Moon is impossible, the WoD provides a way to gain the benefits of running in short WoD exercise sessions daily. Participants using the WoD created “… a sufficiently high (lateral) self-generated artificial gravity likely capable of maintaining, through a few short, almost ‘terrestrial’ running laps a day, an acceptable cardio-motor fitness and bone mineral status, useful to locally move and work around, to prepare the long trip to Mars, and to return home in good condition.”

There’s an elegance around low-tech solutions to confounding problems. A simple WoD could be the solution to the Moon’s low gravity instead of a complicated, energy-hungry device like a centrifuge.

“All of this, by using an inexpensive and passive facility already built in their circular inhabited units,” the authors conclude.

The post Lunar Explorers Could Run to Create Artificial Gravity for Themselves appeared first on Universe Today.

Space debris is a growing problem, so companies are working on ways to mitigate it. A new satellite called ADRAS-J was built and launched to demonstrate how a spacecraft could rendezvous with a piece of space junk, paving the path for future removal. Astroscale Japan Inc, the Japanese company behind the satellite, released a new picture from the mission showing a close image of its target space debris, a discarded Japanese H2A rocket’s upper stage, captured from just a few hundred meters away.

ADRAS-J stands for Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan, and is the first satellite ever to attempt to safely approach, characterize and survey the state of an existing piece of large debris. This mission will only demonstrate Rendezvous and Proximity Operations (RPO) capabilities by operating in near proximity to the piece of space debris, and gather images to assess the rocket body’s movement and the condition of the structure, Astroscale Japan said.

ADRAS-J Launch. Credit: Astroscale Japan, Inc.

The mission launched from New Zealand on February 18 and is part of Phase 1 of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s plan to deal with space debris. Shortly after launch, the ADRAS-J spacecraft began its maneuvers to rendezvous with the chosen piece of space debris. On April 9, mission engineers maneuvered the spacecraft to a desired position several hundred kilometers away from the rocket stage. Then, by April 16, the spacecraft was able to match the orbit of the rocket stage. By the next day, using  navigation inputs from the spacecraft’s suite of rendezvous payload sensors, ADRAS-J was able to attain close approach of several hundred meters.  

“The unprecedented image marks a crucial step towards understanding and addressing the challenges posed by space debris, driving progress toward a safer and more sustainable space environment,” Astroscale Japan said in a press release.

This particular rocket stage was chosen because it did not have any GPS data. Instead, the operations team had to rely on ground based observational data to approximate its position to make the approach. This provided a realistic target for testing debris analysis activity.

The next task, ADRAS-J will attempt to capture additional images of the upper stage through various controlled close approach operations. Astroscale Japan said the images and data collected are expected to be crucial in better understanding the debris and providing critical information for future removal efforts.

A future mission, ADRAS-J2, will also attempt to safely approach the same rocket body through RPO, obtain more images, then remove and deorbit the rocket body using in-house robotic arm technologies.

The post This is an Actual Picture of Space Debris appeared first on Universe Today.

Finnair has cancelled flights to Tartu in Estonia this month because of an ongoing GPS jamming attack – and there is evidence that the attack is being controlled from Russia