Science News March 29 (Patreon)

[This is a transcript with references.]

Welcome everyone to this week’s science news. Today we’ll talk a new explanation for the interstellar object Oumuamua, what’s up with the W-boson anomaly, two new institutes founded by NASA, an airplane powered by hydrogen, a gigapixel 3D microscope, vaccinations without the needles, concrete that talks, nano-labels, and of course the telephone will ring.

Do you remember the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua that Avi Loeb claimed was alien technology? Two astrophysicists have now put forward a new explanation for its weird orbit. And Avi Loeb doesn’t like it.

In 2017, the Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk made a surprising discovery when he analysed data from the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. He saw an object that passed closely by our planet, but it looked neither like a comet nor like an asteroid.

When Weryk traced back its path, the object turned out to have come from outside our solar system. “Oumuamua” the astronomers named it, Hawaiian for “messenger from afar arriving first”.

Oumuamua gave astronomers and physicists quite something to think. It entered our solar system on a path that agreed with the laws of gravity, with no hints at any further propulsion. But as it got closer to the sun, it began to emit particles of some sort that accelerated it. This particle emission didn’t fit that usually observed from comets. Also, the shape of Oumuamua is rather untypical for asteroids or comets. It looks somewhat like a huge cigar with the long side spanning several hundred meters.

When Oumuamua was first observed, no one had any good idea what it was, what it was made of, or what happened when it got close to the sun. Avi Loeb used the situation to claim that Oumuamua is technology of an alien civilization and I hope he enjoyed his five minutes of fame.

One of the possible explanations that astrophysicists later proposed was that Oumuamua was a big chunk of frozen nitrogen that broke off from a larger one, hence the weird shape, and that began to evaporate when it got closer to the sun.

The authors of this new paper, which was just published in Nature, think that wasn’t quite right either. They took another look experiments in the academic literature from decades ago.

These experiments had found that highly energetic particles in the interstellar medium can convert the ice in a comet into molecular hydrogen. And that hydrogen could be trapped in bubbles in the ice. When the comet gets close to the sun, it heats up, the hydrogen bursts out, and, voila, the object suddenly speeds up.

Avi Loeb is not convinced. He claims that the authors of the paper made a mistake in their calculation by not taking into account that the evaporation of the hydrogen in return cools the surface, so the numbers don’t work out in the end. Wait until the government hears that if their numbers don’t work out, they can claim it’s aliens.

The ATLAS experiment at CERN has re-calculated the value of the W-boson mass and found it to be in perfect agreement with the prediction.

You may remember the headlines last year about some supposed sign for new physics. Those headlines were reporting on a result from the CDF collaboration at Fermilab. CDF did a new analysis of data collected from 2002 to 2011. During that time, they measured about 4 million events that contained a particle called the W-boson.

The W-boson is one of the particles in the standard model. It’s one of those that mediate the weak nuclear force. Actually there’s two of them with different charges, but they have the same mass. The W-bosons are extremely short-lived and really only show up in particle colliders.

The value of the mass of the W-boson is related to other parameters in the standard model which have also been measured. So, it isn’t an independent parameter, it has to fit to the others. If you measure the W-boson mass, you can therefore use it as a consistency check for the standard model.

Last year, the CDF collaboration got a result for the W-boson mass that was way larger than what the standard model predicts. That was the reason for the big headlines – it’s called mass media for a reason! In this figure, the grey vertical line is the standard model prediction and this red dot was the result from last year. It’s a stunning 7 sigma away from the prediction. I talked about this in more detail in an earlier video.

The ATLAS collaboration at CERN now also did a new data analysis. They used data from 2011 with improved models for the distribution of quarks and gluons inside protons.  Here you see the summary of their analysis. The grey vertical line is again the standard model prediction. And this is the result they get. As you see it’s in perfect agreement with the standard model. Of course, this doesn’t make the CDF result go away, but it adds to the suspicion that it’s probably not new physics.

You know, the standard model is kind of like the royal family. Both are all about who is doing what with whom. It’s big news when someone looks a little heavier than normal. And both are very difficult to get rid of.

NASA spends 30 million dollars on two new academic institutes to speed up the development of new space technologies.

The first is the Quantum Pathways Institute based at the University of Texas at Austin. Researchers there will study the use of quantum sensors on satellites. What’s a quantum sensor? One that both works and doesn’t work at the same time?Not quite. A quantum sensor uses objects with quantum properties to make incredibly sensitive measurements, for example of magnetic and gravitational fields.

So far, quantum sensors are early-stage technology, with some proofs of principle but not quite ripe for application. NASA wants to know whether they can use these sensors on their satellites. The distribution of Earth’s mass – and therefore its shape and gravitational field – are changing as ice melts and water moves around. So, odd as it sounds, climate change does change the gravitational field of Earth. Quantum sensors could come in handy to track what’s happening.

The second of their new initiatives is the Institute for Model-Based Qualification and Certification of Additive Manufacturing. That’s additive manufacturing, not addictive, and otherwise known as 3D printing. This institute will be led out of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Researchers there will work on 3D printing metal parts for a human outpost on the moon and for rockets to get there.

NASA already has a project for the 3D building of rocket engine components. But they want to know how they will perform during space flight. Another task for the new institute is to come up with certification standards for the parts. Bureaucracy, the Final Frontier.

The California-based company Universal Hydrogen has conducted a test flight of the world’s largest hydrogen fuel cell aircraft. They dubbed it Lightning McClean.

The company replaced one of two conventional engines in a 40-seat airplane with a hydrogen fuel-cell. The plane reached an altitude of about 1 kilometre. The conventional engine was on for part of the time, but during a cruise over the airport, the pilot throttled it back, relying mainly on the fuel cell.

Unlike the engines that you find in hydrogen powered cars, the one they used in this plane doesn’t store energy in a battery. This reduces both the weight and the cost. Of course, there’s a reason that one uses batteries in hydrogen-powered cars. It’s that the power output of the chemical reaction in the fuel cells can’t be quickly adjusted. The battery kicks in when you suddenly need to change the power level. But I guess up in the air there aren’t many acceleration lanes where you’d need that.

Universal Hydrogen has developed a retrofit kit to modify some existing regional airplanes. And they deliver its hydrogen in modular capsules that airports can already handle.

Universal Hydrogen says it has sixteen airline companies lined up for the eventual conversion of 247 aircraft, totalling more than one billion dollars in retrofits. They hope that regional hydrogen passenger service could be in place by 2025.

Bigger passenger planes can’t be retrofitted, but many of those models will have to be replaced by the mid 2030s anyway. The company says those new models could be modified to run on fuel cells.

As I explained in my previous video, I am highly sceptical that a large-scale hydrogen economy will ever make commercial sense, but I guess we’ll find out.

Hi Buzz,

They invented what? Powdered beer?

Well, that should help with the toilet queues at the Oktoberfest.

Yes, I do have moon news. Hang on. Do you remember that they think the moon formed when this small planet crashed into Earth, four and a half billion years ago or so. They now say this also set the tectonic plates in motion.

I think it’s good news. If you want to set things in motion on Earth all you need to do is to hit it with a planet the size of Mars.

Talk soon!

A group of American engineers has developed a high-speed gigapixel microscope in 3D.

They called it a Multi Camera Array Microscope or MCAM. The team took videos from different angles using 54 overlapping cameras. Then they used a computer algorithm to recreate the full three dimensional image.

You can see here how it works with the images of harvester ants. On the left is the composite image. The 3D height map is on the right. The microscope allows behavioural researchers to track animals in ways they hadn’t been able to do before.

This is not just pretty cool, it’s also useful. For example, zebrafish are used to test pharmaceuticals, but currently they have to be anesthetized and kept still while they’re investigated. The new microscope let’s researchers see very precisely how the little fish are doing while living a normal life. Well, as normal of a life as a fish in a pharmaceuticals impact study could have. I hope they pay’s good.

Two biochemists at the University of Texas at Dallas have invented a new way of delivering medicines – through a puff of air rather than a needle. They presented it at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society this month.

The practice of needle-free injections goes back to the 1960s. The U.S. military used jet injectors to fire narrow streams of fluid into the arm for mass vaccinations. But it was painful and sometimes materials splashed back, and you didn’t know exactly what splashed, so let’s just say it didn’t work as desired.

This new system works differently. It fires powdered medication into the arm and the test subjects say it doesn’t hurt at all. It feels like a Nerf bullet hitting the arm. This is great news for patients and also for doctors who like firing Nerf bullets.

To get this done, the researchers developed a crystalline structure -- sort of like a cage for the molecules of medication. They delivered it in a puff of gas. As you can see here in the graphs on the right, if the gas is carbon dioxide, the medication is delivered almost instantly. It’s because the crystalline structure breaks when the carbon dioxide reacts with water in the body. The medication then releases over several days.

One of the big breakthroughs here is that the medication, say, a vaccine, is in powdered form, meaning it doesn’t need refrigeration. I’m sure the idea of delivering drugs by shooting gas puffs isn’t going to be controversial at all.

An engineer at Purdue University in Indiana has invented concrete that communicates through a smartphone app, making it as communicative as the average teenager.

To make concrete talk, you plop a sensor into it as it’s freshly being poured on a highway. You can see an early version of the sensor in this video. The sensor lives in the concrete for years. It contains a material that shows a piezoelectric effect, that is, it can convert pressure and deformation to electrical currents

It’s a practical solution for several problems. If you pour fresh concrete, you need to know when it’s strong enough for further construction or use. You also need to know when it needs fixing or replacement. Finally, maybe the concrete gets lonely and sending messages will make it feel better.

Here is what the new generation of the sensors looks like. The new sensors are already being used on interstate roads in Indiana and Texas and another seven states are pooling money to make the system more widespread.
 
A problem that the researchers still need to address is that bypassers throw sensors into the fresh concrete and it’ll end up saying “Kevin was here” for all eternity.

A team of engineers from Singapore and China has figured out how to 3D print nano-sized security labels that could reduce the sale of fake products.

An estimated 500 million dollars in counterfeit products, from footwear to medical equipment, change hands every year. Current security labels are easy to hack for those who put their minds to it.

The new concept is based on the ancient Chinese tiger tally, a two-piece object used for identification, for example in the military. Soldiers holding a part would be allowed to travel through or enter certain areas when their part fit to that of a local authority.

In the new paper, the engineers used a 3D printer to create nanoscale spirals. These spirals can filter both the colour of the light and the orbital angular momentum. They use two sheets of these filters. If the filters in each sheet match, the light goes through and you get a clear dot. You see here how the signal changes when the two patterns match.

They were able to produce 33 different combinations for their spiral-filters: three distinct colour channels and 11 topological features. This means, by creating an array of 10 pairs by 10 pairs of beams, the number of possible combinations for such a security label is 33 to the 100. That’s about as many as there are vacua in the string theory landscape, and may even be enough for the next season of Ray-Ban glasses.