I had a blog entry written but it got a little angry. While I’m thinking about that, let’s talk about some interesting science.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

 

Mars magnetic anomaly explained

Mars’ magnetic field is… weird. 

 

There’s a lot of evidence that Mars had a symmetrical magnetic field like ours. Earth’s magnetic field protects the planet from getting its atmosphere stripped by the solar wind. Presumably, a Martian symmetrical magnetic field would do the same. 

 

But Mars’ magnetic field is decidedly not symmetrical. It has only remnants and they are concentrated in the southern hemisphere. 

 

Plaintively, we ask why?

 

One hypothesis is that the core of Mars was never a solid core like Earth’s but liquid. This allows the asymmetry.

 

Can we make water on the Moon with solar wind? Maybe.

The Moon is dry. But it does have hydrogen and oxygen, mostly in the form of OH groups in the first few centimeters of soil. The oxygen is inherent in the regolith in the same way Earth has oxygen: it came along with the material. But hydrogen can hit escape velocity easily and leave unless it’s captured.

 

The solar wind is mostly protons—hydrogen without the electrons. Consequently, it can bind with the oxygen on the lunar surface to produce said OH. Add another hydrogen to that OH and you get H2O. 

 

But any hypothesis needs to be tested and a team at NASA Goddard did exactly that to see of lunar soil could produce water when struck by solar wind. 

 

They think it did.

 

Solar panels from Moon dust

One of the reasons humans were able to colonize the New World twenty thousand years ago is they were able to live off the land. On the Moon, there’s not a lot of land to live on. Just dust, vacuum, and radiation.

 

Still, one of the needs for a lunar base is power and no one wants to send hundreds of tons of solar cells to the Moon if they don’t have to. 

 

Well, maybe they don’t have to.

 

Scientists at the University of Potsdam were able to fabricate the glass portion photovoltaic cells from glass generated from melting moondust—moonglass. This reduced a payload of solar cells by up to 99.4%. All we have to do is ship up the non-glass material.

 

AI has actual use: gravitational wave detector design

Gravitational waves are distortions in space-time caused by gravitational events. LIGO does it by having two laser beams interfering with one another over four kilometers. The idea is that once these detectors are stabilized so they don’t dance every time a truck passes by, they will respond to a space distortion. Since this would hit one arm of the detector before the other, the interference pattern changes with the distortion.

 

The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) trained up an AI algorithm called “Urania” to help them design better detectors. Sure enough, Urania was able to design detectors with better theoretical sensitivity than current design. 

 

Go girl.

 

Another way to determine alien life

There have been a lot of attempts to define life in some rigorous way that we could detect at astronomical distances. Life, shall we say, has found a way to makes its definition more philosophical than sciencey. It’s there because we can see it but damned if we can define it.

 

Akshit Goyal and Mikhail Tikhonov thinks we have been asking the wrong question. Instead of trying to define life, define what it does. And what it does is manage energy.

 

Organisms use high energy compounds and break them down into smaller compounds for use. This gives them an energy gradient that can be detected—maybe not at astronomical distances but at least in a way that may be more or less independent of life on earth. 

 

The idea that a stratification of resources might be found in geologic formations like, say, on Mars.

 

(I recently saw a definition of life that described it as a chemical system that operated in terms of evolution. Try seeing that with the James Webb Telescope.)

 

Paleolithic Tools in Ukraine

Archeologists have uncovered an inscribed ivory tool in Ukraine that is about 400,000 years old. The article seems to presume these were Homo sapiens but doesn’t bother to actually state that. If verified, that has two interesting features: Homo sapiens were in Europe a long, long time ago and co-existed with Neanderthals for hundreds of thousands of years and they were inscribing ivory with mammoth pictures.

 

Ivory isn’t a good tool material so the authors seem to think it might have had some symbolic value rather than a real tool. 

 

Regardless, mammoth scrimshaw is cool.

 

Climate Change will make rice toxic

Turns out increasing the temperature and CO2 of rice in a paddy increases the uptake of arsenic. 

 

Yay.

 

Rice is the world’s most consumed grain. Increase of toxicity of even a small amount will result in a large number of people getting sick. 

 

It’s the scale problem. If, say, 1 person in 100,000 people get sick now from arsenic poisoning in rice, that’s 10,000/billion people. If it increases to 4, that’s 40,000/billion people. If it becomes sufficiently toxic that it puts people off eating rice, that’s billions of people with a reduced food supply.

 

Aaaand I’m back to being angry again.

 

Better luck next time.