Science & TechnologyS


Satellite

Threat from explosive space junk is increasing, warns ESA in worrying report


RT
Tue, 13 Oct 2020 10:37 UTC
space junk
© Getty Images/PM images
Despite efforts to combat the problem of space debris in orbit around our planet, the ESA has released a damning report indicating the problem is becoming a lot worse over time, with explosive consequences.

Space debris has been accumulating ever since such pioneering space missions as the launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 and the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in July 1969.

Rocket boosters, defunct satellites and a variety of spaceborne shrapnel now vastly outnumber operational craft in orbit. With each new satellite launch and mission to the ISS, the risk of collision rises, as objects destroy each other, producing yet more debris.

Earlier this year, there were fears that two old satellites might collide, while the International Space Station has also been forced to make emergency maneuvers to avoid a collision three times in 2020 alone.

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Info

Two new space oddities reported by astronomers


Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 13 Oct 2020 22:36 UTC
Black Hole
© ESO/M. KornmesserAn illustration of a star (foreground) experiencing spaghettification as it's sucked in by a supermassive black hole (background) during a tidal disruption event.
Astronomers have described not one but two rather rare sights in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In the first, an international team led by the University of Birmingham, UK, reports spotting a blast of light emitted by a star as it is sucked in by a supermassive black hole just 215 million light-years from Earth.

The phenomenon, known as a tidal disruption event, is caused when a star passes too close to a black hole and the extreme gravitational pull from the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of material - a process with the wonderful name "spaghettification".

As the process occurs, some of the material falls into the black hole, releasing a bright flare of energy which astronomers can detect. It's usually not easy, but this flare was found just a short time after the star was ripped apart.

Matt Nicholl and colleagues also had access to some of the big guns of the telescope world, including the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and New Technology Telescope (NTT), the Las Cumbres Observatory global telescope network, and the Neil Gehrel's Swift Observatory.

They monitored the flare, named AT2019qiz, for six months as it grew brighter then faded away. Their paper is available on the pre-print server arXiv.
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Microscope 1

New tech promises to diagnose COVID-19 through an implantable microchip

Raul Diego
Mint Press News
Thu, 08 Oct 2020 00:00 UTC
Microchip
The POC (point-of-care) diagnostics market stands at about $18.8 billion globally, according to recent market trends, and is expected to grow by a third to $24.1 billion this year and projected to explode by 2024 to $46.7 billion. The main driver for these highly optimistic forecasts is the surge in healthcare technology demand brought on by the pandemic crisis, which is lining the pockets of big pharma and big tech, aided and abetted by the Defense Department's various tentacles into the private sector, like DARPA or In-Q-Tel, where federal dollars are channeled into private enterprise through direct investment, stock purchasing, and grants, representing one of the clearest examples of how the military industrial complex works.

The "detection" of COVID-19 is among the most crowded segments of the POC diagnostics market and recent advances in the life sciences have made new technologies, such as mRNA-based vaccines and testing possible. The U.S. government, through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has been intimately involved in helping these technologies along, and in the case of mRNA, specifically, has made considerable investments in its development dating back to November 2019 in the case of one company developing an mRNA-based COVID-19 diagnostic tool.

Comment: See also:

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2 + 2 = 4

No, science is not a 'social construct'

James Lindsay
New Discourses
Fri, 25 Sep 2020 18:36 UTC
nasa scientists at black board
© J. R. Eyerman, LIFE magazine
When dealing with the Woke — that is, devotees of the ideology outlined in Critical Social Justice Theory — one assumption (among many) that is an almost sure bet to make about their claims is that some trick of language is being played. What's needed to expose the vacuity of the Woke position, then, is not necessarily the ability to bring facts to bear on the matter or even to argue better than they can (as they'll deconstruct your position and leave you looking foolish to anyone slightly sympathetic to their cause). The best thing to do is expose the trick.

Most often, these language games — as Wittgenstein named them, the postmodern theorists then exploited, and the Woke have appropriated — take one of a rather small number of forms. In nearly all cases, it's some form of a "strategic equivocation," in which two ideas are being forwarded simultaneously, allowing the Theorist to play both sides of the argument to his own advantage in any given situation.

One example of these sorts of language games is the "motte and bailey" rhetorical structure, in which a radical position (the "bailey" position) is maintained by defending only a highly defensible (but disingenuous) variation (the "motte"). When the pressure is on, the claim being made is just some perfectly reasonable thing (the motte), like that Critical Race Theory is just an analytical tool that fosters racial sensitivity. When it comes off, the radical position (the bailey) — racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society and thus society requires a revolution to reorder it according to the Critical Race Theory view of the world by empowering Critical Race Theorists — comes back out to play. An extreme example of this style of strategic equivocation are "Troll's Truisms," as Nicholas Shackel had it ("deepities," as named by Dan Dennett). Troll's Truisms occur when something is trivially true in a banal sense with no real implications and false in a profound sense with serious implications (Dennett gives the example of "love is just a word").
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Telescope

In the eye of a stellar cyclone: Bizarre secrets of a ticking time-bomb star 8,000 light years from Earth


PhysOrg
Mon, 12 Oct 2020 18:04 UTC
Apep Wolf-Rayet binary
© European Southern ObservatoryInfrared image of Wolf-Rayet binary, dubbed Apep, 8000 light years from Earth.
While on COVID lockdown, a University of Sydney honours student has written a research paper on a star system dubbed one of the "exotic peacocks of the stellar world".

Only one in a hundred million stars makes the cut to be classified a Wolf-Rayet: ferociously bright, hot stars doomed to imminent collapse in a supernova explosion leaving only a dark remnant, such as a black hole.

Rarest of all, even among Wolf-Rayets, are elegant binary pairs that, if the conditions are right, are able to pump out huge amounts of carbon dust driven by their extreme stellar winds. As the two stars orbit one another, the dust gets wrapped into a beautiful glowing sooty tail. Just a handful of these sculpted spiral plumes has ever been discovered.
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Fireball 5

NASA asteroid hunters spot flurry of new space rocks headed towards Earth, after identifying mysterious new 'minimoon'


RT
Mon, 12 Oct 2020 17:35 UTC
asteroid
© Getty Images/Revolu7ion93
NASA is warning of yet another five asteroids headed our way in the first half of this week, as the agency's leading asteroid expert claims to have solved the mystery of the 'minimoon' set to enter earth's orbit.

Amid a flurry of asteroidal activity as we enter the final few months of 2020, NASA's asteroid hunters have flagged five more space rocks en route ranging in size from 5.5m all the way up to a whopping 45m.

On October 12, two asteroids spotted in the past four days, are due to fly past: the 5.5-meter 2020 TS1 will pass closer to us than the moon, at just 225,000 km, followed shortly after by the 12-meter 2020 TR1 which will swing further out at 1.2 million km.

For reference, the moon orbits the Earth at an average distance of 385,000 kilometers.
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Attention

Do algorithms erode our ability to think?

Lewis Mitchell and James Bagrow
The Conversation
Mon, 12 Oct 2020 17:48 UTC
Social Media
© Charles Deluvio/Unsplash, CC BY-SA
Have you ever watched a video or movie because YouTube or Netflix recommended it to you? Or added a friend on Facebook from the list of "people you may know"?

And how does Twitter decide which tweets to show you at the top of your feed?

These platforms are driven by algorithms, which rank and recommend content for us based on our data.

As Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University, Boston, explains:
If you want to know when social media companies are trying to manipulate you into disclosing information or engaging more, the answer is always.
So if we are making decisions based on what's shown to us by these algorithms, what does that mean for our ability to make decisions freely?
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Robot

Researchers developed a novel technique to produce precise, high-performing biometric sensors printed directly on skin

Ashley J. WennersHerron
The Pennsylvania State University
Fri, 09 Oct 2020 17:37 UTC
Biometric Sensor
© Ling Zhang, Penn State/Cheng Lab and Harbin Institute of TechnologyWith a novel layer to help the metallic components of the sensor bond, an international team of researchers printed sensors directly on human skin.
University Park, Pa. — Wearable sensors are evolving from watches and electrodes to bendable devices that provide far more precise biometric measurements and comfort for users. Now, an international team of researchers has taken the evolution one step further by printing sensors directly on human skin without the use of heat.

Led by Huanyu "Larry" Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, the team published their results in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

"In this article, we report a simple yet universally applicable fabrication technique with the use of a novel sintering aid layer to enable direct printing for on-body sensors," said first author Ling Zhang, a researcher in the Harbin Institute of Technology in China and in Cheng's laboratory.

Cheng and his colleagues previously developed flexible printed circuit boards for use in wearable sensors, but printing directly on skin has been hindered by the bonding process for the metallic components in the sensor. Called sintering, this process typically requires temperatures of around 572 degrees Fahrenheit (300 degrees Celsius) to bond the sensor's silver nanoparticles together.

"The skin surface cannot withstand such a high temperature, obviously," Cheng said. "To get around this limitation, we proposed a sintering aid layer — something that would not hurt the skin and could help the material sinter together at a lower temperature."

By adding a nanoparticle to the mix, the silver particles sinter at a lower temperature of about 212 F (100 C).
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Info

Anatomical change could become the norm


Cosmos Magazine
Sat, 10 Oct 2020 15:29 UTC
Human Arm
© Imran Kadir Photography/Getty Images
The human body continues to evolve in intriguing ways. New research in Australia has confirmed that more and more adults have a median artery in their forearms.

Or, more accurately, they have retained the median artery. It is the main vessel that supplies blood to the forearm and hand in the womb, but usually disappears once the radial and ulnar arteries develop.

Usually, but not always. Since the 18th century, anatomists have been studying its existence in adults, and the new study suggests it could soon become the norm.

"The prevalence was around 10% in people born in the mid-1880s compared to 30% in those born in the late 20th century, so that's a significant increase in a fairly short period of time, when it comes to evolution," says Teghan Lucas, from Flinders University.

"This increase could have resulted from mutations of genes involved in median artery development or health problems in mothers during pregnancy, or both actually. If this trend continues, a majority of people will have median artery of the forearm by 2100."
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Arrow Up

Breakout paper in journal of theoretical biology explicitly supports intelligent design


Evolution News
Mon, 05 Oct 2020 12:12 UTC
red poppy
As John West noted here last week, the Journal of Theoretical Biology has published an explicitly pro-intelligent design article, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems." Let's take a closer look at the contents. The paper is math-heavy, discussing statistical models of making inferences, but it is also groundbreaking for this crucial reason: it considers and proposes intelligent design, by name, as a viable explanation for the origin of "fine-tuning" in biology. This is a major breakthrough for science, but also for freedom of speech. If the paper is any indication, appearing as it does in a prominent peer-reviewed journal, some of the suffocating constraints on ID advocacy may be coming off.

The authors are Steinar Thorvaldsen, a professor of information science at the University of Tromsø in Norway, and Ola Hössjer, a professor of mathematical statistics at Stockholm University. The paper, which is open access, begins by noting that while fine-tuning is widely discussed in physics, it needs to be considered more in the context of biology:
Fine-tuning has received much attention in physics, and it states that the fundamental constants of physics are finely tuned to precise values for a rich chemistry and life permittance. It has not yet been applied in a broad manner to molecular biology.
The authors explain the paper's main thrust:

Comment: The editors of the journal capitulated to the gatekeepers and put a disclaimer on the paper saying they aren't actually "pro-ID". Their excuse for allowing it? They were "unaware" that the keyword "intelligent design" was used:
As John West reported, the co-Chief Editors of the Journal of Theoretical Biology capitulated to intelligent design (ID) critics and added a disclaimer to a groundbreaking peer-reviewed article on intelligent design. They say they were "unaware" that the authors had added the keyword "intelligent design" to the paper. Is this complaint credible? Let's take a look.

The implication is that the editors — Denise Kirschner, Mark Chaplain, and Akira Sasaki — did not realize the article was about intelligent design. That is three people, working together, all failed to notice the obvious. Further, it's implied that the authors inappropriately snuck intelligent design into the keywords when, it would seem from the disclaimer, this was unwarranted. But if the paper is about ID, avowedly so, wouldn't it make sense to put ID in the keywords? After all, that's how keywords work. More on that in a moment. But the precise details of how and when the keyword was added become trivial when you realize that the entire paper is framed around investigating intelligent design, and trying to determine if a scientific methodology for detecting design can be developed. It is completely non-credible for the journal's editors to feign surprise that intelligent design is a core concept in the paper. Had any of them simply read the paper, it would have been evident that the paper has a major focus on ID.

[...]

Perhaps pro-censorship groups like the National Center for Science Education feed science publishers the same talking point when publishers accidentally forget to blacklist ID-friendly viewpoints: "Don't worry about the details or the facts. Just claim you were 'unaware' of the intelligent design connections, and make it look like those devious ID guys tried to sneak it past the reviewers." But as we can see, the article's interest in investigating ID is open, unhidden, and plain to all readers. The only scandal here is on the part of the editors. Either they don't read what they publish, or they are pretending they were "unaware" of the ID connections in the article.


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