Hubble Uncovers a Galactic Wonder: Strange Galaxy Captured in Stunning Detail

By ESA/HUBBLE DECEMBER 26, 2022

Hubble Space Telescope image of spiral galaxy ESO 415-19, , which lies around 450 million light-years away. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

The peculiar spiral galaxy ESO 415-19, which is located approximately 450 million light-years away from Earth, stretches lazily across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. While the center of this object resembles a regular spiral galaxy, long streams of stars stretch out from the galactic core like bizarrely elongated spiral arms. These are tidal streams caused by some chance interaction in the galaxy’s past, and give ESO 415-19 a distinctly peculiar appearance.

ESO 415-19’s peculiarity made it a great target for Hubble. This observation comes from an ongoing campaign to explore the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a menagerie of some of the weirdest and most wonderful galaxies that the Universe has to offer. These galaxies range from bizarre lonesome galaxies to spectacularly interacting galaxy pairs, triplets, and even quintets. These space oddities are spread throughout the night sky, which means that Hubble can spare a moment to observe them as it moves between other observational targets.

This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just about 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies – the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals – thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between September 24, 2003, and January 16, 2004. Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team

This particular observation lies in a part of the night sky contained by the Fornax constellation. This constellation was also the site of a particularly important Hubble observation; the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (see image above). Creating the Ultra Deep Field required almost a million seconds of Hubble time, and captured nearly 10,000 galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. Just as climate scientists can recreate the planet’s atmospheric history from ice cores, astronomers can use deep field observations to explore slices of the Universe’s history from the present all the way to when the Universe was only 800 million years old!

Climate Change Propelled Dinosaurs’ Rise to Dominance

By UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM DECEMBER 26, 2022

Dinosaur ancestors are shown in this artist’s conception of life in the Chañares formation approximately 235 million years ago. Credit: Victor O. Leshyk, www.paleovista.com

Climate change, rather than competition, played a key role in the ascendancy of dinosaurs through the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic periods.

According to new research, changes in global climate associated with the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction – which wiped out many large terrestrial vertebrates such as the giant armadillo-like aetosaurs – actually benefitted the earliest dinosaurs.

In particular, sauropod-like dinosaurs, which became the giant herbivore species of the later Jurassic like Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus, were able to thrive and expand across new territories as the planet warmed up after the extinction event, 201 million years ago.

The new evidence was published on December 16 in the journal Current Biology, by an international team of paleontologists led by the Universities of Birmingham and Bristol, in the UK, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), in Germany, and the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

The team compared computer models of prehistoric global climate conditions such as temperature and rainfall with data on the different locations of dinosaurs taken from sources such as the Paleobiology Database. They showed how the sauropods, and sauropod-like animals, with their long tails and necks and small heads, were the runaway success story of a turbulent period of evolution.

Dr. Emma Dunne, now a lecturer in paleontology at FAU, carried out the research while at the University of Birmingham. She said: “What we see in the data suggests that instead of dinosaurs being outcompeted by other large vertebrates, it was variations in climate conditions that were restricting their diversity. But once these conditions changed across the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, they were able to flourish.

“The results were somewhat surprising, because it turns out that sauropods were really fussy from the get-go: later in their evolution they continue to stay in warmer areas and avoid polar regions.”

Co-author on the paper, Professor Richard Butler, at the University of Birmingham, said: “Climate change appears to have been really important in driving the evolution of early dinosaurs. What we want to do next is use the same techniques to understand the role of climate in the next 120 million years of the dinosaur story.”

Reference: “Climatic controls on the ecological ascendancy of dinosaurs” by Emma M. Dunne, Alexander Farnsworth, Roger B.J. Benson, Pedro L. Godoy, Sarah E. Greene, Paul J. Valdes, Daniel J. Lunt and Richard J. Butler, 16 December 2022, Current Biology.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.11.064

The research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the European Research Council.

New Study Reveals That Caffeine Can Significantly Improve Your Athletic Performance

By RITSUMEIKAN UNIVERSITY DECEMBER 25, 2022

The study found that caffeine supplementation resulted in a significant decrease in the corrected 100-meter sprint time, with athletes experiencing a reduction of 0.14 seconds compared to the control group.

New research supports the use of caffeine as a performance-enhancing aid by demonstrating that caffeine supplementation can reduce sprint time in the 100-meter dash.

In the high-stakes world of international sports, even the slightest advantage can make all the difference in an athlete’s performance. As a result, athletes often turn to training methods and performance-enhancing aids to give them a competitive edge.

Caffeine, a stimulant that affects the nervous system, is a popular choice among athletes as a performance-enhancing aid. In fact, World Athletics (formerly known as the International Association of Athletics Federations) has recognized caffeine as an ergogenic aid in a consensus statement on nutritional strategy for athletics.

However, owing to the absence of research on caffeine’s effects on sprint performance, the recommendation is reflective of evidence from other anaerobic sports rather than sprint running in athletics, like the 100-m sprint event.

A new study by researchers from Japan presents the first evidence demonstrating the ergogenic effects of caffeine on the 100-meter sprint running performance. While boosting the sprint running time during the early stages of race, caffeine contributed to significantly reduced sprint running times among athletes. Credit: Professor Takeshi Hashimoto from Ritsumeikan University

To advance research, a team of researchers from Japan investigated the acute effects of caffeine supplementation on sprint running performance. This study, led by Professor Takeshi Hashimoto from Ritsumeikan University in Japan, was recently published in the Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise journal.

According to Professor Hashimoto, “While previous studies have investigated the effects of caffeine on running activity, evidence from these studies is not conclusive enough to support the World Athletics consensus. A majority of them have looked at its effects on single sprint runs of less than 60 meters. Therefore, it was important to study the ergogenic effects of caffeine on the 100-meter sprint performance.”

The researchers recruited 13 male collegiate sprinters for the study. In a preliminary test, the researchers determined the time it takes for each athlete to reach peak blood plasma caffeine concentration after ingesting it. Taking this into account, the athletes were called two more times for 100-meter time trials after ingesting either caffeine or placebo supplements.

As measures of performance, the researchers measured the sprint velocity and calculated the sprint time. On discounting the effects of environmental factors, the corrected sprint time was used to examine the effects of caffeine supplementation.

The results revealed that the corrected 100-m sprint time was shortened significantly for athletes who received caffeine, with a decrease of 0.14 seconds compared to the controls. This decrease in the time was largely associated with a decrease in sprint time for the first 60 meters of the sprint.

The researchers also found that the mean sprint velocity for the 0–10 m and 10–20 m splits was significantly higher in the athletes who received caffeine. Moreover, no significant difference was seen in the sprint time for the last 40 meters of the sprint, despite the shortening of the sprint time in the first 60 meters. Together, these observations suggest that the caffeine supplementation provided more explosive acceleration to the sprinters in the early stage of the race.

In the long term, these results could translate to the enhancement of sports performance for athletes by enhancing the usage of caffeine as an ergogenic aid during sprints.

“The insights gained from this study have given us the first direct evidence of caffeine’s ergogenicity on sprint running in athletics. This also serves as evidence to directly support the recommendations for caffeine usage by World Athletics. The study thus provides one more advantage that athletes can use to inch themselves closer toward victory,” concludes Professor Hashimoto

Determined to explore the ergogenic effects of caffeine further, Professor Hashimoto and his team intend to call to question the mechanisms behind the effects of caffeine on ballistic actions such as sprinting and jumping.

Reference: “Acute Effect of Caffeine Supplementation on 100-m Sprint Running Performance: A Field Test” by Teppei Matsumura, Keigo Tomoo, Takeshi Sugimoto, Hayato Tsukamoto, Yasushi Shinohara, Mitsuo Otsuka and Takeshi Hashimoto, 14 October 2022, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.
DOI: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000003057

The study was funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. 

Totally Unexpected: Scientists Discover “An Entirely New Way of Designing a Nervous System”

By UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICAL CENTER DECEMBER 25, 2022

This groundbreaking discovery offers new insights into the evolution of complex nervous systems in invertebrate species and has the potential to inspire the development of autonomous underwater devices and other robotics engineering innovations.

Octopuses are not like humans – they are invertebrates with eight arms and are more closely related to clams and snails. Despite this, they have evolved complex nervous systems with as many neurons as in the brains of dogs, allowing them to exhibit a wide range of complex behaviors.

This makes them an interesting subject for researchers like Melina Hale, Ph.D., William Rainey Harper Professor of Organismal Biology and Vice Provost at the University of Chicago, who want to understand how alternative nervous system structures can perform the same functions as those in humans, such as sensing limb movement and controlling movement.

In a recent study published in Current Biology, Hale and her colleagues discovered a new and surprising feature of the octopus nervous system: a structure that allows the intramuscular nerve cords (INCs), which help the octopus sense its arm movement, to connect arms on opposite sides of the animal.

The startling discovery provides new insights into how invertebrate species have independently evolved complex nervous systems. It can also provide inspiration for robotic engineering, such as new autonomous underwater devices.

A horizontal slice at the base of the arms (labeled as A) showing the oral INCs (labeled as O) converging and crossing. Credit: Kuuspalu et al., Current Biology, 2022

“In my lab, we study mechanosensation and proprioception — how the movement and positioning of limbs are sensed,” said Hale. “These INCs have long been thought to be proprioceptive, so they were an interesting target for helping to answer the kinds of questions our lab is asking. Up until now, there hasn’t been a lot of work done on them, but past experiments had indicated that they’re important for arm control.”

Thanks to the support for cephalopod research offered by the Marine Biological Laboratory, Hale and her team were able to use young octopuses for the study, which were small enough to allow the researchers to image the base of all eight arms at once. This let the team trace the INCs through the tissue to determine their path.

“These octopuses were about the size of a nickel or maybe a quarter, so it was a process to affix the specimens in the right orientation and to get the angle right during the sectioning [for imaging],” said Adam Kuuspalu, a Senior Research Analyst at UChicago and the lead author on the study.

Initially, the team was studying the larger axial nerve cords in the arms but began to notice that the INCs didn’t stop at the base of the arm, but rather continued out of the arm and into the body of the animal. Realizing that little work had been done to explore the anatomy of the INCs, they began to trace the nerves, expecting them to form a ring in the body of the octopus, similar to the axial nerve cords.

Through imaging, the team determined that in addition to running the length of each arm, at least two of the four INCs extend into the body of the octopus, where they bypass the two adjacent arms and merge with the INC of the third arm over. This pattern means that all the arms are connected symmetrically.

It was challenging, however, to determine how the pattern would hold in all eight arms. “As we were imaging, we realized, they were not all coming together as we expected, they all seem to be going in different directions, and we were trying to figure out how if the pattern held for all of the arms, how would that work?” said Hale. “I even got out one of those children’s toys — a Spirograph — to play around with what it would look like, how it would all connect in the end. It took a lot of imaging and playing with drawings while we wracked our brains about what could be going on before it became clear how it all fits together.”

The results were not at all what the researchers expected to find.

“We think this is a new design for a limb-based nervous system,” said Hale. “We haven’t seen anything like this in other animals.”

The researchers don’t yet know what function this anatomical design might serve, but they have some ideas.

“Some older papers have shared interesting insights,” said Hale. “One study from the 1950s showed that when you manipulate an arm on one side of the octopus with lesioned brain areas, you’ll see the arms responding on the other side. So it could be that these nerves allow for decentralized control of a reflexive response or behavior. That said, we also see that fibers go out from the nerve cords into the muscles all along their tracts, so they might also allow for a continuity of proprioceptive feedback and motor control along their lengths.”

The team is currently conducting experiments to see if they can gain insights into this question by parsing out the physiology of the INCs and their unique layout. They are also studying the nervous systems of other cephalopods, including squid and cuttlefish, to see if they share similar anatomy.

Ultimately, Hale believes that in addition to illuminating the unexpected ways an invertebrate species might design a nervous system, understanding these systems can aid in the development of new engineered technologies, such as robots.

“Octopuses can be a biological inspiration for the design of autonomous undersea devices,” said Hale. “Think about their arms — they can bend anywhere, not just at joints. They can twist, extend their arms, and operate their suckers, all independently. The function of an octopus arm is a lot more sophisticated than ours, so understanding how octopuses integrate sensory-motor information and movement control can support the development of new technologies.”

Reference: “Multiple nerve cords connect the arms of octopuses, providing alternative paths for inter-arm signaling” by Adam Kuuspalu, Samantha Cody and Melina E. Hale, 28 November 2022, Current Biology.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.11.007

The study was funded by the United States Office of Naval Research. 

NASA Explores a Winter Wonderland on Mars – Otherworldly Holiday Scene With Cube-Shaped Snow

By JET PROPULSION LABORATORY DECEMBER 24, 2022

Cube-shaped snow, icy landscapes, and frost are all part of the Red Planet’s coldest season.

When winter comes to Mars, the surface is transformed into a truly otherworldly holiday scene. Snow, ice, and frost accompany the season’s sub-zero temperatures. Some of the coldest of these occur at the planet’s poles, where it gets as low as minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius).

The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured these images of sand dunes covered by frost just after winter solstice. The frost here is a mixture of carbon dioxide (dry) ice and water ice and will disappear in a few months when spring arrives. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Cold as it is, don’t expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains. No region of Mars gets more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls over extremely flat areas. And the Red Planet’s elliptical orbit means it takes many more months for winter to come around: a single Mars year is around two Earth years

Snow falls and ice and frost form on Mars, too. NASA’s spacecraft on and orbiting the Red Planet reveal the similarities to and differences from how we experience winter on Earth. Mars scientist Sylvain Piqueux of JPL explains in this video. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Still, the planet offers unique winter phenomena that scientists have been able to study, thanks to NASA’s robotic Mars explorers. Here are a few of the things they’ve discovered:

Two Kinds of Snow

Martian snow comes in two varieties: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground.

“Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it,” said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena. “If you were looking for skiing, though, you’d have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface.”

HiRISE captured these “megadunes,” also called barchans. Carbon dioxide frost and ice have formed over the dunes during the winter; as this starts to sublimate during spring, the darker-colored dune sand is revealed. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

How We Know It Snows

Snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft can’t see through those clouds, and surface missions can’t survive in the extreme cold. As a result, no images of falling snow have ever been captured. But scientists know it happens, thanks to a few special science instruments.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can peer through cloud cover using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which detects light in wavelengths imperceptible to the human eye. That ability has allowed scientists to detect carbon dioxide snow falling to the ground. And in 2008, NASA sent the Phoenix lander within 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) of Mars’ north pole, where it used a laser instrument to detect water-ice snow falling to the surface.

NASA scientists can measure the size and shape distribution of snow particles, layer by layer, in a storm. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission is an international satellite project that provides next-generation observations of rain and snow worldwide every three hours. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Ryan Fitzgibbons

Cubic Snowflakes

Because of how water molecules bond together when they freeze, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which atoms arrange themselves determines a crystal’s shape. In the case of carbon dioxide, molecules in dry ice always bond in forms of four when frozen.

“Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped,” Piqueux said. “Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.”

The HiRISE camera captured this image of the edge of a crater in the middle of winter. The south-facing slope of the crater, which receives less sunlight, has formed patchy, bright frost, seen in blue in this enhanced-color image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Jack Frost Nipping at Your Rover

Water and carbon dioxide can each form frost on Mars, and both types of frost appear far more widely across the planet than snow does. The Viking landers saw water frost when they studied Mars in the 1970s, while NASA’s Odyssey orbiter has observed frost forming and sublimating away in the morning Sun.

HiRISE captured this spring scene, when water ice frozen in the soil had split the ground into polygons. Translucent carbon dioxide ice allows sunlight to shine through and heat gases that escape through vents, releasing fans of darker material onto the surface (shown as blue in this enhanced-color image). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Winter’s Wondrous End

Perhaps the most fabulous discovery comes at the end of winter, when all the ice that built up begins to “thaw” and sublimate into the atmosphere. As it does so, this ice takes on bizarre and beautiful shapes that have reminded scientists of spiders, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese.

This “thawing” also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.

 

The days of the hydrogen car are already over

THE CONVERSATION
Published: November 30, 2022


Hydrogen fuel cell cars emerged as an alternative to both the electric and combustion engine vehicle in the early 2000s. They were widely considered an avenue towards universal green motoring. Powered through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, the only tailpipe emission they produce is water.

The technology also promised a traditional driving experience. Drivers can refuel at filling stations and the range of a hydrogen car is comparable to the combustion engine vehicle. Hydrogen vehicle technology also offered oil companies the opportunity to shift their operations towards the production and transportation of hydrogen and hydrogen refuelling at existing stations.

The UK government reiterated its commitment to the technology in 2016 by investing £2 million in the promotion of hydrogen cars to UK businesses. The European Parliament have more recently agreed to set minimum national targets for the deployment of alternative fuels infrastructure. Under this framework, there will be at least one hydrogen refuelling station every 100km along main EU roads.

But hydrogen cars have now all but disappeared. Toyota and Hyundai, the only vehicle manufacturers to produce hydrogen cars for the UK market, sold just 12 hydrogen cars in the country in 2021. Earlier this year, Shell closed all of its UK Hydrogen refuelling stations.

Meanwhile electric vehicles, despite not delivering the range or the fast refuelling of a hydrogen car, have surged in popularity. In 2010, 138 electric vehicles were sold in the UK. This grew to roughly 190,000 annual sales in 2021.
Infrastructure is key

The vehicle types are not competing with each other outright. Instead, this is a case of competition between national technology systems. And where this is the case, the technically superior product rarely triumphs.

VHS video cassette tapes. Eakrin Rasadonyindee/Shutterstock

The Betamax tape recorder failed to take control of the video cassette market in the 1980s, despite being technically superior to its competitors. The lower-quality video home system (VHS) was able to take a dominant share of the market due to their better supply chain infrastructure. As they were stocked in more video rental stores, VHS tapes were simply more accessible than Betamax.

Hydrogen and electric vehicles also depend on broader technological systems. One is based on electricity generation and the other on supplying hydrogen.

Electric vehicles have the advantage of being able to depend on an existing power generation and distribution system – the electrical grid. An electric vehicle can be recharged wherever there is access to a plug socket.

Electric vehicle manufacturer, Tesla, has capitalised on this. Already with a customer base, Tesla was able to build its vehicles and recharging infrastructure simultaneously. They produced over 900,000 new vehicles in 2021 and have installed a global fast charging network of 35,000 superchargers to support them.

Tesla have invested in a global fast charging network. canadianPhotographer56/Shutterstock

The infrastructure that exists to support hydrogen vehicles is limited in comparison and will require extensive investment to introduce. The pipeline infrastructure necessary for a European hydrogen distribution system alone is estimated to cost €80–143 billion (£69–123 billion).

As hydrogen needs to be pressurised and transported either as a gas or a liquid, supply chains must also be redesigned. The cost of developing hydrogen refuelling stations and scaling up hydrogen production will also be extensive. Hydrogen production currently accounts for just 3% of global energy demand.

But governments and businesses are at present unwilling to make the required investments. There is little economic sense in building the infrastructure if the network of cars is too small to use it. Yet at the same time demand for hydrogen cars will remain low until they are supported with compatible infrastructure.
Lessons for the hydrogen car

The introduction of complex technologies and infrastructures have always relied on investment in large scale technology systems. But governments face a choice over which technologies they support.

Investment in technologies to bring public transport systems to cities in developed nations at the turn of the 20th century, to fight wars, and to power modern economies all emerged at a time when governments took responsibility for the need to invest, plan and control production and consumption in the national interest.

Large scale national infrastructure projects including nuclear power and weapons programmes, rail electrification, the development of high-speed trains and manned space missions all occurred throughout the remainder of the century. They all required coordinated efforts to bring them about. This involved government funding, the creation of new institutions such as Nasa and British Rail, research grants for manufacturers, and the setting of clear targets.

Governments have also been the customers of these technologies. The US government, for example, awarded Elon Musk’s space technology programme, SpaceX, a contract to conduct national security launches for the US military

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High-speed rail was introduced to the UK in 1976. 

Gary Blakeley/Shutterstock

The planning and construction of such systems have always been underpinned by the idea that national interests are at stake. This has been the case whether the motive has been to ensure adequate military defences, to be internationally competitive or to provide societal benefits by launching satellites and developing mass public transport systems.

A mixed automotive economy of hydrogen and electric vehicles could accelerate the transition towards zero emissions. But a viable hydrogen automotive system will need investment on a massive scale. It will require the construction of new and complex technology systems and a fundamental shift in policy thinking and public discourse.

Authors

Tom Stacey
Senior Lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Management, Anglia Ruskin University

Chris Ivory
Director of the Innovative Management Practice Research Centre, Anglia Ruskin University
Disclosure statement
Tom Stacey receives funding from ERDF.
Chris Ivory receives funding from ERDF, FORTE (Sweden).