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A new typing model simulates the typing process instead of just predicting words.

The first health impact study of coal train pollution centers on the San Francisco Bay Area, with scientists finding communities near passing coal trains suffer worse health outcomes.

Contrary to previous assumptions, nerve cells in the human neocortex are wired differently than in mice. The study found that human neurons communicate in one direction, while in mice, signals tend to flow in loops. This increases the efficiency and capacity of the human brain to process information. These discoveries could further the development of artificial neural networks.

The energy density of supercapacitors -- battery-like devices that can charge in seconds or a few minutes -- can be improved by increasing the 'messiness' of their internal structure. Researchers used experimental and computer modelling techniques to study the porous carbon electrodes used in supercapacitors. They found that electrodes with a more disordered chemical structure stored far more energy than electrodes with a highly ordered structure.

Scientists have discovered that the magnetic nanobubbles known as skyrmions can be moved by electrical currents, attaining record speeds up to 900 m/s. Anticipated as future bits in computer memory, these nanobubbles offer enhanced avenues for information processing in electronic devices. Their tiny size provides great computing and information storage capacity, as well as low energy consumption. Until now, these nanobubbles moved no faster than 100 m/s, which is too slow for computing applications. However, thanks to the use of an antiferromagnetic material as medium, the scientists successfully had the skyrmions move 10 times faster than previously observed. These results offer new prospects for developing higher-performance and less energy-intensive computing devices.

Scientists have developed artificial heterostructures made of freestanding 2D and 3D membranes that have an energy density up to 19 times higher than commercially available capacitors.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Apollo astronauts set up a collection of lunar seismometers to detect possible Moon quakes. These instruments monitored lunar activity for eight years and gave planetary scientists an indirect glimpse into the Moon’s interior. Now, researchers are developing new methods for lunar quake detection techniques and technologies. If all goes well, the Artemis astronauts will deploy them when they return to the Moon.

Fiber optic cable is the heart of a seismology network to be deployed on the Moon by future Artemis astronauts.

The new approach, called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), is the brainchild of CalTech geophysics professor Zhongwen Zhan. It sends laser beams through a fiber optic cable buried just below the surface. Instruments at either end measure how the laser light changes during the shake-induced tremors. Basically Zhan’s plan turns the cable into a sequence of hundreds of individual seismometers. That gives precise information about the strength and timing of the tremors. Amazingly, a 100-kilometer fiber optic cable would function as the equivalent of 10,000 seismometers. This cuts down on the number of individual seismic instruments astronauts would have to deploy. It probably also affords some cost savings as well.

A seismometer station deployed on the Moon during the Apollo 15 mission. Courtesy NASA. DAS and Apollo on the Moon

Compare DAS the Apollo mission seismometer data and it becomes obvious very quickly that DAS is a vast improvement. In the Apollo days, the small collection of instruments left behind on the Moon provided information that was “noisy”. Essentially, when the seismic waves traveled through different parts of the lunar structure, they got scattered. This was particularly true when they encountered the dusty surface layer. The “noise” basically muddied up the signals.

The layout for the Apollo Lunar Seismic Profiling Experiment for the Apollo 17 mission. Courtesy Nunn, et al. What DAS Does to Detect Quakes on the Moon

The DAS system stations laser emitters and data collectors at each end of a fiber optic cable. This allows for multiple widely spaced installations that measure light as it transits the network. The cable consists of glass strands, and each strand contains tiny imperfections. That sounds bad, but each imperfection provides a useful “waypoint” that reflects a little bit of the light back to the source. That information gets recorded as part of a larger data set. Setting up such a system of telecommunications cables over a large area provides millions of waypoints that scientists can use to measure seismic movements on Earth.

A recent study led by CalTech postdoctoral researcher Qiushi Zhai deployed this type of DAS-enabled fiber optic cable system in Antarctica. The conditions mimic some of the environmental challenges of a lunar deployment—it’s freezing cold, very dry, and far removed from human activities. The sensors measured the small movements of caused by ice cracking and moving around. Those types of signals are perfect analogs to lunar quakes.

Aerial view of Antarctica. A prototype of the lunar DAS system for the Artemis missions to the Moon detected tiny tremors from ice movements here. Photo credit: L. McFadden 2008 Measuring a Lunar Quake Using DAS

Since DAS works well measuring tiny tremors induced by ice, it seems like the perfect “next step” in doing lunar seismology. On the Moon, the fiber optic cable would be buried (just as cables are on Earth) a few centimeters below the level of the regolith. It will sit there waiting for the next quake, which probably won’t take long, since the Moon seems to quiver frequently. When one strikes, its seismic waves will move through the ground from the source. They’ll wiggle the cable. That will affect the light-travel path inside. The actions of light hitting thousands of imperfections inside the cable will provide lunar geologists with high-precision data about moonquakes. That includes their origins, travel time, and other aspects of the wave that will help them understand more about the lunar structure they travel through.

The distributed nature of the seismic network will have a big advantage over the Apollo-style individual seismometers used in the past. And, there are other reasons to use DAS, according to Zhai. “Another advantage of using DAS on the Moon is that a fiber optic cable is physically quite resilient to the harsh lunar environment: high radiation, extreme temperatures, and heavy dust,” Zhai said.

Moon Structure and DAS

Zhai is the first author of a paper describing the DAS system, which should allow scientists to detect close to 100 percent of Moon tremors. The paper offers insight into the advantages that DAS offers. In particular, such an array stretched across large areas of the Moon should provide much higher-quality data about even the smallest tremors that shake the surface.

Since the Moon is not tectonically active, its quakes don’t occur from the same causes as they do on Earth. Some happen during the sunset/sunrise period when temperature changes affect the surface. Others happen thanks to Earth’s pull on the Moon, and still others occur because the Moon is still cooling and contracting. Zhai’s paper suggests that DAS could detect about 15 moonquakes per day, and perhaps help better characterize the thermal moonquakes that happen at sunrise/sunset and the deeper ones that occur during perigee and apogee portions of its orbit, and those intrinsic to the Moon’s contraction. In addition, impacts on the Moon also generate quakes. Information about all these events should give planetary scientists a big leg up on understanding more about the lunar interior structure.

The deployment of DAS and other science experiments will be part of the surface operations of the Artemis missions. It will be part of one of the proposed seven-month stays for astronaut teams. Although there is no specific planned date for seismometer deployment, it’s likely to take place no sooner than the mid-2030s. That’s after the planned missions to build shelters, deploy power stations, and other activities to create the lunar bases.

For More Information

A New Type of Seismic Sensor to Detect Moonquakes
Assessing the feasibility of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) for Moonquake Detection
Lunar Seismology: A Data and Instrumentation Review

The post Artemis Astronauts Will Deploy New Seismometers on the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

I’ll write more about this tomorrow, perhaps, but here’s what I was going to put in tomorrow’s Nooz:

*One day after Columbia University’s President and some of its trustees testified before Congress on endemic antisemitism at the University, and after President Shafik promised to double down on antisemitism, the school has started arresting lots of pro-Palestinian demonstrators engaged in illegal protests.  I guess those nasty Republicans put the fear of God (literally) into Shafik, who doesn’t want to go the way of Liz Magill.

The authorities moved Thursday afternoon to quell a protest at Columbia University, arresting dozens of demonstrators who had constructed an encampment of about 50 tents on campus. The arrests, which drew a new crowd of students to support the protesters, came the day after university leaders pledged to Congress that they would crack down on unauthorized student protests tied to the war in Gaza.

Police officers, clad in riot gear and prepared with zip ties, began taking protesters into custody just before 1:30 p.m. as scores of demonstrators gathered in front of Butler Library. “Since you have refused to disperse, you will now be placed under arrest for trespassing,” a man repeatedly called through a loudspeaker. “If you resist arrest, you may face additional charges.”

The scene played out less than 24 hours after Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, and other top officials insisted to Congress that they would take a harder line in handling the protests that have embroiled campuses across the country since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. Leaders at two other elite schools, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, lost their jobs after similar appearances last year.

Here’s what else to know:

• Hundreds of students and others rallied with the protesters inside and outside of the school overnight and through the morning. “They can threaten us all they want with the police, but at the end of the day, it’s only going to lead to more mobilization,” said Maryam Alwan, a senior and pro-Palestinian organizer on campus, speaking from the tent encampment.

• Police officers loaded at least three buses with demonstrators, who cooperated as they were taken into custody, though other protesters shouted “Shame! Shame!” Organizers had said they expected to be arrested.

• Dr. Shafik angered some students and professors during her appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Wednesday, when she largely conceded that she felt some of the common chants at pro-Palestinian protests were antisemitic. In a letter sent on Thursday afternoon as the arrests began, Dr. Shafik said she “took this extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances.”

About time, I’d say.  Without punishment there is no deterrent, which is my own University’s problem with protestors like these. And foreign students are especially liable, as they could lose their visas if suspended (that’s why MIT didn’t arrest any of its protestors). Colleges are loath to suspend foreign students, or have them arrested, because foreign students pay pretty much the full fees at colleges, whereas Americans often get big breaks on tuition.

And, mirabile dictu, one of the students who has been both arrested and suspended (from Barnard), is Isra Hirsi, the daughter of none other than Congresswoman and notorious antisemite Ilhan “Follow the Benjamins” Omar. (Omar was in fact on the House committee that grilled the Columbia people.

Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, is among several Barnard students who have been suspended for participating in a pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University.

The camp, which includes dozens of tents pitched on the campus’s South Lawn in protest against Israeli actions in Gaza, has created a standoff between administrators and students on the Ivy League campus. Dozens of students were arrested on Thursday, after the university notified them that they would be suspended if they refused to move and the students vowed to remain in place.

Ms. Hirsi posted on social media around 11:30 a.m. on Thursday that she was one of three students suspended so far for participating in the protest, which began on Wednesday, the day the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, appeared before Congress to discuss antisemitism on campus.

At the congressional hearing, Dr. Shafik told lawmakers that she would enforce rules about unauthorized protests and antisemitism. Ms. Omar, who is on the committee that held the hearing and who did not mention that her daughter was among the pro-Palestinian protesters, was one of several Democrats who questioned Ms. Shafik about her actions toward Palestinian and Muslim students.

Ms. Hirsi, 21, said on social media that she was an organizer with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the student coalition that has been pushing the university to cut ties with companies that support Israel. Such divestment is the key demand of protesters in the encampment. She is also involved with the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, one of two student groups that was suspended in November for holding unauthorized protests.

“I have never been reprimanded or received any disciplinary warnings,” she wrote. “I just received notice that I am 1 of 3 students suspended for standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing a genocide.”

Ms. Hirsi is a junior majoring in sociology. Two other Barnard students, Maryam Iqbal, 18, a freshman, and Soph Dinu, 21, a junior majoring in religion, were also suspended, protest organizers said.

Who would have thought that testifying before a hostile group of Republicans in Congress would make college presidents straighten up and fly right? I disagree with the hostile treatment of Presidents, but it’s time to start enforcing the “time, place, and manner” aspects of protests, speech, and demonstrations. It’s also time to enforce behavior codes (and speech codes, if schools have them, which they shouldn’t) uniformly, for it was the lack of uniformity that got Liz Magill fired from Penn and started the process that resulted in Harvard’s Claudine Gay being let go.  My preference is the Chicago Free Expression principles, but those don’t allow you to say anything, anywhere, and at any time on campus.

Pro-Palestinian protestors have been coddled too long (even at the University of Chicago), and unless they get serious discipline from their colleges, they’ll just keep disrupting everything.  This is a lesson that Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, learned, perhaps from being Provost here first.  What a pity that threats like those of Congress are what make colleges reform and apply their rules uniformly!

Now if only the University of Chicago would listen. . .

The dwarf planet Ceres has some permanently dark craters that hold ice. Astronomers thought the ice was ancient when they were discovered, like in the moon’s permanently shadowed regions. But something was puzzling.

Why did some of these shadowed craters hold ice while others did not?

Ceres was first discovered in 1801 and was considered a planet. Later, it was thought to be the first asteroid ever discovered, since it’s in the main asteroid belt. Since then, our expanding knowledge has changed its definition: we now know it as a dwarf planet.

Even though it was discovered over 200 years ago, it’s only in the last couple of decades that we’ve gotten good looks at its surface features. NASA’s Dawn mission is responsible for most of our knowledge of Ceres’ surface, and it found what appeared to be ice in permanently shadowed regions (PSRs.)

New research shows that these PSRs are not actually permanent and that the ice they hold is not ancient. Instead, it’s only a few thousand years old.

The new research is titled “History of Ceres’s Cold Traps Based on Refined Shape Models,” published in The Planetary Science Journal. The lead author is Norbert Schorghofer, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.

“The results suggest all of these ice deposits must have accumulated within the last 6,000 years or less.”

Norbert Schorghofer, senior scientist, Planetary Science Institute.

Dawn captured its first images of Ceres while approaching the dwarf planet in January 2015. At that time, it was close enough to capture images as good as Hubble’s. Those images showed craters and a high-albedo site on the surface. Once captured by Ceres, Dawn followed a polar orbit with decreasing altitude. It eventually reached 375 km (233 mi) above the surface, allowing it to see the poles and surface in greater detail.

“For Ceres, the story started in 2016, when the Dawn spacecraft, which orbited around Ceres at the time, glimpsed into these permanently dark craters and saw bright ice deposits in some of them,” Schorghofer said. “The discovery back in 2016 posed a riddle: Many craters in the polar regions of Ceres remain shadowed all year – which on Ceres lasts 4.6 Earth years – and therefore remain frigidly cold, but only a few of them harbor ice deposits.”

As scientists continued to study Ceres, they made another discovery: its massive Solar System neighbours make it wobble.

“Soon, another discovery provided a clue why: The rotation axis of Ceres oscillates back and forth every 24,000 years due to tides from the Sun and Jupiter. When the axis tilt is high and the seasons strong, only a few craters remain shadowed all year, and these are the craters that contain bright ice deposits,” said lead author Schorghofer.

This figure from the research shows how Ceres’ obliquity has changed over the last 25,000 years. As the obliquity varies, sunlight reaches some crater floors that were thought to be PSRs. Image Credit: Schorghofer et al. 2023.

Researchers constructed digital elevation maps (DEMs) of the craters to uncover these facts. They wanted to find out how large and deep the shadows in the craters were, not just now but thousands of years ago. But that’s difficult to do since portions of these craters were in deep shadow when Dawn visited. That made it difficult to see how deep the craters were.

Robert Gaskell, also from the Planetary Science Institute, took on the task. He developed a new technique to create more accurate maps of the craters with data from Dawn’s sensitive Framing Cameras, contributed to the mission by Germany. With improved accuracy, these maps of the crater floors could be used in ray tracing to show sunlight penetrated the shadows as Ceres wobbled over thousands of years.

This figure from the study shows some of the DEMs the researchers developed for craters on Ceres. White regions represent sunlit areas, while the coloured contours represent PSRs for different axial tilts. Image Credit: Schorghofer et al. 2023.

The DEMs in the above image show that at 20 degrees obliquity, none of the craters are in permanent shadow. That means none of them have truly permanent PSRs. “A PSR starts to emerge in Bilwis crater at about 18°, and they emerge at lower obliquities at the other six study sites. This implies that the ice deposits are remarkably young,” the researchers write in their paper.

This figure from the research shows PSRs in the north-polar region of Ceres. The colour scale shows how oblique each crater is. The research shows that 14,000 years ago, none of these were PSRs, and the ice they hold now is only 6,000 years old. Image Credit: Schorghofer et al. 2023.

About 14,000 years ago, Ceres reached its maximum axial tilt. At that time, no craters were PSRs. Any ice in these craters would’ve been sublimated into space. “That leaves only one plausible explanation: The ice deposits must have formed more recently than that. The results suggest all of these ice deposits must have accumulated within the last 6,000 years or less. Considering that Ceres is well over 4 billion years old, that is a remarkably young age,” Schorghofer said.

So, where did the ice come from?

There must be some source if the ice is young and keeps reforming during maximum obliquity. The only plausible one is Ceres itself.

“Ceres is an ice-rich object, but almost none of this ice is exposed on the surface. The aforementioned polar craters and a few small patches outside the polar regions are the only ice exposures. However, ice is ubiquitous at shallow depths – as discovered by PSI scientist Tom Prettyman and his team back in 2017 – so even a small dry impactor could vaporize some of that ice.” Schorghofer said. “A fragment of an asteroid may have collided with Ceres about 6,000 years ago, which created a temporary water atmosphere. Once a water atmosphere is generated, ice would condense in the cold polar craters, forming the bright deposits that we still see today. Alternatively, the ice deposits could have formed by avalanches of ice-rich material. This ice would then survive in only the cold shadowed craters. Either way, these events were very recent on an astronomical time scale.”

There are other potential sources of water ice. Ceres has a very thin, transient water atmosphere. The water could come from cryovolcanic processes and then be trapped and frozen in shadowed regions.

Ceres also has a single cryovolcano: Ahuna Mons. It’s at least a couple hundred million years old and long dormant. There are dozens of other dormant potential cryovolcanoes, too. But these likely aren’t the water source.

There’s ample water ice at shallow levels in Ceres. If the dwarf planet erodes over time, mass-wasting could expose and release water that freezes in the craters. “The few ice deposits that have been detected spectroscopically outside the polar regions are indeed often associated with landslides, and the sunlit portion of the ice deposit in Zatik crater is best explained by a recent mass wasting event,” the authors explain.

Ceres has been through a lot. As an ancient protoplanet that’s survived to this day, it holds important clues to the Solar System. Though its craters don’t hold ancient ice like once thought, deeper study is revealing the dwarf planet’s true nature.

“The ice deposits in the Cerean PSRs indicate an active water cycle; ice is either repeatedly captured and lost or frequently exposed, or both,” the authors conclude.

The post Ice Deposits on Ceres Might Only Be a Few Thousand Years Old appeared first on Universe Today.

Cocaine and morphine hijacked neural responses in the brains of mice, which resulted in them consuming less food and water

Cosmic rays are high-energy particles accelerated to extreme velocities approaching the speed of light. It takes an extremely powerful event to send these bits of matter blazing through the Universe. Astronomers theorize that cosmic rays are ejected by supernova explosions that mark the death of supergiant stars. But recent data collected by the Fermi Gamma-ray space telescope casts doubt on this production method for cosmic rays, and has astronomers digging for an explanation.

It’s not easy to tell where a cosmic ray comes from. Most cosmic rays are hydrogen nuclei, others are protons, or free-flying electrons. These are charged particles, meaning that every time they come across other matter in the Universe with a magnetic field, they change course, causing them to zig-zag through space.

The direction a cosmic ray comes from when it hits Earth, then, is not likely the direction it started in.

But there are ways to indirectly track down their origin. One of the more promising methods is by observing gamma rays (which do travel in straight lines, thankfully).

When cosmic rays bump into other bits of matter, they produce gamma rays. So when a supernova goes off and sends cosmic rays out into the Universe, it should also send a gamma-ray signal letting us know it’s happening.

That’s the theory, anyway.

But the evidence hasn’t matched expectations. Studies of old, distant supernovas show some gamma ray production occurring, but not as much as predicted. Astronomers explained away the missing radiation as a result of the supernovas’ age and distance. But in 2023, the Fermi telescope captured a bright new supernova occurring nearby. Named SN 2023ixf, the supernova went off just 22 million light-years away in a galaxy called Messier 101 (better known as the ‘Pinwheel Galaxy’). And yet again, gamma rays were conspicuously absent.

NASA Goddard.

“Astrophysicists previously estimated that supernovae convert about 10% of their total energy into cosmic ray acceleration,” said Guillem Martí-Devesa, University of Trieste. “But we have never observed this process directly. With the new observations of SN 2023ixf, our calculations result in an energy conversion as low as 1% within a few days after the explosion. This doesn’t rule out supernovae as cosmic ray factories, but it does mean we have more to learn about their production.”

So where is all the missing gamma radiation?

It’s possible that interstellar material around the exploding star could have blocked gamma rays from reaching the Fermi telescope. But it might also mean that astronomers need to look for alternative explanations for the production of cosmic rays.

Nobody likes a good mystery better than astronomers, and digging into the missing gamma radiation could eventually tell us a whole lot more about cosmic rays and where they come from.

Astronomers plan to study SN 2023ixf in other wavelengths to improve their models of the event, and will of course keep an eye out for the next big supernova, in an effort to understand what is going on.

The most recent gamma-ray data from SN 2023ixf will be published in Astronomy and Astrophysics in a paper led by Martí-Devesa.

The post The Mystery of Cosmic Rays Deepens appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA is in the business of launching things into orbit. But what goes up must come down, and if whatever is coming down doesn’t burn up in the atmosphere, it will strike Earth somewhere.

Even Florida isn’t safe.

Careful consideration goes into releasing debris from the International Space Station. Its mass is measured and calculated so that it burns up during re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere. But in March 2024, something didn’t go as planned.

It all started in 2021 when astronauts replaced the ISS’s nickel hydride batteries with lithium-ion batteries. It was part of a power system upgrade, and the expired batteries added up to about 2,630 kg (5,800 lbs.) On March 8th, 2021, ground controllers used the ISS’s robotic arm to release a pallet full of the expired batteries into space, where orbital decay would eventually send them plummeting into Earth’s atmosphere.

The Canadarm 2 robotic arm releases a pallet of spent batteries into space on March 8th, 2021. Image Credit: NASA

It was the most massive debris release from the ISS. According to calculations, it should have burned up when it entered the atmosphere on March 8th, 2024. But it didn’t.

Alejandro Otero owns a home in Naples, Florida. He wasn’t home on March 8th when there was a loud crash as something smashed into his roof. But his son was. “It was a tremendous sound. It almost hit my son,” Otero told CNN affiliate WINK News in March. “He was two rooms over and heard it all.”

“Something ripped through the house and then made a big hole in the floor and on the ceiling,” Otero explained. “I’m super grateful that nobody got hurt.”

This time, nobody got hurt. But NASA is taking the accident seriously.

Otero cooperated with NASA, and NASA examined the object at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. They determined the debris was from a stanchion used to mount the old batteries on a special cargo pallet.

This image shows an intact stanchion and the recovered stanchion from the NASA flight support equipment used to mount International Space Station batteries on a cargo pallet. The stanchion survived re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere on March 8, 2024, and impacted a home in Naples, Florida. Image Credit: NASA

The stanchion is made of the superalloy Inconel to understand extreme environments, including extreme heat. It weighs 725 grams (1.6 lbs.) It’s about 10 cm (4 inches) in height and 4 cm (1.6 inches) in diameter.

Even though it’s a tiny object, it’s the type of accident that NASA and the ISS are determined to avoid. “The International Space Station will perform a detailed investigation of the jettison and re-entry analysis to determine the cause of the debris survival and to update modelling and analysis, as needed,” a NASA statement read.

Investigators want to know how the debris survived without burning up on re-entry. Engineers use models to understand how objects react to re-entry heat and break apart, and this event will refine those models. In fact, every time an object reaches the ground, the models are updated.

For Otero, this accident amounted to little more than a great story and an insurance claim. But the chunk of stanchion could’ve seriously injured someone or even killed someone.

In January 1997, Lottie Williams was walking through a park with friends in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early morning. They saw a huge fireball in the sky and felt a rush of excitement, thinking they were seeing a shooting star. “We were stunned, in awe,” Williams told FoxNews.com. “It was beautiful.”

Then, something struck her lightly on the shoulder before falling to the ground. It was like a piece of metallic fabric, and after reaching out to some authorities, she learned that it was part of a fuel tank from a Delta II rocket. She’s the first person known to have been hit with space debris. Had it been something with more mass, who knows if Williams would’ve been injured or worse?

That’s why NASA takes debris survival so seriously. The guilt of injuring or even killing someone would be overwhelming. A serious debris accident could also make things very uncomfortable going forward, as people can be fickle and not prone to critical thinking. NASA’s already struggling with budget constraints; the organization doesn’t need any nasty public relations to imperil its progress further.

Complicating matters is that the ESA warned that not all the battery debris would burn up. There wasn’t much else they could do. Fluctuating atmospheric drag made it impossible to predict where debris would strike Earth.

Those who follow space know how complicated and unpredictable this is. And they likewise know how improbable an injury is. But there’s always a non-zero chance of injury or death from space debris for someone going about their life here on the Earth’s surface. If that ever happened, the scrutiny would be intense.

Is it statistical fear-mongering to consider space debris striking someone, injuring them, or worse? Probably. When we see a shooting star in the sky, it’s safe to enjoy the spectacle without worry.

But maybe, just in case, out of an abundance of caution, Don’t Look Up.

The post NASA Confirms that a Piece of its Battery Pack Smashed into a Florida Home appeared first on Universe Today.

I used to think that the “decolonization” of STEM was strongest in New Zealand and South Africa, which of course is a movement to dethrone so-called “Western” science in favor of indigenous science. But now I’m beginning to wonder if the “indigenization/decolonization of science” isn’t making its way deep into Australia as well.  I have followed developments in New Zealand far more closely than these other places, because I hear often from Kiwi scientists who beef about the dethroning of modern science (which hasn’t been “Western” in a while) in favor of Mātauranga Māori (MM), the “way of knowing” of the indigenous Māori people. Also, I have visited New Zealand, love the place, and would be devastated if science were watered down with superstition, myth, legend, and morality.

And that’s the first issue with “decolonizing” science. Usually those movements intend to either defenestrate modern science or at least teach “indigenous science” alongside it as an equally valid “way of knowing”. Yet indigenous science, like MM, is a grab-bag of empirical knowledge based on trial and error (the premier example is the navigation of Polynesians, the ancestors of Māori; another is how to catch eels), but is also imbued with superstitions, myths, legends, word-of-mouth tales, and “rules for living”, including morality. And rarely is indigenous science vetted with the same rigor as is modern science, because modern science has many features missing in indigenous “ways of knowing” (double-blind testing, deliberate replication, hypothesis testing, and so on).  One result is that “indigenous science” can be wrong more often. One example is the insistence of some New Zealand researchers that Polynesians discovered Antarctica in the early seventh century. This is based on oral legend combined with mistranslation; in fact, the Russians were the first to glimpse the continent—in 1820.

Now trial and error methods can indeed produce empirical knowledge in the sense of “justified true belief”, but that is practical knowledge, designed to help people where to find things to eat, how to navigate, how to herd bison, when to plant food, and the like. Its ambit is far narrower than that of modern science, and examples of “indigenous science” that have made valuable contributions to modern science are thin on the ground.

Which brings us to the second issue with indigenous science. Although it’s touted loudly and passionately, examples of indigenous knowledge making substantial contributions to modern science are either scant or missing. Most of the written defenses of enthroning indigenous science I’ve seen are based on a need to pay attention to marginalized people as oppressed victims, whose knowledge must be elevated precisely because they were victims.  But that’s no way to judge science.

And that is precisely the content of this puff piec, coming from Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, touting the dethroning of “mainstream European-based mathematics” in favor of mathematics produced and used by “Indigenous and First Nations peoples around the world.” The article highlights Professor Rowena Ball of ANU’s College of Science, who lists these as her research interests:

Mathematics Without Borders, Truth-Telling in Mathematics History, Decolonisation of STEM, Indigenous and Non-Western Mathematics, Emergence of life, Nonlinear and complex dynamical systems, Thermochemical instabilities and oscillators, Thermodynamic analysis, Railways and trains, Country pub lunches

What is mathematics? What is included in mathematics? Who gets to say? How and why did Western mathematics exclusively colonise minds and curriculums over the whole world? Should that situation continue unabated?

It will not escape your notice if you read the piece, heavy with quotes from Dr. Ball, that she neglects the contributions of anything other than “mainstream European-based mathematics” to modern mathematics, leaving out the contributions of the Egyptians, Greeks, Arabs, Romans, and Babylonians to modern mathematics. Those people were apparently not “indigenous” and at any rate were not “colonized”. But Ball goes on and on, proffering only one tepid example of how a group of Australian aboriginals in Mithaka Country (an area of east-central Australia) had a form of mathematics that was useful. It turns out that it wasn’t mathematics at all, but practical knowledge that we wouldn’t recognize today as “math” at all.

Click the screenshot to read this short piece (h/t Peter Forsythe):

First I’ll give some of her quotes from the ANU piece (indented) and then her holotype specimen of indigenous math.

What constitutes mathematical knowledge? What is included in mathematics? Who gets to decide? These are some of the questions being asked in a growing decolonisation movement.

“Mathematics is a universal human phenomenon, and students of under-represented and minority groups and colonised peoples are starting to be more critical about accepting unquestioningly the cultural hegemony of mainstream European-based mathematics,” says Professor Rowena Ball from the ANU Mathematical Sciences Institute.

Professor Ball leads a research and teaching initiative called Mathematics Without Borders, aimed at broadening and diversifying the cultural base and content of mathematics.

“Mathematics has been gatekept by the West and defined to exclude entire cultures. Almost all mathematics that students have ever come across is European-based,” she explains. “We would like to enrich the discipline through the inclusion of cross-cultural mathematics.”

“Indigenous and First Nations peoples around the world are standing up and saying: ‘Our knowledge is just as good as anybody else’s − why can’t we teach it to our children in our schools, and in our own way?’

“And this is happening in New Zealand, North and South America, and Africa, and also in a great movement in India to revive traditional Indian mathematics.”

But wait!  There’s more:

. . .“There is a lot of gatekeeping going on,” Professor Ball says of having to justify Indigenous maths. “One effect of colonisation of the curriculum is defensive protection of what is thought to be an exclusively European and British provenance of mathematics.”

“Like most mathematicians I was educated in European and British mathematics,” says Professor Ball, “and it’s fine stuff – I still love my original research field in dynamical systems.” But that mathematics did not develop in isolation, she says, and now there’s even more to learn about how non-Western societies have been seeing the world mathematically that many of us haven’t yet tuned into.

“What the general public think of as mathematics tends to be whatever they learned (or, more likely, did not learn) at school. But in many Indigenous societies, mathematics is lived from when you are born to when you rejoin your ancestors,” Professor Ball says.

Rejoin your ancestors? Does she mean as underground worm food? I don’t think so. But I digress.  Ball argues that indigenous math is largely non-numerical, though in her one unpublished paper that is mentioned in the article (see below), numbers and counting figure largely.

At any rate, here is the single example Ball gives of valuable indigenous mathematics. I am not making this up: it involves the direction of smoke signals.

“One interesting example that we are currently investigating is the use of chiral symmetry to engineer a long-distance smoke signalling technology in real time,” Professor Ball says. “If you light an incense stick you will see the twin counter-rotating vortices that emanate − these are a chiral pair, meaning they are non-superimposable mirror images of each other.”

A memoir by Alice Duncan Kemp, who grew up on a cattle station on Mithaka country in the early 1900s, vividly describes the signalling procedure, in which husband-and-wife expert team Bogie and Mary-Anne selected and pulsed the smoke waves with a left to right curl, to signal “white men”, instead of the more usual right to left spiral.

Mithaka country is southwest Queensland − Kurrawoolben and Kirrenderri (Diamantina) and Nooroondinna (Georgina) river channel country − and for thousands of years this region was a rich, well-populated cultural and trade crossroads of the Australian continent.

To create and understand these signals, you have to be a skilled practical mathematician, Professor Ball says.

“Theory and mathematics in Mithaka society were systematised and taught intergenerationally. You don’t just somehow pop up and suddenly start a chiral signalling technology. It has been taught and developed and practised by many people through the generations.”

At that time in the early twentieth century, British meteorologists were just beginning to understand the essential vortical nature of atmospheric flows.

“Imagine if the existing Indigenous Mithaka knowledge of vorticity had been recognised, nurtured and protected? In what ways may it have fed into the high performance, numerical weather forecasting capabilities that we all rely on now?” she asks.

I don’t find this at all convincing. First, Bogie and Mary-Anne sound like white oppressors to me. But even if they weren’t, is the “reverse curl” something the locals actually used to signal “white people around”? It couldn’t have been going on for thousands of years because the first European people arrived in Australia in the early 17th century. So was there an elaborate system of smoke signals before that? Perhaps, but how are they based on mathematics? Patterns of smoke, like drumbeats, is a kind of language, and how to make the patterns and get them understood correctly is based on trial and error. Where does the math come in?

Further, the claim that the Mithaka knowledge of vorticity—I’m not sure what that knowledge is beyond empirical ways to make smoke signals—would have revolutionized “high performance numerical weather forecasting” long before now is simply risible.

Well, that’s enough. But I’d be remiss not to at least mention a paper by Xu and Ball that defends the thesis above. It’s called “Is the study of Indigenous mathematics ill-directed or beneficial?“, and appears at Arχiv.org, which means it hasn’t been published or peer-reviewed. There are a few examples of indigenous mathematics, which I put below. In some cases you’ll have to look up the references given to check on which people they’re referring to:

Much of ordinary day-to-day arithmetic and geometry performed by ‘illiterate’ women, artisans, carpenters and many other workers are unwritten and even unspoken (Wood, 2000). The apprentice learns by watching carefully then doing the mathematics themselves. The use of tools–an unwritten approach–to support arithmetic has a long history; there are different media for recording and computing with numbers, including stones, twigs, knots and notches (Hansson, 2018). People of many Indigenous Pacific and Australian nations can use parts of the body to count quickly and accurately (Goetzfridt, 2007; Owens & Lean, 2018; Wood, 2000), communicating methods, operations and results through speaking, listening and gesture. Weaving skills were taught unwritten to next generations to construct the numerical relationships that give rise to the desired complex geometrical designs with symmetries (Hansson, 2018). Knotted quipus were used by ‘illiterate’ Inca people of South American
Andes regions to allot land and levy taxes (Ascher & Ascher, 2013). The quipu (Figure 1), with its columns of base-10 numerical data encoded as knots, can be thought of as a spreadsheet, and it seems likely that the Inca knew and applied some array and matrix operations.

Dan, an Indigenous language of central Liberia, is non-written but Dan speakers can carry out arithmetic operations orally, including addition, subtraction and division, play games that require fast counting, tracking and calculating skills, and practice geometric principles in constructing buildings (Sternstein, 2008). Fractal geometry, developed to a high art in Western mathematics from the late 1960s and executed in silico, has non-Western antecedents that were implemented in the built environment in Africa (Eglash, 1998). Chaology and fractal geometry have also been a part of traditional Chinese architectural and garden design for thousands of years (Li & Liao, 1998).

Clearly some indigenous people could count and calculate, though the calculating seems to fall largely to the Chinese, not usually considered indigenous. At any rate, what’s above doesn’t jibe with the claim and quote in the article:

Numbers and arithmetic and accounting often are of secondary importance in Indigenous mathematics.

“In fact, as most mathematicians know, mathematics is primarily the science of patterns and periodicities and symmetries − and recognising and classifying those patterns.”

A lot of the above sounds like counting and accounting to me.  Regardless, it’s clear that some indigenous people could count and figure out patterns that involved counting.  I’m not so sure about the Inca “matrix” operations,  but one can hardly carry out some kind of commerce or taxation without being able to count. At any rate, yes, indigenous people had a form of “counting and pattern mathematics,” but to put them on a par even with what the ancient Egyptians and Greeks accomplished mathematically is to give indigenous people too much credit.

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