Science

This morning I received an email from a colleague that said this about the New York Times‘s article on King Charles’s cancer diagnosis:

In the NY Times report there is one sentence mentioning that he is using homeopathy as part of his suite of treatments.

UPDATE: My colleague, who is reliable, swears he saw this in the NYT yesterday, and is baffled that the sentence is gone today.  Readers with a bent for sleuthing might try finding the original article at an archived site.

Well, I can’t find that sentence in the NYT article this morning, nor in the archived version posted right after midnight. Yet we know the King is an advocate of homeopathy. The Guardian of December 17 last year noted that the King had appointed an advocated of woo, including homeopathy, as head of the “royal medical household”:

Yet last week we heard that the head of the royal medical household is an advocate of homeopathy. Dr Michael Dixon has championed such things as “thought field therapy”, “Christian healing” and an Indian herbal cure “ultra-diluted” with alcohol, which claims to kill breast cancer cells. Methods like these might be “unfashionable”, he once wrote in an article submitted to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, but they should not be ignored.

The link above goes to an earlier Guardian article, noting that the head of the royal medical household is not the same thing as thje king’s doctor:

Dr Michael Dixon, who has championed faith healing and herbalism in his work as a GP, has quietly held the senior position for the last year, the Sunday Times reported.

While Dixon, 71, is head of the royal medical household, for the first time the role is not combined with being the monarch’s physician. Duties include having overall responsibility for the health of the king and the wider royal family – and even representing them in talks with government.

There are a lot of people online who are somewhat gleeful about this diagnosis, saying that they’re hoping that King Charles puts the rubber to the road and uses alternative therapies, like homeopathy, but the Daily Fail and other sites note that even Dixon doesn’t think that homeopathy can cure cancer:

[Dixon]  thrown his support behind offering treatments such as aromatherapy and reflexology on the NHS.

In one paper he authored, he referenced an experiment suggesting Indian herbal remedies which had been ‘ultra-diluted’ with alcohol might be able to cure cancer, although Buckingham Palace has staunchly denied Dr Dixon himself believes this can work.

A statement from the palace at the time of his appointment read: ‘Dr Dixon does not believe homeopathy can cure cancer.

‘His position is that complementary therapies can sit alongside conventional treatments, provided they are safe, appropriate and evidence based.’

Dr Dixon, who has reportedly prescribed plants to patients such as devil’s claw and horny goat weed, has also written papers suggesting Christian healers may be able to help people who are chronically ill.

He has a kindred spirit and staunch supporter in the shape of King Charles, who has himself been outspoken on how he believes alternative medicine can help people with illnesses, and was appointed patron of the Faculty of Homeopathy in 2017.

As for me, I have no beef with King Charles, and my first thought when I heard he had cancer was that it was a shame, as he’d waited so long to become King and if he died from this, it would have been a long wait for a short reign. I hope he gets well. What kind of person would want the King to die because he advocates medical woo?

But he should never have promoted that woo, and I’m sure he won’t be using it in his new course of treatment.

From how well they work to side effects such as hair loss, here’s the skinny on new weight loss injections that work by blocking a hormone that normally reduces appetite

How exactly the placebo effect works is still a mystery, but neuroscientist Luana Colloca is working to find the answers in order to change the way we treat pain

If you want to determine your mass, it’s pretty easy. Just step on a scale and look at the number it gives you. That number tells you the gravitational pull of Earth upon you, so if you feel the number is too high, take comfort that Earth just finds you more attractive than others. The same scale could also be used to measure the mass of Earth. If you place a kilogram mass on the scale, the weight it gives is also the weight of Earth in the gravitational field of the kilogram. With a bit of mass, you have the mass of Earth.

Things aren’t quite that simple. The Earth is not a perfectly spherical, perfectly uniform mass, so its gravitational pull varies slightly across the globe. But this method gives a reasonable ballpark value, and we can use it to estimate the masses of other objects in the solar system. But how can we determine the mass of something larger, such as the Milky Way? One method is to estimate the number of stars in the galaxy and their masses, then estimate the mass of all the interstellar gas and dust, and then rough out the amount of dark matter… It all gets very complicated.

A better way is to look at how the orbital speed of stars varies with distance from the galactic center. This is known as the rotation curve and gives an upper mass limit on the Milky Way, which seems to be around 600 billion to a trillion solar masses. The wide uncertainty gives you an idea of just how difficult it is to measure our galaxy’s mass. But a new study introduces a new method, and it could help astronomers pin things down.

Estimated escape velocities at different galactic radii. Credit: Roche, et al

The method looks at the escape velocity of stars in our galaxy. If a star is moving fast enough, it can overcome the gravitational pull of the Milky Way and escape into interstellar space. The minimum speed necessary to escape depends upon our galaxy’s mass, so measuring one gives you the other. Unfortunately, only a handful of stars are known to be escaping, which is not enough to get a good handle on galactic mass. So the team looked at the statistical distribution of stellar speeds as measured by the Gaia spacecraft.

The method is similar to weighing the Moon with a handful of dust. If you were standing on the Moon and tossed dust upward, the slower-moving dust particles would reach a lower height than faster particles. If you measured the speeds and positions of the dust particles, the statistical relation between speed and height would tell you how strongly the Moon pulls on the motes, and thus the mass of the Moon. It would be easier just to bring our kilogram and scale to measure lunar mass, but the dust method could work.

In the Milky Way, the stars are like dustmotes, swirling around in the gravitational field of the galaxy. The team used the speeds and positions of a billion stars to estimate the escape velocity at different distances from the galactic center. From that, they could determine the overall mass of the Milky Way. They calculated a mass of 640 billion Suns.

This is on the lower end of earlier estimates, and if accurate it means that the Milky Way has a bit less dark matter than we thought.

Reference: Roche, Cian, et al. “The Escape Velocity Profile of the Milky Way from Gaia DR3.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.00108 (2024).

The post Astronomers Measure the Mass of the Milky Way by Calculating How Hard it is to Escape appeared first on Universe Today.

An analysis of satellite observations has identified some extreme thunderstorms over the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Mexico with lightning flashes so frequent that the sky would appear continuously lit

Mark Sturtevant has contributed another batch of insect photos today. I’ve indented his captions and IDs, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are more arthropod pictures, and this should complete the set from two summers ago. I am always behind in sharing these to various online sites since I go out a lot to the woods and fields of Michigan, where I live.

One of our larger Caddisflies is the Northern Caddisfly (Pycnopsyche sp.). Caddisflies are related to butterflies and moths, and they can look a lot like moths, but there are differences such as having hairs on their wings rather than scales. Caddisfly larvae are sort of like caterpillars, but they are aquatic and most species carry around a protective case made from either plant matter or pebbles, woven together with silk. Larvae from this genus mainly fasten together a bundle of twigs to use as a portable home.

Here is a short video about the larvae, showing that they can be quite artful in making their cases, and that their use of sticky silk under water is actually very remarkable.

Next up is a Locust Borer (Megacyllene robiniae). These wasp-mimicking beetles are common visitors on goldenrods in late summer, and their larvae tunnel into black locust trees. Since we have both in the yard, I always see these around.

Next is a European Praying Mantis (Mantis religiosa), photographed from a stage on our dining room table. Nothing too special here, but this was done for the purpose of photographing a nerdy detail about Mantids. Unfortunately, the Mantid that I found was a male, and that meant he would be a complete pain in the a** because males constantly want to move around to hunt for lady Mantids. This one frequently flew off from the dining room table, and I’d have to go chase it down. Nevertheless, the nerdy detail was eventually photographed.

Here is that detail – a specialized patch of bristles on the inside of their front femur. Mantids regularly groom themselves, and they even have a special structure on their front legs just for cleaning their large compound eyes. This has been an item of considerable discussion on one of the macrophotography web sites, and the subject has even led to a couple Facebook memes. The internet is weird that way.

Here is a video of a grooming mantis. The moment it uses its eye brush starts at 35 seconds in. It’s not that dramatic, but I geek out on it.

Moving on, here is a large Nursery Web Spider (Pisaurina mira), so-named because females build a web nursery at the tops of plants for their young. I was trying to photograph the spider with my wide-angle macro lens, but at that moment it decided to surprise me by suddenly clambering up onto the camera. I like the result.

As this set was done very late in the season, with fall moving in, there are now other late-season subjects to share. Around the yard at that time there will always be several Very Gravid Orbweavers in their webs. A couple different species are possible, but I think this one is the Shamrock Orbweaver (Araneus trifolium). I also took this one indoors to do a manual focus stack portrait by using the amazing Venus 2.5-5x super macro lens.

Here are Yellow Jackets on wind-fallen apples in the backyard– another sign that the season was ending (*sniff*). On the left is an Eastern Yellowjacket (Vespula maculifrons), and on the right is a German Yellowjacket (Vespula germanica). As is pretty common, the two species soon begin to fight over the same apple, even though there are dozens of the damn fruits on the ground that I will have to pick up later. These contests look rather dramatic, but their stingers never come out.

And finally, here is a focus stacked wide angle macro picture of autumn trees. The perspective shot is done by leaning against a tree and shooting straight up while nudging the focus a little each time. The set of pictures — maybe 8 or so, are then merged with software to give this deep focus picture.”

A sample from the asteroid Bennu, brought back by the OSIRIS-REx mission, contains hints that it was once part of a planetesimal with conditions favourable for life to emerge

Researchers have recreated the hybridisation of two wild yeast species that led to the first lager yeasts, generating new varieties that could make beer with a range of new flavours

People with blue eyes may have better sight in dim conditions than those with brown eyes, which could explain why the colour has persisted in certain populations

A crystals expert has published an answer to how crystals are formed and how molecules become a part of them, solving an age-old mystery about crystal formation.

The Juno spacecraft has revealed some fascinating things about Jupiter since it began exploring the system on July 4th, 2016. Not only is it the first robotic mission to study Jupiter up close while orbiting it since the Galileo spacecraft, which studied the gas giant and its satellites from 1995 to 2003. Juno is also the first robotic explorer to look below Jupiter’s dense clouds to investigate the planet’s magnetic field, composition, and structure. The data this has produced is helping scientists address questions about how Jupiter formed and the origins of the Solar System.

Since 2021, the probe has been in an extended mission phase, where it has been making flybys of some of Jupiter’s largest moons, including Ganymede, Europa, and Io. As it passes these satellites, Juno has captured some incredible images with its main imaging instrument, the JunoCam. On Saturday, February 3rd, 2024, the Juno spacecraft made another flyby of Io and took more captivating photos of the volcanic moon and its pockmarked surface. This was the second part of a twin flyby designed to provide new insight into Io’s volcanic nature and the interior structure of the satellite.

The previous flyby occurred on December 30th, 2023, and (like this latest flyby) brought the spacecraft within 1,500 km (930 mi) of Io’s surface. The two flybys are the closest that any spacecraft has ever made of Io, breaking the previous record established by Juno during the flyby that occurred on October 15th, 2023, where the probe reached a minimum distance of 12,000 km (mi) from the moon’s surface. No spacecraft has passed this close to Io since the Galileo mission buzzed the volcanic moon over twenty years ago.

Image of Io taken by the JunoCam on Dec. 30th, 2023, and processed by citizen scientist Emma Wälimäki. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Emma Wälimäki © CC BY

As always, raw images captured during flybys are available on the mission’s Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) website, where people can upload, process, and colorize them. One particular image processed by citizen scientist Emma Wälimäki (see above) shows the moon’s dark side was lit by sunlight reflected by Jupiter (aka. “Jupitershine”). Other images provided by Juno include the many infrared images that show the many active volcanoes on the moon’s surface and even eruptions that were visible during flybys because they occurred on the moon’s dark side.

These images are part of an investigation by scientists to determine if Io’s active volcanoes are powered by a global magma ocean beneath its surface. Based on current geological models, scientists believe this magma ocean results from tidal flexing in Io’s interior caused by interactions with Jupiter’s powerful gravity. This is similar to what Europa and other icy satellites are believed to experience, where tidal flexing leads to hydrothermal activity at the core-mantle boundary that maintains oceans of liquid water in the interior.

As of this article’s publication, the Juno mission has operated for twelve years, five months, and twenty-seven days. Per its mission extension, the probe will continue to orbit Jupiter from pole to pole until September 2025, though this could be extended further. As long as Juno’s solar panel wings (the largest ever deployed) continue providing power, the mission will continue to study the system and address the fundamental questions of how Jupiter and its satellites came to be.

More images are available at the Juno mission website at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).

Further Reading: Mission Juno SwRI

The post NASA’s Juno Probe Makes Another Close Flyby of Io appeared first on Universe Today.

A Greek philosopher’s musings on pleasure, contained in ancient papyrus scrolls buried by Mount Vesuvius’s eruption 2000 years ago, have been rediscovered with the help of AI

Research involving has shown that a 'swarm' of more than 100 autonomous ground and aerial robots can be supervised by one person without subjecting the individual to an undue workload.

Research involving has shown that a 'swarm' of more than 100 autonomous ground and aerial robots can be supervised by one person without subjecting the individual to an undue workload.

Researchers pioneer dynamic manipulation and the generation principles of trion at the nanoscale using tip-enhanced cavity-spectroscopy.

A new computer program allows scientists to design synthetic DNA segments that indicate, in real time, the state of cells. It will be used to screen for anti-cancer or viral infections drugs, or to improve gene and cell-based immunotherapies.

Switching to ammonia as a marine fuel, with the goal of decarbonization, can instead create entirely new problems. This is shown in a study where researchers carried out life cycle analyses for batteries and for three electrofuels including ammonia. Eutrophication and acidification are some of the environmental problems that can be traced to the use of ammonia -- as well as emissions of laughing gas, which is a very potent greenhouse gas.

Scientists have found a way to boost ethanol production via yeast fermentation, a standard method for converting plant sugars into biofuels. Their approach relies on careful timing and a tight division of labor among synthetic yeast strains to yield more ethanol per unit of plant sugars than previous approaches have achieved.

Researchers wrote new computer algorithms to redesign the interiors of padding down to the scale of a millimeter or less. The result: New kinds of cushions that can absorb as much as 25% more force than current state-of-the-art technologies.

Experts have discovered how to create different colors of blue cheese. After discovering how the classic blue-green veining is created, a team of experts were able to create a variety of different fungal strains that could be used to make cheese with colors ranging from white to yellow-green to red-brown-pink and light and dark blues.