Scientists are debating bizarre theory that EVERYTHING in the universe has consciousness including inanimate objects like rocks and chairs as proponents argue the human conscious exists outside the brain

• There are two prevalent theories for consciousness – monism and dualism
• In monism, consciousness is believed to have emerged from the physical brain
• Dualists believe consciousness is separate from matter or the human body
• Most scientists believe consciousness is tied to a person's body – and have tried to find ways quantify and record consciousness
• Panpsychism is a tricky but convenient third theory about consciousness, describing it as inherent in all matter – and that it did not emerge from the brain 
• Rather than being borne by the human brain or completely separate from it, consciousness simply exists in all things somewhat merging the disciplines 
• The theory of panpsychism first started emerging as early as around the year 600 BCE, though has largely been laughed off by the scientific community 
• The theory has come to the fore again after a recent study on the 'sociality' of mitochondria
• The study concluded that mitochondria – which is found in the cells of plants and animals – engage in 'social' behaviors
• The study represents a 'theoretical shift' in how mitochondria are understood to facilitate future discoveries across scientific disciplines 

By ADAM SCHRADER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 24 July 202

Scientists are debating a bizarre philosophical theory that everything in the universe has consciousness. 

There are two prevalent theories for consciousness – monism and dualism. In monism, generally preferred by scientists, consciousness is believed to be entirely a construct of the physical brain. 

While religious people and traditionalists tend towards dualism, the belief consciousness is entirely separate from matter or the human body. 

Panpsychism is a third theory which describes consciousness as inherent in all matter; both living and inanimate. 

Rather than being borne by the human brain or completely separate from it, consciousness exists in all things, even a chair or rock, and some believe that there is one basic consciousness that exists throughout the universe.

The theory has come to the fore again after a recent scientific study on mitochondria. It found that mitochondria – which is found in the cells of plants and animals – engage in 'social' behaviors.  

The study, published in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews in January,  appears to suggest that mitochondria are conscious beings – but does not actually say whether the interconnectedness in mitochondria is the result of biological processes or some mystical force.

Panpsychism has entered the foreground recently in the scientific community after Dr. Martin Picard, left, and Swiss scientist Dr. Carmen Sandi, right, published a  study on mitochondria

The study reads that mitochondria 'communicate with each other and with the cell nucleus, exhibit group formation and interdependence, synchronize their behaviors, and functionally specialize to accomplish specific functions within the organism.'

Previously, mitochondria have been thought of as the 'powerhouse of the cell,' more like a battery. The study, which does not actually present new findings, represents a 'theoretical shift' in how mitochondria are understood to facilitate future discoveries across scientific disciplines.

An article on Panpsychism, in Salon, called the study 'fascinating scientific trivia' that could be explained by panpsychism but admitted that it was 'empathically' not what the study's two authors had envisioned when conducting their research.

'I do not know enough about panpsychism to make an informed comment,' one of the study authors told the outlet.

In an interview with Salon, David Skrbina - a philosopher and author of the book Panpsychism in the West – said the inability to scientifically explain consciousness has been 'one of the major frustrations' for the scientific community.

'As far as I can tell, and the latest research I've seen, they have been unable to do this, which suggests that consciousness is either a deeper or a more complex phenomenon than most of our scientists have thought and maybe are willing to admit,' he said.

Keith Frankish, an honorary reader in philosophy at the University of Sheffield, wrote in the magazine Aeon that 'panpsychism's popularity stems from the fact that it promises to solve two deep problems simultaneously.'

'The first is the famous 'hard problem' of consciousness. How does the brain produce conscious experience? How can neurons firing give rise to experiences of colour, sound, taste, pain and so on?' he wrote.

'In principle, scientists could map my brain processes in complete detail but, it seems, they could never detect my experiences themselves – the way colours look, pain feels and so on.'

He wrote that the second problem panpsychism promises to solve 'concerns an apparent gap in our scientific picture of the world.' 

Scientists are now debating a bizarre philosophical theory that everything in the universe has consciousness including inanimate objects like rocks and chairs

Frankish wrote that, for example, physics can describe the mass, charge and spin of an electron but doesn't answer 'what an electron, or any other basic particle, is like in itself, intrinsically.'

'And, arguably, it never could, since its conceptual resources – mathematical concepts, together with the concepts of causation and spatiotemporal position – are suitable only for describing structures and processes, not intrinsic qualities,' Frankish wrote. 

'Yet it is plausible to think that particles can't just be collections of dispositions; they must have some intrinsic categorical properties that give rise to their dispositions.'

However, he argues that panpsychism faces its own problems as panpsychists believe consciousness 'emerges from the combination of billions of subatomic consciousnesses, just as the brain emerges from the organisation of billions of subatomic particles;

'How do the micro-experiences of billions of subatomic particles in my brain combine to form the twinge of pain I'm feeling in my knee?' he wrote.

'If billions of humans organised themselves to form a giant brain, each person simulating a single neuron and sending signals to the others using mobile phones, it seems unlikely that their consciousnesses would merge to form a single giant consciousness. Why should something similar happen with subatomic particles?'

Luke Roelofs, a philosopher of mind at NYU's Centre for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, told Salon that panpsychists think that mental experiences such as thought, reasoning, decision-making, and the experiencing of senses are not the same thing as consciousness.

'Consciousness is just subjectivity,' he said. 'And so they think it makes sense for consciousness to exist in simple forms without thought, without reasoning, without vision or hearing or smell.'

He said that critics of panpsychism like Frankish think 'there's nothing left to talk about' when you take away thought and reasoning from the definitions of consciousness.

Frankish himself argues as much, writing that consciousness 'appears to be a specific state of certain highly complex information-processing systems, not a basic feature of the Universe.'

He argues that panpsychism gives consciousness a 'curious status' by placing it 'at the very heart of every physical entity' but then gives no explanation for its role. 

'It finds a place for consciousness in the physical world, but that place is a sort of limbo. Consciousness is indeed a hard nut to crack, but I think we should exhaust the other options before we take a metaphysical sledgehammer to it,' Frankish wrote.

He alternatively concludes anew theory, that consciousness is an 'illusion' and that it 'is not everywhere but nowhere.' 

'Perhaps this seems as strange a view as panpsychism,' he wrote. 'But thinking about consciousness can lead one to embrace strange views.'

Among the first examples of the panpsychist theory came from the philosopher Thales who noted that some objects like magnets and amber must possess minds because they can move themselves, according to the entry on panpsychism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The theory of panpsychism first started emerging as early as around the year 600 BCE, though has largely been laughed off by the scientific community. 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that early Greek philosophers were hit with the same dilemma about panpsychists being debated today.

'If one opts for reductionism [a monistic view that the mind can be reduced to fundamental elements] it is incumbent upon one to explain how the reduction happens,' the encyclopedia entry reads.

'On the other hand, if one opts for the panpsychist view that mind is an elemental feature of the world, then one must account for the apparent lack of mental features at the fundamental level.'

Nearly two millennia later, scientists like Sir Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei worked to mathematize and quantify nature and the sciences by removing experiences and qualifiers.

Meanwhile, philosopher Rene Descartes, who lived during the 17th century Enlightenment, took the dualist arguing that physical bodies served as a house for the mind and souls - which were separate entities.

Philip Goff, associate professor of philosophy at Durham University, told Salon that 'what Descartes was making very rigorous was the philosophy of Galileo.'

Goff explained that Galileo argued consciousness had to be removed from the scientific process and explained in other academic disciplines because it could not be described mathematically.

'Consciousness involves quality — the redness of a red experience, the smell of coffee, the taste of min. These qualities that can't be captured in a purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics,' said Goff, one of the leading scholars on panpsychism.

'So Galileo said that if we want mathematical science, we need to take consciousness out of the domain of science.'

#Panpsychism, the idea that inanimate objects have consciousness, gains steam in science communities

An expanding notion of what "consciousness" is could have profound repercussions

By MATTHEW ROZSA

SALON
PUBLISHED JULY 23, 2021

DNA, Atoms and particles (Getty Images/Yuichiro Chino)

Dr. Martin Picard is an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, specializing in both psychiatry and neurology. Together, expertise in these two fields suits one well to understanding the essence of what makes one human. Picard is particularly knowledgable about mitochondria, a structure found within nearly all cells that have a nucleus. They provide most of the chemical energy that cells use in their various biochemical tasks, and are sometimes likened to batteries.

Picard sees something else in mitochondria, too. Last year, he and a Swiss scientist named Dr. Carmen Sandi published a paper in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, which posited that mitochondria do not merely keep us alive, but in many ways, have lives of their own. And, perhaps, are even "social" creatures.

"Sociality has profound evolutionary roots and is observed from unicellular organisms to multicellular animals," Picard and Sandi write. "In line with the view that social principles apply across levels of biological complexity, a growing body of data highlights the remarkable social nature of mitochondria."
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They continue: "Similar to individuals among social networks, mitochondria communicate with each other and with the cell nucleus, exhibit group formation and interdependence, synchronize their behaviors, and functionally specialize to accomplish specific functions within the organism. Mitochondria are social organelles."

Of course, if mitochondria are conscious beings, that would mean we have trillions and trillions of these brainless beings chilling throughout literally every cell of our bodies. That idea may seem absurd until you consider a scientific concept which could explain it: Panpsychism, or the idea that consciousness is inextricably linked to all matter and simply grows stronger as a physical object become more complex.

This, emphatically, is not what Picard and Sandi had in mind when they wrote their article (Picard told Salon that "I do not know enough about panpsychism to make an informed comment.") At the same time, their discovery is just one more piece of fascinating scientific trivia that could be explained by this revolutionary theory.

Panpsychism's appeal may stem partly from the fact that scientists currently can not explain what consciousness – the thing that gives you a mind and makes you self-aware — actually is. During the 17th century Enlightenment, philosopher René Descartes famously argued for a so-called "dualist" approach to explaining how our mind interacts with our body. He argued the physical matter of our bodies and whatever substance creates a mind are separate entities (perhaps connected by the pineal gland), with our flesh essentially serving as a house for our souls. This argument holds that if science could explain everything, it should be able to quantify a mind/soul — visually describe it, hear it, feel it, measure and record it. None of that has happened; indeed, the very notion of it happening seems nonsensical.

This may be partly why, although most scientists and philosophers today are monists (meaning they believe our mind directly comes from our physical bodies), dualistic ideas are still quite prevalent in our culture.

"The problem is a lot of regular people, who are not philosophers, are dualists, because they believe in the mind or the soul as a separate entity from their physical being, their physical body," David Skrbina, a philosopher and author of the book "Panpsychism in the West," told Salon. "And so a lot of people for religious reasons, and just 'common sense' reasons, tend to think in dualist or Cartesian terms without really even understanding it. And so when we talk to the public at large, we are sort of stuck dealing with the Cartesian question, even though most philosophers, I think, do not give it much credibility at all."

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That said, those who believe our minds come directly from our bodies are also facing some logical challenges.

"They have to accommodate mind and consciousness within a physicalist framework, which is arguably quite difficult," Skrbina explained. "And that's been sort of one of the central challenges today, is to figure out how to not be a dualist, but still explain the reality, the evident reality of mind and consciousness."

In other words, there is no equation, no theory that would account nor explain our conscious feelings, the everyday state of awareness and thought that constitute life and existence. There is nothing in physics or chemistry or biology that accounts what it is like to be.

That's not to say that scientists haven't tried to explain consciousness through science. The most obvious approach would be to find physical features that correspond to states of consciousness. For instance, if you could figure out which parts of the brain are associated with feeling happy, sad, inspired or bored, you could in theory follow that lead to ultimately learn about how the brain itself "produces" consciousness.

"It has not been successful," Skrbina pointed out. "This has been one of the major frustrations, I think, in the scientific community, is to actually find the physical correlate of the various states of consciousness. As far as I can tell, and the latest research I've seen, they have been unable to do this, which suggests that consciousness is either a deeper or a more complex phenomenon than most of our scientists have thought and maybe are willing to admit."

This is where panpsychism fills in the void. It offers an explanation for consciousness that doesn't try to do an end run around the known laws of the physical world, but assumes consciousness is an intrinsic part of it.

Besides — as Luke Roelofs, a philosopher of mind at NYU's Centre for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, told Salon — the most popular framework for explaining consciousness does not hold up to scrutiny.

"The biggest motivation is dissatisfaction with the mainstream approach to explaining consciousness, which is to identify it with some sort of complex information processing structure," Roelofs explained by email. "Panpsychists generally think that structure alone can't do the job: taking completely non-conscious ingredients and arranging them in a complicated way seems compatible with the whole system remaining completely non-conscious." Because the human brain is made up of the same basic matter as everything else in existence, "the most natural view seems to be that [consciousness] is a general feature of matter."

Hence, panpsychism — and hence the idea that matter, in general, is conscious, regardless of whether it is an organism or not.

As for the opposition to panpsychism? One problem is that skeptics feel it is ludicrous at face value.

"I think that mostly comes from more basic differences in how people think about consciousness," Roelofs told Salon. "Panpsychists think that thought, reasoning, decision-making, vision and hearing and smell and all of our cognitive complexity: none of those are the same thing as consciousness. Consciousness is just subjectivity, just 'is there something it's like to exist right now?' And so they think it makes sense for consciousness to exist in simple forms without thought, without reasoning, without vision or hearing or smell. A lot of critics think that's just a mix-up: they think that once you take away thought, reasoning, etc. that's it, there's nothing left to talk about."

The obvious next question, then, is: what is conscious? And how does it separate itself? Would a rock or a table have a single unified conscious — or perhaps something bigger, like a planet, or even a solar system?

For those questions, too, panpsychists have ideas.

"Panpsychism typically does not take all things to be conscious as a whole, or to have their own unified consciousness," Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosopher and associate professor at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, told Salon by email. "Fundamental particles would have simple, unified consciousness. Sometimes, this simple consciousness 'combines' or unifies into more complex forms. This happens in the human brain—we have unified consciousness as whole. But it probably doesn't happen in e.g. tables and chairs—these things are mere collections of independently conscious particles."

Another criticism, which Roelofs acknowledged at least addresses the idea on its own terms, is that panpsychism does not necessarily answer all of the questions that it poses.

"Panpsychists think you can't explain human consciousness by putting together lots of non-conscious things in the right structure; okay, but is it actually easier to explain it by putting lots of conscious things in the right structure?" Roelofs asked. "Does it even make sense for a group of minds to combine into one bigger mind?" He added that he has written extensively on this subject, "investigating why combining minds seems so puzzling, and whether we can make sense of it anyway. But it remains a genuinely difficult challenge to panpsychism as a view."

On the other hand, science is equally stuck when it comes to explaining the subjective experiences that we can embrace when we listen to music, enjoy delicious food, watch a movie or fall in love. There is something unquantifiable about the joys of life, a reality that is not encompassed when we try to reduce emotions to hormones.

This brings us to Philip Goff, associate professor of philosophy at Durham University, who told Salon that there is another philosopher whose ideas we must challenge, one who lived in the same period as Descartes — Galileo Galilei.

"What Descartes was making very rigorous was the philosophy of Galileo," Goff explained, citing his book "Galileo's Error." He argued that because consciousness could not be explained in the qualitative and mathematical terms that Galileo's deemed essential for something to be scientific, the great scientist concluded it had to be decoupled from the scientific process and explained through other intellectual disciplines.

"Consciousness involves quality — the redness of a red experience, the smell of coffee, the taste of mint," Goff said. "These qualities that can't be captured in a purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics. So Galileo said that if we want mathematical science, we need to take consciousness out of the domain of science. In Galileo's worldview, there is this radical division in nature between the quantitative mathematical domain of science and the physical world, and the qualitative domain of consciousness with its colors, and sounds, and smells and tastes."

Panpsychism, by its very premise, would make it possible to merge the two disciplines.

Panpsychism also has radical implications for religions, since so many focus on questions of what happens after we die. It is likely that our brains still comprise the bulk of our identity (so when the neurons which store your memories die, the memories most likely die forever along with them), but panpsychism allows for the possibility that your conscious "self" lives on in some form. It does not even entirely preclude the possibility that we take some of our identity with us; to paraphrase Stanley Kubrick when he directed "The Shining," the seemingly horrifying prospect of ghosts existing at least means that death is not final.

If true, panpsychism would raise questions about other substances and the degree to which non-human things are self-aware. Does that mean inanimate objects are also self-aware? Do a chair, a pair of pants and a rock have the capacity to think as a human, a dog and a pig? What about more primitive organisms like bacteria and viruses?
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"Panpsychism does suggest that there may well be some level of consciousness everywhere in nature," Roelofs explained. "Panpsychists all accept dog-consciousness, but some might not want to accept chair-consciousness: they might say that each particle making up the chair is conscious, but it's not constructed the right way for these to 'add up' to anything. Others might think that chairs have consciousness, but of an incredibly diffuse sort: because there's no brain or nervous system, there's no order or structure to the chair's experience, just an undifferentiated blur."

Ultimately, he added, "The impact of panpsychism isn't so much to answer these questions, but to suggest continuity: don't expect to find a discontinuous boundary somewhere between the simplest animal that is conscious and the most complex animal that isn't." Roelofs says there isn't a line that one could draw: "even if some sorts of consciousness are so simple that it's more useful for us, in practice, to treat them as 'mindless', nevertheless the differences are ultimately just matters of degree."

In the end, it may prove impossible to ever definitively ascertain whether panpsychism holds water. After all, without some way to visually or otherwise physically identify consciousness, we can't precisely say whether an inanimate object has any rudimentary "consciousness" in it. It's not like you can ask a virus or chair if they are self-aware.

"Scientifically speaking, we're in quite a bind with consciousness in particular and with the mind in general, just because of the nature of what it is," Skrbina told Salon. "It is not the kind of thing that is really, like I say, subject to scientific analysis."


MATTHEW ROZSA is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

In historic first, NASA spacecraft maps what lurks below surface of Mars

NASA's InSight lander has allowed planetary scientists to map the interior of another planet for the first time.




Jackson Ryan
July 23, 2021 6:47 p.m. PT


When Galileo observed the planet Mars with a telescope over 400 years ago, it registered as little more than a blank orb, hanging in the infinite dark. In the four centuries since, scientists have attempted to fill in the blanks.

It wasn't long after Galileo that Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens came along and made a profound discovery about Mars. Observing the planet in 1659, Huygens noticed a large, dark area on its face, shading in a heart-shaped blotch in a sketch of the red planet. It was the first time humans had observed the surface features of another world.

Some 359 years later, in November 2018, NASA landed InSight on the Martian surface about 2,000 miles east of the blotch, the eighth time the space agency had put a robotic explorer on the red planet. Its mission, which was recently extended to 2022, is to listen for "marsquakes" and understand what's going on beneath the surface of our cosmic neighbor.

In a series of three studies published in the journal Science on Thursday, a global team of researchers describe the interior of Mars using data obtained by InSight's seismometer, an instrument that responds to vibrations and noise under Mars' surface. Analyzing a series of marsquakes, felt by InSight since 2019, researchers have been able to reveal the inner workings of another planet in our solar system for the first time -- a breakthrough for planetary geoscience.
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Ear to the ground


The first planetary rattle detected by InSight's seismometer, known as SEIS, in 2019 was just like that first tentative drawing from Huygens. It revealed Mars was more seismically active than the moon, but not quite as active as Earth, and gave researchers a tantalizing first look at the kind of data InSight would be able to gather.

A cutaway of SEIS, a dome-shaped instrument that sits on the surface of Mars. The white outer layer shields the sensitive instrument from the environment, while the inner layer of organized chaos contains pendulums that measure vibrations and noise.NASA/JPL-Caltech/CNES/IPGP

SEIS (pictured right) is a dome-shaped instrument that was deployed shortly after InSight's arrival on Mars. It rests on the Martian soil and, as NASA says, is like a doctor's stethoscope, listening into the "pulse" of the planet. It's an extremely sensitive piece of tech, recording the seismic waves that rumble and vibrate through the planet's interior after a quake.

Its exterior dome is a shield against the Martian environment, protecting SEIS from the winds and dust that could affect measurements of internal vibrations. The seismometer itself is a rather simple device: it contains three weights, suspended like a pendulum, that can detect vibrations from different directions -- like when a seismic wave, generated by a marsquake, passes over them.

Previous research has shown that marsquakes are common, but they aren't very powerful. Only a handful register upward of magnitude 3 which, on Earth, might feel like a slight rumbling from a few miles away, but isn't quite strong enough to cause significant damage to structures and buildings. Most originate in the upper layer of the planet's crust, but the studies probed 10 that originated from deeper below the surface.

Listening to the waves generated by these quakes is how researchers came to understand Mars' innards. Seismic waves that move through the planet's interior are changed by the material they come into contact with -- allowing InSight to paint a picture of what's happening in the ground.
Ogres, onions and other planets

The anatomy of a "differentiated" planet like Mars is, to borrow from a 20-year-old film, just like an onion (...or an ogre). It has layers. Although scientists have filled in the blanks in regards to surface features, atmosphere and chemical composition of the soil, what's happening below the surface has been a mystery.

"For all we know about Mars -- most of it is limited to the top meter," says Gretchen Benedix, an astrogeologist at Curtin Unversity in Australia who was not affiliated with the study. "It's like looking at a present and focusing on the wrapping."

In the suite of new studies, researchers probed these layers for the first time by studying the waves that jiggled InSight's SEIS. "This new information is like opening the gift to take a peek," says Benedix.

One of the studies, led by Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun, a geophysicist at the University of Cologne, used the data to study the uppermost layer of the planet, known as the crust.

The upper layer of the crust, which is composed of basalt rock from ancient lava flows, seems to be at most around 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) thick. But InSight's data revealed that another layer, approximately double that size, lies just beneath it. Underneath that, Knapmeyer-Endrun said in a press release, might be where the "mantle" begins -- which would make Mars' crust "surprisingly thin."

A "selfie" of the InSight lander, taken on the surface of Mars.NASA/JPL-Caltech

But the team also showed that there may be a third layer in the crust, extending the depth down to around 40 kilometers.

Then there's the Martian core, which threw up some surprises of its own.

As demonstrated in the image at the top, marsquakes can send vibrations all the way down to the planet's core, where they bounce off and fling back toward SEIS. These signals, as described in a study led by Simon Stähler, a geophysicist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, were relatively faint but helped estimate how big the planet's core is. And size matters here.

The boundary between the mantle and the core seems to be a touch under 1,000 miles below the surface, which is larger than some studies have suggested. The suggestion, according to an accompanying piece published in Science on Thursday, is that the iron-nickel core is less dense than previously predicted, but is in a liquid state as other studies have argued.
Why does the inside of Mars matter?

The return of seismology to Mars was described by University of Texas geophysicist Yosio Nakamura as "a new dawn" in a Nature Geoscience commentary in 2020. The ability to detect seismic waves helps place some fundamental constraints on how the planet likely evolved over time and, according to Benedix, "tells us a lot about the thermal evolution of that planet."

Heat emanates from the core of a planet during its formation and early evolution and by understanding the composition of the core, researchers can hypothesize how Mars may have cooled over time. Combining this with other data, obtained by orbiting spacecraft and NASA's and China's rovers, doesn't just help us understand Mars -- it reveals how planets form, change and develop across the solar system and potentially outside it, too.

InSight also attempted to take a direct measure of the temperature below the surface of the red planet using a "burrowing mole." But early on, as the mole attempted to dig into Mars' crazy soil, it got stuck. Heroic attempts by NASA engineers to free the mole proved fruitless and, in January, it was declared dead. However, InSight's mission is not over -- it will continue listening for marsquakes into 2022. Though it only provides a single "ear," as it were, repeated observations should allow scientists to further refine their understanding of Mars' interior.

In less than four centuries, we've gone from Huygens sketch of a heart-shaped blotch on Mars' face to understanding the very heart of Mars itself. May the blanks continue to be filled in.

First published on July 22, 2021 at 11:00 a.m. PT.

Artificial Intelligence Helps Improve NASA’s Eyes on the Sun

A group of researchers is using artificial intelligence techniques to calibrate some of NASA’s images of the Sun, helping improve the data that scientists use for solar research. The new technique was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on April 13, 2021. 

A solar telescope has a tough job. Staring at the Sun takes a harsh toll, with a constant  bombardment by a never-ending stream of solar particles and intense sunlight. Over time, the sensitive lenses and sensors of solar telescopes begin to degrade. To ensure the data such instruments send back is still accurate, scientists recalibrate periodically to make sure they understand just how the instrument is changing. 

Launched in 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, has provided high-definition images of the Sun for over a decade. Its images have given scientists a detailed look at various solar phenomena that can spark space weather and affect our astronauts and technology on Earth and in space. The Atmospheric Imagery Assembly, or AIA, is one of two imaging instruments on SDO and looks constantly at the Sun, taking images across 10 wavelengths of ultraviolet light every 12 seconds. This creates a wealth of information of the Sun like no other, but – like all Sun-staring instruments – AIA degrades over time, and the data needs to be frequently calibrated.  

This image shows seven of the ultraviolet wavelengths observed by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on board NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The top row is observations taken from May 2010 and the bottom row shows observations from 2019, without any corrections, showing how the instrument degraded over time.

Credits: Luiz Dos Santos/NASA GSFC

Since SDO’s launch, scientists have used sounding rockets to calibrate AIA. Sounding rockets are smaller rockets that typically only carry a few instruments and take short flights into space –  usually only 15 minutes. Crucially, sounding rockets fly above most of Earth’s atmosphere, allowing instruments on board to to see the ultraviolet wavelengths measured by AIA. These wavelengths of light are absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere and can’t be measured from the ground. To calibrate AIA, they would attach an ultraviolet telescope to a sounding rocket and compare that data to the measurements from AIA. Scientists can then make adjustments to account for any changes in AIA’s data. 

There are some drawbacks to the sounding rocket method of calibration. Sounding rockes can only launch so often, but AIA is constantly looking at the Sun. That means there’s downtime where the calibration is slightly off in between each sounding rocket calibration. 

“It’s also important for deep space missions, which won’t have the option of sounding rocket calibration,” said Dr. Luiz Dos Santos, a solar physicist  at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author on the paper. “We’re tackling two problems at once.” 

Virtual calibration

With these challenges in mind, scientists decided to look at other options to calibrate the instrument, with an eye towards constant calibration. Machine learning, a technique used in artificial intelligence, seemed like a perfect fit. 

As the name implies, machine learning requires a computer program, or algorithm, to learn how to perform its task.

First, researchers needed to train a machine learning algorithm to recognize solar structures and how to compare them using AIA data. To do this, they give the algorithm images from sounding rocket calibration flights and tell it the correct amount of calibration they need. After enough of these examples, they give the algorithm similar images and see if it would identify the correct calibration needed. With enough data, the algorithm learns to identify how much calibration is needed for each image.

Because AIA looks at the Sun in multiple wavelengths of light, researchers can also use the algorithm to compare specific structures across the wavelengths and strengthen its assessments.

To start, they would teach the algorithm what a solar flare looked like by showing it solar flares across all of AIA’s wavelengths until it recognized solar flares in all different types of light. Once the program can recognize a solar flare without any degradation, the algorithm can then determine how much degradation is affecting AIA’s current images and how much calibration is needed for each. 

“This was the big thing,” Dos Santos said. “Instead of just identifying it on the same wavelength, we’re identifying structures across the wavelengths.” 

This means researchers can be more sure of the calibration the algorithm identified. Indeed, when comparing their virtual calibration data to the sounding rocket calibration data, the machine learning program was spot on. 

The top row of images show the degradation of AIA’s 304 Angstrom wavelength channel over the years since SDO’s launch. The bottom row of images are corrected for this degradation using a machine learning algorithm.

Credits: Luiz Dos Santos/NASA GSFC

With this new process, researchers are poised to constantly calibrate AIA’s images between calibration rocket flights, improving the accuracy of SDO’s data for researchers. 

Machine learning beyond the Sun

Researchers have also been using machine learning to better understand conditions closer to home. 

One group of researchers led by Dr. Ryan McGranaghan - Principal Data Scientist and Aerospace Engineer at ASTRA LLC and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center -  used machine learning to better understand the connection between Earth’s magnetic field and the ionosphere, the electrically charged part of Earth’s upper atmosphere. By using data science techniques to large volumes of data, they could apply machine learning techniques to develop a newer model that helped them better understand how energized particles from space rain down into Earth’s atmosphere, where they drive space weather. 

As machine learning advances, its scientific applications will expand to more and more missions. For the future, this may mean that deep space missions – which travel to places where calibration rocket flights aren’t possible – can still be calibrated and continue giving accurate data, even when getting out to greater and greater distances from Earth or any stars.

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Header image caption (same as image in the story): The top row of images show the degradation of AIA’s 304 Angstrom wavelength channel over the years since SDO’s launch. The bottom row of images are corrected for this degradation using a machine learning algorithm. Credits: Luiz Dos Santos/NASA GSFC

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By Susannah Darling
NASA Headquarters, Washington

Last Updated: Jul 23, 2021

Editor: Susannah Darling

Belgian scientists help develop new method to predict ‘hidden’ solar storms

Sunday, 25 July 2021

By Lauren Walker

 

The Sun by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

An international group of scientists, including from Belgium, have found a new method that can predict stealth coronal mass ejections (CMEs), a type of solar storm, occurring on the Sun’s surface, helping to prevent them from causing damage on Earth.

Most of the Sun is in a charged plasma state, which means the gas is highly ionised, and when such a cloud is ejected by the sun, it is called a plasma cloud or CME.

“Stealth CMEs have always posed a problem, because they often originate at higher altitudes in the Sun’s corona (the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere), in regions with weaker magnetic fields,” author Dr Erika Palmerio, a researcher at the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley, said in a press release.

“This means that unlike normal CMEs – which typically show up clearly on the Sun as dimmings or brightenings – stealth CMEs are usually only visible on devices called coronagraphs designed to reveal the corona,” she added.

Without spotting CMEs, it is impossible to predict where on the Sun it came from, “so you can’t predict its trajectory and won’t know whether it will hit Earth until it’s too late,” Palmerio said.

Continuous, smaller danger

The last time a CME posed a potential threat to people on Earth was just over nine years ago, in July 2012, when an enormous, diffuse cloud of magnetised plasma, tens of thousands of kilometres wide, was ejected by the sun at a speed of hundreds of kilometres per second.

In this case, the CME just missed the Earth because its origin on the Sun was facing away from our planet at the time, however, if it had hit the Earth, it would have disabled satellites, power grids around the globe would have been knocked out, GPS systems, self-driving cars, and electronics jammed, and railway tracks and pipelines damaged.

The new imaging techniques were applied to remote sensing data of the coronal mass ejection on 8 October 2016. Credit: Palmerio, Nitta, Mulligen et al

The cost of the potential damage of such a large-scale CME has been estimated at between €500 billion and €2.2 trillion in the US alone.

The Earth is impacted by lesser versions of CMEs once every three years, and as the CMEs take around more than one day to reach our planet, the technique could give humans time to prepare for the potential geomagnetic storm.

The scientists, including Marilena Mierla and Andrei Zhukov of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, have said the technique, which will help in taking measures to limit damage to electronics and power grids on Earth from the electromagnetic radiation of such eruptions, can be applied immediately.

New Method Can Detect 'Stealth' Solar Storms Before They Strike Earth

ANDY TOMASWICK, UNIVERSE TODAY
25 JULY 2021

Space is full of hazards. The Earth, and its atmosphere, does a great job of shielding us from most of them.

But sometimes those hazards are more powerful than even those protections can withstand, and potentially catastrophic events can result.

Some of the most commonly known potential catastrophic events are solar flares. While normal solar activity can be deflected by the planet's magnetic field, resulting in sometimes spectacular auroras, larger solar flares are a danger to look out for.

So it's worth celebrating a team of researchers from the International Space Science Institute which found a way to better track these potentially dangerous natural events.

Extremely large coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are relatively rare, and when they do happen they normally aren't pointed at Earth.

This was the case in 2012, when a massive solar flare missed Earth but could have knocked out power grids and destroyed satellites on an entire hemisphere of the planet.

Flares as large as the one in 2012 are relatively easy to detect using conventional sensing methods, because of their size but also their positioning.

These sensors can watch for signs of brightening on the Sun's surface that are indicative of a solar flare, or watch the flare itself as it passes out of the sun into the blackness of space.

Unfortunately, the same sensing techniques are not able to detect the most important kind of CMEs – those that are aimed right for us but don't cause any brightening.


These CMEs, which don't produce any telltale signs on the Sun's surface, are known as "stealth" CMEs.

Usually, we only notice these when they actually hit the Earth, and don't have a good indication of where they formed on the Sun. However, the researchers used data collected on four stealth CMEs by NASA's STEREO spacecraft that did in fact track them back to their origins on the Sun.

(Palmerio et al., Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, 2021)

Above: Four different times and imaging techniques capture the 3 March 2011 CME. The top row uses intensity images; the second row uses image differencing with a fixed temporal separation; the third row uses Wavelet Packet Equalization (WPE); and the fourth row uses Multi-scale Gaussian Normalization (MGN). Dimming and brightening regions are indicated with arrows and active region AR 11165 is circled with an arrow in the first column.

When they subsequently analyzed those origin points with other data collected simultaneously, they noticed a changing brightening pattern that appeared for all four stealth CMEs.

They believe these changes are indicative of the stealth CME's formation, allowing scientists precious time to detect and prepare for a potential massive CME hit once similar patterns are detected.


Detecting the patterns themselves can prove tricky though.

STEREO's work in finding the source region of the CMEs used in the study was simply lucky – the spacecraft happened to be looking in the right place at the right time.

To fully flesh out this technique, more data from an angle off-set from Earth will be needed to model the structure of the newly found CME and its origin region.

Help is on the way, though – ESA launched the Solar Orbiter last year, which should be able to collect the necessary data as part of its mission.

It can also help with an even more challenging problem – detecting "super-stealth CMEs", which don't show up on a coronagraph, a standard tool used to detect other types of solar flares.

Understanding is the key to defeating, or at least coping with, this potentially deadly environmental hazard. Now we have a tool to predict more of those hazards, and a path forward to detect even more of them.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

Memorial event in Prince Rupert harbour to draw attention to tugboat safety

Since 2016, there have been 350 accidents involving tugboats or barges in B.C., including 24 sinkings and two fatalities, according to data collected by the TSB.

Author of the article:Glenda Luymes
Publishing date:Jul 24, 2021 •

Tugboat workers in Vancouver on March 31, 2021. Some marine stakeholders are calling on Transport Canada to improve the safety regulations governing small vessels after two men died when a tugboat sank near Kitimat in February. PHOTO BY NICK PROCAYLO /PNG


More than 20 boats, including ferries, fishing vessels and tugboats, are expected to take part in a memorial event in the Prince Rupert harbour this month in honour of a tugboat captain who died at sea.

Troy Pearson lost his life on Feb. 11 when the tugboat he was captaining sank in the Gardner Canal en route from Kitimat to Kemano. Also killed was 25-year-old Charley Cragg, a Tsawwassen man who had recently moved to Terrace and was working his first shift on the boat. A third man, 19-year-old Zac Dolan, was rescued after he made it to shore.

The event is being planned for July 31 by Pearson’s widow, Judy Carlick-Pearson, who originally intended to scatter Pearson’s ashes in the harbour a few weeks after his birthday.

“Next thing you know, we had people from the coast guard saying they wanted to be here, as well as guys from the ferries, fishing boats, commercial tugs and the marine union,” she said.

Carlick-Pearson is hoping the event, which will involve the boats forming a wide circle in the harbour while eight bells sound to signal the end of the watch, will bring attention to the continuing investigation into the sinking of the tugboat Ingenika.

Troy Pearson and wife Judy Carlick-Pearson. 

PHOTO BY SUBMITTED PHOTO /PNG

Charley Cragg. PHOTO BY ARLEN REDEKOP /PNG

On Feb. 10 — a day on which 11 cold temperature records were broken as B.C. was hit by an Arctic outflow — Pearson, Cragg and Dolan boarded the tugboat despite a forecast of 50-knot winds. The boat, which belonged to Wainwright Marine Services, was towing a barge carrying construction supplies for a multi-year Rio Tinto tunnel project at Kemano designed to guarantee a stable supply of hydroelectric power to the company’s Kitimat aluminum smelter.

RCMP Cpl. Madonna Saunderson said that just after midnight on Feb. 11, an emergency beacon was received from a tugboat in the Gardner Canal. The RCMP vessel Inkster was dispatched from Hartley Bay and found a man dead in the water. The coast guard found a second dead man. A third person was rescued after reaching shore.

Reached Friday, Saunderson said the RCMP’s investigation into the tugboat sinking comtinues. The Transportation Safety Board said its investigation is still underway as well, with nothing new to say at this time. Postmedia received a similar reply from both WorkSafeBC and the B.C. Coroners Service.

Many in B.C.’s marine community are hoping the four investigations could lead to improved safety regulations in the tow industry. Since 2016, there have been 350 accidents involving tugboats or barges in B.C., including 24 sinkings and two fatalities, according to data collected by the TSB.

The board has been calling on Transport Canada to make safety management systems (SMS) mandatory on all vessels, including small tugboats like the Ingenika, for almost a decade.

SMS is an internationally recognized framework that allows companies to identify and address safety risks. It can incorporate elements such as safe operating standards, a planned maintenance program, a crew training regime and how to respond to specific emergency situations. Transport Canada already requires SMS for larger vessels.

Other stakeholders, including some B.C. tugboat companies, want to see the tug-to-tow weight ratio regulated.

There are currently no regulations governing the tug-to-tow ratio, which allows small tugs to pull large barges that may be beyond their capabilities, said Jason Woods, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Local 400.

“You can tow a barge full of logging equipment on a bungee cord if you want to,” he has said.

Transport Canada has indicated it is working on a number of “new regulatory projects” that will apply to all Canadian vessels, including making SMS mandatory, with a first draft expected in the fall.

Meanwhile, Carlick-Pearson, as well as some coastal First Nations communities, are calling on authorities to raise the Ingenika from the bottom of the Gardner Canal both to prevent environmental damage and determine why the tug sank.

“Without the boat, we won’t really know what happened that night,” she said. “It could be a smoking gun.”

Carlick-Pearson has also started raising funds to start a marine training school in Prince Rupert in honour of her husband. She hopes to teach kids and families about safety on the water, as well as offer the courses needed for a career in the marine industry. Pearson had to travel to Ladner to do his training, she said.

“It would be better to have something here, closer to home, particularly for Indigenous people who might not want to leave their community for training.”

For more information about the Pearson Marine School of Safety or the memorial event, contact judycarlick@gmail.com.

#BDS DRIVES ZIONIST VINDICTIVENES

‘Ben & Jerry’s will regret the day they boycotted Israel’

Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center announces plans to assert control of the Ben & Jerry's trademark in Judea and Samaria.

BY YAIR ALTMAN

A Ben & Jerry's factory near Kiryat Malakhi, on July 21, 2021. Photo by Flash90.

(July 25, 2021 / Israel Hayom) The decision by ice cream giant Ben & Jerry’s to pull its business beyond the Green Line means that under U.S. law its parent company, Unilever, has lost the right to protect the brand’s trademark in Judea and Samaria, the Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center announced over the weekend.

The NGO said it plans to apply for trademark licensing of a similar brand under the name “Judea and Samaria’s Ben & Jerry’s,” with the explicit intent of rivaling the original.


Last week’s decision by Ben & Jerry’s, widely panned as a capitulation to the anti-Israeli BDS movement, was slammed by lawmakers from across the political spectrum, as well as by Jewish groups worldwide.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett vowed to fight the decision “aggressively,” saying, “There are many ice cream brands, but only one Jewish state. Ben & Jerry’s decided to brand itself as the anti-Israel ice cream. This decision is morally wrong and I believe that it will become clear that it is also commercially wrong.”

Unilever’s CEO Alan Jope stressed last week that the multinational consumer goods company, whose Israeli branch is among the five leading consumer products companies operating in the country, was “fully committed to our business in Israel.”
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In a letter to Unilever, Shurat HaDin asserted that it plans to assert ownership of the brand in Judea and Samaria, citing U.S. legislation. Under U.S. law, the letter claims, in order for Unilever to preserve trademark protection for the Ben & Jerry’s brand name, it must demonstrate full intent to conduct business in a particular area. By announcing that the company does not intend to operate in Judea and Samaria, the British conglomerate has forfeited the right to claim said trademark as its own, the NGO argues.

“Unilever is no longer in a position to enforce its trademark in these areas,” said Shurat HaDin chief Nitsana Darshan-Leitner.

“These are our new weapons and approach in the war against BDS: Anyone who stops selling their products in Israel will find that we have taken over their trademarks and rights. Ben & Jerry’s will regret the day they boycotted Israel,” she said.

Brooke Goldstein, executive director of the Lawfare Project and co-founder of the End Jew Hatred movement, said last week that the sheer size of Unilever opens it up to possible significant financial penalties.

“By virtue of its wayward subsidiary, Unilever—a massive international conglomerate—risks potentially crushing financial consequences in terms of its ability to receive investments from, or do business with, the majority of US states,” she said.

This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.

ZIONIST LABOUR LEFT

Yes, Meretz does differentiate between Israel and settlements

Continued construction in the settlements and the blurring of the Green Line will force us to repeatedly decide between working for the settlements and all of Israel's citizens.

By Mossi Raz
Published on 07-23-2021 


Israel Hayom opinion editor Eithan Orkibi claims Meretz's support for a boycott of the settlements is weakening the coalition. Indeed. As far back as 2015, Meretz submitted legislation to label settlement products. In 2020, I said that "Meretz supports the boycott of products manufactured in the settlements." Meretz party leaders have said the same in the past. Tamar Zandberg, the party's chairwoman, said: "I am not prepared to give my money to the injustice and violation of human rights of occupation and settlements." Former Meretz leader Zehava Gal-On also announced her boycott of settlement products.

Our position is that settlements are immoral, illegal, and cause incredible damage to state security. As long as the damage was to security, the economy, and democracy, it was ignored by the Right. But then came Ben & Jerry's announcement it would no longer sell ice cream in the Palestinian territories, and the ostrich removed its head from the sand. For years, Israeli soldiers have been called to risk their lives to protect the settlements. Ice cream is nothing in comparison. It's hard to complain about a policy that distinguishes between Israel and the territories when the State of Israel, having never applied Israeli law there, does the same thing itself. Similarly, all of the countries in the world differentiate between the occupied territories and sovereign Israel.

The only thing is that a commercial company now wants to do the same and is demanding its Israeli licensee stop sell its products outside Israel and in illegal settlements in the occupied territories in particular. The move is only logical: An Israeli licensee should only sell in Israel, just as a French licensee should only sell in France.

How should the licensee have responded?

When the Europeans, within the framework of the Horizon 2020 funding program for research and innovation, demanded, as they did in previous projects, their money not be transferred to the settlements, the Israeli government under then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "folded." Even the Netanyahu government didn't dare harm Israel's glorious scientific field over the spoke in the wheel that is the settlements.

This is precisely how the Israeli licensee should have responded, by expressing their political views, protesting, and possibly trying to overturn the decision. Ultimately, though, they should have agreed that the license only applied to Israeli territory and protected their employees. After all, absent the settlements, there would be no boycott: The employees would be protected, and Israel's citizens would have their ice cream.

The State of Israel has controlled the territories for ideological purposes for 54 years through the economic exploitation of the Palestinians' cheap labor and natural resources.

Ben & Jerry's, a Jewish-owned US company that chose to set up one of its few overseas factories in Israel, cannot be accused of antisemitism. If anything, the opposite is true. Distinguishing between sovereign Israel and the settlements is an expression of support for sovereign Israel and Israeli interests. This is Meretz's worldview, and the current coalition is no weaker due to the existence of disagreements on the path to achieving the common goal of a better Israel.

The ice cream debacle is just a sign of things to come. Ben & Jerry's is not boycotting Israel but the settlements. Continued construction in the settlements and the blurring of the Green Line will force us to repeatedly decide between working for the settlements or all of Israel's citizens.