Category Archives: Science

Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

Researchers from Imperial College London, working with the Beckley Foundation, have for the first time visualised the effects of LSD on the brain: In a series of experiments, scientists have gained a glimpse into how the psychedelic compound affects brain activity. The team administered LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) to 20 healthy volunteers in a specialist research centre and used various leading-edge and complementary brain scanning techniques to visualise how LSD alters the way the brain works.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveal what happens in the brain when people experience the complex visual hallucinations that are often associated with LSD state. They also shed light on the brain changes that underlie the profound altered state of consciousness the drug can produce.

A major finding of the research is the discovery of what happens in the brain when people experience complex dreamlike hallucinations under LSD. Under normal conditions, information from our eyes is processed in a part of the brain at the back of the head called the visual cortex. However, when the volunteers took LSD, many additional brain areas – not just the visual cortex – contributed to visual processing.

Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial, who led the research, explained: “We observed brain changes under LSD that suggested our volunteers were ‘seeing with their eyes shut’ – albeit they were seeing things from their imagination rather than from the outside world. We saw that many more areas of the brain than normal were contributing to visual processing under LSD – even though the volunteers’ eyes were closed. Furthermore, the size of this effect correlated with volunteers’ ratings of complex, dreamlike visions.”

The study also revealed what happens in the brain when people report a fundamental change in the quality of their consciousness under LSD.

Dr Carhart-Harris explained: “Normally our brain consists of independent networks that perform separate specialised functions, such as vision, movement and hearing – as well as more complex things like attention. However, under LSD the separateness of these networks breaks down and instead you see a more integrated or unified brain.

“Our results suggest that this effect underlies the profound altered state of consciousness that people often describe during an LSD experience. It is also related to what people sometimes call ‘ego-dissolution’, which means the normal sense of self is broken down and replaced by a sense of reconnection with themselves, others and the natural world. This experience is sometimes framed in a religious or spiritual way – and seems to be associated with improvements in well-being after the drug’s effects have subsided.” [Continue reading…]

Amanda Feilding, executive director of the Beckley Foundation, in an address she will deliver to the Royal Society tomorrow, says: I think Albert Hoffman would have been delighted to have his “Problem child” celebrated at the Royal Society, as in his long lifetime the academic establishment never recognised his great contribution. But for the taboo surrounding this field, he would surely have won the Nobel Prize. That was the beginning of the modern psychedelic age, which has fundamentally changed society.

After the discovery of the effects of LSD, there was a burst of excitement in the medical and therapeutic worlds – over 1000 experimental and clinical studies were undertaken. Then, in the early 60s, LSD escaped from the labs and began to spread into the world at large. Fuelled by its transformational insights, a cultural evolution took place, whose effects are still felt today. It sparked a wave of interest in Eastern mysticism, healthy living, nurturing the environment, individual freedoms and new music and art among many other changes. Then the establishment panicked and turned to prohibition, partly motivated by American youth becoming disenchanted with fighting a war in far-off Vietnam.

Aghast at the global devastation caused by the war on drugs, I set up the Beckley Foundation in 1998. With the advent of brain imaging technology, I realised that one could correlate the subjective experience of altered states of consciousness, brought about by psychedelic substances, with empirical findings. I realised that only through the very best science investigating how psychedelics work in the brain could one overcome the misplaced taboo which had transformed them from the food of the gods to the work of the devil. [Continue reading…]

Just to be clear, as valuable as this research is, it is an exercise in map-making. The map should never be confused with the territory.

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Yuri Milner is spending $100 million on a probe that could travel to Alpha Centauri within a generation

Ross Andersen writes: In the Southern Hemisphere’s sky, there is a constellation, a centaur holding a spear, its legs raised in mid-gallop. The creature’s front hoof is marked by a star that has long hypnotized humanity, with its brightness, and more recently, its proximity.

Since the dawn of written culture, at least, humans have dreamt of star travel. As the nearest star system to Earth, Alpha Centauri is the most natural subject of these dreams. To a certain cast of mind, the star seems destined to figure prominently in our future.

In the four centuries since the Scientific Revolution, a series of increasingly powerful instruments has slowly brought Alpha Centauri into focus. In 1689, the Jesuit priest Jean Richaud fixed his telescope on a comet, as it was streaking through the stick-figure centaur. He was startled to find not one, but two stars twinkling in its hoof. In 1915, a third star was spotted, this one a small, red satellite of the system’s two central, sunlike stars.

To say that Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to Earth is not to say that it’s near. A 25 trillion mile abyss separates us. Alpha Centauri’s light travels to Earth at the absurd rate of 186,000 miles per second, and still takes more than four years to arrive. [Continue reading…]

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Why science and religion aren’t as opposed as you might think

By Stephen Jones, Newman University and Carola Leicht, University of Kent

The debate about science and religion is usually viewed as a competition between worldviews. Differing opinions on whether the two subjects can comfortably co-exist – even among scientists – are pitted against each other in a battle for supremacy.

For some, like the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, science and religion represent two separate areas of enquiry, asking and answering different questions without overlap. Others, such as the biologist Richard Dawkins – and perhaps the majority of the public – see the two as fundamentally opposed belief systems.

But another way to look at the subject is to consider why people believe what they do. When we do this, we discover that the supposed conflict between science and religion is nowhere near as clear cut as some might assume.

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Dramatic change in the moon’s tilt may help us trace the origin of water on Earth

By Mahesh Anand, The Open University

Astronomers have found evidence that the axis that the moon spins around shifted billions of years ago due to changes in the moon’s internal structure. The research could help explain the strange distribution of water ice near the lunar poles – the tilt would have caused some of the ice to melt by suddenly exposing it to the sun while shadowing other areas. It could also help us pinpoint craters that have been shadowed for so long that they contain water ice from early in the solar system.

Identifying recent and ancient water ice in specific craters will help scientists map the history of water on the moon. And as the moon likely formed from the Earth colliding with a planet 4.5 billion years ago, it may also help explain how the Earth got its water – a longstanding puzzle.

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Pluto defies all expectations

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Space.com reports: Pluto, known for more than eight decades as just a faint, fuzzy and faraway point of light, is shaping up to be one of the most complex and diverse worlds in the solar system.

Pluto’s frigid surface varies tremendously from place to place, featuring provinces dominated by different types of ices — methane in one place, nitrogen in another and water in yet another, newly analyzed photos and measurements from NASA’s New Horizons mission reveal.

“That is unprecedented,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, who’s based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

“I don’t know any other place in the entirety of the outer solar system where you see anything like this,” Stern told Space.com. “The closest analogy is the Earth, where we see water-rich surfaces and rock-rich surfaces that are completely different.”

That’s just one of the new Pluto results, which are presented in a set of five New Horizons papers published online on Thursday in the journal Science. Taken together, the five studies paint the Pluto system in sharp detail, shedding new light on the dwarf planet’s composition, geology and evolution over the past 4.6 billion years. [Continue reading…]

See also an infographic explaining NASA’s mission to Pluto. Continue reading →

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Astronomers just saw farther back in time than they ever have before

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The Washington Post reports: To look through the lens of a telescope is to peer back in time.

The light we view through it has spent hundreds, millions, even billions of years crossing the vastness of space to reach us, carrying with it images of things that happened long ago.

On Thursday, astronomers at the Hubble Space Telescope announced that they’d seen back farther than they ever have before, to a galaxy 13.4 billion light years away in a time when the universe was just past its infancy.

The finding shattered what’s known as the “cosmic distance record,” illuminating a point in time that scientists once thought could never be seen with current technology.

“We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble,” Yale University astrophysicist Pascal Oesch, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. [Continue reading…]

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Meet the world’s most notorious taxonomist

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Susie Neilson writes: In 2005, the taxonomist Quentin Wheeler named a trio of newly discovered slime-mold beetles after George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. He believed the names could increase public interest in the discovery and classification of new species, and help combat the quickening pace of extinction. (Species go extinct three times faster than we can name them.)

He knew he was onto something when, having received a call from the White House, it was Bush on the other end, thanking him for the honor. Wheeler, now the president of SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, began attributing all sorts of provocative names to his bugs, including Darth Vader, Stephen Colbert, Roy and Barbara Orbison, Pocahontas, Hernan Cortez, and the Aztecs — he has even named 6 species after himself. Youcan call his strategy “shameless self-promotion” — Wheeler already has.

Nautilus spoke with Wheeler about his work.

What’s exciting about taxonomy?

It is the one field with the audacity to create a living inventory of every living thing on the entire planet and reconstruct the history of the diversity of life. Who else would tackle 12 million species in 3.8 billion years on the entire surface of the planet? If that isn’t real science, I don’t know what is. It infuriates me that taxonomy is marginalized as a bookkeeping activity, when in fact it has the most audacious research agenda of any biological science. [Continue reading…]

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Race is a social construct, scientists argue

Scientific American: More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of “white” and “black” as discrete groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.

Science would favor Du Bois. Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. And yet, you might still open a study on genetics in a major scientific journal and find categories like “white” and “black” being used as biological variables.

In an article published today (Feb. 4) in the journal Science, four scholars say racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out. [Continue reading…]

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Ancient societies were far more advanced than we commonly assume

Pacific Standard reports: Trapezoids are, oddly enough, fundamental to modern science. When European scientists used them to simplify certain astronomical calculations in the 14th century, it was an important first step toward calculus—the mathematics Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz developed to understand the physics of astronomical objects like planets. In other words, trapezoids are important, and we’ve known this for nearly 700 years.

Well, the Babylonians knew all of that 14 centuries earlier, according to new research published in Science, proving once again that ancient societies were way more advanced than we’d like to think. [Continue reading…]

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Inferred planet ten times size of Earth has yet to be seen

Science magazine reports: The solar system appears to have a new ninth planet. Today, two scientists announced evidence that a body nearly the size of Neptune — but as yet unseen — orbits the sun every 15,000 years. During the solar system’s infancy 4.5 billion years ago, they say, the giant planet was knocked out of the planet-forming region near the sun. Slowed down by gas, the planet settled into a distant elliptical orbit, where it still lurks today.

The claim is the strongest yet in the centuries-long search for a “Planet X” beyond Neptune. The quest has been plagued by far-fetched claims and even outright quackery. But the new evidence comes from a pair of respected planetary scientists, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, who prepared for the inevitable skepticism with detailed analyses of the orbits of other distant objects and months of computer simulations. “If you say, ‘We have evidence for Planet X,’ almost any astronomer will say, ‘This again? These guys are clearly crazy.’ I would, too,” Brown says. “Why is this different? This is different because this time we’re right.”

Outside scientists say their calculations stack up and express a mixture of caution and excitement about the result. “I could not imagine a bigger deal if — and of course that’s a boldface ‘if’ — if it turns out to be right,” says Gregory Laughlin, a planetary scientist at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz. “What’s thrilling about it is [the planet] is detectable.” [Continue reading…]

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Most threats to humans come from science and technology, warns Hawking

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The Guardian reports: The human race faces one its most dangerous centuries yet as progress in science and technology becomes an ever greater threat to our existence, Stephen Hawking warns.

The chances of disaster on planet Earth will rise to a near certainty in the next one to ten thousand years, the eminent cosmologist said, but it will take more than a century to set up colonies in space where human beings could live on among the stars.

“We will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period,” Hawking said. His comments echo those of Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, who raised his own concerns about the risks of self-annihilation in his 2003 book Our Final Century.

Speaking to the Radio Times ahead of the BBC Reith Lecture, in which he will explain the science of black holes, Hawking said most of the threats humans now face come from advances in science and technology, such as nuclear weapons and genetically engineered viruses. [Continue reading…]

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Scientists who give science a bad name

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According to theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Lawrence Krauss, gravitational waves “may have been discovered!!”


The earlier rumor Krauss referred to was this:


LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — a project involving more than 900 scientists. Krauss isn’t one of them.

Following Krauss’s tweet in September, LIGO spokesperson Gabriela González, a physicist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, told Davide Castelvecchi she was “upset at the possibility that someone in the LIGO team might have initiated the rumour, although Krauss and other researchers told me [DC] that they did not hear it directly from members of the LIGO collaboration. ‘I give it a 10–15% likelihood of being right,’ says Krauss, who works at Arizona State University in Tempe.”

Krauss has now boosted his confidence level to 60% — a surprisingly high level given that he says this:

“I don’t know if the rumour is solid,” Krauss told the Guardian. “If I don’t hear anything in the next two months, I’ll conclude it was false.”

González now tells Ian Sample at The Guardian:

“The LIGO instruments are still taking data today, and it takes us time to analyse, interpret and review results, so we don’t have any results to share yet.

“We take pride in reviewing our results carefully before submitting them for publication – and for important results, we plan to ask for our papers to be peer-reviewed before we announce the results – that takes time too!” she said.

At this point, it seems like the story might reveal more about Lawrence Krauss than it says about gravitational waves.

What makes Krauss’s excitement so uncontainable when the news will definitely come out — if and when there is news — without his help?

Scientists have a duty to fulfill a role as public educators and there has never before been a time when this need has been greater. To a degree this is an evangelical role, but as with every other individual who assumes such a position, each is at risk of becoming intoxicated by the reverential respect they receive from their audience as message and messenger become intertwined.

This may then lead to an over-extension of authority — exactly what Krauss and fellow scientists who dub themselves antitheists are guilty of when they make pronouncements about religion.

Here’s Krauss on religion and xenophobia:

Last night, The Guardian reports:

More than 200 far-right extremists have been arrested after they went on a rampage during a xenophobic rally in the German city of Leipzig, setting cars on fire and smashing windows.

Many of the extremists were already known to police as football hooligans and wrought chaos on Monday in an area known to be left-leaning, while thousands of supporters of the anti-migrant Pegida movement held an anti-refugee demonstration elsewhere in the city, authorities said.

A total of 211 arrests were made after the Connewitz district of the eastern city was attacked, police confirmed.

Are we to view this as a modern-day crusade in which German Christians purge their fatherland of the invading Muslim hordes?

On the contrary, I doubt very much that many (or perhaps even any) of those involved would be particularly ardent in expressing any religious faith. What is likely beyond doubt is that they were all white.

Xenophobia is generally a form of racism and the xenophobes don’t close ranks on the basis of theological quizzing — they can identify their cohorts and their enemies simply through the color of their skin.

When religion and racism intermingle, the underpinning of the racism is much less likely to be found in religious doctrine itself than it is on prevalent affiliations based on racial, national and cultural identity.

If as they claim, the antitheists want to rescue humanity from religion because of its irrationality, why focus on religion alone? There are many other forms of irrational behavior that are equally if not more destructive.

For instance, the religion in modernity which through advertising relentlessly promotes more widespread and unquestioning faith than that found in any conventional religion, is consumerism: the belief that the acquisition of material goods is the key to human happiness.

You are what you own — I know of no other idea that is more irrational and yet holds such a firm grip on so much of humanity.

This religion has grown more rapidly and more extensively than any other in human history and in the process now jeopardizes the future of life on Earth.

In terms of doctrine, most conventional religions oppose materialism. As the Bible says:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal.

The antitheists are going to say this is a bad investment because heaven doesn’t exist, but in doing so they devalue the ecological wisdom contained in such religious efforts to rein in human avarice.

The core criticism of religion is directed at its appeal to beliefs that have no empirical foundation and yet what’s strange about focusing on doctrine is that it glosses over the gulf between belief and practice.

Arguably, the destructive impact of religion derives mostly from the fact that so many believers fail to practice what they profess. They situate the locus of meaning in the wrong place by thinking, this is who I am, rather than this is how I live. In so doing, they inhabit identity traps: static forms of self-definition that obscure the dynamic and interactive nature of human experience.

On this issue, Lawrence Krauss and others could learn a lot from Neil deGrasse Tyson:

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Why life is not a thing but a restless manner of being

Tim Requarth writes: Mike Russell found his moment of inspiration on a warm spring evening in Glasgow in 1983, when his 11-year-old son broke a new toy. The toy in question was a chemical garden, a small plastic tank in which stalactite-like tendrils grew out of seed crystals placed in a mineral solution. Although the tendrils appeared solid from the outside, when shattered they revealed their true nature: each one was actually a network of hollow tubes, like bundles of tiny cocktail straws.

At the time, Russell, a geologist, was struggling to understand an unusual rock he had recently found. It, too, was solid on the outside but inside was full of hollow tubes, their thin walls riddled with microscopic compartments. It dawned on him then that this rock – like the formations in his son’s toy – must have formed in some unusual kind of liquid solution. Russell posited a whole new geological phenomenon to explain it: undersea hydrothermal hotspots where mineral-rich water spewed from Earth’s interior and then precipitated in the cool surrounding water, creating chemical gardens of towering, hollow rocks growing up from the ocean floor.

That was a huge intuitive leap, but it soon led Russell to an even more outlandish thought. ‘I had the epiphany that life emerged from those rocks,’ he said. ‘Many years later, people would tell me the idea was amazing, but it wasn’t to me. I was just thinking in a different realm, in the light of what I knew as a geologist. I didn’t set out to study the origin of life, but it just seemed so obvious.’

What seemed obvious to Russell was that his hypothetical chemical gardens could solve one of the deepest riddles of life’s origin: the energy problem. Then as now, many leading theories of life’s origins had their roots in Charles Darwin’s speculation of a ‘warm little pond’, in which inanimate matter, energised by heat, sunlight or lightning, formed complex molecules that eventually began reproducing themselves. For decades, most origin-of-life research has focused on how such self-replicating chemistry could have arisen. They largely brushed aside the other key question, how the first living things obtained the energy to grow, reproduce and evolve to greater complexity.

But in Russell’s mind, the origin of life and the source of the energy it needed were a single issue, the two parts inextricably intertwined. As a geologist (now working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California), he came at the problem with a very different perspective from his biology-trained colleagues. Undersea chemical gardens, Russell realised, would have provided an abundant flux of matter and energy in the same place – a setting conducive for self-replicating reactions, and also a free lunch for fledgling creatures. It has long troubled researchers that the emergence of life seems to rely on highly improbable chemical events that lead toward greater complexity. By considering energy first, Russell believed he could address that. In his view, the emergence of biological complexity was not improbable but inevitable. [Continue reading…]

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Dawn of the Anthropocene: Five ways we know humans have triggered a new geological epoch

By Jan A. Zalasiewicz, University of Leicester and Mark Williams, University of Leicester

Is the Anthropocene real? That is, the vigorously debated concept of a new geological epoch driven by humans.

Our environmental impact is indeed profound – there is little debate about that – but is it significant on a geological timescale, measured over millions of years? And will humans leave a distinctive mark upon the layers of rocks that geologists of 100,000,000AD might use to investigate the present day?

Together with other members of the Anthropocene Working Group we’ve just published a study in Science that pulls much of the evidence together.

The case for the Anthropocene might be distilled into five strands:

1. Carbon in the atmosphere

Carbon is important, both due to its growing impact on global warming and because it leaves long-lived geological traces. The increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – now higher than at any time in at least the past few million years – can be found as fossil bubbles in the geologically short-lived “rock” that is polar ice.

But there are wider and more long-lived traces too, in the form of changed patterns of carbon isotopes (absorbed by every living thing) and in tiny, virtually indestructible particles of fly ash released from furnaces and chimneys. These are leaving an indelible signal in rock and soil strata now accumulating.

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Mapping the Earth from the surface to the core

Steve LeVine writes: This was the defining tension underlying the half-century-long study of the supercontinents: That, unlike in other fields that deal in the very old, the scientists had no time machine. Astronomers, by looking through telescopes at galaxies billions of light years away, are transported back to the early universe. Paleontologists, by stumbling on ancient fossils, can look directly at remnants of prehistoric life. But no instrument or evidence had ever similarly teleported their paleogeologist comrades back to the age of supercontinents.

Instead, paleogeologists painstakingly pieced together their theories using disparate fragments of clues, mainly from the magnetic signatures in old rocks. At first, to give their field a face, they translated these clues into cut-out shapes on paper or in Adobe Illustrator, and strung them together into mosaic-like animations still found today on Google.

But while pretty good as far as they went, most such depictions were faulty in important ways. Among the unavoidable imperfections was their typical reliance on a “flat Earth,” two-dimensional illustrations that distorted the appearance and movement of the continents. In addition, they provided plate movements, but ignored the inextricable system that penetrates thousands of miles into the bowels of the Earth, linked all the way to the core. [Continue reading…]

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Poachers using science papers to target newly discovered species

The Guardian reports: Academic journals have begun withholding the geographical locations of newly discovered species after poachers used the information in peer-reviewed papers to collect previously unknown lizards, frogs and snakes from the wild, the Guardian has learned.

In an age of extinctions, scientists usually love to trumpet the discovery of new species, revealing biological and geographical data that sheds new light on the mysteries of evolution.

But earlier this year, an announcement in the Zootaxa academic journal that two new species of large gecko had been found in southern China contained a strange omission: the species’ whereabouts.

“Due to the popularity of this genus as novelty pets, and recurring cases of scientific descriptions driving herpetofauna to near-extinction by commercial collectors, we do not disclose the collecting localities of these restricted-range species in this publication,” the paper said. [Continue reading…]

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Will we ever understand the beginning of the universe?

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Ross Andersen writes: One crisp day last March, Harvard professor John Kovac walked out of his office and into a taxicab that whisked him across town, to a building on the edge of the MIT campus. People were paying attention to Kovac’s comings and goings that week. He was the subject of a fast-spreading rumour. Kovac is an experimental cosmologist midway through the prime of a charmed career. He did his doctoral work at the University of Chicago and a postdoc at Caltech before landing a professorship at Harvard. He is a blue chip. And since 2009, he has been principal investigator of BICEP2, an ingenious scientific experiment at the South Pole.

Kovac had come to MIT to visit Alan Guth, a world-renowned theoretical cosmologist, who made his name more than 30 years ago when he devised the theory of inflation. Guth told Kovac to take the back steps up to his office, to avoid being seen. If Guth’s colleagues caught a glimpse of the two men talking, the whispers swirling around Kovac would have swelled to a roar.

The science of cosmology has achieved wonders in recent centuries. It has enlarged the world we can see and think about by ontological orders of magnitude. Cosmology wrenched the Earth from the centre of the Universe, and heaved it, like a discus, into its whirling orbit around one unremarkable star among the billions that speed around the black-hole centre of our galaxy, a galaxy that floats in deep space with billions of others, all of them colliding and combining, before they fly apart from each other for all eternity. Art, literature, religion and philosophy ignore cosmology at their peril.

But cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know if the world we see around us is spatially infinite, or if there are other kinds of worlds beyond our horizon, or in other dimensions. And then the big mystery, the one that keeps the priests and the physicists up at night: no cosmologist has a clue why there is something rather than nothing. [Continue reading…]

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The magical Solar System discoveries we made in 2015

By Monica Grady, The Open University

It has been a busy year for Solar System exploration – and particularly our galactic neighbourhood’s small icy bodies. Comets, asteroids, Kuiper Belt Objects and planetary satellites have all been in the news – from stunning images of comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko at the start of the year, to the recent close-up of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, via Ceres and Pluto.

Early January was a continuation of the stream of data from Rosetta, as comet 67P drew closer to the sun. Images were released of jets emanating from the sun-facing surface, from which it could be seen that sublimation of water-ice increased during the daytime, and died down at night. But because the dark surface of the comet retained some heat, the comet was not completely inactive at night – it was possible that fluid might exist for very short periods, leading to sub-surface hydrous activity.

Activity on Comet 67P.
ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA, CC BY-SA

One of the other significant results from Rosetta was recognition from magnetic measurements that the two lobes of the comet had been separate bodies, presumably brought together by collision.

Closest approach to the sun was in mid-August, a few weeks after the Philae lander signalled that it had woken up after its enforced hibernation. Unfortunately, communication between Rosetta and Philae could not be established reliably, leaving a certain amount of frustration that additional data could not be acquired from the surface.

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