It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, December 21, 2024
Neutrality has played a pivotal, but under-examined, role in international relations, new research shows
News Release
Heriot-Watt University
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Dr David Dekker is a Research Fellow at Edinburgh Business School, part of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Dr Dekker is an expert in social network theory, a science which merges mathematics and sociology.
Researchers have developed a new way of understanding international relations by analysing almost 200 years of alliances, hostilities and neutrality between countries.
The research team, led by Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, concludes that neutrality has played a far greater role in global stability than previously thought – but has been under-explored and often mislabelled.
The study analysed 192 years of data between 1816 and 2007 from the Correlates of War (CoW) project, which collects and shares data on international relations.
Lead author Dr David Dekker, a Research Fellow at Edinburgh Business School, explained: “Our findings show that that neutral ties were more prevalent over a long period than alliances and hostilities, and played a pivotal, but previously unquantified role, in international stability.”
Neutrality has largely been ignored or under-analysed in previous research, which has tended to categorise international relations as either positive or negative. Within this binary system, neutrality is often incorrectly categorised as negative or ignored, which is even more problematic. For example, if your friend has an alliance with one of your enemies, it can put huge stress on the relationship with your friend – and be a source of conflict.
“In other words, international relations aren’t just black and white, they’re multi-layered.”
By introducing neutrality as a third category in their analysis, alongside positive and negative international relations, the team identified 26 new types of relation groupings between countries. They define this new, more granular, measure of relational structure as "balance correlations" – and argue that this new way of exploring relationships between countries – and other parts of society – has profound implications for policymakers.
“Policymakers can benefit from this because we’ve been able to quantify types of behaviour and that were not identified before,” Dr Dekker said. “As well as helping us understand the dynamics between countries, it’s an approach that could be used, for example, to develop strategies for supply chains or to build stable learning environments in schools by understanding the relationships between students.”
The study, titled ‘Balance Correlations, Agentic Zeros, and Networks: The Structure of 192 Years of War and Peace,’ has been published in the journal, PLOS ONE. The co-authors of the research are David Krackhardt from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the United States; Patrick Doreian from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and Pavel N. Krivitsky from the University of New South Wales in Australia.
The researchers also found that neutrality can have dramatic effects on the formation and dissolution of social ties. It can lead to more conflict in periods when this behaviour is adopted widely. For example, they identify the 69 years between 1867 and 1936 as a particularly turbulent period when ‘neutrality behaviour’ dominated.
“If a country chooses to be neutral to another country, that can really tip the balance in the whole system,” Dr Dekker explained. “And we saw that during this turbulent period, which included World War I and all kinds of other disputes around the world. It’s only after the Second World War that we see a much more stable pattern arising again.”
The study extends a theory of interpersonal relations, called balance theory, which was developed during World War II by Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider.
By analysing groupings of three people, countries, or other actors, this theory for example predicts that 'a friend of a friend is a friend.' Other predicted relationship groupings include ‘a friend of an enemy is an enemy’ and ‘the enemy of a friend is an enemy.’ All of these have different impacts on the balance of sentiment in a three-party relationship.
Dr Dekker is an expert in social network theory, a science which merges mathematics and sociology. Originally from The Netherlands, he has a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam and, alongside his academic work, advises businesses on green investments.
Edinburgh Business School is one of the world's largest providers of postgraduate business education, with 49,000 alumni across 158 countries.
New research published in Science Advancesreveals that right whales can survive for more than 130 years — almost twice as long as previously understood.
Extreme longevity is a trait common to the right whales’ cousins, the bowheads.
Scientists working with Indigenous subsistence hunters in Utqiaġvik used chemical analysis of harvested bowhead whales to show they can live more than 200 years. Corroborating the chemical evidence, hunters have recovered 19th-century harpoon tips from bowheads taken in modern hunts.
Right whales, which are much more closely related to bowhead whales than any other species, appear to exhibit similar lifespans. Like bowheads, right whales filter feed through baleen and migrate seasonally to give birth. Whalers considered them the “right” whales to hunt due to their thick blubber, which caused them to float when killed.
The current study examined four decades of data collected by photo identification programs tracking individual whales from two species: the Southern right whale, which lives in the oceans south of the equator, and the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, found along the Atlantic coast of North America. Researchers used the data to construct survivorship curves — graphs that show the proportion of a population that survives to each age — similar to those used by insurance companies to calculate human life expectancies.
Analysis revealed that Southern right whales, once thought to live only 70 to 80 years, can exceed lifespans of 130 years, with some individuals possibly reaching 150 years. In contrast, the study found the average lifespan of the North Atlantic right whale is just 22 years, with very few individuals surviving past the age of 50.
According to University of Alaska Fairbanks associate professor Greg Breed, the stark contrast in lifespans between these two closely related species is primarily due to human impacts. Breed is the study’s lead author.
“North Atlantic whales have unusually short lifespans compared to other whales, but this isn’t because of intrinsic differences in biology, and they should live much longer,” he said. “They’re frequently tangled in fishing gear or struck by ships, and they suffer from starvation, potentially linked to environmental changes we don’t fully understand.”
Breed has spent years studying marine mammals, including seals, certain species of which can live up to 50 years, and narwhals, with lifespans of a century or more. He noted that a lack of data on whale aging led to significant underestimations of their lifespans in the past.
“We didn’t know how to age baleen whales until 1955, which was the very end of industrial whaling,” Breed said. “By the time we figured it out, there weren’t many old whales left to study. So we just assumed they didn’t live that long.”
The study has important implications for conservation efforts. “To attain healthy populations that include old animals, recovery might take hundreds of years,” Breed said. “For animals that live to be 100 or 150 and only give birth to a surviving calf every 10 years or so, slow recovery is to be expected.”
The study also underscores the importance of cultural knowledge among whale populations.
“There’s a growing recognition that recovery isn’t just about biomass or the number of individuals. It’s about the knowledge these animals pass along to the next generation,” Breed said.
“That knowledge isn’t just genetic — it’s cultural and behavioral. Older individuals teach survival skills. Younger animals learn by observing and copying the strategies of the older ones.”
The loss of older individuals disrupts this critical transfer of knowledge and can impair the survival of the young.
Breed and his colleagues intend to extend their research to other whale populations and predict whether other whale species currently thought to live around 80 years may also have much longer lifespans. They hope to learn more about how whaling affected the number of old individuals in current whale populations and predict when their numbers will recover to pre-whaling levels.
Passive interfaces, such as light switches or doorknobs, refer to hardware that can store energy, but the energy can only be used for the purpose it was intended. However, research is imagining new ways for that energy to be harvested and adapted — turning your doorknob could power your alarm system or opening your freezer could turn on your kitchen light.
By integrating smart capabilities such as sensing and energy harvesting, Dr. Jeeeun Kim is transforming passive interfaces into adaptive interfaces, altering hardware to be used in non-traditional ways. These interfaces will assist people with disabilities, automate domestic tasks, and power millions of computers.
“Daily design issues are hard to attend if prior experiences are used as a baseline,” said Kim. “Even to those with known personal goals, like reducing utility bills, adopting the latest scientific advances in real life demands expertise because tools to support end-users, like you and me, are lacking.”
3D-Printed Augmentations
The project will aim to increase user awareness about daily computational challenges and redesign opportunities using 3D-printed augmentations. One example of augmentations is adding an attachment to a window slide or a refrigerator’s door hinges and then that converts the energy created from sliding the window or opening the fridge door into energy to be used in new ways. For example, with augmentation a doorknob rotation could power an intruder alarm or opening a refrigerator could power the fridge’s inventory display.
This research will build on new methods to capture interaction properties, which are highly conceptual, as well as critical fabrication parameters for complex augmentations that are efficient and accurate. This will allow users to have access to smart augmentations at minimal cost.
“Unfortunately, recent advances in AI research of today only focuses on object, instance level detection from millions of images and videos such as a toilet, microwave, not the human interactions, lifting a toilet lid and tapping on microwave’s button panels, where all human-centered computing challenges actually occur,” Kim said.
To accomplish this task, Kim has developed a new framework for creating a large-scale dataset that helps describe human interactions with daily objects, fine-grained parts and their interaction properties. Kim also developed an end-to-end software system for lay persons to aim their smartphone camera toward their indoor environment to scan for hidden accessibility barriers and overlay detected information on the Augmented Reality (AR) views.
Awareness Of Wasted Energy
Kim hopes this tool will help promote pro-social behaviors, assisting people to be aware of accessibility and design opportunities that are abundant but overlooked.
“My research is not limited to accessibility solely,” said Kim. “I hope my toolkit for end-users can scan the multi-residential buildings and interactions at multiple dimensions, so residents also can notice how inaccessible their common physical environments are, how much energy is being wasted and how they can make changes toward smart, sustainable buildings by themselves.”
While the complete replacement of these interfaces with smart devices is not feasible and may create e-wastes causing huge impact on the environments, augmentations promise cost-effective reconfiguration of daily interfaces. Kim hopes this research is a blueprint for altering physical interfaces in ways that make them more energy and cost effective, while also being easier to use.
“By tackling multifaceted, interdisciplinary approaches across digital fabrication, end-user programming, deep learning, robotics, and design, this project lays the foundation for a future where every individual creates daily innovations in assistive computing devices, smart homes, and green buildings,” said Kim.
Funding for this research is administered by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), the official research agency for Texas A&M Engineering.
By Michelle Revels, Texas A&M Engineering
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Can the heart heal itself? New study says it can
An international research team found evidence that heart muscle can regenerate after heart failure in some people with artificial hearts
University of Arizona Health Sciences
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Hesham Sadek, MD, PhD, is the director of the Sarver Heart Center and chief of the Division of Cardiology in the Department of Medicine at the U of A College of Medicine – Tucson.
Credit: Photo by Kris Hanning, U of A Health Sciences Office of Communications
A research team co-led by a physician-scientist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson’s Sarver Heart Center found that a subset of artificial heart patients can regenerate heart muscle, which may open the door to new ways to treat and perhaps someday cure heart failure. The results were published in the journal Circulation.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart failure affects nearly 7 million U.S. adults and is responsible for 14% of deaths per year. There is no cure for heart failure, though medications can slow its progression. The only treatment for advanced heart failure, other than a transplant, is pump replacement through an artificial heart, called a left ventricular assist device, which can help the heart pump blood.
“Skeletal muscle has a significant ability to regenerate after injury. If you’re playing soccer and you tear a muscle, you need to rest it, and it heals,” said Hesham Sadek, MD, PhD, director of the Sarver Heart Center and chief of the Division of Cardiology at the U of A College of Medicine – Tucson’s Department of Medicine. “When a heart muscle is injured, it doesn’t grow back. We have nothing to reverse heart muscle loss.”
Sadek led a collaboration between international experts to investigate whether heart muscles can regenerate. The study was funded through a grant awarded to Sadek by the Leducq Foundation Transatlantic Networks of Excellence Program, which brings together American and European investigators to tackle big problems.
The project began with tissue from artificial heart patients provided by colleagues at the University of Utah Health and School of Medicine led by Stavros Drakos, MD, PhD, a pioneer in left ventricular assist device-mediated recovery.
Jonas Frisén, MD, PhD, and Olaf Bergmann, MD, PhD, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, led teams in Sweden and Germany and used their own innovative method of carbon dating human heart tissue to track whether these samples contained newly generated cells.
The investigators found that patients with artificial hearts regenerated muscle cells at more than six times the rate of healthy hearts.
“This is the strongest evidence we have, so far, that human heart muscle cells can actually regenerate, which really is exciting, because it solidifies the notion that there is an intrinsic capacity of the human heart to regenerate,” Sadek said. “It also strongly supports the hypothesis that the inability of the heart muscle to ‘rest’ is a major driver of the heart’s lost ability to regenerate shortly after birth. It may be possible to target the molecular pathways involved in cell division to enhance the heart’s ability to regenerate.”
Finding better ways to treat heart failure is a top priority for Sadek and the Sarver Heart Center. This study builds on Sadek’s prior research into rest and heart muscle regeneration.
In 2011, Sadek published a paper in Science showing that while heart muscle cells actively divide in utero, they stop dividing shortly after birth to devote their energy to pumping blood through the body nonstop, with no time for breaks.
In 2014, he published evidence of cell division in patients with artificial hearts, hinting that their heart muscle cells might have been regenerating.
These findings, combined with other research teams’ observations that a minority of artificial heart patients could have their devices removed after experiencing a reversal of symptoms, led him to wonder if the artificial heart provides cardiac muscles the equivalent of bedrest in a person recovering from a soccer injury.
“The pump pushes blood into the aorta, bypassing the heart,” he said. “The heart is essentially resting.”
Sadek’s previous studies indicated that this rest might be beneficial for the heart muscle cells, but he needed to design an experiment to determine whether patients with artificial hearts were actually regenerating muscles.
“Irrefutable evidence of heart muscle regeneration has never been shown before in humans,” he said. “This study provided direct evidence.”
Next, Sadek wants to figure out why only about 25% of patients are “responders” to artificial hearts, meaning that their cardiac muscle regenerates.
“It’s not clear why some patients respond and some don’t, but it’s very clear that the ones who respond have the ability to regenerate heart muscle,” he said. “The exciting part now is to determine how we can make everyone a responder, because if you can, you can essentially cure heart failure. The beauty of this is that a mechanical heart is not a therapy we hope to deliver to our patients in the future – these devices are tried and true, and we’ve been using them for years.”
Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered that around 15 days of dry weather can trigger the flowering of durian. Observations of 110 durian plants revealed that flowering occurred around 50 days after an approximately 15-day dry spell, independent of whether the plant was grafted or grown from a seed. The team’s work might not only impact the production of a valuable agricultural asset but deepen our understanding of tropical ecosystems.
Known in many countries as the “king of fruits,” the durian is known for its distinctive strong odor, large size, and thorny rind. Though its odor splits opinions, its widespread culinary use in Asia makes it an exceptionally valuable crop, accounting for the largest share of fruit in Malaysia by production, area planted, and quantity produced. Yet, there is much that is unknown about its cultivation, including how its flowering is triggered.
To uncover the secrets of durian flowering, a team of researchers led by Professor Shinya Numata and Aoi Eguchi from Tokyo Metropolitan University undertook an extensive survey of durian, observing 110 plants in the orchard of the University Technology Malaysia with local collaborators. Their study covered both seed-grown and grafted plants, focusing on the timing at which individual plants flowered, measured against an extensive survey of weather conditions.
The team found that durian plants flowered approximately 50 days after a prolonged period of dry weather. These dry spells needed to be long enough to show up in moving average traces, specifically periods where rainfall averaged over 15-day windows was less than 1 millimeter. Previous work had hinted at some correlation between either dryness or low temperature. This is the first time that the exact conditions had been pinned down with such accuracy, though they found no correlation with maximum or minimum temperature. Their work was found to apply to durian plants irrespective of their varieties, as flowering seemed to occur at the same time for both. The same was also found for both seed-grown and grafted plant types.
The team had proposed that there was some relationship between the flowering of durian and the more general burst of flowering seen in the tropics following long dry spells. However, such general flowering events require a longer dry spell of around 30 days to occur. This explains why durian tend to flower multiple times a year, while synchronized flowering across species occurs once every few years.
Given its commercial value, insights like these will inform effective agricultural practices to predict flowering and manage harvests. The team hope that their findings will also deepen our understanding of the southeast Asian tropical ecosystem.
This work was supported by a JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 22J21299.
This graphic offers a glimpse of the history of the Universe, as we currently understand it. The cosmos began expanding with the Big Bang but then around 10 billion years later it strangely began to accelerate thanks to a theoretical phenomenon termed dark energy.
One of the biggest mysteries in science – dark energy – doesn't actually exist, according to researchers looking to solve the riddle of how the Universe is expanding.
For the past 100 years, physicists have generally assumed that the cosmos is growing equally in all directions. They employed the concept of dark energy as a placeholder to explain unknown physics they couldn't understand, but the contentious theory has always had its problems.
Now a team of physicists and astronomers at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand are challenging the status quo, using improved analysis of supernovae light curves to show that the Universe is expanding in a more varied, "lumpier" way.
The new evidence supports the "timescape" model of cosmic expansion, which doesn't have a need for dark energy because the differences in stretching light aren't the result of an accelerating Universe but instead a consequence of how we calibrate time and distance.
It takes into account that gravity slows time, so an ideal clock in empty space ticks faster than inside a galaxy.
The model suggests that a clock in the Milky Way would be about 35 per cent slower than the same one at an average position in large cosmic voids, meaning billions more years would have passed in voids. This would in turn allow more expansion of space, making it seem like the expansion is getting faster when such vast empty voids grow to dominate the Universe.
Professor David Wiltshire, who led the study, said: "Our findings show that we do not need dark energy to explain why the Universe appears to expand at an accelerating rate.
"Dark energy is a misidentification of variations in the kinetic energy of expansion, which is not uniform in a Universe as lumpy as the one we actually live in."
He added: "The research provides compelling evidence that may resolve some of the key questions around the quirks of our expanding cosmos.
"With new data, the Universe's biggest mystery could be settled by the end of the decade."
Dark energy is commonly thought to be a weak anti-gravity force which acts independently of matter and makes up around two thirds of the mass-energy density of the Universe.
The standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) model of the Universe requires dark energy to explain the observed acceleration in the rate at which the cosmos is expanding.
Scientists base this conclusion on measurements of the distances to supernova explosions in distant galaxies, which appear to be farther away than they should be if the Universe's expansion were not accelerating.
However, the present expansion rate of the Universe is increasingly being challenged by new observations.
Firstly, evidence from the afterglow of the Big Bang – known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – shows the expansion of the early Universe is at odds with current expansion, an anomaly known as the "Hubble tension".
In addition, recent analysis of new high precision data by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has found that the ΛCDM model does not fit as well as models in which dark energy is "evolving" over time, rather than remaining constant.
Both the Hubble tension and the surprises revealed by DESI are difficult to resolve in models which use a simplified 100-year-old cosmic expansion law – Friedmann's equation.
This assumes that, on average, the Universe expands uniformly – as if all cosmic structures could be put through a blender to make a featureless soup, with no complicating structure. However, the present Universe actually contains a complex cosmic web of galaxy clusters in sheets and filaments that surround and thread vast empty voids.
Professor Wiltshire added: "We now have so much data that in the 21st century we can finally answer the question – how and why does a simple average expansion law emerge from complexity?
"A simple expansion law consistent with Einstein's general relativity does not have to obey Friedmann's equation."
The researchers say that the European Space Agency's Euclid satellite, which was launched in July 2023, has the power to test and distinguish the Friedmann equation from the timescape alternative. However, this will require at least 1,000 independent high quality supernovae observations.
When the proposed timescape model was last tested in 2017 the analysis suggested it was only a slightly better fit than the ΛCDM as an explanation for cosmic expansion, so the Christchurch team worked closely with the Pantheon+ collaboration team who had painstakingly produced a catalogue of 1,535 distinct supernovae.
They say the new data now provides "very strong evidence" for timescape. It may also point to a compelling resolution of the Hubble tension and other anomalies related to the expansion of the Universe.
Further observations from Euclid and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope are needed to bolster support for the timescape model, the researchers say, with the race now on to use this wealth of new data to reveal the true nature of cosmic expansion and dark energy.
Caption: This graphic offers a glimpse of the history of the Universe, as we currently understand it. The cosmos began expanding with the Big Bang but then around 10 billion years later it strangely began to accelerate thanks to a theoretical phenomenon termed dark energy.
Caption: This graphic shows the emergence of a cosmic web in a cosmological simulation using general relativity. From left, 300,000 years after the Big Bang to right, a Universe similar to ours today. The dark regions are void of matter, where an ideal clock would run faster and allow more time for the expansion of space. The lighter purple regions are denser so clocks would run slower, meaning under the "timescape" model of cosmology that acceleration of the Universe's expansion is not uniform.
Credit: Hayley Macpherson, Daniel Price, Paul Lasky / Physical Review D 99 (2019) 063522
Further information
The paper 'Supernovae evidence for foundational change to cosmological models' by Antonia Seifert, Zachary Lane, Marco Galoppo, Ryan Ridden-Harper and David L Wiltshire, has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters. DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slae112. The paper 'Cosmological foundations revisited with Pantheon+' by Antonia Seifert, Zachary Lane, Ryan Ridden-Harper and David L Wiltshire, has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stae2437.
The timescape cosmology was proposed by David Wiltshire in 2007, using the mathematical formalism of Thomas Buchert in general relativity, as a viable alternative to dark energy. In the intervening 17 years, the timescape model has been further developed and tested against a variety of cosmological data by David Wiltshire and his students. Zachary Lane and Antonia Seifert jointly developed the codes used in the new analysis.
Notes for editors
About the Royal Astronomical Society
The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), founded in 1820, encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science.
The RAS organises scientific meetings, publishes international research and review journals, recognises outstanding achievements by the award of medals and prizes, maintains an extensive library, supports education through grants and outreach activities and represents UK astronomy nationally and internationally. Its more than 4,000 members (Fellows), a third based overseas, include scientific researchers in universities, observatories and laboratories as well as historians of astronomy and others.
The RAS accepts papers for its journals based on the principle of peer review, in which fellow experts on the editorial boards accept the paper as worth considering. The Society issues press releases based on a similar principle, but the organisations and scientists concerned have overall responsibility for their content.
Dark energy 'doesn’t exist' so can't be pushing 'lumpy' Universe apart – study
Article Publication Date
19-Dec-2024
Texas A&M researchers illuminate the mysteries of icy ocean worlds
New research advances understanding of the habitability of icy moons
Texas A&M University
As NASA’s Europa Clipper embarks on its historic journey to Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, Dr. Matt Powell-Palm, a faculty member at Texas A&M University’s J. Mike Walker ‘66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, has unveiled groundbreaking research that could transform our understanding of icy ocean worlds across the solar system. The study published in Nature Communications, co-authored with planetary scientist Dr. Baptiste Journaux of the University of Washington, introduces a novel thermodynamic concept called the “centotectic” and investigates the stability of liquids in extreme conditions - critical information for determining the habitability of icy moons like Europa.
Revolutionizing the Search for Habitability
The exploration of icy ocean worlds represents a new frontier in planetary science, focusing on understanding the potential for these environments to support life. Powell-Palm’s research addresses a fundamental question in this field: under what conditions can liquid water remain stable on these distant, frozen bodies? By defining and measuring the cenotectic, the absolute lowest temperature at which a liquid remains stable under varying pressures and concentrations, the team provides a critical framework for interpreting data from planetary exploration efforts.
This study combines Powell-Palm’s expertise in cryobiology - specifically the low-temperature thermodynamics of water - initially focused on medical applications like organ preservation for transplantation, with Journaux’s expertise in planetary science and high-pressure water-ice systems. Together, they developed a framework that bridges disciplines to tackle one of the most fascinating challenges in planetary science.
“With the launch of NASA Europa Clipper, the largest planetary exploration mission ever launched, we are entering a multi-decade era of exploration of cold and icy ocean worlds. Measurements from this and other missions will tell us how deep the ocean is and its composition,” said Journaux. “Laboratory measurements of liquid stability, and notably the lowest temperature possible (the newly-defined cenotectic), combined with mission results, will allow us to fully constrain how habitable the cold and deep oceans of our solar system are, and also what their final fate will be when the moons or planets have cooled down entirely.”
A Texas A&M Legacy of Innovation in Space Research
The research was conducted at Texas A&M and led by mechanical engineering graduate student Arian Zarriz. The work reflects Texas A&M’s deep expertise in water-ice systems and tradition of excellence in space research, which spans multiple disciplines. With the recent groundbreaking of the Texas A&M Space Institute, the university is poised to play an even larger role in space exploration, providing intellectual leadership for missions pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.
“The study of icy worlds is a particular priority for both NASA and the European Space Agency, as evidenced by the flurry of recent and upcoming spacecraft launches,” said Powell-Palm. “We hope that Texas A&M will help to provide intellectual leadership in this space.”
Looking Ahead
As planetary exploration missions, such as those targeting icy moons, continue to expand our understanding of the solar system, researchers at Texas A&M and beyond prepare to analyze the wealth of data they will provide. By combining experimental studies like those conducted by Powell-Palm and Journaux with the findings from these missions, scientists aim to unlock the secrets of cold, ocean-bearing worlds and evaluate their potential to harbor life.
