Jun 22 2021

Drinking Any Type of Coffee (Even Decaf) Associated With Reduced Risk of Chronic Liver Disease

Drinking coffee that is caffeinated (ground or instant) or decaffeinated is associated with a reduced risk of developing chronic liver disease and related liver conditions, according to a study published in the open access journal BMC Public Health.

Researchers at the Universities of Southampton and Edinburgh, UK, found that drinking any type of coffee was associated with a reduced risk of developing and dying from chronic liver disease compared to not drinking coffee, with the benefit peaking at three to four cups per day.

The authors studied UK Biobank data on 495,585 participants with known coffee consumption, who were followed over a median of 10.7 years to monitor who developed chronic liver disease and related liver conditions.

Of all participants included in the study, 78% (384,818) consumed ground or instant caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee, while 22% (109,767) did not drink any type of coffee. During the study period, there were 3,600 cases of chronic liver disease, including 301 deaths. Additionally, there were 5,439 cases of chronic liver disease or steatosis (a build of up fat in the liver also known as fatty liver disease), and 184 cases of Hepatocellular carcinoma, a type of liver cancer.

Compared to non-coffee drinkers, coffee-drinkers had a 21% reduced risk of chronic liver disease, a 20% reduced risk of chronic or fatty liver disease, and a 49% reduced risk of death from chronic liver disease. The maximum benefit was seen in the group who drank ground coffee, which contains high levels of the ingredients Kahweol and cafestol, which have been shown to be beneficial against chronic liver disease in animals.

Instant coffee, which has low levels of Kahweol and cafestol was also associated with a reduced the risk of chronic liver disease. While the reduction in risk was smaller than that associated with ground coffee, the finding may suggest that other ingredients, or potentially a combination of ingredients, may be beneficial.

Dr. Oliver Kennedy, the lead author said: “Coffee is widely accessible and the benefits we see from our study may mean it could offer a potential preventative treatment for chronic liver disease. This would be especially valuable in countries with lower income and worse access to healthcare and where the burden of chronic liver disease is highest.”

The authors caution that, as coffee consumption was only reported when participants first enrolled in the study, the study does not account for any changes in the amount or type of coffee they consumed over the 10.7-year study period. As participants were predominantly white and from a higher socio-economic background, the findings may be difficult to generalize to other countries and populations.

The authors suggest that future research could test the relationship between coffee and liver disease with more rigorous control of the amount of coffee consumed. They also propose validating their findings in more diverse groups of participants.

Reference: “All coffee types decrease the risk of adverse clinical outcomes in chronic liver disease: a UK Biobank study” 21 June 2021, BMC Public Health.
DOI: 10.1186/s12889-021-10991-7

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Jun 21 2021

Anti-aging Protein in Red Blood Cells Helps Prevent Mental Decline, Poor Memory and Hearing Deficits

Mice lacking ADORA2B in their blood exhibit accelerated aging, including poor memory and hearing deficits.

Research conducted by Qiang et al has discovered a link between a protein in red blood cells and age-related decline in cognitive performance. Published in the open access journal PLOS Biology on June 17th, 2021, the study shows that depleting mouse blood of the protein ADORA2B leads to faster declines in memory, delays in auditory processing, and increased inflammation in the brain.

As life expectancies around the world increase, so are the number of people who will experience age-related cognitive decline. Because the amount of oxygen in the blood also declines with age, the team hypothesized that aging in the brain might be naturally held at bay by adenosine receptor A2B (ADORA2B), a protein on the membrane of red blood cells which is known to help release oxygen from the blood cells so it can be used by the body. To test this idea, they created mice that lacked ADORA2B in their blood and compared behavioral and physiological measures with control mice.

The team found that as the mice got older, the hallmarks of cognitive decline — poor memory, hearing deficits, and inflammatory responses in the brain — were all greater in the mice lacking ADORA2B than in the control mice. Additionally, after experiencing a period of oxygen deprivation, the behavioral and physiological effects on young mice without ADORA2B were much greater than those on normal young mice.

Thus, aging in the brain is naturally reduced by ADORA2B, which helps get oxygen to the brain when needed. Further testing will be needed to determine whether ADORA2B levels naturally decline with age and whether treatment with drugs that activate ADORA2B can reduce cognitive decline in normal mice.

Dr. Xia, the leader of the study, commented “Red blood cells have an irreplaceable function to deliver oxygen to maintain bioenergetics of every single cell within our body. However, their function in age-related cognition and hearing function remains largely unknown. Our findings reveal that the red blood cell ADORA2B signaling cascade combats early onset of age-related decline in cognition, memory and hearing by promoting oxygen delivery in mice and immediately highlight multiple new rejuvenating targets.”

Reference: “Erythrocyte adenosine A2B receptor prevents cognitive and auditory dysfunction by promoting hypoxic and metabolic reprogramming” by Qingfen Qiang, Jeanne M. Manalo, Hong Sun, Yujin Zhang, Anren Song, Alexander Q. Wen, Y. Edward Wen, Changhan Chen, Hong Liu, Ying Cui, Travis Nemkov, Julie A. Reisz, George Edwards III, Fred A. Perreira, Rodney E. Kellems, Claudio Soto, Angelo D’Alessandro and Yang Xia, 17 June 2021, PLOS Biology.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001239

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Jun 20 2021

Highly Chirped Laser Pulses Defy “Conventional Wisdom”

An illustration of the optical fiber Kerr resonator, which Rochester researchers used with a spectral filter to create highly chirped laser pulses. The rainbow pattern in the foreground shows how the colors of a chirped laser pulse are separated in time. Credit: University of Rochester illustration / Michael Osadciw

University of Rochester researchers describe first highly chirped pulses created by a using a spectral filter in a Kerr resonator.

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was shared by researchers who pioneered a technique to create ultrashort, yet extremely high-energy laser pulses at the University of Rochester.

Now researchers at the University’s Institute of Optics have produced those same high-powered pulses—known as chirped pulses—in a way that works even with relatively low-quality, inexpensive equipment. The new work could pave the way for:

Better high-capacity telecommunication systems
Improved astrophysical calibrations used to find exoplanets
Even more accurate atomic clocks
Precise devices for measuring chemical contaminants in the atmosphere

In a paper in Optica, the researchers describe the first demonstration of highly chirped pulses created by a using a spectral filter in a Kerr resonator—a type of simple optical cavity that operates without amplification. These cavities have stirred wide interest among researchers because they can support “a wealth of complicated behaviors including useful broadband bursts of light,” says coauthor William Renninger, assistant professor of optics.

By adding the spectral filter, the researchers can manipulate a laser pulse in the resonator to widen its wavefront by separating the beam’s colors.

The new method is advantageous because “as you widen the pulse, you’re reducing the peak of the pulse, and that means you can then put more overall energy into it before it reaches a high peak power that causes problems,” Renninger says.

The new work is related to the approach used by Nobel laureates Donna Strickland ’89 (PhD) and Gerard Mourou, who helped usher in a revolution in the use of laser technology when they pioneered chirped pulse amplification while doing research at the University’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

The work takes advantage of the way light is dispersed as it passes through optical cavities. Most prior cavities require rare “anomalous” dispersion, which means that the blue light travels faster than red light.

However, the chirped pulses live in “normal” dispersion cavities in which red light travels faster. The dispersion is called “normal” because it is the much more common case, which will greatly increase the number of cavities that can generate pulses.

Prior cavities are also designed to have less than one percent loss, whereas the chirped pulses can survive in the cavity despite very high energy loss. “We’re showing chirped pulses that remain stable even with more than 90 percent energy loss, which really challenges the conventional wisdom,” Renninger says.

“With a simple spectral filter, we are now using loss to generate pulses in lossy and normal dispersion systems. So, in addition to improved energy performance, it really opens up what kinds of systems can be used.”

Other collaborators include lead author Christopher Spiess, Qiang Yang, and Xue Dong, all current and former graduate research assistants in Renninger’s lab, and Victor Bucklew, a former postdoctoral associate in the lab.

“We’re very proud of this paper,” Renninger says. “It has been a long time coming.”

Reference: “Chirped dissipative solitons in driven optical resonators” by Christopher Spiess, Qian Yang, Xue Dong, Victor G. Bucklew and William H. Renninger, 10 June 2021, Optica.
DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.419771

The University of Rochester and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health supported this project with funding.

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Jun 20 2021

NASA Struggles to Fix Failure of Hubble Space Telescope’s 1980s Computer

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched by the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. Avoiding distortions of the atmosphere, Hubble has an unobstructed view peering to planets, stars, and galaxies, some more than 13.4 billion light-years away. Credit: NASA

NASA continues to work on resolving an issue with the payload computer on the Hubble Space Telescope. The operations team will be running tests and collecting more information on the system to further isolate the problem. The science instruments will remain in a safe mode state until the issue is resolved. The telescope itself and science instruments remain in good health.

The computer halted on Sunday, June 13. An attempt to restart the computer failed on Monday, June 14. Initial indications pointed to a degrading computer memory module as the source of the computer halt. When the operations team attempted to switch to a back-up memory module, however, the command to initiate the backup module failed to complete. Another attempt was conducted on both modules Thursday evening to obtain more diagnostic information while again trying to bring those memory modules online. However, those attempts were not successful.

The payload computer is a NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer-1 (NSSC-1) system built in the 1980s that is located on the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling unit. The computer’s purpose is to control and coordinate the science instruments and monitor them for health and safety purposes. It is fully redundant in that a second computer, along with its associated hardware, exists on orbit that can be switched over to in the event of a problem. Both computers can access and use any of four independent memory modules, which each contain 64K of Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) memory. The payload computer uses only one memory module operationally at a time, with the other three serving as backups.

Launched in 1990, Hubble has contributed greatly to our understanding of the universe over the past 30 years.

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Jun 19 2021

Georges Lemaître, who blew up the universe

Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître was a Belgian Catholic priest, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain.

Born: July 17, 1894, Charleroi, Belgium

Died: June 20, 1966, Leuven, Belgium

Known for: Expansion of the universe, Big Bang, Hubble’s law

Education: Jesuit College Charleroi, Catholic University of Leuven, Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Interests: Physics, mathematics, astronomy, theology

Achievements: First expresses the idea of the Big Bang as a theory of the origin of the universe, which he calls the hypothesis of the primary atom; two years before Edwin Hubble’s article, he first proposed the theory of an expanding universe, widely and erroneously attributed to Hubble.

A journalist suggests that only three people understand the General Theory of Relativity, and Arthur Eddington, who gave the first proof of it, asks: “Three? Me and Einstein – but, for God’s sake, who is the third? ” The third is Georges Lemaître, a Belgian who developed the idea of an expanding universe and laid the foundation of modern cosmology with the theory of the Primary Atom, the Cosmic Egg or the Big Bang.

Georges Lemaître was born in 1894 in Charleroi, Belgium. From an early age he combined a rare interest in science, technology and religion. He graduated from a Jesuit college, studied engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven and continued with physics, mathematics, astronomy, theology.

He received his doctorate in mathematics in 1920, graduated in theology three years later, was ordained a priest, and went to Cambridge, Eddington, to study cosmology, astronomy, and mathematics. In the United States he became a doctor of science and returned as a professor in Leuven. The circle is closing, it’s time for a big scientific explosion.

In 1927, Lemaître published an article entitled “Homogeneous Universe with Constant Mass and Growing Radius, Taking into account the Radial Velocity of Extragalactic Nebulae.” In other words, the universe is expanding without adding new mass, and the “nebulae” are disappearing.

The expanding universe was predicted by the Theory of Relativity, but Albert Einstein himself rebelled against it. However, Lemaître formulated what became known as Hubble’s law two years later and even calculated the famous Hubble constant.

Due to the misfortune of being born in a small country, however, Lemaître published the theory in a prestigious Belgian publication that no one in the world reads. Except for Eddington. He wrote a commentary for the Royal Scientific Society and called Lemaître’s work a “brilliant solution to the basic problems of cosmology,” but in the meantime Hubble came up with the idea independently and is now known as its author.

Lemaître’s original theory was published in English in 1931, but due to lack of space, the mathematics proving the speed of galaxy scattering were shortened. The suspicions that this was done on behalf of Hubble have not been proven.

But there is something else – Lemaître’s scientific merits are neglected because he is a Catholic priest and the scientific world is suspicious. Things change as Lemaître takes the next giant step with the theory of the Primary Atom and the explosion that gives birth to space, time, and the entire known universe.

In 1931, Lemaître was invited to England and put forward a new theory – the Big Bang. The idea is that now that the galaxies are moving away, they were very close to each other. By logic, in the beginning all matter must be collected in a point and mathematics confirms it.

The idea is so astonishing that it provokes either complete admiration or complete denial, but gradually conquers minds. To do this, however, some questions must first be answered.

Why exactly are we the center from which galaxies flee? Answer – we are not, every point in the universe is a center. We will see a decent illustration of this if we draw dots on a balloon and inflate it. And how does a meek atom suddenly explode? It is not clear, there is a point of singularity beyond which we cannot look. But there is an explanation in what is called a spontaneous explosion of the atom. For example, radium has a half-life of 1270 years, and when they expire, sparks (atoms) begin to fly out of it.

At first, many mocked the theory. According to the BBC in 1949, astronomer Fred Hoyle contemptuously called it The Big Bang Theory – but the name remains. In addition to professional jealousy, Lemaître is suspected of wanting to confirm the idea of the divine beginning of the world. Remember – God snaps his fingers and light comes out.

Nothing like this is in the mind of this worthy man, and he proved it in 1951, when Pope Pius XII wrote in a proclamation: “Lemaître’s theory provides a scientific confirmation of the Catholic faith.” And Lemaître replied that the theory was neutral, and that the pope had better not interfere in cosmology.

Then the relic radiation is discovered, which should have remained from the early hot phase of the universe, if his theory is correct. And in 1966, Georges Lemaître could safely go to the god of cosmology. Or in heaven.

The European transport spacecraft ATV5 “Georges Lemaître” (named after him) was the last in a series of European spacecraft from the ATV program. The first of them, “Jules Verne”, was at the station in 2008, reminds TASS. Russian and American ships continued to supply the ISS.

On January 28, 2015, ATV5 “Georges Lemaître” separated from the International Space Station (ISS) on February 14 and was subsequently submerged in the Pacific Ocean.

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Jun 18 2021

And the wind has a holiday

World Wind Day is an international event that is celebrated annually on June 15. The tradition first began in Europe in 2007 and took on a global dimension two years later.

The wind sector is also the fastest growing sector in many regions of the world. In more than 75 countries around the world, wind farms are in operation, generating energy from clean and renewable sources. Thousands of people are involved in producing wind energy, but for many people wind energy is a mystery.

World Wind Day is an occasion to visit wind farms, get answers from experts, take part in the event and understand everything about wind energy. This day is a great opportunity to remind people around the world that a real energy revolution can be achieved in terms of the way electricity is produced, saving billions of tonnes of CO2 and creating many new jobs.

World Wind Day is also a day to discover the work that the world’s pioneers have done in this direction. More than 75 countries around the world have wind farms that produce energy from a clean and renewable source.

Because they require no fuel, wind farms have less impact on the environment than many other forms of power generation. Wind farms have, however, been criticised for their visual impact and impact on the landscape. Typically they need to be spread over more land than other power stations and need to be built in wild and rural areas, which can lead to “industrialization of the countryside”, habitat loss, and a drop in tourism. Some critics claim that wind farms have adverse health effects, but most researchers consider these claims to be pseudoscience (wind turbine syndrome characterized as such). Wind farms can interfere with radar, although in most cases, according to the US Department of Energy, “siting and other mitigations have resolved conflicts and allowed wind projects to co-exist effectively with radar”. (“WINDExchange: Wind Turbine Radar Interference”. WINDExchange. Retrieved 19 June 2019)

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Jun 18 2021

Mission to Venus: Europe’s large-scale return to space

The European Space Agency has announced huge plans for the next three decades

The last few years have really looked exciting when it comes to space exploration. Only in 2021 did the United States and China land their spacecraft on Mars, where they are actively conducting missions.

Even the United Arab Emirates became the first Arab state to send a mission to the Red Planet and even make large-scale plans to build a Martian city.

As for the moon, NASA plans to send a man there again soon, while Russia and China want to build a whole habitable base together.

For their part, private companies are also showing increasing interest in space and are in themselves a competition reminiscent of that between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic are building their own spaceships, and Bezos himself plans to fly among the stars next month.

Two weeks after Bezos leaves Amazon, he will fly aboard his own rocket.

And while America and Asia seem to be making more and more progress in space exploration, Europe somehow seems to be lagging behind. The latest large-scale missions of the European Space Agency (ESA) are the Venus Express, which ended in 2014, and the Mars Express, which is expected to be completed by the end of next year.

However, this will soon change, as ESA recently announced large-scale plans for the next three decades until 2050.

It is a multi-component Voyage 2050 strategy, “and its first missions are expected to launch at the beginning of the next decade. Most of them will be of the so-called L-Class, which means that they are large-scale and high-priority.”

“The plan is the result of the enormous efforts of the scientific community and the teams of our committee,” Fabio Favata, head of ESA’s Strategy, Planning and Coordination Office, said in an official statement. “Voyage 2050 has launched and will maintain Europe’s place in the forefront of space science for decades to come.”

The last missions of the current program until 2025 “Cosmic Vision” are currently in a different stage of development. The Cosmic Orbiter solar satellite has already been sent into space, while other special ARIEL, Euclid and Plato telescopes will be launched by the end of the decade.

Voyage 2050’s main focus will be on three areas: studying the giant moons in the solar system, observing exoplanets near our galaxy, and studying the evolution of the first structures in the early universe.

This will include studying the moons of Jupiter, Neptune and Saturn. Some of them are thought to have subterranean oceans, and hence the possibility of life.

ESA plans to return to Venus and launch the EnVision mission, which is worth 610 million euros, in 2031.

Compared to Mars, Venus is much less frequently visited, and so far only European, Russian, Japanese and American missions have reached it. The planet will increasingly attract our attention due to the observed climate change of Earth-like exoplanets.

Scientists will try to find the answer to the question why the atmosphere of Venus is so poisonous at the moment, provided that it once had quite similar characteristics to those of our planet. Once upon a time there was even water, but over time it disappears, carbon dioxide slowly begins to suffocate the atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect of the planet turns it into a real oven.

So far, more than 20 missions have been sent there, and thanks to them we know that the air of Venus is not exactly air. It consists of 97% carbon dioxide, which is so dense that it is about 100 times thicker than the Earth’s atmosphere. It also has a temperature of 462 degrees Celsius.

All this makes sending devices there a real challenge, because the atmosphere itself literally eats away at any material known to man.

Recently, the Venus Express finds evidence that Venus once had oceans and volcanoes. EnVision’s job will be to confirm this data and check for active volcanoes. as the available technology will allow a significantly deeper look at the composition of the local atmosphere and will also make it possible to look for possible traces of the presence of hot lava.

The latter can be done using a special radar provided by NASA. In fact, EnVision will follow two US missions that will depart for Venus a little earlier. VERITAS will make a detailed topography, while DAVINCI + will go deep into the planetary atmosphere and reach the surface itself.

Together, the three missions will complement each other and provide many answers for scientists about the different destinies of Venus and Earth.

And there will also be an opportunity to talk again about the European Space Agency as a leading factor in space research.

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Jun 13 2021

A building material from banana peels and algae have been created

The development is the work of specialists from the Institute of Industrial Sciences at the University of Tokyo.

Japanese scientists have created a new building material, for the production of which they used food waste, the Daily Mail writes.

The development is the work of specialists from the Institute of Industrial Sciences of the University of Tokyo.

For the new building material, scientists have used banana peels, cabbage leaves, algae, and other food waste. Initially, they were dried to a powdery state, after which they were mixed with water and subjected to strong heat, adds BTA.

The tests performed show that the obtained material exceeds the target bending strength and does not yield to the strength of the concrete.

Scientists also used salt and sugar to create the new building material, but they did not affect its strength.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo are squeezing cabbage, fruit peels, and other food scraps into sturdy building material.

The witch in Hansel and Gretel’s tale may have been something about her edible house and attractiveness to children. A research team from the Institute of Industrial Sciences at the University of Tokyo has discovered how to make durable, healthy, and still edible building materials from food.

Sprinkled cabbage leaves, seaweed, and banana peels may not be as exciting as gingerbread and pastries, but they could be part of a sustainable construction product recipe.

“Our goal was to use ordinary seaweed and food scraps to build materials that are at least as strong as concrete,” said Yuya Sakai, a specialist in sustainable building materials and lead author of an upcoming material study, on Tuesday. food waste, we also wanted to determine if the recycling process has affected the taste of the original materials. ”

The team is testing a hot pressing technique commonly used to compress wood dust into building materials. Instead of wood, they are vacuum dried and then sprayed with a variety of food waste, including onion and fruit peels, as well as cabbage.

“The processing technique consists of mixing the food powder with water and spices, then pressing the mixture into a mold at high temperature,” the university said. All products obtained, except for the pumpkin skin, passed the team’s stress tests.

Researchers have found a solution to the pumpkin problem. “We also found that Chinese cabbage leaves, which produce material more than three times stronger than concrete, can be mixed with a weaker pumpkin material to provide effective strengthening., said Kota Machida, project associate.

The molded materials remained edible, although the team did not say whether they were difficult to chew. Even leaving the materials exposed to the air for four months did not change the taste and there was no problem with decay.

The development of potentially plasterable materials is still at an early stage, but maybe one day you could build your own home from them. This will lead the witch’s house to the modern age.

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Jun 10 2021

The Solar System is our neighbourhood

The Solar System is humanity’s space neighborhood, where all the lives of all humans will take place. Everyone knows about the Sun and the planets, but rarely does anyone know any more details about it. Learning more about it means learning more about humanity’s origin. That is one of the reasons why humans have always set their eyes up to the sky.

The scientific revolution began with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium where he explained that the Sun is at the center of the Solar System. But the Sun is not only the center of the Solar System, it is the Solar System, as it contains more than 99,75% of the total mass in the Solar System. There are billions of other bodies in the Solar System such as comets, asteroids, and the 8 planets, but all these only accounts for the remaining 0,25% of the total mass.

Since Copernicus’s discovery, it is well established that all these bodies rotate around the Sun, and the further it gets from the Sun, the slower they rotate. But, where is the end of the Solar System? There’s no clear answer and it depends on the definition used.

The end of the Solar System can be considered to be located at the limit of the heliosphere, this is, the region where the radiation of the Sun is stronger than the radiation of the rest of the stars. In this case, the Solar System’s edge is at 100 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun or 15000 million kilometers. In other words, if you drove your car at 300km/h, it would take you 5700 years to reach there. The most impressive fact is that 2 human-made spacecraft have already crossed that border: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

The other way to define the Solar System is the region over which the gravitational force of the Sun is the biggest force over a body. In this case, the limit is much further, at 50000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. At this point lies the Oort cloud, a cloud of billions of icy comets surrounding the Sun.

In this vast region, there are billions of bodies rotating in ellipses around the Sun, and all of them were formed through the same process. Before the Sun even existed, 4500 million years ago, there was a nebula. A nebula is like a giant cloud in space. Because of a distant supernova, which is the explosion of a star, the nebula was extremely compressed causing most of the hydrogen in the nebula to come together. The mass of hydrogen was so big that its gravity started attracting more hydrogen, and the friction between all the particles raised the temperature and pressure until it was high enough for nuclear fusion to take place. This moment is the birth of the Sun.

The rest of the bodies in the Solar System were created similarly by the particles that were not attracted by the Sun. The lighter elements were pushed far by the Sun’s radiation and so the gas giants were formed: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The heavier elements, on the other side, were stuck closer to the Sun forming the rocky planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Finally, asteroids and comets were formed the same way, but they did not manage to attract enough material to grow to the size of a planet. Most asteroids are located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and they can’t for bigger bodies because of Jupiter’s gravitational pull. Similarly, comets usually come from Kuiper’s belt, a region beyond Neptune, and the main difference with asteroids is that they are made of ammonia, methane, and water ice instead of rock and metal.

In the beginning, there were trillions of smaller bodies that got gravitationally attracted to each other and started growing in size through a process called accretion, forming only a handful of protoplanets and all the asteroids and comets. During this time, the Solar System was extremely dangerous with millions of astronomical collisions, as that’s how bodies would grow in size. Finally, all the protoplanets either crashed with each other forming the planets currently present in the Solar System or became their moons.

Before the nebula was compressed, it was a 3-dimensional amorphous cloud, however, the Solar System is now mainly flat with all bodies rotating in the same dimension. The reason behind this is the conservation of angular momentum, one of the fundamental properties of the universe. This is the same reason why ice-skaters pull their arms closer to spin faster.

When collisions started, bodies were rotating around the Sun in every direction, similar to how we represent an atom (although that’s not what an atom looks like). However, all the collisions ended up canceling out the velocities in the directions perpendicular to the rotation plane, only leaving bodies to move in that direction, giving it the actual shape.

The size of the Solar System is almost incomprehensible on a human scale, however, when zooming out, it is nothing but a speck of dust in the vastness of our galaxy, the Milky Way; and our Sun becomes one star between billions.

Until not long ago, the Solar System was the only system with known planets, giving it a special value. However, in 1992, the first exoplanet was discovered (an exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star that is not the Sun) removing the “special” tag from our Solar System. And ever since then thousands of more planets have been found, with the most recent estimates putting the total number of planets in the Milky Way somewhere between 100-400 billion.

This opens up the debate about life somewhere else in the universe. Are we alone in the universe?

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Jun 4 2021

NASA’s SpaceX Dragon Resupply Mission Launches – Cargo Includes Water Bears, Squid, Solar Panels

NASA’s 22nd SpaceX cargo resupply mission launches. Credit: NASA TV

The latest SpaceX Dragon resupply spacecraft is on its way to the International Space Station after launching at 1:29 p.m. EDT Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, bearing more than 7,300 pounds of science experiments, new solar arrays, and other cargo.

The spacecraft launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy. It is scheduled to autonomously dock at the space station around 5 a.m. Saturday, June 5, and remain at the station for about a month. Coverage of arrival will begin at 3:30 a.m. on NASA Television, the agency’s website, and the NASA app.

This 22nd contracted resupply mission for SpaceX will deliver the new ISS Roll-out Solar Arrays (iROSA) to the space station in the trunk of the Dragon spacecraft. After the Dragon docks to the space station’s Harmony module, the robotic Canadarm2 will extract the arrays and astronauts will install them during spacewalks planned for June 16 and 20.

Among the science experiments Dragon is delivering to the space station are:

These immature bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes) are part of UMAMI, an investigation that examines whether space alters the symbiotic relationship between the squid and the bacterium Vibrio fischeri. Credit: Jamie S. Foster, University of Florida

Symbiotic squid and microbes in microgravity

The Understanding of Microgravity on Animal-Microbe Interactions (UMAMI) study examines the effects of spaceflight on the molecular and chemical interactions between beneficial microbes and their animal hosts. Microbes play a significant role in the normal development of animal tissues and in maintaining human health. “Animals, including humans, rely on our microbes to maintain a healthy digestive and immune system,” says UMAMI principal investigator Jamie Foster. “We do not fully understand how spaceflight alters these beneficial interactions. The UMAMI experiment uses a glow-in-the-dark bobtail squid to address these important issues in animal health.”

The bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes, is an animal model that is used to study symbiotic relationships between two species. This investigation helps determine whether spaceflight alters the mutually beneficial relationship, which could support development of protective measures and mitigation to preserve astronaut health on long-duration space missions. The work also could lead to a better understanding of the complex interactions between animals and beneficial microbes, including new and novel pathways that microbes use to communicate with animal tissues. Such knowledge could help identify ways to protect and enhance these relationships for better human health and well-being on Earth as well.

Cell Science-04 flies tardigrades, or water bears, to the space station for a study seeking to identify the genes involved in its adaptation and survival in high stress environments. Credit: Thomas Boothby, University of Wyoming

Water bears take on space

Tardigrades, known as water bears due to their appearance under a microscope and common habitat in water, are tiny creatures that tolerate environments more extreme than most life forms can. That makes them a model organism for studying biological survival under extreme conditions on Earth and in space. In addition, researchers have sequenced the genome of the tardigrade Hypsibius exemplaris and developed methods for measuring how different environmental conditions affect tardigrade gene expression. Cell Science-04 characterizes the molecular biology of short-term and multigenerational survival of water bears, identifying the genes involved in adaptation and survival in high stress environments.

The results could advance understanding of the stress factors affecting humans in space and support development of countermeasures. “Spaceflight can be a really challenging environment for organisms, including humans, who have evolved to the conditions on Earth,” says principal investigator Thomas Boothby. “One of the things we are really keen to do is understand how tardigrades are surviving and reproducing in these environments and whether we can learn anything about the tricks that they are using and adapt them to safeguard astronauts.”

A cotton seedling for the TICTOC investigation prepared for flight. TICTOC studies how root system structure affects cotton plant resilience, water-use efficiency, and carbon sequestration during the critical phase of seedling establishment. Credit: Simon Gilroy, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Producing tougher cotton

Cotton plants that overexpress a certain gene show increased resistance to stressors, such as drought, and yield 20% more cotton fiber than plants without that characteristic under certain stress conditions. This stress resistance has been tentatively linked to having an enhanced root system that can tap into a larger volume of soil for water and nutrients. Targeting Improved Cotton Through On-orbit Cultivation (TICTOC) studies how root system structure affects plant resilience, water-use efficiency, and carbon sequestration during the critical phase of seedling establishment. Root growth patterns depend upon gravity, and TICTOC could help define which environmental factors and genes control root development in the absence of gravity.

Cotton is used in a variety of consumer products from clothing to bed sheets and coffee filters, but the effects of its production include significant water use and intensive use of agricultural chemicals. “We are hoping to reveal features of root system formation that can be targeted by breeders and scientists to improve characteristics such as drought resistance or nutrient uptake, both key factors in the environmental impacts of modern agriculture,” says principal investigator Simon Gilroy. Improved understanding of cotton root systems and associated gene expression could enable development of more robust cotton plants and reduce water and pesticide use.

On-the-spot ultrasound

Butterfly IQ Ultrasound demonstrates use of a portable ultrasound in conjunction with a mobile computing device in microgravity. The investigation collects crew feedback on ease of handling and quality of the ultrasound images, including image acquisition, display, and storage.

“This type of commercial off-the-shelf technology could provide important medical capabilities for future exploration missions beyond low-Earth orbit, where immediate ground support is not available,” says Kadambari Suri, integration manager for the Butterfly iQ Technology Demonstration “The investigation also examines how effective just-in-time instructions are for autonomous use of the device by the crew.” The technology also has potential applications for medical care in remote and isolated settings on Earth.

Developing better robot drivers

Pilote, an investigation from the ESA (European Space Agency) and the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), tests the effectiveness of remote operation of robotic arms and space vehicles using virtual reality and interfaces based on haptics, or simulated touch and motion. Testing of the ergonomics for controlling robotic arms and spacecraft must be performed in microgravity, because designs from Earth-based testing would use ergonomic principles that do not fit conditions experienced on a spacecraft in orbit. Pilote compares existing and new technologies, including those recently developed for teleoperation and others used to pilot the Canadarm2 and Soyuz spacecraft. The investigation also compares astronaut performance on the ground and during long-duration space missions. Results could help optimize the ergonomics of workstations on the space station and future space vehicles for missions to the Moon and Mars.

Protecting kidneys in space and on Earth

Some crew members exhibit an increased susceptibility to kidney stones during flight, which could affect their health and the success of the mission. The Kidney Cells-02 investigation uses a 3D kidney cell model (or tissue chip) to study the effects of microgravity on the formation of microcrystals that can lead to kidney stones. It is part of the Tissue Chips in Space initiative, a partnership between the ISS U.S. National Laboratory and the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) to analyze the effects of microgravity on human health and translate that to improvements on Earth. This investigation could reveal critical pathways of kidney disease development and progression, potentially leading to therapies to treat and prevent kidney stones for astronauts and for the 1 in 10 people on Earth who develop them.

“With this study, we hope to identify biomarkers or ‘signatures’ of cellular changes that occur during the formation of kidney stones,” says principal investigator Ed Kelly. “This may lead to novel therapeutic interventions. The rationale for conducting this study on the space station is that the microcrystals behave in a manner like what happens in our own kidneys, meaning they stay suspended in the kidney chip tubes and do not sink to the bottom, like they do in labs on Earth.”

This image shows the planned configuration of six iROSA solar arrays intended to augment power on the International Space Station. The roll-up arrays arrive on the SpaceX-22 resupply mission. Credit: NASA/Johnson Space Center/Boeing

Bonus power

New solar panels headed to station are made up of compact sections that roll open like a long rug. The ISS Roll-out Solar Arrays (iROSA) are based on a previous demonstration of roll-out panels performed on station. They are expected to provide an increase in energy available for research and station activities. NASA plans a total of six new arrays to augment the station’s power supply with the first pair launching on this flight. The Expedition 65 crew is scheduled to begin preparations for spacewalks to supplement the station’s existing rigid panels this summer. The same solar array technology is planned to power NASA’s Gateway, part of the Artemis program.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is sending the company’s Dragon spacecraft, filled with more than 7,300 pounds of research, crew supplies and hardware to the space station to support expeditions 65 and 66.

These are just a few of the hundreds of investigations currently being conducted aboard the orbiting laboratory in the areas of biology and biotechnology, physical sciences, and Earth and space science. Advances in these areas will help keep astronauts healthy during long-duration space travel and demonstrate technologies for future human and robotic exploration beyond low-Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars through NASA’s Artemis program.

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May 31 2021

Masks in the sea became more than jellyfish

Global Marine Conservation

Divers on the Greek island of Corfu found more used protective masks than jellyfish at sea.

It turns out that the pandemic has exacerbated the problem of garbage in the seas and oceans.

Disposable masks, which are supposed to protect against the virus, often end up in the water. According to environmental groups, almost 2 billion masks were found last year alone.There are many other organizations working on marine conservation and other environmental issues such as biodiversity and global warming. We list them here both as a public service and to spread the word.

A group of divers from the Organization for the Protection of the Ocean regularly clean the sea near Corfu. They find a lot of plastic, but also more and more waste from the COVID crisis.

Currently, about 130 billion disposable masks are used worldwide – per month. The big problem with these preservatives is that once released into the environment, they do not decompose for up to 450 years.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”– Henry Beston (authjor of The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod).

There are many other organizations working on marine conservation and other environmental issues such as biodiversity and global warming, they are deeply committed to marine conservation and founded on the concept that, by sharing the wonders of the ocean and marine life, people will be inspired to protect it. We list part of them here both as a public service and to spread the word.

Blue Frontier Campaign: founded in 2003 by David Helvarg, author of Blue Frontier – Saving America’s Living Seas and 50 Ways to Save the Ocean. Blue Frontier works to support seaweed (marine grassroots) efforts at the local, regional and national level, with an emphasis on bottom up organizing to bring the voice of citizen-activists into national decision-making that will impact our public seas.

Conservation International: a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC and operating in more than 30 countries worldwide to apply innovations in science, economics, policy and community participation to protect the Earth’s plant and animal biodiversity in major tropical wilderness areas and key marine ecosystems.

Deep Sea Conservation Coalition: “The NGOs listed in this document jointly call on the UN General Assembly to adopt a resolution declaring an immediate moratorium on high seas bottom trawling, and to simultaneously initiate a process under the auspices of the UN General Assembly to 1) assess deep sea biodiversity and ecosystems, including populations of fish species, and their vulnerability to deep sea fishing on the high seas; and 2) adopt and implement legally binding regimes to protect deep sea biodiversity from high seas bottom trawling and to conserve and manage bottom fisheries of the high seas consistent with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS 1982), UN Fish Stocks Agreement (FSA 1995), UN FAO Compliance Agreement (1993), Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD 1992), and the UN FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (Code 1995).”

Environmental Defense: a non-profit organization based in New York bringing together experts in science, law and economics to tackle complex environmental issues that affect our oceans, our air, our natural resources, the livability of our man-made environment, and the species with whom we share our world.

European Network on Invasive Alien Species (NOBANIS): a network of common databases on alien and invasive species of the region. By establishing a common portal access to IAS-related data, information and knowledge in the region is facilitated.

Fauna and Flora International (FFI): aims to change the policy and behavior that contribute to biodiversity loss by engaging a wide range of governments and non-governmental organizations, and by raising the profile of biodiversity within the wider global development debate.

Global Coral Reef Alliance (GCRA): a coalition of volunteer scientists, divers, environmentalists and other individuals and organizations, committed to coral reef preservation. Focuses on coral reef restoration, marine diseases and other issues caused by global climate change, environmental stress, and pollution.

Greenpeace International: Greenpeace’s oceans campaign focusing on three major threats to the world’s oceans: overfishing, pirate fishing, whaling, and intensive shrimp aquaculture.

Institute for Ocean Conservation Science: to advance ocean conservation through science. They conduct world-class scientific research that increases knowledge about critical threats to oceans and their inhabitants, provides the foundation for smarter ocean policy, and establishes new frameworks for improved ocean conservation. The Institute’s research focuses on advancing ecosystem-based fisheries management, a strategy which recognizes that the oceans’ problems are interconnected and that species and habitats cannot be successfully managed in isolation; as well as on advancing knowledge about vulnerable and ecologically important marine animals that are understudied. They are dedicated to developing scientific approaches to sustainably manage forage fish, small schooling fish that are food for marine mammals and seabirds but are being depleted from our oceans.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): The IPCC has been established by World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.

International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI) is an informal partnership between Nations and organizations which strives to preserve coral reefs and related ecosystems around the world. Although the Initiative is an informal group whose decisions are not binding on its members, its actions have been pivotal in continuing to highlight globally the importance of coral reefs and related ecosystems to environmental sustainability, food security and social and cultural wellbeing. The work of ICRI is regularly acknowledged in United Nations documents, highlighting the Initiative’s important cooperation, collaboration and advocacy role within the international arena.

International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW): engages communities, government leaders, and like-minded organizations around the world to achieve lasting solutions to pressing animal welfare and conservation challenges-solutions that benefit both animals and people.

International Maritime Organization (IMO) – IMO’s Intervention Convention affirms the right of a coastal State to take measures on the high seas to prevent, mitigate or eliminate danger to its coastline from a maritime casualty. The International Convention on Oil Pollution Preparedness, Response and Co-operation (OPRC), 1990 provides a global framework for international co-operation in combating major incidents or threats of marine pollution. A protocol to this convention (HNS Protocol) covers marine pollution by hazardous and noxious substances.

IUCN Global Marine Programme provides vital linkages for the Union and its members to all the IUCN activities that deal with marine issues, including projects and initiatives of the Regional offices and the 6 IUCN Commissions. Its co-ordination role is above and beyond the policy development and thematic guidance that it undertakes to provide to assist governments, communities and NGOs alike.

IUCN Invasive Species Specialist Group: a global group of 146 scientific and policy experts on invasive species from 41 countries. ISSG provides advice on threats from invasives and control or eradication methods to IUCN members, conservation practitioners, and policy-makers. The group’s activities focus primarily on invasive species that cause biodiversity loss, with particular attention to those that threaten oceanic islands.

Nature Conservancy: Climate change isn’t a distant threat it is happening now. The past three years were hotter than any other time in recorded history. The Nature Conservancy is focused on innovative solutions that match the urgency of this crisis. We are protecting & restoring forests, improving working lands, helping communities build resilience & working to ensure a clean energy future. Together with supporters like you, we can halt the catastrophic march of climate change so that our communities can thrive & natural places that renew our spirits can endure.

Ocean Conservancy: serves to protect ocean ecosystems and conserve the global abundance and diversity of marine wildlife through science-based advocacy, research, and public education.

Oceana: a non-profit international advocacy organization dedicated to restoring and protecting the world’s oceans through policy advocacy, science, law, and public education.

Ocean Project: an initiative to raise awareness of the importance, value, and sensitivity of the oceans through a network of aquariums, zoos, and conservation organizations.

OceanCare: committed to marine wildlife protection since 1989. Through research and conservation projects, campaigns, environmental education, and involvement in a range of important international committees, OceanCare undertakes concrete steps to improve the situation for wildlife in the world’s oceans. In 2011, OceanCare was granted Special Consultative Status on marine issues with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.

Project Aware Foundation: PADI’s foundation established to help conserve underwater environments through a wide variety of activities including education, advocacy, and action.

Project Seahorse: an international and interdisciplinary marine conservation organization comprised of biologists, development specialists, and other professionals committed to conserving and managing seahorses, their relatives and habitats, through research, education, empowering communities, establishing marine-protected areas, managing subsistence fisheries, restructuring international trade, redressing habitat loss.

Polar Bears International: a nonprofit organization dedicated to the worldwide conservation of the polar bear and its habitat through research, stewardship, and education. We provide scientific resources and information on polar bears and their habitat to institutions and the general public worldwide.

Reef Check: a volunteer, community-based monitoring mechanism operating in more than 60 countries designed to measure and maintain the health of coral reefs.

Reef Relief: dedicated to preserve and protect living coral reef ecosystems through local, regional, and global efforts focusing on science to educate the public and advocate policymakers to achieve conservation, protection, and restoration of coral reefs.

ReefBase: created to facilitate sustainable management of coral reefs and related coastal/marine environments, in order to benefit poor people in developing countries whose livelihoods depend on these natural resources.

The Safina Center: Led by ecologist and author Carl Safina, the Safina Center is comprised of Staff, Fellows and Creative Affiliates who together create a body of scientific and creative works that advance the conservation of wildlife and the environment, and give a voice to nature.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society: an international non-profit, marine wildlife conservation organization whos mission is to end the destruction of habitat and the slaughter of wildlife in the world’s oceans in order to conserve and protect ecosystems and species. Sea Shepherd uses innovative direct-action tactics to investigate, document, and take action when necessary to expose and confront illegal activities on the high seas.

Turtle Island Restoration Network: fights to protect endangered sea turtles in ways that make cultural and economic sense to the communities that share the beaches and waters with these gentle creatures. With offices in California and Costa Rica, STRP has been leading the international fight to protect sea turtle populations worldwide.

Seal Conservation Society: a non-profit organization protecting and conserving pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walrus) worldwide by monitoring and minimizing threats to pinnipeds, providing comprehensive information on pinniped-related issues to individuals, groups and the media, and by working with other conservation groups, rescue and rehabilitation centers, research establishments, and governments.

Shifting Baselines: a “media project” — a partnership between ocean conservation and Hollywood to help bring attention to the severity of ocean decline.

Sierra Club: the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. We amplify the power of our 3.5+ million members and supporters to defend everyone’s right to a healthy world.

Society for Conservation Biology (SCB): an international professional organization dedicated to promoting the scientific study of the phenomena that affect the maintenance, loss, and restoration of biological diversity. The Society’s membership comprises a wide range of people interested in the conservation and study of biological diversity: resource managers, educators, government and private conservation workers, and students.

The Species Survival Commission (SSC): “the world’s greatest source of information about species and their conservation needs”. The SSC is a network of some 8,000 volunteer members from almost every country of the world, all working to stop the loss of plants, animals, and their habitats. Members include researchers, government officials, wildlife veterinarians, zoo and botanical institute employees, marine biologists, protected area managers, and experts on plants, birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and invertebrates. SSC produces the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, provides technical and scientific advice to governments, international environmental treaties, and conservation organizations, publishes species Action Plans, and policy guidelines, and implements on-ground conservation projects.

Surfrider Foundation: a non-profit organization that works to protect our oceans, waves, and beaches through its chapters located along the East, West, Gulf, Puerto Rican, and Hawaiian coasts, and with its members in the USA and International Surfrider Foundation chapters and affiliates in Japan, Brazil, Australia, France and Spain.

TRAFFIC: wildlife trade monitoring network that works to ensure that trade in wild plants and animals is not a threat to the conservation of nature. TRAFFIC is a joint programme of WWF and IUCN – The World Conservation Union.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – an international treaty to begin to consider what can be done to reduce global warming and to cope with whatever temperature increases are inevitable. Recently, a number of nations have approved an addition to the treaty: the Kyoto Protocol, which has more powerful (and legally binding) measures. The UNFCCC secretariat supports all institutions involved in the climate change process.

Whale & Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS): an international non-profit working toward the conservation and welfare of all cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) by reducing threats to cetaceans and their habitats and by raising awareness about the need to address the continuing threats to their welfare and survival.

WildAid: The illegal wildlife trade is a multi-billion dollar global industry largely driven by consumer demand in expanding economies. While most wildlife conservation groups focus on scientific studies and anti-poaching efforts, WildAid works to reduce global consumption of wildlife products and to increase local support for conservation efforts. We also work with governments and partners to protect fragile marine reserves from illegal fishing and shark finning, to enhance public and political will for anti-poaching efforts, and to reduce climate change impacts.

World Resources Institute: environmental think tank working to move human society to live in ways that protect Earth’s environment and its capacity to provide for the needs and aspirations of current and future generations. WRI provides objective information and practical proposals for policy and institutional change that will foster environmentally sound, socially equitable development for.

World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA): WSPA works with more than 449 member organisations to raise the standards of animal welfare throughout the world. Our vision is a world in which the welfare of animals is understood and respected by everyone, and protected by effective legislation.

World Wildlife Fund: WWF’s Endangered Seas Program works in more than 40 countries to campaign, lobby, develop and advocate solutions, commission and publish impartial data, advise, and champion the conservation of the marine environment and sustainable livelihoods.

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May 31 2021

Le Figaro:The Struggle for Space – Part of the New Cold War

Space exploration has become relevant again, “got a second wind”, writes Le Figaro journalist Nicolas Bavere. The United States expects to send a man to the moon before the end of the decade and then prepare for flights to Mars. China, for its part, is developing at a tremendous rate in space: in 2019, it sent a ship to the far side of the moon, and recently its spacecraft landed on Mars. And China has ambitions to send its astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite by 2030. “The renaissance of space is inseparable from the new Cold War, in which the United States and China oppose each other,” the author wrote. During the bipolar system, space, along with nuclear weapons, was at the epicenter of hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union. And it is space that will play a decisive role in the outcome of the confrontation between Washington and Beijing, the author of the article believes.

It determines the effectiveness of modern weapons. So, although international treaties prohibit the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in outer space, militarization is still taking place there. All major nations already have commands in the armed forces that deal with space.

Among other things, space is becoming the most important infrastructure for the digital economy and plays a crucial role in competition between countries and continents. “Space in the 21st century will become what the seas were – in the 19th century: whoever controls it controls the earth,” the author writes. The current phase of space exploration differs from the previous one in three respects.

First, space shuttles and the small size of satellites allow them to be concentrated and used for dual purposes.

Second, space has become a market and emerged from US monopoly. Although it is still under party control in China, private entrepreneurs have entered the United States.

Third, according to the author of the article, now the United States and China dominate in space, while Russia and Europe are receding into the background. And if Russia is trying to cooperate with China, Europe is content with second-rate programs. The European model of development is proving to be too complex and bureaucratic, outdated. It suffers from chronic underfunding and growing divisions between France and Germany. “Space is one of the key aspects of the strategic autonomy of France and Europe, both technologically, economically and militarily,” concluded the author of the article in Le Figaro.

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May 31 2021

The first bicycle ambulances into operation

The first Turkish bicycle lines were put into operation this week on the “princely” islands of Buyukada and Heibeliada near Istanbul. Equipped with four bicycles, a team will be available to intervene when accidents occur on the islands on weekends and holidays.

Ambulances are adapted to provide emergency first aid with an oxygen tank and an automatic external defibrillator. The team is prepared for any scenarios they may face, including rescuing people from drowning, treating those who have fallen from great heights, and responding to patients with acute coronary syndrome.

The bicycle lines will work on weekends and holidays, when the islands are particularly crowded with tourists and it is extremely difficult to get around.

Team members who have completed first aid training will answer emergency calls before a normal ambulance arrives if necessary.

If several emergency calls are received at once, the ambulance team will determine which patients should be prioritized. In this way, patients who need further treatment will be transferred to the city faster.

Bicycle is an evolution trend for giving help to people in congested areas. But is it the right solution for everyone? We try to explain when you can choose a bicycle ambulance and when you need something different.

A cycle response unit is a crew of two or more paramedic equipped with bicycles that can operate as a frontline response to ordinary emergencies in a town centre. When traffic congestion, pedestrian areas and crowds of people can make it difficult to reach a patient.

What kind of Medical device do you need on a bicycle ambulance?

The cycle responders’ kit is very similar to a standard Basic Life Support (BLS) equipment that we can found on ambulances, without electro-medical instruments and transportation devices. As for the fast response unit on car, or the motorcycle response units (MRU), you need to have:

Defibrillator

Oxygen

Pulse oximeter monitor

Blood pressure device

Adult and paediatric BLS kit (bag, valve, mask, ecc..)

Small bag of drugs like (for Paramedic and Professionals)

Bandages and dressings

Rubber gloves

Cleanses

Soft splint

Ice pack

Burn pack

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May 31 2021

Curious about the rain: Do you know what a raindrop contains?

Learn some interesting facts you may not have known before

1. Speed of raindrops

The drops change in size during the fall process mainly due to the speed of movement. This begs the question, how fast do raindrops fall? They can reach speeds of up to 32 km / h. Of course, not all drops fall so fast. Some slowly descend to the ground at a speed of 3 km / h.

2. The shape of the raindrop

What does a drop of rain look like? It begins its life in a cloud in the form of a sphere, but as it begins to fall to the ground, it acquires a shape that is more similar to the upper half of a hamburger. What a huge disappointment, because we all believed that the drop had a pointed tip. It turns out, however, that it looks more like this:

3. The weight of the raindrop

The phrase “heavy rain” can be an oxymoron, as long as the average weight of one drop is 0.2 grams. It is lighter than a human eyelash.

4. Eternal rain

If you are planning to visit the Mauncinrama area of India, it is worth taking a wetsuit. This is the wettest place on the planet. About 1,186 cm of rain falls every year. The main reason for this is that the Himalayas impede the movement of clouds. The Colombian city of Kidbo is the wettest city in the world.

5. Thirst

The water that falls from the sky is not like the mineral water. But you can still drink rainwater. However, you should know that together with it you swallow everything from the electrical network and the smoking plant.

6. Composition of rain

And to be more specific, rainwater contains bacteria, market, dust, dirt, smoke and other chemicals. On planets such as Venus, the rain is not from water, but from sulfuric acid and methane.

7. The dance of the rain

This is not an urban myth. The Indian tribes actually practice certain dances in the hope of summoning rain. There are, of course, deeper beliefs in this, as agriculture needs irrigation rain. However, drip systems have not been invented before.

8. Fun in the rain

Rain usually harms sports because the playgrounds get muddy. In darts, this inconvenience does not exist. It is believed that this game was created in the Middle Ages in England. Like darts, the children’s song “Rain Rain Go Away” originated in England. In the 16th century, when the country was in conflict with Spain, the Spanish Armada failed to invade Britain in 1588. One of the reasons was the terrible rainy weather.

9. Rain does not always make the ground wet

In some very dry and hot places, the rain sometimes evaporates before reaching the ground.

10. Why we love the smell of rain

When the raindrops reach the ground, we smell freshly dug soil. This is because the soil is inhabited by bacteria called actinomycetes, which leave the sensation of this specific aroma.

11. Color rain

Sometimes the rain has color. This colored rain occurs when the falling drops contain enough dust particles in themselves.

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May 29 2021

This is where temperatures reach 80 degrees on earth

A study of the most extreme surface temperatures on Earth showed that the hottest areas are the Loot Desert in Iran and the North American Sonoran Desert, Science Alert reported.

According to satellite data from the last two decades, the surface in these two areas sometimes heats up to 80.8 degrees Celsius.

Dasht-e Lut, which means “Desert of Emptiness”

occupies the first place in terms of surface heat. Extensive salt desert located in the southeastern part of Iran. In particular, it is located in three provinces – Kerman, Baluchestan and Sistan. Compared to other deserts in the world in terms of net size, the Lut Desert is at position 27. The name “Lut” is an Arabic reference to the Prophet Lot. This prophet is the same as the Lot from the Old Testament in the Bible, as well as from the Qur’an. In religious texts, he was a messenger of God sent to Sodom and Gomorrah.

From 2002 to 2019. the temperature there was regularly incinerating, probably because it was between mountain ranges that stopped the air above the dunes, especially in the parts covered with black volcanic rock.

The data confirm the findings in 2011. In 2004, 2007, and 2009, the highest land temperatures were recorded in the Lut Desert.

In 2005, the region reached 70.7 degrees Celsius, but according to the authors of the new study, the values were probably higher.

Following this first analysis, NASA is updating satellite software and can now better record Earth’s surface temperatures. With it, experts conclude that temperatures in the Lut Desert were 10 degrees higher than previously thought.

Temperatures in the Sonoran Desert on the US-Mexico border can reach such extreme levels, but not as often as in the Loot Desert. Death Valley in California was considered the hottest place on Earth with a record temperature of 56.7 degrees Celsius, but that’s just the heat of the air. It turns out that not all types of cacti can fit in a flower pot on the windowsill. Among them are real giants that reach a height of 20 meters and even serve as a habitat for birds. Such cacti grow in the North American desert of Sonora and are strictly protected by the state and 25 years in prison await the destruction or damage of this plant.

The study also found the coldest place on Earth – Antarctica with a record of minus 110.9 degrees Celsius – 20 degrees lower than previous calculations.

The results of the study are published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the national information agency of the Republic of Bulgaria (the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency) writes.

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May 27 2021

Important Global Health Problem Identified: Disease of the Smallest Heart Blood Vessels

Microvascular Angina Is Important Global Health Problem

Mechanisms of myocardial ischaemia, including the microvessels. Credit: European Heart Journal

For the first time, a prospective, international study has shown that chest pain caused by problems with the very small vessels supplying blood to the heart is an important health problem that increases the risk of heart attacks, stroke, and death due to cardiovascular reasons.

The study, which is published today (May 27, 2021) in the European Heart Journal^[1], recruited 686 patients from 14 institutions in seven countries on four continents^[2] between July 2015 and December 2018 to investigate microvascular angina (MVA). Until now, MVA was widely thought to be a benign disease that mainly occurs in women. However, the study showed that during one to two years of follow-up until December 2019, events such as stroke, heart attack and hospitalization for chest pain (angina) occurred in nearly 8% of patients each year. Men and women were almost equally affected and the prognosis was no different according to sex or ethnicity.

Until relatively recently, little was known about MVA and it can be difficult to diagnose, partly because diagnostic criteria were proposed only in 2018 by the COronary VAsomotor Disorders International Study (COVADIS) Group. Patients with MVA can experience chest pains similar to those of a heart attack and/or shortness of breath, which can lead to them being admitted to the hospital. However, standard tests, such as electrocardiograms (ECGs), angiograms and echocardiography, do not detect significant problems with heart rhythm or the main coronary arteries, meaning that MVA is often not diagnosed.

Only 5% of coronary arteries are visible by coronary angiography. Credit: European Heart Journal

First author of the study and member of the COVADIS Group, Professor Hiroaki Shimokawa, said: “Microvascular angina is an under-researched area, partly because no definite universal definition was available before the COVADIS definition and partly because cardiologists are mainly interested in the large coronary arteries but not the smaller vessels that are also part of the coronary circulation. The former are easily visible by coronary angiography, whereas the latter are not.

“Currently, many doctors are not aware of the importance of coronary microvascular dysfunction. As a result, many patients with MVA are misdiagnosed as having postmenopausal disorders or an imbalance of conscious and unconscious nervous system, for instance. However, previous research has suggested that the number of patients with MVA is three to four million in USA, which is equal to or greater than the number of patients with breast cancer, so it is an important global problem.”^[3]

Prof. Shimokawa, who is Vice Dean of the Graduate School at the International University of Health and Welfare (Narita, Japan) and Emeritus/Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Medicine, Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan), and colleagues applied the COVADIS diagnostic criteria in the current study: 1) signs and symptoms suggesting reduced blood flow to the heart (myocardial ischaemia); 2) no evidence of the main coronary arteries being blocked; 3) objective evidence of myocardial ischaemia provided by non-invasive stress testing of the heart using ECGs or non-invasive imaging such as cardiac magnetic resonance; and 4) evidence of impaired coronary microvascular function showing, for instance, inability of the coronary arteries to increase blood flow under stress, heart microvascular spasms, indications of abnormal resistance to blood flow in the heart’s tiny blood vessels, or delayed flow in the arteries of the contrast agent used for angiograms, indicating increased resistance to blood flow in more distant vessels (known as “coronary slow flow”) but with no evidence of disease in the main coronary arteries.

During the follow-up period, there were 78 cases of death or hospitalization due to major cardiovascular problems such as heart attack and stroke, heart failure, or unstable angina (6.4% in men and 8.6% in women) – an annual incidence of 7.7% among all the patients in the study. Hospitalization for unstable angina was the commonest event.

Analysis showed that high blood pressure, previous history of coronary artery disease and stable angina were all important and independent predictors of these major cardiovascular events. Although Caucasians had a higher risk than Asians (annual incidences of 9.3% versus 4.5%), there was no significant difference between the two ethnic groups after adjustments were made for factors that could affect the results, such as age, sex, high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking etc. Women had significantly worse quality of life than men, although they had a similar long-term prognosis; the researchers say this could be due to the effect of female hormones on pain perception.

Prof. Shimokawa said: “Angina is usually thought to be caused mainly by narrowing of the large coronary arteries. However, even after treatment of these arteries with stents or bypass surgery, approximately 40% of patients will still experience chest pains, suggesting problems with microvascular dysfunction are very common. In addition, it has been recently and convincingly demonstrated that the treatment of the large coronary arteries with stent or bypass surgery alone does not significantly improve the long-term prognosis of patients with coronary artery disease, again suggesting the prognostic importance of coronary microvascular dysfunction.

“Our international study demonstrates the importance of coronary microvascular dysfunction in patients with MVA. Considering the fact that coronary microvascular dysfunction is involved not only in MVA but also in other forms of cardiovascular disease, including large coronary artery disease and myocardial disease, we believe clinicians should pay closer attention to it.”

The researchers say that the management and treatment of MVA represents a major unmet need and more research is needed. Patients are usually treated with drugs to prevent blood clotting, such as statins, angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs), or drugs to dilate blood vessels such as beta-blockers, calcium channel blockers, and nitrates.

Editor-in-Chief of the European Heart Journal, Filippo Crea, Professor of Cardiology and Director of the Department of Cardiovascular and Pneumological Sciences at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Rome, Italy), is a co-author of the study. He said: “It can be estimated that in most European countries, 20,000-40,000 people per million of the population suffer from angina. Thus, the total number of angina patients is about 21 million in Europe. As several studies have shown that about 50% of angina patients do not have coronary narrowing, this means that about ten million people in Europe have angina caused by functional alterations in either the large or small coronary arteries or both. The situation is similar in Asia and US. This huge number of patients deserves to be carefully identified and treated. In addition, these data should stimulate the development of drugs that specifically target coronary microcirculation. Last but not least, these functional alterations are frequent not only in angina patients but also in those who present with myocardial infarction.”

Limitations of the study include the fact that it was an observational study with no reference group against which to compare results; there was a relatively small number of major cardiovascular events during the follow-up period, which may affect the statistical power of the study; the majority of these events were hospitalization for unstable angina; patients with obstructive coronary artery disease diagnosed by conventional or coronary computed angiography were excluded from the study; and there are no data on changes or adherence to medical therapy, or on symptoms or quality of life during the follow-up period.

Notes:

“Clinical characteristics and prognosis of patients with microvascular angina: an international and prospective cohort study by the Coronary Vasomotor Disorders International Study (COVADIS) Group”, by Hiroaki Shimokawa et al., 27 May 2021, European Heart Journal.
DOI: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehab282
The following countries enrolled patients into the study: Japan (191 cases), the UK (171), Germany (109), the USA (88), Italy (59), Spain (51) and Australia (17).
“Ischemia and no obstructive coronary artery disease (INOCA). Developing evidence-based therapies and research agenda for the next decade,” by C. Noel Bairey Merz et al. Circulation. 2017;135:1075-1092.

European Society of Cardiology, 0 Comments

May 26 2021

Hackers attack 70 times per minute

Hackers attack 70 times per minute: what happens when a computer is left unsecured on the internet

Every device connected to the internet has a unique IP address. Those IP addresses are public, and they allow computers to find and communicate with each other via the Internet Protocol. Normally, we want to allow legitimate parties to connect to our IP addresses, and keep out adversaries by using firewalls, authentication, and access control.

But what if we didn’t take any of those precautions? How long would it take for malicious hackers to find and attack your device? What methods would they use? What do they seek? And where do they come from?

Comparitech researchers sought to find the answers to these questions by setting up honeypots—dummy computers designed to lure in attackers so we can record their every step.

Researchers set up honeypot devices emulating a range of internet-accessible services and supporting a wide range of protocols including RDP, SSH, MySQL, VNC, and more. The honeypots were left unsecured so that no authentication was required to access and attack it. Using this method, Comparitech researchers sought to find out which types of attacks would occur, at what frequency, and where they come from.

In total, our researchers found 101,545 attacks in a 24-hour period, or 70 attacks per minute. To give you some idea of how much attacks have increased, a 2007 University of Maryland study recorded a mere 2,244 attacks per day, a fraction of what we recorded in 2021. Read more on the FULL STUDY– Comparitech Study

About Comparitech: A pro-consumer website providing information, tools, and comparisons to help consumers in the US, UK and further afield to research and compare tech services. Founded in 2015, it is now a remote team of 30 researchers, writers, developers, and editors covering a wide range of online services including VPNs, password managers, ID theft protection, antivirus, internet providers, network monitoring. Each month, over 1 million people visit Comparitech.com and trust them to help them make more savvy decisions. Collectively they have produced over 1,200 reviews and guides. They conduct a battery of tests on all products and services they review, such as the 200+ automated speed tests that they perform daily on a wide range of VPNs.

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May 26 2021

Metamorphosis: The Fascinating Secrets of How Clownfish Earn Their Stripes

Amphiprion percula, a species of clownfish photographed in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea. Credit: Tane Sinclair-Taylor

The distinctive white stripes in clownfish form at different rates depending on their sea anemone hosts, a PNAS study finds.

Clownfish species develop their characteristic white stripes, or bars, during the process of metamorphosis
Researchers have now discovered that the white bars form at different speeds depending on the sea anemone the clownfish live in
Thyroid hormones, which are important for metamorphosis, control the speed the white bars form
Levels of thyroid hormones are higher in clownfish that live in the giant carpet anemone compared to clownfish living in the magnificent sea anemone
Clownfish living in the giant carpet anemone also show increased activity of duox, a gene involved in forming thyroid hormones

Charismatic clownfish, the coral reef fish made famous by the film Finding Nemo, are instantly recognizable by their white stripes. These stripes, which scientists call bars, appear as clownfish mature from larvae into adults in a process called metamorphosis, but how these distinctive patterns form has long remained a mystery.

Now, a new study has found that the speed at which these white bars form depends on the species of sea anemone in which the clownfish live. The scientists also discovered that thyroid hormones, which play a key role in metamorphosis, drive how quickly their stripes appear, through changes in the activity of a gene called duox.

“Metamorphosis is an important process for clownfish – it changes their appearance and also the environment they live in, as clownfish larvae leave life in the open ocean and settle in the reef,” said senior author Professor Vincent Laudet, who leads the Marine Eco-Evo-Devo Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST). “Understanding how metamorphosis changes depending on the sea anemone host can help us answer questions not only about how they adapt to these different environments, but also how they might be affected by other environmental pressures, like climate change.”

In the study, published on May 24th, 2021 in PNAS, a team of researchers from the Centre for Island Research and Environmental Observatory (CRIOBE) in France first surveyed the clownfish species, Amphiprion percula, in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea.

The clownfish species, Amphiprion percula, relies on either the long-tentacled sea anemone, Heteractis magnifica (left) or the short-tentacled Stichodactyla gigantea (right) as its host. The sea anemones, armed with toxic stinging cells on their tentacles, protect clownfish from predators on the reef. The clownfish also protect the sea anemone from predators and provide nutrition and oxygenation to their host. Credit: Kina Hayashi

The clownfish there can live either in the magnificent sea anemone, Heteractis magnifica, or the more toxic giant carpet anemone, Stichodactyla gigantea.

During the survey, the team made a fascinating observation; the juvenile clownfish that lived in the giant carpet anemone gained their adult white bars faster than clownfish living in the magnificent sea anemone.

Clownfish Develop Their Stripes at Different Rates

During metamorphosis, the clownfish, Amphiprion percula, turns a vibrant orange and develops three white bars in succession, from head to tail. The rate at which the bars form depends on the sea anemone that the clownfish live in. Clownfish living in the long-tentacled anemone, Heteractis magnifica, (left) have fewer stripes than clownfish of the same age and size living in the shorter, carpet-style anemone, Stichodactyla gigantea (right). The image shows the typical appearance of clownfish aged 150-200 days. Credit: Fiona Lee, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

“We were really interested in understanding not only why bar formation occurs faster or slower depending on the sea anemone, but also what drives these differences,” said first author Dr. Pauline Salis, a postdoctoral researcher at the Observatoire Océanologique de Banyuls-sur-Mer, Sorbonne Université Paris, who studies color patterning in coral reef fish.

In the lab, the team worked with the clownfish, Amphiprion ocellaris, a close relative of Amphiprion percula. They focused on thyroid hormones, which are known to trigger metamorphosis in frogs.

The clownfish, Amphiprion ocellaris, is one of the rare few species of coral reef fish that can be raised in a lab. Prof. Laudet uses the species to study the hormones involved in life history strategies, including metamorphosis. Credit: OIST

The researchers treated larval clownfish with different doses of thyroid hormones. The higher the dose of thyroid hormones, the faster the clownfish developed the white bars, the team reported. Conversely, when the researchers treated the clownfish with a drug that stopped thyroid hormones from being produced, bar formation was delayed.

The white bars form due to pigment cells, called iridophores, which express a specific subset of genes. Thyroid hormones accelerated white bar formation by activating these iridophore genes, the research team found.

Thyroid Hormones Accelerate the Development of White Bars in Clownfish Larvae

Clownfish larvae treated with thyroid hormones formed a higher number of bands at an earlier stage of development, compared to control larvae that weren’t treated with thyroid hormones. The image shows a control clownfish larvae (top) and a larvae five days after it was given a dose of thyroid hormones (bottom). Credit: Pauline Salis, first author

Next, the scientists tested whether these observations held true the field. When the CRIOBE lab returned to Kimbe Bay, they transported juvenile clownfish from both species of sea anemone back to Dr. Salis in France.

Levels of thyroid hormones were much higher in the clownfish from the giant carpet anemone than in the clownfish from the magnificent sea anemone, Dr. Salis confirmed.

To gain insight into what caused these higher levels of thyroid hormones, the team measured the activity of most genes in the clownfish genome.

“The big surprise was that out of all these genes, only 36 genes differed between the clownfish from the two sea anemone species,” said Prof. Laudet. “And one of these 36 genes, called duox, gave us a real eureka moment.”

Duox, which makes the protein dual oxidase, plays an important role in the formation of thyroid hormones, previous research has shown. The duox gene showed higher levels of activity in clownfish from the giant carpet anemone, compared to clownfish from the magnificent sea anemone.

Further experiments in collaboration with Professor David Parichy from the University of Virginia, U.S., confirmed that duox is important for developing iridophore pigment cells. When the duox gene is inactivated in mutant zebrafish, development of the iridophore pigment cells is delayed, the study found.

Taken together, the data suggests that increased activity of duox in clownfish living in the giant carpet anemone result in higher levels of thyroid hormones, and thus the faster rate of white bar formation as iridophore pigment cells develop quicker.

However, the research raises still more questions for the scientists to answer, including the ecological reason for this variation in the rate of white bar formation.

It may be because the giant carpet anemone is more toxic, with thyroid hormone levels increasing as a response to stress, the researchers speculated.

“Here at OIST, we’re starting to delve into some possible explanations,” said Prof. Laudet. “We suspect that these changes in white bar formation are just the tip of the iceberg, and that many other differences are present that help the clownfish adapt to the two different sea anemone hosts.”

Reference: “Thyroid hormones regulate the formation and environmental plasticity of white bars in clownfishes” by Pauline Salis, Natacha Roux, Delai Huang, Anna Marcionetti, Pierick Mouginot, Mathieu Reynaud, Océane Salles, Nicolas Salamin, Benoit Pujol, David M. Parichy, Serge Planes and Vincent Laudet, 24 May 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2101634118

Funding: Agence Nationale de la Recherche, National Institute of Science

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May 24 2021

Unusual Property in Hydrogen Fuel Device Discovered – Could Be Ultimate Guide to Self-Improvement

Hydrogen gas bubbles evolve from water at a thin layer of gallium oxynitride formed on gallium nitride surfaces. This work demonstrates the chemical transformation of gallium nitride into gallium oxynitride leads to sustained operation and enhanced catalytic activity, thus showing promise for oxynitride layers as protective catalytic coatings for hydrogen evolution. Credit: Illustration by Ella Maru Studios

Three years ago, scientists at the University of Michigan discovered an artificial photosynthesis device made of silicon and gallium nitride (Si/GaN) that harnesses sunlight into carbon-free hydrogen for fuel cells with twice the efficiency and stability of some previous technologies.

Now, scientists at Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories – in collaboration with the University of Michigan – have uncovered a surprising, self-improving property in Si/GaN that contributes to the material’s highly efficient and stable performance in converting light and water into carbon-free hydrogen. The research, reported in Nature Materials, could help radically accelerate the commercialization of artificial photosynthesis technologies and hydrogen fuel cells.

Materials in solar fuels systems usually degrade, become less stable, and as a result produce hydrogen less efficiently, but the team found an unusual property in Si/GaN that somehow enables it to become more efficient and stable.

Previous artificial photosynthesis materials are either excellent light absorbers that lack durability or they are durable materials that lack light-absorption efficiency.

But silicon and gallium nitride are abundant and cheap materials that are widely used as semiconductors in everyday electronics such as LEDs (light-emitting diodes) and solar cells, said co-author Zetian Mi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan who invented Si/GaN artificial photosynthesis devices a decade ago.

When Mi’s Si/GaN device achieved a record-breaking 3 percent solar-to-hydrogen efficiency, he wondered how such ordinary materials could perform so extraordinarily well in an exotic artificial photosynthesis device – so he turned to senior author and Berkeley Lab scientist Francesca Toma for help.

HydroGEN: Taking a team science approach to solar fuels

Mi had learned about Toma’s expertise in advanced microscopy techniques for probing the nanoscale (billionths of a meter) properties of artificial photosynthesis materials through HydroGEN, supported by the DOE’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office.

HydroGEN is a national lab consortium led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to facilitate collaborations between national labs, academia, and industry for the development of advanced water-splitting materials.

Toma and lead author Guosong Zeng, a postdoctoral scholar in Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division, suspected that GaN might be playing a role in the device’s unusual potential for hydrogen production efficiency and stability.

To find out, Zeng carried out a photoconductive atomic force microscopy experiment to test how GaN photocathodes could efficiently convert absorbed photons into electrons, and then recruit those free electrons to split water into hydrogen, before the material started to degrade and become less stable and efficient.

They observed 2-3 orders of magnitude improvement in the material’s photocurrent coming from tiny facets along the “sidewall” of the GaN grain. The material also had increased its efficiency over time, even though the overall surface of the material didn’t change that much.

To gather more clues, the researchers recruited scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) at the National Center for Electron Microscopy in Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, and angle-dependent X-ray photon spectroscopy (XPS).

Those experiments revealed that a 1 nanometer layer mixed with gallium, nitrogen, and oxygen – or gallium oxynitride – had formed along some of the sidewalls. A chemical reaction had taken place, adding “active catalytic sites for hydrogen production reactions,” Toma said.

Density functional theory (DFT) simulations, carried out by co-authors Tadashi Ogitsu and Anh Pham at LLNL confirmed their observations. “By calculating the change of distribution of chemical species at specific parts of the material’s surface, we successfully found a surface structure that correlates with the development of gallium oxynitride as a hydrogen evolution reaction site,” Ogitsu said. “We hope that our findings and approach – a tightly integrated theory-experiments collaboration enabled by the HydroGEN consortium – will be used to further improve the renewable hydrogen production technologies.”

Looking ahead, Toma said that she and her team would like to test the Si/GaN photocathode in a water-splitting photoelectrochemical cell, and that Zeng will experiment with similar materials to get a better understanding of how nitrides contribute to stability in artificial photosynthesis devices – which is something they never thought would be possible.

“It was totally surprising,” Zeng said. “It didn’t make sense – but Pham’s DFT calculations gave us the explanation we needed to validate our observations. Our findings will help us design even better artificial photosynthesis devices.”

Reference: “Development of a photoelectrochemically self-improving Si/GaN photocathode for efficient and durable H₂ production” by Guosong Zeng, Tuan Anh Pham, Srinivas Vanka, Guiji Liu, Chengyu Song, Jason K. Cooper, Zetian Mi, Tadashi Ogitsu and Francesca M. Toma, 5 April 2021, Nature Materials.
DOI: 10.1038/s41563-021-00965-w

This work was supported by the HydroGEN Advanced Water Splitting Materials Consortium, established as part of the Energy Materials Network under DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

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May 24 2021

Best Evidence to Date of How and When the Milky Way Came Together

Aging individual stars helped date an early merger event.

New research provides the best evidence to date into the timing of how our early Milky Way came together, including the merger with a key satellite galaxy.

Using relatively new methods in astronomy, the researchers were able to identify the most precise ages currently possible for a sample of about a hundred red giant stars in the galaxy.

With this and other data, the researchers were able to show what was happening when the Milky Way merged with an orbiting satellite galaxy, known as Gaia-Enceladus, about 10 billion years ago.

Their results were published on May 17, 2021, in the journal Nature Astronomy.

An artist’s impression of the thick disc in the middle of the Milky Way. Credit: ESO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Kornmesser/R. Hurt, CC BY 4.0

“Our evidence suggests that when the merger occurred, the Milky Way had already formed a large population of its own stars,” said Fiorenzo Vincenzo, co-author of the study and a fellow in The Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

Many of those “homemade” stars ended up in the thick disc in the middle of the galaxy, while most that were captured from Gaia-Enceladus are in the outer halo of the galaxy.

“The merging event with Gaia-Enceladus is thought to be one of the most important in the Milky Way’s history, shaping how we observe it today,” said Josefina Montalban, with the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., who led the project.

By calculating the age of the stars, the researchers were able to determine, for the first time, that the stars captured from Gaia-Enceladus have similar or slightly younger ages compared to the majority of stars that were born inside the Milky Way.

A violent merger between two galaxies can’t help but shake things up, Vincenzo said. Results showed that the merger changed the orbits of the stars already in the galaxy, making them more eccentric.

Vincenzo compared the stars’ movements to a dance, where the stars from the former Gaia-Enceladus move differently than those born within the Milky Way. The stars even “dress” differently, Vincenzo said, with stars from outside showing different chemical compositions from those born inside the Milky Way.

The researchers used several different approaches and data sources to conduct their study.

One way the researchers were able to get such precise ages of the stars was through the use of asteroseismology, a relatively new field that probes the internal structure of stars.

Asteroseismologists study oscillations in stars, which are sound waves that ripple through their interiors, said Mathieu Vrard, a postdoctoral research associate in Ohio State’s Department of Astronomy.

“That allows us to get very precise ages for the stars, which are important in determining the chronology of when events happened in the early Milky Way,” Vrard said.

The study also used a spectroscopic survey, called APOGEE, which provides the chemical composition of stars – another aid in determining their ages.

“We have shown the great potential of asteroseismology, in combination with spectroscopy, to age-date individual stars,” Montalban said.

This study is just the first step, according to the researchers.

“We now intend to apply this approach to larger samples of stars, and to include even more subtle features of the frequency spectra,” Vincenzo said.

“This will eventually lead to a much sharper view of the Milky Way’s assembly history and evolution, creating a timeline of how our galaxy developed.”

Reference: “Chronologically dating the early assembly of the Milky Way” by Josefina Montalbán, J. Ted Mackereth, Andrea Miglio, Fiorenzo Vincenzo, Cristina Chiappini, Gael Buldgen, Benoît Mosser, Arlette Noels, Richard Scuflaire, Mathieu Vrard, Emma Willett, Guy R. Davies, Oliver J. Hall, Martin Bo Nielsen, Saniya Khan, Ben M. Rendle, Walter E. van Rossem, Jason W. Ferguson and William J. Chaplin, 17 May 2021, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01347-7

The work is the result of the collaborative Asterochronometry project, funded by the European Research Council.

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Category Archives: Science

The development is the work of specialists from the Institute of Industrial Sciences at the University of Tokyo.

Hackers attack 70 times per minute: what happens when a computer is left unsecured on the internet

HydroGEN: Taking a team science approach to solar fuels

Aging individual stars helped date an early merger event.

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