There have been amazing changes in the way we view the smaller bodies in the solar system over the last five years. The Rosetta spacecraft’s observations of the duck-shaped comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko taught us a lot. Similarly, the heart-shaped ice-covered plains of Pluto photographed by New Horizons and the bright spots on Ceres, as imaged by the Dawn mission, have forced us to revise our ideas of the formation and evolution of comets, asteroids and faraway dwarf planets – and the relationship between them.
Now, courtesy, not of instruments on board spacecraft, but of detectors firmly based on the ground, we have observations of something that seems to be somewhere in the spectrum between comet and asteroid – but with a strange orbit that sets it apart from any other body in the solar system.
The orbit is hyperbolic, the object entered the solar system at a very steep angle to the ecliptic plane. It then rounded the sun, dipping below the ecliptic as it did so, and shot out again. What makes this orbit so interesting is that when its trajectory is traced back, it is clear that the object did not originate within the solar system – not even within the “Oort Cloud”, the reservoir that marks the outer fringes of our planetary system.
ESO/K. Meech et al., CC BY-SA
The mystery visitor comes from beyond the fringe, and so is interstellar. This is the first time scientists have discovered an asteroid from outside the solar system, and the finding has been published in Nature.
In honour of this interstellar tourist – and perhaps in the hope that we might start to observe more of them, the International Astronomical Union has come up with a new cataloguing system for interstellar asteroids. It is designated I1/2017U1, with the “I” for interstellar and “1” because it is the first. The interstellar object was detected by the PanSTARRS1 telescope on Hawaii, with follow-up observations on five other major telescopes. The discoverers of I1/2017U1 have named it “‘Oumuamua” – a Hawaiian-based word meaning a messenger reaching out from the distant past.
'Oumuamua has an odd shape – about 800 metres long and ten times as long as it is wide. And although its hyperbolic orbit originally led observers to conclude that it was a comet, additional images showed no trace of a comet tail, and it was reclassified as an interstellar asteroid. It is likely comprised of rock and perhaps metals. Spectra, images of light captured from an object and spread out according to its wavelengths, reveal that its surface is reddish. This is the case for both some comets or a certain class of asteroids (D-class).
So, we have a small, dim, fast-moving object – why should we get excited? Let’s be grandiose about it – after all, practically every article following discovery of gravitational waves declared that this was “opening a new window on the universe”. And, given its orbit, surely 'Oumuamua is worthy of similar hyperbole? I reckon we can say that the object is “illuminating the path to extrasolar worlds”, although we probably will not be able to trace exactly which planetary system it comes from. It shows that planetary systems around other stars are likely to have formed in a similar way to our own, ejecting fragments of rock like 'Oumuamua.
Planetary scientists study comets and asteroids because they are almost unchanged records of the material from which the solar system formed. Carbon-rich meteorites derived from certain asteroids contain organic matter that, when delivered to Earth by impact in the earliest days of terrestrial history, could have been the precursor material from which life developed. Such meteorites also contain small quantities of interstellar organics from reactions in the interstellar medium.
It is possible that 'Oumuamua and objects like it could carry similar records of their stellar formation. And it is also possible that there are many such objects hurtling through the solar system. As instruments on telescopes get more powerful, we will be able to detect them more readily and even make spectral measurements of their composition. This is exciting, as they almost certainly have different compositions than our own – shedding light on how the extrasolar system they came from formed.
As William Shakespeare wrote over 400 years ago:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
By Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
I am an expert on aging and retirement and I also help employees transition from work to retirement by facilitating seminars and workshops in corporate Canada. And I often wonder however if our “go at it alone” attitude has led us down a lonely and isolating path.
Here are some recent stats:
I suspect that these numbers are even higher among the general Canadian population, not just CARP members.
According to science, loneliness shortens our lifespan. Twice as much as obesity. Yes, you read that right.
Dr. John Cacioppo, the world’s foremost authority on loneliness, maintains that the number of people in your life does not inoculate you from experiencing loneliness. Rather, it’s the feeling of being lonely that places the brain and body at risk.
Cacioppo equates feeling lonely with feeling hungry. We compromise our survival and well-being when either is ignored.
We are biologically hardwired to respond to our environment. When we experience low blood-sugar levels, we crave food. The feeling of our stomachs being empty is a warning sign to eat and it’s essential to our very survival.
When we feel lonely, we desire connection with others, much like the loud rumble that your tummy makes when hungry.
Loneliness triggers “hyper-vigilance.” That is your brain is on the lookout for social threats, which consequently puts us on the defensive. We become more reactive to negative events and perceive daily hassles as more stressful.
A lonely brain awakens often, experiences fragmented sleep and cannot recover from the day’s stressful events.
A lonely brain is also subject to an increase in depressive symptoms and has difficulty self-regulating. That is why you may find yourself irritable and impulsive.
A lonely brain is also at risk of cognitive and physical decline.
A three-year Dutch study followed more than 2,000 participants aged 65 to 86. While none of the participants had signs of dementia at the outset of the study, results revealed that those who reported feeling lonely had a 64 per cent increase in the risk of developing dementia.
People also experience an increase in loneliness when they retire from work. That’s why you want to make sure that you’re retiring to something, and that you have friends outside of your place of employment.
Loneliness also affects the body. Psychologist Stephen Suomi’s research indicates that loneliness distorts the expression of certain genes. An experiment separating newborn primates from their mothers during their first four months of life resulted in the altered development of immunity-related genes that help the body fight viruses.
Social psychologist Lisa Jaremka’s research indicates that lonely people have higher levels of activated viruses in their system and are at greater risk of suffering from chronic inflammation, which has been linked to Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, heart disease and even suicide.
While obesity increases your odds of an early death by 20 per cent, loneliness increases your odds by 45 per cent.
What are we to do with an emotional state that is so powerful that it can alter our brains, compromise our physiology and cut short our longevity?
We are physiologically and psychologically primed for connection.
The next time you feel lonely and out of sorts, acknowledge it as a signal that you are in need of connection and seek out companionship.
Your body and your brain will be thankful that you did, and you may even increase your longevity.
By Gillian Leithman, Assistant Professor of professional business skills and aging, retirement, and knowledge management researcher, Concordia University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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Americans’ political beliefs have become increasingly polarized. Pew Research Center[/caption]
As social media has emerged over the last two decades, I have been studying how it changes innovation, and researching the effects of internet communications on consumer opinions and marketing. I developed netnography, one of the most widely used qualitative research techniques for understanding how people behave on social media. And I have used that method to better understand a variety of challenging problems that face not only businesses but governments and society at large.
What I have found has shaken up some of the most firmly held ideas that marketers had about consumers – such as how internet interest groupscan drive online purchasing and the power of stories, utopian messages and moral lessons to connect buyers with brands and each other. In one of my latest studies, my co-authors and I debunk the idea that technology might make consumers more rational and price-conscious. Instead, we found that smartphones and web applications were increasing people’s passions while also driving them to polarizing extremes.
When people express themselves through social media, they communicate collectively. Rachel Ashman, Tony Patterson and I studied sharing of images of food in an intensive three-year ethnographic and netnographic study of a variety of online and physical sites. We collected and analyzed thousands of pictures, conducted 17 personal interviews and set up a dedicated research webpage where dozens of people shared their “food porn” stories.
Our results indicate that people share images of food for a number of reasons, including the desire to nurture others with photos of home-cooked food, to express belonging to certain interest groups like vegans or paleos, or to compete about, for example, who could make the most decadent dessert. But this sharing can become competitive, pushing participants to one-up each other, sharing images of food that look less and less like what regular people eat every day.
Here is how it works. Many people start by sharing food images only with people they know well. But once they broaden out to a wider group on social media, several unexpected and startling things begin to happen. First, they find sites where they can feel comfortable expressing their opinions to a like-minded “audience.”
This audience creates a community-type feeling, expressing respect and belonging for certain kinds of messages and outrage or contempt for others. Communications innovators in social media communities often also create new language forms, such as the frustrated guys in men’s-rights-oriented social media forums on Reddit bringing new life to the 19th-century word “hypergamy,” or young people creating sophisticated emoji codes in their relationship texting.
Through language and example, community members educate one another. They reinforce each others’ thinking and communication. Members of social media communities direct raw emotions into particular interests. For example, a general fear about job security might become channeled through the feedback loops on Facebook into an interest in immigrant jobs and immigration policy.
Those feedback loops have even more sensational effects. People use social media to communicate their need for things like money, attention, security and prestige. But once those people become a part of a social media platform, our research reveals how they start to look for wider audiences. Those audiences show their interest and approval by liking, sharing and commenting. And those mechanisms drive future social media behavior.
In our study of food image sharing, we wondered why the most popular food porn images depicted massive hamburgers that were impossible to eat, dripping with bacon grease, gummy worms and sparklers. Or super pizza that contained tacos, macaroni and cheese and fried chicken. The answer was that the algorithms that drive participation and attention-getting in social media, the addictive “gamification” aspects such as likes and shares, invariably favored the odd and unusual. When someone wanted to broaden out beyond his or her immediate social networks, one of the most effective ways to achieve mass appeal turned out to be by turning to the extreme.
Taking an existing norm in the community (massive burgers, say) and expanding upon it almost guaranteed a poster a few hundred likes, a dozen supportive comments and 15 minutes of social media glory. As each user tried to top the outrageous image of the user coming before, the extremes of food porn ratcheted toward ever more sensational towering burgers and cakes. Desire for what was once the extremes began to seem normal. And the ends separated farther from the few who remained in the middle.
In our research, we suggested that the exact same mechanisms are at work in general society. As the Pew research revealed, American beliefs have become more partisan and more extreme. Religious beliefs are more fundamentalist. Political figures around the world are more polarized. Language is more crude.
Although the divided state of Americans is a bellwether for some of these unwelcome developments, the phenomenon seems to be global. A recent Mashable article blamed social media for fueling the horrific ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, a country where Facebook viewed on mobile devices has become for many people the sole source of news. Hate speech on social media has been a major and growing problem in Europe and Africa for several years now. Around the world, social media is feeding strong partisan talk with attention. Moderation and a balanced approach to ideas and discourse seem to be fading away.
The fault for these developments lies, at least in part, in people’s consumption of technology. Even without foreign interference, our research demonstrates that social media is built for polarization and extremes. The basic engagement mechanisms of popular social media sites like Facebook drive people to think and communicate in ever more extreme ways.
As people experience how these technological and social changes play out online, they will have to figure out how to adapt and change their behaviors – or risk becoming increasingly divided and driven to extremes.
Scientists James Watson and Francis Crick were famously the first to work out the structure of DNA, and Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins are often credited for capturing the images of the molecule that made this possible. But several other scientists who played a pivotal role in one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century are far less known – and deserve celebration.
In the autumn of 1947, Creeth and his PhD supervisors published the third of three papers from researchers at what became the University of Nottingham, which completed the evidence needed to show how the DNA molecule is held together. By proving that DNA contained the molecular glue known as hydrogen bonds, they made it possible for Watson and Crick to work out the molecule must take the shape of two strands held together in a double-helix structure. This discovery, six years after Creeth’s work, enabled the creation of genetic science as we know it today.
Creeth even produced his rough own model for DNA, formed of two chains held together by the bonds between its building blocks – not too dissimilar from the actual structure. Unfortunately, his discoveries seem to have missed almost everybody’s radar. So 70 years on, Nottingham has celebrated the discovery of hydrogen bonds in DNA with a special conference held in the building where the discovery was made and a dedicated plaque at the entrance.
Creeth was born in 1924 and educated at the local Northampton County Grammar school. He stayed in England’s East Midlands to read chemistry at what was then University College Nottingham, and after graduation undertook his PhD under the chemists J. Masson Gulland and Denis O. “Doj” Jordan, who helped Creeth reach his groundbreaking conclusions.
At that time there was growing interest in DNA because scientists suspected it might be the substance associated with genes or inheritance. Research had shown it was made from sections known as nucleotides. Each contained a sugar residue known as deoxyribose, a phosphate-group molecule and one of four different types of nitrogen-group molecules or “bases”: thymine (T), cytosine (C), adenine (A) and guanine (G).
But how the DNA molecule was constructed and held together, and how it recorded our genes remained a mystery. Some scientists even (incorrectly) thought it might take the shape of a ball. If they could work out its exact structure, they might be able to reveal the secrets of the genetic code.
Creeth’s fellow students, C.J. Threlfall and H.F.W. Taylor had already made inroads. Threlfall had worked out how to purify a sample of DNA so it could be examined for clues about the structure. Gulland, Jordan and Taylor then studied the purified DNA using a process called electrometric titration to follow how its pH changed as they added acid or alkali.
When they didn’t get the results they expected, they thought it might have been caused by the presence in the DNA structure of hydrogen bonds. These occur when hydrogen atoms share electrons with certain other atoms including oxygen and nitrogen, and can affect the overall shape of the molecule.
The final and definitive step was made in an experiment by Creeth using a technique know as viscometry. This provides a measure of the size of the DNA molecule in solution and how the size can change.
The acid or alkali irreversibly disrupted these bonds to break down the DNA molecule into smaller units and make the solution much runnier. Though Creeth and his supervisors never quite managed to make the final step of working out the exact structure of DNA, they did manage to show hydrogen bonds must be an important part of the molecule.When a strong acid or alkali was added to the solution, its “viscosity” or thickness (resistance to flow) dramatically dropped, which indicated the presence of hydrogen bonds. Creeth, Gulland and Jordan concluded that the hydrogen bonds joined the bases of neighbouring nucleotides.
In his PhD thesis of 1947, Creeth correctly predicted the DNA molecule comprised two chains, each with a phosphate-sugar backbone on the outside and hydrogen bonded bases on the inside. This two-chain structure was later shown to perfectly fit the biological function of DNA. The hydrogen bonds were strong enough to hold the complementary chains together but weak enough so they could be pulled apart and read or copied like genetic instructions, which is the basis of how cells divide and how genes are passed on.
Shortly after the discovery, however, the team dispersed. Gulland tragically died in a train crash soon afterwards, and Jordan moved to the University of Adelaide via Princeton. It took Crick and Watson to determine the precise structure, in which the hydrogen bonds force the chains into a twisted double-helix arrangement.
While the three Nottingham scientists never made the final connections, their work was vital in making possible one of the most influential discoveries of modern science. In Creeth’s own words, looking back after his retirement: “In hindsight, we had been given not just a glimpse, but a good view of that particular bonding that is nothing less than the key to life on this planet.”
By Stephen Harding, Professor of Applied Biochemistry, University of Nottingham
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
