IMPERIALISM IN SPACE 

NO NOT MING THE MERCILESS

Can we (legally) colonize space?

As the space race heats up, many legal issues are up for debate.

By Hope Reese
September 5, 2021

Credit: Destina / Adobe Stock


In 1967, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union came together to draft the Outer Space Treaty — now signed by more than 100 countries — intended to facilitate the peaceful exploration of space. Written in the Cold War era, in a climate of fear, “it was really about not putting nukes in space,” Jim Dunstan, founder of Mobius Legal Group and General Counsel at TechFreedom, told Freethink.

But in our new era of hyper-exploration, where billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are talking about establishing Martian constitutions and zipping up into space on private flights —the agreement is proving to be insufficient. Many new issues, such as what to do with orbital debris, what could happen if (some of us) decide to colonize Mars, and developing ethical standards for space exploration, are still open to debate.

To learn more about these issues, I spoke to Dunstan, who has practiced law for nearly four decades, with a focus in space law. We talked about establishing a Martian economy and whether the rich should have first access to space, among other topics. Here is our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

Why is the removal of orbital debris such a big problem? And how could it be resolved?

There’s all of this flotsam and jetsam floating around in space that nobody can go touch. Under the Outer Space Treaty, once you own it, once you launch it, you own it forever and nobody else can, nobody else can go and take it out — even if it’s a hazard.

We’ve got to get into the mindset of maritime law, which says that if you are impeding the free access to orbits, I can go take your derelict vehicle out. For national security reasons, the US won’t push that issue, nor will any foreign country. Because one, we don’t want the world to know exactly what we’ve got up there, and two, we don’t want to have anybody coming in and taking our stuff out.

The problem is: who’s going to shoulder the liability? Under the treaty regime, countries remain responsible for their objects. The flip side of that is they’re only responsible for damage that occurs in outer space, if it can be demonstrated that they were negligent. So if they lose control of a satellite, it’s “an act of God” —nobody is responsible. We’ve turned a blind eye on this. So it’s much safer to leave this very dangerous junk up than to resolve it by figuring out how to get around that liability issue so that somebody could bring the [debris] down.

The problem is: who’s going to shoulder the liability? Countries are only responsible for damage that occurs in outer space, if it can be demonstrated that they were negligent.

Congress needs to declare a policy that once an American company has lost control of a satellite and it’s therefore dead, it should be treated like maritime flotsam and jetsam — anybody can come take it out. The second way we need to do this is with a bilateral agreement with another country. The real candidate is Russia. If you look at the most dangerous objects that are floating around up there, they happen to be the very large, upper-stage Zenit, second stages of Russian launches. These things are floating in really bad places in terms of congestion. Completely uncontrolled, they’re all tumbling. I suggest a US company buys one of these and takes it down, to establish a policy that this could be done.

Should countries with greater resources, technological capabilities, or access have more privileges when it comes to what happens in space?

Well, that’s the big issue which has essentially derailed any further establishment of additional treaties.

So, in the four established treaties [1967 Outer Space Treaty, 1968 Rescue Agreement, 1972 Liability Convention, 1975 Registration Convention], the undergirding principle is that activities in space should be done for the benefit of all mankind — that space should be free and open to explore and use. Things like GPS, which is a public good, should not be not denied to the world. If you’ve got a GPS chip in your phone, even if your phone doesn’t work around the world, GPS will still tell you where you are. And weather satellites—we may have our issues in Cuba, right? But we still tell them when a hurricane is about to hit them.

If mankind owns outer space, where would that ownership end? Do humans own the entire universe?

The 1979 Moon Treaty introduced this new concept, which is that outer space is the common heritage of mankind and belongs to all mankind. Okay, well, if it’s owned by all mankind, where would that ownership end?

Do human beings own the entire universe? That’s a little bit homosapien-centric is it, isn’t it? So that’s what’s derailed us going forward —this notion that humans own space. The spacefaring nations who take all the risks, put up all the money and, yes, get the direct benefits of space activities are unwilling to say, “well, wait a second, why do I now essentially lose control of my objects, lose control of the benefit, lose control of the economics, when I’m taking all the risk and everything now belongs to mankind at large?”

We’ve never really functioned well in an economic system where everybody knows everything. It doesn’t tend to work very well because there’s no reward for the risk taking. And that’s why we’re at loggerheads.

The rejection in the ’79 Moon Treaty rejected the provisions that would have established a UN regime to tax any of the mining activity in space. That’s really why the moon treaty went down in flames — nobody wanted to sign up to allow somebody else to tax all the benefits. This concept that developed nations are willing to just hand it all over to the UN to both administer and tax and then distribute the benefits of those activities has been rejected by the developed countries.

Developing countries, obviously not so happy about that, but what are you going to do at that point?

What about uber-wealthy figures like Jeff Bezos — who recently went on an 11-minute trip to space — and Elon Musk, who wants to colonize Mars? What influence do they have on space exploration and laws?

Look, Elon is prone to hyperbole. Here’s the problem with what Elon wants to do. There have been efforts over the past 50 years to establish these free-floating sea colonies. People saying, “I’m sick and tired of world governments. I’m just going to build this gigantic boat, and I’m going to populate it with a whole bunch of rich people, and we’re just going to float off into the high seas and declare ourselves to be independent.”

Great concept, functionally can’t happen, because of the taxing authority of individual nations. I just can’t walk up, walk into the IRS in the United States and say, “I hereby abdicate my US citizenship and residency. Don’t ever come see me for taxes again.” What the IRS will say is, “Okay, whose citizen are you going to become, and do we have a reciprocal tax treaty with them?” “Well, no. I’m going to go live on a boat.” “Well, great. You can go live on a boat, and then you’ll file your taxes with the United States every year.”

We are all citizens of some country, and with that citizenship comes a responsibility to pay the local taxes. And that’s why these floating sea colonies have never shoved off into the seas because they can’t figure out how to get around that taxing problem. The same is going to happen on Mars.

Elon is saying that he’s going to sell everything he owns, and he is going to pack up himself and his family and head off to Mars and, therefore, claim that he is now a citizen of Mars. Well, good luck. He’s going to have to leave behind a nice big chunk of cash to pay lawyers when the IRS comes after him .

What could a space marketplace look like?

So long as a Mars colony is not self-sufficient, it will never be able to break free. If you’re importing your food, if you’re importing your oxygen, even if you’re importing the Silicon chips that make the computers go, mother Earth is going to have something that you need so desperately that you can’t just say, “Screw off.” So it’s going to have to be a colony that’s so well-developed that it doesn’t need anything back from earth.

The flip side is maybe there is something on Mars that is so valuable to earth that you can trade for your freedom.

As long as you are reliant on the earth for something, Earth is always going to be able to call the shots.

You could conceive of something on Mars, or maybe even the moon when you come down to it because one of the things that the moon has is a fair amount of helium-3. So I could conceive of a situation where a lunar colony is set up and, sure, it gets a lot of stuff from Earth, but it exports helium-3 down to fusion nuclear reactors back on earth. Now you’ve got an economic parity or even an economic upper hand on the lunar colony, and now you can negotiate the terms and negotiate your freedom.

But short of that, as long as you are reliant on the earth for something, Earth is always going to be able to call the shots.

What about those who say, “Hey, we need to fix problems on earth before we head to Mars?” What does it mean if Elon Musk takes his family to Mars while other people are left behind?

I’ll give a couple of examples from history. I was in the team that won the very first cellular telephone license for a company called MCI way back when. When MCI rolled out cellular telephone service, the most optimistic projections would be that in the United States, there will be 10 million cell phones. That was based on the anticipated price of the cell phone and the anticipated cost of providing the service. Only the 10 million wealthiest people in the United States would be able to afford it––that’s 3%. Well, what happened? Obviously, there are 330 million people in the United States and I think there are something akin to 500 million active cell phones.

It was possible because the 10 million all signed up and it all paid the price at the high prices that cell phone service was at the beginning.The very first mobile telephone cell phone cost $10,000, and weighed 10 pounds. And with that high price, then companies could begin to bring down the price of doing that. Now cell phones are almost weightless and basically free. The privileged were their early adopters and they drove the price down. Same thing with personal computers, which were expensive at first.

Yes, the ‘privileged’ will be the early adopters in space. And you better pray that they do, because otherwise we’re never going to get anywhere.

Let’s go back to airplanes. Only less than 1% could afford to get into a Ford Trimotor, or a DC-2 or DC-3, in the 1930s and travel from place to place. Airlines were incredibly expensive. Well, more people started buying tickets and by the time in the late sixties, early seventies, that basically anybody who could afford to take an airplane flight.

So, yes, the ‘privileged’ will be the early adopters in space. And you better pray that they do, because otherwise we’re never going to get anywhere.

How are the privileged bringing down the cost of going to space?

It’s expensive to launch things and it’s expensive to build things in space. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the rich guys, are driving down the cost to launch. A study called the Fast Space towards fast paced studies done by Air University showed that Musk brought down the cost of orbit by almost an order of magnitude in terms of the price per pound per order. And here’s the second part of that equation that’s so vital: the price of actual hardware to go into space.

So, yes, the privileged are always the early drivers. And oh, by the way, an awful lot of rich people died on the Titanic. So, these people are taking risks for their own lives, as well as their own fortunes. You can call them privileged or you can call them pioneers. I choose the latter.

It’s expensive to launch things and it’s expensive to build things in space. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the rich guys, are driving down the cost to launch.

Building stuff that goes into space is very expensive. But if you look at the Starlink satellites on a price per kilogram of the actual satellite itself, all right, so the Starlink satellites are half a million dollars a piece. On a price per kilogram basis, that is a 99% reduction in the price of your average telecommunication satellite. Why is that possible? Because he’s mass producing these things.

But what if we think about it less as a technological advance and more as imperialism — that the most powerful nations will take the biggest piece of the pie?

Well, you can think of it in one of two ways. One is you have a finite pie of resources and you get to choose how you divide that up.That’s what we’ve done since we climbed down out of the trees. And when somebody else’s pasture looked better than ours, we went and killed them. So, if we wish to continue as a species to do that, great. We continue to do that and I challenge anybody to say that they can find a way to perfectly divide that limited pie. Hasn’t worked yet in the known history of mankind.

But there’s a trillion times more resources in the near solar system than there is on earth. You get free energy from the sun once you’re out above the atmosphere of the earth. You have asteroids floating around that contain the equal of the entire mass amount of precious metals that are on earth. Almost all the precious metals that are on earth came from asteroids. If you look at how the earth was formed, we didn’t end up with any of the heavy, precious metals, because they all bubbled off into space and are flying around in chunks above our heads.

So I may be the first one out to do it and I’m taking the risks —I may lose my life, and other people may lose their lives doing this. But there’s plenty more for everybody because the pie is nearly infinite.

 

CAPITALI$M IN SPACE

NASA pays space startup $.10 for moon mining mission

It's the first payment on a contract that could have major implications for human space exploration.

By Kristin Houser
September 5, 2021

Credit: Lunar Outpost

NASA just paid Colorado startup Lunar Outpost $.10 for meeting the first part of its moon mining contract. But don’t let the low dollar amount fool you — this payment could have major implications for human space exploration.

The challenge: Every extra ounce of payload increases the cost of a space mission. By figuring out how to mine and use any soil, water, and other resources that may already be on the moon, Mars, and beyond, NASA could cut the cost of sending people beyond Earth.

“Space resources will play a key role in NASA’s Artemis program and the future of space exploration,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the recent Space Symposium in Colorado.

“The ability to extract and use extra terrestrial resources will ensure Artemis operations can be conducted safely and sustainably in support of human exploration,” he continued.

Moon mining partnerships: Rather than relying on its own missions — which can move slowly due to government red tape — NASA wants to partner with the private sector to explore the potential of moon mining.

In December 2020, it signed contracts with four companies, agreeing to pay them between $1 and $15,000 to collect samples of moon dust — Lunar Outpost was the company that submitted the lowest bid.

“Space resources will play a key role in NASA’s Artemis program and the future of space exploration.”BILL NELSON

Obviously, the contract amounts won’t be enough to actually fund the moon mining missions, but the idea behind them is to set a precedent for how NASA pays for space resources collected by the private sector.

“This sets a legal and procedural framework that will be utilized for generations and decades to come for companies like ours and many others to go out and collect resources from the lunar surface from other planetary bodies and make them basically useful for humanity,” Cyrus said.

Fulfilling the contract: NASA agreed to pay Lunar Outpost 10% of the contract once its moon mining plan passed a review milestone, and the agency stuck to its word, presenting CEO Justin Cyrus with a check for $.10 at the Space Symposium.


In late 2022, Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) rover will land on the moon as part of a mission with Nokia to establish a lunar mobile network. MAPP will make its attempt at moon mining for NASA then, collecting about 100 grams of lunar dust.

The contract will be considered complete once Lunar Outpost provides NASA with images of the sample and the collection process and transfers ownership of the moon rocks to the agency — it’ll be NASA’s responsibility to retrieve the sample (if it wants to).

Glasgow Uni engineers 'channel Star Trek' by developing world's first touchable holograms

Previously the realm of science fiction technology, the team at Glasgow Uni have developed a new way to create the sensation of physically interacting with holographic projections.

By Craig Williams
5 SEP 2021

The idea of touchable holograms is familiar to millions from its appearance in sci-fi favourites like Star Trek’s holodeck. (Image: Reach PLC)

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A piece of science fiction technology could be one step closer to reality after engineers at Glasgow University developed the world's first haptic - or touchable - holograms.

The idea of touchable holograms is familiar to millions from its appearance in sci-fi favourites like Star Trek’s holodeck, where characters can interact with solid-seeming computer simulations of people, objects and places.

Now, a crack team of engineers from the uni have developed a new way to create the sensation of physically interacting with holographic projections.

In a new paper published in the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems , the team describe how they have developed a new technique they call ‘aerohaptics’. The system pairs volumetric display technology with precisely controlled jets of air to create the sensation of touch on users’ hands, fingers and wrists.

The technique could form the basis of new ways to interact with virtual objects, advanced forms of teleconferencing, and even empower surgeons to perform procedures remotely.

The system, developed by the University’s Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) research group, is based around a pseudo-holographic display which uses glass and mirrors to make a two-dimensional image appear to hover in space – a modern variation on a 19th-century illusion technique known as Pepper’s Ghost.

It pairs a Leap Motion sensor to track users’ hand movements with a moveable air nozzle to direct airflow to their palms and fingertips.

In the paper, the team offer an example of how they used the system to create a realistic sensation of bouncing a basketball. With a computer-generated 3D image of a basketball displayed in space, and the Leap Motion sensor tracking the movement and location of the user’s hands, the system varies the direction and force of the airflow to create aerohaptic feedback.

A piece of science fiction technology could be one step closer to reality with a new development in haptic holograms. (Image: University of Glasgow)

The feedback is also modulated based on the virtual surface of the basketball, allowing users to ‘feel’ the rounded shape of the ball as it rolls from their fingertips when they bounce it and the slap in their palm when it returns. Users can even ‘push’ the virtual ball with varying force and sense the resulting change in how a hard bounce or a soft bounce feels in their palm.

Professor Ravinder Dahiya of the University of Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering leads the Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) group, which developed the system.

Professor Dahiya said: “Haptic feedback and volumetric display technology has come a long way in recent years, bringing us closer to being able to convincingly interact with virtual objects.

“However, current haptic tech often still involves wearable or handheld peripherals, which add cost and complication and could be holding back widespread adoption of the technology.

“Aerohaptics creates a convincing sensation of physical interaction on users’ hands at a relatively low cost. We are already looking in to adding additional functionality to the system, such as adding temperature control to their airflow to deepen the sensation of interacting with hot or cool objects.

Why is the color blue so rare in nature?


By Mindy Weisberger

about 21 hours ago

Feeling blue? That color isn't as common as you may think.

In poison dart frogs, bright blue colors broadcast a warning to predators that the animal is toxic. 

(Image credit: Lillian King/Getty Images)

When you look up at the blue sky overhead or gaze across the seemingly endless expanse of a blue ocean, you might think that the color blue is common in nature.

But among all the hues found in rocks, plants and flowers, or in the fur, feathers, scales and skin of animals, blue is surprisingly scarce.

But why is the color blue so rare? The answer stems from the chemistry and physics of how colors are produced — and how we see them.

Related: Why is the sky blue?


We're able to see color because each of our eyes contains between 6 million and 7 million light-sensitive cells called cones. There are three different types of cones in the eye of a person with normal color vision, and each cone type is most sensitive to a particular wavelength of light: red, green or blue. Information from millions of cones reaches our brains as electrical signals that communicate all the types of light reflected by what we see, which is then interpreted as different shades of color.

When we look at a colorful object, such as a sparkling sapphire or a vibrant hydrangea bloom, "the object is absorbing some of the white light that falls onto it; because it's absorbing some of the light, the rest of the light that's reflected has a color," science writer Kai Kupferschmidt, author of "Blue: In Search of Nature's Rarest Color" (The Experiment, 2021), told Live Science.

"When you see a blue flower — for instance, a cornflower — you see the cornflower as blue because it absorbs the red part of the spectrum," Kupferschmidt said. Or to put it another way, the flower appears blue because that color is the part of the spectrum that the blossom rejected, Kupferschmidt wrote in his book, which explores the science and nature of this popular hue

In the book "Blue," writer Kai Kupferschmidt explores the science behind this elusive color. (Image credit: Courtesy of The Experiment)

In the visible spectrum, red has long wavelengths, meaning it is very low-energy compared with other colors. For a flower to appear blue, "it needs to be able to produce a molecule that can absorb very small amounts of energy," in order to absorb the red part of the spectrum, Kupferschmidt said.

Generating such molecules — which are large and complex — is difficult for plants to do, which is why blue flowers are produced by fewer than 10% of the world's nearly 300,000 flowering plant species. One possible driver for the evolution of blue flowers is that blue is highly visible to pollinators such as bees, and producing blue blossoms may benefit plants in ecosystems where competition for pollinators is high, Adrian Dyer, an associate professor and vision scientist at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Company in 2016.

As for minerals, their crystal structures interact with ions (charged atoms or molecules) to determine which parts of the spectrum are absorbed and which are reflected. The mineral lapis lazuli, which is mined only in Afghanistan and produces the rare blue pigment ultramarine, contains trisulfide ions — three sulfur atoms bound together inside a crystal lattice — that can release or bind a single electron.

"That energy difference is what makes the blue," Kupferschmidt said.


Azurite is a copper carbonate hydroxide mineral known for its deep-blue color. (Image credit: Serge Briez/capmediations/Getty Images)

Blue animals' colors don't come from chemical pigments. Rather, they rely on physics to create a blue appearance. Blue-winged butterflies in the Morpho genus have intricate, layered nanostructures on their wing scales that manipulate layers of light so that some colors cancel each other out and only blue is reflected; a similar effect happens in structures found in the feathers of blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata), the scales of blue tangs (Paracanthurus hepatus) and the flashing rings of venomous blue-ringed octopuses (Hapalochlaena maculosa).

Blue shades in mammals are even rarer than in birds, fish, reptiles and insects. Some whales and dolphins have bluish skin; primates such as golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) have blue-skinned faces; and mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx) have blue faces and blue rear ends. But fur — a trait shared by most terrestrial mammals — is never naturally bright blue (at least, not in visible light. Researchers recently found that platypus fur glows in vivid shades of blue and green when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) rays, Live Science previously reported).


The highly venomous blue-ringed octopus. (Image credit: Belive/Getty Images)

"But it takes a lot of work to make this blue, and so the other question becomes: What are the evolutionary reasons to make blue? What's the incentive?" Kupferschmidt said. "The fascinating thing when you dive into these animal worlds is always, who's the recipient of this message and can they see the blue?"

For example, while humans have three light-sensing receptor types in our eyes, birds have a fourth receptor type for sensing UV light. Feathers that appear blue to human eyes "actually reflect even more UV light than blue light," Kupferschmidt explained. By that reasoning, the birds that we call blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) "would probably call themselves 'UV tits,' because that's what they would mostly see," he said.


Related: How do dogs see the world?


Because of blue's scarcity in nature, the word for blue was a relative latecomer to languages around the world, appearing after the words for black, white, red and yellow, according to Kupferschmidt.

"One theory for this is that you really only need to name a color once you can dye things — once you can divorce the color from its object. Otherwise, you don't really need the name for the color," he explained. "Dyeing things blue or finding a blue pigment happened really late in most cultures, and you can see that in the linguistics."


Birds' brilliant blue plumage, such as that of Spix's macaws (Cyanopsitta spixii), gets its color not from pigments but from structures in feathers that scatter light. (Image credit: Wera Rodsawang/Getty Images)

The earliest use of blue dye dates to about 6,000 years ago in Peru, and the ancient Egyptians combined silica, calcium oxide and copper oxide to create a long-lasting blue pigment known as irtyu for decorating statues, researchers reported Jan. 15 in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science. Ultramarine, a vivid blue pigment ground from lapis lazuli, was as precious as gold in medieval Europe, and was reserved primarily for illustrating illuminated manuscripts.

RELATED MYSTERIES

—How do we see in color?

—Why do babies' eyes start out blue, then change color?

—Why is the ocean blue?

Blue's rarity meant that people viewed it as a high-status color for thousands of years. Blue has long been associated with the Hindu deity Krishna and with the Christian Virgin Mary, and artists who were famously inspired by blue in nature include Michelangelo, Gauguin, Picasso and Van Gogh, according to the Frontiers in Plant Science study.

"The relative scarcity of blue available in natural pigments likely fueled our fascination," the scientists wrote.

Blue also colors our expressions, appearing in dozens of English idioms: You can work a blue-collar job, swear a blue streak, sink into a blue funk or talk until you're blue in the face, to name just a few. And blue can sometimes mean contradictory things depending on the idiom: "'Blue sky ahead' means a bright future, but 'feeling blue' is being sad," Kupferschmidt said.

Blue’s scarcity in nature may have helped shape our perception of the color and things that appear blue. "With blue, it's like a whole canvas that you can still paint on," Kupferschmidt said. "Maybe because it is rare in nature and maybe because we associate it with things that we can't really touch, like the sky and the sea, it's something that is very open to different associations."

Originally published on Live Science.

Three Ways to Prevent Our Next Massive Power Failure

Hurricane Ida exposed the grid’s weaknesses. It didn’t have to be this way.

EMILY PONTECORVOBio

Utility poles lean over a street following Hurricane Ida on August 31, 2021 in Houma, Louisiana.

Scott Olson/Getty

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Hurricane Ida, one of the strongest storms to hit the US on record, intensified so rapidly before hitting New Orleans that city officials did not have enough time to issue a mandatory evacuation order. Limited exit routes from the city meant that people would have been stuck in traffic on the highway when the storm came. Those who stayed in the city and surrounding area were hit by 150-mile-per-hour winds and heavy rains that knocked out power to almost 1 million homes and businesses in Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday. By Thursday afternoon, in the midst of the blazing heat wave, Entergy, the utility that serves most of the region, reported that only 18 percent of its system had been restored.“The reality is, our infrastructure is built for the climate of the past, and we keep rebuilding it by incremental improvements.”

At the same time that stronger, wetter storms like Ida are exposing the dangerous weaknesses of the US electricity grid, the clearest pathways to stop the effects of climate change from getting worse all involve people becoming more and more reliant on it—for example, by trading gas-powered cars for electric ones, or using renewable electricity to heat homes. As demand for electricity grows, experts say that the way utilities and policymakers address grid resilience, which is largely reactive rather than preventative, has to change.

Ida’s aftermath shows just how risky petrochemical production is in a hurricane zone

“The reality is, our infrastructure is built for the climate of the past, and we keep rebuilding it by incremental improvements,” said Roshi Nateghi, an assistant professor of industrial engineering at Purdue University. “And that’s just not gonna cut it.”

Resilience is a slippery word. There’s no universally agreed-upon way to define or measure it. Experts say it’s unrealistic to expect a grid that never has outages, but there are at least three different kinds of solutions that Nateghi and others point to that could help our electricity system withstand stronger storms and, in the inevitable case of an outage, ensure that communities get the minimal service needed to remain safe.

The first begins with what we’ll call the old, incremental way of thinking—a focus on the physical infrastructure that makes up the grid. The scale of the damage wrought by Ida was severe. Entergy reported that within its transmission system—the high-voltage poles and wires that deliver electricity from power plants to the distribution lines that serve customers’ neighborhoods—more than 200 wires and 200 substations had been put out of service by the storm. In its distribution system, about 10,000 poles, 13,000 wires, and 2,000 transformers were damaged or destroyed.

There’s a lot utilities can do to minimize this kind of damage during storms. They can design systems to withstand stronger winds by using stronger wires supported by poles spaced more closely together. They can replace wooden poles with concrete and steel, and be diligent about trimming trees nearby. But Nateghi said these kinds of fixes are piecemeal and may be more expensive in the long term than an often-debated solution with high upfront costs—burying power lines underground. “It’s always argued to be really expensive,” said Nateghi, who said that when you look at the full costs of these disasters, many of which enter the billions, it might not seem as expensive. Buried lines are protected from wind and can be insulated from flooding. The downside is that they are harder to access for repairs.

Half of low-income households in New Orleans spend more than 10 percent of their income on energy. The nationwide average is 3.5 percent.

Logan Burke, the executive director of New Orleans-based nonprofit the Alliance for Affordable Energy, said there have been conversations about burying lines in New Orleans for decades. Part of the problem is that the cost of burying lines would likely get passed on to customers through their electric bills, and that the city, and Louisiana at large, has extreme levels of poverty and high energy burdens. Half of the low-income households in New Orleans spend more than 10 percent of their income on energy, according to a 2016 report, and a quarter spend more than 19 percent, compared to a national average energy burden of 3.5 percent.

“The hesitance to burying lines is, how do we do this in a way that people can afford?” said Burke. Unless the federal infrastructure bill, or a reconciliation bill, provides additional dollars for that kind of project, she said, it’s simply not an option for Louisiana.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill that the Senate passed in early August contained $65 billion for the power grid, with $10 billion to $12 billion specifically for building new transmission lines. The Biden administration also announced last month that it is making nearly $5 billion available through the Federal Emergency Management Agency for projects that improve community resilience to extreme weather.

The second possible solution, which is cheaper than burying lines and something that utilities can take advantage of today, is using predictive computer modeling to identify where the biggest weaknesses in their systems are in order to make those incremental improvements more strategically. Nateghi and other academic researchers have published methods that use meteorological models of climate impacts and translate them into potential infrastructure damage to predict which areas are most likely to lose power. As part of her doctoral research, Nateghi worked with utilities in the southeast to incorporate such models into their planning and said they were able to cut costs and fare better in future storms. Farzad Ferdowsi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Louisiana who has worked with Entergy, agreed that one of the things the company could do to improve resilience is more comprehensive modeling.

Entergy has forcefully fought proposals to allow for more locally produced and controlled electricity.

But regardless, the grid will sometimes fail in one way or another. That’s why Burke thinks it’s more important to shift the conversation around resilience away from utilities to people. “We think it’s so important to be thinking about how to help people stay safe in their homes or where they’re sheltering, and that includes things like distributed solar and storage,” she said. New Orleans has a lot of rooftop solar, but most of it isn’t paired with batteries, which would allow it to provide power when the larger grid goes down. Burke imagines homes and community-based organizations like libraries, churches, and schools that have solar and storage systems that could be connected to form “neighborhood reliability corridors.” They would be able to operate as microgrids, independently from Entergy’s system, and allow communities to access cooling and other basic electricity needs in the aftermath of storms.

Entergy has forcefully fought proposals to allow for more locally produced and controlled electricity in New Orleans, instead convincing the city council to allow it to build a new gas-fired power plant in the city on the grounds of improved resilience during storms. That plant didn’t keep the power on during Ida because of damage to transmission and distribution lines. The company was able to start it up on Wednesday morning and provide power to a small part of New Orleans East, but most of the city is still blacked out, and Entergy has not yet provided estimates for when power will be restored.

New Orleans power outages as of the morning of Thursday, September 2

Entergy

“We expect to complete assessing all damage today, and then we can begin providing estimated restoration times for customers,” said Deanna Rodriguez, Entergy New Orleans’ president and CEO, during a press conference on Thursday morning.

Entergy can earn a rate of return on big capital investments like power plants, while locally produced solar would eat away at its profits. Like in other cities, Burke said that in the last month she has heard lots of calls for a public power utility that wouldn’t be subject to profit-motivated decision making. But she’s not very optimistic about a future for public power in New Orleans.

“New Orleans only has one Fortune 500 company, and it is Entergy,” she said. “They wield political power, they fund a lot of nonprofits. The kind of power that they have is fairly unmatched in the state. And so a movement to municipalize has a big heavy barrier up against it.”

Lawmakers: Ida damage shows need for infrastructure upgrades

By MATTHEW DALY and HOPE YEN

1 of 7

United States Geological Survey workers push a boat as they look for residents on a street flooded as a result of the remnants of Hurricane Ida in Somerville, NJ., Thursday, Sept. 2, 2021. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Shaken by haunting images of surging rivers, flooded roads and subways and other damage caused by the remnants of Hurricane Ida, lawmakers from both parties are vowing to upgrade the nation’s aging infrastructure network.

As the deadly storm moved from the Gulf Coast through the Northeast, members of Congress said the deluge offered irrefutable evidence that power lines, roads, bridges and other infrastructure are deteriorating even as storms and other extreme weather are strengthening. At least 50 people from Virginia to Connecticut died as storm water from Ida’s remnants cascaded into people’s homes and engulfed automobiles, overwhelming urban drainage systems unable to handle so much rain in such a short time.

At least 16 deaths deaths were blamed on the storm in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

“Global warming is upon us,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “When you get two record rainfalls in a week (in New York City), it’s not just coincidence. When you get all the changes that we have seen in weather, that’s not a coincidence. ... It’s going to get worse and worse and worse, unless we do something about it.”

Schumer and other lawmakers said the catastrophe is the latest example of why the nation needs the nearly trillion-dollar infrastructure bill passed by the Senate last month. He and other Democrats also are calling for passage of President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion, partisan rebuilding plan aimed at helping families and combating climate change.

“It’s so imperative to pass the two bills,” Schumer said.

Democrats hope to pass both bills by the end of this month, but action on the bipartisan bill may be difficult until the larger package is ready. Progressives have said they won’t support a bipartisan bill without strong companion legislation to advance their priorities.

Biden made a pitch Friday for the bipartisan bill, saying it “is going to change things on our streets across the country.” He cited the bill’s “historic investment” in roads, rail and bridges, as well as clean energy, clean water and universal broadband.

“It’s about resilience,” Biden said. “Make our roads and highways safer. Make us more resilient to the kinds of devastating impacts from extreme weather we’re seeing in so many parts of the country.”

The plan includes $110 billion to build and repair roads and bridges and $66 billion to upgrade railroads. It also includes about $60 billion to upgrade the electric grid and build thousands of miles of transmission lines to expand use of renewable energy and nearly $47 billion to adapt and rebuild roads, ports and bridges to help withstand damage from stronger storms as well as wildfires and drought.

“If we’re going to make our country more resilient to natural disasters, whatever they are, we have to start preparing now,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La.

Cassidy, a lead negotiator on the bipartisan bill, has touted the infrastructure legislation as a boon to hurricane-prone states such as his. “I’m sure hoping that Republicans look around my state, see this damage and say, ‘If there’s money for resiliency, money to harden the grid, money to help sewer and water, then maybe this is something we should be for,’” he told CNN.

Ultimately, repair and replacement of roads, bridges and other infrastructure damaged by Hurricane Ida and other natural disasters are likely to be funded by Congress as emergency relief money. But the bipartisan bill will be valuable in providing major investments in “future-proofing” infrastructure against climate change and extreme weather such as Ida, according to Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington think tank.

The bill would be the first to devote money for “climate resilience,” including $17 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers to address backlogs in federal flood control projects.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would receive $492 million to map inland and coastal flooding, including “next-gen” modeling and forecasts. Another $492 million would go toward improving the resilience of coastal communities to flooding by restoring natural ecosystems.

The legislation also provides $3.5 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help communities reduce the risk of flood damage and $8.7 billion for the Transportation Department to award grants to states to improve resiliency in ports and other coastal infrastructure.

“We have to start planning for what the future might hold and do modeling that’s going to help us predict what these future risks are going to be,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told “Fox News Sunday,” calling the increasing frequency of severe storms that intensify more rapidly “a new normal” because of climate change. “These threats aren’t going to go away, and we need to start to reduce those impacts.”

The U.S. had 22 climate and weather disasters in 2020 with losses exceeding $1 billion each, with eight such disasters this year as of July 9, according to NOAA. Ida and its remnants will likely cost in the tens of billions, analysts say.

Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., said a bipartisan infrastructure bill is needed, but the bill approved by the Senate could harm oil-producing states such as Louisiana by freezing out benefits for states that encourage fossil-fuel production.

The Democratic-only bill is even worse, Graves said, calling it “a final nail in the coffin” to the offshore oil industry, which is already struggling because of the pandemic and the hurricane.

“All this does is benefit Iran,” Graves said. “It benefits Russia. It benefits China.”

In an interview, Graves said he would prefer to use emergency spending to help Louisiana and other states hit by the hurricane. That way, money “is tailored to the disaster” and based on need, not ideology, he said.

But Ed Potosnak, executive director of the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters, said emergency spending, and even the bipartisan infrastructure bill, is not sufficient to address the threat of climate change.

“We have not taken the bold measures we need to protect our families and our way of life and our communities that we cherish,” he said.

Potosnak, whose central New Jersey neighborhood was flooded by Ida, said storms are increasing in intensity and frequency, with at least seven “100-year storms” in the past few decades.

“I hope this storm is a reminder to all our elected officials: This is what climate change looks like,″ Potosnak said. “Congress needs to act to match the challenge we face.”

The quiet search for dark matter deep underground

In which the author travels to South Dakota to visit a gold mine—housing LUX.

MATTHEW FRANCIS - 9/6/2021, 6:39 AM

A mile below ground, a sign hangs over the door to the LUX dark matter experiment telling visitors how far to Wall Drug—in both dimensions.

Matthew R. Francis

Update, Sept. 6, 2021: It's Labor Day Weekend in the US, and even though most of us are continuing to call home "the office," Ars staff is taking a long weekend to rest and relax. And given we can't travel like we could during Labor Day Weekends past, we thought we'd revisit one of our favorite trips from the archives. This story on our adventure to the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment in South Dakota originally ran in July 2014, and it appears unchanged below.

One of the quietest, darkest places in the cosmos isn’t out in the depths of space. It’s at the center of a tank of cold liquid xenon in a gold mine deep under the Black Hills of South Dakota. It needs to be that quiet: any stray particles could confuse the detectors lining the outside of the tank. Those detectors are looking for faint, rare signals, ones that could reveal the presence of dark matter.

The whole assembly—the container of liquid and gaseous xenon, the water tank enveloping that, and all the detectors—is called the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment. So far, LUX hasn’t found anything, but the days of its operation are just beginning: the detector was installed and started operations just last year.

Though still relatively young, LUX has already set many standards for hunting for dark matter particles. When I visited, the facility was gearing up for the next data collection run, one that will involve 300 days of constant operation. The size and sensitivity of the experiment, its designers’ dedication to understanding any noise sources, and the relative simplicity of the detector lead many to hope that if there’s any dark matter to be found, LUX—or its successor—will find it.

(I’ll use “detector” to describe LUX as a whole in addition to the individual photon detectors that are the business-end of the experiment. I hope the context will make it clear which is which.)

That last "if" is a big one, of course. Dark matter is remarkable for its invisibility—it neither absorbs nor emits light of any wavelength. We know about it through its gravitational action, the way it shaped galaxies, organized the largest objects in the Universe, and affected the spectrum of light from the early days of the cosmos. Based on the structure of galaxies, astronomers suspect it is made of particles. But how massive those particles are, how many types might exist, and how they interact are still matters of some conjecture.


The LUX experiment is inside a metal tank containing 71,600 gallons of pure water, so the xenon detector isn't visible. The head at lower left is LUX researcher Rick Gaitskell.
Matthew R. FrancisIf, for example, dark matter doesn’t interact with ordinary matter on any scale our experimental cleverness can currently reach, LUX will turn up nothing, no matter how sophisticated the experiment is.

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Rick Gaitskell, one of the principle researchers on LUX, is a professor at Brown University in the United States. (He was born and educated in England, a heritage that came through in his sartorial choice of green flannel three-piece suit with bright red socks.) He told Ars, “I’ve been looking for dark matter for 27 years. We’ve had a number of results over the years where we’ve either ended up seeing nothing or one or two cases we’ve seen something that looked actually rather exciting, in that it showed initially many of the features you might associate with a dark matter interaction.” However, none of those have been confirmed by later experiments—and most now have mundane explanations.

This past frustration is part of what drives Gaitskell. He quit another experiment when he concluded it was likely never to succeed: the detection rate, based on calculations, would likely be less than one dark matter particle per century for each kilogram of detector material. For most detector materials, that implies a prohibitively high cost. If you want to find dark matter on the scale of a year or two, you’d need a detector with masses of several metric tons. But mass is where LUX and its siblings—such as the XENON100 experiment at Gran Sasso in Italy—excel. Using xenon as the detection medium has many advantages, including the ability to build large.
Unicorns, Wall Drug, and dark matter


The lab housing LUX has many small paper unicorns sitting on top of server racks and other equipment.
Matthew R. FrancisTo understand how LUX hunts dark matter, I decided to visit the lab and see for myself. It's not exactly in a location that makes you think of physics.



I arrived in South Dakota during the dying throes of winter; at the end of March, the Black Hills were still snow-covered, but the warmer air carried tantalizing hints of spring. Thankfully, the flights fell between late-season snowfalls, though it snowed enough to cover my rental car during my day underground at LUX. The Black Hills are mountains in miniature, steep rocky peaks topping out lower than the foothills of the grander front range of the Rockies or the Tetons. Nevertheless, they are mountains with all that entails: sudden snowstorms, gates that can close off the roads in the case of severe weather, and “falling rocks” signs everywhere.

LUX is part of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), housed at the now-defunct Homestake gold mine in the town of Lead. (The irony of a gold mine in Lead vanished quickly. The name is pronounced “leed," not like the metal.) The whole region cashes in on its Wild West past, especially the adjacent town of Deadwood. Every hotel and gas station has slot machines, and innumerable billboards advertise big payouts at the casinos. South Dakota in general has unrestrictive laws about billboards, as anyone crossing the state by car knows. There are signs for Wall Drug, Mount Rushmore, and various other tourist destinations that nearly dwarf the attractions themselves. Continuing this trend, the lab has its own Wall Drug sign, showing the distance to be 97 miles away horizontally, plus 2037 feet vertically. Advertisement


By advertising standards, Sanford and LUX are relatively low key. The lab generally isn’t open to the public. To get to it, I had to drive through a residential neighborhood up steep (and at that time of year) snow-packed streets. Because access to the underground portion of the lab requires running the mining elevators—known as “cages”—I had to report at 6am for safety training. Even with jet-lag more or less in my favor, that was still rather early to be functional, though I had it better than the BBC film crew that flew in from the UK.

The safety briefing consisted largely of a video letting us know what we should do if we needed to evacuate the lab. We signed a waiver. We even had to affirm that we would make “intelligent choices,” a seemingly futile thing to ask a bunch of journalists with no mining experience among them. Finally, before descending, we had to don rubber steel-toed boots, coveralls, safety goggles, hard hats with lanterns, and a special emergency breathing apparatus clipped to a heavy utility belt. We made for a sexy-looking crew by the end of the process.

The cages themselves are large enough for about 15 people, with tracks in the floor for the mining carts. They have no built-in lights, so during the 10-minute descent, many of the crew turned on their hard-hat lanterns. (This is not a trip for those with claustrophobia.) Even the motors raising and lowering the cages are vintage: they were built in 1939, and the cable spools are cast iron. The gauges showing the position of the elevators are huge disks with pointers, another delightfully analog touch.

Gaitskell brought an adapted airplane altimeter into our cage to show in real time how far we were descending. Since the top of the mine is roughly a mile above sea-level and the lab is about a mile below ground, we nearly reached the elevation of my home city of Richmond, Virginia. My ears certainly registered the change in air pressure.

However rustic the approach, the lab itself is a typical, sleek modern facility: all shiny pipes, metal stairways, and tile floors. The typical accoutrements of office life abound. There are computers, white boards, water coolers, and (that most necessary piece of lab equipment) espresso machines all underground. University College London PhD student Sally Shaw told me “You kind of forget you’re underground down there.” Additionally, the researchers have adorned the lab with personal touches. A warning sign admonishes visitors to not feed the scientists, and when I looked around, I spotted a few paper unicorns sitting on various shelves. Shaw said the unicorns probably started as a late-night boredom project, but they grew into an inside joke. After all, hunting for dark matter is like looking for unicorns.

Be vewwy vewwy quiet, we're hunting WIMPs


The LUX detector.
Matt Kapust/Sanford Underground Research FacilityLUX is designed to hunt for weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs (one of the more unfortunate acronyms in cosmology). As the name suggests, WIMPs should interact with ordinary matter, albeit infrequently and weakly—what physicists call relatively low energy scales. From astronomical surveys, researchers also predict they should have a relatively large mass and move slowly compared to the speed of light. (We’ll discuss some alternative ideas in the third installment of this series.)

Beyond those basic criteria, however, LUX is designed to be as particle-agnostic as possible. Any particle that fits the basic description should register in the detector.

That could be critical, as "WIMP" is a fairly generic term that encompasses a number of hypothetical particle types predicted by theory. For example, the category includes particles predicted in some versions of supersymmetry; the “lightest supersymmetric partner” is sometimes listed as the most likely candidate for WIMP dark matter. But this isn't the only option that's been suggested.

The general properties of WIMPs don’t come from a particular theory, but from a general idea of how they should behave. WIMP models involve particles ranging from about 40 to 1,000 times the mass of a proton, though lower-mass versions are also possible—an important consideration. No matter what, though, experiments are looking for particles moving relatively slowly compared to the speed of light, meaning they will deposit very little energy into the detector.

While LUX consists of 368 kilograms of xenon, not all of the mass is used for dark matter hunting. In fact, most of the volume of the experiment consists of shielding. Each layer blocks more particles that could interfere with WIMP searches. Jim Dobson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh and University College London, explained the process. “We go underground to get away from the majority of the cosmic rays. Then you build a huge water tank to mitigate the remaining cosmics that get through and any kind of radioactive materials in the cavern.” The biggest annoyances are gamma rays and neutrons, which are rare that far below ground but problematic. (Neutrinos, which like WIMPs are electrically neutral, are too high energy to be confused with dark matter.)

Finally, the xenon is part liquid, part gas. The gas portion is the final barrier. “We only look for dark matter in the inner region of the detector, where the xenon itself acts as … the most effective final shield towards radiation. When you get right in the center, you have almost zero background in that region that could fake a WIMP experiment.” This is a key difference with some other experiments, which showed something that looked like a WIMP, but it was actually the result of a more mundane process in the detector itself. LUX is designed to sidestep those problems.

Most WIMPs entering LUX won’t hit anything, but given enough time, we might get lucky. Xenon is very nonreactive. It is an inert gas, meaning that it doesn’t form chemical bonds easily. If a WIMP strikes the nucleus of a xenon atom, it transfers some energy. This results in a number of events—the rebound of the nucleus, the loss of one electron, and the production of some photons. Fortunately, we're very good at detecting photons and stray electrons.

However, as Dobson said, “The challenge of that is reading out the signal from the middle of the detector. How do you see a few photons of light right in the middle, how do you see a few electrons being created by that interaction? This is why you have to purify the xenon constantly." And that’s part of graduate student Sally Shaw’s job: monitoring the purification process. While she laughingly downplays the importance of her efforts—“get the PhD student to do the monkey work”—it’s obviously something that needs doing. When all goes well, “you could see the concentration of the nitrogen dropping each time we took a sample, see [the xenon] getting purer.” Advertisement


Pure xenon is essential because it is remarkably transparent to both the light and electrons ejected from a possible WIMP collision. Anything else, particularly nitrogen (which can be outgassed from the tank walls), clouds the chamber, and the tiny signal could disappear—a major tragedy in experimental terms. Pure xenon also will not absorb stray electrons; there’s no place for the atom to hold them. Applying a very small electric field across the tank gently encourages those electrons to move upward until they can be registered at the detector at LUX’s top surface.

The challenge in LUX, then, is to pick up that single electron and figure out where it came from inside the tank of liquid xenon. That in turn allows researchers to measure how much energy the WIMP transferred to the xenon atom and work backward to figure out how much mass it has. The mass, of course, is one of the important parameters characterizing any particle, setting the scale for how much energy was required to create it in the Universe’s first instants of existence.
So underground, even hipsters don't know about it

Beyond the detector, LUX is a challenging project with many unusual aspects. While engineering is always an aspect of big physics experiments, any facility deep underground will have more than its share of complications. The Sanford lab occupies about 12 miles of the original tunnels from the Homestake gold mine. While that’s a tiny fraction of the total mine, maintaining a livable working environment requires keeping the air circulating and breathable, pumping water out (anything that deep underground will flood if left alone), as well as providing electricity and communications.

When you consider workers are present in the mine for long shifts, something has to be done with their bodily wastes. Unlike more ordinary trash, it’s not something you can carry back to the surface in a receptacle. (In the brief periods I was in the lab, I didn’t need to use the Port-a-potties or combustion toilets, though perhaps I should have taken care of business in the name of research—you, dear readers, deserve no less.)

Rick Gaitskell told Ars, “When you start as a physicist, you sort of assume you’ll spend your time on very esoteric calculations. The reality is I know more about pumping water, mining operations, how to treat water—which is fascinating—when you’re pulling over half a million gallons a day out of the mine, just the business of treating [it] is fascinating technology.” For comparison, that’s roughly the same as pumping and chemically treating enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Safety is an overwhelming concern as well. The first morning of my visit, we were delayed in going below ground for several hours after a fiber-optic cable used for monitoring carbon monoxide levels was severed. While nobody I spoke to thought that meant conditions were dangerous in the mine, every piece of protocol is designed to make sure people are safe.

While the modern incarnation of the lab is very recent—LUX wasn’t installed underground until winter of 2013, and the other experiments are still under construction—Homestake has a storied history as a physics facility. Ray Davis constructed a neutrino detector in the mine back in the late 1960s; the results he obtained led him and collaborator John Bahcall to recognize that two-thirds of the expected neutrinos from the Sun were absent. That discovery led eventually to our modern understanding of neutrino oscillation and a Nobel Prize for Davis in 2002. (Bahcall was unfairly left out of the award.) LUX is housed in the same artificial cave blasted out of the rock for Davis’ experiment; today that part of the mine is known as the Davis Campus in his honor.

Gaitskell said that Homestake ceased mining operations in 2002 when gold prices tanked and looked like they would remain low indefinitely, but it took several more years for the Sanford lab to negotiate access. During that time, water rose to fill much of the mine, drowning the tunnels until the Davis Campus was about 400 feet below the surface. The pumps needed to be restarted and the area cleaned before any physics experiments could become more than a dream. Advertisement


Beyond its extreme location, another difference between LUX and other particle physics experiments is the way responsibility is doled out. Both Dobson and Shaw commented on how quickly junior researchers were allowed to take responsibility for important aspects of the experiment. Shaw in particular is a first-year PhD student. In most labs, she wouldn’t be participating in on-site research until later in her program, but at LUX that’s more standard. She told Ars, “It was a bit of a shock that I could come out so quickly—only a few months in, and they said straight away, ‘oh here’s some responsibility’—woo! I think it’s good, it was a real shock that the people I had heard on telephone conferences I thought were postdocs or quite old turned out to just be PhD students because they’re really pulling their weight.”

Dobson concurred. “By the time they’re at the end of their PhDs, [the students] really own whole subsystems. I was really surprised when I joined; it’s really cool how much responsibility they’re given. Along with the [senior researchers], the mature PhD students are the ones who know the most.” That’s in contrast to many of the big particle experiments such as the detectors at CERN, where hundreds of researchers may be involved, and there’s little room for junior students to contribute anything other than basic grunt-work.
First results and the future

In its preliminary run in 2013, LUX took data for about 90 days. Already during that relatively short time of operation, the detector pushed the limits of what other experiments had done, both in terms of the energy range of searching and the control of potential false signals. Again, the extremely quiet center of the xenon tank is LUX’s advantage. Any signal the researchers might see would be hard to mistake for anything other than a WIMP. The fact that they didn’t see anything during those 90 days isn’t a mark of failure—it's a sign everything is working as expected.

But of course, the LUX team wants to see dark matter, that’s why the upcoming 300-day run is crucial. LUX will need to run reliably for 24 hours a day for the better part of a year, which will leave us with a lot of clean data for researchers to work with. If any WIMP signals are present, 300 days should be sufficiently long to tell us something about what kind of particle is producing them. If nothing is there, on the other hand… it’s going to rule out some possibilities. Null experiments can be as valuable to science as those that discover something new.

And LUX isn’t the end of the road. Gaitskell told Ars, “Even at the time we were putting LUX together, we knew there would be a successor experiment. The reason is that if you see anything in LUX, you want to make detailed measurements of it. If you don’t see anything, you want to increase your sensitivity.” If LUX does detect dark matter during its 300-day run, the upgraded experiment—known as LZ, for LUX-ZEPLIN—will be even better able to characterize it. (ZEPLIN was a similar xenon-based dark matter detector in northwest England; LZ will combine resources from both existing projects.) The goal of LZ will be to help us understand how the particles interact, how much mass they have, what kind of spin they possess… all the characteristics of the particles to help fit them into what we know about other matter.

If all goes as planned, LZ will also occupy the Davis Campus where LUX currently resides. The detector will consist of at least five metric tons of xenon, more than a 10-fold increase in volume over LUX, with a corresponding increase in sensitivity. As Jim Dobson said, with LZ “you’re getting close to seeing coherent neutrino scattering from atmospheric neutrinos.” That’s nearly the practical limit of anything you could do with a dark matter experiment. If the researchers don’t see anything with LUX and LZ, there’s probably nothing to be seen in that energy range. But Dobson is sanguine. “If you discover something and the signal is big enough, you can start actually doing a lot more physics and exploring what that signal means. Exciting times!”

Further reading: Physical Review Letters, 2014. DOI: (About DOIs).

FDA’s new test results on PFAS in food tell an incomplete story

By Brian Ronholm 

on September 6, 2021
CONTRIBUTED OPINION


Imagine using a radar gun to detect speeding in cars, but then manipulating the radar so that it only detects speeding in cars going over 100 mph. This means any reading below 100 mph would be considered undetectable and any data results would conceal any problems by showing that minimal or no speeding has occurred.

Based on FDA test results on per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) in food released last week, the FDA appears to have employed a similar approach when it conducted its survey/testing. The testing methodology used by the agency applied limits of detection and quantitation that likely underrepresented the presence of PFAS in food. Had lower detection and quantitation limits been applied, the FDA likely could have found PFAS contamination in the tested food to be much more pervasive, as the FDA’s own earlier released results and testing at commercial laboratories suggest.

Presenting these test results using this less sensitive methodology unnecessarily minimizes the risk that consumers are facing. PFAS are an ever-expanding group of thousands of man-made toxic chemicals that are widely used to make fluoropolymer coating that allows products to be more resistant to heat, stains, grease and water. Consumers can be exposed to PFAS in myriad ways — food, food packaging, water, clothing, cosmetics, cooking surfaces, etc.

Several PFAS characteristics make them especially dangerous to humans.

First, they are extremely persistent, resistant to breaking down naturally in the environment, and remain in people’s bodies for years. This is why they are often described as “forever chemicals.”

Second, they are highly mobile, spreading quickly and remain prevalent throughout our environment. Finally, they can be toxic at very low doses and have been linked to a variety of severe health effects, including an increased risk of cancer, thyroid disease, and birth defects.

The high detection level the Food and Drug Administration used for this survey is only part of the reason to be skeptical of their results. The FDA’s current PFAS testing method is only capable of detecting and quantifying 16 of the more than 600 PFAS that are currently in use. The agency itself has acknowledged that their sampling is very limited.

Returning to the radar gun analogy — in addition to the radar only being able to detect cars going over 100 mph, it’s further limited in that it can only measure 16 of more than 600 cars that pass by the radar; this means hundreds of cars going over 100 mph still would go undetected because the radar gun is only equipped to detect 16 cars.

Yet another issue of concern about the FDA’s PFAS testing methodology is that none of the PFAS tested were ones approved for food packaging. This was a missed opportunity, as the FDA could have provided updated data on how much PFAS in food packaging leaches into food products. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) found nearly half of fast food wrappers collected in 2014 and 2015 had high fluorine counts, a reliable indicator of PFAS use in food packaging products.

Granted, testing for PFAS in food can be difficult. There are many PFAS chemicals for which there are no analytical standards and many complex food matrices that can hinder unbiased detection and quantification of PFAS chemicals.

Also, serious efforts to develop test methods for investigating the occurrence of, and potential exposure to, PFAS chemicals from food began only recently, so there currently are no robust methods that could be used to test and report on an adequate number of food-relevant PFAS chemicals.

However, in releasing these misleading test results, the FDA is conveying a false sense of security about PFAS contamination in food that has the potential to be harmful, especially in the long-term. If the FDA would like to do something meaningful, they should move quickly to ban PFAS in all food packaging.

Brian Ronholm is the Director of Food Policy for Consumer Reports. He leads CR’s advocacy efforts to advance a safe and healthy food system. He previously served as Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and, prior to that, served in the office of Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut.

WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE

Shelby Rogers expects '9 million death threats' on social media after US Open loss

Ryan Young· Writer
Mon., September 6, 2021, 

Shelby Rogers barely had time to look at her phone after her loss at the US Open on Monday afternoon, but she knew what was on it.

Or if they weren't there yet, they were coming.

Rogers — who fell in straight sets to Great Britain’s Emma Raducanu in the fourth round of the Grand Slam — said she was facing roughly “9 million death threats” coming her way on social media from those who are mad at her from losing.

"Obviously we appreciate the spotlight in those moments, but then you have today and I'm going to have nine million death threats and whatnot," she said after her loss, via ESPN. "It's very much polarizing, one extreme to the other very quickly."

While that number may be exaggerated, the impact even one death threat has is real.

"You could probably go through my profile right now — I'm probably a 'fat pig' and words that I can't say right now," Rogers said, via ESPN. "But, it is what it is. You try not to take it to heart, and it's the unfortunate side of any sport and what we do."

Sloane Stephens speaks out about abuse

Rogers isn’t the only one speaking out about abuse on social media at the US Open.

Fellow American star and former US Open champion Sloane Stephens said she received more than 2,000 abusive comments and messages on Instagram after she fell to Angelique Kerber in the third round at the US Open.

Stephens shared examples on her Instagram story, some of which included racial slurs and threats of sexual violence.

“This type of hate is so exhausting and never-ending,” she wrote, in part. “This isn’t talked about enough, but it really freaking sucks.

“I’m happy to have people in my corner who support me. I’m choosing positive vibes over negative ones. I choose to show you guys happiness on here, but it’s not always smiles and roses.”

Rogers was very much on the same page as Stephens on Monday. Though she said she tries to ignore the comments, she said that it “does get to your head sometimes.

“Social media can’t control what I’m doing and the way my training is going to move forward, but I wish it didn’t exist,” she said, via ESPN. “It’s really tough.”

Shelby Rogers said she expects to receive death threats and abuse on social media after her loss at the US Open. (Sarah Stier/Getty Images)

Death threats after tennis losses now the norm, players say

Steve Keating
ReutersStaff
Monday, September 6, 2021 

NEW YORK -- As if a fourth round 6-2 6-1 thrashing at the U.S. Open was not hard enough to deal with, American Shelby Rogers said that she would most likely have to contend with death threats on social media following Monday's loss to Emma Raducanu.

While death threats over a tennis match may seem shocking, several players at this year's U.S. Open have said such things are now part of sport with much of the abuse coming from gamblers hooked on online betting.

"I'm going to have nine million death threats and whatnot," said Rogers with a shrug. "At this point in my career, I'd say I'm used to it.

"I kind of wish social media didn't exist.

"You could probably go through my profile right now, I'm probably a fat pig and words that I can't say right now."

American Sloane Stephens said she received a torrent of angry messages on social media, including racist and sexist abuse, following her third round loss to Angelique Kerber.

Stephens, who is Black, said she got over 2,000 messages of abuse after Friday's 5-7 6-2 6-3 defeat, including threats of physical harm.

"It's so hard to read messages like these, but I'll post a few so you guys can see what it's like after a loss," she wrote in an Instagram story.

What followed was a series of racist and sexist messages aimed at the 28-year-old.

"This type of hate is so exhausting and never ending," she said.

The WTA Tour said in an email to Reuters that the number of players targeted for online abuse is on the rise and it is working with social media companies to find ways of curtailing the harassment.

The Tour is also working with Theseus, a risk assessment and management company, which specializes evaluation, protection and support for athletes if they encounter online harassment.

"Theseus and the WTA work with the social media platforms to shut down accounts when warranted, and if applicable, local authorities are notified," said the WTA.

"Working with Theseus allows the WTA and the players to take the most appropriate action, while enabling WTA players to safely keep their social media accounts and use them to communicate and share exciting highlights, stories and news to their fans."

Rogers acknowledged that social media interaction is encouraged as way to market the sport and connect with fans.

"It's part of marketing now, we have contracts, we have to post certain things," said Rogers. "It is what it is.

"You try not to take it to heart, and it's the unfortunate side of any sport.

"You know, just focus on the important things, not comments from people in their mom's basement.

"It's really unfortunate and some of it does get to your head sometimes."

(Reporting by Steve Keating in New York. Editing by Pritha Sarkar)