Tag: science

Week long movie of Pluto produced by New Horizons

10:28 pm

Cool images! Using New Horizons’ long range camera scientists have compiled a movie showing Charon and Pluto orbiting each other during the last week of January 2015.

Pluto and Charon were observed for an entire rotation of each body; a “day” on Pluto and Charon is 6.4 Earth days. The first of the images was taken when New Horizons was about 3 billion miles from Earth, but just 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) from Pluto—about 30% farther than Earth’s distance from the Sun. The last frame came 6½ days later, with New Horizons more than 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) closer.

The wobble easily visible in Pluto’s motion, as Charon orbits, is due to the gravity of Charon, about one-eighth as massive as Pluto and about the size of Texas.

Our view of Pluto, and Charon, is only going to get better as New Horizons zooms towards its July fly-by.

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The endless and all-compassing terrors of global warming

4:23 pm

Want to know what scientists have predicted climate change will do to the Earth? Go to ClimateChangePredictions.org, where they keep a full list of every prediction they can find.

I especially like the category “Having it both ways,” where they list different predictions that insisted on opposite consequences. For example did you know that global warning is going to bring both “less rain” and “more rain”, Other predictions are equally amusing.

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Sunspot activity tracks prediction

1:43 pm

On Monday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the sunspot activity for the Sun in January. As I do every month, I am posting it here below the fold, with annotations to give it context.

As I have noted previously, the ramp down from solar maximum continues to track the 2009 prediction of the solar scientist community (indicated by the red curve) quite closely. As NOAA also notes,

While awaiting final confirmation, all evidence points to the most recent solar maximum having peaked at 82 in April, 2014. This was within the expected range for the peak, but occurred significantly later than predicted.

Since their graph doesn’t show the entire curves for their predictions, the above statement seems reasonable. However, looking at the graph with those curves inserted (see my annotated graph below the fold), it becomes clear that not only did the peak occur much later than predicted, the maximum’s overall activity was also generally less than predicted.
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Rosetta preps for close fly-by of Comet 67P/C-G

9:12 am

Single frame image

Cool image time! In preparation for a close fly-by of Comet 67P/C-G on Saturday — where it will zip past the comet less than three miles above its surface — Rosetta has eased away to a distance of about 60 miles, allowing its navigation camera to snap its first single frame image since the spacecraft’s initial close approach last summer.

The image brightness has been adjusted to make the plume more obvious. Also, if you look closely at the full resolution version of the image, it is possible to see the dusty material that forms the coma surrounding the nucleus.

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New ebola drug appears somewhat effective

10:06 am

Drug trails in Guinea of a new ebola drug suggest that it might have some positive effect on mortality.

A researcher who had seen the data and asked not to be identified told Science that favipiravir did not help all of the patients treated with it at two trial sites in Guinea. In a subset of trial participants who had low levels of Ebola virus in the blood, however, the mortality was just 15%. In similar patients who entered the centers earlier and did not receive favipiravir, mortality was 30%.

The trials with this drug are being conducted without a control group, which makes it harder to pin down the cause of these results. The article also describes several other drugs being readied for testing, some of which are expected to be more effective.

The trials, however, are faced with two issues. First, the easing of the epidemic is making it more difficult to do the studies. And second,

So far, Guinea and Sierra Leone, where Ebola is still infecting dozens of people a week, have refused invitations to join the study. Their main stumbling block is trial design. ZMapp will be the first Ebola treatment that will be tested against a placebo control. “I think that’s the only way to tell whether these drugs are safe and effective,” Lane says. The governments of Guinea and Sierra Leone, as well as Doctors Without Borders, which runs Ebola centers in those countries, have for ethical reasons been reluctant to participate in treatment trials that use a placebo.

The moral dilemma of doing drug tests where some patients get a placebo has always been a problem for medical research. It is therefore not surprising to see it here as well.

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“The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever.”

9:35 am

Link here.

This is a nicely written review of some of the research that Steven Goddard, Paul Homewood, and others have done to uncover the wholesale and unjustified adjustments to the surface temperature data that have been done by scientists at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and at NOAA. Essentially, the warming of the past half century has been faked by artificially lowering the recorded temperatures of the past while artificially raising the recorded temperatures of the present.

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Plumes and dust surrounding Comet 67P/C-G

11:07 am

Plumes and dust

Cool image time! A new navigation camera mosaic from Rosetta shows both a clear plume rising out of Comet 67P/C-G as well as a “large number of small white blobs and streaks in the image are likely specks of dust or other small objects in the vicinity of the comet.”

The fact that, unlike previously, they did not have to significantly overexpose the image to bring out the plume and dust illustrates the increasing activity at the comet.

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Scientists discover that bigger is not better

10:36 am

Why am I not surprised? An comparison of the size of research labs and the number of impact papers the lab published found that increasing the number of students to the staff above a certain point does little to increase research success.

To publish the most papers, labs should ideally have 10 to 15 members, according to a much-discussed study in PeerJ PrePrints. Adding more and more graduate students and postdocs beyond that number does not guarantee a continued rise in high-impact papers, the study found, partly because the extra workers tend to be much less productive than the principal investigator (PI). Mark Pallen, who heads a microbiology lab at the University of Warwick, UK, tweeted “Nice that PIs matter!”

Not surprisingly, there is much skepticism of this result in the scientific community, as having more workers in their lab tends to give them a justification for requiring more grant funds.

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OSIRIS-REx to get more fuel for its asteroid mission

10:17 am

In what might be a first for the planetary science/engineering community, an unmanned probe, being built to bring samples back from the asteroid Bennu, is turning out to be lighter than expected, thus allowing engineers to stuff its tanks with extra fuel to extend its mission.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, being built at a Lockheed Martin facility in Denver, is coming in lighter than the lift capability of the Atlas 5 rocket, which will lift off in its “411” configuration with a four-meter payload fairing, a single-engine Centaur upper stage, and one strap-on solid rocket booster.

The proposal — described as a “heavy launch option” — would add an extra 341 pounds of fuel to the spacecraft’s fuel tank.

Planetary probes never end up lighter than planned, at least until now. During construction scientists have always found it impossible to resist adding more instruments or capabilities, and thus engineers always struggle to get the spacecraft built within its weight budget. For OSIRIS-REx to have this wonderful problem is surely astonishing.

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Astronomers find an invisible dwarf galaxy

10:05 am

Using dark matter data that suggested the existence of a faint dwarf galaxy 300,000 light years away on the other side of the Milky Way, astronomers have pinpointed its location by finding a tiny cluster of bright Cepheid variable stars, also located at that distance.

“These young stars are likely the signature of this predicted galaxy,” said Chakrabarti, assistant professor in RIT’s School of Physics and Astronomy. “They can’t be part of our galaxy because the disk of the Milky Way terminates at 48,000 light years.” Invisible particles known as dark matter make up 23 percent of the mass of the universe. The mysterious matter represents a fundamental problem in astronomy because it is not understood, Chakrabarti said.

This result is intriguing because it not only found a previously unknown dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, it also provides further evidence that dark matter, whatever it is, does exist. The dark matter of this unseen dwarf galaxy showed its gravitational effects on Milky Way stars, and when the astronomers looked at the right spot suggested by those effects, they found distant stars that had to belong to the invisible dwarf galaxy, proving it was there. This is comparable to finding Neptune and Pluto by analyzing their gravitational effects and then predicting their location in the sky.

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Five years later a second attempt to put a Japanese spacecraft into Venus orbit

9:55 am

If at first: After failing to place its Akatsuki spacecraft into orbit around Venus in 2010 because of a cracked engine nozzle, Japan has announced its plans for a new attempt later this year.

The attempt will be made on December 7. If successful, the spacecraft will begin studying Venus’s climate and atmosphere only a short time after the end of Europe’s very success Venus Express mission.

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New Pluto images from New Horizons

4:02 pm

Pluto from 126 million miles

The New Horizons science team has finally released the navigation image of Pluto and Charon that the spacecraft took on January 25.

A cropped version is on the right. The image shows Pluto and its biggest moon Charon, with both appearing somewhat elongated in shape. Why this is so is not explained by the press release, but I suspect it is because the goal of the image was not sharpness but to locate the planet for navigation purposes.

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Life found that hasn’t changed in 2 billion years

6:00 pm

Scientists have discovered a micro-organism that has not evolved in more than 2 billion years.

Schopf and his colleagues used a variety of spectroscopic imaging techniques to study sulfur bacteria fossils embedded in deep sea rocks of varying ages. Analysis of the microorganisms from 1.8 billion-year-old rocks from Western Australia and 2.3 billion-year-old rocks collect off the coast of Chile showed that ancient sulfur bacteria looks the exact same now as it has for more than two billion years.

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The Hubble Space Telescope lives on!

8:18 pm

At a press conference at the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society scientists and engineers of the Space Telescope Science Institute that operates the Hubble Space Telescope reported that it is functioning far better than expected and is likely to continue to function until 2020 or beyond.

This is good news, since there is nothing being planned to replace Hubble. The article implies that the James Webb Space Telescope has that job, but Webb is an infrared telescope, not optical, and thus observes the universe in wavelengths not visible to the human eye.

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Gravitational wave/inflation discovery literally bites the dust

9:24 pm

The uncertainty of science: The big discovery earlier this year of gravitational waves confirming the cosmological theory of inflation has now been found to be completely bogus. Instead of being caused by gravitational waves, the detection was caused by dust in the Milky Way.

Even while the mainstream press was going nuts touting the original announcement, I never even posted anything about it. To me, there were too many assumptions underlying the discovery, as well as too many data points with far too large margins of error, to trust the result. It was interesting, but hardly a certain discovery. Now we have found that the only thing certain about it was that it wasn’t the discovery the scientists thought.

Nor is this unusual for the field of cosmology. Because much of this sub-field of astronomy is dependent on large uncertainties and assumptions, its “facts” are often disproven or untrustworthy. And while the Big Bang theory itself unquestionably fits the known facts better than any other theory at this time, there remain too many uncertainties to believe in it without strong skepticism.

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Hayabusa-2 in “tip-top” shape

9:34 am

Launched in December for a 2018 rendezvous with an asteroid, Hayabusa-2 has successfully completed its initial check-out according to Japanese officials.

Checkups on early-phase functionality are being carried out over a three-month period. Although the first Hayabusa had suffered malfunctions of its ion engines, it is confirmed that the four ion engines of Hayabusa-2 are functioning properly, JAXA said. Kuninaka said: “With the engines functioning, the explorer can set out on its voyage with a lot of leeway. I feel like, ‘Way to go!’”

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Privately-built weather satellite constellation to be built

9:25 am

The competition heats up: A private company, dubbed Spire, has announced its intention to launch a 20-satellite constellation of weather satellites, all cubesats, by the end of 2015.

Spire raised $25 million in Series A funding during the summer of 2014, bringing its total amount to $29 million. The company already has customers in a variety of verticals, but Platzer said weather was planned to be a focus from the company’s inception.

…With the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) facing an impending weather data gap, an increasing amount of focus has been placed on leveraging commercial options as well. Last year NOAA issued a Request for Information (RFI) on RO that piqued interest from the commercial sector. Congress has also urged the agency to leverage private sector capabilities.

For years I argued that there is no justification for the federal government to provide free weather satellite data to private companies like the Weather Channel. There is more than enough profit to be made tracking and predicting the weather for these companies to launch their own orbiting networks, just as the television and communications industries do. Thus, it is good to see a new start-up take advantage of this need and to push to make a business out of it.

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Update on Philae on Comet 67P/C-G

9:01 am

The Rosetta team has provided a detailed update describing their so far unsuccessful search for Philae on the surface of Comet 67P/C-G.

In addition, the update also looks into the possibility that Philae might wake up in the late spring when the comet’s orbit and rotation changes enough so its solar panels are more exposed to the Sun.

Bottom line: Don’t expect them to find the lander from images. Right now it is a mere three pixels in size. And whether it will come back to life as well also remains unknown.

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The surprisingly dark and organic surface of Comet 67P/C-G

9:02 am

Link here.

The first surprising result emerging from VIRTIS’s study of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is the measurement of its albedo, or how much sunlight is reflected by the surface of the nucleus. With an albedo of only 6%, about half as much as the Moon’s, 67P/C-G is one of the darkest objects in the Solar System. Such a low reflecting power indicates that the surface of the comet contains minerals such as, for example, iron sulfides, but also carbon-based compounds. The low albedo also indicates that there is little or no water ice on the outermost layers of the surface of the nucleus.

“This clearly doesn’t mean that the comet is not rich in water, but only that there is no water ice in the outermost shell, just over one millimetre thick,” explains Fabrizio Capaccioni, VIRTIS Principal Investigator from INAF-IAPS in Rome, Italy. “The reason for this is rooted in the recent history of the comet’s evolution, since repeated passes in the vicinity of the Sun cause surface ice to sublimate.”

This result, combined with other Rosetta data, also suggests that during each pass the dust that did not escape along the comet’s tail settled back down to coat the surface and hide the lower layers of water ice.

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Got $500? You too can get a scientific paper published!

11:33 am

A Harvard scientist used a random text generator to create a fake science paper entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and was able to get it accepted at 17 journals. [Note: the link includes an auto-download of the pdf of the scientist’s fake paper.]

Shrime decided to see how easy it would be to publish an article. So he made one up. Like, he literally made one up. He did it using www.randomtextgenerator.com. The article is entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and its authors are the venerable Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. The subtitle reads: “The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” Shrime submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks and, so far, 17 of them have accepted it. (They have not “published” it, but say they will as soon as Shrime pays the $500. This is often referred to as a “processing fee.” Shrime has no plans to pay them.) Several have already typeset it and given him reviews, as you can see at the end of this article. One publication says his methods are “novel and innovative”!. But when Shrime looked up the physical locations of these publications, he discovered that many had very suspicious addresses; one was actually inside a strip club.

Essentially, these fake journals are scams to get $500 from scientists, generally from third world countries who can’t get their papers published in the bigger first world journals. (What does that tell us about those bigger first world journals?)

The best line of the article however was this: “Many of these publications sound legitimate. To someone who is not well-versed in a particular subfield of medicine—a journalist, for instance—it would be easy to mistake them for valid sources.” [emphasis mine] It seems to me that if you are a journalist writing about a particular field, you should be reasonably educated on that field and be able to spot a fake journal. I certainly can. That it is assumed that mainstream journalists who report on medicine cannot speaks volumes about the quality of the field.

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