Astronomer Vera Rubin Taught Me about Dark Matter—and about How to Live Life

The groundbreaking scientist ushered in a revolution in how we think about the universe. She also lived by a set of principles that made her an exceptional human being

By Ashley Jean Yeager on August 17, 2021
Rubin at her office at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 2010, at the age of 82. Credit: Linda Davidson Getty Images


“Could I come to the telescope with you?” I innocently asked the late astronomer Vera Rubin that question a few weeks after I met her in 2007.

Even then, in her late 70s, Rubin continued her trips to places such as Kitt Peak National Observatory to scour the outermost edges of far-flung galaxies in order to clock how quickly the galaxies’ stars whipped around their cores. In our solar system, Mercury whips around the sun at high velocity, while Pluto merely plods along, and astronomers naturally assumed that stars close to a galaxy’s core would similarly move faster than stars out at the edge.

Yet years of work with her collaborator Kent Ford and other colleagues had revealed that this isn’t true; the stars farthest out tend to move just as swiftly as stars closer in. In the 1960s and 1970s, this observation shocked scientists. It implied that the gravity from some invisible form of matter was making the outermost stars move unexpectedly quickly—and that there was vastly more matter in the cosmos that astronomers originally thought. It meant, as Rubin so adeptly noted in 1985, the universe had been playing a trick on us, keeping the majority of the universe’s matter hidden from view.


I had not known about the universe’s trick until I came across a description of Rubin’s research while interning at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and wandering around the Explore the Universe exhibit. Reading about Rubin, my brain buzzed. Who was she? Why hadn’t I heard more about her? Did we really not know what most of the universe was made of? I peppered my supervisor, David DeVorkin, with these questions and others. He pointed me to Rubin’s collection of essays, Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters. A day later he asked: “Would like you to interview Vera?”

Absolutely, yes, I said. DeVorkin was working on Rubin’s oral history, which he wanted to finish. I read and researched, preparing questions. On the day of the interview, Rubin welcomed us into her office at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, the same one she’d shared with Ford for decades. Dozens of stories and anecdotes later, we headed to Rubin’s home not far from Chevy Chase, where both Vera and Robert Rubin, her husband, answered our questions. The couple finished each other’s thoughts. They made each other laugh. In that afternoon, their love and respect for each other were obvious, even unspoken. That’s the kind of relationship I want, I remember thinking.

Finding a partner who was patient, kind and as invested in your career as in their own, was advice Rubin often gave in talks and interviews. She not only said it. She lived it. She also showed me how to make others feel important. Even though I was a stranger, an intern, she listened to me. She asked me questions about my aspirations. She encouraged me. She didn’t have to do that. She chose to.

Because I felt Rubin was so approachable, I dared to write and ask to go to the telescope with her. She thanked me for my “sweet letter,” and in a September 20, 2007 e-mail wrote, “The answer is yes, but … telescope time is very valuable and making mistakes is very easy.” She told me when to arrive at the telescope, when to watch her work and when to ask questions. And then she said, “Bring a warm coat or jacket … we’ll be observing in a warm room but have to go out to the telescope sometimes.” She was open to my request, set boundaries and still looked out for my well-being. High expectations and warmth (no coat pun intended) again were traits I wanted to emulate.

On that crisp night in mid-November 2007, we met at Kitt Peak. That first night there, she flicked a switch, and the darkness of the telescope’s dome swallowed her. She quickly and confidently took a few steps, grabbed the staircase railing, and climbed up. At the top, she slid her hand across the door, found the knob and pushed. Nothing happened. Like a football lineman, she lowered her center of gravity and threw her weight against the hinged hunk of metal, bumping it open with her hip. That scene became the opening of my book, Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter and Beyond, a tour of Rubin’s life. In it, I try to convey her grace, wit and grit, even in the face of sexism and sometimes scorn for her research. I also explore the life lessons she taught me: Listen, speak up against injustice, be fearless and, above all, be curious.
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“Don’t shoot for the stars, we already know what’s there,” she once said. “Shoot for the space in between because that’s where the real mystery lies.”

This essay was adapted from the author's new book Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter and Beyond.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Ashley Jean Yeager is the associate news editor at Science News. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master's degree in science writing from MIT. She is the author of Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter and Beyond, a biography of astronomer Vera Rubin. Follow her on Twitter @AshleyJYeager.

Astronomers were skeptical about dark matter — until Vera Rubin came along

She built a bulletproof case for exploring the concept.

By Byrd Pinkerton and Noam Hassenfeld

Aug 17, 2021, 8:00am EDT

Vera Rubin in 2010, at her office in Washington, DC. 

Linda Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Vera Rubin didn’t “discover” dark matter, but she put it on the map.

Dark matter is a wild concept. It’s the idea that some mind-boggling percentage of all the matter in the universe may be invisible, and wholly unlike the matter that makes up Earth. Rubin is celebrated because she forced much of the astronomy community to take it seriously.

That reckoning moment came in 1985, when she stood in front of the International Astronomical Union and walked the audience through some of the data she had collected.

Her data showed that stars at the edges of multiple galaxies were moving in ways that didn’t make sense, according to the rules of physics. One possible explanation for this strange phenomenon, Rubin suggested, was the existence of a mysterious “dark matter” at the edges of the galaxy. In the decades since that talk, research into dark matter has exploded, revolutionizing astronomy.

In Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond, a new biography of Rubin, science journalist Ashley Yeager explains how Rubin, who died in 2016, grew from a young researcher whose bold ideas were initially ignored into the kind of scientist who could change an entire field. In 2020, we interviewed Yeager for an episode of the Unexplainable podcast about dark matter. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

Noam Hassenfeld

When did Vera Rubin first get interested in astronomy? What’s her origin story?
Ashley Yeager

About the age of 11 is when she started to look at the stars. Vera and her sister, Ruth, shared a bedroom in their Washington, DC, townhouse. And Ruth remembers Vera constantly crawling over her at night to be able to open the windows and look out at the night sky and start to track the stars. So clearly, Vera was captivated by the night sky. And that stuck with her.

She then went to Vassar, where she studied astronomy. [While at Vassar, she met a mathematician named Robert Rubin.] They ended up getting married. And that drove one of the biggest decisions in Vera’s life, because she wanted to go to graduate school for astronomy.

She’d gotten into Harvard, but Robert Rubin was at Cornell. He was well into his graduate studies. They had to make a choice, and Vera said, “Let’s stay together. I’ll come to Cornell with you and I’ll do my master’s in astronomy while you finish your PhD in physics.”

Noam Hassenfeld

Isn’t that kind of a wild choice? To choose Cornell based on a husband?

Ashley Yeager

It’s the late 1940s. And Vera, in some ways, was very traditional, even though she was nontraditional in other ways. She felt that she was expected to get married by the end of her four years at Vassar. That was still something that was societally kind of expected.

And I actually think it set her up to be more successful than maybe she would have been, had she gone to Harvard or Princeton or somewhere else, just because of the exposure that she got. There was intellectual freedom she had at Cornell, to be able to probe into different questions in astronomy that she probably would have been pushed away from, had she been in a more structured graduate program.

Noam Hassenfeld

So she’s at Cornell. She’s probing into questions. She’s got a lot of intellectual freedom. What are the big questions that are occupying her mind?

Ashley Yeager

The biggest one, which becomes her master’s thesis, is really the idea of “Does the universe rotate?”

Noam Hassenfeld

Wait, does the universe rotate?

Ashley Yeager

So, probably no. This was a question posed by a very eccentric astronomer named George Gamow. Vera’s husband actually showed Vera this paper that George Gamow had written about this idea. And she thought, “Well, why would we not try to answer that question?”

Noam Hassenfeld

The kind of question that, if she were at another university, maybe she wouldn’t have had the freedom to dive into?

Ashley Yeager

I think so. I get the sense, reading through the literature and looking through the history, that she probably would have been guided to a more traditional question.

And as she started to look through the data, the numbers started to suggest that there was this odd, sideways motion that perhaps could be interpreted as a universal rotation. She presented her idea to her master’s thesis adviser, William Shaw.

He says, “Your conclusion is really good. I want to present it under my name at this upcoming astronomy conference.”

And Vera is like, “No! I might not be a member of this society yet. But you’re not presenting my data for me. I’m going to present it under my own name, come hell or high water.”

Noam Hassenfeld

So does she?

Ashley Yeager

Yes. She goes to this meeting. Apparently, the drive from New York to Pennsylvania, where the meeting was, was harrowing. It was the winter, snowy. They had a newborn in the car. Her dad was actually driving because he was the only one with a car at the time.

But she gives the presentation, and the reaction is less than great. There are some heavy critics in the room. A lot of scoffing. She does have one person, Martin Schwarzschild, who encourages her. He says, “This is really interesting. But we need more data to be able to make this conclusion.”

And that’s a criticism that really sticks with her throughout her career. Later on, she really tries to have or collect as much data as possible to support her conclusions, just because of that experience.

Noam Hassenfeld

What happens next?

Ashley Yeager

She takes a little bit of a break, because she really has this strong sense of wanting to set up a home and start a family. There’s this moment in the early 1950s, when she’s at the playground with her son. She had been reading astrophysical journals to stay connected with what was going on in astronomy.

So her son’s playing in the sandbox and she’s reading the journal, and she just breaks into tears because she misses doing research so much. She misses that curiosity of asking questions and searching for data, and really trying to figure out the answers to how the universe works.

It’s at that point that her husband says, “You need to go back to school. It’s time. We’ll figure out child care. We’ll figure out how to get dinners made. But let’s do it.”

Noam Hassenfeld

So she goes back into astronomy. And eventually she starts doing research at Kitt Peak National Observatory, right? What’s that like?

Ashley Yeager

We’re talking late 1960s. This is a 84-inch telescope, very large. Vera is at the telescope with Kent Ford, her collaborator. They’re looking at this galaxy called Andromeda, which is our nearest neighbor. They’re looking at these really young, hot stars on the edge of the galaxy, and they’re trying to get the speeds of these stars — how fast are these stars going around Andromeda?

So they’re looking at the data, and they’re going, “Oh my gosh, this is not what we expected.” The assumption was that the stars closer in would fly around the sun fast, and the stars farther out would go super slow. But these stars were moving faster than they expected.

The only way for those stars far out in the galaxy to move that fast is [that] there’s got to be something happening out there that we don’t understand.

Noam Hassenfeld

What does she think is going on?

Ashley Yeager

Well, she’s not really sure. And again, she doesn’t like to make assumptions or speak without data. So she and Kent Ford, and a couple other people, they really start to do a systematic study of galaxies.

She does 20 galaxies, and then 40, and then 60. And they all show this bizarre behavior of stars, these stars out far in the galaxy, moving way, way too fast. So at that point, you know, the astronomy community is like, “Okay, we have to deal with this.”

In 1985, Vera Rubin gives this talk at the IAU. She says, “Nature has played a trick on us. That we have been studying matter that makes up only a small fraction of the universe. The rest of the universe is stuff that we don’t understand, and we can’t see it.”

And I think because she did this in so many galaxies — we’re talking 60 galaxies — there was really no denying it. It was really her work that pushed the community over the edge, to say we have to accept the idea that dark matter exists.

Noam Hassenfeld

It sounds like if you really want to upend our entire conception of the universe, you have to come with some data.

Ashley Yeager

Yeah, absolutely. Because she held onto that criticism of her master’s and PhD work — she would just go after the data, and really make sure that the story she told from that data rang true.

One of the things that made her a remarkable scientist is her perseverance. She did face a lot of roadblocks, especially because she was a woman in science in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. She had to really persevere. Unfortunately, she will never get to see or know what dark matter is. But I don’t know that she had a problem with that. She would take pride in the fact that she opened a whole new realm of astronomy and physics.

She basically created more questions than answers, and I think that’s the mark of a remarkable scientist: when you open up these questions that no one ever thought of before. When you create a whole new generation of scientists who can go and answer them.

A 'mermaid' species of algae discovered on Andaman and Nicobar islands
WION Web Team
New Delhi, India Published: Aug 17, 2021, 

Acetabularia jalakanyakae Photograph:( Twitter )

The name Acetabularia jalakanyakae is inspired by the tale of the Little Mermaid by Danish writer Hans Christian Anderson

The Andaman Islands' archipelago has yielded a new species of plant. Indian biologists discovered the marine green algae during a visit to the island in 2019.

Researchers from the Punjab Central University have named the species Acetabularia jalakanyakae. After nearly four decades, a new species of algae has been discovered on the islands.

Also read | Volcanic eruption under sea creates new crescent-shaped island in Japan

According to the scientists, the name "Jalakanyaka" which means mermaid in Sanskrit, is a reference to the story of Little Mermaid by Danish writer Hans Christian Anderson.

The scientists confirmed that they had discovered this species for the first time after nearly two years of the laborious identification process.

Over 18 months, the researchers sequenced the plant DNA and compared its form with that of other plants.

Dr Felix Bast, who led the study, said the newly discovered species is stunning. Its caps appear to be umbrellas of mermaids.

Also read | Researchers calculate constant pi to a new record 62.8tn figures

The plant consists of a single gigantic cell with a nucleus, which is its main characteristic. This discovery was described in an article in the Indian Journal of Geo-Marine Sciences.

Andaman and Nicobar Islands contain some of the world's last healthy coral reefs, as well as a rich diversity of other organisms and algae.

The looming threat of climate change, as well as higher seawater temperatures and acidifying oceans, poses major stress to these ecosystems.

As per Dr Bast, seawater temperatures are rising, leading to a decrease in oxygen concentration in the water, a consequence dangerous to everything that needs oxygen to survive, including this species.

Who Created the Renewable-Energy Miracle?


The Paul Krugman newsletter

As terrible as many things in the world are, climate is unique in posing an existential threat to civilization. And it’s horrifying that so many political figures are dead set against any serious action to address that threat.

Despite that, there’s still a chance that we’ll do enough to avoid catastrophe — not because we’ve grown wiser but because we’ve been lucky. We used to believe that achieving big reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be difficult and expensive, although not nearly as costly as anti-environmentalists claimed. Over the past dozen years or so, however, we’ve experienced a technological miracle. As nicely documented in an article by Max Roser, the costs of solar and wind power, once dismissed as foolish hippie fantasies, have plunged to the point that quite modest incentives could lead to a rapid reduction in use of fossil fuels:

Here comes the sun. Our World in Data

But was it really luck? Did this miracle — actually two miracles, since generating electricity from the sun and from the wind involve completely different technologies — just happen to arrive in our moment of need? Or was it a consequence of good policy decisions?

The answer is that there’s a pretty good case that policy — the Obama administration’s investments in green energy and European subsidies, especially for offshore wind — played a central role.

What’s the justification for that conclusion? Start with the fact that neither wind nor solar power was a fundamentally new technology. Windmills have been in widespread use at least since the 11th century. Photovoltaic solar power was developed in the 1950s. And as far as I can tell, there haven’t been any major scientific breakthroughs behind the recent dramatic decline in both technologies’ costs.

What we’re looking at, instead, appears to be a situation in which growing use of renewable energy is itself driving cost reductions. For solar and wind, we’ve seen a series of incremental improvements as energy companies gain experience, big reductions in the price of components as things like turbine blades go into mass production and so on. Renewables, as Roser points out, appear to be subject to learning curves, in which costs fall with cumulative production.

And here’s the thing: When an industry has a steep learning curve, government support can have huge positive effects. Subsidize such an industry for a few years, and its costs will fall with experience, and eventually it will reach a tipping point where its growth becomes self-sustaining and the subsidies are no longer needed.

That’s arguably what has happened, or is on the verge of happening, for renewable energy.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — the Obama stimulus — was mainly intended to address the collapse in demand that followed the 2008 financial crisis. It helped a lot but got a bad reputation all the same because it was underpowered and hence failed to produce rapid recovery. (And no, that’s not hindsight. I was screaming about it at the time.) But it also included significant funding for green energy: tax breaks, subsidies, government loans and loan guarantees.

Some of the projects the government backed went bad, and Republicans made political hay over the losses. But venture capitalists expect some of the businesses they back to fail; if that never happens, they aren’t taking enough risks. Similarly, a government program aimed at advancing technology is bound to end up with some lemons; if it doesn’t, it’s not extending the frontier.

And in retrospect, it looks as if those Obama initiatives really did extend the frontier, pushing solar energy in particular from a high-cost technology with limited adoption to the point that it’s often cheaper than traditional energy sources.

Obama’s policies also helped wind, but there I suspect that a lot of the credit goes to European governments, which heavily subsidized offshore wind projects early in the last decade.

In short, there’s a really good case to be made that government support for renewable energy created a cost miracle that might not have happened otherwise — and this cost miracle may be the key to saving us from utter climate catastrophe.

MOST SCIENCE IS CITIZEN SCIENCE
How a volcano and flaming red sunsets led an amateur scientist in Hawaii to discover jet streams

August 16, 2021 8.09am EDT

The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 sent volcanic dust and gases circling the Earth, creating spectacular sunsets captured by artists. William Ashcroft via Houghton Library/Harvard University


On the evening of Sept. 5, 1883, people in Honolulu witnessed a spectacular sunset followed by a period of extended twilight described as a “singular lurid after sunset glow.” There were no signs of anything else out of the ordinary, but these exceptional twilight glows returned each morning and evening over the following weeks.

Among the mystified Honolulu citizens was 56-year-old Rev. Sereno Edwards Bishop, who in his varied career in Hawaii had been a chaplain, school principal and surveyor, and who had a keen interest in science. Over the subsequent weeks and months, the exceptional twilight glows occurred around the whole globe. Remarkably, as scientists first grappled with understanding the origin of the twilight glows, Bishop’s efforts would lead to the first convincing explanation.

Rev. Sereno Edwards Bishop (1827–1909) Wikipedia

His discoveries led to scientific investigations of the winds high above the ground and ultimately yielded information that today is used to forecast weather over extended periods.

I am a meteorologist in Hawaii who helped revive appreciation of Bishop’s seminal contribution to the scientific exploration of the upper atmosphere.
A volcanic eruption half a world away

Today we know that the 1883 glows were caused by the sun below the visible horizon illuminating a mist of small liquid droplets in the atmosphere high above the ground.

The mist was made of sulfuric acid droplets that were formed by reactions of the massive amounts of sulfur dioxide gas produced by the explosive eruption of Mount Krakatoa close to the equator in Indonesia on Aug. 27, 1883. The eruption sent the droplets high into the atmosphere, where the winds transported them around the world. They spread gradually, and it was November before people in London began to notice the glow.

Much later, scientists observed similar effects after the June 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. The material Pinatubo injected into the upper atmosphere could be followed in detail with satellite observations, and their connection with spectacular sunsets and twilight glows was clearly established.

Sketches of twilight and afterglow on one evening in 1883 in London following the Krakatoa eruption. William Ashcroft via Houghton Library/Harvard University

In 1883, Bishop had no idea that there had been a volcanic eruption until the San Francisco newspapers arrived. Very quickly, he formulated a hypothesis that he published as a letter in his local newspaper.

“I am disposed to conjecture that some very light element among the vapors of the Java eruptions has continued at a very great height in the atmosphere, and has been borne … across the Pacific into this region,” Bishop wrote.

He realized that he could connect the eruption to the glowing skies most credibly by gathering reports of the first appearance of the glows elsewhere and tracking the initial spread of the “vapor” from Krakatoa. Bishop continued his letter: “I earnestly invite, in behalf of science, all shipmasters and mates to publish what they may have observed at sea.”

Bishop assembled a dozen such reports over the first three weeks after the eruption and was able to show that the “vapor” that produced the glows had moved westward from Krakatoa, along the equator to reach Honolulu 10 days later. This implied that there was a wind high in the atmosphere blowing steadily with an extreme speed that, at ground level, is seen only in hurricanes.

Tracking the red sunsets following the Krakatoa eruption. The stars mark the initial reports and dates of seeing the exceptional twilight colors in 1883.

Bishop published his observations in The Hawaiian Monthly, concluding that there was “a vast stream of smoke due west with great precision along a narrow equatorial belt with an enormous velocity, around the globe.”

The equatorial jet stream

Bishop called the motion of the volcanic aerosol a “smoke stream.” In fact, the equatorial winds transporting the aerosol were the first discovery of what meteorologists now call a jet stream.

A half-century would pass before the experiences of pilots flying at heights of several miles revealed the existence of the extratropical jet streams lower down in the atmosphere that are now familiar from TV newscasts. Jet streams are strong, typically narrow bands of wind. The more familiar lower atmospheric jet streams move weather systems in the middle latitudes from west to east. By contrast, Bishop’s jet stream circles the equator at high altitudes and actually can blow from east to west.

Bishop’s work opened further exploration of the equatorial jet stream that culminated in the 1961 discovery that the equatorial jet stream varied from strong east winds to strong west winds roughly every other year. This so-called Quasi-biennial Oscillation has been shown to connect with weather near the ground, particularly in Europe and the North Atlantic, a fact that is now routinely exploited in making long range forecasts for the weather.

Bishop’s contribution was acknowledged by the scientists who first followed him, and he won a prize from New York’s Warner Observatory in a contest for essays explaining the post-Krakatoa glows. Bishop even merited a brief obituary in an American meteorological science journal.

Bishop, who was the son of missionaries, could also be a divisive figure in Hawaii. He supported the U.S. annexation of the islands, and his religious views opposed some native Hawai'ian traditions, such as the hula dance. His contributions to science were largely forgotten in the 20th century.

An international scientific committee’s celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Quasi-biennial Oscillation discovery is an opportunity to remember Bishop and his discovery.


Author

Kevin Hamilton
Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Hawaii

LOOK: Sicily's Mount Etna taller than ever after six months of activity

Mount Etna, Europe's most active volcano, lights up the early morning sky with smoke and lava during an eruption. Picture: Etna Walk/Handout via Reuters

By AFP Aug 16, 2021

Rome - Mount Etna's southeastern crater has grown in height after six months of activity, Italy's vulcano monitoring agency said Tuesday, making Europe's tallest active volcano taller than ever.

The famous volcano's youngest and most active crater has risen to a new record of 3 357 metres above sea level, said INGV, the National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology, based in the Sicilian city of Catania.

"Thanks to the analysis and processing of satellite images, the south-east crater is now much higher than its 'older brother', the north-east crater, for 40 years the undisputed peak of Etna," the INGV wrote in a press release.

Some 50 episodes of ash and lava belching from the mouth of the crater since mid-February have led to a "conspicuous transformation of the volcano's outline", with its dimensions calculated through satellite images, it said.

The northeastern crater of Etna reached a record height of 3 350 metres in 1981, but a collapse at its edges reduced that to 3,326 metres, recorded in 2018.

The crater has been churning out smoke and ash since February, while posing little danger to surrounding villages.

Mount Etna in Sicily has roared back into spectacular volcanic action
Europe's largest active volcano sent an eruptive cloud that reached a height of 11 kilometres (6.83 miles) above sea level. According to the Catania Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology, it also caused ash and debris to fall on some villages located on the slopes of the volcano. There was no impact on the operations of the nearby Catania international airport....

Sicily's government estimated in July that 300,000 tonnes of ash had been cleaned up so far.

The ash has been a nuisance in surrounding areas, dirtying streets, slowing traffic and damaging crops.

In Catania, a two-hour drive from the volcano, pensioner Tania Cannizzaro told AFP that Mount Etna was both beautiful and an annoyance, with ash sometimes falling "like rain".

Streams of red hot lava flow as Mount Etna, Europe's most active volcano, erupts. Picture: Etna Walk/Giuseppe Distefano/Handout via Reuters

"Depending on the wind, the rumblings of the volcano reach Catania and make the windows shake," she said, adding that the ashes turn the streets and balconies black.

"But there is also the spectacle, especially in the evening, when you see this red plume that moves."

Lethal autonomous weapons and World War III: it’s not too late to stop the rise of ‘killer robots’


The STM Kargu attack drone. STM

August 11, 2021 10.12pm EDT

Last year, according to a United Nations report published in March, Libyan government forces hunted down rebel forces using “lethal autonomous weapons systems” that were “programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition”. The deadly drones were Turkish-made quadcopters about the size of a dinner plate, capable of delivering a warhead weighing a kilogram or so.

Artificial intelligence researchers like me have been warning of the advent of such lethal autonomous weapons systems, which can make life-or-death decisions without human intervention, for years. A recent episode of 4 Corners reviewed this and many other risks posed by developments in AI.

Around 50 countries are meeting at the UN offices in Geneva this week in the latest attempt to hammer out a treaty to prevent the proliferation of these killer devices. History shows such treaties are needed, and that they can work.

The lesson of nuclear weapons

Scientists are pretty good at warning of the dangers facing the planet. Unfortunately, society is less good at paying attention.

Listen to ‘Don’t Call Me Resilient,’ a provocative new podcast about raceFind out more

In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing up to 200,000 civilians. Japan surrendered days later. The second world war was over, and the Cold War began.

Read more: World politics explainer: The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The world still lives today under the threat of nuclear destruction. On a dozen or so occasions since then, we have come within minutes of all-out nuclear war.

Well before the first test of a nuclear bomb, many scientists working on the Manhattan Project were concerned about such a future. A secret petition was sent to President Harry S. Truman in July 1945. It accurately predicted the future:

The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.

If after this war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation. All the resources of the United States, moral and material, may have to be mobilized to prevent the advent of such a world situation …

Billions of dollars have since been spent on nuclear arsenals that maintain the threat of mutually assured destruction, the “continuous danger of sudden annihilation” that the physicists warned about in July 1945.

A warning to the world

Six years ago, thousands of my colleagues issued a similar warning about a new threat. Only this time, the petition wasn’t secret. The world wasn’t at war. And the technologies weren’t being developed in secret. Nevertheless, they pose a similar threat to global stability.

Read more: Open letter: we must stop killer robots before they are built

The threat comes this time from artificial intelligence, and in particular the development of lethal autonomous weapons: weapons that can identify, track and destroy targets without human intervention. The media often like to call them “killer robots”.

Our open letter to the UN carried a stark warning.


The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable. The endpoint of such a technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.

Read more: World's deadliest inventor: Mikhail Kalashnikov and his AK-47

Strategically, autonomous weapons are a military dream. They let a military scale its operations unhindered by manpower constraints. One programmer can command hundreds of autonomous weapons. An army can take on the riskiest of missions without endangering its own soldiers.
Nightmare swarms

There are many reasons, however, why the military’s dream of lethal autonomous weapons will turn into a nightmare. First and foremost, there is a strong moral argument against killer robots. We give up an essential part of our humanity if we hand to a machine the decision of whether a person should live or die.

Beyond the moral arguments, there are many technical and legal reasons to be concerned about killer robots. One of the strongest is that they will revolutionise warfare. Autonomous weapons will be weapons of immense destruction.

Previously, if you wanted to do harm, you had to have an army of soldiers to wage war. You had to persuade this army to follow your orders. You had to train them, feed them and pay them. Now just one programmer could control hundreds of weapons.

Organised swarms of drones can produce dazzling lightshows - but similar technology could make a cheap and devastating weapon. Yomiuri Shimbun / AP

In some ways lethal autonomous weapons are even more troubling than nuclear weapons. To build a nuclear bomb requires considerable technical sophistication. You need the resources of a nation state, skilled physicists and engineers, and access to scarce raw materials such as uranium and plutonium. As a result, nuclear weapons have not proliferated greatly.

Autonomous weapons require none of this, and if produced they will likely become cheap and plentiful. They will be perfect weapons of terror.

Can you imagine how terrifying it will be to be chased by a swarm of autonomous drones? Can you imagine such drones in the hands of terrorists and rogue states with no qualms about turning them on civilians? They will be an ideal weapon with which to suppress a civilian population. Unlike humans, they will not hesitate to commit atrocities, even genocide.
Time for a treaty

We stand at a crossroads on this issue. It needs to be seen as morally unacceptable for machines to decide who lives and who dies. And for the diplomats at the UN to negotiate a treaty limiting their use, just as we have treaties to limit chemical, biological and other weapons. In this way, we may be able to save ourselves and our children from this terrible future.

Author
Toby Walsh

Professor of AI at UNSW, Research Group Leader, UNSW
Disclosure statement

Toby Walsh is a Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and author of the recent book, “2062: The World that AI Made” that explores the impact AI will have on society, including the impact on war.
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Big Oil’s Carbon Capture Push Is All Talk And No Substance

By Haley Zaremba - Aug 17, 2021

Big Oil has cleaved into two factions. On the Eastern side of the Atlantic, supermajor oil companies in Europe have majorly divested from oil and gas. Reading the writing on the wall, Big Oil in the European Union has made a concerted effort to place itself at the forefront of the green energy transition, pivoting to rebrand itself as Big Energy. Across the pond in the United States, Big Oil has taken an entirely different approach. Instead of accepting the inevitable and imperative move away from fossil fuels, U.S. supermajors have doubled down on oil and gas and turned to carbon capture as a means of offsetting their environmental impact. 

As the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sound the alarm bells about the fast-approaching threat of catastrophic climate change, the United States seems as deadset as ever on finding a way to get on board with the fight against global warming and rebrand itself as climate-conscious without letting go of its sizeable oil and gas industry. Even President Joe Biden, who featured climate change as a central tenet of his platform, has recently sparked the ire of environmentalist and climate activists with what some see as a toothless effort at curbing emissions through the $1 trillion dollar infrastructure bill. 

Critics have argued that the bill itself seems co-opted by the oil industry, as efforts like carbon capture continue to receive major government support. Carbon capture has largely functioned as a means of allowing the oil industry to produce barrels of oil with a low(er) carbon footprint, or even net-zero barrels, without encouraging the industry to actually produce less oil and gas. In some cases, carbon capture is merely a means of ramping up oil production via a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). EOR entails capturing natural gas that would otherwise be vented into the atmosphere as a byproduct of oil extraction and then pumping that gas back into the ground to force more oil to the surface. 

While a net-zero barrel of oil might sound like a great advance, the reality is that we don’t need to merely offset the emissions of the energy industry. The reality of climate change is so dire that we must offset carbon at the same time that we phase out fossil fuels entirely. We need to be taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, not merely limiting the amount that we continue to release.Related: Why The U.S. Is So Vulnerable To Rising Oil Prices

Carbon capture is not the only strategy being employed by the oil and gas industry that critics decry as blatant greenwashing. Oil and gas companies in the United States have also begun to invest in solar and to power their own operations with a higher mix of renewable energy. This approach, while great for PR, is not going to do much to move the needle on the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions, however. Part of the problem is that the fossil fuel industry continues to aim for low-hanging fruit when it comes to curbing emissions instead of aiming for the more challenging, and more important, sources of emissions. 

The sector has primarily opted to tackle scope 1 and 2 emissions -- those that are directly produced by a company and the goods and energy it consumes -- but the vast majority of emissions occur either upstream or downstream in the value chain and outside of the company’s direct purview. Scope 3 emissions -- such as the exhaust coming out of your tailpipe -- are not technically an oil company’s emissions, but they are a direct result of an oil and gas company’s operations. They are also the most significant source of emissions in the oil and gas value chain.

While U.S. fossil fuel companies are certainly making some headway on climate change -- they’re acknowledging its importance and beginning to take some concrete actions -- it’s all too little too late unless they pivot away from extraction in a very serious way. Justifying continued production with carbon offsetting will not be enough to keep the world on track to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Hopefully, with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) becoming the mainstream, oil companies will have to compete with each other to be more green than ever before in order to stay in investor’s good favor.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

GAS CITY HEARTS💓 BLUE HYDROGEN

Invest Medicine Hat looks to future with prospective revenue generator and hydrogen economy


Invest Medicine Hat front and centre at City Council
By Tiffany Goodwein

COUNCIL MEMBERS RAVING OVER INVEST MH

Aug 17, 2021 | 5:14 AM


MEDICINE HAT, AB — Weeks after a flurry of public outrage, it was a sea of high praise from council for Invest Medicine Hat, as they presented a mid-year report.

During the council meeting Coun. Phil Turnbull went so far as to say the council meeting was probably “the single best council meeting” he has sat through during the past four years.

Other councillors were not shy to show their support for Invest Medicine Hat including Coun. Darren Hirsch.

“I would just challenge people to start looking at the horsepower within Invest and you will get blown away with the talent that is in this room,” he said.

The praise comes a month after it was learned three city staffers formed a private company to bid on the Invest Medicine Hat privatization contract. The move ultimately triggered an independent review. At the council meeting on Aug. 3, Mayor Ted Clugston said the issue has been forwarded to the Audit Committee, which will vote on who will do the review.

When asked about the timing of the mid-year report, Clugston said it was planned well in advance and had nothing to do with the public scrutiny. Clugston also showed his support for the Invest Medicine Hat team and said he has absolute confidence in their ability.

“What you saw here was astronomical, was groundbreaking, was probably one of the most unique reports in the country of Canada, and frankly being imitated by other jurisdictions who see the value of what we are doing here without perhaps an election going on and people looking for an angle to differentiate themselves and make other people look bad,” he said.

One of the highlights of the mid-year report was the possible development of a new revenue stream for the city, by using the city’s compressed natural gas facility.

“We have been approached by a party looking to utilize the city’s fleet for effectively a hub and spoke type strategy where the city’s CNG station would represent the hub and this private company would build out the spokes,” stated Erik Van Enk, Invest Medicine Hat’s acting managing director.

According to city officials, the city-owned compressed natural gas facility is underutilized and is only used to power city buses and sanitary trucks. But the facility has the capacity to be used for much more.

Clugston said the interest spurred from the private company, does not mean the city is selling their compressed natural gas facility, rather the city would be the recipient of carbon credits.

“A lot of the revenue comes from the carbon credits, and then we can take those carbon credits they are almost like cash and apply them to offset our usage at the power plant or maybe sell them to other people who are carbon-intensive, so that is a revenue source,” Clugston said.

The name of the company expressing interest in the city’s compressed natural gas facility was not disclosed during the meeting. But it was noted the same company is building a compressed natural gas facility in Redcliff and Swift Current.

Invest Medicine Hat also touched on their efforts to establish a hydrogen task force aimed at making Medicine Hat the second hydrogen hub in Canada. Staff at Invest Medicine Hat noted that switching to hydrogen would allow the city to reduce their carbon footprint. It would also help large existing businesses save on carbon taxes which would help those businesses stay in the region.

“We are in direct competition with any jurisdiction looking to attract investment, and in an environment of escalating carbon taxes we have to be cognizant of that and we have to look I think at what the impact would be to the city of Medicine Hat,” acting managing director Erik Van Enk said.

Members of council were eager to discuss their excitement for the prospect of a hydrogen hub in the area the opportunities that could arise.

“It is a game-changer, absolutely incredible. I would go so far as to say mark this moment on our city’s historical timeline. This will be significant, Coun. Robert Dumanowski said.

A report on the viability of the region as a hydrogen hub will come out early next year, according to the city.

The impact of the vacant 1.7 million-square-foot Aurora Sun complex was also discussed.

In March, Aurora Sun confirmed the facility would be going up for sale. According to Invest Medicine Hat, $6 million was provided by the city as an incentive for Aurora Sun to build the facility.

Invest Medicine Hat reiterated that while the facility is vacant it still generates around $1.4 million in property tax revenue every year. If the facility was operational, tax revenue would reach $3.3 million, according to Invest Medicine Hat.

The land is listed for sale under Toronto-based real estate firm Colliers International, and the city including Clugston are confident that another buyer will come soon, noting there have been many businesses expressing their interest.

At one point, Aurora Sun was projected to bring some 650 jobs to Medicine Hat.

Penticton to ponder partnership for green energy facility

Green energy pitch to city

Chelsea Powrie - Aug 17, 2021 /  | Story: 343119

Photo: Frontenac Energy

The City of Penticton is exploring the possible construction of a green solar hydrogen production plant for use as an energy source.

Frontenac Energy is pitching its technology to the city as a partnership, hoping to open a facility in the district. They use aluminum and water through their proprietary process to create electricity through heat and hydrogen gas.

"This is very new for the natural gas industry. It is being done in other parts of North America at this time, but we'll probably be the first [facility of its kind] in Western Canada if we do it here," Frontenac VP of Business Development Steve Neill told city council at Tuesday's meeting.

Initially, the facility could provide 1 megawatt of power (enough for roughly 1,000 people) to the Penticton grid, which could be scaled up in the future, sold at a rate of $0.054/kwh, even during peak times — a potential for savings, Frontenac says, as currently FortisBC charges the city higher rates during those hours of the day.

Frontenac would also share part of the revenue from carbon credits with the City of Penticton as well.

The process also produces high-pressure steam that could be used for heating purposes at city facilities. By-products include clean water and benign aluminum oxide, the latter of which Frontenac would be recycling and re-selling to smelters.

"We don't landfill anything," said David White, Frontenac CEO and founder said.

"Think of Frontenac as a gas station and a power producer. Very low environmental impact, close to where the consumers would use the product. I think everybody would like to see the world move closer to a cleaner energy source."

All aluminum used would be provided by the community and nearby communities, everything from aluminum pop or beer cans from the community to aluminum siding.

"Our fuel is in the local area and we just buy it and repurpose it," White explained.

"Our solution is cost competitive. We will be able to go toe to toe with fossil fuels on price. So we will stand on our own two feet as a business.We are a small company but we are good at what we do. 100 per cent Canadian owned and we're very excited to get going here in Penticton."

Frontenac representatives said many of the team members live in the Okanagan Valley, leading to the decision to pursue Penticton as their flagship. Also, Penticton is fairly unique in the province in a key way.

"It's a lot easier to deal with a community that has their own electrical utility for buying the electrical power. And in British Columbia there's only about a handful of communities like Penticton that have that ability, so it just made things a lot easier for us to deal with you as well," Neill explained.

If eventual development permits are approved by council, they anticipate an 18-month construction process. Frontenac also noted the project would come with 15-20 jobs for locals, and potential for partnership with the Penticton Okanagan College campus.

Coun. Judy Sentes pointed out at the end of Frontenac's presentation that they are not a registered company in B.C., asking when that will happen, as it adds to credibility.

"My apologies. We should have probably done it before this," White said in answer, adding they plan to register in September.

"We have spent a lot of the summer securing all our equity. So that's been our focus, which we've completed. So now we have the term sheet in hand and we have the money."

Council received the presentation for information only at this time and will be discussing the matter in more detail at future meetings.

Ocean Power Technologies Announces DOE Award Supporting Development of Next Generation Wave Energy Converter Concept


Ocean Power Technologies, Inc.
Tue, August 17, 2021

MONROE TOWNSHIP, N.J., Aug. 17, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ocean Power Technologies, Inc. ("OPT" or "the Company") (NYSE American: OPTT), a leader in innovative and cost-effective low-carbon ocean energy solutions, today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) selected the Company to further the development of a next-generation wave energy converter.

"Investment by the U.S. government towards the commercialization of clean energy technology is critical to achieving our nation's net-zero emissions goals," said Philipp Stratmann, President and Chief Executive Officer of OPT. “This award from the DOE will allow OPT to continue innovative blue tech power and data solution development.”

In the DOE’s recently announced awards for clean energy Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) projects, OPT will receive up to $197,203 to perform a preliminary conceptual design and feasibility study of a modular and scalable small-scale Mass-on-Spring Wave Energy Converter (MOSWEC) PowerBuoy® for powering autonomous ocean monitoring systems.

OPT holds multiple patents related to MOSWEC technology, which generates power from the relative motion caused by the ocean waves. OPT’s MOSWEC design has a hermetically sealed hull to protect internal components, is about the size of a standard shipping container, and is easily transportable and deployable. In addition, the design is scalable to support a wide range of applications and missions.

About Ocean Power Technologies
Headquartered in Monroe Township, New Jersey, OPT aspires to transform the world through durable, innovative, and cost-effective ocean energy solutions. Its PowerBuoy® solutions platform provides clean and reliable electric power and real-time data communications for remote offshore and subsea applications in markets such as offshore oil and gas, defense and security, science and research, and communications. To learn more, visit www.oceanpowertechnologies.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
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