Does Space Curve Back Around On Itself?

The cosmos are vast, seemingly going on forever in every direction away from oneself. The same was once true, though, of the vast sphere of Earth.

Eventually, as our means of navigation improved, we discovered that if you go any direction on the surface of Earth from a starting point, and can maintain a straight line course, you will come back to where you started.

What if the universe is like this, as well? Could it be? And, if it were, given its vastness, could we ever really know?

The following Forbes article takes the form of an intriguing Thought Experiment asking exactly these questions, and offering some of the best answers we have in an area of inquiry for which we in fact have very few.

#BlindMeWithScience #Cosmology #SpaceTime

Stephen Hawking's 'Final' Paper: 'Soft Hair' and the Black Hole Information Paradox

Black Holes gobble up matter, energy, and even light and time into their inescapable gravity maws. Traditionally, nothing had been thought to escape this, resulting in a paradox: although it should never be possible to erase all information about a given thing from existence, anything thrown into a Black Hole appeared to do exactly that. As a result, Black Holes were called hairless, or bald, to indicate that although we could define them by mass, charge, and spin, we could not recover anything about the qualities of these possessed by any object which crossed the Event Horizon.

Eventually, one Sir Stephen Hawking conjectured that Black Holes also possess temperature, and thus obey the laws of thermodynamics previously believed not to apply to them, and that they eventually decayed through emitting a type of radiation called Hawking Radiation. It then became necessary to reconcile this Information Paradox: where it may have been possible to imagine information going into a Black Hole and staying there forever, beyond reach, it is a paradox to think they can both radiate, and yet also erase all information.

In 2015, Hawking teamed up with a pair of colleagues to propose a partial resolution to the paradox: at least some information about the electrical charges of objects falling into Black Holes may be preserved in a halo of zero-energy photons around the Event Horizon, called 'soft photons' or 'soft hairs'. Where a hairless Black Hole is distinguished from others only by mass, spin, and charge, hairy Black holes also differ entropically.

Now, in what may, or may not, actually be his final paper, Hawking joined with a team of colleagues earlier this year to calculate the thermodynamic entropy of Black Holes with a particular profile of soft hair, finding that their results agreed with Hawking's original formula for calculating Black Hole entropy.

It is not certain, however, that there are no other papers forthcoming with his name upon them.

#BlindMeWithScience #StephenHawking #BlackHoles

Physicists May Be Able To Conclusively Prove or Disprove Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory, in highly simplified form, states that our universe began with a singularity, which expanded in a great burst of spacetime, energy, and matter. In most contemporary theories, this expansion is still ongoing, and may or may not reverse some day.

While substantial evidence supports a version of cosmic events in line with this general outline, some Theories instead posit that this general description is correct, but that our current expansion period followed the contraction of some previous spacetime, which compressed until it bounced back out.

With such theories agreeing with each other on the known observations, we have been in need of a new observation to reconcile and resolve this quandry of having too many working theories. A team of researchers from Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) may have found one: measuring massive fields in the primordial universe.

In theory, these fields would have experienced quantum fluctations and density perturbations reflecting the scale of the primordial universe. This would, in effect, tell us how large the cosmos were when expansion kicked in, telling us if it contracted and bounced or began from a singularity.

Time and Peer Review will determine if this is, in fact, a valid measurement standard for testing these competing theories, but if validated, we may soon be able to answer definitely whether the expansion of the cosmos occurred 'In the Beginning', or was merely another, albeit significant, moment in a cosmic history stretching even farther back in time, perhaps to eternity itself.

#BlindMeWithScience #Cosmology #BigBang

NASA May Have a Plan To Stop a Supervolcano From Killing Us All

Supervolcanoes are one of the greatest threats to human survival which we have never faced in modern times (or anywhere near modern times). In and of themselves, they could wipe out our species, and their threat is only greater nowadays due to our reliance on high technology and infrastructure.

There also happens to be a known supervolcano in the United States, the Yellowstone Caldera, which erupts approximately every 600,000 years. And, oh yes, its last eruption was about 600,000 years ago, so although that does not mean it will erupt soon (as that number is only an average), it well might.

Now NASA has a plan to potentially prevent such a disaster, by drilling a 10 kilometer hole near (but not directly above) the supervolcano, and pumping water under high pressure into the hole, thereby reducing the temperature day by day until it cools enough not to erupt.

Then again, if anything goes wrong, the whole thing could blow even sooner, and the price tag for this project would be nearly $3.5bn, a high cost to accidentally kill us all if it did. On the bright side, the drilling site could be used simultaneously as a geothermal power plant, thereby mitigating the costs.

Should it appear the volcano will definitely blow in the foreseeable future, then, we may well have a Plan of Action to prevent it and save humanity. It's just a very risky plan that may totally backfire.

What do you think about this?

#BlindMeWithScience #NASA #Supervolcano

Genetic Interdependence Between Mother and Offspring in Direct Development

Broadly speaking, there are two major categories of animal species with regard to maturing into an adult form: indirect developing species, which pass through a non-adult-like larval stage, and direct developing species, which come out as more-or-less little versions of the adult form. The result is very large differences in size and morphology between the mature forms of these species, though why this is the case has not entirely been understood.

In particular, several aspects of direct development, including offspring size, are influenced by the genome of the mother, rather than the offspring. Researchers at New York University have now performed the first analyses of the transition from indirect to direct development, in the process shedding light on a hitherto unrecognized interdependence between the mother and offspring in direct development species which helps explain this distinction.

What they have discovered is that the genes governing larval development, and those governing egg size, are completely independent. Consequently, this balance exerts a natural selective pressure, lest a mismatch arise between the two sets of genes, as it sometimes will.

By analogy, think of raising developing animals inside containers, where if they grow too large or too small for the container, they will suffer or even perish, but with no way to know in advance which ones will grow to the right size, or which containers may simply be too large or small to be viable hosts. Over generations of this, assuming variation exists but is not limitless, selective pressures would create an increasingly good fit between the developing animals, and the containers, such that only lineages which fit well into the containers will survive, and only containers within a range of sizes that can accommodate the developing animals will be viable hosts. This is essentially the relationship between the offspring and the egg in direct development.

The result will tend to be offspring with a good fit to both the egg itself, and to their external environment despite having 'skipped' the larval stage in which exposure to the external environment would shape subsequent development (with maternal genetic influences substituting for this), but it also means that some offspring will not be good fits for their host egg cells, or may be mismatched with the external environmental conditions. As always, there are costs and benefits to any adaptation, but for direct developing animals, the benefits of the strategy have clearly outweighed its costs.

#BlindMeWithScience #Evolution #EvolutionaryBiology

New Research Helps Settle Old Debate: Relatedness Not Key To Social Cooperation

How does society form, in evolutionary terms?  It's a hard question.  It can often seem, after all, like the 'Law of the Jungle' is unforgiving, like Lord Tennyson's "nature red in tooth and claw".  Why would creatures of the same kind cooperate, en masse, to ever be able to form societies, which some species have done?  This question goes back even farther than Darwin in the evolutionary theories (Darwin's Natural Selection being merely the culmination, the opus, of an existing field of inquiry).

For some, it was proof of something beyond the biological processes.  Mankind, after all, is a social creature, capable at time of great and even seemingly selfless nobility, which surely set him above the beasts, made in the image of God or some such thing to be nobler.  Of course, we now know we are not unique, even if we are the most advanced version of the principle.

An easy resort, and one often suggested, was to attribute the cooperative and even altruistic behaviors necessary for society to genetic relatedness.  For eusocial insects like termites, in fact, this seemed a well supported conclusion.  It then followed that, for higher animal forms with social lives, one need only evoke and elaborate the principle: Simple Fitness of reproduction, becomes Extended Fitness of larger genetic units like prides and packs, clans and tribes.  Cooperation with unrelated members could be seen as an accidental side-effect of the majority of group members being related, and thus anyone else accepted within the group also being treated as such.

There have long been doubts about this, however, rooted in the most basic Cost-Benefit Analysis perspective of evolutionary adaptiveness: that cooperation, altruism, even society can and given right conditions will arise, absent the need for strong genetic relatedness, provided the benefits of these to survival is generally greater for all cooperating parties than it would be to go it alone or compete directly.  If one monkey can get zero bananas from a tree, but two working together can get ten, and each can only each three or four anyways, it matters not a whit if they share kinship, this perspective argues, and thus while relatedness may play a role, it need not be decisive.  Evidence for the general willingness of non-kin creatures within a pack, pride, tribe, or other social group to cooperate do, in fact, abound in higher species, but some have argued this reflects cognitive sophistication building on kinship-derived mechanisms, with eusocial insects seemingly buttressing the claim.

New research from Hokkaido, Japan has given new weight to the argument against relatedness as key to forming society.  A team of Evolutionary Biologists from Hokkaido University studied sweat bee nests on different parts of the island, measuring their reproductive success as either solitary bees defending their nests, or cooperate groups of bees defending a common nest, and controlled for genetic relatedness of the cooperating group members.  They found that 92% of the Fitness advantage of the cooperative groups could be accounted for by the benefits of cooperation, and only 8% by relatedness.

Thus, as may not be surprising to those who never endorsed the relatedness argument, it seems that the benefit of society is society itself, rather than society merely being an extension of mechanisms for directly promoting the fitness of specific reproductive lineages, with any non-kin social cooperation being a mere happenstance.

#BlindMeWithScience #Evolution #EvolutionaryBiology

UCF Scientists Selling 'Fake' Mars Dirt for Real Research

Astrophysicists at the University of Central Florida (UCF) Planetary Sciences Group have developed a technique to create dirt samples identical to Martian soils right here on Earth.

The ability to study the properties and behaviors of Martian soils up-close is indispensable for the success of future, especially long-term and manned, missions to the Red Planet. For example, since future Colonists cannot bring dirt from Earth to grow their foods, they will need to find plants that thrive in the native soil, or simple ways to modify this soil to enhance its fecundity (or both).

While such simulants, as they are called, are nothing new per se, they are notoriously difficult to create, and have typically lacked scientific standardization. For $20/kg (plus shipping), UCF will ship their standardized Mars simulant to purchasers, which at present includes a half ton purchase of Mars simulant by the Kennedy Space Center.

The UCF technique allows for the creation of simulants of the several known types of Martian soil, and in addition for the creation of simulants of soils from other heavenly bodies, such as Moon and asteroid dirt. Their formula is also freely available to other researchers, for those who may have the resources available to be able to cook up their own simulant batches in the lab.

#BlindMeWithScience #NASA #Mars #RedPlanet

Researchers Create Human Egg Cells From Blood Cells

A team of Japanese Researchers has succeeded, for the first time, in creating human eggs cells from adult human blood cells. Their technique involves extracting the blood cells and turning them into induced pluripotent stem cells, placed inside miniature ovaries created from mouse embryonic cells, where they transform into egg cells.

The current product of this process is immature egg cells, but in the future it will almost certainly be possible to produce mature, and therefore reproductively viable, egg cells by this technique, and to create such cells from nearly any type of adult DNA-containing cell.

The ramifications of this are hard to overstate. An end to infertility issues? Quite likely. New techniques of creating 'Designer Babies', even before the fetal stage (and thus avoiding any legal barriers that apply or may some day apply only at fetal stages and beyond)? Probably. A means for LGBTQ+ people to have babies together which are wholly the product of their own DNA? Possibly. Getting pregnant by willing or unwilling Dead People, Celebrities, or anyone else for whom a single DNA-bearing cell sample can be obtained? A near certainty, barring probable laws against or severely curtailing such things.

Most dramatically: Could this become the basis for a radical evolutionary change in human reproduction, resulting in as-yet-unknowable changes to our species, perhaps even the eventual end of sex itself as a human behavior? That is, remarkably, not even remotely outside the realm of possibility, though this would likely take many, many generations to develop.

These are just some of the issues raised by this, alongside the ever present question regarding all such technologies: if everyone can make babies of their own, then how will we ever hope to solve the problem of Orphans? Each such innovation reduces the available pool of potential parents for children who have lost their caretakers, been abandoned, or simply been unwanted.

#BlindMeWithScience #Biology #ReproductiveHealth

Why America Took Longer To Master Clocks: It's the Physics, Stupid!

In 1656, the Dutch Physicist Christiaan Huygens gave the world his greatest invention: the pendulum clock. Pendulums are influenced by gravity, which even in the mid-17th Century was being recognized as a mathematical constant and thus a strong basis for consistent timekeeping.

Huygens utilized this constancy in his formula for the period of a pendulum, the basis for accurate pendulum clock timekeeping: T = 2π √(L/g). This formula alone has earned him the moniker of World's First Theoretical Physicist. His discovery enabled timekeeping to become accurate to within seconds each day, a remarkable leap over previous measurement techniques.

The American Colonies, being bereft of the clockmaking experts of Europe, would not build its own pendulum clocks for more than a century. Being limited otherwise to Sundial technology, their solution was to buy a Dutch pendulum clock and have it shipped to and started up in America.

When the clock arrived and was started up, however, they were disturbed to find that it was in error by minutes, with the error accumulating each day, far less accurate than the mere seconds of error they were expecting. Assuming it to be defective, it was sent back to the Dutch, who upon starting it up, found it to be working perfectly. Returned to the Colonies, however, it resumed its error.

What no one could have realized at the time was that the issue came down to the assumed gravitational constant: while we now know it to be true that gravity is a physical constant, and while it remains as true now as it was then that the average gravity of Earth across the planet is 9.81 m/s2, the actual gravity on any part of our surface can vary somewhat due to latitude differences.

As it so happened, a significant latitude difference existed between the birthplace of the Dutch clock, and the Colonial location where it was set up. The result was that the pendulum period, valid for the Dutch country, was not valid for the Colonies, or at least not in its chosen location.

Issues such as these eventually brought the variability of gravity at the surface of the planet to the awareness of clockmakers, resulting in adjustments to the pendulum period tailored to the specific location where it would be used, restoring their potential to bring precise timekeeping to the whole world.

#BlindMeWithScience #Physics #Timekeeping