Science News June 7 (Patreon)

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

Welcome everyone to this week’s science news! Today we’ll talk about a new search for dark matter, how to navigate with quantum effects, why amino acids are left-handed, medical tests in a cave, the Roman space telescope, a new record for optical fibres, a water plume on Saturn’s moon, forever chemicals, and of course, the telephone will ring.

Researchers at DESY in Hamburg just launched a new search for dark matter. It works by what they call “shining a light through a wall”.

The experiment is called ALPS II which, according to the website stands for “Any Light Particle Search”. It searches for a specific particle which is called axion-like. The axion itself is a particle that was proposed in the 1970s. It was experimentally ruled out very quickly. The axion-like particles which the new experiment looks for are a modified version of the original axion, one that is more difficult to measure.

Axion-like particles interact very weakly and have small masses. They have recently become popular candidates for dark matter. The reason they’ve increased in popularity is that experiments have failed to find other particles that were supposed to make up dark matter, if that exists, which it may not.

The hypothetical axion-like particles are believed to interact with electromagnetic fields, that includes magnetic fields and also lasers. So the idea of the experiment is to send a powerful laser through a strong magnetic field towards an opaque wall. The light from the laser can’t pass through the wall. But if those axion-like particles exist, then some of the light can turn into them. The new particles can pass through the wall, and then turn back into light. So, on the other side of the wall, one would see light.

The experiment is called ALPS II because it’s the second installation of the experiment. The first ran from 2007 to 2010. As you guessed correctly the first run didn’t find anything. The new experiment will use 24 decommissioned superconducting dipole magnets from the HERA ring accelerator which will improve the sensitivity by a factor of ten over the first run.

Initial results from the experiment are expected sometime next year. Chances are they won’t find anything, but I’m sure physicists will be excited, no matter what.

A team of researchers from Imperial College London just unveiled a prototype of a new quantum sensor. It’ll be tested as a GPS-free navigation system aboard a Royal Navy research ship. The quantum sensor is a very accurate accelerometer. The idea is, if you know your starting position and you can measure accelerations extremely precisely, you can integrate over the acceleration and know where you are. That way, you don’t have to rely on satellite contact.

The quantum accelerometer doesn’t only look cool, it works by cooling atoms down to almost absolute zero where they form a condensate. At that low temperature, quantum properties can span throughout the condensate. One then beams lasers into the condensate to measure the changes in the atomic wave-functions caused by the acceleration.

This quantum navigation is part of a research area called quantum sensing. Because quantum effects get so easily disturbed, using them can vastly improve measurement accuracy. This allows the development of better detectors not just for acceleration but also magnetic and gravitational fields. Quantum sensors are already being used in laboratories, and space agencies are looking into using them in future missions. You see, high sensitivity isn’t just trendy on social media.

Scientists from Japan have proposed a new explanation for why organic chemistry on earth prefers left-handed molecules.

We’re used to thinking about molecules by their molecular composition, but molecules are more complicated than that. They have a shape in three dimensions. Many molecules have more than one shape, they have what’s known as a handedness or chirality. It means that the molecules come in two shapes that are mirror images of each other but have the same atomic composition.

It’s long been known that on our planet amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are mostly left-handed. But why that is so has remained a mystery. One hypothesis is that the environment on young earth favoured one handedness for the first amino acids and then the rest had to fit to that. It could for example have been the influence of polarized light or certain mineral surfaces.

The authors of the new paper now studied the optical properties of amino acids found on the Murchison meteorite. The Murchison meteorite is a famous meteorite that fell in Australia in 1969 and is known for containing organic compounds, including amino acids.

They say that their analysis suggests that molecular chirality may have originated not on young earth, but earlier, when the Milky way formed, more than 10 billion years ago. In the young Milky Way there would have been a lot of emission from gas clouds that are full of hydrogen. They give off light at a specific frequency known as the Lyman-alpha emission line. This light tends to be strongly polarized. The researchers say that their measurements support the idea that this was the origin of the handedness of some molecules, which then became the precursors of our amino acids.

Hi Albert,

No, I don’t really buy the stuff with the polarized light. I think it’s much easier, if you’ve ruled out all the plausible hypotheses, the right one is what’s left.

True, it won’t win me a Nobel Prize. Thanks for calling anyway.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have begun a futuristic project at the bottom of one of the UK’s deepest mining sites. The Bio-SPHERE project is located 1 point 1 kilometre underground in the Boulby Underground Laboratory in North-East England. Its purpose is to develop medical equipment that could be used in future human bases on the moon or even on mars.

Both the USA and China have plans to bring humans back on the moon, and the idea to build a station there has also been thrown around in recent decades. But the challenges are enormous, especially for health care. Low-gravity environments with high radiation exposure and difficult-to-handle equipment pose many risks, and there won’t be no emergency helicopter to rush astronauts to a hospital.

In their recent paper, the researchers propose the creation of a modular habitat structure for medical aid operations including tissue substitutes, implantation, and recovery. The operations would rely on local resources to the extent possible. The cave trial is supposed to test the feasibility of doing these treatments in confined spaces with limited equipment and little personnel.

“Have you been living in a cave” isn’t the insult that it used to be.

NASA has completed an important step in the construction of the Roman Space Telescope.

The Roman Space Telescope is a new infrared space telescope. It’s named after Nancy Grace Roman, the first chief of astronomy at NASA. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2027 and will, among other things, look for gravitational lensing and study the evolution of the large scale structure of the universe. This is a computer simulation of what the new telescope might see. It should reach the same resolution as the Hubble telescope but cover an area 100 times as large.

NASA just completed a key part of one of the instruments on board the telescope. The Instrument is called the Wide Field Instrument and the part is called the Focal Plane System. It’s now being transported to Boulder.

When completed, the Roman Telescope will carry 24 detectors in total, 18 for normal use and six set aside as spares. Each of these detectors has sixteen point eight million pixels, which will allow the telescope to take its massive, detailed photographs.

NASA expects the Focal Plane System to be integrated into the Wide Field Instrument by spring next year. Then, it will be shipped to the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, where it’ll be added to the rest of the telescope. Yes, it’s taking a while but when the thing finally goes to space NASA can rightfully joke that the Roman Space Telescope wasn’t built in a day.

An international team of researchers has created the world’s fastest optical fibre at a standardized diameter. They were able to send data at speeds up to 1 point 7 Petabits per second over a distance of more than 60 kilometres, through a fibre with a diameter of 125-micrometers, that’s about the width of a human hair.

That the fibre has standardised dimensions means it could be slotted into existing infrastructure without a massive overhaul of our information systems. It uses 19 cores to carry signals transmitted by digital signal processing. These signals can be encrypted and can be altered with existing digital programs. The cable is fed those signals through a 3D laser-printed glass chip, which is also compatible with current transmission equipment.

For comparison, a Google-funded transatlantic communications cable that went live last year transfers data at up to 350 Terabits per second over a distance of more than six thousand kilometres. The new cable would be almost 5 times faster.

I like the idea that somewhere at the bottom of the ocean there are fish watching us exchange angry tweets at petabit speed. What a time to live in.

The James Webb Space Telescope has picked up on a massive plume of water created by a geyser-like volcano on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. When you hear geyser you might think of Yellowstone National Park, but those on Enceladus are on a whole different planet. Moon, I mean. The plume of water was emitted last year in November and stretched over nine thousand six hundred kilometers, that’s about the distance from Chicago to Tokyo.

Enceladus is interesting to researchers because it’s home to a subsurface ocean made up of liquid saltwater, which could be hospitable to life. The moon is just about 500 kilometres in diameter, but researchers discovered that the plume of water gets ejected far out into space, where they contribute to Saturn’s outermost ring.

Researchers have known about the plumes on Enceladus for a while now thanks to the Cassini orbiter, which explored Saturn’s ring system in 2005. Back then they also found traces of organic compounds in the water plumes, such as methane and formaldehyde. That’s exciting because microbes could use them to generate energy. The new observations did not confirm the organic compounds, but further measurements will be looking for them.

ESAand NASA are both thinking about launching a dedicated mission to Enceladus to have a close look at what’s going on there. They would like you to know though that while a 10 thousand kilometre water geyser will look magnificent on the family photos, there are currently no restrooms at the facility.

An article that just appeared in the Annals of Global Health says that the chemical industry was aware of the dangers of some of its products decades before scientists found out, and that they actively suppressed research on the topic. The authors claim that chemical manufacturers DuPont and 3M were aware that the polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS for short, which they produced were highly toxic to humans and animals, and they knew this over 40 years before the issue rose to public awareness.

PFASs are useful for paints and coatings because they repel water and prevent stains. Since scientists have caught wind of their toxicity, several of them have been taken off the market, but some are still used for things like clothing and non-stick pans.

Unfortunately, these chemicals turned out to be not only toxic but also highly resistant to breaking down. This is why they’ve been dubbed “forever chemicals” which would also make a good title for my recurring nightmares about failing a chemistry exam.

The new article now says that the first industry study on the negative impacts of forever chemicals was conducted already in nineteen 59. This and several follow-up studies revealed serious problems. “Highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested,” reads one nineteen 70 DuPont-funded study. “Highly toxic” when inhaled, said another report in nineteen 88.

But publicly, the companies didn’t mention anything. They treated their internal studies as “confidential,” with some executives even noting they “wanted this memo destroyed.” The study did not find that the industry funded favourable research, but they did nothing to reveal the dangers eithers.

Forever chemicals are now so ubiquitous that nearly all Americans, including new-borns, carry them in their bloodstream. They’ve polluted groundwater and soil in many US communities, hundreds of which have now sued companies for billions of dollars in reparation. Just last week the first of those lawsuits was settled. Many are likely to follow.

You may think that particle physicists are somewhat full of themselves by asking for a collider with a 100 kilometres circumference, but at least they’re not using the whole world as a laboratory.