Tag: science

Breakthrough on battery life?

6:50 pm

New research might have discovered engineering that could significantly increase the efficiency of the batteries we use.

This is where Mya Le Thai’s magic gel comes in. Typically, a Lithium Ion battery can go through between 5000 and 7000 recharge cycles before it dies and will also gradually lose its energy storage capacity over time. When researchers applied Thai’s plexiglass-like gel to gold nanowires in a manganese dioxiode shell, it increased that number to over 200,000 and the battery didn’t lose any of its power or storage capacity over a period of three months.

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The first Juno picture of Jupiter from orbit

5:18 pm

Juno's first picture in orbit

The Juno science team have released the first image since the spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter. I have posted a cropped version on the right, showing only the moon Io. The full image shows Europa and Ganymede as well.

The image was taken from almost 3 million miles away, which accounts for its fuzziness. Expect much better pictures when the spacecraft dips down close in late August.

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Vision problems from weightlessness

6:03 pm

This article provides an excellent review of the vision problems caused by long term exposure to weightlessness, including the efforts to study the problem on Earth.

Bottom line:

Before a human trip to Mars — a journey of six-to-nine months that NASA says it wants to achieve by the 2030s — researchers agree that VIIP [the name given to this problem] must be understood much better. VIIP could be the first sign of greater dangers to the human body from microgravity. “We’re seeing the visual and neural, ophthalmic manifestations of it,” Barratt said. “I’m fairly certain this is a bit more global than that.”

Richard Williams, the chief health and medical officer at NASA, agrees that what we do not know about VIIP still poses the biggest threat. Ironically, one of the only ways to get more knowledge is spend more time in microgravity. “The longer we stay in space, the more we’re going to learn,” Williams said.

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Two anti-fracking/anti-oil industry environmental papers retracted

11:40 pm

Thank goodness these were peer reviewed! Two environmental papers, one claiming increased air pollution near fracking sites and the second claiming that the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill caused air contamination, have now both been retracted because of “crucial mistakes.”

According to the corresponding author of both papers, Kim Anderson at Oregon State University, the journal plans to publish new versions of both papers in the next few days. In the case of the fracking paper, the conclusions have been reversed — the original paper stated pollution levels exceeded limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for lifetime cancer risk, but the corrected data set the risks below EPA levels.

The fracking paper received some media attention when it was released, as it tapped into long-standing concerns about the environmental dangers of hydraulic fracturing (fracking), which extracts natural gas from the earth. A press release that accompanied the paper quoted Anderson as warning: “Air pollution from fracking operations may pose an under-recognized health hazard to people living near them.”

Both papers, published in Environmental Science and Technology, were retracted on the same day (June 29), both due to mistakes in reported levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), pollutants released from burning oil, gas, and other organic matter.

They say that the errors were due to an “honest spreadsheet error.”

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TMT likely to abandon Hawaii

3:55 pm

Officials from the consortium that is building the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) have revealed that they are looking very seriously at alternative locations.

Officials behind the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) are considering new locations for the $1.4bn facility, and expect to decide whether to opt for a new site early next year. The TMT is due to be built on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea mountain but, following protests from local residents, its building permit was revoked last December by the state’s Supreme Court. New locations that are being considered include Baja California in Mexico, the Canary Islands and Chile, as well as locations in India and China.

They claim that Hawaii is still their first choice, but if they don’t see any progress by summer in the permitting process, I expect them to tell Hawaii to go to hell (though not in those words) and pick somewhere else.

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Permanently shadowed regions on Ceres

9:53 am

Using data from Dawn scientists have calculated that Ceres could have significant regions on the floors of crater, which are permanently shadowed and which could accumulate water ice.

In this study, Schorghofer and colleagues studied Ceres’ northern hemisphere, which was better illuminated than the south. Images from Dawn’s cameras were combined to yield the dwarf planet’s shape, showing craters, plains and other features in three dimensions. Using this input, a sophisticated computer model developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, was used to determine which areas receive direct sunlight, how much solar radiation reaches the surface, and how the conditions change over the course of a year on Ceres.

The researchers found dozens of sizeable permanently shadowed regions across the northern hemisphere. The largest one is inside a 10-mile-wide (16-kilometer) crater located less than 40 miles (65 kilometers) from the north pole. Taken together, Ceres’ permanently shadowed regions occupy about 695 square miles (1,800 square kilometers). This is a small fraction of the landscape — much less than 1 percent of the surface area of the northern hemisphere.

Because Ceres is much farther than the Sun that the Moon or Mercury, the scientists believe it very likely that water ice could have accumulated in these cold traps.

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MRI software bug invalidates 40,000 research papers

9:33 am

The uncertainty of science: A bug just discovered in the computer software used by MRIs to measure brain activity could invalidate 15 years of research and 40,000 science papers.

They tested the three most popular fMRI software packages for fMRI analysis – SPM, FSL, and AFNI – and while they shouldn’t have found much difference across the groups, the software resulted in false-positive rates of up to 70 percent. And that’s a problem, because as Kate Lunau at Motherboard points out, not only did the team expect to see an average false positive rate of just 5 percent, it also suggests that some results were so inaccurate, they could be indicating brain activity where there was none.

“These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results,” the team writes in PNAS. The bad news here is that one of the bugs the team identified has been in the system for the past 15 years, which explains why so many papers could now be affected. [emphasis mine]

The research the article described is focused entirely on the problems the software causes for past research. It makes no mention of the problems this software bug might cause for actual medical diagnosis Was the treatment of any patients effected by this bug? It does not say.

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Juno turns on

9:09 am

The Juno engineering team has begun turning the spacecraft’s instruments back on following its Jupiter orbital insertion.

Everything looks fine. The next important engine burn on October 19 will shrink the orbit from 53 days to 14 days. In the meantime the present orbit will dip down close to Jupiter on August 27. Expect some news on September 1.

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A planet with three suns

3:18 pm

Astronomers, using instruments on the Very Large Telescope in Chile, have discovered an exoplanet that orbits around three suns.

Located about 340 light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus, HD 131399Ab is believed to be about 16 million years old, making it one of the youngest exoplanets discovered to date, and one of very few directly imaged planets. With a temperature of 850 Kelvin (about 1,070 degrees Fahrenheit or 580 degrees Celsius) and weighing in at an estimated four Jupiter masses, it is also one of the coldest and least massive directly imaged exoplanets.

“HD 131399Ab is one of the few exoplanets that have been directly imaged, and it’s the first one in such an interesting dynamical configuration,” said Daniel Apai, an assistant professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences who leads a research group dedicated to finding and observing exoplanets at the UA.

“For about half of the planet’s orbit, which lasts 550 Earth-years, three stars are visible in the sky, the fainter two always much closer together, and changing in apparent separation from the brightest star throughout the year,” said Kevin Wagner, a first-year PhD student in Apai’s research group and the paper’s first author, who discovered HD 131399Ab. “For much of the planet’s year the stars appear close together, giving it a familiar night-side and day-side with a unique triple-sunset and sunrise each day. As the planet orbits and the stars grow further apart each day, they reach a point where the setting of one coincides with the rising of the other – at which point the planet is in near-constant daytime for about one-quarter of its orbit, or roughly 140 Earth-years.”

The orbit of the planet remains somewhat uncertain, and thus it might not be stable.

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Balanced rock on Mars

10:00 am

Balanced rock on Mars

Cool image time! Prior to going into safe mode Curiosity’s mast camera took a series of images of its surroundings, as is routine as the rover travels. Among those images was the image above, though I have cropped it and reduced its resolution to show here. It reveals a balanced rock on the horizon. It also shows, as do the other survey images, how increasingly rough the terrain is becoming that Curiosity is traveling through.

The Curiosity science team has no intention of getting too close to this rough terrain, but they do hope to get better views of this rock as they continue the rover’s journey uphill.

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New Hubble image of Crab Nebula

9:42 am

Crab Nebula

Cool image time! Scientists have released a new Hubble Space Telescope image taken of the innermost regions of the Crab Nebula, the remains of a supernova explosion that took place a thousand years ago in 1054.

On the right is a reduced resolution version of this new image. I have also cropped it to focus on the nebula’s center, where the pulsar is located. The circular concentric rings are exactly what they appear to be, ripples of energy spreading out from the pulsar. Back in 2002 Hubble took a series of images of the Crab Nebula over several days, which scientists then assembled into a movie showing these waves as they emanated out from the nebula’s center.

My only complaint with this beautiful new image is that they did not take a longer series of new exposures to create a longer movie, to better show the actual daily changes that the nebula undergoes. It seemed obvious to do then, and obvious to do now. Yet, it hasn’t happened.

The image download page for today’s release is here.

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Curiosity in safe mode

4:31 pm

For the first time in three years, Curiosity has entered safe mode.

On July 2, Mars rover Curiosity ceased science operations on the slopes of Mount Sharp after a fail safe was tripped, forcing the nuclear-powered robot into a low-power “safe mode.” According to a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory report, preliminary information communicated by Curiosity suggests an “unexpected mismatch between camera software and data-processing software in the main computer” may have been the culprit and the rover’s automated systems took over, preventing any permanent damage from being caused.

They are in communications with the rover, and expect a full recovery.

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Weird dunes on Mars

11:11 am

Weird dunes on Mars

Cool image time! The image on the right, cropped and reduced in resolution to fit here, shows an area of inexplicable dark dunes located in Mars’ high northern latitudes. Located in a circular depression (whose outline can be seen across the top and left side of the image), geologists only partly understand the processes producing these dunes. As the noted on the release webpage:

However, a circular depression (probably an old and infilled impact crater) has limited the amount of sand available for dune formation and influenced local winds. As a result, the dunes here form distinct dots and dashes. The “dashes” are linear dunes formed by bi-directional winds, which are not traveling parallel to the dune. Instead, the combined effect of winds from two directions at right angles to the dunes, funnels material into a linear shape. The smaller “dots” (called “barchanoid dunes”) occur where there is some interruption to the process forming those linear dunes. This process is not well understood at present and is one motivation for HiRISE to image this area.

Be sure to look at the full image, as it covers a wider area and shows dunes that travel in all directions, forming mazelike patterns that no theory presently explains.

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Auction of first published book describing Copernicus’ heliocentric theory

8:53 am

Got some spare cash? On July 13, the auction house Christies in London will be selling a first edition of the first book ever published describing Copernicus’ theory that the Earth orbited the Sun.

De Libris Revolutionum Eruditissimi Viridoctoris came not from Nicolaus Copernicus, but from his only student, Georg Joachim Rheticus, and when published in 1540, provided the momentum needed for Copernicus to finally have his landmark De revolutionibus orbium coelestium published in 1543.

Rheticus (1514-1574) published this first book on the subject based on his studies under Copernicus, all the while imploring his master to finally publish the master work which had been finished for 25 years. Copernicus resisted publishing De revolutionibus orbium coelestium for 30 years due to his fear of the Catholic Church, but when Rheticus published this book in 1540, Copernicus finally gave Rheticus the go ahead to publish the major work for him.

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Cubesats to the planets!

8:47 am

Link here. The article is a good detailed overview of the many upcoming planetary missions that are using small and relatively inexpensive cubesats as either part of their mission, or are the mission itself.

This trend also partly explains the number of new rocket companies like Rocket Lab and Firefly Space Systems that are developing small rockets aimed at launching cubesats. These companies have recognized a growing demand, and are trying to serve it. As the article notes,

Lifts are so hard to come by that the first interplanetary CubeSat — NASA’s twin INSPIRE mini-spacecraft, intended to test key technology for future missions — has been waiting for almost two years. “We still have to find a ride,” says Anthony Freeman, who manages the Innovation Foundry at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

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A short but weak solar maximum?

3:03 pm

On July 4th NOAA released its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in June. It is annotated and posted below.

June 2016 Solar Cycle graph

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

Not surprisingly, the time periods with no sunspots in June, including a 12 day stretch that just ended today, is reflected by the graph’s precipitous drop in June.

What is significant to me is the speed with which this solar maximum seems to be ending. Normally, weak solar cycles are also long solar cycles. The Sun not only doesn’t get as active, but the ramp up and down is extended, as is the period of the solar minimum. This is what happened during the solar minimum from 2007 to 2010. It was longer than normal, which meant that the solar maximum occurred much later than predicted by the 2007 predictions of the solar science communities (shown in green).

This recent stretch of blank days however is now suggesting that the solar maximum is going to end much sooner than the later 2009 prediction (shown in red). Even more astonishing, the numbers in June aligned with the 2007 high prediction, which would make this one of the shortest solar maximums on record!

I don’t expect these low numbers to continue. I expect sunspot activity to recover and continue, with the minimum likely occurring after 2018. If it does come sooner, however, that will once again be evidence suggesting we are heading for a Grand Minimum, with no sunspots for decades.

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NASA okays New Horizons mission extension, rejects Dawn asteroid fly-by

3:48 pm

NASA has approved an extension of the New Horizons mission to fly past Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019.

In the same press release the agency announced that they have decided that they will get more worthwhile science by keeping Dawn in orbit around Ceres for the reminder of its life, rather then sending it on a proposed fly by of another asteroid.

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