Big Monopoles, BPA and Autism-DNA Link
Oct 8 at 4:04pm by Aileen
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Kreck
News this week from the rarified realm of science research is both interesting and far-reaching. And no, by far-reaching I’m not talking about discovery that the planet Saturn has a huge, invisible ring nobody noticed before.
In the field of physics, some may have heard of Paul Dirac’s postulated magnetic monopoles – the quantum of the magnetic force, with a single pole instead of two. Dirac postulated that these must exist, and led to his famous ‘strings’ (which eventually led to some current GUT models). But nobody has ever actually ‘seen’ a monopole, so it’s been an open question of whether such beasties exist. Now, an NIST research team believe they’ve found the next best thing, monopoles the size of molecules!
They of course aren’t real monopoles, but apparently behave the same predicted way. Thus these synthetic compounds could allow scientists to do further research in the lab rather than just on paper napkins. They will be testing monopole predictions with these spin ice molecules, such as whether the postulated particles obey Coulomb’s Law. Stay tuned, this could get fascinating quickly!
Next up is a study about the ubiquitous BPA body burdens 93% of us carry around these days. BPA is a common chemical found in some plastics and epoxy resins. A paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives this week from researchers at Simon Fraser University, UNC-CH and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital linked prenatal BPA exposure to unusually aggressive, hyperactive behavior in 2-year old girls.
Neurodevelopmental disorders – ADD, ADHD, the Autism spectrum, etc. – have been most prevalent in young boys, who represent some 80% of the diagnoses. Further research on this environmental contaminant should be watched, as if the connection is solid, we can expect more and more young girls to suffer the same sorts of problems. BPA has also been linked to fertility problems, growth retardation and learning disorders as well as permanent changes to DNA in mice.
Speaking of Autism’s spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders, researchers from MIT and the Center for Human Genetic Research at Massachusetts General Hospital have discovered that a single letter change in DNA may be indicative of Autism. This is known as a Single Nucleotide Polymorphism [SNP], and researchers tied it to chromosomes 5, 6, 20. The gene on chromosome 5 is associated with neuron development and autistic children showed lower expression.
This is just one piece of what researchers expect is a highly complex genetic puzzle, but it might lead to tests that can identify those at risk of producing autistic children, and identifying it in children very early. It also could help lead to specific treatments in the future. Progress is being made at last in dealing with this spectrum as a real medical condition and not just an indicator of lousy parenting skills. Which has been one of the most hurtful urban myths ever propagated by people who had no idea what they were talking about. That some of them were psychologists and physicians is sad, so we can all be thankful that some real answers are coming in.
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Global Cooling, Global Warming
Aug 8 at 2:02pm by Aileen
Researchers from Oregon State University and other institutions have published an article in the journal Science that they say puts to rest a long scientific debate on the causes of periodic ice ages in the history of our planet. The conclusion? Earth Wobbles.
The last major ice age reached its peak about 26,000 years ago, held steady for about 7,000 years, then began melting 19,000 years ago. The melting was caused by an increase in solar radiation, the researchers say, and not by carbon dioxide’s “greenhouse” effect, or any changes in ocean temperatures. These mechanisms have been cited recently by some scientists trying to understand what appears to be happening now with the increase in global temperatures termed “Global Warming” and said to be caused primarily by pollution from human activities.
The researchers analyzed 6,000 dates and locations of ice sheets to define when they started to melt. This confirmed a theory developed more than fifty years ago that held small but definable changes in Earth’s rotation as the trigger for both the accumulation of ice and its melting cycle. Putting that together with changes in the Earth’s axis and rotation going back 50 million years, they found that the gravitational influences of the larger planets – primarily Saturn and Jupiter – leads to predictable cycles.
Right about now, the scientists say, we should be changing from an interglacial period toward conditions that will ultimately lead to another ice age. That is, if human contributions to Global Warming don’t thwart the process. Meanwhile, a close look at plans to mitigate global warming with ‘Geoengineering’ suggests that such plans may well do more harm than good.
Research presented at a symposium at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting concludes that geoengineering is potentially dangerous, and that the risks outweigh the benefits. Plans such as limited nuclear detonations and subsequent fires to release lots of carbon into the atmosphere, seeding the atmosphere with light colored sulfur particles to mimic gigantic volcanic eruptions, and seeding the oceans with iron to increase carbon uptake all come with side-effects that could be disastrous, ecologists say.
Indeed, if we are starting to ‘wobble’ to the gravitational tune of our giant planetary neighbors toward another ice age, taking big efforts to cool the planet right now could actually speed up the process! Perhaps we should put off the big projects until we know more about all this, eh?
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What Does It Mean for a Singularity to be Naked?
Mar 2 at 8:08pm by Aileen
Almost everyone who is interested enough to follow scientific developments is familiar with the good old “Black Hole” in space. This is what happens when massive stars collapse in on themselves and there’s nothing to stop it. Eventually all the mass gets crushed to infinite (or near infinite) density, creating a “Singularity.” This tiny point in spacetime exerts all the gravity of all the mass that became part of it, so their effects can be observed on other stars and matter near them.*
[* High energy physicists have suggested that singularities can come in much smaller 'mini' and 'micro' size, and are hoping to produce one at CERN if they ever get the Large Hadron Collider going.]
These black holes are said to be hidden behind an event horizon, where matter and energy being sucked in toward the singularity exceeds the speed of light. Beyond that boundary of spacetime, nothing within can ever get out again. Roger Penrose came up with the Cosmic Censorship hypothesis back in the ’70s when he and Stephen Hawking were formalizing the solutions to Einstein’s equations that predicted the existence of black holes. It seemed ‘indecent’ to Penrose that a singularity might ever exist that was not shielded from outside view by an event horizon, and that view predominated research for decades despite whispers here and there that naked singularities could indeed exist.
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Reality Might Be a Hologram
Feb 5 at 4:04pm by Aileen
Researchers at Cardiff University have managed to confirm a prediction made before the British-German gravity wave detector GEO600 was up and running, and it just might open up a whole new era in fundamental physics.
The press release Cardiff researchers could herald a new era explains that the GEO600 detector has been receiving some mysterious ‘noise’ that might confirm that the true nature of the universe is holographic, as predicted by physicist Craig Hogan at Fermilab. The GEO600 team is now gearing toward further experiments that may lend further evidence in favor of this theory. New Scientist has a more in-depth article, Our world may be a giant hologram that fleshes out the concepts.
Physicists have long hypothesized that the universe is ‘grainy’ at the Planck level, which is the smallest conceptual unit of space and time. Scientists cannot hope ever to measure phenomena at that level, but if the universe is a hologram projected from those tiny “grains of sand” they may well be able to detect levels of the projection as far into the high energy/small size range as they can ever go. That projection, Hogan maintains, is the source of the noise in the detector.
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The Chicken-Egg Question Goes Galactic
Jan 12 at 6:06pm by Aileen
Hi-res infrared composite of galactic core
Atronomers and astrophysicists determined some years ago – after that strange beastie known as a “black hole” was accepted to probably be a real physical phenomenon, that there are gigantic black holes at the center of galaxies. Moreover, they found they could determine the mass of these galactic black holes via a fairly simple ratio between the mass of the central bulge of stars and the hole they surround (about 1:10,000). It has been presumed that the hole at the galactic center got there by the joining of stellar mass black holes, which then continued to grow by accretion of mass from the stars drawn into the gravity well.
More recently, however, scientists examining galaxies much farther away in space and time found a different pattern. The farther back into the history of the universe they looked, the ratio between galactic black holes and the mass of the stars surrounding them did not follow the 1:10,000 ‘rule’ – the holes account for much more of the mass, meaning they were huge even way back in the early days of the universe.
As quoted in Wired’s article Yo Galaxy’s Mama Is a Black Hole, astronomer Chris Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory said during a briefing at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting that “The simplest conclusion is that the black holes come first and they somehow grow the galaxy around them.”
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Supernovae, Comets and Holey Mammoth Tusks
Jan 5 at 11:11pm by Aileen
…a tale of mass extinction and woe
Blue Sky Studios
Not so very long ago the wizened gatekeepers of scientific orthodoxy staged a vigorous and extremely nasty campaign designed to prevent any possibility that impressionable science students or the great unwashed masses might come to suspect that things in our cosmic neighborhood were ever anything but perfectly peaceful, perfectly ordered, and perfectly safe. It was the middle of the 20th century, a bit over 150 years since the staid scientists at the Royal Society in London had discovered the hard way that stones really can fall from the sky despite their pronouncements to the contrary.
Yet the publication of Worlds in Collision in 1950 – and Ages in Chaos in 1952 – purported to demonstrate that the Earth had suffered some serious cosmic upheavals within the memory of human civilizations. These ideas drove such astronomical lions as Harlow Shapley to use every underhanded method and scheme available to destroy the author and reassure the public once again that, despite all evidence and witness through the ages, stones do NOT fall from the sky, comets do NOT wreak havoc on the Earth, and the perfect clockwork of cosmic orderliness is NOT violated by disorderly events. Thus did the notorious Velikovsky Affair take its place in the annals of science’s ample history of internal turf wars.
Many young people today are quite used to the idea that our planet has been bombarded by cosmic billiard balls of one sort or another, learning about the epochal events that marked transitions from one age to another, usually by causing mass extinctions of life forms and altering the course of evolution. Even children’s books and movies portray the catastrophic events of 65 million years ago when a large asteroid ended the age of the dinosaurs. Yet apart from those now-recognized disasters in the distant past of our planet, scientists have tended to remain skeptical of the notion that such world-shattering events have ever occurred – or been recorded – in the short (~100,000 year) history of human beings on this planet.
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Uh, Oh. “Copernican Principle” Might Be Wrong
Sep 29 at 6:06pm by Aileen
Most of us have never heard of this “Copernican Principle” that is apparently so popular in astrophysics. According to Wikipedia The Copernican principle insists that Earth is not in a central, specially favored position in the universe (or solar system). New York Times science blogger John Tierney examines the principle as part of the Doomsday argument.
Physicists at Oxford University, however, have released a paper that reaches the conclusion that we just might inhabit a ‘special’ region of the universe after all.
In the article Dark Energy: Is It Merely An Illusion?, the Oxford scientists theorize that we might instead inhabit a “huge void” in the universe where the density of matter is particularly low. This would tend to account for increasing expansion, which simply cannot be explained by the gravitational realities factored on the density of matter, on the assumption that the density is uniform throughout the universe.
The Oxford mavericks conclude that forthcoming tests of the Copernican principle should help sort the reality from the theories in the next few years.
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Busy Week in Astro-News
Apr 4 at 6:06pm by Aileen
The annual meeting of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast this week has produced some cool news items on the astronomical discoveries of the past year. First up, we have some interesting findings in our own neighborhood with research focusing on our sun. An international team announced that they’d discovered the source of the solar wind.
The solar wind consists of electrically charged particles that flow away from the sun in all directions. The scientists working with the Hinode mission and the UK’s Extreme Ultraviolet imaging Spectrometer to determine that the sun’s magnetic fields create bright regions of activity on the solar surface. The edges of these bright regions emit hot gas at high speeds. The magnetic fields connect even in separated regions, and this connection (or collision) allows hot gas to escape from the sun’s gravitational field as solar wind.
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New Theories and X-Rated Space Follies
Dec 13 at 6:06pm by Aileen
Quantum Iron in the Core, Killer ETs and Indecent Singularities
Researchers have recently discovered some new things about both our own planet’s core and our close encounters of the closest kind with extraterrestrial billard balls. Beginning here at home, geophysics researchers published a paper in Science reporting that Deep Earth Model Challenged by New Experiment.
Apparently the iron concentrated in the lower Earth mantle behaves quite differently than previous models predicted. Instead of finding a particular, thin “transition zone” at a certain depth where the temperature and pressure ‘flips’ the spin of electrons in Iron atoms to a paired state (a quantum effect that affects the density of the iron compounds), the experiments found a whole new region in the lower mantle where both high and low spin states coexist in the same crystal structure.
This continuous transition zone grew to a thickness of nearly 750 miles, comprising the entire region between the depths of 620 and 1,365 miles beneath the surface of the Earth.
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Our Universe: Missing, Found, Then Missing Again
Nov 8 at 10:10pm by Aileen
Keeping Up With Astronomy’s Game of Hide-and-Seek
Big astrophysics science news this week that a Big Chunk of the Universe Is Missing – Again. This requires a little background for understanding how it is our universe can be so adept at playing hide-and-seek.
As much as 96% of the mass necessary to account for how our universe is observed to be has been missing for a long time. The mass is necessary to explain the gravity that holds galaxies together, but all the atomic matter we can see in planets, comets, asteroids, assorted space junk, stars and galaxies accounts for just 4% of it. In 1974 astronomer Vera Rubin discovered that instead of following a Newtonian scheme where Mercury travels faster around the sun than Neptune does, almost all stars rotating around a galaxy’s center – at any distance – all travel at the same speed.
There had to be some ‘extra’ source of gravity working in galaxies, but there wasn’t nearly enough mass to account for this anomaly. The choice was between gravity being variable (unthinkable!) or the existence of a great deal of extra mass that we couldn’t see. Scientists jumped on that answer in defense of Newtonian/Einsteinian gravity and gifted us with “Dark Matter.”
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