Technology

Crowdsourced Geospatial Data Will Mean A 'Seismic Shift'

sb admin — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 03:10:51 +0000

Crowdsourced Geospatial Data Will Mean A 'Seismic Shift'

Astronomy has long been dominated by expert amateurs but with geospatial data everywhere, thanks to widely available internet and smartphones, it is not just that directions that were once only available in a paper map are now updated on your phone in real time to account for traffic.

It is changing the relationships of science also. Crowdsourced scientific data will go from obscure folding protein folding of 15 years ago to relevance everywhere.

That evolution will continue to be driven by how the data is gathered.

Credit: Xiao Huang, Emory University

According to the authors, urban planning, transportation and environmental monitoring have been particularly impacted by crowdsourcing information, with “unprecedented real-time sights and community-driven perspectives, often leading to more responsive and adaptive decision-making processes,” thanks to user-generated data.

The same type of data is informing the commercial sector, as well, with better-informed customer-centric product development and marketing strategies. The significance of this shift lies in its empowerment of ordinary individuals to contribute to and influence fields traditionally dominated by experts and authorities. This democratization has not only diversified the types of data available but has also led to richer, more multifaceted insighted into human behavior and environmental changes.

Despite such a shift, however, the researchers said a comprehensive, overarching perspective to connect the various data sources, such as social media platforms, with the application domains, such as public health or remote sensing, is still needed.

“We aim to bridge this gap and provide a holistic view of the use and potential of crowdsourcing geospatial data,” said Emory University professor Xiao Huang. “In this study, we conduct an exhaustive analysis of the current efforts, possibilities and obstacles associated with crowdsourced geospatial data across two fundamental perspectives: human observations and Earth observations.”

Earth observations refers to the work of large entities, such as academic institutions or government bodies to record data, as opposed to human observations made on social media, for example. In coupling these two perspectives, the researchers identified seven specific challenges: ensuring data quality and accuracy; protecting data privacy; training and educating non-experts; sustaining data collection; navigating legal and ethical issues; and interpreting data. Their paper summarizes the current state of affairs in each area, as well as a potential pathway forward.

“Crowdsourced geospatial data has a critical role and vast potential in enhancing human and Earth observations,” Huang said. “This data, contributed by the general public through various platforms, offers high-resolution spatiotemporal observations that traditional methods might miss. This comprehensive review paper underscores the democratization of data collection and its implications for various sectors, emphasizing the necessity of integrating these non-traditional data sources for more comprehensive and nuanced understanding and decision making.”

The researchers identified three primary future directions: expanding the scope of geospatial crowdsourcing by harnessing the power of the crowd; pioneering a sustainable crowdsourcing ecosystem, from motivation to retention; and translating crowdsourced geospatial data into real-world impact.

sb admin Thu, 02/01/2024 - 22:10

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First Artificial Enzyme From Two Non-Biological Groups Created

sb admin — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 18:34:27 +0000

First Artificial Enzyme From Two Non-Biological Groups Created

Scientists have used an unnatural amino acid and a catalytic copper complex to create a new, artificial enzyme.

Enzymes are natural catalysts that operate under mild conditions. This makes them an attractive alternative for industrial chemical catalysis, which may require high temperature and pressure and toxic solvents or metals. However, not all chemical reactions can be catalyzed by natural enzymes. Modifying existing enzymes is one option but University of Groningen Chemistry Professor Gerard Roelfes believes that creating new enzymes could be another valuable option.

For this study, they added a copper complex to a protein that had no enzymatic properties and inserted an unnatural amino acid into the protein. Together with the copper, a side chain of the amino acid was able to catalyze the required reaction. This technique could replace standard chemical catalysis and make chemistry more energy-efficient and therefore cleaner.

The structure of the LmrR protein (green), with the two added catalytic groups binding to their substrates. Image: Reuben Leveson-Gower

"Natural enzymes evolved to catalyse specific reactions. Adapting requires a kind of devolving of the enzyme. That is why we pioneered the creation of new, unnatural enzymes," Roelfes says. In 2018, they created a non-enzymatic protein, the bacterial transcription factor LmrR, which could form non-biological hydrazone structures after the insertion of the unnatural amino acid p aminophenylalanine. This was the first enzyme created using an unnatural amino acid as a catalytic group.

This time, they used the same LmrR protein and added two abiological catalytic components to it: one was the same unnatural amino acid p aminophenylalanine and the other a copper-containing complex. Both can activate the reaction partners for the classic Michael addition reaction, which is widely used in organic chemistry to create carbon-carbon bonds. "But they both have to be in the right position to efficiently and selectively catalyse this reaction,' says Roelfes. "Just adding both components to a test tube would not work: 'In fact, they cancel each other out when they come too close."

The copper-containing complex attaches itself to the doughnut-shaped LmrR protein through supramolecular bonds. Its position is determined by the interaction with the protein. They determined where the p-aminophenylalanine should be inserted into the protein to create an active site. The catalytic part of this amino acid is an aniline side chain. They knew the potential utility of this aniline side chain for catalysis and envisioned that it would be possible to combine it with copper catalysis. When the novel enzyme was constructed, the adapted protein turned out to be a very selective catalyst for the Michael addition.

sb admin Mon, 02/10/2020 - 13:34

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AI Will Revolutionize DNA Evidence – Once We Can Trust The Results

sb admin — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 18:23:20 +0000

AI Will Revolutionize DNA Evidence – Once We Can Trust The Results

DNA evidence often isn’t as watertight as many people think. Sensitive techniques developed over the past 20 years mean that police can now detect minute traces of DNA at a crime scene or on a piece of evidence. But traces from a perpetrator are often mixed with those from many other people that have been transferred to the sample site, for example via a handshake. And this problem has led to people being wrongly convicted.

Scientists have developed algorithms to separate this DNA soup and to measure the relative amounts of each person’s DNA in a sample. These “probabilsitic genotyping” methods have enabled forensic investigators to indicate how likely it is that an individual’s DNA was included in a mixed sample found at the crime scene.

And now, more sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are being developed in an attempt to extract DNA profiles and try to work out whether a DNA sample came directly from someone who was at the crime scene, or whether it had just been innocently transferred.

But if this technology is successful, it could introduce a new problem, because it’s currently impossible to understand exactly how this AI reaches its conclusions. And how can we trust technology to provide vital evidence if we can’t interrogate how it produced that evidence in the first place? It has the potential to open the way to even more miscarriages of justice and so this lack of transparency may be a barrier to the technology’s use in forensic investigations.

Similar challenges emerged when DNA analysis software was first developed a decade ago. Evidence derived from DNA mixture software very quickly ran into challenges from defense teams (including that of OJ Simpson), who were concerned that the prosecution should demonstrate that the software was correctly validated.

How accurate were the results, and what was the known error rate? How exactly did the software work and could it accommodate defense hypotheses? Were the results really so dependable that a jury could safely convict?

It is a fundamental tenet of the law that evidence must be open to scrutiny. The jury cannot rely on bald assertions (claims made without evidence), no matter who makes them and what expertise they have. But the owners of the software argued it was their protected intellectual property and how it worked shouldn’t be made public.

A battle ensued that involved the use of novel court procedures to allow defense teams to privately examine how the software worked. Finally, the courts were persuaded that full access to the source code was needed, not least to test hypotheses other than those put forward by the prosecution.

AI can predict whether someone was actually at the site of a DNA sample. Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

But the software hasn’t completely solved the issues of DNA mixtures and small, degraded samples. We still don’t know definitively if the DNA in a sample came directly from a person or was transferred there. This is complicated by the fact that different people shed DNA at different rates – a phenomenon known as their “shedder status”.

For example, a sample taken from a murder weapon could contain more DNA from someone who hasn’t touched it than from the person who actually committed the murder. People have been charged with serious offences because of this.

Add the fact that DNA is transferred at different rates across different surfaces and in different environmental conditions and it may become almost impossible to know exactly where DNA in a sample came from. This problem of “transfer and persistence” threatens to seriously undermine forensic DNA.

As a result, experiments are underway to find ways of more accurately quantifying DNA transfer in different circumstances. And AI has the potential to analyse the data from these experiments and use it to indicate the origin of DNA in a sample.

But AI-based software has an even greater transparency problem than probabilistic genotyping software did, and one that’s currently fundamental to the way it works. The exact way the software works isn’t just a commercial secret – it’s unclear even to the software developers.

Transparency issues

AI uses mathematical algorithms to complete tasks such as matching a facial expression to a particular set of emotions. But, crucially, it is able to learn through a process of trial and error and gradually manipulates its underlying algorithms in order to become more efficient.

It’s this process of manipulation and change that isn’t always transparent. The software makes its changes incredibly rapidly according to its own indecipherable logic. It can derive fantastically efficient results but we can’t say how it did so. It acts like a black box that takes inputs and gives outputs, but whose inner workings are invisible. Programmers can go through a clearer development process but it is slower and less efficient.

This transparency issue affects many broader applications of AI. For example, it makes it very difficult to correct AI systems whose decisions display a racial or gender bias, such those used to sift through employee resumes, or to target police resources.

And the advent of AI-driven DNA analysis will add a further dimension to the problems already encountered. Defence lawyers could rightly challenge the use of this technology, even if its use is limited to intelligence gathering rather than providing prosecution evidence. Unless transparency problems are addressed at an early stage, the obstacles to AI use in the forensic field could prove insurmountable.

How might we go about tackling these challenges? One option may be to opt for the less efficient, constrained forms of AI. But if the purpose of AI is to do the tasks we are less capable of or less willing to do ourselves, then reducing efficiency may be a poor solution. Whichever form of AI we opt to use, within an adversarial system of criminal justice there must be the potential for review, to reverse-engineer all automated decisions, and for third parties to provide unambiguous validation.

Ultimately, this is not merely a technical issue, but an urgent ethical problem that goes to the heart of our criminal justice systems. At stake is the right to a fair, open and transparent trial. This is a fundamental requirement that must be addressed before the headlong rush of technological advancement carries us past the point of no return.

By Karen Richmond, Postdoctoral research fellow, University of Strathclyde . This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

sb admin Wed, 01/29/2020 - 13:23

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The Hubble Space Telescope Is Falling (Synopsis)

esiegel — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 05:09:00 +0000

The Hubble Space Telescope Is Falling (Synopsis)

"When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength." -Dalai Lama

Orbiting at hundreds of miles above Earth’s atmosphere, you’d think the Hubble Space Telescope would be safe and stable for a long time. But despite our definitions, Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t “end” and space doesn’t “begin” when we get 60 miles (100 kilometers) up. Instead, Earth’s atmosphere continues, albeit tenuously, for incredible distances, until it eventually merges with the solar wind. It’s the fourth (of five) layers that contains the Hubble Space Telescope: the thermosphere.

The layers of Earth's atmosphere, as shown here to scale, go up far higher than the typically-defined boundary of space. Every object in low-Earth orbit is subject to atmospheric drag at some level. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Kelvinsong.

Although each oxygen molecule might travel for a kilometer before striking another, the presence of these molecules is enough to slowly produce a drag on Hubble. Over the timespan of years and decades, it loses altitude and begins to fall. If we do nothing, then by the late 2020s to the mid-2030s, it will uncontrollably de-orbit on its own. Our greatest optical observatory will be lost, and there are no plans to save it.

The soft capture mechanism installed on Hubble (illustration) uses a Low Impact Docking System (LIDS) interface and associated relative navigation targets for future rendezvous, capture, and docking operations. The system’s LIDS interface is designed to be compatible with the rendezvous and docking systems to be used on the next-generation space transportation vehicle. Image credit: NASA.

Come learn how the Hubble Space Telescope is falling, what we can do, and why we need to act now.

esiegel Wed, 10/18/2017 - 01:09

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Get a Kickstarter-thingy and you might get enough funding by the end of the month.

I think there are always some old satellites worthy of saving.
So we should try to find a general solution.

Maybe NASA should try to design little remote controlled space drones that can fly to any satellite and attach itself to it
(imagine one or multiple drones attached to each satellite).

And imagine afterwards, movements of the satellite controlled by those attached drones.

They could be used to increase lifetime of old satellites, as well as they could take them down for a fast and controlled reentry (to keep Earth's orbit clean).

I felt the same way about Skylab, and waiting for the space shuttle to save it is what killed it. At this point they need to do some cost analysis and determine what the cost of putting another telescope in orbit (with more powerful instrumentation) versus saving the dated Hubble would be.

@Frank @2,
Sounds interesting but for a few possible complications.
Having a drone that could move other satellites around could be perceived (or actually be) as a weapon by other nations. It in theory sound like some of the anti-satellite weaponry I've read about.
The other problem is the orbits. You might have to have multiple drones set up for the different kinds of orbits, as you would probably spend a great deal of fuel just to match the same location in orbit while evading thousands of pieces of space junk.

@Elle H.C.,
The defunct space shuttle cost broke down around 450 million dollars a launch. I'm not sure you could reasonably expect that much in a month or two. Developing an entirely new launch system would put that figure in the billions of dollars.
.
Maybe the SpaceX people might make a publicity thing out of it.

@CFT #5

How big of a rocket would it take to push it into a safe position? There are regularly going 'supply' rockets into space, so I'm guessing that an extra package going along wouldn't cost that much.

I'm here indeed thinking of a Space X like enterprise to figure it all out. There are 7 billion people on this planet I'm sure you can set up anywhere a company that could figure out a solution. Even India and China are up there …

Now I might be exaggerating but I have the impression that students that finish a PhD these days have an understanding of technology and tools available that's ten times more advanced then 20 years ago, they could run a simulation on a laptop, by components for a fraction etc.

How far would you get for $100.000?

@Elle H.C.,
While I do like your ingenuity in thinking about ways to save Hubble, also consider the alternative of replacement. Sometimes keeping an older piece of technology ends up being far more expensive and less productive than originally thought, this is made more complicated because of the cost of sending one type of craft for replacement, versus another kind of craft for repair or orbit alteration might also be significant.

@CFT,

Well the James Webb Space Telescope is going to be launched around this time next year and it will be the one that takes science a step further, so Hubble could be sold as a kind of secondhand telescope to a bunch of enthusiasts.

Anyway they could also give a couple of billions to NASA to do the update, I don't care the money spend flows anyhow back into the economy.

I just checked and it appears that at 27,000 lbs a falcon 9 could launch a replacement (it can deliver 50,000 lbs to a low earth orbit. But the science community has determines that the Webb telescope with its different bands is a better use of funds. Further if this article is correct : http://www.iflscience.com/space/telescopes-ground-may-be-cheaper-hubble…
"When E-ELT observations start in 2024, the state-of-the-art correction for atmospheric distortion will allow it to provide images 16 times sharper than those taken by Hubble."

This does suggest that at least for wavelenghts that make it to the ground ground based scopes are better, the web being an example of a telescope that operates at wavelenghts blocked by the atmosphere.
So for example you would not replace Hubble in the visible light range but in ultraviolet, since the Webb telescope handles the infrared. (so it can detected strongly red shifted objects)

I'm with Elle. This won't be cheap and I would rather NASA spend their government money on the new stuff - so much to do and so much more to learn
Leave conservation to philanthropy. Or private. Surely a few of the fats cats could get their heart behind this.

We got bigger things to worry about. Like a 75% decline in insects over 30 years - now THAS a scary problem. Only stayed on the from page of CNN for half a day - Trumps rants seem to be more important.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/19/europe/insect-decline-germany/index.html

@Steve Blackband #10,
Relax. Just relax and put things into perspective with George Carlin.
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
.
The planet has been through a lot worse than us.
There is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine, it's the people who are in trouble.

5 NASA Photos That Changed The World

esiegel — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 05:00:50 +0000

5 NASA Photos That Changed The World

"Truth in science, however, is never final, and what is accepted as a fact today may be modified or even discarded tomorrow. Science has been greatly successful at explaining natural processes, and this has led not only to increased understanding of the universe but also to major improvements in technology and public health and welfare." -National Academy of Sciences

It’s no secret that peering out into the distant Universe is best done from space, just as looking at our entire world is best done from that same vantage point. For all of human history until the mid-20th century, this was an utter impossibility. But thanks to advances in rocketry, and how NASA managed to put space technology together, we now have views of everything from our home planet to the deepest recesses of the Universe that have taught us lessons we never could have imagined.

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Image credit: NASA / JPL.

From the most distant galaxies to a distant view of Earth, all the way back to the youngest baby picture of the Universe ever taken, NASA has been with us throughout every step of the journey. As we peer ever deeper into the abyss and put not just the cosmic story but our place in it into perspective, it’s important to periodically look back at the beautiful but science-rich images that helped shape our view of what all this is actually about.

The full UV-visible-IR composite of the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field; the greatest image ever released of the distant Universe. Image credit: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI).

Come see the five NASA photos that changed the world, and see if your list of five would be any different. (I bet it would be!)

esiegel Fri, 10/13/2017 - 01:00

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I have a bone to pick with the person that named Bill Anders Apollo 8 photo "Earthrise". They clearly did not understand the mechanics of the Earth-Moon system.

The Earth does not "rise" on the Moon. I wonder how many people realize that if you lived on the Moon the Earth would hang in the same spot in the sky eternally. It would go through phases like the Moon does, but it would never change its position.

The only reason that Anders saw the Earth "rise" is because his craft was orbiting the Moon at the time.

To refer to the Earth "rising" from the Moon is just wrong.

I don’t know about the other pictures, but “Earthrise” and the “Pillars of Creation” are #1 & #2 in my book!

Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first pictures of 'earth rise'. Sadly grainier BW was dismissed by color in the publics imagination, or by the fact it was taken by a man. So I guess the Apollo ones fit better in the 'change the world' category.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_1

Still, in terms of 'change the world', Galileos first sketches (OK not images but still) I think deserve to be at the very top of this list.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/2009/02/25/our-solar-system-galileos-…

Oh poop. I just realized you said NASA photos. OK, nix last comment.

Well, the Sun does not rise on the Earth either, if you want to be pedantic.

IMO all astro photo's ever taken are equally important. We learn our craft from seeing the results of a session with a camera-on-telescope. Next time, what we learned, gets applied to the new session. Progress. As technology improves, we get better again.
Yes, we have improved over time, but that is inevitable. Our nature to be better at what we do is always there.

An interesting story to note about the "pale blue dot" image. Sagan had to struggle to get approval to do that picture, because there was no science value in taking that image. And even when the picture was made, at first it seemed like a dud.. just one pixel among many. It was only after Sagan put it in context of his now famous paragraphs, that;s us.. the only home we've ever known.." did it start to sink in. And really sink in :)

Sure is difficult to pin it down to five, especially in terms of 'changed the world'.
This was also a big one for me and popular impact.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/576200main_s84-27017_fu…

As was this (even though, according to Armstrongs own autobiography, it wasn't the first footstep).
https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/138157main_footstep.jpg

And in terms of 'changed the world', tragically, this one.
http://a.abcnews.com/images/Technology/GTY_Challenger_Explosion_ER_1601…

Wahoo. My copy of Treknology arrives wednesday. Thats the rest of the week gone!!

Here is my nominee:
http://hubblesite.org/image/1415/news_release/2003-28

Double Comments of the Week #178: From Point Particles To The Very First Galaxies Of All

esiegel — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 05:48:31 +0000

Double Comments of the Week #178: From Point Particles To The Very First Galaxies Of All

“I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.” -Mewtwo, Pokemon (via Takeshi Shudo)

After a week of commenting technical difficulties here on Scienceblogs, Starts With A Bang!'s Comments of the Week series is back with a vengeance! I'm so stoked that it's October, because Treknology, comes out in just two weeks! (And yes, if you want an autographed, signed copy shipped from me directly, there will be an opportunity for all of you.) Star Trek: Discovery is out, and we'll be having reviews every Monday after an episode airs, and so you may have noticed this means the end of Mostly Mute Monday for a while. But don't fret; I've started "Five For Fridays," where we'll be doing a new series on five facts, questions, examples, or some other scientific "thing" each Friday going forward. That, and of course the new Starts With A Bang podcast is live, on the James Webb Space Telescope!

So with two weeks to make up for and all the comments now rescued, I'll just be taking a carefully curated selection of comments from each of the following articles, restricted to the ones where you bothered to comment, of course:

If matter is made of point particles, why does everything have a size? (for Ask Ethan),
5 Things the world needs from Star Trek: Discovery (beginning our Monday ST:DIS reviews),
New space telescope, 40 times the power of Hubble, to unlock astronomy's future,
How much fuel does it take to power the world?,
The Big Bang wasn't the beginning, after all,
5 Questions you were too embarrassed to ask about the expanding Universe (for Five For Fridays),
How can worlds that never get above freezing have liquid water? (for Ask Ethan),
Star Trek: Discovery, analysis and recap, Season 1, Episodes 1-2 (ST:DIS review),
It from Bit: is the Universe a cellular automaton? (by Paul Halpern),
The four ways the Earth will actually end,
LIGO-VIRGO Detects The First Three-Detector Gravitational Wave,
Is the inflationary Universe a scientific theory? Not anymore (says Sabine Hossenfelder), and
Five surprising facts about the first galaxies in the Universe (for Five For Fridays).

So no more delays; it's onto our comments of the week!

Trees are seen blown over in a parking lot as hurricane Irma moves through the area of Pembroke Pines, Florida on September 10, 2017. Making landfall as a Category 4 storm, the 2017 season, featuring both Harvey and Irma, is the first in recorded history where two Category 4 (or higher) storms have made landfall in the same year. Image credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

From Denier on the impact of hurricanes: "Hurricanes are going to happen no matter what we do, but Irma is perhaps the perfect case in point on the impact of economics. The Category 4 eye wall rolled right across Key West and they’re mostly fine. It came through in the early morning and by that night there were even a couple of bars on the island that opened. There is money in Key West and the structures are well built. There are keys that don’t have Key West’s wealth. On those Keys there are mobile home parks and unrenovated houses built before the 1986+ building codes were enacted. They didn’t fare so well. It wasn’t uncommon to see a newer looking home appear as if nothing happened sitting across the street from a scene of utter devastation. Down in the Caribbean there is even less wealth and many of those islands look like they were hit by an atomic bomb."

We have now had three category five hurricanes this Atlantic hurricane season, all of which did extraordinary damage to United States territories: Harvey, Irma, and Maria. The season isn't over yet, either, but hopefully the worst of the damage is. There is really no amount of building that can save you in the worst-case scenario. Portions of Puerto Rico were prepared for 27 feet of flooding; those parts received 80 feet from the onslaught of Maria.

No, you can't look at one particular event and say, "this was the work of climate change." But you can look at what happened and say, "what can we do to repair the damage, to aid the affected, to rebuild in a more resilient fashion, to reduce the potential damage in the future, and to learn the lessons from the havoc that has been wreaked." That is my big hope for what can come out of all of this, but I have little faith that hope will come to fruition in the near future in this country.

The energy levels and electron wavefunctions that correspond to different states within a hydrogen atom, although the configurations are extremely similar for all atoms. The energy levels are quantized in multiples of Planck's constant, but even the lowest energy, ground state has two possible configurations depended on the relative electron/proton spin. Image credit: PoorLeno of Wikimedia Commons.

From Another Commenter on why matter takes up space: "The Pauli Exclusion Principle goes a long way towards explaining why matter occupies space."

This is true in one particular sense: it explains why atoms are the sizes that they are, and why multiple atoms, bound together, remain the sizes that they are. By preventing two electrons (a great example of a fundamental fermion) from occupying the same quantum state, the Pauli Exclusion Principle prohibits atoms from "shrinking" together or overlapping too much.

But the differing forces, both nuclear and electromagnetic (and to a lesser extent, gravitational), are responsible for why individual protons and neutrons, or single atoms themselves, have the sizes that they do. Yes, Pauli is an important component, but even without it, the building blocks of matter-as-we-know-it would still occupy the same volume they're observed to occupy.

From macroscopic scales down to subatomic ones, the sizes of the fundamental particles play only a small role in determining the sizes of composite structures. Image credit: Magdalena Kowalska / CERN / ISOLDE team.

From Kasim Muflahi on whether point particles would necessarily be black holes: "I agree with the implication of the question i.e. it implies that electrons, quarks etc. shouldn’t be described as zero-volume points because they have mass; and mass is quantised so that it can’t exist in a zero volume point. If it did, it’d be a black hole."

That is not necessarily true. Quarks and electrons are fundamental as far as we can measure, but there is no rule (as you incorrectly posit) that prevents these particles from being as small as the Planck scale, which is some 10^-35 meters. Our observations can constrain them down to scales of around 10^-18 or 10^-19 meters; colliders show that if they do have a physical size, it is smaller than that. We can also infer an interaction cross-section, but that is not equivalent to a physical size according to the rules of quantum mechanics.

Could they be point particles? According to the quantum rules of the Universe, as best as we understand them, yes they could. Your intuition is no substitute for the actual physics.

Ethan Siegel's upcoming new book, Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive. Image credit: Quarto / Voyageur Press, CBS / Paramount, and E. Siegel.

From Steve Blackband on my upcoming book, Treknology: "Looking forward to your Trek book. You know you will have a vociferous audience. Ive only been to one Trek conference and all i can say is that these guys are crazy!
No doubt you will do better than that awful and childish Shatner book on Trek tech. However I will be most interested in how you compare with Lawrence Krauss, of whom I am a big fan."

We're all a little crazy; I take that in a good way!

The book, Treknology, is starting to get its first reviews and so far they're very positive. I've also been doing a whole slew of interviews and podcasts about it, and there's a lot of buzz, as you'd expect, around all things Star Trek right now. But I am curious how you feel this new book compares with Krauss' now-classic The Physics of Star Trek, especially since I was a senior in high school when it came out (IIRC) and I read it. Of course, a lot has happened in the past 20+ years, and many of the technologies featured in Star Trek, including TNG, DS9, and Voyager, were simply undeveloped back in the 1990s, but are well on their way now!

It's a fantastic illustration of how science doesn't end, but progresses, and so much becomes possible in terms of how humanity can benefit when it does.

An artist's conception (2015) of what the James Webb Space Telescope will look like when complete and successfully deployed. Note the five-layer sunshield protecting the telescope from the heat of the Sun. Image credit: Northrop Grumman.

From Patrick Sweetman on the upcoming NASA flagship missions: "I suppose these things take a long time to get off the ground, but we haven’t even hoisted the James Webb Telescope yet."

These things take more than "a long time" to get off the ground. NASA, with the way its budget currently works, gets approximately one flagship mission per decade for astrophysics. In the 1990s, that was Hubble. In the 2000s, we didn't get one, owing to the legacy of "faster, better, cheaper," which gave us two (faster and cheaper) out of the three (it wasn't better). In the 2010s, we're getting James Webb; in the 2020s, it'll be WFIRST. There are a number of candidates for the 2030s, and LUVOIR is one of the finalists and perhaps the most ambitious, exciting, and expensive one.

But I've been sarcastically looking at so much of what's been proposed recently, rolling my eyes and thinking to myself, "why don't you dream a little smaller, if that's even possible." LUVOIR may be the first mission I've seen come down the pipeline, with the exception of Big Bang Observer (which would be a quartet of LISAs at different points around Earth's orbit, which is being floated for the 2050s at the earliest), that actually seems like an ambition worthy of humanity's dreams. I like it.

Also, even though the launch date got bumped, don't be down on Webb. The "five year life" is like how Opportunity (still roving, by the way) was supposed to be a 90 day mission. They've got enough onboard coolant for the mid-IR instrument to last a decade, and even past that point, the near-IR instruments on Webb could propel it into a second decade. Since L2 servicing for LUVOIR will be ideal (if not mandatory), there's no reason why the Webb wouldn't make a great testbed for it. The rewards of a refueled and serviced JWST could be astounding!

Reactor nuclear experimental RA-6 (Republica Argentina 6), en marcha. As long as there's the right nuclear fuel present, along with control rods and the proper type of water inside, energy can be generated with only 1/100,000th the fuel of conventional, fossil-fuel reactors. Image credit: Centro Atomico Bariloche, via Pieck Darío.

From John, quoting me and responding on nuclear energy: "“… Is it only our fears of nuclear disaster that prevents us from using our current technology to better the world for humanity for generations to come?’

I fear that is true. If only it were not so!"

It's easy to point to disasters like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, and showcase the highly publicized failures that demonstrate the dangers of nuclear power used irresponsibly, while the potential of using reactor fuel to generate nuclear weapons plays on some of humanity's greatest fears.

But fear is the great mind-killer when it comes to policy, and reason is the only solution. There are scientific solutions to nuclear energy without the possibility of meltdowns, without the waste problems, and without the nuclear weapons danger. If we cared about our world enough to make it so, we could switch away from fossil fuels and onto nuclear power within a decade. Alas, fear has carried the day up until the present, with far less than 10% of the world's energy coming from nuclear. This has the potential to change... if we can all agree. Again, I'm not optimistic about that anytime soon, but the world is changing, and that's a "crisitunity" if there ever was one.

Even though inflation may end in more than 50% of any of the regions at any given time (denoted by red X’s), enough regions continue to expand forever that inflation continues for an eternity, with no two Universes ever colliding. Image credit: E. Siegel.

From Denier on the beginning of the Universe: "Do they have a theory on why it didn’t happen earlier? Why didn’t the Big Bang happen at the beginning? Why wait? What was it about expanding space that didn’t allow a Bang then later did allow a Bang?"

What we can say about inflation is that, by its nature, it wipes out any information (as far as our observable Universe is concerned) that pre-existed before the final 10^-33 seconds (or so) of inflation. It's only those tiny, last moments that leave any sort of information imprint on our observable Universe at all. There are many models that are viable of what happened prior to those final moments of inflation, including:

that inflation was eternal to the past,
that there was a singularity in the past, and only a small region was inflating, but that inflating region took over in short order,
that inflation was a consequence of our Universe "rejuvenating" from a prior state,

and many others. Different regions of space will see inflation end at different times, but they are forever lost to us; we can only access what's physically, causally connected to us, and all we see is all we get.

Different curvatures for two-dimensional surfaces. Image credit: Shashi M. Kanbur at SUNY Oswego.

From Jim Paige on what flat space actually means: "Ethan, I know that the universe is “flat,” but when I think of that description I picture something like a very thin pancake or sheet of paper.

Since we live in a universe with 3 “travel” dimensions & time, combining to form space-time, that seems very different than “flat” to me.

I haven’t been able to get a handle on the explanation of what a flat universe really means. Could you explain the answer to me?"

I'm going to take you down a dimension, because if you want to visualize the full three dimensional space, you'd need to have experience in four dimensions to be outside of it. So let's instead think of a sheet of paper as "flat," which works just fine for two dimensions. If you took a sheet of paper shaped like a sphere, that would be "positive curvature," while if you had a sheet of paper that was shaped like a saddle, there'd be "negative curvature." The think you can ask is what happens to parallel lines, which you can ask in any number of dimensions that's two or more.

If you have positive curvature, parallel lines will eventually meet, which is why lines of longitude all meet at the poles.
If you have zero curvature (or perfect spatial flatness), the parallel lines will never meet, always remaining equidistant.
If you have negative curvature, parallel lines diverge, getting farther apart the farther away you move.

We have used this technique and light from the CMB, the Big Bang's leftover glow, to measure our spatial curvature. It's 0, to a precision of ~10^-2, the best we've ever measured. If we can measure down to about 10^-5 or 10^-6, we should be able to get down to the actual curvature predicted by inflation. Interesting!

The warrior that Burnham kills is given the traditional Klingon death ritual... and then predictably used as a political tool to start a war. Image credit: Jan Thijs/CBS © 2017 CBS Interactive.

From Sinisa Lazarek on the start of Star Trek: Discovery: "the first two episodes were more of an intro into this world (although they don’t show anything of either the klingon world and state of afairs or federation, only brief hints), then they are “get to know the crew” episodes. Sort of like game of thrones but on steroids.. ok, here are the characters, by the end of the 2nd episode most of them will die.. But in the sneak peak after 2ns episode you get to learn that the whole show will more or less revolve around Burnham and the war with klingons."

Well, that's certainly what the start of the show is about, but I'm not entirely sure that we're truly in for "War Trek" as I've feared. The Federation is flawed; the Klingon empire clearly has those who disagree with T'Kuvma. (Don't forget that when it came to the initial warrior killed by Burnham, that warrior's brother would not give into T'Kuvma's demagoguery.) After all, even though they call him "T'Kuvma the Unforgettable," he's never mentioned by name in any other Star Trek series. Clearly, he's been forgotten.

And that alone should be enough to give hope; if interstellar species can learn from their failures to create a more perfect future, perhaps we can, too.

Conway's Game of Life is a popular and very simple algorithm for encoding the evolution of a system, leading to complex but stable/quasi-stable patterns. Image credit: MrJavaFrank / YouTube.

From Frank on why the Universe must be a cellular automaton: "IMHO universe/reality must be a Cellular Automata Quantum Computer operating at Planck scale."

Be very, very careful when you attempt to apply your login and intuition to how the Universe ought to behave. The "rules" that govern the Universe are neither intuitive nor necessarily logical to us; all we can do is ask nature "what are you doing" and listen and try to make sense of it. When we add ourselves into the equations, that's when we most easily are led astray.

You did post an interesting set of thoughts, though; I don't necessarily agree with them, but I don't necessarily disagree fully, either.

A collision between two large, rocky bodies in space can be catastrophic for one or both of them. This has happened to Earth before, and will no doubt happen again. But the end of the Earth? That's happening even if something like this never does. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

From Bennett Smith on this blog: "This is a general comment to readers, not a comment on this article in particular. I want to say that Dr. Siegel’s articles are simple enough for me as a layman to understand, but complex enough to be meaningful and challenging. People who use the comments section to post attacks on Dr. Siegel are jerks and should be ashamed of themselves. If they so adamantly disagree with Dr. Siegel, they should create their own blogs. But it’s much easier to disparage than it is to create. I for one hope that Ethan continues his blog for years to come, because I enjoy them and look forwarding to reading them."

Well, wow. I very rarely get a comment this kind and generous directed towards me. It made me feel very good, so thank you for saying, Bennett. People will do what they do for their own internal reasons, and I will likely never know what those reasons are, fully. But this out-of-nowhere kindness means a lot to me, and so thank you.

All inner planets in a red dwarf system will be tidally locked, with one side always facing the star and one always facing away, with a “ring” of Earth-like habitability between the night and day sides. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

From Naked Bunny with a Whip on the ultimate locking: "Earth’s rotation won’t be tidally locked to the sun before it becomes a white dwarf, will it? Actually, can it ever be tidally locked to the sun with the moon orbiting it?"

The Earth will be more strongly locked to the Moon than to the Sun, and so the Earth-Moon lock wins. When the Moon spirals away sufficiently from the Earth, the Earth will co-orbit the Moon with a period of 47 days. As our Sun loses mass (after it becomes a white dwarf), our orbit will be pushed out, will take approximately 2-3 years, and the tidal forces on our world will be only about 20% of what they are today due to the Sun. The Moon will cause a permanent deformation in the world.

Interestingly, if we were at the right distance, we could have a perfect locking, where the Moon would always be located at the L2 Lagrange point, but alas, nature didn't give us that setup.

The noise (top), the strain (middle), and the reconstructed signal (bottom) in all three detectors. Image credit: The LIGO and VIRGO scientific collaborations.

From Sinisa Lazarek on the significance of the latest gravitational wave detection: "Looking at the picture in the Forbes article (where all three detectors/signals are shown), Livingston signal does look like an actual signal. Hanford looks so/so, but Virgo looks just like noise. Why are they so different? On the other hand, why does a waveform look different in all three detectors if it;s the same signal?"

Well, three things:

The top row shows the signal-to-noise ratio. Yes, in Livingston, it's off the charts, peaking at 14. But a SNR greater than 1 you can do something with. At Hanford, it got up to 7, which is robust. At Virgo, it "only" got up to 4.5 (which is still good), an incredible feat considering that Virgo is only about at a third the operating sensitivity of either LIGO detector.
They are all so different because the gravitational wave has a specific planar orientation as it passes through Earth, and each detector occupies a different two-dimensional plane because the Earth is round! So Livingston is more favorable configured for this particular wave than either Hanford or Virgo (in Italy).
And if you look at the bottom row, you can clearly visually see the goodness-of-fit in all three detectors; it isn't "just noise" even to your naked eye.

So... pretty incredible.

Also, there's a candidate for the snarkiest comment of the week in here:

Way to go, NBwaW.

Also, as Michael Kelsey notes, Virgo has only 3 km arms, while each LIGO detector has 4 km arms, which makes Virgo less sensitive in principle.

To those who are doubters, skeptics, trolls, etc., however you choose to self-define, as long as you obey the rules of conduct on this blog, you are welcome. But that does not entitle you to a response from me. Remember that.

The quantum fluctuations that occur during inflation do indeed get stretched across the Universe, but the larger feature of inflation is that the Universe gets stretched flat, removing any pre-existing curvature. Image credit: E. Siegel / Beyond The Galaxy.

And finally, from CFT on an actual quality comment on Sabine's article deriding inflation: "I think Sabine Hossenfelder says it precisely and elegantly:
“It is this abundance of useless models that gives rise to the criticism that inflation is not a scientific theory. And on that account, the criticism is justified. It’s not good scientific practice. It is a practice that, to say it bluntly, has become commonplace because it results in papers, not because it advances science.”"

There are a great many successes that inflation has had, and I think Sabine is being grossly unfair to cosmic inflation by defending Steinhardt et al.'s perspective as thoroughly as she does. I think she is dismissive of a great amount of scientifically robust predictions that inflation has given us that have been borne out by observation, and I think I will have no choice but to write a follow-up piece for later this week.

However, I think Sabine was right about the creation of useless model after useless model, which is a hallmark of "not even science" anymore. It was part of -- interestingly enough -- why I wrote that String Theory was not even a scientific theory two years ago, and her defense of string theory as science is completely inconsistent with her criteria for inflation. But you do not have to agree with me 100% of the time, and Sabine is just as much a physicist (if not more!) than I am, and is entitled to her opinion and I am proud to represent that on my platform, even if I don't agree.

But there's much more exciting stuff to come, and with that said, have a great start of October and I hope you're looking ahead to more science and even more fun as Halloween approaches!

esiegel Sun, 10/01/2017 - 01:48

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IMHO what should be accepted as the size of a quantum particle must be its Compton wavelength. (See below.)

I had also said I think BHs are must be made of Planck particles. I want to clarify that what I think maybe happening in BHs is, when they form, particles (neutrons?) get compressed, their Compton wavelength gets smaller and smaller, until their wavelength/size drops to Schwarzschild radius, then they turn into Planck particles.

From Wikipedia:
""A Planck particle, named after physicist Max Planck, is a hypothetical particle defined as a tiny black hole whose Compton wavelength is equal to its Schwarzschild radius.""

Or maybe original particles get disintegrated into multiple Planck particles, or maybe original particles get destroyed and new Planck particles form from the available energy.

Also if above is really correct about how BHs form, that implies when physicists collide quantum particles with higher and higher energies, and see upper limit for true size of each particle drops smaller and smaller, what must be really happening is, as particles collide they are in effect getting compressed, so their Compton wavelength drops according to collision energy (but physicists interpret that as meaning Compton wavelength and (true) size of a particle are unrelated concepts).

Ethan:
"I’m going to take you down a dimension, because if you want to visualize the full three dimensional space, you’d need to have experience in four dimensions to be outside of it."
What?? Not so. Anyone can directly observe 3-D space by just looking around here in the real world. What is an "experience in four dimensions" anyway? Space (volume) is completely described by three axes. You write nonsense.

" If you have positive curvature, parallel lines will eventually meet, which is why lines of longitude all meet at the poles."

http://mathopenref.com/parallel.html
"Parallel lines remain the same distance apart over their entire length. No matter how far you extend them, they will never meet."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_(geometry)
In geometry, parallel lines are lines in a plane which do not meet; that is, two lines in a plane that do not intersect or touch each other at any point are said to be parallel."
Ethan:
" If you have zero curvature (or perfect spatial flatness), the parallel lines will never meet, always remaining equidistant."
(One out of three statements correct.)
Ethan:
" If you have negative curvature, parallel lines diverge, getting farther apart the farther away you move."

As with convergence, if they diverge they are not, by definition, parallel.
You really should read Kelley Ross's paper on the Ontology and Cosmology of Non-Euclidean Geometry and quit spouting the standard mainstream confusion based on imaginary geometry with no referent in the real world.

Thanks for the explanation about the Earth/Moon/Sun rotation. I'm always happy to see it when my intuition is roughly correct, though the reality is always more complex (and better quantified).

The reason I asked is that Larry Niven's short story "One Face" popped into my head as I was finishing your article. It didn't seem like the resolution of that story would be physically possible.

There is an adage that goes:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair

In reference to Ethan's comment about Sabine's inconsistency with Super stings, I've noticed that almost everyone that reacts strongly to 'letting them go' is invested heavily in them, usually professionally for many years. I can easily understand why this would make a person not want to acknowledge something isn't working out when they have so many years of their life invested in an idea. That said, when your theory can not falsified (it's true no matter what) it isn't science anymore, it's belief. There is no way around this, brutal as it may seem.

@Frank #1: You wrote, "IMHO what should be accepted as the size of a quantum particle must be its Compton wavelength." Sure, and that _is_ what we call "size" in the very low energy limit. But if you restrict yourself to zero energy, then you miss an awful lot of actual, real-world physics.

So how do you measure the "size" of a quantum entity? Well, you could try using a "ruler" or "calipers": Constrain it to a finite region, and when you can't squeeze any more (like a micrometer on a ball bearing), then you know the size. But I'm sure you know, Frank, as well as I do what happens if you do that: constraining position bumps up the momentum (motion), and doing so enough can change the properties of the entity you're constraining (excitation energies, internal states, even stuff like pair production).

So instead, in the real world, we measure the size of quantum entities by scattering: throw something at what you want to measure and see how it bounces. This works extremely well for charged entities. It's how Rutherford figured out that the gigantic (10^-10 m) atom has a really tiny (10^-14 m) hard little core in the middle, with pretty much empty space around it.

How did he figure that out? And how did he get a size? By looking at the _pattern_ (angular distribution) of scattering for a charged particle (alpha, +2) off a charged sphere (atom or nucleus). For EM, we can calculate what that distribution should be (it's an undergraduate homework problem): for a perfect point charge, the distribution is proportional to 1/sin^4. For a spherical charge, that distribution is modified with a cut-off set by the radius of the sphere.

So we can shoot charged projectiles in a beam at charged targets, measure the angular distribution, and extract the radius of the target. If you do that with electron-electron or electron-proton scattering, you don't really get an interesting result. The e-e repulsion is so strong that you don't really get to probe small radii. But at much higher energies, the beam has enough kinetic energy to get into the target field much closer to the center, and you can start to look for deviations from 1/sin^4.

For electrons on protons at medium energies (a few GeV electron beam on hydrogen), we see deviations from 1/sin^4 that are consistent with a hard sphere of radius about 10^-15 m (1 fm). At even higher energies, we start to probe _inside_ that sphere, and interact with the proton's constituents in such a way as to produce new secondary particles, not just scattering the electron.

But for electron-electron scattering, even at the very highest energies (135 GeV for each electron in a collision) probing as close as we can get to the charges shows _NO_DEVIATION_ from 1/sin^4 angular scattering. The beam energy allows us to translate that result into a maximum possible size (if the size were larger, then we'd see deviations).

That upper limit for the sphere an electron's charge must be enclosed in is currently no larger than 10^-18 m (the same is true for the size of the constituents in a proton). Maybe the electron's charge really _is_ that size. Maybe it's really down at the Planck scale, or maybe it's a true mathematical point (which is what we use in the Standard Model, because it makes the maths easier :-).

We don't know. All we know is that, at the highest precision we can measure, the electric field of an electron _looks_like_ it is a perfect 1/r^2 field coming from a point at the center.

@ Ethan
" but I’m not entirely sure that we’re truly in for “War Trek” as I’ve feared."

After watching E03 just now.. I think we're in for Dark Trek.

@CFT#5
Again I agree.
This was right to the point : "...when your theory can not falsified (it’s true no matter what) it isn’t science anymore, it’s belief."

It seems that most theoretical physics ( with an emphasis on math) and cosmology 'these days' falls into that category.

Evidence?... What evidence? Playing with toy models in a closed room... mostly it seems.

I think Sabine was right about the creation of useless model after useless model, which is a hallmark of “not even science” anymore.

I somewhat disagree. All this model-building is, in one sense, an attempt to come up with different hypotheses in the hopes that one of them will turn out to be useful, predictive, etc. As with many things in science, you don't know how useful the result will actually be until you get it. Now the vast majority, if not all, of these models will end up being useless. With our perfect hindsight, we see those useless things and think 'what a waste' - but with are extremely limited foresight, we have no idea which future model will be in the useless category.

Sub-fields of science often go into a 'hypothesis exploration' phase like this experimental testing is hard to come by, for two reasons. One, because it's a comparatively cheap and easy activity to do while you're waiting for those terribly difficult, lengthy, and expensive experiments to be developed and performed. And two, because one possible payoff of a new good hypothesis might be cheaper, faster, easier ways to test amongst the candidates.

In short, sometimes in science you have a good idea of which frogs are secret princes and which ones aren't. Those are the good times. But other times you have no idea which - if any - frogs are princes. In those bad times, progress may boil down to doing a lot of kissing. Inflation theory right now is going through a 'kiss a lot of frogs and hope for a prince' phase.

Let's hear it for Paul Feyerabend!

Ask Ethan: Why don't we build a telescope without mirrors or lenses?

esiegel — Sat, 30 Sep 2017 05:06:44 +0000

Ask Ethan: Why don't we build a telescope without mirrors or lenses?

"Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera." -Yousuf Karsh

Every time you shine light through a lens or reflect it off of a mirror, no matter how good it is, a portion of your light gets lost. Today’s largest, most powerful telescopes don’t even simply have a primary mirror, but secondary, tertiary, even quaternary or higher mirrors, and each of those reflections means less light to derive your data from. As CCDs and other digital devices are far more efficient than anything else, why couldn’t we simply replace the primary mirror with a CCD array to collect and measure the light?

This diagram shows the novel 5-mirror optical system of ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Before reaching the science instruments the light is first reflected from the telescope's giant concave 39-metre segmented primary mirror (M1), it then bounces off two further 4-metre-class mirrors, one convex (M2) and one concave (M3). The final two mirrors (M4 and M5) form a built-in adaptive optics system to allow extremely sharp images to be formed at the final focal plane. Image credit: ESO.

It seems like a brilliant idea on the surface, and it would, in fact, gather significantly more light over the same collecting area. True, CCDs are more expensive, and there are technical challenges as far as applying filters and aligning the array properly. But there’s a fundamental problem if you don’t use a mirror or lens at all that may turn out to be a dealbreaker: CCDs without lenses or mirrors are incapable of measuring the direction light is coming from. A star or galaxy would appear equally on all portions of your CCD array at once, giving you just a bright, white-light image on every single CCD pixel.

This photo, taken at the Astrium France facility in Toulouse, shows the complete set of 106 CCDs that make up Gaia's focal plane. The CCDs are bolted to the CCD support structure (CSS). The CSS (the grey plate underneath the CCDs in this photo) weighs about 20 kg and is made of silicon carbide (SiC), a material that provides remarkable thermal and mechanical stability. The focal plane measures 1 × 0.5 metres. Image credit: ESA's Gaia / Astrium.

It’s a remarkable idea, but there’s a good physical reason why it won’t pan out. For the foreseeable future, we still need optics to make a telescope!

esiegel Sat, 09/30/2017 - 01:06

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Ethan,
There are new tech I think you don't know about:
"http://newatlas.com/caltech-lensless-camera/50182/"
"http://newatlas.com/bae-systems-flat-lens/31715/"
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased-array_optics"

What about mixing incoming photons with laser light and recording the interference pattern? I mean, a whole-sky hologram.

"Placing a CCD array at the prime focus .... a technique that's been in use for well over 100 years.".

Perhaps a little less than that. The CCD was invented in 1969.

What is Biotech?

finchtalk — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 20:51:40 +0000

What is Biotech?

The biotechnology (biotech) industry is incredibly diverse. Recently, I wrote about the size of the biotech industry, which is, of course, related to how biotechnology is defined. As a strict definition, biotechnology is the use of biology to turn raw materials into useful products. However, the act of developing a biotech product requires many enabling technologies, reagents, and services that form today's modern industry.

The term biotechnology was first coined in 1919 by Károly Ereky, a Hungarian agricultural engineer, who foresaw a time when biology could be used for turning raw material into useful products. The emerging field of synthetic biology represents the natural progression of this idea as our ability to synthesize gene sequences and engineer biochemical pathways and even entire microorganisms in rational designs for a myriad of purposes from speciality chemicals, to food, to energy improves.

While biotechnology products such as bread, wine, and beer, have been around for millennia, the earliest biotechnology companies, as exemplified by Genentech, were founded in the late 1970s after the initial discoveries of restriction enzymes and the realization they could be harnessed for use in DNA cloning. Many of these companies focused on producing human therapeutic proteins, like human insulin, in cost-effective ways. To carry out this work, these companies also needed reagents such as restriction enzymes that were in themselves biotech products. Hence, an ecosystem of companies developed into a larger industry.

That industry today is diverse and includes companies with therapeutic missions; technology focused companies that provide analytical instrumentation, systems for automation, reagents for assays and production; companies that focus on diagnostics for determining appropriate therapeutic and medical interventions; service organizations that specialize in using advanced technology as well as providing clinical trial, regulatory, and other experience to groups; and software companies that specialize in different kinds of informatics. Some companies are very large aggregates of many specialties and others, such as startups and early commercial ventures, are narrowly focused on a specific disease, application, or technology.

For students gaining hands on training at one of the more than 100 Bio-Link.org programs throughout the United States, or in degree programs in colleges and universities, the biotech industry provides many opportunities. Basic training in preparing solutions, working with DNA and proteins, performing immunoassays, and working with lab equipment provide a common set of skills that fulfill many job requirements. As the Bio-Link programs also emphasize the importance of record keeping in laboratory notebooks, such students are well-suited for positions in industry. In addition to general lab skills, Bio-Link programs may also offer specialized training that is suited to local industry needs.

The Biotech-Careers.org web site, with its database of over 5600 (and growing) biotechnology -companies and employers, provides an overview of the industry. Each biotechnology-company in the database has one or more assigned terms as a way to describe a business' core activity. These terms can be used to filter companies, based on what they do, to understand opportunities for educational objectives, trends for instruction, and job prospects for those seeking employment. The data can also be used to characterize the industry in general and local (by state) ways.

Presently, nearly 400 terms are used to describe the industry. When the top 100 terms are visualized in a word cloud (above), where the size of a term indicates how many companies have that term, several themes can be be observed. A large number of companies (667) are engaged in small molecule development. Who knew small molecules could be so big? A majority of these companies are traditional pharmaceutical companies, but as these companies can also have biotech products they are part of the biotechnology industry. The second largest category are medical device companies. These are in biotechnology because, like pharmaceutical companies, some device companies also make biotechnology products, and some devices are made from biological materials. Other terms in the word cloud emphasize the ecosystem nature of the biotechnology industry. Antibodies, for example, can be reagents in diagnostic assays. They can also be therapeutics. Contract services and research are activities that support other companies.

Finally, these terms show the vast diversity of the industry. As noted Biotech-Careers.org describes the industry with nearly 400 terms. When the frequency of each term is examined, one sees that many terms are used only a few items; 279 terms are associated with 10 or fewer companies, and 115 terms are associated with only single companies. This long-tail appears because biotechnology is concerned with solving new problems by translating research discoveries into useful products to benefit society. As such the biotechnology field is always evolving–just like biology.

finchtalk Fri, 09/29/2017 - 16:51

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Future Farms Will Be Run By Robots

gregladen — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 09:45:51 +0000

Future Farms Will Be Run By Robots

I have a love-hate relationship with farmers. I have a great deal of respect for the enterprise and for those who dedicate their lives to it. But, I also become annoyed at the culture in which modern American farming embeds itself. And, I don't feel a lot of reticence talking openly about that.

Having done plenty of farming myself, I don't feel the need that so many others do to be extra nice to farmers out of lack of understanding. I know when the farmers complain about too little or too much rain, they are studiously ignoring the fact that if it is harder to plant or harvest, they make out like bandits with the price of their product. Farmers talk about how hard that life is, and yes, it is indeed very hard, but they seem to not mention that a typical large scale farm these days (as most farms are) is a multi tens of millions of dollars business sitting on enormously valuable land. Whenever things go really wrong with farms in the US, they get help. As it is now, we have some of the most bone-headed agricultural policies ever invented mainly to keep farmers happy, because so many US Congressional districts span vast farmland and little else.

And what does America get back for giving farmers so much help in producing a product that we have no choice but to buy? We get a lot of crap. Red counties are farm counties. Red districts give us a Republican House. Farmers mainly backed trump, even though Trump policies are almost all bad for almost all farmers.

As a brief aside, and to illustrate the disconnect between farmer culture and actual farmer self interest, I can give you this example.

Have you ever heard of Mexican cheese? Or, more to the point, have you ever been to Mexico, and then, while there, had some cheese? That cheese might have been made in Mexico, but they don't really make cheese in Mexico. Most of the cheese eaten there is imported. From where? From Wisconsin. Nowhere else. Why? Because of Clinton's trade policies. Clinton made a bunch of sweet deals for American farmers and that was one of them. Rural farmers in Wisconsin voted for Trump, and Trump was the guy who was going to end NAFTA (and still might, who knows?). NAFTA keeps Wisconsin dairy and cheese in business. Get rid of NAFTA, Wisconsin becomes the West Virginia of cheese. Why? Because Mexico would rather buy its cheese from South America because it is cheaper, and the moment the Wisconsin dairy industry is not propped up by NAFTA, the free market takes over and California ends Wisconsin agriculture.

Look around the world. Farmers are taking it in the neck in many other countries, often because of the very climate change so many farmers pretend to believe is a hoax. But not in countries that take care of their farmers. America takes care of its farmers. And at every opportunity, the farmers screw over America.

Therefore, perhaps it will be with great pleasure that Modern Civilization advances to the next level. Robot farmers.

Hands Free Hectare is a project run by Harper Adams University and Precision Decisions Inc. The idea is to develop robots that will plant, tend, and harvest crops.

Now, of course, there will still be farmers, but fewer. So few, perhaps, that most people who are all "oh, I'm a poor farmer, living out in the farmlands, help me help me," can stop whinging and move to the city. A small number of technologists, mostly the children of former Mexican migrant workers because immigrants or the children of recent immigrants or migrants are the only people in America who still have ambition, will learn the technology and run the farms and, we hope, keep the robots happy and busy.

Anyway, HFHa, as it calls itself, has been at this a while, and the latest iteration involved a major harvest of barley without humans touching anything but buttons and software. HFHa robot expert Martin Abell working for Precision Decisions, noted “This project aimed to prove that there’s no technological reason why a field can’t be farmed without humans working the land directly now and we’ve done that. We achieved this on an impressively low budget [and] we used machinery that was readily available for farmers to buy; open source technology; and an autopilot from a drone for the navigation system.”

Notably, much of the large equipment used was decades old, with the new technology added to it.

Here is the site for Hands Free Hectare, which is a British enterprise.

I for one welcome our new farmer-robot overlords.

gregladen Tue, 09/26/2017 - 05:45

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NAFTA's impact on Wisconsin dairy is overstated. There was a preexisting federal law that set prices based on distance from some place in Wisconsin.

MikeN #1:

Yes - Eau Claire I believe.

Government price fixing at its finest.

It hurts Wisconsin farmers and helps California farmers (who get to charge much more for their milk).

Totally unfair in the modern world, with refrigerated vehicles.

They should get rid of that law and let the market decide what the price of milk is.

Mexico is second behind Canada in importing Wisconsin products, and it takes in over half of the annual "cheese product" from Wisconsin. The market has been growing, and analysts in WI lay it to provisions in NAFTA, contrary to the naysayers.

A bigger issue is what removing NAFTA agreements could do to the general economy in WI, where a good percentage of the workforce is tied to the dairy industry. Big hits to dairy could translate to big losses -- not a simple thing to predict, however.

This is even more complicated by the absurdly high subsidies paid to (dairy and non-dairy) farmers to keep prices low. (The same issue applies to subsidies paid to fossil fuel suppliers.)

Dean I was speaking only of cheese. Wisconsin exports a lot of things to Canada, some of which is agricultural, and some of that is dairy, and some of that is cheese. Wisconsin makes about 3 billion pounds of cheese a year, and over half of that goes to Mexico. A bunch goes elsewhere in the US. Canada does not take over half of Wisconsin cheese. If so, that has changed in just a few months and it is not recorded anywhere obvious.

But yes, you are correct in that we can expand the argument without damaging it at all, to include all dairy from Wisconsin or all agriculture from Wisconsin, and we find that NAFTA, which applies to both Canada and the US, keep Wisconsin from becoming West Virginia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ0JGjKYVdU

" Wisconsin makes about 3 billion pounds of cheese a year, and over half of that goes to Mexico."

That's what I said. My primary point was to counter the idea that NAFTA did not influence this, because that isn't what the data says.

The secondary point was that the system of subsidies simply makes the problem worse.

they seem to not mention that a typical large scale farm these days (as most farms are) is a multi tens of millions of dollars business sitting on enormously valuable land. /blockquote>
Yup, and they screw over smaller farmers at every opportunity.
Many of the large scale "farmers" now wear suits and live in mansions, while sending others out to do the work.
Subsidies have majorly screwed up what food production and farming should earn, as well as costs to consumers. Government subsides severely distort food costs - and why are we subsidizing products like high fructose corn syrup anyway?? They are very damaging to health.
ugh

What is a small farm?

>It hurts Wisconsin farmers and helps California farmers

Required to charge more -> less sales.

Automation in agricultural has allowed cities to expand well beyond what was possible before the age of fossil fuels.

I just finished picking some pears and table grapes from our little orchard (vs a row crop farm). Existing vineyards and orchards in hilly areas were not designed for automated picking.

It’s been 25 years since I spent time in Beijing so I don’t know if the new generation of technical, and governmental, elites still think the cultural revolution was worthwhile in terms of ensuring the lives of the poor are considered in developing plans/strategy.

Ref point 10 and 11 https://creativeconflictwisdom.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/strategy-by-any…

How much fuel does it take to power the world?

esiegel — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 05:01:15 +0000

How much fuel does it take to power the world?

"In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. 10 percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads." -Stewart Brand

Arguably the greatest advance of humanity — and the cause of the greatest increase in our quality of life — in the past few centuries has been the widespread availability of electrical energy. It powers our homes, our industries, our automobiles, our places of business and more. Our world runs on energy, with the world using upwards of 155,000 TeraWatt-hours annually. That’s a huge amount of energy, and it requires a huge amount of fuel. But must it?

World energy consumption by part of the world, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015. Image credit: Gail Tverberg / Our Finite World.

If we were to power the world entirely with coal, oil, or natural gas, it would take billions of tonnes of fuel each year to make it happen. If we switched to nuclear, those “billions” drop to thousands. And if we could switch to nuclear fusion or even antimatter, the amount of fuel plummets even further. Looking at the numbers, it makes no sense not to switch. Is it only our fears of nuclear disaster that prevents us from using our current technology to better the world for humanity for generations to come?

A fusion device based on magnetically confined plasma. Hot fusion is scientifically valid, but has not yet been practically achieved to reach the 'breakeven' point. Image credit: PPPL management, Princeton University, the Department of Energy, from the FIRE project.

I’m not 100% sure.

esiegel Wed, 09/20/2017 - 01:01

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environment

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Testing. My replies won't post on the Discovery comments.

Ethan,

"... Is it only our fears of nuclear disaster that prevents us from using our current technology to better the world for humanity for generations to come?"

Alas, I fear it is! If only it were not so!

Ethan,

"... Is it only our fears of nuclear disaster that prevents us from using our current technology to better the world for humanity for generations to come?'

I fear that is true. If only it were not so!

"... Is it only our fears of nuclear disaster that prevents us from using our current technology to better the world for humanity for generations to come?"

I fear that it is. If only it were not so!