7 billion years: Scientists say Earth’s oldest solid material found

The stardust, formed five to seven billion years ago, came from a meteorite that fell to Earth 50 years ago in Australia, they said in a paper published in the journal PNAS.

Agence France-Presse Jan 14, 2020

Earth based on Nasa image.

(Getty Images/iStockphoto file photo for representation)

Researchers said Monday that new techniques have allowed them to identify the oldest solid material ever found on earth.

The stardust, formed five to seven billion years ago, came from a meteorite that fell to Earth 50 years ago in Australia, they said in a paper published in the journal PNAS.

It came down in 1969 in Murchison, Victoria state, and scientists from Chicago’s Field Museum have possessed a piece of it for five decades.

Philipp Heck, curator of meteorites at the museum, examined pre-solar grains, which are bits of stardust that become trapped in meteorites, making them time capsules of the period before the sun was born.


“They’re solid samples of stars, real stardust,” Heck said in a statement.

When the first stars died after two billion years of life they left behind the stardust, which formed into the block which fell to earth as the meteorite in Australia.

Although researchers first identified the grains in 1987 their age could not be determined.


But Heck and other colleagues recently used a new method to date these grains, which are microscopic in size. They are from silicon carbide, the first mineral formed when a star cools.

To separate the ancient grains from the relatively younger ones, scientists crushed fragments of the meteorite into a powder. Then they dissolved it in acid, which left only the pre-solar particles.

“It’s like burning down the haystack to find the needle,” says Heck.


When dust is in space it is exposed to cosmic rays which slowly change its composition. This allows researchers to date it.

A decade ago, only 20 grains from the meteorite were dated by a different method. Now, researchers have been able to determine the age of 40 grains, most of which are between 4.6 billion and 4.9 billion years old.

These ages correspond to the moment when the first stars began to break up, and since that type of star lived for two to 2.5 billion years, the stardust can be as old as seven billion years.

“These are the oldest solid materials ever found, and they tell us about how stars formed in our galaxy,” Heck said.

The new dating by this team confirms an astronomical theory which predicted a baby boom of stars before the formation of our sun, instead of a constant rhythm of star formation.

“We basically came to the conclusion that there must have been a time in our galaxy when more stars formed than normal, and at the end of their lives they become dust producing,” Heck told AFP.

The task now is to apply the same method on other meteorites.

But according to Heck, there are fewer than five known to be in collections and big enough to give up such secrets.

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Bioplastics continue to blossom—are they really better for the environment?

Replacing plastic looks hard, but alternatives to fossil fuel materials are on the rise.

TROY FARAH - 1/20/2020

Enlarge / Spilled garbage on the beach off the Black Sea in Bulgaria.
iStock / Getty Images

The English metallurgist Alexander Parkes never saw the widespread realization of his spectacular 19th-century invention, celluloid, the first plastic. While a revolutionary breakthrough, Parkesine, as it was called, was expensive and brittle. It was used in objects like buttons and combs, but ultimately quality control issues led Parkes’ company to bankruptcy in 1868 just 12 years after the discovery.

Parkesine, however, was also the first bioplastic—a plastic made from renewable plant material instead of fossil fuels. And today with the environmental impact of plastics increasingly on the public mind, bioplastics are making a big comeback. They’re proposed by some as the solution to beaches deluged with plastic and fish bellies stuffed with bottle caps. And perhaps bioplastics can replace oil-based polymers that commonly trash oceans with materials that can break down more easily and would protect a planet already smothered in these resilient substances

Bioplastic items already exist, of course, but whether they’re actually better for the environment or can truly compete with traditional plastics is complicated. Some bioplastics aren’t much better than fossil fuel-based polymers. And for the few that are less injurious to the planet, cost and social acceptance may stand in the way. Even if widespread adoption of bioplastics occurs down the line, it won’t be a quick or cheap fix. In the meantime, there is also some pollution caused by bioplastics themselves to consider. Even if bioplastics are often less damaging than the status quo, they aren’t a flawless solution.

So, could saving the planet simply come down to some design decisions? We may soon find out. Market demand for bioplastics is ballooning, with global industrial output predicted to reach 2.62 million tonnes annually by 2023, according to the Berlin-based trade association European Bioplastics. Currently, that’s only one percent of the 335 million tonnes of conventional plastics produced every year. But the European Commission, in its 2018 Circular Economy Action Plan, detailed bioplastics research as part of their strategy to drive investment in a climate-neutral economy.

“Sometimes we like to see the word ‘green,’ but we always should have appropriate awareness about the material we are dealing with,” says Federica Ruggero, an environmental engineer at the University of Florence, Italy. “It's a very good starting point in the production chain to have these new materials that can substitute plastics … but it's also important to consider the waste that comes from this material.”

To put it plainly: not all bioplastics are created equal. So which ones may be key to a genuinely “greener” future? In 2020, five candidates seem to be rising to the eco-friendly top.

Bioplastic basics

Bioplastics have come a long way since the days of Alexander Parkes. Today, these materials can be made from many renewable resources: cornstarch, beet sugar, kiwi skins, shrimp shells, wood pulp, even mangos and seaweed. They can function approximately the same as materials like vinyl or PET, the plastic most commonly used in drink bottles.

But if these polymers don’t actually have a smaller carbon footprint than plastics refined from petroleum, they may only be another example of greenwashing, a misleading marketing tactic more about image than outcomes. That’s one of the problems with the fact that there isn’t yet a universal definition of “bioplastic.”

“Bioplastic is basically anything that people like to call bioplastic,” says Dr. Frederik Wurm, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany. The term can currently mean a material made from fossil fuels that can biodegrade, such as PCL, a plastic used in packaging and drug delivery.

Bioplastics can also be biobased and not biodegradable, like the PET bottles Coca-Cola made entirely from plants. But their end product is chemically identical to PET made from oil, so it can still take centuries to fully break down. In 2013, the Coca-Cola Company (considered by one environmental advocacy group as the “most polluting brand”) pledged to make all their bottles this way by 2020, but it later backpedaled to focus more on recycling, according to the The W all Street Journal. Greenpeace, the pro-environment non-profit, has said, “Plant bottles are not the answer.”

Additives mixed with conventional plastics to speed up biodegradation don’t seem to help either. Oxo-degradable products are standard plastics that are chemically treated to quickly fragment when exposed to sunlight and oxygen—but they don’t break down entirely. And because these plastics are otherwise no different from untreated versions, the microplastics they produce can still pose environmental hazards. The European Union is currently working to ban oxo-degradable plastics.

Generally, it appears the starting material is less important than what it’s turned into, making the ideal plastic both biobased and biodegradable. A few of these polymers do exist, but they disintegrate only under certain conditions.


Enlarge / A recycling factory worker in Thailand surveys the scale of plastics being disposed.
Pramote Polyamate / Getty Images

Polylactic Acid (PLA)

The most popular bioplastic is polylactic acid or PLA, which is typically made from fermented plant starches. PLA already sees widespread use, often as single-use cups labeled with something like “compostable in industrial facilities.”

FURTHER READING Making industrial chemistry green: catalysts, chemicals, and lifecycle

Therein lies the flaw: PLA only breaks down under ideal temperatures in industrial composts. In ocean water, where microorganism populations differ from landfills, PLA is as unlikely to fully disintegrate as a polyethylene plastic bag. Most home composts can’t manage PLA, and recycling it improperly can contaminate other salvageable plastics.
Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB)

In 1926, French researcher Maurice Lemoigne found that by stressing out Bacillus megaterium, a bacteria much larger than E. coli, the microbe would produce polyhydroxybutyrate, or PHB. This can be used to make a plastic that, when it breaks down, becomes nothing but CO2, water, and organic biomass.

Unfortunately, few things are made of PHB because it’s up to 100 times more expensive to produce than other plastics, and cost is not predicted to drop soon. To get around this, scientists have tried genetically modifying plants to produce PHB just like fermenting bacteria, but so far those experiments haven’t been able to lower the price by much.
Polybutylene Succinate (PBS)

PBS was yet another accidental discovery, this time in 1863 by the Portuguese professor Agostinho Vicente Lourenço, who wasn’t fully aware of what he uncovered when he fermented sugar and mixed it with toxic ethylene glycol. PBS was rediscovered in the 1930s and made into biodegradable plastic, but it was too brittle and largely forgotten for decades. It was investigated once more in 1993 by a Japanese company called Showa Denko that began producing 3,000 tonnes per year under the trademark Bionolle. Their improved recipe made a much stronger polymer than previous attempts.

PBS is a useful substitute for propylene, the second most widely used plastic, and can be used for bags and as a replacement for the long sheets of mulch film used in agriculture. However, its complex synthesis produces a large amount of greenhouse gases, which may not make it all that much better for the environment.

In 2016, Showa Denko ceased making PBS, saying they couldn’t compete with the “harsh market environment for biodegradable plastics.” A few other companies, such as Dow Chemical and Mitsubishi Chemical Corp, still make it, however, and the market is slowly growing.

Hemp

Kevin Tubbs, founder of the Hemp Plastic Company, says his customers are united by one thing: “They carry a purple-passion hatred for what's happening with fossil fuel-based polymer. They're tired of swimming in it, walking in it, they're just tired of that. There's got to be a better solution out there.”

Tubbs believes that solution is hemp, the non-intoxicating cousin to Cannabis sativa, or marijuana. Hemp is a fibrous plant that has been used for many centuries as a textile, but it only became fully legal again in the United States in December 2018. A lot of hemp is processed for CBD, a medicinal chemical swept up in the latest wellness trend, but the stalks and leaves that are left over can be processed into all kinds of plastics.

This year, Tubbs anticipates making about 50 million tons of hemp plastic pellets that can be used on regular plastics equipment, such as 3D printers or injection molds, which makes the switch for manufacturers a little easier. Some of the hemp plastics are like PLA, able to break down into vegetable material at the end of its life under the right conditions. Other varieties are a blend of one-third hemp, one-third petroleum plastics. But even a small amount is impactful, in Tubbs’ view.

“We believe that every bit of it we use is raw fossil fuel we didn't use,” Tubbs says. “We don't see it as the end-all solution at all but … If we only did 10 percent of the market, that'd be better than we've done as a country since plastic was invented,” citing the fact that less than nine percent of plastic is recycled in the US.
Enlarge / The complicated structure of lignin.
Wikimedia Commons

Lignin

Wurm says one of the most promising bioplastic candidates is lignin, a blackish biodegradable byproduct of paper manufacturing. Approximately 70 million tons of this stuff is pulped every year, but most of it is burned for fuel. It’s commonly said that “you can make anything you want out of lignin—except money,” as a 2017 review puts it before detailing how that is mostly no longer the case. These days lignin has become cost-effective for 3D printing or adhesives, and it can be plasticized or used to reinforce other bioplastics.

However, there is still a lack of investment in this market because it’s difficult or not worth the effort for companies to transition to using these materials. The cost of all bioplastics remains relatively high due to low oil prices.

“The biodegradable materials, regardless which kind of them [there] are, they cannot compete from the cost,” Wurm says, but adds that taxing less-environmentally friendly materials could help. “If the producers and the customers have to pay more for whatever gram of plastic, they might come up with lighter and more efficient ways of packaging things.”  

Enlarge / All of these Lego pieces will now be made of sugarcane-derived polyethylene.
Lego\

A better bioplastic future

Designing an effective bioplastic needs to focus not only on what the material is made from, but how it will die and how quickly, even if it doesn’t end up in the preferred environment. But studies on the different outcomes of bioplastics can vary based on waste management standards, as Ruggero has studied, so it’s not always known how effectively bioplastics will break down in various environments.

“It’s very difficult to say that bioplastics [are] degradable in every environment,” Ruggero says. “That's why there are many different standards for the assessment of biodegradation.” Unifying those standards is crucial for making bioplastics actually sustainable, as well as not confusing consumers who may not realize what to do with these plastics at the end of their life cycle.

“That’s the challenge,” Wurm adds. “To develop a material which biodegrades in a reasonable timeframe and also is good food for the microorganisms that they can really take it up into the organism and do something, make biomass of it, and not just [release] it out as CO2 or methane.”

In the meantime, both Wurm and Ruggero suggest that a cultural shift in consumption attitudes is more important than finding plastic alternatives. Less overall plastic consumption should be a central focus. Some research suggests bioplastics may actually incentivize littering because people may think it will dissipate in nature. Waste management systems may also be unequipped to handle some of these materials, so they wind up in landfills anyway. An overhaul of this system would require better separation policies, as the EU has proposed.

“The fact that it is ‘bio’ doesn't exempt us from a rigorous collection of product,” Ruggero says. “The best way to reduce the problem of plastics is not always to change the different kind of plastic, which doesn't exploit the fossil fuels or is biodegradable.”

If bioplastics do become the norm, the energy required to grow and process the plant material also needs to be taken into consideration. However, one statistic suggests that even if all plastics were to switch to biobased sources, it would only make up five percent of all agricultural space. Nonetheless, places like South America may be at risk of greater deforestation to grow sugarcane used in plastics, for example, to say nothing of emissions from harvesting, refining, or shipping the bioplastics.

FURTHER READING New Lego pieces: Still hard on your feet, but easier on the planet

Current polymer supply chains—from extraction to production to recycling and end of life— are tightly wound for max efficiency. Adding new materials to the mix would be a costly endeavor that many large corporations may not even consider without more interest from the public or government oversight first. But overall, research and development of bioplastics is a step in the right direction, Ruggero says. “It's good to try to have new materials that are more environmentally friendly and you know how they are defined, but it's also important to consider them into the production chain."

A smarter plastic is only part of the equation, in other words. But as consumer demand increases, prices drop, and new technology emerges, bioplastics—whatever the term may eventually indicate—are likely to become more pervasive, especially as companies like Lego, IKEA, McDonald’s, and Nestlé explore multi-million dollar investments in this space.

“Everything was biodegradable when polymer chemistry actually started in the 19th century,” Wurm says, until chemists discovered stronger, cheaper alternatives using petroleum. “But we go back with modern chemistry. I think this is a strength that we can use what we learned on the way.”

Troy Farah is an independent journalist from Southwest California. His reporting on drug policy and science has appeared in WIRED, The Guardian, Discover Magazine, VICE and more. Previously at Ars, he shared the story of Dr. Aniru Conteh's battle against Lassa fever. He co-hosts the drug policy podcast Narcotica. Follow him on Twitter @filth_filler


MEANWHILE BIG OIL WANTS TO PRODUCE EVEN MORE PLASTICS
 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-surge-of-new-plastic-is-about-to-hit.html

Tremors turns 30, the most perfect B movie creature feature ever made
The film faltered at the box office but amassed a huge cult following over the years.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE - 1/19/2020

It has been 30 years since the release of Tremors, an unabashed love letter to the B-movie creature features of the 1950s that remains as fresh today as it was three decades ago. The film is sheer perfection and ranks among my personal favorite films of all time. As Ars' own Nathan Matisse wrote last year, "If B-movie horror with flashes of comedic brilliance and a few edge-of-your-seat scares interests you, viewers likely can't do much better than Tremors."

(Major spoilers below, because it's been 30 years.)

Writers S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock came up with the initial idea for Tremors in the early 1980s while making educational safety videos for the US Navy. They climbed a desert boulder for a shot and pondered what they would do if, for some reason, they were stuck there due to some outside force they eventually dubbed "Land Sharks." A friend of theirs, Ron Underwood, was a documentary director for National Geographic and helped them develop a believable creature for what would become the script for Tremors. Wilson and Maddock hit the big time with their 1986 film Short Circuit (directed by John Badham), which enabled them to finally bring Tremors to the silver screen.

The story takes place in the tiny fictional desert town of Perfection, Nevada—population 15, at least at the start of the film. Local handymen/BFFs Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) are eking out an existence doing odd jobs for the residents in exchange for all that personal freedom. Said residents include Walter (Victor Chong) who runs the local market; teenaged horror Melvin (Bobby Jacoby); single mom Nancy (Charlotte Stewart), who sells pottery and has a daughter, Mindy (Ariana Richards); a doctor, Jim (Conrad Bachmann), and his wife, Megan (Bibi Besch); rancher Miguel (Tony Genaro); a survivalist couple, Burt and Heather Gummer (Michael Gross and Reba McEntire); Nestor (Richard Marcus); and two elderly residents: Edgar Deems (Sunshine Parker) and "Old Fred" (Michael Dan Wagner), a farmer.

FURTHER READING Kevin Bacon shares the Tremors TV pilot—Val is washed, Graboids are hungry

There's also a grad student, Rhonda (Finn Carter), who is spending the summer monitoring her university's seismology equipment. She soon picks up on some very strange readings, right about the time Perfection's residents start dying under mysterious circumstances. Eventually, everyone discovers the culprits: four giant subterranean creatures that Walter dubs "graboids," since they "hunt" by sensing vibrations and shooting snake-like protrusions out of their mouths to grab their prey. From then on, it's humans vs. graboids in a battle of wits to determine the survival of the fittest.

Tremors debuted in theaters on January 19, 1990 and grossed a mere $3.7 million opening weekend, eventually eking out $16.6 million domestically against its modest $11 million budget. Both Maddock and Wilson criticized the marketing of the film, with Maddock calling the theatrical trailer "cringeworthy." (It actually is pretty bad.) Critics generally liked the film, praising the performances and how well the film walked the tonal tightrope between horror and humor.

Tremors really took off with its release on home video (and, subsequently, DVD and streaming), gaining a substantial cult following. Numerous bad sequels followed, all straight-to-video/DVD. In style and tone, they had more in common with the Sharknado franchise than the original film. There was Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996), Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001), Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004), Tremors 5: Bloodlines (2015), and Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell (2018). A seventh installment, Tremors: Island Fury, is rumored to be in development. There was even a short-lived SyFy TV series in 2003, set just after the events of Tremors 3, that was abruptly cancelled after just 13 episodes.

I enjoy a cheesy SyFy flick as much as anyone, but none of the sequels even comes close to capturing the magic of the original Tremors. It's got a terrific cast of characters, for starters, all types one would expect to find in a town like Perfection. Burt's "UZI 4U" license plate and impassioned rants about eminent domain are just one example of many delightful details. The actors all nail their portrayals. (Special shoutout to Finn Carter's Rhonda, who is that rare gem in film: a believable working scientist.) It has an equally terrific script, with on-point dialogue that illuminates the intricate relationships among the residents, especially the inevitable tensions and arguments. ("I know, I know, he thinks he knows everything," Heather says soothingly to a disgruntled Burt after a face-off with Earl.)

Director Ron Underwood (who went on to make City Slickers and Mighty Joe Young) set the narrative up like a mystery, introducing us to the main characters and setting as they realize the threat that is coming for them. We don't see the graboids at all at first, just their victims. Val and Earl find Edgar Deems perched on an electrical tower, dead of dehydration. Something terrified him so much, despite his trusty Winchester rifle, that he chose to die slowly over days rather than come down.

Next, we see Old Fred working the hoe as his sheep start bleating in terror. The ground rumbles, and poor Fred is yanked underground. Val and Earl find his head and assume a serial killer is on the loose—especially when they discover the gory remains of two road workers. They find what appears to be a dead snake attached to the underside of their truck and finally encounter the first full-sized graboid while riding for help in nearby Bixby.

Underwood expertly boosts the suspense by revealing there are actually four graboids, then blocks off the one road out of town and takes away each alternate option as the creatures close in. Eventually the surviving residents of Perfection find themselves trapped on a cluster of boulders in the desert—the scenario that inspired the film—while the last two graboids lie in wait for them to either die of thirst, like Edgar, or attempt to run for safety and become lunch.

But it's the ingenious design of the graboids that really make the film for me—how the characters figure out the monsters' characteristics. Above all, the graboids are smart and capable of learning about their human prey and adapting accordingly. When humans hide in a car, they dig around the surrounding soil so the whole vehicle sinks underground. They do the same thing to loosen building foundations when the residents take refuge on their roofs. They dig a trap just as the humans are almost safely to the mountains, and so forth. The humans have to keep upping their game to survive, and the ingenious ways they outwit the monsters is a huge part of the film's delight.

Several years ago, SyFy attempted to revive the TV series, with Blumhouse Productions behind the project—even signing on Bacon to reprise his role as Val, focusing on what happened to him 25 years later. (Footloose might have catapulted Bacon to stardom, but Val ranks among his most career-defining performances). As Nathan Matisse wrote:

Val has clung to his hero days while the town of Perfection struggled to determine its next move. The show's Graboids' World theme park more closely resembles an aging regional destination than Disney World, and even the local cafe probably regrets changing its name to an inevitable Instagram thirst trap, Grab-A-Coffee.

But the network ended up passing on the pilot, although footage was shown at the 2019 ATX Television Festival last year. And it's sadly unlikely to find a home elsewhere. Ah well, at least we still have the original to watch and re-watch, hopefully for decades to come.

Listing image by Universal Picture

The first casualty: Edgar Deems (Sunshine Parker).

Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) check with Doctor Jim (Conrad Bachmann) and his wife Megan (Bibi Besch) to determine Edgar's cause of death.

Old Fred (Michael Dan Wagner) becomes a graboid's lunch.

Roadworkers Howard (John Goodwin) and Carmine (John Pappas) scoff at Val and Earl's warnings.

Burt (Michael Gross) thinks it's some kind of snake.

PhD student Rhonda (Finn Carter) notices some odd seismic readings.

"That's how they get you."

Earl and Val realize the threat is underground.

The graboid opens its gaping maw.

"I found the ass end!" One graboid down, three to go.

That's a lot bigger than a snake.

Pole vaulting to Rhonda's truck, being sure to stay on the residual boulders.

Give Rhonda a hand with the driving, guys.

Val saves Little Mindy (Ariana Richards) and mom Nancy (Charlotte Stewart

Rhonda in a tight spot.

R.I.P. Walter Chang (Victor Wong).

Val and Earl are distraught that they couldn't save Walter.

Melvin (Bobby Jacoby) panics.

You want survivalists Burt and Heather (Reba McEntire) on your side in a gunfight.

Second graboid bites the dust.

Victory lap: "Picked the wrong goddamned rec room to break into, didn't ya!"

The survivors end up cornered on a cluster of boulders by the graboids lying in wait.

Preparing to go graboid fishing with homemade bombs.

Kabloom! Three down, one to go.

"This one ain't dumb

Val offers himself as bait.

"Can you fly?"

Answer: nope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zvVozefYw

Astronomers find an oddball asteroid entirely inside the orbit of Venus
"Getting past the orbit of Venus must have been challenging."
ERIC BERGER - 1/20/2020

Enlarge / The Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California.
Caltech Optical Observatories

Astronomers have found nearly 1 million asteroids in our Solar System, with the vast majority located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

It is far rarer to find asteroids with orbits closer to the Sun, and especially inside the orbit of Earth, due to Jupiter's gravitational influence. There are only about 20 known asteroids with orbits entirely inside that of Earth's. They are called Atira asteroids.

Many of these Atira asteroids have orbits that are substantially tilted away from the plane of the Solar System, suggesting past encounters with Mercury or Venus.
A rare find

Until now, scientists have theorized that Vatira asteroids might exist—those with orbits inside Venus—but had yet to find one. They would be difficult to observe because their orbits would bring them close to the Sun, leaving only a short window to find them in the dusk or dawn sky. And also because presumably they are quite rare due to the gravitational challenge of squeezing into a stable orbit so near the Sun.  

Enlarge / 2020 AV2 orbits entirely within the orbit of Venus.
Bryce Bolin/Caltech

But now astronomers have found a Vatira asteroid for the first time. The body, called 2020 AV2, was found earlier this month by the California Institute of Technology's Zwicky Transient Facility, and confirmed by other observatories around the world.

"Getting past the orbit of Venus must have been challenging," said George Helou, a Caltech astronomer and co-investigator at the Zwicky facility, in a news release. "The only way it will ever get out of its orbit is if it gets flung out via a gravitational encounter with Mercury or Venus, but more likely it will end up crashing on one of those two planets."

Astronomers say the asteroid spans about 1 to 3 kilometers in diameter and has an orbit tilted about 15 degrees relative to the plane of the Solar System. During its 151-day elongated orbit, it remains within the path of Venus while also approaching the orbit of Mercury. It likely was thrown into the intervenusian orbit by an encounter with another planet.

The Zwicky camera, attached to a telescope at Palomar Observatory in Southern California, is well suited to finding asteroids because it scans the entire sky rapidly and can observe asteroids during their short-lived appearances in the night sky.

FURTHER READING 

It looks like NASA is getting serious about finding hazardous asteroids

Why Didn't the Allies Bomb Auschwitz?

By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer 

A new PBS documentary probes the deliberation behind the historic decision.

Train tracks converge at the entrance to the Nazi 

death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. In this photo,

 taken in 1945, the tracks are strewn with snow-covered 

personal effects that belonged to the camp's inmates.
(Image: © Alamy)

In the spring of 1944, Allied forces received disturbing intelligence about horrific atrocities taking place at Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland, a place now known as one of the Nazis' most brutal extermination camps.

Two escaped Jewish prisoners revealed first-hand knowledge of the horrors they experienced, and the Allies faced a terrible choice at a pivotal moment during the war, when their military resources were already strained to the breaking point.

Should they deploy aircraft to bomb the death camp, despite a substantial risk of killing trapped prisoners? Or were the military cost and potential loss of life too great, when the outcome of World War II itself hung in the balance? In a new PBS documentary, "Secrets of the Dead: Bombing Auschwitz," historians probe the deliberations of Allied leaders: Should they perform a moral but militarily fruitless action, or concentrate their might on crushing the Nazi war machine for good?

Established in 1940 near the town of Oświęcim, Poland, as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, Auschwitz's inmate numbers skyrocketed as the war progressed. In August 1944, Auschwitz held around 400,000 people: 205,000 were Jews and 195,000 were non-Jews — Poles, Soviet POWs, Roma and other ethnic groups, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. (By the war's end an estimated 1.1 million people had died there.)

When Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped Auschwitz in April 1944, they brought with them the first eyewitness testimony describing gas chambers and the Nazis' use of mass murder at an unthinkable scale. Their detailed account to Slovakia's Jewish underground, first known as the Vrba-Wetzler report, was later distributed as The Auschwitz Protocol, according to PBS.

From May through July of 1944, copies of the report were sent to neutral Switzerland's War Refugee Board; to the War Refugee Board headquarters in Washington, D.C.; and to leaders of the Allied forces, including the American assistant secretary of war, John McCloy. Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, was so troubled by the report that he issued a memo recommending a bombing raid on the death camp.

But ultimately, no bombers were sent to Auschwitz. Though Allied raids were already targeting the German chemical plant IG Farben, which was located just 4 miles (6 kilometers) from the death camp and even used Auschwitz prisoners for labor, several factors led the Allies to reject Auschwitz as a potential target, said Tami Davis Biddle, a professor of history and national security strategy at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Sketch of the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria from

 the English-language version of the Vrba-Wetzler report, published 

November 1944.

 (Image credit: Executive Office of the United States War Refugee Board)

An uncertain outcome

One reason can be traced to widespread anti-Semitism in the U.S. and the U.K. during WWII, fanned by a highly effective Nazi propaganda campaign suggesting that Jews were manipulating the Allied war machine, Biddle told Live Science.

"Politicians got nervous if it looked like they were making special efforts on behalf of the Jews," Biddle said. In fact, many figures in American leadership — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — agreed at the time that maintaining public support of the war effort required downplaying emphasis on Jewish interests, said Michael Berenbaum, a professor of Jewish studies at American Jewish University in Los Angeles.

"There was a fear that Americans would support the war effort less if they thought it was war about the Jews," Berenbaum told Live Science.

There was also the question of how accurately Auschwitz could be bombed from the air. Allied military officers had some aerial photos of the camp, and the Auschwitz Protocol provided more intel about the buildings, so bombers could pick targets that would cause fewer casualties. But aerial bombing during WWII was notoriously inaccurate; so-called precision bombing, as we know it today, was impossible, and a raid could have killed far more prisoners than it saved, Biddle said.

"You would need to drop 220 bombs on each of the four crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau to have a 90% chance of one of them hitting each crematorium," Biddle said.


Aerial photographs such as this one, taken above Auschwitz on April 4,1944,

 gave the Allies limited information about the layout and distribution of buildings.

 (Image credit: Alamy)

What's more, assigning bombers to an Auschwitz raid would divert military resources away from the front lines, Biddle said.

"We look back on World War II and we tend to think, well, it was probably obvious that we were going to win. It wasn't," Biddle said. The window in 1944 in which it was possible to strike at Auschwitz was also one of the most intense periods of fighting on the European continent; Allied forces were scrambling to move armies eastward, shut down German rocket-launching sites and prevent a resurgence of the Luftwaffe — the German air force.

"The military was very jealous of its resources. It's pretty much fighting for its life in 1944," Biddle said. "On the one hand, there's the case for diverting resources to go hit this target. On the other hand, there's this sense that we've just got to defeat the Germans no matter what, and focus everything on the military defeat."

Even if the Allies had bombed Auschwitz, it wouldn't have been a "magic bullet" that saved millions of lives, Berenbaum said. By the time the Allies had what they needed to proceed with a raid, it would have been too late for most of the Holocaust's 11 million victims. Most of the death camps had already been shut down by the retreating Nazis; at that point, about 90% of the people murdered by the Third Reich had already been killed, Berenbaum said.

Nevertheless, there's no denying that bombing Auschwitz would have sent a resounding message that such terrible atrocities would not go unanswered.

"I wish we had done it," Biddle said. "I wish that we could look back on our record of the war and say, we understood how awful this was, and we want to make a moral statement."

"Secrets of the Dead: Bombing Auschwitz" premieres Jan. 21 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), pbs.org/secrets and the PBS Video app to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Related: 

Photos: The Flying Bombs of Nazi German

Photos: Escape Tunnel at Holocaust Death Site

In Photos: Girls' Hut Found at Nazi Death Camp

Images: Missing Nazi Diary Resurfaces

Originally published on Live Science.

Could Scientists 'Hack' the Zika Virus to Kill

Brain Cancer?

By Nicoletta Lanese - Staff Writer 

Could Zika be used as a cancer treatment?  

   

(Image: © Shutterstock)

The moquito-spread Zika virus known for its links to brain damage in babies born to infected mothers has the potential to target and destroy brain cancer, scientists have found.

New research has revealed that the Zika virus breaks into brain cells by using a special molecular key, and scientists think the virus could be tweaked so that it infects only brain cancer cells, leaving  healthy cells unharmed.

The aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma often defies standard cancer treatment because the disease transforms normal brain cells into stem cells. While typical neurons stop dividing after so many replications, stem cells can reproduce indefinitely and grow a whole new tumor from just a handful of cells. Patients typically survive less than 20 months after being diagnosed with glioblastoma; even if the cancer can be forced into remission, the tumors typically regrow and take the life of the patient within 12 months. 

But where standard treatments fail, the Zika virus may offer a new strategy to wipe out the deadly disease, according to a pair of studies published Jan. 16 in the journals Cell Reports and Cell Stem Cell.   

Related: The 9 Deadliest Viruses on Earth

"While we would likely need to modify the normal Zika virus to make it safer to treat brain tumors, we may also be able to take advantage of the mechanisms the virus uses to destroy cells to improve the way we treat glioblastoma," senior author Dr. Jeremy Rich, director of neuro-oncology and of the Brain Tumor Institute at UC San Diego Health, said in a statement. (Rich and his colleagues authored the Cell Stem Cell paper.) 

When the Zika virus infects developing fetuses, the virus stunts brain development by targeting neural stem cells and stunting their proliferation. Rich and his co-authors wondered whether the virus' strategy could be co-opted to shrink brain tumors. In a 2017 study published in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, the team put their theory to the test and found that the Zika virus actually prefers to infect glioblastoma stem cells over normal brain cells — at least in petri dishes and mouse models of the disease. The reason behind this preference remained a mystery, until now. 

To learn how Zika breaches the membranes of cancer cells, the team scanned the virus' surface for integrins — receptors that viruses often use to latch onto their victims' cells and slip inside. Having identified various integrins on the viral surface, the researchers then blocked each with a protein. Then, they unleashed the modified virus into a lab dish holding a mix of normal brain stem cells and cancerous ones. If a particular integrin helped Zika hack into brain cells, blocking the receptor should stop the infectious virus in its tracks.

Through trial-and-error, the team learned that an integrin called αvβ5 serves as the key that lets Zika into brain cells.    

"When we blocked other integrins, there was no difference," Rich said. "But with αvβ5, blocking it with an antibody almost completely blocked the ability of the virus to infect brain cancer stem cells and normal brain stem cells." 

Related: 5 Facts About Brain Cancer

According to the study, αvβ5 consists of two halves: αv and β5. The former half appears in abundance on brain stem cells, which may help to explain how the virus targets both healthy and cancerous brain stem cells. The latter half, however, mostly appears on cancer cells and renders tumors more aggressive, regarding how quickly they can spread. 

For this reason, glioblastomas may be more vulnerable to Zika infection than normal brain stem cells. The team confirmed the idea by injecting Zika into human brain organoids — tiny models of the human brain grown in a lab dish. In the mini-brains, the virus reliably infected cancer cells more often than healthy cells. But without an intact αvβ5 receptor, the virus could not infect the cells at all.     

The second study, published in Cell Reports, also confirmed that αvβ5 grants Zika its cancer-crushing powers. 

Using the CRISPR gene-editing technique, the researchers selectively deleted specific genes from glioblastoma stem cells and exposed each mutant tumor to the Zika virus. When they deleted the gene that contained instructions to build αvβ5, Zika could no longer grab hold of the cancer cells. The discovery "made perfect sense" because αvβ5 appears in such large quantities on neural stem cells, the virus' primary target, senior author Tariq Rana, professor and chief of the Division of Genetics in the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center, said in the statement.   

Related: 7 Odd Things That Raise Your Risk of Cancer (and 1 That Doesn't)

With the knowledge that αvβ5 may be a soft spot in aggressive glioblastomas, the researchers now aim to genetically modify the Zika virus to target the cancer while sparing healthy cells.  

Other deadly viruses could also serve as weapons against brain cancer. In a study published in 2018 in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers treated glioblastoma patients with a genetically modified poliovirus and found that more than 20% remained alive three years later, as compared with 4 percent of patients who received a standard treatment, Live Science reported at the time. As the field of virotherapy continues to grow, once-deadly diseases may prove to be powerful weapons in the fight against cancer.