Physblog

Error in a scientific paper: here's what I did

6/19/2019

“Say, doesn’t that look remarkably similar to something else that I saw…”

Compiling data for a scientific publication is challenging. What to include and exclude is a tacit consideration for every scientist. Before you might get angry that scientists are ‘fiddling with the data’ or ‘only showing you what they want’, please consider the following: you yourself are an information gathering and filtering machine. In fact, you harvest information involuntarily all the time. However, your evolutionary self has learnt to filter and select information and pitch it according to your need. When you walk in to a room you don’t actively notice that the walls are flat or that you are wearing shoes; but if the walls were to spontaneously turn green or your shoes disappear, you’d notice it right away. Is that a fire on my desk?!

When a scientist presents data, we hope they do so openly and honestly, and normally expect a broad overview to guide the reader as to where this data should be placed in the grand scheme of things. There will inevitably be an element of self-selection in any scientist’s data; this is unavoidable and yet totally understandable. Include everything and any scientific work will become unreadable, boring and uninformative. Include too little and you run the risk of not making your point clear enough. Finding that balance is an art-form. The peer review process aspires to produce a higher publication standard. In reality, it can only do so up to a certain point. However, once a publication is out there in cyber space, the general public can always weigh in to scrutinize its finer details. Which brings me to the purpose of this post...

I recently noticed a peculiarity in a scientific paper *. I initially identified it as an error, because I had seen exactly the same graph elsewhere. After a quick check of the old publication, I noticed that these ‘new’ data points were exactly the same as the old ones, although they were coloured differently, the x-axis scale was changed and some of the data points were missing. See for yourselves:

The data in question. The x-axis is different and yet the data looks the same... although with different colours and some points are missing... (I've expanded part of the data with a dotted box, for clarity)

Above are two graphs (1 and 2) from two different publications on different years (I’ve made enlarged dotted boxes for clarity). Interestingly, the publications had some shared authors, some of whom (lets say) weren’t strangers to high profile journal publications. Without going in to the details of what the graphs show, it seemed reasonable that the data was a copy. Given the curious nature of the data, I decided to contact the editor of the journal; especially since changing the x-axis scale could have implications for the interpretation of the data. This wasn't a malicious attack on those authors, it could very well have been an oversight, which it fine. But in the interest of integrity, it was worth at least asking.

Scientists are routinely reminded of the importance of the expected high standards required for publication. For a good reason: to uphold the integrity of skeptical inquiry. I remember attending a lecture on exactly such a topic from the editor-in-chief of one scientific journal, and the message was crystal clear: “no issue is too small, let us know if you have a query”. So that’s what I did.

After some routine preamble to the editor, I signed off my email “… the data looks similar, including the noise, although the x-axis scale differs. I thought it important to point this out.” I was a little nervous because I wanted to maintain anonymity (which they do categorically adhere to). But, being the coy inquirer that I am, I at least wanted someone to check this data anomaly without it being seen as a personal attack on the authors. I can confidently say that the editor's response (up until the eventual correction) was very professional and reassuring.

In one back and forth, the journal editor responded thusly: “… thank you for bringing to our attention this discrepancy. We believe _*journal*_ should be of the highest order of rigor and greatly appreciate people who carefully read our work and call to our attention these issues. If you have any further questions… once again, I want to give you a sincere thank you for giving this manuscript such a careful reading to find this error and bringing it to our attention.”

A few short months later both journals published corrections and the world is a better place.

After note: I would highly encourage any reader of science to be involved in the material that you read (which you undoubtedly do already!). Interact with it somehow. Whether it’s a scientific journal or a newspaper article, many authors are only a click away. Ask them something whether you agree or disagree, or just want clarification. Sometimes when you dig you’ll find enlightenment and a shining ray of optimism. Other times you may find sheer malevolence (honestly) and a stark peak through a door that someone didn’t realise was left ajar **. Either way, there's a chance you could learn something, and that’s not such a bad proposition.

* if you would like to know which articles these are please PM me
** a follow up post on malevolent responses to some past inquiries will be sure to follow shortly

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Cold Fusers Beware: DANGEROUS EXPERIMENTS AHEAD

6/10/2019

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a HOT-fusion Tokamak of the Joint European Torus (JET) project. Within this chamber plasma swirls at near light speed, causing nuclei to fuse.

If, when conducting a table-top experiment, sometimes “part of it vapourised” and at other times the “contents and a part of the fume cupboard housing the experiment were destroyed”, you should probably proceed with extreme caution (but proceed you must!). These words hail from a famous publication by electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989 entitled "Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium". In it, they detail the holy grail of energy production – nuclear fusion – and they claimed to be able to do it ‘cold’.

The importance of such a result would be colossal. Being able to generate more energy than you input would be our golden ticket to unleash energy sustainability. The end of energy scarcity as we know it. With abundant energy on tap we’re talking about global clean drinking water, emission free energy resources, electricity for all of humanity and interstellar travel…

So why has so little progress been made since the Fleischmann-Pons experiments in 1989? In truth, many attempts have since been made to repeat the experiments but, unfortunately for us all, no one has succeeded in making cold fusion work. Ever since 1989, there has been a heated debate among scientists, mostly consisting of a swathe of scathing reports against Fleischmann and Pons and their methods. Countless scientific bodies, institutes, research councils, research journals and even government agencies all weighed in on the issue. Suffice it to say, that although the claim of cold fusion was an extremely hard pill to swallow, at the end of the day it didn’t in fact meet the expected verification criteria of any new found technology; especially something as groundbreaking as cold fusion. And so, for years, cold-fusion has been relegated to the dustbin of science history.

Any mention of cold fusion, has since met with heightened skepticism and a fear of academic suicide. Which makes the new publication on cold fusion, in the journal Nature, all the more remarkable. Motivated by “the possibility that such judgement might have been premature”, they “embarked on a multi-institution programme to re-evaluate cold fusion to a high standard of scientific rigour”. Although their final results are essentially null, it highlights a key component to scientific discovery: don’t be too quick to disqualify new ideas, since you don’t know where they might lead. Although the results of the Nature paper didn’t give us cold fusion, they propose a number of exciting areas of research, derived from their work, that could very well have a high impact in other areas of research, like materials science. But in 1989, in the wake of these experiments, the case went cold…

What was the cold fusion that Fleischmann and Pons tried to achieve? Here is a very brief introduction of what ‘hot fusion’ (or just… ‘fusion’) is, to drive the point home about why cold-fusion would be so remarkable:

Fusion is a nuclear reaction whereby two small nuclei fuse, forming a larger nucleus. The initial nuclei are often positively charged, strongly repelling each other. However, when those nuclei are close enough, electrostatic repulsion gets overcome by the attracting 'strong nuclear force', which causes those nuclei to fuse together. This releases a huge amount of energy. But bringing nuclei together (especially two positively charged ones) is by no means a simple task. It does occur in our Sun constantly: hydrogen fuses to form heavier elements, releasing light and heat. However, the processes governing fusion of elements in the Sun are driven by the large amounts of pressure and heat causing those nuclei to fuse. Attempts to replicate hot-fusion, on Earth, are normally done by accelerating a magnetically confined plasma (e.g. Tokamak *) or with electromagnetic heating or particle beams, and more. Unfortunately, it requires so much energy to bring about fusion in these Earth-based instruments that it far exceeds the energy released by the fusion reaction itself! Only once the energy output is greater than the energy input, can we really start talking about the usefulness of fusion energy.

Enter… cold fusion. Cold fusion claims to release a measurable amount of energy without having to heat your nuclei to extremely high temperatures and pressures. The original experiments in 1989 attempted to dissolve a high concentration of deuterium (which is a hydrogen atom (i.e. a proton) packed with an extra neutron) in to a palladium electrode. The concentration being so high, that hydrogen nuclei within the solid lattice actually come energetically closer to one another than in a lattice of solid hydrogen; assisted by counterbalancing of charges from electrons as well. Fleischmann and Pons used this idea in an electrolytic cell, and found that their electrical power output was greater than their electrical power input. This purportedly meant that they had liberated some energy by fusing hydrogen. Eureka! Not so fast...

Unfortunately, after ~3 decades of research, cold fusion claims have not materialised. The research published in 2019 in the journal Nature, however, does offers a promising perspective on ancillary issues surrounding some aspects of cold fusion. For example, loading palladium with an ‘ultra-high’ saturation of hydrogen has exhibited unique materials properties, such as phase changes in these materials. At certain hydrogen concentrations, these highly saturated materials behave in unique ways and respond differently at particular pressures and temperatures. Pushing the limit of these material properties is certainly a worthwhile endeavour, especially since they exhibit distinct, measurable characteristics that can be controlled, manipulated and predicted. Indeed, loading metals with extremely high concentrations of hydrogen may very well be a prerequisite for cold fusion but pushing the limit of hydrogen saturation may also be a promising direction to explore, in and of itself **. Simply put: no one has been able to convincingly show that such metal loading (with hydrogen) is even possible, let alone it being a precondition for the elusive ‘cold fusion’.

Lets not get bogged down with cold fusion though. The truth is that this study in Nature was very brave; it touched a nerve and dared to re-think old scientific ideas and perhaps most importantly, did not overstate their claims about cold fusion at all. They give a very pragmatic outlook and prospect for the future, touching upon many important areas that could really benefit from further scientific exploration; and we may just learn something as a bonus along the way.

One question that was put to the authors was: ‘why pursue cold fusion when it has not been proven to exist?’. The authors respond by saying: “one response is that evaluating cold fusion led our programme to study materials and phenomena that we otherwise might not have considered. We set out looking for cold fusion, and instead benefited contemporary research topics in unexpected ways.”

Or in the words of a modern proverb: “Shoot for the moon, even if you miss it, you’ll land among the stars.” - Norman Vincent Peale, i.e. shoot for cold fusion and who knows what you might discover...

* a few UK based Tokamak's are of note: Oxford's Tokamak Energy and a the JET partnership
** the Nature paper provides a few more exciting secondary outcomes that may also derive from cold fusion research

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Where are all the missing planets?

5/27/2019

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An artists impression, showing the prevalence of planetary systems around stars. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1204a/

How did our Earth get here? Or any planet, for that matter? The pessimistic answer: nobody really knows. The optimistic answer: we know more than you think… But the real question is: where did all the planets go?!

For many decades, astronomers have been speculating about how planets form and, lacking observable data, primarily used theoretical models based on fields like geology, thermodynamics and relativity (and more) to predict planetary scenarios. It may come as a surprise to some, but the planets in our solar system are quite poorly understood (in some respects!). Very few probes have been sent to (or near) those planets to make the careful measurements necessary to make strong conclusions about the structure of those planets, their composition, ring structure (if any) and material composition. Even the interior structure of our own Earth has not been fully resolved, let alone how it came to be the way it is.

Which brings us to the critical question of this article: why are some planets missing?! I’d like to start by saying that no one has been stealing planets (although that is an interesting proposition*)... you’ll see what I mean in just a moment!

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has been operating for about 1 year looking for exoplanets (planets outside of our solar system). It does this by monitoring the brightness of stars; when the brightness of that star drops periodically, it is deduced that a planet must be transiting that star, periodically blocking the stars’ light to us, because of its regular orbit. Certain properties of those planets can be determined from these transits: the profile of the ‘edge’ of the brightness curve could tell us about whether the planet has an atmosphere or not, the decrease in the star’s periodic brightness can tell us about how close (or how large) the planet is to the star, etc. So far TESS has found 24 planets since April 2018. We would probably expect planets of all sizes to be found (perhaps a Gaussian distribution), right? Wrong! A recent unexpected finding is slowly being confirmed: Planets that are 2 to 4 times the size of Earth are common. However, planets 1.5 to 2 times the size of Earth are rare. Why?

For about a decade, the Kepler Space Telescope scoured the night sky for exoplanets; clocking a whopping 2,662 exoplanets. Within their data, they found that between 1.5 to 2 Earth masses, planets seem to be relatively scarce. This has become known as the Fulton gap; named eponymously after the scientist who first described it in 2017.

A few suggestions have been made to explain why planets between 1.5 to 2 Earth masses are ‘missing’. One suggestion is that there is a mass tipping point (many scientists go for "Goldilocks" terminology...) for maintaining an atmosphere. Only planets above a certain size will maintain an atmosphere, whereas below a certain size it will lose its atmosphere. These mass tipping points could affect other planetary geologic processes that dictate the final mass of a planet. Another theory, introduces tipping points as early as planetary genesis i.e. the final material outcome of a planet is highly sensitive to the initial conditions of that planet’s formation. Another suggestion, is that during the cooling stage of a planets formation it loses mass by its atmosphere evaporating, meaning that different sizes of planets will have a different likelihood of forming. All contenders are possible; but more data is needed to corroborate the observed data with theoretical models to help explain this phenomenon.

Having said this, there are many general rules that can be understood by making rudimentary observations of the planets in our solar system. For example, small rocky planets form closer to our sun, whereas the larger gas giants orbit further away. Tidal forces are partly responsible for whether planetary rocks coalesce to form planets or not (think of the rocky ‘remnants’ of the asteroid belt, or the rocky/icy rings of planets as being unformed moons). Furthermore, the radiative processes imparted by our sun are partly responsible for the formation of gas giants at larger orbital radii, but could this somehow be the cause of the ‘size gap’ of the observed ‘missing planets’?

It’s exciting that TESS is also seeing a gap in the size distribution of planets. However, with only 24 planets detected by it, it will take some time to confirm whether this trend is ‘real’. What is great to see is that the working hypothesis in one experiment (the Kepler Space telescope, and data from 2,662 planets discovered, with a ‘size distribution gap’) is now being tested in a completely different experimental set up (TESS). One of the hallmarks of a good theory is ‘predictive power’. Without being able to test your hypothesis its hard to say anything about… anything, in science. So the results from TESS seem really interesting, in the wake of the prior Kepler results.

The ‘missing planets’ observation is currently an unexplained anomaly. Such results can only mean one thing: a journey in to the unknown. A new way of understanding things, is on the horizon. Exciting times.

*capturing a planet would be awesome. I’m working on a proposal to the Xprize, to secure funding for this project to “end the war against scarcity of resources”... by stealing a planet

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The First Black Hole Image :)

4/17/2019

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In the centre of a nearby galaxy (M87) lurks a supermassive black hole, 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun. The Event Horizon Telescope team broke the news on April 10th sending shock waves around the world. This really is a momentous occasion; a watershed moment in astrophysics. The theoretical work of Einstein has yet again been vindicated (see earlier blogpost). But instead of writing about how astounding this image is, or how it even came to be (which was by no means a simple task), I would like to focus on what the image… is actually showing us!

A black hole is a region of space-time that experiences such strong gravitational effects that nothing can escape it, not even light… hence it is a black hole! So, what is space-time? Space-time was a conceptual tool that emerged from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (in 1905) to describe the strong gravity regime. It links the three dimensions of space with time to make a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Space-time is often portrayed as a warped coordinate system that is distorted by the presence of mass (think of a snooker ball (mass) being placed on a bedsheet (curvature of space-time), see this great demo).

When the mass is large enough (e.g. stars merging or galaxies colliding) relativity predicts that space-time is warped so much, black holes can be formed. The edge of a black hole, beyond which nothing can return, is called the event horizon. This "point of no return" in a black hole is defined by the Schwarzschild radius (Rs) and is equal to 2GM/c^2 (G = gravitational constant, M = mass of black hole). And whats at the centre of a black hole? Current theory points towards it being a singularity (a point of infinite density), but no one can be sure (for now?); nothing can be sent inside to check and (more importantly!) retrieved to shed light on the issue.

So is the famous picture showing us the edge of the event horizon, or something else?! Well, it’s not the event horizon. So what is it...

The area surrounding a black hole is a rather apocalyptic zone. It is occupied by dust and gas, millions of degrees hot, that is orbiting at a fraction of the speed of light. This is known as the accretion disc and is a flat disc of matter surrounding the black hole. Images of the black hole over time has led scientists to state that the matter in the accretion disc is orbiting clockwise, and completes an orbit every two days.

The innermost stable circular orbit of matter is actually at 3Rs, within that all matter plummets towards the black hole never to be seen again. Light, however, has no mass and can orbit closer. Nonetheless, even light can have momentum and is affected by the warping of the space-time continuum. You may have heard of gravitational lensing? This is when light is ‘bent’ around a large mass, such that even if a galaxy is exactly behind a closer galaxy we would still be able to see the further galaxy (albeit possibly distorted) since light from the distant galaxy can be bent around the closer galaxy, like a lens. Lensing is a great example of the bending of light due to the warping of spacetime by a heavy mass. Here is a great example of gravitational lensing in a recent APOD picture:

Rogelio Bernal Andreo (DeepSkyColors.com). You can see circular streaks across this whole image. Those are the distorted light streaks from galaxies that are far away from the closer, central masses occupying the centre of this image.

So light surrounding a black hole can orbit closer; at up to 1.5Rs. If you were to hold yourself at 1.5Rs, and look tangentially from the orbit, you would see the back of your head (!), because light would orbit circularly. At 2.6Rs light doesn’t get sucked in and we would actually be able to see that light, in the form of a ring of light if viewing from far away.

Another thing to think about: what plane or tilt is the accretion disc relative to how we are looking at it? If we see the accretion disc flat-on, then we wont see much distortion of the light from the accretion disc itself. However, if the accretion disc is at any other tilt angle (i.e. such that part of the accretion disc is behind the black hole) then it’s light will be warped above and below the black hole. In this case, we will see the type of black hole shown in the Interstellar movie (below) where the accretion disc is side-on, and the light you see above and below the black hole is actually the light from the accretion disc going over-round-and-under the black hole as well as under-round-and-over the black hole. Confusing, I know! It really changes the way we think about light and space; and all dreamt in the inner recesses of the brains of very clever people over 100 years ago. Brilliant.

A screenshot of the black hole in the movie Interstellar. The accretion disc is edge-on. What you see above and below the black hole is the light from the edge-on accretion disk that has travelled around the back side of the black hole and now in to our eyes...

In addition to this, the Doppler effect could make some regions of the accretion disc look brighter than others, depending on if they are moving towards or away from us. This is known as relativistic beaming. And is the black hole spinning?!... well lets leave it at that for now!

So, what does the iconic first black hole image actually show us?!? The black circle you see in the centre is not the event horizon; it is the blurry radius beyond which we begin to see light. Surrounding that we see light from the accretion disc which (at this resolution), seems to be relatively flat-on (i.e. not like the Interstellar black hole image).

Well there you have it. A black-hole, imaged, in our lifetime. An awesome achievement of ingenuity. A milestone reached. Next stop (and hopefully very soon): An image of the black hole at the centre of our very own Milky Way… stay tuned.

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Astronaut Scott Kelly: "The sky is definitely NOT the limit"

3/7/2019

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I sat in the lecture hall waiting, giddy, and I thought to myself: "I'm (more or less) a grown man, and I'm having the flutters over the imminent arrival of astronaut extraordinaire Scott Kelly". Looking around, I could see the same thing in other members of the audience, until suddenly a colleague turned to me and said "Physbot, I've got butterflies in my stomach"!

Ever since i was a kid I had a fascination with the night sky and dreamed of being an astronaut. Although, unfortunately for the world I never became one, Scott Kelly's personal account gave a down to Earth picture of what it took him to make it. Although there is no guide book to becoming an astronaut, per se, having read some astronaut biographies there are a couple of parallel trends (in case you were considering it).

Kelly was "not astronaut material". He started off by telling us that he wasn't even average but actually rather below average. He was relatively unsuccessful at school, wasn't a 'book reader' and mostly attained mediocre grades. He even told us that he turned up to the wrong college on his first day! Nonetheless, there were a number of triggers that perked his interest in space, aided by parental inspiration (his mother becoming the first female police officer in their state?) for a career as an astronaut. It took a whimsical bet in the boys' toilets at school which got him thinking more seriously about it!

Early on he read The Right Stuff, a 1979 book about strapping rockets on to aircraft and experimental space flight, and shot him off in the right direction. What was heartening, was his imbued sense of passion for... Earth! Peering 200 miles down out of the ISS, on his first space walk (EVA) he really laments the troubles and woes that could lead to our own destruction. He was surprisingly modest about the adventure to Mars. Although he was for it, he said it would never grant us the opportunities that Earth has ('perhaps in many hundreds of years'...). So lets better protect it!

And Kelly wasn't the first astronaut or scientist with these sentiments towards Earth. Carl Sagan said so beautifully when referring to Earth as the Pale Blue Dot. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield's book with title "An Astronaut's Guide to Life of Earth" echos this message too. So if you're not going to be an astronaut, maybe look earthward. If you read any of those astronaut books you'll quickly find that those astronauts in training were also geologists, deep sea divers, fighter pilots and dentists. Or as Scott Kelly put it: "the sky is definitely NOT the limit".

A wonderful evening, filled with great stories and anecdotes.

A humbling experience.

To note:

I would highly recommend reading Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins, the command module pilot for the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on the Moon.
The film Moon, is one of the best thought-provoking sci-fi films that I know of; not that it has any immediate relevance but really tackles some rather dark philosophical conundrums
For those who haven't yet seen First Man, I would highly recommend it! A Hollywoodised version of the Moon landing, following Neil Armstrong. Including some interesting twists that I had not known about. Gives a stark account of the trials and tribulations at the early stages of manned space flight
When I was a university student I was looking online at how to become an astronaut (some 15 years ago). To my amazement, I found a job posting on the Job Centre! This was at the time waaay before Tim Peake. So there were no British astronauts (almost ever, depending on how you define that), and the Job Centre is offering astronaut positions with "relocation required" and "requires strong commitment and science background". I wonder if they're still offering that!

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From Giant Pancake to Dented Walnut to Snowman to Gingerbread Man

2/10/2019

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"It seems the "space snowman" is more like a "gingerbread man"", the BBC reports. In classic fashion the BBC has again taken the traditional stance of turning space objects in to inanimate objects. This time the transmutation was quite remarkably from meteorological to culinary!

Furthermore, NASA broke the news with:

"The larger lobe more closely resembles a giant pancake and the smaller lobe is shaped like a dented walnut!"

And rather unexcitingly (but rather honestly!), the actual research group who made the discovery (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory) went for "... is not, as it turns out, quite so round as initially anticipated.... New Horizons confirm the highly unusual, flatter shape..."

In summary:

Talk about an identity crisis!

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People will see what they want to see...

1/30/2019

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A wonderful representation of the Elephant and the Rider, by Sasha Eslami, found here: https://medium.com/@SashaEversnap/elephant-the-rider-b179e9816ca9

Have you ever had one of those bizarre conversations with people that simply won't "understand your factual point of view"? Hehe, me too. How can these imbeciles be so wrong? Especially when you come with facts. Hard. Concrete. Immutable facts... Hold on to your horses... or elephants (!) and you may be surprised.

In the wake of a previous post about the public's perception of science, I'd like to share some thoughts from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. Haidt's main thesis is that rationalism (loosely: understanding the world through facts and logic) is not the central drive of peoples' morality. We are hard wired as people to be guided by intuition, rather than weigh up moral conundrums solely on the basis of rationalism.

He calls this the "rationalist delusion" (certainly a poke at Dawkins) and likens human moral decision-making to an elephant (aka intuition) and a rider (aka rational being). The elephant (intuition) is running the show; and although the rider (rational beings) can guide the elephant to some extent, the elephant is really in control. If an elephant leans, even our rational self leans. Throw in some built in instincts of disgust and motor reflexes and you've got yourself one complicated situation!

Haidt quotes from many scientific studies that show that peoples' decision making can change markedly with external stimuli. A funny, but illuminating example being: "those told to stand near a sanitizer became temporarily more conservative [in their moral decision making]", haha!

Regarding science, we can also be swayed. Humans (and animals) are very good at falling in to the trap of 'confirmation bias', which is "the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories" i.e. people will see what they want to see.

Regarding science, Haidt writes: "If people can literally see what they want to see - given a bit of ambiguity - is it any wonder that scientific studies often fail to persuade the general public? Scientists are really good at finding flaws in studies that contradict their own views, but it sometimes happens that evidence accumulates across many studies to the point where scientists must change their minds. I've seen this happen in my colleagues (and myself) many times, and it's part of the accountability system of science - you'd look foolish clinging to discredited theories. But for non-scientists, there is no such thing as a study you must believe. It's always possible to question the methods, find an alternative interpretation of the data, or, if all else fails, question the honesty or ideology of the researchers." He goes on to say that nowadays people can just go online, and select from a myriad of 'facts' that will show them exactly what they wanted to see in the first place, if it aligns with their beliefs. So how are your facts working out for you now?!

That is to say... 'scientific facts' often aren't enough to convince people of a 'scientific fact' if it goes against a person's basic intuition. So next time you're trying to explain something scientific to someone, about how electrons don't occupy any space, or that dark matter is invisible, or that the cat is dead and alive, or that vaccinations are of utmost importance, and people "just won't believe your facts"... take a step back and breathe, crack open a can of coke (or lilt, for the old timers), and relax. It's ok! Be patient. People will be interested in hearing interesting things in any case. They might learn something and so might you. And Haidt gives a few reasons why there is still hope for the "elephant" within us all, to learn something new and change our moral compass.

I'll leave you with this. In weighing up scientific facts where there is a lot at stake, that conversation will look very different. What if someone wont believe a fact that may get themselves hurt? How would you approach that situation?

In sum: people will see what they want to see. Warning: So will you!

You can find Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind, here.

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BBC reveals plethora of inanimate objects in space...

1/14/2019

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After the wonderful discovery and imaging of Ultima Thule recently (the farthest object visited by a human space craft) I noticed that the BBC decided to describe the rock as a Snowman... In fact, a quick search online shows that many media outlets were guilty of this; namely, naming space objects after stupid things. I then tried to figure out "to what end" did they decide to do this. It's long been said that in order to make science 'more appealing' journalists need to make science more 'relatable', and who doesn't relate to snowmen (so the logic goes). Teachers are also told this and it leads to all sorts of funny syllabuses and schemes that we have to teach. I wonder if this is true, useful or helpful. I'll explain why...

Science is inherently interesting! Having discussed lesson planning with many teachers, I can safely say that scientists have a much easier job of making things interesting than other fields of study (that's not to disparage other fields of learning!). And yet, there seems to be a need among mainstream media outlets to dumb-down scientific content. It's no wonder that many people are disconnected from science if mainstream media regularly feeds us space junk in the form of inanimate objects. This, of course, is not the only factor making people disenchanted with science.

But, by comparison, media outlets make no shortage of highly convoluted technical jargon when it comes to the finance or business sections of news coverage! Dr. Ben Goldacre has been vocal about this for quite some time and wrote a great column in the Guardian for a decade demystifying science for public consumption. For example, he makes the (facetious) point that media outlets tend to sort all food items in to: "causes cancer" or "does not cause cancer"! Why do they do this?!

In short, don't get put off by media outlets dumbing things down. There are many great technical science magazines and other media formats for public consumption; some of which can be found on the links page. The internet is alive with good science content, I would highly encourage you searching it out!

So, without further ado, here are some examples of inanimate objects BBC found in space...

BBC, 2 January 2019
Nasa's New Horizons: 'Snowman' shape of distant Ultima Thule revealed

BBC, 13 December 2018

NASA's Jupiter Mission Juno Reveals Giant Polar Storms

BBC, 3 June 2018

What is Pluto's heart made of?

BBC, 11 February 2018

'Oumuamua: 'space cigar's' tumble hints at violent past

BBC, 24 September 2018

There is huge 'monolith' on Phobos, one of Mars's moons

For those of you who noticed... Monolith is a very relevant reference to the greatest science fiction film of all time: 2001 A Space Odyssey

I'm actually quite amazed that there wasn't a separate article in the BBC about the levitating spoon!

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

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Rare Repeating Energy Burst from Distant Galaxy

1/10/2019

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An artist’s conception of the centre of an active galaxy where gamma-ray bursts originate. Guys... its just a drawing... Credit: NASA

The rarest of rare: repeating Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) were detected from the same point in the sky. But will we see it repeat again? “The answer is definitely maybe” said scientists conclusively in 2017.

This year, radio telescopes in Canada have spotted something strange in a rare astronomical event known as a Fast Radio Burst (FRB). FRB’s were first detected in 2007; they are high intensity radio signals lasting only a few milliseconds that emanate from distant galaxies. And scientists know exactly what their cause is… Aliens… nah just kidding, they have no idea! Yet!

Since 2007 about 50 – 60 such events have been spotted, however, this is only the second time that a repeated signal (5 times) was detected emanating from exactly the same place, in the space of a few months. The first time this happened was in 2012 from a galaxy 2.5 billion light-years away (with a few repeat signals from that point). So this appears to not be some accident of measurement. Intriguing…

So where do these FRB’s come from? The 2012 ‘repeater’ came from a star-forming region in a dwarf galaxy (there are different types but it’s basically ‘a small galaxy’). Scientists think that this is no coincidence as it is likely that the conditions for these bursts would arise from some extreme astronomical environment.

Some have suggested that FRB’s arise in magnetars, a type of neutron star with a powerful magnetic field that are thought to arise as a result of unusually large supernova explosions; thought to be prevalent in dwarf galaxies. Others suggest that supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) are the cause. AGN’s are high luminosity emanations of (normally) electromagnetic waves coming from the centre of galaxies. Sometimes the ejection from an AGN points towards Earth, making it look very bright (we call it a ‘blazar’). It has been suggested that streams of plasma emanating from AGN’s can interact (somehow) with pulsars (another type of neutron star, highly magnetized and rotating) to produce FRBs. Indeed, previously, a faint gamma-ray burst was observed coinciding with an FRB and may eventually help explain the origin of FRBs.

So that’s a brief journey through some high energy astrophysics terminology (!): gamma-ray bursts (most energetic explosions in the universe, from supernovae), active galactic nuclei, quasars, blazars, magnetars, pulsars, FRBs, neutron stars, etc. (more on these another time).

But no one yet knows why FRB’s are only momentary and seem not to appear again. Perhaps more time is needed to see if repeated FRB’s are more common than previously thought, or a signature of some new interesting phenomenon in astrophysics. Will it happen again… “the answer is definitely maybe”!

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The Giant Peanut in Space

1/2/2019

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Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI; sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane

On new years’ day, the world was witness to new images from the “most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft”. NASA’s New Horizons space explorer set out in 2006 and has only now flown past a mysterious rock named Ultima Thule and came to within 3,500km of it (although at the time of writing this article, a day later, we’re now at…. 1,665,527km!). New Horizon’s has flown past Jupiter and Pluto (more on this in a later post) and arrived somewhere in the Kuiper belt; a rock and ice ‘filled’ region believed to hold the key to understanding the origins of our solar system.

Scientists working on the New Horizon’s project have been looking for a suitable object to study in the Kuiper belt ever since the launch in 2006. Ultima Thule was discovered only in 2014 and the Hubble Space Telescope was recruited to track its trajectory. Interestingly enough, in 2017, Ultima Thule blocked three background stars (known as an ‘occultation’) on its journey tumbling through the Kuiper belt region. Data from five different telescopes gave strong indications that Ultima Thule was an odd shaped object with two uneven lobes.

The object’s strange shape has now been confirmed by data during the close fly-by and shows that Ultima Thule is bowling-pin shaped* and rotates on a similar axis as a plane’s propeller. Its size is about 35 by 15 km. The shape was mainly determined by following the object’s shadows, rotation and trajectory, in much the same way as ‘Oumuamua’s shape was found (see previous post).

Regarding its shape, there is some speculation as to whether the object is one continuous body or, in fact, a contact binary. This is where two objects have come in to contact with one another through gravitational attraction and merely touch; but eventually fuse and coalesce. Either way, this could shed light on how planets form, through the accumulation of rocky material.

Another great discovery at the far reaches of our ever-mystifying Solar System!

*when I first saw images of Ultima Thule, it looked more like peanuts in their husk than a bowling-pin (as reported by most Media agencies!), and thus, I refer to it here as the Giant Peanut in Space

********** UPDATE - 03.01.19 **********
New high resolution image of Ultima Thule:
(~33km long)

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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The Giant Peanut in Space

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