News Feeds

Scientists report a new method that achieves for the first time valley polarization in centrosymmetric bulk materials in a non-material-specific way. This 'universal technique' may have major applications linked to the control and analysis of different properties for 2D and 3D materials, which can in turn enable the advancement of cutting-edge fields such us information processing and quantum computing.

Scientists report a new method that achieves for the first time valley polarization in centrosymmetric bulk materials in a non-material-specific way. This 'universal technique' may have major applications linked to the control and analysis of different properties for 2D and 3D materials, which can in turn enable the advancement of cutting-edge fields such us information processing and quantum computing.

I’ve collected several articles on the troubles at Columbia and other American campuses; two of these I found in Tom Gross’s newsletter. If you click on the headlines, you can access them all for free, as I’ve used archived links. I also give a brief excerpt from each article below the headline.

In my view, this is a far more troublesome time for colleges than the period of civil rights and anti-Vietnam-war protests of 1968 and after, for the protestors are not only bigoted and calling for the extermination of Israel, but seem opposed to all Western values—almost as if they would be delighted to live under Hamas. They’re certainly extolling Hama and Iran, both purveyors of terrorism.

And, if I don’t miss my guess, this trouble will spread off campus, for campus is where what is ideologically “cool” begins. (As Andrew Sullivan said, “We’re all on campus now.”)  Arresting or expelling the protestors won’t solve the problem, for arrested protestors are energized protestors.

The solution? I don’t know, but I put the blame on universities themselves, which, by buying into and selling DEI to campuses throughout America, have promoted the divisive idea that Jews are settler-colonialists who don’t deserve a state.

I’m not afraid that concentration camps will come to America, but these protests have exposed not only the ugly underbelly of anti-Semitism among many Americans, but also the hatred of Western values of young people, probably instilled in them by colleges themselves or adopted as the au courant ideology. As you’ll see in the second article, the protests are of course applauded by foreign terrorists and extremists Muslims, for the college students camped out across America are playing precisely by the Islamist rulebook.

The points that in common among these articles are that the student protests of today are not similar to the civil-rights and antiwar protests of the Sixties, as the ones going on now are pervaded by bigotry, hatred, and a wish to destroy a people. Further, several articles argue that preventing the disruption of society and academia in this way, or refusing to even call out the hatred, will ultimately redound to a weakening of American—and therefore Enlightenment—values. This is not going to end soon.

First, in the NYT, John McWhorter is appalled by the demonstrations, but lays them at the door not of antisemitism but of DEI:

Excerpts:

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew-hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.

Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere, and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

. . .On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.

But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.

This Wall Street Journal column is important, for it’s by Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organization that translates articles, speeches, and sermons from Arabic into Hebrew, English, and other languages. MEMRI thus has its finger on the pulse of Middle Eastern Muslim society. Stalinsky notes that those who promote terror in the Middle East are also promoting these college protests (I suggest that they’re funding them, too), and certainly approve of them, for the protests will move worldwide Islamism forward. Globalize the intifada!

Excerpts:

What is most discouraging is the lack of attention to what the protesters are demanding, which goes far beyond a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.

Take the March 28 re-election fundraiser for President Biden in New York featuring Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, which was disrupted by shouting in the auditorium. That made headlines, yet the protesters’ chants, including “Down with the USA” and the “Al-Qassam are on their way,” a reference to Hamas’s miliary wing, received no coverage. Neither did their physical threats to attendees outside, a common tactic. Also ignored are the flags and posters of designated terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—displayed at protests in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

Major terror organizations have expressed support for these protests and disruptive actions, which have long been a key part of Hamas’s plan to win hearts and minds in the West. As early as a decade ago, during the July-August 2014 Israel-Gaza war, Hamas’s Interior Ministry issued guidelines to social-media activists on framing events for a Western audience.

. . . Every senior Hamas leader has also acknowledged the importance of the protests and said that influencing U.S. and Western policy is part of the organization’s strategy for destroying Israel. Khaled Mashal, the Hamas leader abroad, on Oct. 10 urged supporters to protest “in cities everywhere.” On Oct. 31, he said that the organization’s friends “on the global left” were responding to its appeal. On March 27, he called for millions to take to the streets in protest, saying there had been an unprecedented shift in global public opinion.

. . . Six months after the attack on Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others aren’t merely cheering those protesting in the streets. They are working with and grooming activists in the U.S. and the West, through meetings, online interviews and podcasts.

. . . On March 25, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest student group hosted an event called “Resistance 101” on campus. It featured leaders of the PFLP-affiliated Samidoun, Within Our Lifetime and other extremist organizations. At the event, former PFLP official Khaled Barakat referred to his “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad [and] the PFLP in Gaza,” saying that particularly after Oct. 7, “when they see students organizing outside Palestine, they really feel that they are being backed as a resistance and they’re being supported.” On March 30 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Mr. Barakat said “the vast majority” of young Americans and Canadians now “support armed resistance” because of “the introduction of colonialism, racism, and slavery studies into history curricula.”

. . . The collaboration between senior terrorists and their growing list of friends in the U.S. and the West has real-world consequences. These groups are designated terrorist for a reason. They don’t plan marches and rallies—they carry out terrorist attacks. And when the U.S. and Western activists, including college students, see that their marches and protests aren’t achieving their goals, they may consider their next steps—which will be influenced by the company they have been keeping.

From Bret Stephens in the NYT, who begins his story with the visit of two Jewish Yale undergraduates, one visibly Hasidic, to the center of campus protests, where they were “yelled at, harassed, and pushed”.  Like McWhorter and others. Stephens notes that Jews are treated much worse in these demonstrations than other minorities would be, for DEI considers Jews as “white adjacent”.  Stephens not only sees administrators’ lack of action as a form of “bigotry,” but also argues that history will show the demonstrators ineffectual and wrong. And donors will speak with their wallets:

Excerpts:

Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza — whatever one thinks about those views. It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust — provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension.

But as the experiences of scores of other Jewish students on American campuses testify, we are well past the fine stage.

At the University of California, Berkeley, students were spat on and grabbed by the neck by anti-Israel demonstrators. When a small group of students held Israeli flags in front of the Columbia protest, a young demonstrator, her face mostly masked by a kaffiyeh, stood in front of them with a sign that read, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” a reference to the wing of Hamas that led the Oct. 7 attacks. At Yale, according to a video shared by Crispe, a demonstrator read a “poem” threatening those who “finance, encourage and facilitate this mass killing against us: May death follow you, wherever you go, and when it does I hope you will not be prepared.”

. . .The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

. . . Crispe’s and Tartak’s defiance commends them. As for the student bigots who have put them through these ordeals — and the university administrators who have dallied and equivocated in the face of that bigotry — history will eventually render a verdict. Donors, alumni and prospective students should reach their own verdicts sooner.

From the Harvard Crimson, published at a university where protests are muted, but a student organization was expelled for illegal demonstrations:

An excerpt from the above:

The Crimson reported on Monday that the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee was suspended for “violating student organization rules”— but that doesn’t mean that student organizing efforts will suddenly cease. It’s likely that, like on campuses across the country, the opposite will occur.

While inflated accusations of antisemitism on college campuses may undermine the ability to call it out where it actually exists in the pro-Palestine movement, the antisemitic scenes unfolding at Columbia University — and now other campuses, too — are as blatant as ever.

The ongoing demonstrations are led by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (whose post-Oct. 7 statement makes the PSC’s words seem benign) and conducted in partnership with an organization called Within Our Lifetime and a few other campus groups.

WOL’s demonstrations at Columbia this weekend were advertised as “Flood Columbia For Gaza,” seemingly referencing Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre: “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”

. . .Pro-Palestine groups must acknowledge that proud extremist antisemites are joining campus protests at universities much like ours, and confront the fact that their hateful and violent theories of change are seeping into on-campus advocacy.

These extremists do not care about promoting peaceful coexistence and ending the onslaught on innocent civilians in Gaza. They are there because these protest spaces have opened a conduit that is permissive of violent extremism and overt eliminationist antisemitism. It seems student organizations have allowed it, or at the very least, turned a blind eye in the name of coalition-building.

That said, the students who were arrested for their specific encampment protest within Columbia’s gates — while their words and choices may be objectionable to some — were largely non-violent. Even the police said so.

But non-violent is not the same as non-hateful, and a peaceful act does not negate overt antisemitism and intimidation of students on Columbia’s campus.

. . .The chaos at Columbia — which blurred the lines between student and non-student protestors and unleashed a whirlwind of antisemitism reminiscent in tone to the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, V.A. — is a prime example.

If they are dedicated to peacebuilding, pro-Palestinian campus organizations — as they determine the goals of their movements, how to frame their rhetoric, and with whom to build coalitions — must reckon with an irrefutable fact: Over seven million Jews live between the river and the sea, too, and they sure as hell aren’t going “back to Poland,” where over 85 percent of the Jewish population was murdered in death camps.

Simplify their existence to settler-colonialism all you want, and the fact still stands.

A lasting ceasefire, Palestinian liberation, and any positive future in the region will not come from demonizing and attacking Jews and Israelis. It will not happen through eliminationist slogans and events where “Zionists are not welcome.” Boycotting Starbucks probably won’t do it either.

Until that reality is fully recognized in the ethos of pro-Palestine student organizations, their voices and demands will fall on deaf ears. They will be co-opted by violent and hateful extremists, making administrators all the more emboldened to repress their non-violent demonstrations.

Author Nekritz says that pro-Palestinian demonstrators will attain their goals only when they “treat other people with respect, afford our opponents dignity, and foster conversations across deep disagreement.” Good luck with that!

Below: Brendan O’Neill at Spiked is not known for gentle persuasion, and his anger is on view in this article. He sees the Columbia protests, as do others here (as well as I) as a harbinger of the dismantling of Enlightenment values after the entitled, propagandized, and antisemitic college students of our era grow up. (Note: that is of course not all college students, or even a majority, but does include the most vociferous and activist ones.)

Excerpts:

Hands down the worst take on the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ that has taken over Columbia University in New York City for the past week is that students have always done things like this. Students have forever occupied buildings and quads to make a political point. Students have long agitated against war. Students often find themselves in the grip of passionate radical intensity. Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.

The wilful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.

The camp might look and sound like student politics as normal, with its juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue and the occasional appearance of pitiable university officials warning campers of suspension. But scratch the radical surface and you’ll swiftly find an ugly underbelly of reactionary cries and even outright racism. No sooner had the students erected their tent city ‘for Palestine’ last Wednesday than it became a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel and plain old bigotry against Jews.

Columbia has rang out with cries of ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’. You don’t need to be an expert in Middle East affairs to decipher this demand. It’s a sick call to seize the entirety of Israel – all of it – and create a new state more in keeping with the Israelophobic yearnings of both privileged Westerners and radical Islamists. Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made even clearer in a follow-up chant: ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ‘48!’ That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist. They want a world without Israel. They want to lay waste to the national home of the Jews.

. . .We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.

More than that, it is a howl of rage against civilisation. This rancid camp with its flashes of outright Jew hate is not an extension of the anti-war activism of old – it’s an extension of the loathing for civilisation that the young have been inculcated with these past few years. To these protesters, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves, represent Western values and Western modernity, and thus they must be raged against. Israel has become a moral punchbag for the sons and daughters of privilege whose hatred for their own societies has driven them over the cliff edge of reason and decency.

How foolish we were to think that education might deliver the young from the benighted ignorances of the past. For today, it is the most educated, the dwellers of the academy, who have allowed the world’s oldest hatred to wash over them. We can now see the consequences of teaching the young to be wary of Western civilisation and to treat everything ‘Western’ as suspect and wicked. All they’re left with is the lure of barbarism, the demented belief that even savagery can become praiseworthy if its target is ‘the West’. If events at Columbia do not wake us up to the crisis of civilisation, nothing will.

From the Wall Street Journal, where author Jason Riley is an opinion columnist. And as he’s African-American, he adds a civil-rights perspective to his piece, and calls for authority to curb illegal demonstrations:

Excerpts:

In 1957, white mobs in Little Rock, Ark., in defiance of the Brown ruling, were preventing black students from safely attending school. President Dwight Eisenhower decided to do something about it. In a prime-time television address, the president explained that “demagogic extremists” and “disorderly mobs” were thwarting the law and that he had an “inescapable” responsibility to respond if Arkansas officials refused to protect black students. “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts,” he said. Then Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division.

The particulars then and now may differ, but the same principle is at stake. The federal government was obligated to come to the aid of an ethnic minority group being threatened by mob violence. Jews in 2024 deserve no less protection than blacks in 1957. And if university officials can’t handle the situation, or won’t let police deal properly with the unrest, Mr. Biden needs to step up.

. . .Mr. Biden’s response to antisemitism is also tempered by political expediency. The young people acting out on campuses are a crucial voting bloc that Democrats worry about losing to independent candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” the president said on Monday, before quickly adding: “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” That sounds like someone who knows how badly he needs Michigan, a state with a large Arab-American population that has soured on him for supporting Israel.

Contrary to what Mr. Biden suggested, the outrage over what is happening to Jews isn’t the result of ignorance or a misunderstanding. Rather, it stems from yet another viewing of a movie Jews have seen too many times. It’s the one where those in a position to do something choose to do nothing.

Biden’s statement was craven: an attempt to placate everyone. The man is incapable of condemning attacks on one side without offering a bouquet to the other.  He’s certainly desperate to get as many votes as possible, but I’m tired of his waffling.  The fact is that the demonstrators at Columbia are worthy of condemnation for their act alone. It’s as if he said, “I condemn the attack of ships in the Red Sea, but I also condemn those who don’t have empathy for the Houthis.”

The latest strip from Jesus and Mo, called “nerds”, came with the email note, “Don’t take the red pill! Or is it the blue one? I can never remember.”

To Mo, it’s “Allah all the way down”:

Today’s photos are black-and-whites sent in by Jim Blilie. His notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Another set here of black and white images.  Some are scans of color images, and are noted.  I am continuing to enjoy reimagining some of my color images in black and white.

First, a shot of Summit Lake in Jasper National Park, Canada, September 1981.  A figure in a landscape.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a December 1988 shot of skiing in the Cascade Range (back when my knees would do that).  These places are all now grown over with trees and no longer really skiable.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a shot taken in Lincoln Park in Seattle in March 1990 after a rare sea-level snow fall.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is a shot of the Mount Saint Helens crater, 10 years after the eruption, in March 1990.  Taken the old-fashioned way, from a Cessna 172 that a friend was piloting.  Scanned Kodachrome 64:

Next is a shot of Nilgiri North in Nepal, taken in the summer of 1991.  Taken with my old Tokina ATX 80-200mm f/2.8 lens at 200mm, f/5.6 and 1/500s (I remember the entire sequence of choices leading up to this photo as ai watched the clouds drift into place).  Scanned Kodachrome 64:

Next is a shot from along the Seine in Paris in May 1992.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Next is another shot from May 1992 in France:  Sully sur-Loire chateau.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Another shot from France; but much more recent:  Paris in 2010.  I call this, “Before the Rush”.  Waiters relaxing before the dinner opening.  (Pentax K-5 and a telephoto lens, not sure which one.)

Figures under Double Arch in Arches National Park, Utah, June 2013.  (Pentax K-5 and almost certainly the same telephoto lens as the above photo):

Next is a shot from Badlands National Park in South Dakota from July 2013:

Finally, an image of a sunflower from Shawano County, Wisconsin, August 2023.  (Olympus m4/3 camera):

Some of these photos were taken during my bicycle tour around the world in 1990-92.

Equipment:

Pentax K-1000, ME Super, and LX cameras
Various Pentax M series and A series lenses
Pentax K-5 digital camera and various Pentax D lenses
Olympus OM-D E-M5 mirrorless M4/3 camera and various Olympus and Lumix lenses
Epson V500 Perfection scanner and its software
Lightroom 5 photo software

Over the last few years I have been renovating my home. Building on Earth seems to be a fairly well understood process, after all we have many different materials to chose from. But what about future lunar explorers. As we head closer toward a permanent lunar base, astronauts will have very limited cargo carrying capability so will have to use local materials. On the Moon, that means relying upon the dusty lunar regolith that covers the surface. Researchers have now developed 20 different methods for creating building materials out of the stuff. They include solidification, sintering/melting, bonding solidification and confinement formation. But of all these, which is the best?

Apollo astronauts reported the surface of the Moon to be covered in a fine, powdery material, similar in texture to talcum powder. The material, known as the lunar regolith is thought to have formed by the constant bombardment from meteoroids over millions of years. The impacts bombarded the rocks on the Moon’s surface breaking them down into fine grains. The layer varies in depth across the surface from 5 metres to 10 metres and consists mostly of silicon dioxide, iron oxide, aluminium dioxide and a few other minerals. The fine nature of the dust makes it difficult for astronauts and machinery alike to operate on the surface and its sharp contours make it somewhat hazardous.

After taking the first boot print photo, Aldrin moved closer to the little rock and took this second shot. The dusty, sandy pebbly soil is also known as the lunar ‘regolith’. Click to enlarge. Credit: NASA

Any future engineers that visit the Moon to construct habitats will need to somehow employ the use of this material in their work. A paper published in the journal Engineering by Professor Feng from the Tsinghua University has conducted a review of possible techniques. Almost 20 techniques have been employed and these have been categorised into four main processes. 

In what I can only assume to be a process similar to concrete and its reaction with water, reaction solidification takes regolith particles and reacts them with other compounds. These will have to be transported to the Moon and, when mixed with regolith, will solidify. The process would create a solid material where regolith comprises 60% to 95% of the overall mixture. 

An alternative approach involves sintering or melting the regolith by subjecting it to high temperatures. The approach can create solid material composed of entirely regolith however, temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees are required and this in itself will pose challenges and safety concerns on the lunar surface. 

Bonding solidification is a process that uses other particles to bond regolith together. Similar to the reaction solidification, the result is 65% to 95% regolith in the final product. It requires lower temperatures than melting making it a safer process and it takes less time than solidification. 

Finally a process known as confinement formation is an intriguing approach which uses a fabric to restrict and constrain the regolith, forming what are ultimately, bags of the stuff. This seems to be an advanced form of sand bag where the particles are not connected as they are in other processes, but still confined. 99% of the final product would be regolith and whilst it is a faster, lower temperature process, it may lack the strength of other techniques. 

Based on a series of articles that were recently made available to the public, NASA predicts it could build a base on the Moon by 2022, and for cheaper than expected. Credit: NASA

Finding the best approach requires consideration of cost, performance, safety, energy consumption, and resource requirements. To address the many components, the team identified the 8IMEM quantification method which includes 8 indicators. Working through the processes that have been identified, the team recommend confinement formation as the best, most cost effective and safest approach. 

The confinement formation, whilst the most cost effective and fastest method may not be suitable for all construction needs. It may be suitable for some laboratory needs for example but when it comes to living quarters may not be the best. The research will help to focus and inform future decisions on construction on the Moon. 

Source : Researchers quantify the ideal in situ construction method for lunar habitats

The post There are Four Ways to Build with Regolith on the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

When patients are diagnosed with cancer, or a terminal illness of any kind, they report that there are a couple of near universal reactions by the people around them. First, everyone has advice for them. Everyone thinks they know what caused their illness and what will cure it. The floodgates of free advice and misinformation open. Everyone also wants them to stay […]

The post Don’t Blame the Patient first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Obese mice that lost weight on a low-fat diet before getting a flu shot had better immune responses than those that lost weight afterwards, suggesting diet and weight loss influence vaccine efficacy

A set of large, distinctive footprints suggest a raptor dinosaur that lived in East Asia 96 million years ago grew to a length of 5 metres

Six full-body fossils of Ptychodus sharks have been formally analysed for the first time, revealing that they were fast swimmers that preyed on shelled creatures

A nontoxic separation process recovers critical minerals from electronic scrap waste.

Climate change’s effects on ocean water temperatures and salinity could shrink sonar detection ranges underwater and make it more challenging to spot submarines

Astrobiologists continue to work towards determining which biosignatures might be best to look for when searching for life on other worlds. The most common idea has been to search for evidence of plants that use the green pigment chlorophyll, like we have on Earth. However, a new paper suggests that bacteria with purple pigments could flourish under a broader range of environments than their green cousins. That means current and next-generation telescopes should be looking for the emissions of purple lifeforms.

“Purple bacteria can thrive under a wide range of conditions, making it one of the primary contenders for life that could dominate a variety of worlds,” said Lígia Fonseca Coelho, a postdoctoral associate at the Carl Sagan Institute (CSI) and first author of “Purple is the New Green: Biopigments and Spectra of Earth-like Purple Worlds,” published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.

Artist’s concept of Earth-like exoplanets, which strikes the careful balance between water and landmass. Credit: NASA

According to NASA’s Exoplanet Archive, 5612 extrasolar planets have been found so far, as of this writing, and another 10,000 more are considered planetary candidates, but have not yet been confirmed. Of all those, there are just over 30 potentially Earth-like worlds, planets that lie in their stars’ habitable zones where conditions are conducive to the existence of liquid water on surface.

But Earth-like has a broad meaning, ranging from size, mass, composition, and various chemical makeups. While being within a star’s habitable zone certainly means there’s the potential for life, it doesn’t necessarily mean that life could have emerged there, or even if it did, the life on that world might look very different from Earth.

“While oxygenic photosynthesis gives rise to modern green landscapes, bacteriochlorophyll-based anoxygenic phototrophs can also colour their habitats and could dominate a much wider range of environments on Earth-like exoplanets,” Coelho and team wrote in their paper. “While oxygenic photosynthesis gives rise to modern green landscapes, bacteriochlorophyll-based anoxygenic phototrophs can also colour their habitats and could dominate a much wider range of environments on Earth-like exoplanets.”

The researchers characterized the reflectance spectra of a collection of purple sulfur and purple non-sulfur bacteria from a variety of anoxic and oxic environments found here on Earth in a variety of environments, from shallow waters, coasts and marshes to deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Even though these are collectively referred to as “purple” bacteria, they actually include a range of colors from yellow, orange, brown and red due to pigments  — such as those that make tomatoes red and carrots orange.

These bacteria thrive on low-energy red or infrared light using simpler photosynthesis systems utilizing forms of chlorophyll that absorb infrared and don’t make oxygen. They are likely to have been prevalent on early Earth before the advent of plant-type photosynthesis, the researchers said, and could be particularly well-suited to planets that circle cooler red dwarf stars – the most common type in our galaxy.

A collection of bacteria samples in the Cornell University Space Sciences Building. Ryan Young/Cornell University.

That means this type of bacteria might be more prevalent on more and a wider variety of exo-worlds.

On a world where these bacteria might be dominant, it would produce a distinctive “light fingerprint” detectable by future telescopes.

In their paper, Coelho and team presented models for Earth-like planets where purple bacteria might dominate the surface and show the impact of their signatures on the reflectance spectra of terrestrial exoplanets.

“Our research provides a new resource to guide the detection of purple bacteria and improves our chances of detecting life on exoplanets with upcoming telescopes,” the team wrote.

“We need to create a database for signs of life to make sure our telescopes don’t miss life if it happens not to look exactly like what we encounter around us every day,” said co-author Lisa Kaltenegger, CSI director and associate professor of astronomy at Cornell University, in a press release from Cornell.

The post Purple Bacteria — Not Green Plants — Might Be the Strongest Indication of Life appeared first on Universe Today.

A new chip can efficiently accelerate machine-learning workloads on edge devices like smartphones while protecting sensitive user data from two common types of attacks -- side-channel attacks and bus-probing attacks.

Planetary nebula are some of nature’s most stunning visual displays. The name is confusing since they’re the remains of stars, not planets. But that doesn’t detract from their status as objects of captivating beauty and intense scientific study.

Like all planetary nebula, the Southern Ring Nebula is the remnant of a star like our Sun. As these stars age, they will eventually become red giants, expanding and shedding layers of gas out into space. Eventually, the red giant becomes a white dwarf, a stellar remnant bereft of fusion that emanates whatever residual thermal energy it has without ever generating anymore. The white dwarf lights up the shells of gas expelled earlier, and we get to enjoy the show.

When the long-awaited JWST started delivering images, the Southern Ring Nebula (NGC 3132) was one of its first targets. It was one of five objects that made up the telescope’s first science results. The JWST’s images revealed something surprising about NGC 3132: it has two stars. The white dwarf is in the center of NGC 3132 and its companion is between 40 to 60 AU away, about the same distance as Pluto is from the Sun.

Researchers wanted to understand more about the Southern Ring Nebula’s structure. The JWST works in the infrared and can image warm hydrogen in the nebula. But to get a more complete image of the nebula, a team of researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) turned to the Submillimeter Array (SMA). The SMA can sense the cooler CO (carbon monoxide) in the nebula beyond the JWST’s reach. It sensed CO’s presence and measured its velocity and the velocities of other molecules.

The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal titled “The Molecular Exoskeleton of the Ring-like Planetary Nebula NGC 3132.” Professor Joel Kastner from the RIT School of Physics and Astronomy is the lead author.

The new observations showed that most of the nebula’s hydrogen gas is in a large expanding ring and that a second expanding ring lies almost perpendicular to the first.

“JWST showed us the molecules of hydrogen and how they stack up in the sky, while the Submillimeter Array shows us the carbon monoxide that is colder that you can’t see in the JWST image,” explained Kastner.

This figure from the study shows the velocities of three molecules in NGC 3132 as measured by the SMA. From left to right: 12CO, 13CO, and CN (cyanide.) The images clearly show the primary ring in the nebula. Image Credit: Kastner et al. 2024.

“The extra velocity dimension from the array’s radio wavelength observations then effectively allows us to see the nebula in 3-D. When we started to turn the whole nebula around in 3-D, we immediately saw it really was a ring, and then we were amazed to see there was another ring,” Kastner said.

“Surprisingly, the data further reveal that the nebula also appears to harbor a second, dust-rich molecular ring (Ring 2)—detected in (dust) absorption, in low-excitation emission lines, in H2, and (now) in 12CO(2–1)—that appears to lie nearly perpendicular to Ring 1,” the authors explain in their published research.

This figure from the study shows the SMA observations of NGC 3132 in the left column and the JWST infrared image in the right column. The bottom images show the different velocities of molecules in the nebula. The light blue velocity shows the presence of the main ring, but the red and pink high-velocity clumps show the presence of a second ring. Image Credit: Kastner et al. 2024.

The rings are offset from one another, which explains why the 3D view made the second one more visible. The team matched their observations to a geometric model that showed inclinations of 45° for Ring 1 and 78° for Ring 2.

These panels from the published research show the two rings around NGC 3132. The left panel shows the rings with a 45° for Ring 1 and 78° for Ring 2. The right panel shows the two rings with a 15° for Ring 1. Image Credit: Kastner et al. 2024.

Why does the Southern Ring Nebula have two offset rings?

The authors say we have a pole-on view of a bipolar nebula shaped by the presence of a second star. There are many bipolar nebulae, including well-known ones like the Butterfly Nebula.

The Butterfly Nebula as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Image Credit: By NASA, ESA and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team – http://www.hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/25/image/f/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7777740

However, the presence of a second star has complicated NGC 3132’s shape. “We suggest that this apparent two-ring structure may be the remnant of an ellipsoidal molecular envelope of AGB ejecta that has been mostly dispersed by a series of rapid-fire but misaligned collimated outflows or jets,” the authors explain in their research. “Such a scenario would be consistent with the hypothesis that the mass-losing AGB progenitor of NGC 3132 was a member of an interacting triple star system.”

It would be consistent, but the authors say there’s no way to conclude that a third star was involved with current research. “Detailed simulations of the dynamical effects of such multiple-star toppling jets systems on AGB molecular envelopes are required to test this speculative scenario for the shaping of the molecular exoskeleton of NGC 3132,” the authors explain.

The presence of all that molecular gas in the nebula surprised scientists. The intense UV from the white dwarf should break up the carbon monoxide and the molecular hydrogen. But it hasn’t.

“Where does the carbon and the oxygen and the nitrogen in the universe come from?” said Kastner. “We’re seeing it generated in the sun-like stars that are dying, like the star that’s just died and created the Southern Ring. A lot of that molecular gas could wind up in planetary atmospheres and atmospheres can enable life.”

The post See the Southern Ring Nebula in 3D appeared first on Universe Today.

The venerable Hubble Space Telescope is like a gift that keeps on giving. Not only is it still making astronomical discoveries after more than thirty years in operation. It is also making discoveries by accident! Thanks to an international team of citizen scientists, with the help of astronomers from the European Space Agency (ESA) and some machine learning algorithms, a new sample of over one thousand asteroids has been identified in Hubble‘s archival data. The methods used represent a new approach for finding objects in decades-old data that could be applied to other datasets as well.

The research team was led by Pablo García-Martín, a researcher with the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). It included members from the ESA, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy, the University of Craiova, the Université Côte d’Azur, and Bastion Technologies. The paper that describes their findings, “Hubble Asteroid Hunter III. Physical properties of newly found asteroids,” recently appeared in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Ask any astronomers and they will tell you that asteroids are material left over from the formation of the Solar System ca. 4.5 billion years ago. These objects come in many shapes in sizes, ranging from peddle-sized rocks to planetoids. Observing these objects is challenging since they are faint and constantly in motion as they orbit the Sun. Because of its rapid geocentric orbit, Hubble can capture wandering asteroids thanks to the distinct curved trails they leave in Hubble exposures. As Hubble orbits Earth, its point of view changes while observing asteroids following their orbits.

Hubble image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158, with streaks left by photobombing asteroids. Credit: NASA, ESA, P. G. Martín (AUM)/J. DePasquale (STScI)/A. Filippenko (UC Berkeley)

Asteroids have also been known to “photobomb” images acquired by Hubble of distant cosmic objects like UGC 12158 (see image above). By knowing Hubble’s position when it took exposures of asteroids and measuring the curvature of the streaks they leave, scientists can determine the asteroids’ distances and estimate the shapes of their orbits. The ability to do this with large samples allows astronomers to test theories about Main Asteroid Belt formation and evolution. As Martin said in a recent ESA Hubble press release:

“We are getting deeper into seeing the smaller population of main-belt asteroids. We were surprised to see such a large number of candidate objects. There was some hint that this population existed, but now we are confirming it with a random asteroid population sample obtained using the whole Hubble archive. This is important for providing insights into the evolutionary models of our Solar System.”

According to one widely accepted model, small asteroids are fragments of larger asteroids that have been colliding and grinding each other down over billions of years. A competing theory states that small bodies formed as they appear today billions of years ago and have not changed much since. However, astronomers can offer no plausible mechanism for why these smaller asteroids would not accumulate more dust from the circumstellar disk surrounding our Sun billions of years ago (from which the planets formed).

In addition, astronomers have known for some time that collisions would have left a certain signature that could be used to test the current Main Belt population. In 2019, astronomers from the European Science and Technology Centre (ESTEC) and the European Space Astronomy Center’s Science Data Center (ESDC) came together with the world’s largest and most popular citizen-science platform (Zooniverse) and Google to launch the citizen-science project Hubble Asteroid Hunter (HAH) to identify asteroids in archival Hubble data.

This graph is based on Hubble Space Telescope archival data that were used to identify a largely unseen population of very small asteroids. Credit: NASA/ESA/P. G. Martín (AUM)/E. Wheatley (STScI)

The HAH team comprised 11,482 citizen-science volunteers who perused 37,000 Hubble images spanning 19 years. After providing nearly two million identifications, the team was given a training set for an automated algorithm to identify asteroids based on machine learning. This yielded 1,701 asteroid trails, with 1,031 corresponding to previously uncatalogued asteroids – about 400 of which were below 1 km (~1090 ft) in size. Said Martin:

“Asteroid positions change with time, and therefore you cannot find them just by entering coordinates, because they might not be there at different times. As astronomers we don’t have time to go looking through all the asteroid images. So we got the idea to collaborate with more than 10,000 citizen-science volunteers to peruse the huge Hubble archives.”

This pioneering approach may be effectively applied to datasets accumulated by other asteroid-hunting observatories, such as NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Once the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has accumulated a large enough dataset, the same method could also be applied to its archival data. As a next step, the HAH project will examine the streaks of previously unknown asteroids to characterize their orbits, rotation periods, and other properties.

Further Reading: ESA Hubble, Astronomy & Astrophysics

The post Hubble Has Accidentally Discovered Over a Thousand Asteroids appeared first on Universe Today.

Video gamers who exploit glitches in games can help experts better understand buggy software, students suggest.

Researchers describe the steps they took to manipulate DNA and proteins -- essential building blocks of life -- to create cells that look and act like cells from the body. This accomplishment, a first in the field, has implications for efforts in regenerative medicine, drug delivery systems and diagnostic tools.

Astrophysicists have made a significant step toward solving the last puzzle in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence theory by observing the weak to strong transition in the space plasma turbulence surrounding Earth with newly developed multi-spacecraft analysis methods.

Astrophysicists have made a significant step toward solving the last puzzle in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence theory by observing the weak to strong transition in the space plasma turbulence surrounding Earth with newly developed multi-spacecraft analysis methods.