Science News Nov 01 (Patreon)

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

Welcome everyone! Science never rests and this week we have quite a selection of news. It looks like the sun’s magnetic field will flip earlier than expected, the moon is 40 million years older than anyone thought, a group of geologists have found that Earth’s core is leaking, we’ll have a look at the tiniest particle accelerator ever, why airline pricing is such a mess, hear what the International energy agency has to say about the condition of our electric grids, how physics improves protein folding predictions, the most water-repellent surface ever, and of course, the telephone will ring.

The Sun is about to turn on its head – magnetically speaking.

The American National Solar Observatory says that the Sun will likely reach the maximum of its current cycle earlier than expected. The solar cycle is approximately 11 years in total and at the peak of each cycle the magnetic poles change polarity, they swap basically. The current phase is called the solar maximum and it goes along with an increase in the frequency of sunspots and solar flares. The sun is also a little brighter during the solar maximum which means it emits a little more energy. Yes, this does have a small effect on the temperature of Earth, but, no, it’s not where global warming comes from. 

A sunspot is a region where magnetic field lines from the interior of the sun pierce through the surface. These regions tend to be colder, so they look like dark spots. The regions where they are created on the sun move towards the equator as the cycle progresses. If you plot the latitude of the sun spot birth places as a function of time you get what’s called the butterfly diagram.

These sunspots leave behind magnetic fields that wander to the poles of opposite polarity and weaken them. So more spots, more weakening. The guys from NSO recently observed a darkening of one of the poles, which is an indication that the magnetic field there is very weak already.

The next solar maximum was originally predicted for 2025, but now it looks like it’ll be 2024 and the magnetic poles will probably flip within the next year.

After the solar maximum and the pole flip, the sun’s activity will decrease for the next five and a half years. So if your days seem a little upside-down, maybe you can blame it on the sun.

According to a new study that was just published, the moon is 40 million years older than we thought.

The moon is believed to have formed in the early phase of earth’s creation, when another small planet, about the size of mars, crashed into young earth. Scientists previously thought this happened around 4 point four two billion years ago. This age determination is usually done by analysing samples for how far radioactive decay chains have progressed.

In the new study, they re-examined a sample of moon dust that was sent back to Earth by the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

They looked in particular at the ratio of lead and uranium. They determined this by evaporating some of the rocks with a laser and then measuring the weight of the atoms that drifted away. That way you can tell very precisely what the rocks are made of. In this case, the researchers were looking at the ratio of lead to uranium atoms trapped within certain crystals.

You see, uranium decays into lead over time, and by figuring out the ratio of both types of atoms allowed the researchers to figure out how old the crystals were.

They discovered that the sample was somewhat more than 4 point 46 billion years old, meaning the Moon must be about 40 million years older than earlier estimates said.

I’m sorry for the moon really. It’s bad enough to find out you’re 40 million years older than you thought, but how do you explain this to your health insurance?

A team of researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany have managed to create a prototype mini particle accelerator, and it’s just about a millimetre in size.

The device is what’s called a dielectric laser accelerator. It works by shooting a laser pulse into a dielectric material with nanoscopic structure that’s kind of like a tunnel basically. The laser creates an electromagnetic field in the nano-tunnel which drags the electrons along. This idea was proposed a few years ago already, but so far it hasn’t been shown that it works. This is what they’ve done now.

Their devices were between zero point two and zero point five micrometres in length. They could create an average energy gain between 4 point 6 and ten point eight kilo electron volt per electron. In addition to accelerating the electrons, they also showed that they could keep them on track and not have them randomly splatter into all directions. This technology is likely to be useful in fields such as imaging and treatments of materials and biological tissue.

This is really neat but for context, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN can accelerate protons up to a maximum energy of seven Tera electron Volt, that’s a billion times more than what the mini-accelerator can do. So yeah I’m afraid we’re not going to have a hand-held LHC any time soon.

The earth’s core is leaking, according to new paper from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and CalTech. The team drew that conclusion from unusually high ratios of helium-3 that they found in lava samples from Baffin Island in Canada.

Helium-3 isn’t used to fill up birthday party decorations. It’s an incredibly rare isotope of helium. The usual helium on Earth is helium four. Helium three has one neutron less. What little Helium three there is on earth is left over from the earliest stages of our planet’s formation. If there’s some in the upper layers of Earth’s crust, it usually gasses out and disappears into space. The scientists now say that the amount of Helium-3 in those rocks is too high for that. It must be transported somehow from the core to the surface. So, the core leaks.

I think rather than a core-leak they should have called it Earth-farts, then you wouldn’t have missed it in the headlines.

Have you ever bought a plane ticket for a round trip because that was cheaper than the one-way ticket? Airfares are a mess. A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a US-based nonprofit, has done a deep-dive into airline ticket pricing and figured out why it’s such a mess.

They looked at the ticket pricing strategies of a “major U.S. airline” though they won’t say which, and found that their pricing scheme defies basic economic logic. Or, as they put it in the paper, the company does not act as a “rational, unitary decision-maker”.

What they mean is that airlines don’t sell their seats like normal economic goods, like, say, a farmer sells a carton of eggs. They don’t adjust seat prices for maximum profit by making them cheaper when there’s many left or more expensive when there’s high demand. And they don’t adjust their prices based on that of competitors either.

The reason for this, so the researchers say, is that big airlines make their pricing decisions with several different departments. They don’t act like one entity, and that has some odd consequences.

In their paper the researchers explain that the airline first has a department that decides how many flights of which capacity should go when and where. Then they have a department that estimates what that will cost, and that uses an algorithm to decide on a small set of fixed prices. These prices are shared in a global ticketing distribution system that most airlines use. This is to makes sure that customers in any country see the same seats available at the same price. The prices in this system are then updated every once in a while in big steps, based on how the cost estimate develops. What other airlines do just doesn’t play a role in that.

To make matters even odder, the researchers found that the airline pricing team seems to frequently underprice tickets, and revenue management teams then go and correct this. This is all very confusing but at least they found one very reliable pattern, which is that airfares go up in jumps, 21, 14, and 7 days ahead of the flight.

That’s a weird way of making business for a company that isn’t even owned by Elon Musk.

The International Energy Agency has published a report on the status of world’s electricity grids. They say that it’s badly in need of an upgrade.

The electric grid isn’t just the power lines, it includes transformers, distributors, converters, and storage. All that plays a major role in the transition to renewable energies. This is partly because wind and solar don’t deliver twenty-four seven, so the electricity must be stored and then be distributed on demand. But in addition, we’re supposed to all drive electric vehicles, and those need to be charged somehow.

In my video on electric vehicles, I explained why the electric grid is a bottleneck in the transition to renewables.

The new report backs this up with numbers. It says that to meet climate goals, the electric grid needs to be expanded at least twenty percent faster over the next decade than it did in the previous decade.

And then there’s this. There are more than three thousand Gigawatts of renewable energy projects awaiting connections to the grid, with half of those projects in advanced stages. That’s right, they’re building renewable energy power plants, but we can’t use them because they’re not connected to the grid.

The IEA report estimates that in order to meet climate goals, we need to nearly double our investments in the grid.

Our glorious transition to renewable energies is certainly happening any moment now.

Hello,

A robot vacuum cleaner escaped from a hotel? Well, it seems the AI takeover will be a lot less dusty than anyone thought.

They found it under a bush? Guess we finally know what Aristotle meant when he said nature abhors a vacuum.

Thanks for calling in.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo have come up with a new model to predict how proteins fold.

Proteins are long chains of molecules that fold into particular shapes. They carry out all basic functions in living things and make up for example digestive enzymes or antibodies.

Artificial intelligence, notably Deepmind’s Alphafold, has been dominating the protein folding predictions recently. But the issue with these approaches is that they give you a prediction for the resulting shape, they don’t tell you how they protein folded. They don’t tell you the intermediate steps. These intermediate steps however are important to understand interactions and energy requirements.

This study now looked at a particular type of proteins and expands on a physics. model dating back to 1979 that draws on statistical mechanics. Basically, it’s using interactions between neighbouring molecules to identify the most energy efficient folding.  

For the new model, they added some interactions that are less local which turned out to be a big improvement. They managed to predict the entire folding process for six long proteins, and showed that the results are neatly compatible with observations.

It’s not going to outdo AlphaFold, but rather it’s a complementary approach that one day quite possibly will also be fed into an AI. So you see physicists still have their uses. At least for now.

A group of researchers from Finland say they’ve created the most water repellent surface ever.

This could have lots of real-world applications for clothing or cars or dishware and so on.

Even better, the researchers used what’s called a self-assembled monolayer, that’s a single layer of molecules that spontaneously organizes and attaches to a solid surface. In the study, they applied the layer atop a silicon surface. Then they put drops on the surface and slowly tilted it. The angle at which the drops start slipping tells you how slippery the surface is. This one turns out to be very slippery indeed!

They also did a computer simulation that correctly described the interaction between the water and the surface.

They researchers point out though that their monolayer isn’t quite ready for application because at moment the layer breaks and scratches very easily. So it’ll probably be some time until I dare to wear white.

You can take the quiz here.