Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 44

Trust the Science! files: U Washington kept quiet — knowingly — on flawed transgender study

We are told: They did not want to “ruin ‘positive coverage’”

University of Washington media officials knowingly kept quiet on a flawed study that claimed that injecting children with off-label puberty blockers benefited their health, according to emails obtained by a conservative radio host. “A University of Washington study, in partnership with Seattle Children’s Hospital, claimed gender-affirming care via puberty blockers leads to positive mental health outcomes for transgender teen patients,” commentator Jason Rantz reported. “That characterization, however, was false, forcing substantial edits to the materials used to promote the study and prompting UW to cease promoting the research.”

Matt Lamb, “University of Washington knowingly kept quiet on flawed transgender study” at The College Fix (August 26, 2022)

EXCLUSIVE: UW Medicine falsely claimed a study showed gender-inclusive care led to rates of depression plummeting.

I obtained emails showing that staff didn’t correct false reporting about the study because it received such positive coverage.https://t.co/WjanIEhcEz

— Jason Rantz on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) August 24, 2022

Social science journalist Jesse Singal first raised concerns about the methodology in April and reported he could not obtain the raw data behind the paper. “Singal has a laundry list of issues with the study: 1) the data did not back up claims made about mental health improvement; 2) the researchers provide little specific data that is typically on display in these kinds of studies, and 3) the researchers may not have used the correct statistical method,” Rantz wrote.

Matt Lamb, “University of Washington knowingly kept quiet on flawed transgender study” at The College Fix (August 26, 2022)

Open season on Jesse Singal for noticing?

Or … alternatively … how about this, Little Rays of Sunshine — University of Washington Chapter: Hereafter, we will reasonably assume that anything you say on the topic stands a good chance of being — in whole or in part — a falsehood. And what should we do with a fish when only some of it stinks?

Here’s the open access study as of August 26, 2022.

You may also wish to read: Why many now reject science… do you really want to know? Part 1 COVID demonstrated — as nothing else could — that the “science” was all over the map and didn’t help people avoid panic. As the panic receded, the government started setting up a disinformation board to target NON-government sources of panic, thus deepening loss of trust.

and

U.S. shuts down its paused Disinformation Governance Board.
Faced with resounding unpopularity, the Department of Homeland Security has decided that the Board is not necessary. While the reaction has been described as a “rightwing backlash,” it included pretty much anyone who did not want the government deciding what is “true.”

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At Live Science: Could extinct Tasmanian tigers be brought back from the dead?

Mindy Weisberger writes:

The last known thylacine died in captivity in 1936.

Can an extinct species be brought back to life? Scientists are taking a “giant leap” in that direction by using gene-editing to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger, a carnivorous marsupial from Australia and the continent’s only marsupial apex predator. It died out nearly a century ago, driven to extinction by human hunters and by the introduction of nonnative species to their grassland, wetland and forest habitats.

Tasmanian tigers are extinct — but that could change within 10 years, scientists say. (Image credit: Colossal Biosciences)

Researchers with the project, a collaboration between the University of Melbourne and the genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences in Dallas, suggest that this so-called de-extinction could reinstall Tasmanian tigers (Thylacinus cynocephalus) to the wild within a decade, and could help restore balance to beleaguered Australian ecosystems where the animals once roamed, university representatives said in a statement.

Scientists in the Thylacine Integrated Genomic Restoration Research (TIGRR) Lab at the University of Melbourne have already sequenced the thylacine genome from preserved thylacine DNA and pinpointed which living marsupials are most genetically similar to thylacines, according to the statement. Colossal’s CRISPR gene editing technology will enable the group to take cells from a closely related living marsupial species, the fat-tailed dunnart (Sminthopsis crassicaudata), create a template genome, and then edit it to produce a thylacine genome and grow viable thylacine embryos. 

“With this partnership, I now believe that in ten years’ time we could have our first living baby thylacine since they were hunted to extinction close to a century ago,” team member Andrew Pask, a professor of epigenetics at the University of Melbourne and leader of the TIGRR Lab, said in the statement. “We can now take the giant leaps to conserve Australia’s threatened marsupials and take on the grand challenge of de-extincting animals we had lost.”

Tasmanian tigers, or thylacines, appeared in Australia about 4 million years ago and were once widespread across the continent, according to the Australian Museum in Sydney. Despite their name, they didn’t look much like tigers; in fact, they were sometimes referred to as “long dogs with stripes” because of their doglike heads and distinctively-marked rumps, according to the University of Melbourne.

Thylacines vanished from most of the Australian mainland about 2,000 years ago, and an estimated population of about 5,000 were in Tasmania around the time of European colonization in the 1800s, according to the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra. But by the 1920s, thousands of Tasmanian tigers had been slaughtered by human hunters who mistakenly saw the marsupials as a threat to livestock. The last Tasmanian tiger seen in the wild was killed in 1930, and the last specimen in captivity — an individual nicknamed “Benjamin” — died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936, NMA says.

According to researchers with the de-extinction project, resurrecting Tasmanian tigers would be a conservation success story; not only for restoring a species lost to human activity, but also for building a lifeline for vulnerable and threatened species across Australia, “developing gestational and genetic rescue technologies for future marsupial conservation efforts,” Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm said in a statement.

“With our planet’s biodiversity at risk, we will continue to contribute scientific resources to preserving the species and ecosystems necessary to sustain life,” Lamm said.

Full article at Live Science.

Will the genome of a Tasmanian tiger, copied into cells from a closely related living marsupial species be able to produce a Tasmanian tiger? Research has already revealed that the information content of a cell extends beyond its DNA, as explained in an article at Evolution News.

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At Sci News: Look-Alike Humans Have Similar DNA

New research led by Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute scientists shows that people with extreme look-alike faces share common genotypes, but differ in their DNA methylation and microbiome landscapes.

“For decades, the existence of individuals who resemble each other without having any family ties has been described as a proven fact, but only in anecdotal terms and without any scientific justification,” said senior author Dr. Manel Esteller, a researcher at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute.

“The widespread use of the Internet and social networks for image-sharing has meant that we are now able to identify and study such people.”

Look-alike humans share similar genotypes and differ in their DNA methylation and microbiome landscape. Image credit: Joshi et al., doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2022.111257.

In their study, Dr. Esteller and his colleagues set out to characterize a set of look-alike humans on a molecular level.

To do so, they recruited human doubles from the photographic work of François Brunelle, a Canadian artist who has been obtaining worldwide pictures of look-alikes since 1999. They obtained headshot pictures of 32 look-alike pairs.

They determined an objective measure of likeness for the pairs using three different facial recognition algorithms.

In addition, the participants completed a comprehensive biometric and lifestyle questionnaire and provided saliva DNA for multiomics analysis.

“This unique set of samples has allowed us to study how genomics, epigenomics, and microbiomics can contribute to human resemblance,” Dr. Esteller said.

Overall, the results revealed that these individuals share similar genotypes, but differ in their DNA methylation and microbiome landscapes.

Half of the look-alike pairs were clustered together by all three algorithms.

Genetic analysis revealed that 9 of these 16 pairs clustered together, based on 19,277 common single-nucleotide polymorphisms.

Moreover, physical traits such as weight and height, as well as behavioral traits such as smoking and education, were correlated in look-alike pairs.

Taken together, the results suggest that shared genetic variation not only relates to similar physical appearance, but may also influence common habits and behavior.

“Our findings provide a molecular basis for future applications in fields such as biomedicine, evolution, and forensics,” Dr. Esteller said.

“Our study shows genetic markers that are critical in the development of the shape of the nose, lip, and mouth, plus completely novel determinants of bone structure and skin texture that also provide characteristic features of our face.”

“The environmental markers, such as the epigenome and the microbiome were more distinct between look-alikes and thus the differences in these people who resemble each other can be attributed to the chemicals that regulate the same DNA sequence and to the composition of the microbiome.”

“Because the human population is now 7.9 billions, these look-alike repetitions are increasingly likely to occur,” he said.

The findings appear today in the journal Cell Reports.

Complete article at Sci News.

It seems that nature has been producing “deep fakes” long before human technology developed that ability.

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At Science Daily: Risk of volcano catastrophe ‘a roll of the dice’

While funding is pumped into preventing low-probability scenarios such as asteroid collision, the far more likely threat of a large volcanic eruption is close to ignored — despite much that could be done to reduce the risks, say researchers.

The world is “woefully underprepared” for a massive volcanic eruption and the likely repercussions on global supply chains, climate and food, according to experts from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), and the University of Birmingham.

In an article published in the journal Nature, they say there is a “broad misconception” that risks of major eruptions are low, and describe current lack of governmental investment in monitoring and responding to potential volcano disasters as “reckless.”

However, the researchers argue that steps can be taken to protect against volcanic devastation — from improved surveillance to increased public education and magma manipulation — and the resources needed to do so are long overdue.

Mani compares the risk of a giant eruption to that of a 1km-wide asteroid crashing into Earth. Such events would have similar climatic consequences, but the likelihood of a volcanic catastrophe is hundreds of times higher than the combined chances of an asteroid or comet collision.

Mount Rinjani, Indonesia (stock image).
Credit: © Wirestock Creators / stock.adobe.com

“Hundreds of millions of dollars are pumped into asteroid threats every year, yet there is a severe lack of global financing and coordination for volcano preparedness,” Mani said. “This urgently needs to change. We are completely underestimating the risk to our societies that volcanoes pose.”

“The Tonga eruption was the volcanic equivalent of an asteroid just missing the Earth, and needs to be treated as a wake-up call,” said Mani.

Financial losses from a large magnitude eruption would be in the multi-trillions, and on a comparable scale to the pandemic, say the experts.

“We may not know about even relatively recent eruptions due to a lack of research into marine and lake cores, particularly in neglected regions such as Southeast Asia,” said Cassidy. “Volcanoes can lie dormant for a long time, but still be capable of sudden and extraordinary destruction.”

The experts also call for increased research into volcano “geoengineering.” This includes the need to study means of countering aerosols released by a massive eruption, which could lead to a “volcanic winter.” They also say that work to investigate manipulating pockets of magma beneath active volcanoes should be undertaken.

Full article at Science Daily.

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At Phys.org: NASA tests new moon rocket, 50 years after Apollo

Marcia Dunn writes:

Years late and billions over budget, NASA’s new moon rocket makes its debut next week in a high-stakes test flight before astronauts get on top.

The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket will attempt to send an empty crew capsule into a far-flung lunar orbit, 50 years after NASA’s famed Apollo moonshots.

If all goes well, astronauts could strap in as soon as 2024 for a lap around the moon, with NASA aiming to land two people on the lunar surface by the end of 2025.

Liftoff is set for Monday morning from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

The six-week test flight is risky and could be cut short if something fails, NASA officials warn.

“We’re going to stress it and test it. We’re going make it do things that we would never do with a crew on it in order to try to make it as safe as possible,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The retired founder of George Washington University’s space policy institute said a lot is riding on this trial run. Spiraling costs and long gaps between missions will make for a tough comeback if things go south, he noted.

“It is supposed to be the first step in a sustained program of human exploration of the moon, Mars, and beyond,” said John Logsdon. “Will the United States have the will to push forward in the face of a major malfunction?”

The price tag for this single mission: more than $4 billion. Add everything up since the program’s inception a decade ago until a 2025 lunar landing, and there’s even more sticker shock: $93 billion.

NASA’s high-tech, automated Orion capsule is named after the constellation, among the night sky’s brightest. At 11 feet (3 meters) tall, it’s roomier than Apollo’s capsule, seating four astronauts instead of three. For this test flight, a full-size dummy in an orange flight suit will occupy the commander’s seat, rigged with vibration and acceleration sensors. Two other mannequins made of material simulating human tissue—heads and female torsos, but no limbs—will measure cosmic radiation, one of the biggest risks of spaceflight. One torso is testing a protective vest from Israel. Unlike the rocket, Orion has launched before, making two laps around Earth in 2014. This time, the European Space Agency’s service module will be attached for propulsion and solar power via four wings.

APOLLO VS. ARTEMIS

More than 50 years later, Apollo still stands as NASA’s greatest achievement. Using 1960s technology, NASA took just eight years to go from launching its first astronaut, Alan Shepard, and landing Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon. By contrast, Artemis already has dragged on for more than a decade, despite building on the short-lived moon exploration program Constellation. Twelve Apollo astronauts walked on the moon from 1969 through 1972, staying no longer than three days at a time. For Artemis, NASA will be drawing from a diverse astronaut pool currently numbering 42 and is extending the time crews will spend on the moon to at least a week. The goal is to create a long-term lunar presence that will grease the skids for sending people to Mars. NASA’s Nelson, promises to announce the first Artemis moon crews once Orion is back on Earth.

WHAT’S NEXT

There’s a lot more to be done before astronauts step on the moon again. A second test flight will send four astronauts around the moon and back, perhaps as early as 2024. A year or so later, NASA aims to send another four up, with two of them touching down at the lunar south pole. Orion doesn’t come with its own lunar lander like the Apollo spacecraft did, so NASA has hired Elon Musk’s SpaceX to provide its Starship spacecraft for the first Artemis moon landing. Two other private companies are developing moonwalking suits. The sci-fi-looking Starship would link up with Orion at the moon and take a pair of astronauts to the surface and back to the capsule for the ride home. So far, Starship has only soared six miles (10 kilometers). Musk wants to launch Starship around Earth on SpaceX’s Super Heavy Booster before attempting a moon landing without a crew. One hitch: Starship will need a fill-up at an Earth-orbiting fuel depot, before heading to the moon.

Full article at Phys.org.

The development of advanced technology requires a remarkable suite of “prior fitness” factors that have allowed humans to progress from controlling fire to developing metallurgy to electronics and all their applications. I’ve just finished reading The Miracle of Man, by Michael Denton, who makes this case for any beings who have achieved the level of technology that is epitomized by NASA’s space program.

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At Big Think: Without Einstein, we might have missed General Relativity

Einstein’s “happiest thought” led to General Relativity’s formulation. Would a different profound insight have led us forever astray?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Prior to Einstein’s arrival on the scene, there were a few problems with Newtonian physics: it didn’t work correctly at high speeds, and the observed orbit of Mercury didn’t match the theoretical predictions. After his insights that led us to Special Relativity, Einstein had what he called “his happiest thought,” which was the equivalence principle, leading him to formulate the General theory of Relativity. But if he, or anyone else, had a different set of insights instead, it could have led to an “epicycle” style fix to Newtonian gravity that solved the immediate problem but didn’t describe the underlying physics at all. 

Back in the late 1800s, what we thought of as “fundamental science” was rapidly advancing, leading to two different conflicting perspectives. Among most of the old guard, Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism represented a spectacular achievement: making sense of electricity and magnetism as a single, unified phenomenon. Along with Newtonian gravity and the mechanical laws of motion, it seemed that everything in the Universe could soon be explained. But many others, including many young and emerging scientists, saw precisely the opposite: a Universe on the verge of a crisis.

At speeds approaching the speed of light, time dilation and length contraction violated Newton’s laws of motion. When we tracked the orbit of Mercury over centuries, we found that its precession deviated from the Newtonian prediction by a small but significant amount. And phenomena like radioactivity simply couldn’t be explained within the existing framework.

Back in the late 1800s, what we thought of as “fundamental science” was rapidly advancing, leading to two different conflicting perspectives. Among most of the old guard, Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism represented a spectacular achievement: making sense of electricity and magnetism as a single, unified phenomenon. Along with Newtonian gravity and the mechanical laws of motion, it seemed that everything in the Universe could soon be explained. But many others, including many young and emerging scientists, saw precisely the opposite: a Universe on the verge of a crisis.

At speeds approaching the speed of light, time dilation and length contraction violated Newton’s laws of motion. When we tracked the orbit of Mercury over centuries, we found that its precession deviated from the Newtonian prediction by a small but significant amount. And phenomena like radioactivity simply couldn’t be explained within the existing framework.

The coming decades would see many revolutionary developments take place: special relativity, quantum mechanics, mass-energy equivalence, and nuclear physics among them. But perhaps the most imaginative leap forward was Einstein’s General Relativity, which only came about because of one key realization. If things had played out just slightly differently, we might still be chasing after that game-changing theoretical insight today.

For hundreds of years, since the time of Tycho Brahe, we had tracked the perihelion of Mercury as it approached the Sun at its closest, and found something shocking: unlike the predictions of Newtonian gravity, Mercury did not return to the same place with each completed orbit!

This was a bit of a puzzle. Under the laws of Newtonian gravity, any negligibly small mass in a stable gravitational orbit around a large, unmoving one would have to make a closed ellipse: returning to its exact same starting point upon completing each revolution. However, there were two known factors that should complicate this about the planet Mercury’s orbit as observed from Earth.

Planet Earth has equinoxes, and those equinoxes precess as our rotation axis migrates over time. With each passing century, this accounts for 5025 arc-seconds of precession, where 3600 arc-seconds makes up 1°.There are other masses in the Solar System that also exert gravitational forces on all of the other masses, leading to an additional precession effect. From the seven other major planets, Venus through Neptune, Mercury gains an additional 532 arc-seconds of precession per century.

All told, that’s a predicted precession of 5557 arc-seconds per century. And yet, even in the early 1900s, we had conclusively determined that the observed precession was more like 5600 arc-seconds per century, with an uncertainty of less than 0.1% in that figure. Newtonian gravity, somehow, was still failing us.

Other ideas included modifying Newton’s gravity. Simon Newcomb and Asaph Hall took Newton’s law of gravitation and decided to modify the exponent attached to the inverse-square force law — the “2” in the 1/r part of Newtonian gravity — to account for Mercury’s precession. Instead of being exactly 2, they noted that if the exponent in the force law were changed to “2 + ε,” where ε (the Greek letter epsilon) was some tiny number that could be tuned to match the observations, Mercury’s perihelion precession could be explained without messing up the orbits of any of the other planets. It was a clever, but ultimately incorrect and insufficient, approach.

Einstein imagined being in some sort of a room, with that room accelerating through space. Then he asked himself what sort of measurement, if any, could he make from within that room that would distinguish that accelerating room-in-motion from an identical room that was stationary, but in a gravitational field?

His spectacular realization — that there would be none — led him to the conclusion that what we experienced as gravity wasn’t a “force” at all in the old, Newtonian, action-at-a-distance sort of sense. Instead, just as objects in motion relative to one another experienced their passage through space and time differently, gravitation must represent some sort of alteration for how an observer experienced the spacetime through which they passed. 

Einstein went off, enlisted the help of others, and mathematically began thinking of how the presence of matter-and-energy would curve and distort the very fabric of spacetime. In 1915, this culminated in the release of General Relativity in its final form. Mass (and energy) told spacetime how to curve, and that curved spacetime told all matter and energy how to move through it.

The author points out that other, ad-hoc modifications to Newtonian gravity (like adding epicycles to the geocentric model of the solar system) could have given a match between theory and observations. But such a “solution” would have lacked the profound insights into spacetime that formed the foundation of Einstein’s General Relativity, and the theory wouldn’t have actually given a true description of how nature works.

In science, finding one fix that works for one problem (or a small set of similar problems) among many isn’t the way our understanding of the Universe advances. Sure, it may make us feel better when we have a successful description of things, but getting the right answer for the wrong reason can often lead us even farther astray than not being able to obtain the right answer at all.

The hallmark of a good scientific theory is that it can explain:

a wide variety of existing observations,across a broad range of timescales, distance scales, energy scales, and other physical conditions,can make new predictions that differ from the previously prevailing theory,and that those predictions can be put to the test, either validating it or refuting it,

while introducing the fewest number of new free parameters possible. Today, a Universe governed by General Relativity, that began with an inflationary state that gave rise to the hot Big Bang, and that contains some form of dark matter and dark energy in addition to the “normal stuff,” is the most remarkably successful picture we’ve ever concocted. But as awesome as our successes are, we’re still searching for a better, more successful description of reality. Whether there is one or not, the only way we’ll find out is to keep on trying, and letting nature itself be the ultimate arbiter of the only important question we can ask: what is true?

Complete article at Big Think

In considering “the only important question we can ask”, namely, “What is true?”, can we think of any commonly held theory that matches some of the data, but has had to be propped up by various “epicycles,” and may “lead us even farther astray” by missing a profound understanding of reality?

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At SciTech Daily: NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Sheds Light on Galaxy Evolution and Black Holes

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals never-before-seen details of the galaxy group called “Stephan’s Quintet” in an enormous new image. The close proximity of this group gives scientists a ringside seat to galactic mergers and interactions. Astronomers rarely see in so much detail how interacting galaxies trigger star formation in each other, and how the gas in these galaxies is being disturbed. Stephan’s Quintet is a fantastic “laboratory” for studying these processes fundamental to all galaxies. In a level of detail never seen before, the image also shows outflows driven by a supermassive black hole in one of the group’s galaxies. Tight galaxy groups like this may have been more common in the early universe when superheated, infalling material may have fueled very energetic black holes.

AN ENORMOUS MOSAIC OF STEPHAN’S QUINTET IS THE LARGEST IMAGE TO DATE FROM NASA’S JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE, COVERING ABOUT ONE-FIFTH OF THE MOON’S DIAMETER. IT CONTAINS OVER 150 MILLION PIXELS AND IS CONSTRUCTED FROM ALMOST 1,000 SEPARATE IMAGE FILES. CREDIT: NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCINASA’s Webb Sheds Light on Galaxy Evolution, Black Holes

Best known for being prominently featured in the classic Christmas film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Stephan’s Quintet is a stunning visual grouping of five galaxies. Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals Stephan’s Quintet in a new light. 

Webb shows never-before-seen details in this galaxy group thanks to its powerful, infrared vision and extremely high spatial resolution. Sparkling clusters of millions of young stars and starburst regions of fresh star birth grace the image. Sweeping tails of gas, dust, and stars are being pulled from several of the galaxies due to gravitational interactions. Most dramatically, the Webb Space Telescope captures huge shock waves as one of the galaxies, NGC 7318B, smashes through the cluster.

WITH ITS POWERFUL, MID-INFRARED VISION, THE MID-INFRARED INSTRUMENT (MIRI) SHOWS NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN DETAILS OF STEPHAN’S QUINTET, A VISUAL GROUPING OF FIVE GALAXIES. MIRI PIERCED THROUGH DUST-ENSHROUDED REGIONS TO REVEAL HUGE SHOCK WAVES AND TIDAL TAILS, GAS, AND STARS STRIPPED FROM THE OUTER REGIONS OF THE GALAXIES BY INTERACTIONS. IT ALSO UNVEILED HIDDEN AREAS OF STAR FORMATION. CREDIT: NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI

Together, the five galaxies of Stephan’s Quintet are also known as the Hickson Compact Group 92 (HCG 92). Although called a “quintet,” only four of the galaxies are actually close together and caught up in a cosmic dance. The fifth and leftmost galaxy, called NGC 7320, is well in the foreground compared with the other four. In fact, NGC 7320 resides just 40 million light-years from Earth, while the other four galaxies (NGC 7317, NGC 7318A, NGC 7318B, and NGC 7319) are around 290 million light-years away. This is still fairly close in cosmic terms, compared with more distant galaxies billions of light-years away. Studying such relatively nearby galaxies like these helps astronomers better understand structures seen in a much more distant universe.

This proximity provides scientists a ringside seat for witnessing the merging and interactions between galaxies that are so crucial to all of galaxy evolution. Rarely do astronomers witness in so much detail how interacting galaxies trigger star formation in each other, and how the gas in these galaxies is being disturbed. Stephan’s Quintet is an excellent “laboratory” for studying these processes fundamental to all galaxies.

Tight groups like this may have been more common in the early universe when their superheated, infalling material may have fueled very energetic black holes called quasars. Even today, the topmost galaxy in the group – NGC 7319 – harbors an active galactic nucleus, a supermassive black hole that is about 24 million times the mass of the Sun. It is actively pulling in material and puts out light energy equivalent to 40 billion Suns.

Combined with the most detailed infrared image ever of Stephan’s Quintet from MIRI and the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the data obtained by Webb will provide a bounty of valuable, new information. For instance, it will help astrophysicists understand the rate at which supermassive black holes feed and grow. Webb also sees star-forming regions much more directly, and it is able to examine emissions from the dust – a level of detail that was previously impossible to obtain.

SciTech Daily

It’s appropriate here to refer to the thesis of The Privileged Planet, which argues that Earth is…

An Exceptional Platform for Discovery

The basic thesis of TPP is that the best places for intelligent observers are also the best places for observing. A corollary is that Earth is both an exceptionally habitable place and an exceptional platform for discovery. It is an empirical cumulative case argument. If it is a fair statement about reality, then I expect the TPP thesis to strengthen as we gain knowledge in astronomy, physics, and the Earth sciences.

The stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope have only strengthened the assertion that a feature of Earth is its ideal location within the spacetime of the cosmos, allowing remarkable discoveries about our universe.

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At Phys.org: Scientists are unraveling the mystery of the arrow of time

The flow of time from the past to the future is a central feature of how we experience the world. But precisely how this phenomenon, known as the arrow of time, arises from the microscopic interactions among particles and cells is a mystery—one that researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS) are helping to unravel with the publication of a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters. The findings could have important implications in a variety of disciplines, including physics, neuroscience, and biology.

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Fundamentally, the arrow of time arises from the second law of thermodynamics: the principle that microscopic arrangements of physical systems tend to increase in randomness, moving from order to disorder. The more disordered a system becomes, the more difficult it is for it to find its way back to an ordered state, and the stronger the arrow of time. In short, the universe’s tendency toward disorder is the fundamental reason why we experience time flowing in one direction.

These researchers have, with their acknowledgment of the principle of thermodynamics (“microscopic arrangements of physical systems tend to increase in randomness, moving from order to disorder”), completely undercut any theory suggesting that natural processes can generate the complex, functional biomolecules required for life.

“The two questions our team had were, if we looked at a particular system, would we be able to quantify the strength of its arrow of time, and would we be able to sort out how it emerges from the micro scale, where cells and neurons interact, to the whole system?” said Christopher Lynn, the paper’s first author and a postdoctoral fellow with the ITS program. “Our findings provide the first step toward understanding how the arrow of time that we experience in daily life emerges from these more microscopic details.”

To begin answering these questions, the researchers explored how the arrow of time could be decomposed by observing specific parts of a system and the interactions between them. The parts, for example, could be the neurons that function within a retina. Looking at a single moment, they showed that the arrow of time can be broken down into different pieces: those produced by parts working individually, in pairs, in triplets or in more complicated configurations

Armed with this way of decomposing the arrow of time, the researchers analyzed existing experiments on the response of neurons in a salamander retina to different movies. In one movie a single object moved randomly across the screen while another portrayed the full complexity of scenes found in nature. Across both movies, researchers found that the arrow of time emerged from the simple interactions between pairs of neurons—not large, complicated groups. Surprisingly, the team also observed that the retina showed a stronger arrow of time when watching random motion than a natural scene. Lynn said this latter finding raises questions about how our internal perception of the arrow of time becomes aligned with the external world.

“These results may be of particular interest to neuroscience researchers,” said Lynn. “They could, for example, lead to answers about whether the arrow of time functions differently in brains that are neuroatypical.”

“Chris’ decomposition of local irreversibility—also known as the arrow of time—is an elegant, general framework that may provide a novel perspective for exploring many high-dimensional, nonequilibrium systems,” said David Schwab, a professor of Physics and Biology at the Graduate Center and the study’s principal investigator.

Phys.org

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At Sci.News: Voyagers Mark 45 Years in Space

NASA’s Voyager 2 probe lifted off on August 20, 1977, quickly followed by its twin, Voyager 1, on September 5.

The twin Voyager probes are NASA’s longest-operating mission and the only spacecraft ever to explore interstellar space.

Launched in 1977, both probes traveled to Jupiter and Saturn, with Voyager 1 moving faster and reaching them first.

Together, the probes unveiled much about the Solar System’s two largest planets and their moons.

This infographic highlights NASA’s Voyager mission’s major milestones, including visiting the four outer planets and exiting the heliosphere, or the protective bubble of magnetic fields and particles created by the Sun. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Voyager 2 also became the first and only spacecraft to fly close to Uranus (in 1986) and Neptune (in 1989), offering humanity remarkable views of these distant worlds.

While Voyager 2 was conducting these flybys, Voyager 1 headed toward the boundary of the heliosphere.

Upon exiting it in 2012, Voyager 1 discovered that the heliosphere blocks 70% of cosmic rays.

Voyager 2, after completing its planetary explorations, continued to the heliosphere boundary, exiting in 2018.

The twin spacecraft’s combined data from this region has challenged previous theories about the exact shape of the heliosphere.

“Today, as both Voyagers explore interstellar space, they are providing humanity with observations of uncharted territory,” said Voyager’s deputy project scientist Dr. Linda Spilker, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“This is the first time we’ve been able to directly study how a star, our Sun, interacts with the particles and magnetic fields outside our heliosphere, helping scientists understand the local neighborhood between the stars, upending some of the theories about this region, and providing key information for future missions.”

“The heliophysics mission fleet provides invaluable insights into our Sun, from understanding the corona or the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, to examining the Sun’s impacts throughout the Solar System, including here on Earth, in our atmosphere, and on into interstellar space,” said Dr. Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters.

“Over the last 45 years, the Voyager missions have been integral in providing this knowledge and have helped change our understanding of the Sun and its influence in ways no other spacecraft can.”

Over the years, the Voyager team has grown accustomed to surmounting challenges that come with operating such mature spacecraft, sometimes calling upon retired colleagues for their expertise or digging through documents written decades ago.

Each Voyager is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator containing plutonium, which gives off heat that is converted to electricity. As the plutonium decays, the heat output decreases and the Voyagers lose electricity.

To compensate, the researchers turned off all nonessential systems and some once considered essential, including heaters that protect the still-operating instruments from the frigid temperatures of space.

All five of the instruments that have had their heaters turned off since 2019 are still working, despite being well below the lowest temperatures they were ever tested at.

Recently, Voyager 1 began experiencing an issue that caused status information about one of its onboard systems to become garbled.

Despite this, the system and spacecraft otherwise continue to operate normally, suggesting the problem is with the production of the status data, not the system itself.

The probe is still sending back science observations while the engineering team tries to fix the problem or find a way to work around it.

“The Voyagers have continued to make amazing discoveries, inspiring a new generation of scientists and engineers,” said Voyager’s project manager Suzanne Dodd, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“We don’t know how long the mission will continue, but we can be sure that the spacecraft will provide even more scientific surprises as they travel farther away from the Earth.”

Sci News

An amazing achievement of human ingenuity and engineering design! Currently, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are about 14.6 billion miles and 12.1 billion miles from Earth, respectively. Times-of-flight for radio signals to reach Earth from the probes are about 22 hours and 18 hours, respectively. At their current speeds in their journeys away from the sun (38,000 mph and 34,400 mph) it would still take nearly 17,700 years for Voyager 1 to travel 1 light year. Since the Sun’s nearest stellar neighbor is about 4.2 lyrs away, interstellar space travel for humans remains heavily on the fictional side of science fiction.

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At Mind Matters News: A neurosurgeon on why some people function with only half a brain

First, the mind is not the brain and second, people tend to see the mind–brain relationship in terms of the cultural conceptions that matter to them:

The means by which people with major parts of their brains removed maintain function are not understood. It’s nonsense to say, as some do, that “The brain is massively parallel and recursive and functions under network rules and laws.” That’s typical neuroscience gibberish. The fact is that neuroscientists study the brain using network theory, and… surprise!… the brain seems to be a network.

The ancient Greeks studied the brain according to caloric theory, and… surprise!… the brain seemed to be a heat generator.

The 19th century physiologists studied the brain using mechanical concepts and… surprise!… the brain seemed like a machine…

My computer is a network and has redundancy. But if I cut it in half with a chainsaw it sure as hell won’t work. Neuroscientists are just making stuff up. It’s confabulation, not science.

News, “A neurosurgeon on why some people function with only half a brain” at Mind Matters News (August 19, 2022)

Michael Egnor also notes, “The diseased hemisphere was never particularly functional anyway, and brain function in the healthy hemisphere was probably adequate for many years prior to the surgery.”

But that only answers some of the questions.

You may also wish to read: People with half their brains removed do well on psych tests. In a recent study, adults who had had hemispherectomies as children — to combat severe epilepsy — performed within 10% of other study subjects on face and word recognition. Findings like this are a challenge to those who insist that the mind is simply what the brain does. The mind may not be split or removed when the brain is.

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