Science Marvels: A Goldilocks Planet? Mass extinctions. Prognostication!

Sitting in at the symposium of NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program (I am on the NIAC advisory council) we all gathered round for the announcement confirming recent rumors of a "goldilocks zone" planet orbiting the nearest visible star to our own -- Proxima Centauri. 

The planet orbits every 11.2 days. It’s at least 1.3 times as massive as our planet, and based on its likely size, astronomers think it is rocky. Its home star is only .15 percent as bright as the sun. "The system is 25 trillion miles away, more than 270,000 times farther than the sun."  The Proxima team used the radial velocity method, analyzing the star's light for wobbles caused by orbiting planets… a different approach than the "transit eclipse" approach used by the Kepler spacecraft to detect thousands of new worlds. They used the HARPS spectrograph, mounted on a 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. 

Note this planet orbiting so close to its dim sun will probably be tidal-locked like our moon is toward the Earth. Also, like most small K or M types stars, Proxima emits a lot of flares and X-rays, meaning even if there's liquid water on this world. Hence any life would need to shelter along a Twilight Zone.

Can we learn more? Well, if we are lucky with the Proxima system's orbital plane -- there’s only a 1.5 percent chance the Proxima Centauri system’s geometry is arranged in such a way that we could see it transit in front of its sun. But if so, we might be able to look at its atmosphere. Even if there's no transit, some of the endeavors being funded by NIAC might enable us to see this new world much better, so stay tuned!

Oh, other news in the oh wow department: a galaxy with the same mass as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of our galaxy's star power. Apparently, at first impressions, about 99.99 percent of this other galaxy is made up of dark matter.

== Looking to the future... and past ==

My friend and fellow futurist Glen Hiemstra - founder of futurist.com -  was interviewed by Popular Mechanics on the pitfalls and rewards of trying to peer ahead into tomorrow’s Undiscovered Country. 

Speaking of which, this seems an Indiegogo crowd-funding project worth a look. One of the best-looking endeavors to develop processes for tissue culture meat. In this case the ambition means “growing real meat, non GMO, no antibiotics, in machines at supermarkets all over the world.” To be clear, this once-science-fictional idea - if implemented in ways that deliver a tasty, healthful product with far great efficiency and vastly lower karma than current herds and slaughterhouses - could reduce human impact on the environment decisively, in the nick of time.  (With no help from those helping wage a War on Science.)

Turning the other direction. For 35 years I have been tracking the topic of past extinctions on Earth, as paleontologists parse the sedimentary fossil layers ever more finely, dissecting periods when our planet's diversity of life gradually rose and then suddenly plummeted.  We know the most famous extinction event, the demise of the dinosaurs, was caused (all or mostly) by a huge asteroid that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, 65 million years ago. Evidence is growing that extinction events  - many or most of them - seem to follow a cyclical rhythm of every 26 to 30 million years, with varying severity, and I have discussed this cycle - with fascinating theories - elsewhere.

But not all such events fit into any cyclical pattern. Some were one-off… as would be the "anthropocene" extinction that we're causing ourselves, right now, through the powerful impact of human civilization. Time will tell, perhaps soon, whether this will be a mild one (if we wise up and act like grownups) or a severe event.

Now comes evidence of another one that shows just how scary the universe can be. Scientists have found remnants of a supernova - anomalous traces of Iron 60- encased in the fossilized chains of “magnetofossils,” extracted from two Pacific Ocean sediment cores. The supernova that expelled the iron-60 is believed to have occurred at least 325 light-years away from Earth, starting around 2.6 million – 2.8 million years ago, bombarding the Earth for nearly 800,000 years. This corresponds with an extinction event which occurred in that timeframe, affecting mollusks such as marine snails and bivalves. There was also a global cooling at the same time.  

These things come in all sizes. For example, anomalous amounts of carbon 14 are found in certain tree rings around the globe, suggesting that 10,000 or so years ago there might have been a massive solar flare -- far smaller than any supernova, but near and sharp enough to affect isotopic ratios in the atmosphere. Such a flare - today - would be vastly worse than the "Carrington Event" that fried telegraph lines in 1859, or the slightly lesser one in the 1920s.  We are fools if we don't do minimal preparations to safeguard civilization. (A theme I just preached in DC for the upteenth time.)

== Innovative ideas ==

Solar City is taking the step I’ve longed for — they are going to roll out a roofing integrated product. “It's not a thing on the roof. It is the roof, which is a quite difficult engineering challenge and not something that is available anywhere else," Elon Musk said.

China announced plans to create a human occupied station 3000 meters below the surface of the ocean, to develop methods for exploiting undersea resources.

Wow. What an age we live in. Paraplegics regain some feeling & movement after using brain-machine interfaces.

Though there’s a need to tease out certain selection effects, if appears that eating more protein from plant sources was associated with a lower risk of death, while eating more protein from animals was associated with a higher risk of death. Synergistically, the same shift in behavior can help the planet, too.  Still… I wonder if fish protein rates differently.  Other studies seem to say so.

Experiments at the South Pole have apparently ruled out a fourth type of “sterile” neutrino.  

Dassi, a UK bike manufacturer, claims a bicycle frame frame that weighs 750g, although it says that this could be more than halved to just 350g at some point in the future, incorporating super strong graphene layers amid the carbon composites. Look forward to bikes you can lift with a finger, or cars that weigh hundreds of pounds vs. thousands.

An Oslo-based startup called Iris AI (www.iris.ai) is building an AI science assistant. Iris is built with combination of neural and statistical models to help researchers and corporate innovators identify knowledge for their R&D project, PhD or innovation process across research disciplines. How it works: Drop in a research paper abstract and Iris builds you a visual results map letting you browse the most relevant open-access research on the topic of your interest.  Someone try it and report back here!

== Science and the world ==

Fascinating and fun… “We finally know who forged Piltdown Man, one of science’s most notorious hoaxes.”  Oh BTW… want some musical fun from a great classic? Mike Oldfield's spectacular album Tubular Bells has a 'Caveman' part known as 'The Piltdown Man.' It is way cool.

A lovely essay by a physicist who offered to consult for amateurs (sometimes – if unfairly – called ‘crackpots) and steering them toward either refining their ideas or seeing the flaws. It’s a fun piece. Scientists should learn from it and we all should have to spend 50 hours doing this, in our apprenticeship.  But what really stands out is the core lesson: that scientists have no objection to amateurs in principle.  We  all know about Humason and many other gifted amateurs who won names in the annals of science.  Most working scientists haven’t the time and many lack the patience… but in a burgeoning Age of Amateurs, making this kind of connections may be increasingly important.  

And finally...

"The human footprint continues to expand, with three quarters of earth's land surface now experiencing measurable pressures from buildings, roads, crops, pastures and other human structures and activities, according to a new report. Those pressures are building most intensely in the few remaining wild areas of high biodiversity, it notes. But the report also finds an encouraging trend: in recent years, growth in the footprint has lagged far behind population and economic growth. From 1993 to 2009, population grew 23 percent, and the global economy by 153 percent–but human influence on land went up only 9 percent. The mismatch suggests that increasing urbanization and more sustainable use of resources may be buying time ." -- from Kevin Krajick, in Physics.org

We need to remember what's at stake. Anyone participating in the War on Science, or swallowing any of the propaganda put out by media that hate the knowledge professions, is actively hurting your grand-children and our world.  There is no compromise here.  Any political party that has collaborated with the War on Science needs to be torched. To the ground.