Category Archives: Science

Ancient Venus may have been much like Earth

The Washington Post reports: For a 2-billion-year-long span, ending about 715 million years ago, Venus was likely a much more pleasant spot that it is today. To observe Venus now is to witness a dry and toxic hellscape, where the planet heats up to a scorching 864 degrees Fahrenheit. A super-strong electric wind is believed to suck the smallest traces of water into space. With apologies to Ian Malcolm, life as we know it could not find a way.

But travel back in time a few billion years or so. Ancient Venus, according to a new computer model from NASA, would have been prime solar system real estate, to the point it may have been downright habitable.

That life would find Venus amenable hinges on two main factors. Venus would have needed much balmier temperatures, and it also would have needed a liquid ocean — which is a significant if, although elemental traces such as deuterium indicate water existed on Venus at one point. As Colin Wilson, an Oxford University planetary physicist, told Time in 2010, “everything points to there being large amounts of water in the past.”

Venusian temperatures, too, appear to have been far cooler when the solar system was younger. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a report published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, calculated that the average surface temperature 2.9 billion years ago was about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Such temperature would have made Venus, surprisingly for a planet closer to the Sun, a bit chillier than Earth was at the time. [Continue reading…]

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Discerning order in randomness

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Kevin Hartnett writes: Standard geometric objects can be described by simple rules — every straight line, for example, is just y = ax + b — and they stand in neat relation to each other: Connect two points to make a line, connect four line segments to make a square, connect six squares to make a cube.

These are not the kinds of objects that concern Scott Sheffield. Sheffield, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies shapes that are constructed by random processes. No two of them are ever exactly alike. Consider the most familiar random shape, the random walk, which shows up everywhere from the movement of financial asset prices to the path of particles in quantum physics. These walks are described as random because no knowledge of the path up to a given point can allow you to predict where it will go next.

Beyond the one-dimensional random walk, there are many other kinds of random shapes. There are varieties of random paths, random two-dimensional surfaces, random growth models that approximate, for example, the way a lichen spreads on a rock. All of these shapes emerge naturally in the physical world, yet until recently they’ve existed beyond the boundaries of rigorous mathematical thought. Given a large collection of random paths or random two-dimensional shapes, mathematicians would have been at a loss to say much about what these random objects shared in common.

Yet in work over the past few years, Sheffield and his frequent collaborator, Jason Miller, a professor at the University of Cambridge, have shown that these random shapes can be categorized into various classes, that these classes have distinct properties of their own, and that some kinds of random objects have surprisingly clear connections with other kinds of random objects. Their work forms the beginning of a unified theory of geometric randomness. [Continue reading…]

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A molecule deep in space could help explain the origins of life

Discover Magazine reports: A peculiar new molecule hovering within a star-forming dust cloud in deep in space could help explain why life on Earth is the way it is.

The cloud, called Sagittarius B2, resides near the center of the Milky Way, and it’s there that researchers from the California Institute of Technology discovered an organic element that displays a key property shared by all life. Propylene oxide is the first element discovered outside of our solar system to exhibit chirality, or the presence of two distinct, mirror-image forms. Many complex molecules have this property, including myriad organic molecules necessary for life. The chemical formula of these two versions is exactly the same, but the structure is flipped.

All life on Earth is composed of chiral molecules, and the versions organisms use, either right- or left-handed, determines fundamental properties of their biology. For example, all living things only use the right-handed form of the sugar ribose to form the backbone of DNA, giving it that the signature twist. You can think of molecular handedness by picturing gloves — hence the “handed terminology”. The gloves, or molecules, may look similar, but you could never put a left-handed glove on your right hand. [Continue reading…]

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Yes, there have been aliens

Adam Frank writes: Last month astronomers from the Kepler spacecraft team announced the discovery of 1,284 new planets, all orbiting stars outside our solar system. The total number of such “exoplanets” confirmed via Kepler and other methods now stands at more than 3,000.

This represents a revolution in planetary knowledge. A decade or so ago the discovery of even a single new exoplanet was big news. Not anymore. Improvements in astronomical observation technology have moved us from retail to wholesale planet discovery. We now know, for example, that every star in the sky likely hosts at least one planet.

But planets are only the beginning of the story. What everyone wants to know is whether any of these worlds has aliens living on it. Does our newfound knowledge of planets bring us any closer to answering that question?

A little bit, actually, yes. In a paper published in the May issue of the journal Astrobiology, the astronomer Woodruff Sullivan and I show that while we do not know if any advanced extraterrestrial civilizations currently exist in our galaxy, we now have enough information to conclude that they almost certainly existed at some point in cosmic history. [Continue reading…]

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Theophrastus: The unsung hero of Western Science

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Andrea Wulf writes: In 345 B.C.E., two men took a trip that changed the way we make sense of the natural world. Their names were Theophrastus and Aristotle, and they were staying on Lesbos, the Greek island where tens of thousands of Syrian refugees have recently landed.

Theophrastus and Aristotle were two of the greatest thinkers in ancient Greece. They set out to bring order to nature by doing something very unusual for the time: they examined living things and got their hands dirty. They turned away from Plato’s idealism and looked at the real world. Both Aristotle and Theophrastus believed that the study of nature was as important as metaphysics, politics, or mathematics. Nothing was too small or insignificant. “There is something awesome in all natural things.” Aristotle said, “inherent in each of them there is something natural and beautiful.”

Aristotle is the more famous of the two men, but Theophrastus deserves equal bidding in any history of naturalism. Born around 372 B.C.E. in Eresos, a town on the southwestern coast of Lesbos, Theophrastus was 13 years younger than Aristotle. According to Diogenes Laërtius — a biographer who wrote his Eminent Philosophers more than 400 years afterwards but who is the main source for what we know about Theophrastus’ life — Theophrastus was one of Aristotle’s pupils at Plato’s Academy. For many years they worked closely together until Aristotle’s death in 322 B.C.E. when Theophrastus became his successor at the Lyceum school in Athens and inherited his magnificent library. [Continue reading…]

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Has the quantum era has begun?

IDG News Service reports: Quantum computing’s full potential may still be years away, but there are plenty of benefits to be realized right now.

So argues Vern Brownell, president and CEO of D-Wave Systems, whose namesake quantum system is already in its second generation.

Launched 17 years ago by a team with roots at Canada’s University of British Columbia, D-Wave introduced what it called “the world’s first commercially available quantum computer” back in 2010. Since then the company has doubled the number of qubits, or quantum bits, in its machines roughly every year. Today, its D-Wave 2X system boasts more than 1,000.

The company doesn’t disclose its full customer list, but Google, NASA and Lockheed-Martin are all on it, D-Wave says. In a recent experiment, Google reported that D-Wave’s technology outperformed a conventional machine by 100 million times. [Continue reading…]

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How the event that killed off the dinosaurs wiped out life in Antarctica

By James Witts, University of Leeds

The Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction 66m years ago was the most recent of five similar crises to have devastated life on Earth over the last 540m years. It rapidly killed off an estimated 76% of species around the globe, including, most famously, the dinosaurs.

But exactly how this event affected different areas of the globe has not been entirely understood. Some scientists have suggested that creatures living at high latitudes could have been sheltered from the worst effects of the mass extinction. Now our new research, published in the journal Nature Communications, reveals that this wasn’t the case – even marine molluscs in Antarctica were affected.

Scientists are still debating what caused the extinction. Many researchers believe it was a sudden crisis, triggered by a catastrophic asteroid impact. This formed the 200km Chicxulub crater, today buried off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. It also produced a thin layer of rock found all over the world known as the “K–Pg boundary”. This “fallout” layer is rich in debris from the asteroid impact and an element called Iridium, rare on Earth but common in space rocks. It coincides with many of the extinctions in the fossil record to within 32,000 years – a geological blink of an eye.

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A skeptic bashing Skeptics

John Horgan, in a slightly edited version of a talk he gave recently at Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, writes: I hate preaching to the converted. If you were Buddhists, I’d bash Buddhism. But you’re skeptics, so I have to bash skepticism.

I’m a science journalist. I don’t celebrate science, I criticize it, because science needs critics more than cheerleaders. I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality. That keeps me busy, because, as you know, most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong.

So I’m a skeptic, but with a small S, not capital S. I don’t belong to skeptical societies. I don’t hang out with people who self-identify as capital-S Skeptics. Or Atheists. Or Rationalists.

When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber.

Here’s an example involving two idols of Capital-S Skepticism: biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss. Krauss recently wrote a book, A Universe from Nothing. He claims that physics is answering the old question, Why is there something rather than nothing?

Krauss’s book doesn’t come close to fulfilling the promise of its title, but Dawkins loved it. He writes in the book’s afterword: “If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.”

Just to be clear: Dawkins is comparing Lawrence Krauss to Charles Darwin. Why would Dawkins say something so foolish? Because he hates religion so much that it impairs his scientific judgment. He succumbs to what you might call “The Science Delusion.” [Continue reading…]

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All European scientific articles to be freely accessible by 2020

The Netherlands EU Presidency 2016: All scientific articles in Europe must be freely accessible as of 2020. EU member states want to achieve optimal reuse of research data. They are also looking into a European visa for foreign start-up founders.

And, according to the new Innovation Principle, new European legislation must take account of its impact on innovation. These are the main outcomes of the meeting of the Competitiveness Council in Brussels on 27 May.

Under the presidency of Netherlands State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science Sander Dekker, the EU ministers responsible for research and innovation decided unanimously to take these significant steps. Mr Dekker is pleased that these ambitions have been translated into clear agreements to maximise the impact of research. ‘Research and innovation generate economic growth and more jobs and provide solutions to societal challenges,’ the state secretary said. ‘And that means a stronger Europe. To achieve that, Europe must be as attractive as possible for researchers and start-ups to locate here and for companies to invest. That calls for knowledge to be freely shared. The time for talking about open access is now past. With these agreements, we are going to achieve it in practice.’

Open access means that scientific publications on the results of research supported by public and public-private funds must be freely accessible to everyone. [Continue reading…]

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How did Earth warm enough to support life?

Space.com reports: Life on Earth may owe its existence to incredibly powerful storms that erupted on the sun long ago, a new study suggests.

Potent and frequent solar eruptions could have warmed the planet enough for life to take root, and also provided the vital energy needed to transform simple molecules into the complex building blocks of life, such as DNA, researchers said.

The first organisms evolved on Earth about 4 billion years ago. This fact has long puzzled scientists, because in those days, the sun was only about 70 percent as bright as it is today.

“That means Earth should have been an icy ball,” study lead author Vladimir Airapetian, a solar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. “Instead, geological evidence says it was a warm globe with liquid water. We call this the Faint Young Sun Paradox.” [Continue reading…]

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The ex-anarchist construction worker who became a world-renowned scientist

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Daniel Gumbiner writes: “See these lichens here? I don’t know how you see them but, to me, I see them as a surrealist.”

I am sitting in the UC Riverside herbarium, speaking to Kerry Knudsen, Southern California’s only professional lichenologist. We are looking at his collection of lichens, which consists of over 16,000 individual specimens, all of them neatly organized in large green file cabinets. Knudsen has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers on lichens, and discovered more than 60 species that are new to science. It is an extraordinary output, for any scientist, but Knudsen has achieved it in only fifteen years. Science is his second career. For more than two decades he worked in construction. Before that, he was a teenage runaway living in an anarchist commune in Chicago.

“He’s amazing,” said Shirley Tucker, a retired professor of botany at LSU. “He came out of nowhere and became an expert in the most difficult genera.”

A lichen is a fungus in a symbiotic relationship with an algae or a cyanobacteria. The fungus essentially farms the algae or cyanobacteria, who are able to harvest energy from the sun through photosynthesis. In return, the fungus provides the algae or cyanobacteria with protection, but the relationship is a little one-sided.

“The algae is trapped,” Knudsen explained. “It has a lot of tubes going into it. It’s controlled by chemical signals … The first time I saw it under the microscope, I wanted to join the Algae Liberation Front. I mean, it looked bad.”

Scientists believe that lichen evolved over 500 million years ago, about the same time as fish. Although lichen make up 8 percent of the world’s biomass, they are rarely considered by the amateur naturalist, and therefore have very few common names. [Continue reading…]

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Why physics is not a discipline

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Philip Ball writes: Have you heard the one about the biologist, the physicist, and the mathematician? They’re all sitting in a cafe watching people come and go from a house across the street. Two people enter, and then some time later, three emerge. The physicist says, “The measurement wasn’t accurate.” The biologist says, “They have reproduced.” The mathematician says, “If now exactly one person enters the house then it will be empty again.”

Hilarious, no? You can find plenty of jokes like this — many invoke the notion of a spherical cow — but I’ve yet to find one that makes me laugh. Still, that’s not what they’re for. They’re designed to show us that these academic disciplines look at the world in very different, perhaps incompatible ways.

There’s some truth in that. Many physicists, for example, will tell stories of how indifferent biologists are to their efforts in that field, regarding them as irrelevant and misconceived. It’s not just that the physicists were thought to be doing things wrong. Often the biologists’ view was that (outside perhaps of the well established but tightly defined discipline of biophysics) there simply wasn’t any place for physics in biology.

But such objections (and jokes) conflate academic labels with scientific ones. Physics, properly understood, is not a subject taught at schools and university departments; it is a certain way of understanding how processes happen in the world. When Aristotle wrote his Physics in the fourth century B.C., he wasn’t describing an academic discipline, but a mode of philosophy: a way of thinking about nature. You might imagine that’s just an archaic usage, but it’s not. When physicists speak today (as they often do) about the “physics” of the problem, they mean something close to what Aristotle meant: neither a bare mathematical formalism nor a mere narrative, but a way of deriving process from fundamental principles.

This is why there is a physics of biology just as there is a physics of chemistry, geology, and society. But it’s not necessarily “physicists” in the professional sense who will discover it. [Continue reading…]

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‘Nobody knew what you would see on the other side of a mountain’

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Carl Zimmer writes: As a boy growing up in Denmark, Eske Willerslev could not wait to leave Gentofte, his suburban hometown. As soon as he was old enough, he would strike out for the Arctic wilderness.

His twin brother, Rane, shared his obsession. On vacations, they retreated to the woods to teach themselves survival skills. Their first journey would be to Siberia, the Willerslev twins decided. They would make contact with a mysterious group of people called the Yukaghir, who supposedly lived on nothing but elk and moose.

When the Willerslev twins reached 18, they made good on their promise. They were soon paddling a canoe up remote Siberian rivers.

“Nobody knew what you would see on the other side of a mountain,” said Eske Willerslev, who is now 44. “There were villages on the maps, and you wouldn’t even see a trace of them.”

Dr. Willerslev spent much of the next four years in Siberia, hunting moose, traveling across empty tundra and meeting the Yukaghirs and other people of the region. The experience left him wondering about the history of ethnic groups, about how people spread across the planet.

A quarter of a century later, Dr. Willerslev is still asking those questions, but now he’s getting some eye-opening answers.

As the director of the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, Dr. Willerslev uses ancient DNA to reconstruct the past 50,000 years of human history. The findings have enriched our understanding of prehistory, shedding light on human development with evidence that can’t be found in pottery shards or studies of living cultures. [Continue reading…]

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Ancient space dust hints at a mysterious period in Earth’s early history

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Rebecca Boyle writes: Geologists tell a pretty broad-brush narrative of Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history. For its first half-billion years, the newly formed planet was a seething ball of lava constantly pelted by giant space rocks, including a Mars-sized object that sheared off a chunk that became the moon. Things calmed down when the Late Heavy Bombardment tapered off some 3.8 billion years ago, but volcanoes ensured Earth’s atmosphere remained a toxic stew of gases with almost no oxygen to speak of. It stayed that way for another billion years, when single-celled bacteria filled the oceans. Around 2.5 billion years ago, at the end of the Archean era, algae figured out how to make energy from sunlight, and the Great Oxygenation Event gave Earth its lungs. Complex life took its time, finally exploding in the Cambrian era some 500 million years ago. Evolution moved a lot faster after that, resulting in dinosaurs, then mammals, then us.

It’s a great story, and scientists have been telling it for decades, but tiny fossilized space pebbles from Australia may upend it entirely, giving us a new narrative about Earth’s adolescence. These pebbles rained down on our planet’s surface 2.7 billion years ago. As they passed through the upper atmosphere, they melted and rusted, making new crystal shapes and minerals that only form where there is plenty of oxygen. A new paper describing the space pebbles will be published today in the journal Nature. It suggests the atmosphere’s upper reaches were surprisingly rich in oxygen during the Archean, when Earth’s surface had practically none.

“If they’re right, a lot of people have had misconceptions, or have been wrong,” says Kevin Zahnle, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Moreover, if the research holds up, geologists will have a new mystery on their hands: How did all that oxygen get there, and why didn’t it reach the ground? [Continue reading…]

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The spark of life and a burst of zinc fluorescence

For some religious believers, the idea that human life has a divine origin includes the notion that the biological event of conception has a divine component: the moment at which a soul enters a developing embryo.

It is now being claimed that this belief is supported by scientific evidence.

Citing a recently published study appearing in Scientific Reports, Catholic Online says:

Researchers discovered the moment a human soul enters an egg, which gives pro-life groups an even greater edge in the battle between embryonic life and death. The precise moment is celebrated with a zap of energy released around the newly fertilized egg.

Teresa Woodruff, one of the study’s senior authors and professor in obstetrics and gynecology at the university, delivered a press release in which she stated, “to see the zinc radiate out in a burst from each human egg was breathtaking.”

It’s easy to understand why images showing a burst of light as an egg is fertilized, might appear to provide scientific validation of religious belief.

But attaching religious significance to these findings requires ignoring a key detail in what has been reported.

If the zinc spark that’s been observed — a burst of zinc fluorescence that occurs as millions of zinc atoms get dumped out of the egg — actually bore a relationship with the arrival of a soul enabling the emergence of life, then no such sparks would have been photographed. Why? Because the experiment involved staging a facsimile of fertilization using a sperm enzyme, not live sperm.

Either the experimenters fooled God into placing souls into unfertilized eggs, or these “sparks of life” can be understood as chemical events — though no less wondrous to behold.

Moreover, for those who insist these zinc sparks are triggered by souls, they might need to make some theological revisions to accommodate the evidence that mice apparently possess souls too.

To understand the science in more detail, watch this:

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Exploding the myth of the scientific vs artistic mind

By David Pearson, Anglia Ruskin University

It’s a stereotype, but many of us have made the assumption that scientists are a bit rigid and less artistic than others. Artists, on the other hand, are often seen as being less rational than the rest of us. Sometimes described as the left side of the brain versus the right side – or simply logical thinking versus artistic creativity – the two are often seen as polar opposites.

Neuroscience has already shown that everyone uses both sides of the brain when performing any task. And while certain patterns of brain activity have sometimes been linked to artistic or logical thinking, it doesn’t really explain who is good at what – and why. That’s because the exact interplay of nature and nurture is notoriously difficult to tease out. But if we put the brain aside for a while and just focus on documented ability, is there any evidence to support the logic versus art stereotype?

Psychological research has approached this question by distinguishing between two styles of thinking: convergent and divergent. The emphasis in convergent thinking is on analytical and deductive reasoning, such as that measured in IQ tests. Divergent thinking, however, is more spontaneous and free-flowing. It focuses on novelty and is measured by tasks requiring us to generate multiple solutions for a problem. An example may be thinking of new, innovative uses for familiar objects.

Studies conducted during the 1960s suggested that convergent thinkers were more likely to be good at science subjects at school. Divergent thinking was shown to be more common in the arts and humanities.

However, we are increasingly learning that convergent and divergent thinking styles need not be mutually exclusive. In 2011, researchers assessed 116 final-year UK arts and science undergraduates on measures of convergent and divergent thinking and creative problem solving. The study found no difference in ability between the arts and science groups on any of these measures. Another study reported no significant difference in measures of divergent thinking between arts, natural science and social science undergraduates. Both arts and natural sciences students, however, rated themselves as being more creative than social sciences students did.

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What the European Union can learn from CERN about international co-operation

By Roger Barlow, University of Huddersfield

Can Europe work? This is the real question being asked of British people on June 23. Behind the details of subsidies, regulations and eurozones lies a more fundamental puzzle: can different nationalities retain their own identities and work together, without merging into some bland United States of Europe?

I would like to suggest that there may be an example to follow in the history of CERN, the international research organisation based in Switzerland, and home to the world-famous particle accelerators used recently by teams of thousands of scientists from many nations to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson.

There are many similarities between CERN and the EU. The former was founded in 1954 and the latter in 1957, when the Treaty of Rome was signed (although it was then called the European Economic Community). Both CERN and the EU have grown over the years. The EU started with six countries and now brings together 28. CERN has grown from an initial 12 members, including the UK, to 21.

Both also emerged as a response to a post-war world in which the two superpowers dominated, not only militarily but also economically and scientifically. The US and the USSR were supreme on either side of the iron curtain, and with their great resources they pushed ahead with prestige research: space travel, electronics, and nuclear physics.

The European nations were impoverished by the financial and human cost of the war. Many of its greatest (often Jewish) scientists had fled to the US and were slow to come back. None had the people or the capacity to compete on their own.

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