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)
Advancing AI in the Aviation Sector by Implementing Sustainable Fuel Solutions
In today's era, artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the aviation industry considerably, improving efficiency, security, and general performance.
In today’s era, artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the aviation industry considerably, improving efficiency, security, and general performance. Essential concepts comprise predictive analytics, computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing.
The aviation industry accounts for 2% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. The industry has lately started to concentrate on sustainability as the need for air travel continues to grow. One essential scope of interest is the adoption and development of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) to decrease carbon emissions. AI has emerged as a decisive mechanism to optimize and accelerate the adoption of SAF in aviation. AI algorithms have further been employed in autopilot systems to help pilots in aircraft control and navigation as a consequence decreasing the chance of human error. One of the fundamental edges of AI in aviation is its capability to interpret enormous magnitudes of data quickly with accuracy. AI algorithms can process intricate aviation data, temperature patterns, and air traffic data to optimize flying pathways, lower fuel consumption, and enhance overall flight efficiency. This capacity has allowed airlines to function more efficiently and decrease their carbon footprint by minimizing emissions and fuel consumption.
The overall integration of AI in aviation is altering the industry, paving the path for a secure and more efficient air travel experience. In the future, AI could enable autonomous flights, reduce delays, and enhance air traffic management. It has become binding for the aviation sector to explore alternative fuel sources due to the larger emphasis on reducing carbon emissions and sustainability. Therefore, AI plays a crucial part in optimizing the production, distribution, and utilization of sustainable fuels. It is likewise used in flight systems to optimize routes, predict maintenance needs, and improve fuel efficiency. Furthermore, AI-powered chatbots help travellers with many services including check-ins, bookings and in-flight assistance. Similarly, AI contributes to the growth of more efficient and environment-friendly biofuels. Importantly, researchers can specify the most appropriate components and strategies for producing sustainable aviation fuels by using machine learning algorithms to explore diverse varieties of biomass and chemical processes. This not only decreases greenhouse gas emissions but also assists in reducing the industry’s dependence on fossil fuels.
The fundamental concepts in AI to ensure the sustainability of fuel in aviation include:
Predictive Maintenance- To enhance the efficiency and reliability of aircraft engines often designed to accommodate SAF. AI can assist in decreasing fuel consumption and prevent costly breakdowns by examining extensive segments of data to foresee when aircraft parts require supervision or replacement, saving airlines time and finances.
Fuel Productivity and Aircraft Planning- AI algorithms can optimize flying speed, routes and altitudes to reduce fuel emissions and consumption.
Emission reporting and monitoring- Through AI, one can gather and interpret data on fuel emissions and use. AI systems can additionally help airlines in tracking their environmental performance and comply with regulatory prerequisites.
Sustainable Fuel Growth- AI can explore extensive datasets to find sustainable feedstock for biofuels such as agricultural waste or algae, decreasing dependency on fossil fuels and optimizing production.
Enhance Air Traffic Management- AI can optimize air traffic management by enhancing the flow of aircraft and easing congestion around airports resulting in lower fuel consumption, reduced emissions and more rapid flight duration. For instance, Project Bluebird by the UK is examining how AI can work with humans to make air traffic management more sustainable by planning better routes and decreasing on fuel consumption.
Designing a more fuel-efficient aircraft: Examining the past data on aircraft design and performance through machine learning models for the innovation of more eco-friendly and sustainable aircrafts.
Programs for verifying carbon emissions: The use of AI in tracking and demonstrating a decrease in emissions is achieved through sustainable approaches in aviation. In this context, the European Union Safety Agency (EASA) in its AI roadmap is dedicated to assuring that the aviation industry benefits from the possibility of incorporating AI in its functions while preserving the most heightened benchmarks of security and environmental preservation.
Training of Crew through Simulation: To ensure well preparedness to operate aircraft in the most sustainable and fuel-efficient manner.
Minimizing Noise Pollution: To schedule flight routes that reduce noise pollution, address environmental problems and enhance the all-around sustainability of airplanes.
Prediction and Prevention of Contrails: The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report states that clouds formed by contrails are around 35% of aviation’s global warming impact. Thus, AI can help in speeding the contrail avoidance.
Airlines for the most part can consequently improve their functional efficiency while decreasing the environmental influence by leveraging AI-driven solutions for predictive maintenance, fuel optimization, greener supply chains, emission monitoring and flight planning. The aviation industry is looking at net-zero emissions by 2050 and is examining AI as a tremendous means to enable them to succeed in their journey to more sustainable air transport moves through the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. To conclude, the aviation sector can make significant strides towards attaining a more sustainable future by harnessing the power of AI to optimize fuel consumption, generate biofuels, and improve production processes. The integration of AI in aviation sustainable fuels thus harbors tremendous possibilities for decreasing the environmental influence of the aviation industry.
Modern commercial aircraft flying at high altitudes create longer-lived planet-warming contrails than older aircraft, a new study has found.
The result means that although modern planes emit less carbon than older aircraft, they may be contributing more to climate change through contrails.
Led by scientists at Imperial College London, the study highlights the immense challenges the aviation industry faces to reduce its impact on the climate. The new study also found that private jets produce more contrails than previously thought, potentially leading to outsized impacts on climate warming.
Contrails, or condensation trails, are thin streaks of cloud created by aircraft exhaust fumes that contribute to global warming by trapping heat in the atmosphere.
While the exact warming effect of contrails is uncertain, scientists believe it is greater than warming caused by carbon emissions from jet fuel.
Published today in Environmental Research Letters, the study used machine learning to analyse satellite data on more than 64,000 contrails from a range of aircraft flying over the North Atlantic Ocean.
Modern aircraft that fly at above 38,000 feet (about 12km), such as the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 Airliners, create more contrails than older passenger-carrying commercial aircraft, the study found.
To reduce jet fuel consumption, modern aircraft are designed to fly at higher altitudes where the air is thinner with less aerodynamic drag, compared to older commercial aircraft, which usually fly at slightly lower altitudes (around 35,000ft/11km).
This means these higher-flying aircraft create less carbon emissions per passenger. However, it also means they create contrails that take longer to dissipate – creating a warming effect for longer and a complicated trade-off for the aviation industry.
Double whammy of warming
Dr Edward Gryspeerdt, the lead author of the study and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, said: “It's common knowledge that flying is not good for the climate. However, most people do not appreciate that contrails and jet fuel carbon emissions cause a double whammy warming of the climate.
“This study throws a spanner in the works for the aviation industry. Newer aircraft are flying higher and higher in the atmosphere to increase fuel efficiency and reduce carbon emissions.
“The unintended consequence of this is that these aircraft flying over the North Atlantic are now creating more, longer-lived, contrails, trapping additional heat in the atmosphere and increasing the climate impact of aviation.
“This doesn’t mean that more efficient aircraft are a bad thing – far from it, as they have lower carbon emissions per passenger-mile. However, our finding reflects the challenges the aviation industry faces when reducing its climate impact.”
The study did confirm a simple step that can be taken to shorten the lifetime of contrails: reduce the amount of soot emitted from aircraft engines, produced when fuel burns inefficiently.
Modern aircraft engines are designed to be cleaner, typically emit fewer soot particles, which cuts down the lifetime of contrails.
While other studies using models have predicted this phenomenon, the study published today is the first to confirm it using real-world observations.
Co-author Dr Marc Stettler, a Reader in Transport and the Environment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London, said: “From other studies, we know that the number of soot particles in aircraft exhaust plays a key role in the properties of newly formed contrails. We suspected that this would also affect how long contrails live for.
“Our study provides the first evidence that emitting fewer soot particles results in contrails that fall out of the sky faster compared to contrails formed on more numerous soot particles from older, dirtier engines.”
Private jets the worst offenders of contrails
Even higher in the sky, the researchers found that private jets create contrails more often than previously thought – adding to concerns about the excessive use of these aircraft by the super-rich.
Despite being smaller and using less fuel, private jets create similar contrails to much larger commercial aircraft, the analysis found, which surprised the researchers.
Private jets fly higher than other planes, more than 40,000 feet above earth where there is less air traffic. However, like modern commercial aircraft creating more contrails compared to lower-flying older commercial aircraft, the high altitudes flown by private jets means they create outsized contrails.
Dr Gryspeerdt said: “Despite their smaller size, private jets create contrails as often as much larger aircraft. We already know that these aircraft create a huge amount of carbon emissions per passenger so the super-rich can fly in comfort.
“Our finding adds to concerns about the climate impact caused by private jets as poor countries continue to get battered by extreme weather events.”
Operational differences lead to longer lifetimes of satellite detectable contrails from more fuel efficient aircraft
Article Publication Date
7-Aug-2024
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
NOAA, United Airlines to measure greenhouse gases during domestic flights An instrumented Mooney research aircraft passes over the Northern Rocky Mountains in Montana during NOAA’s 2023 NOGAP aerial mission to capture atmospheric profiles of greenhouse gases in a series of flights across the United States.
Photo courtesy of Anna McAuliffe/Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences
July 23 (UPI) -- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is teaming up with United Airlines to measure greenhouse gases and pollutants in the sky during domestic flights.
The multi-year agreement, announced Tuesday, will equip a Boeing 737 with an instrument package to improve monitoring of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. The equipment will also improve the accuracy of weather forecasts in the United States.
"This collaboration represents a significant leap forward in U.S. efforts to monitor and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions," said Sarah Kapnick, the NOAA's chief scientist.
"If we can harness the capabilities of commercial aircraft, we will be poised to make rapid advancements in the understanding of greenhouse gas emissions that can inform policies."
The NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory already operates a network of 60 sampling sites around the world, using private pilots to collect airborne samples.
"This new partnership with United is the first step in establishing a Commercial Aircraft Greenhouse Gas Monitoring Program," said GML director Vanda Grubišić, "which will add valuable greenhouse gas measurements near large urban areas where most of greenhouse gas emissions originate."
Tuesday's agreement with United Airlines, which was announced during the White House Super Pollutants Summit in Washington, D.C., would test the potential for a larger network of commercial aircraft to increase the number of airborne samples collected.
"We'll be collecting data over multiple cities multiple times a day, in different seasons, and under varying weather conditions," said Colm Sweeney, who leads GML's commercial aircraft program.
"This will allow scientists to more accurately measure U.S. emissions at sub-regional scales, which is one goal of a national greenhouse gas monitoring strategy announced earlier this year, and at just 1% of the cost of deploying research aircraft," Sweeney added.
United Airlines is hoping the NOAA's air-monitoring equipment will help clear the skies by reducing wispy contrails, the white streaks from planes.
Water vapor measurements could improve weather forecasts for regions prone to high-altitude contrail formation, which can trap heat. That information would allow airlines to alter flight paths and reduce contrail formation.
Sunday, June 23, 2024
AU CONTRAIRE
Op-Ed: Just Stop Oil – Not stopping oil, annoying Greens, and making anti-oil look bad
Just Stop Oil has been making all the wrong noises too often. Attacking Stonehenge was an incredibly bad and very ugly move, guaranteed to infuriate Greens. It comes on top of other useless vandalism attacks and some of the worst publicity any supposedly Green movement could want.
The group acts like the 1970s “radicals”, creating impossibly hostile scenarios for dialog with any government, oil company or stakeholders. It has started an argument nobody can win.
Oil is a problem. The oil sector is too backward, stupid, and insular to realize it can repurpose all of its products away from fuels. The sector doesn’t even need to tweak distribution or anything else. All it needs to do is, just make other, non-polluting products. Apparently, that’s too difficult.
You can’t stop billions of oil dollars with cheap stupid and counterproductive publicity stunts. You can’t stop it with self-righteousness. You’re not offering alternative solutions; you’re just making a racket.
Just Stop Oil is effectively creating sympathy for the oil sector simply because of its extremely offensive and idiotic targeting of inoffensive subjects. No Green is ever going to agree with this ultra-dumb vandalism.
The targeting of these so-called protests is also highly questionable. What is supposed to be achieved by attacking the Rugby World Cup? That audience isn’t famous for its Green sympathies. Nor is Wimbledon.
When did Van Gogh’s Sunflowers poison the world? How did Stonehenge become responsible for a brain-dead energy sector? How did Les Miserables contribute to global warming?
No direct Just Stop Oil protests against actual oil companies seem to happen. There’s not an atom of orange paint on a Chevron, Exxon, or BP property, or anything else. Why?
This looks far more like a brazen right-wing negative publicity campaign than any kind of legit climate protest group. They have achieved precisely nothing. They will continue to achieve nothing if they continue with this worthless attention-getting charade.
An extremely old McCarthyist tactic is to discredit opposition groups by joining them and carrying out destructive actions in their names. The Black Bloc, which used to show up at environmental protests, would “help” protect the Amazon by burning people’s cars. That, of course, antagonized just about everyone and got far more publicity than the protest or the issues. It also discredited the real protesters.
The net effect of this absurdly over-the-top conspicuous “extremism”, of course, is hyper-polarization. One of the easiest anti-environmental tricks is to simply paint environmentalists as whackos. The actual issue, which is just cleaning up a toxic world, gets lost in the negative imagery.
That’s been going on for 50 years at least. It’s also one of the reasons so little has been done about the plague of environmental disasters. Governments and companies feel safe not “giving in” to supposed nutcases.
I think it’s fair to say that no real Greens want any part of Just Stop Oil.
I certainly don’t. They’re ridiculous.
Goodbye Just Stop Oil, and back to Central Casting with you. \
Monday, May 06, 2024
SOME FOLKS CALL THEM CHEMTRAILS
More Data Needed to Understand Contrails, their Climate Effect and to Develop Mitigation
The report highlights the complexity of contrail science, noting gaps in the understanding of how contrails form, or when they could persist, and how they impact the climate
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) called for urgent action to deepen the understanding on the formation and climate impact of aviation contrails to develop effective mitigation measures.
The newly released IATA report Aviation Contrails and their Climate Effect: Tackling Uncertainties and Enabling Solutions calls for a strengthening of collaboration between research and technological innovation, coupled with policy frameworks to address aviation’s non-CO2 emissions through more atmospheric data.
The report highlights the complexity of contrail science, noting gaps in the understanding of how contrails form, or when they could persist, and how they impact the climate. The lack of high-resolution, real-time data on atmospheric conditions (particularly humidity and temperature at cruising altitudes) hinders precise contrail forecasting.
Willie Walsh, IATA’s Director General said: "The industry and its stakeholders are working to address the impact of non-CO2 emissions on climate change, particularly contrails. To ensure that this effort is effective and without adverse effects, we must better understand how and where contrails form and shrink the uncertainties related to their climate impact.
"Action now, means more trials, collection of more data, improvement of climate models, and maturing technologies and operations. Formulating and implementing regulations based on insufficient data and limited scientific understanding is foolish and could lead to adverse impacts on the climate.
"That is why the most important conclusion from this report is to urge all stakeholders to work together to resolve current gaps in the science so that we can take effective actions."
Recommendations
With current levels of understanding, the report made the following recommendations:
• In the immediate term (2024-2030), the priority for mitigating aviation’s climate change impact should be on reducing CO2 emissions over the uncertain gains that could stem from contrail detection and their mitigation. Over this time, increasing airline participation in sensor programs, continuing scientific research, and improving humidity and climate models should be the focus of work on contrail mitigation.
• Mid-term actions (2030-2040) should involve establishing standards for data transmission, continuous validation of models, and encouraging aircraft manufacturers to include provisions for meteorological observations, as well as selected avoidance.
• Longer-term actions (2040-2050): Aircraft should be continuously providing data and the models and infrastructure should be there and be reliable. The community will have at this point a more complete understanding of the non-CO2 effects of alternative fuels, with extended mitigation measures. These action items collectively aim to mitigate the climate impact of aviation while advancing scientific understanding and technological capabilities.
Background on Aviation’s Non-CO2 Emissions
Aviation's impact on climate extends beyond CO2 emissions, with non-CO2 effects such as contrails and nitrogen oxides (NOx) also contributing to global warming. Persistent contrails, formed in ice-supersaturated regions, can transform into cirrus clouds which reflect incoming solar radiation (during the day) as well as trap outgoing heat.
On balance, it is understood that contrails have a warming effect on the climate, with diurnal, seasonal, and geographical variations. However, despite extensive studies, significant uncertainties exist with respect to the capacity to predict individual contrail formation and their specific climate impact.
Initiatives and Trials: Recent collaborations among meteorologists, climate researchers, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers have yielded new insights that underscore the need for enhanced data collection and analyses of the likely air traffic network complications regarding any solutions.
Trials with modified flight paths and alternative fuels have shown potential yet limited efficacy due to the variability of atmospheric conditions and the localized nature of where contrails occur.
Technological Advances and Future Directions: Advancements in developing humidity sensors to be placed on aircraft are critical for contrail prediction and avoidance strategies. Current sensor technology on commercial aircraft lacks the required sensitivity and response time, and there are only a handful of such sensors in operation at altitude.
Ongoing research aims to develop more accurate, robust, and scalable solutions, and the use of sensors on a limited population of aircraft would allow the necessary improvement and validation of numerical weather prediction models.
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
CLOUDSEEDING
Dubai’s Record Rain Floods Expensive Homes and Halts Flights
TWO YEARS OF RAIN IN 24 HOURS
Verity Ratcliffe and Kateryna Kadabashy Wed, April 17, 2024 Dubai’s Record Rain Floods Expensive Homes and Halts Flights
(Bloomberg) -- Dubai flights have been severely disrupted and cars were left stranded on flooded roads after record rainfall over the past day brought the city to a standstill.
The United Arab Emirates experienced its heaviest downpour since records began in 1949, Dubai’s media office said in a statement. It caused chaos for residents as water entered the city’s expensive homes and underground car parks, left some buildings without power and resulted in widespread flooding even a day later.
One person died after being swept away by flash floods in the north of the country, the National newspaper reported. In neighboring Oman, at least 18 people have died in recent days as the heavy rains caused flooding, AP reported, citing a statement from the country’s National Committee for Emergency Management.
Dubai airport, one of the world’s busiest, is suffering from “significant disruption,” it said Wednesday on X. Online departure boards showed most arrivals or departures as canceled or delayed as of 1 p.m. local time. Emirates, the biggest international airline, said it was halting all check-ins for passengers for the day. The heavy rains across the desert nation came after cloud seeding. The UAE has been carrying out seeding operations since 2002 to address water security issues, but the lack of drainage in many areas can trigger flooding, including in cities such as Dubai that’s a global financial and business center.
The Gulf state’s National Center of Meteorology dispatched at least seven seeding planes from Al Ain airport between Sunday and Monday, the government agency said. That technique involves implanting chemicals and tiny particles — often natural salts such as potassium chloride — into the atmosphere to coax more rain from clouds.
With global warming threatening a surge in heat-related deaths in the UAE, Dubai’s media office on Tuesday dubbed the downpours “rains of goodness,” despite the flooded houses and overflowing swimming pools.
The latest storms followed heavy rains earlier this year that had also caused flooding and traffic snarls. Dubai’s government told its employees to work from home again on Wednesday due to the weather conditions and urged private employers to do the same. Schools have been directed to remain closed.
People took to social media to share updates on the aftermath of the weather. Some videos showed cars being swept off roads, one showed the ceiling of a shop collapsing as water inundated one of Dubai’s most popular malls, while another claimed to have footage of a collapsed road near the eastern city of Al Ain.
There was some rainfall elsewhere in the region as well. Dammam in eastern Saudi Arabia saw the heaviest showers in the country in the past 48 hours. Riyadh was hit with sand and wind storms that at one stage led to near-zero visibility but otherwise faced dry conditions on Tuesday.
Saudi’s flagship carrier Saudia and budget airlines Flynas scrapped two dozen flights between them, according to FlightAware. Some early Wednesday flights from Bahrain’s main airport were canceled but departures resumed mid-morning, according to the Bahrain International Airport website. Qatar’s Hamad International Airport was also operating normally.
Photos show Dubai overwhelmed by torrential rain — and may expose the downsides of trying to control the weather
Kelsey Vlamis,Mikhaila Friel Updated Wed, April 17, 2024 Photos show Dubai overwhelmed by torrential rain — and may expose the downsides of trying to control the weather
The United Arab Emirates experienced torrential rainfall and flash floods, beginning late Monday.
Videos appear to show planes taxiing down flooded runways at Dubai International Airport.
The flooding could have been worsened by cloud seeding, a practice to address water scarcity.
Torrential rainfall pummeled the United Arab Emirates this week, resulting in flash floods that caused air travel chaos, closed schools, and deluged homes.
The rain began late Monday, flooding the UAE with more than half a foot (6.26 inches) of water in 24 hours, according to the Dubai Meteorological Office and cited by ABC News. That is more than two years' worth of rain in one day, the outlet noted.
There are claims that cloud seeding may have played a role in the flash floods. The practice sees planes inject clouds with chemicals that can increase rainfall.
One fatality was reported by police at the time of writing on Wednesday: A 70-year-old man died in Ras al-Khaimah when his vehicle was swept away in the flooding.
Flooding also occurred in Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. In Oman, 19 people died in flash floods, according to local media. Cars are engulfed in water on a busy road in Dubai.GIUSEPPE CACACE/Getty Images
Dubai International Airport — recently named the most luxurious airport in the world — said planes were diverted. Some services now appear to have restarted.
Unverified videos on social media appeared to show heavily flooded tarmac, with large passenger airplanes creating waves and taxiing through several feet of water.
The airport did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider about the videos. Vehicles drive on a flooded road during torrential rain in the Gulf Emirate of Dubai on April 16, 2024.GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP/Getty Images
"We advise you NOT to come to the airport, unless absolutely necessary," an airport spokesperson wrote on X on Wednesday.
They added that planes continue to be delayed and diverted.
An unnamed couple told the AP that the situation at the airport is "absolute carnage," with some passengers sleeping there or at the Metro station. An empty car is pictured among the flooding on April 17, 2024.GIUSEPPE CACACE/Getty Images
Dubai recieved more than 5.6 inches of rain by Tuesday evening, around the amount it typically gets in a year and a half, according to Sky News.
It marks its heaviest rainfall in 75 years, according to a WAM news agency cited by Sky News.
In a post shared on X, the UAE's National Centre of Meteorology showed the regions that have been most affected.
The UAE may have been playing rainmaker by cloud seeding
While images of extreme flooding can show the consequences of the climate crisis, this particular event may have been worsened by a direct attempt to play rainmaker — literally.
To address water scarcity in the typically dry country, the UAE started using a practice referred to as cloud seeding in the 90s and early 2000s.
Cloud seeding is a method designed to increase the amount of water that falls from a cloud. It involves identifying suitable clouds and then using aircraft or ground-based generators to introduce a chemical agent that facilitates the production of snowflakes.
Cloud seeding has been used in countries worldwide, including in western US states dealing with drought, like California, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Texas. Vehicles are stranded on a flooded street following torrential rain in the Gulf Emirate of Dubai on April 16, 2024.GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP/Getty Images
The practice has long been controversial, with critics dismissing it as an attempt to "play God" or being potentially harmful to the environment or public health. Scientists have not documented the harmful impacts of cloud seeding, and recent studies have suggested that the practice works.
Ahmed Habib, a specialist meteorologist, told Bloomberg that the UAE's cloud seeding operations contributed directly to the heavy rainfall that fell this week.
Vehicles on Dubai are trapped by the heavy rainfall.Anadolu/Getty Images
Habib told the outlet that two planes conducted cloud seeding operations on Monday and Tuesday and that seven seeding missions had been carried out in two days.
Flight-tracking data analyzed by the AP suggested that an aircraft affiliated with the UAE's cloud-seeding project flew around the country Sunday.
"For any cloud that's suitable over the UAE you make the operation," Habib told Bloomberg. A submerged duty machine is seen after heavy rain in the United Arab Emirates on April 16, 2024.Stringer/Anadolu/Getty Images
The UAE's weather bureau said no cloud seeding had taken place during Tuesday's rain, according to the National News. It did not immediately respond to a request by BI for comment.
Chris England, a weather producer at Sky News, said he doesn't believe cloud seeing to be a reason behind the floods as evidence of it working is "pretty slim at best."
Despite warning citizens to remain home during the heavy rain, the UAE government's press office said they were "rains of goodness," as the country has dealt with a rise in heat-related illnesses and deaths that some hope can be alleviated by an increase in rainfall.
Schools across the UAE continued to be closed on Wednesday, and employees are working from home, according to the Sky News report.
Watch: Widespread flooding across Dubai after torrential rain
Our Foreign Staff Wed, April 17, 2024
Torrential rain flooded roads, homes and malls and briefly halted operations at Dubai International Airport as storms lashed the Gulf on Tuesday.
Dubai, the Middle East’s financial centre, was paralysed by the heavy storms that caused widespread flooding around the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Flagship shopping centres Dubai Mall and Mall of the Emirates both suffered flooding, and water was ankle-deep at at least one Dubai Metro station.
Roads and residential communities also suffered heavy flooding in scenes repeated around the oil-rich Emirates, a desert country where rain is an unusual event.
The weather board urged residents to stay away from areas of flooding and water accumulation - BACKGRID Roads in Dubai were flooded after torrential rain - Atif Bhatti/ESN/AFP via Getty Images
Schools were shut across the UAE and expected to remain closed on Wednesday, when further storms, including hail, are forecast.
Dubai Airport, the world’s busiest international hub measured by passenger traffic, temporarily suspended operations and cancelled more than 50 flights.
Videos on social media showed planes taxiing across an apron flooded with deep water.
“Due to the intense storm, operations were temporarily suspended for 25 minutes this afternoon, but have since re-commenced, and are now in recovery mode,” a Dubai Airports spokesman said. Some inland areas of the UAE recorded more than 80mm of rain over 24 hours - Atif Bhatti/ESN/AFP via Getty Images
Heavy rain is an unusual event in the desert country - Jules Annan/Backgrid
The Asian Champions League football semi-final between the UAE’s Al Ain and Saudi side Al Hilal, due to be hosted in Al Ain, was postponed for 24 hours because of the weather.
Some inland areas of the UAE recorded more than 80 millimetres of rain over the 24 hours to 8am, approaching the annual average of about 100mm.
The weather board “urged residents to take all the precautions... and to stay away from areas of flooding and water accumulation”.
The storms in the region left at least 18 people dead in Oman.
Is Cloud Seeding to Blame for Floods? What to Know
Koh Ewe
TIME Wed, April 17, 2024 A car is left on a flooded street following heavy rains in Dubai early on April 17, 2024. Credit - Giuseppe Cacace—AFP/Getty Images
In a place as dry as the desert city of Dubai, whenever they can get rain, they’ll take it.
United Arab Emirates authorities will often even try to make it rain—as they did earlier this week when the National Center of Meteorology dispatched planes to inject chemicals into the clouds to try to coax some showering.
But this time they got much more than they wanted. Dubai faced torrential downpours on Tuesday, with flooding shutting down much of the city, including schools and its major airport—killing at least one man whose car was swept away as well as at least 18 others in neighboring Oman, including a bus full of schoolchildren.
The UAE government media office said it was the heaviest rainfall recorded in 75 years and called it “an exceptional event.” More than a typical year’s worth of water was dumped on the country in a single day.
Now, many people are pointing a finger at the “cloud seeding” operations preceding the precipitation.
“Do you think the Dubai floods might have something to do with this?” popular social media account Wide Awake Media asked on X, alongside a clip of a news report on the UAE’s weather modification program.
But experts say that while cloud seeding may have enhanced the rainfall, pinning such a devastating downpour on it is misguided.
“It is very unlikely that cloud seeding would cause a flood,” Roslyn Prinsley, the head of disaster solutions at the Australian National University Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, tells TIME, describing such claims as “conspiracy theories.”
It’s not the first time cloud seeding has been blamed for floods—in Dubai and around the world. In February, social media users charged officials working on a cloud seeding pilot program in California with causing storms that hit the state, despite the technology not even being used before the storms in question. And in Australia in 2022, as the nation down under experienced record rainfall, social media users recirculated an old news clip that questioned if there was a link between cloud seeding and flooding—to which fact-checkers answered: there isn’t.
Here’s what to know about cloud seeding, how and whether it even works, and what scientists say people should actually be worried about.
How does cloud seeding work?
Cloud seeding basically works by artificially recreating the process by which rain and snow naturally occur: In normal clouds, microscopic droplets of water vapor are attracted to atmospheric aerosols like dust or pollen or salt from the sea. When enough water droplets converge around these nuclei, they form ice crystals and fall.
Clouds are seeded, typically by specially equipped aircraft but also by ground-based generators, by implanting particles, commonly silver iodide, in and around selected clouds to act as nuclei and trigger the precipitation process. Does cloud seeding even work?
Since the futuristic-sounding weather modification technique was introduced in the 1940s, it has been used regularly across the world, from the UAE to China to the United States, for a wide range of intended purposes. Mostly employed by governments grappling with drought, cloud seeding has even found itself a part of some of the biggest events in history, from clearing urban pollution and ensuring blue skies at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to staving away Moscow-bound radioactive clouds in the wake of a nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, to hampering the movement of U.S. enemies during the war in Vietnam. (Weather modification in warfare has since been banned by the U.N.)
For decades, a rain-scarce UAE has invested heavily in cloud seeding, including granting permanent residency to experts, and funding research programs to better identify the seedability of clouds.
But the science on just how effective cloud seeding is remains inconclusive. In 2003, the U.S. National Research Council concluded that “there still is no convincing scientific proof” of its efficacy at the time. A landmark 2020 study, however, found that cloud seeding does work—but researchers are clear about its limitations.
UAE meteorological officials say that their cloud seeding operations can increase rainfall by 10-30%, while Californian authorities’ estimates for their own program sit at 5-10%. The Desert Research Institute (DRI), the state of Nevada’s research group, says cloud seeding can increase seasonal precipitation by about 10%, while the World Meteorological Organization assessed in 2019 that the impacts of cloud seeding range from next to nothing to 20%. And success in producing rain depends significantly on atmospheric conditions such as wind and cloud temperatures.
That’s why experts agree that cloud seeding tends to get a bad rap from the public. Its impact is often overstated, and while it can enhance rainfall, other natural and unnatural factors play a much greater role in causing floods. Are there any concerns about cloud seeding?
A number of myths are associated with cloud seeding, such as that it causes what’s known as “chem-trails,” cloud-like streaks of white in the sky. DRI says those are actually “jet contrails, and they are the aviation equivalent of visible plumes of steamy breath on a cold morning.” They have “no connection with cloud-seeding activities.”
But there are other reasons for skepticism about cloud seeding.
Critics argue that seeding clouds in one region may simply deprive another of rain, as the clouds will unleash precipitation before they were meant to. (Iran has for years accused its neighbors of “stealing their rain.”)
Others have expressed health concerns about the chemicals used to seed clouds. Silver iodide, a common substance used, may be toxic to animals, though others insist it is safe.
In a publication for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Laura Kuhl, a public policy professor at Northeastern University, argues that cloud seeding may do “more harm than good” due to these uncertainties and because, given its limited effectiveness, it promotes a sense of “techno-optimism” that “can obscure deeper structural drivers of vulnerability like unsustainable water use and unequal distribution of access to water.” What’s to blame for floods?
The severity of the recent flooding in Dubai could be in large part because the perennially dry country hasn’t developed effective drainage infrastructure to deal with intense rainfall. But experts note that a major reason for such extreme weather events is climate change, since warmer air can hold more water, which then leads to heavier rainfall and floods in some areas.
Prinsley says that when it comes to dealing with global warming and increasingly destructive weather phenomenon, people should be more concerned about human activities that “seed” the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses than with cloud seeding.
“Climate change on top of natural weather and climate processes is the cause of much of the extreme weather that we are seeing across the world. Cloud seeding is used to make recalcitrant clouds produce some rain,” she says. “The thunderstorms themselves are much more likely to have caused the extreme flooding in Dubai due to climate change-fuelled intense rainfall—as is happening across the world.”
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
SPACE
Giant volcano discovered on Mars
A deeply eroded giant volcano, active from ancient through recent times and with possible remnants of glacier ice near its base, had been hiding near Mars’ equator in plain sight
SETI INSTITUTE
IMAGE:
FIGURE 1: A GIANT VOLCANO HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT IN ONE OF MARS’ MOST ICONIC REGIONS. THENEWLY DISCOVERED GIANT VOLCANO ON MARS IS LOCATED JUST SOUTH OF THE PLANET’S EQUATOR, IN EASTERN NOCTIS LABYRINTHUS, WEST OF VALLES MARINERIS, THE PLANET’S VAST CANYON SYSTEM. THE VOLCANO SITS ON THE EASTERN EDGE OF A BROAD REGIONAL TOPOGRAPHIC RISE CALLED THARSIS, HOME TO THREE OTHER WELL-KNOWN GIANT VOLCANOES: ASCRAEUS MONS, PAVONIS MONS, AND ARSIA MONS. ALTHOUGH MORE ERODED AND LESS HIGH THAN THESE GIANTS, THE NEWLY DISCOVERED VOLCANO RIVALS THE OTHERS IN DIAMETER, WHICH IS ABOUT 450 KM (280 MILES) (RED DASHED CIRCLE IN THIS PICTURE). POSSIBLE BURIED GLACIER ICE IS ALSO REPORTED UNDER A RELATIVELY RECENT VOLCANIC DEPOSIT WITHIN THE PERIMETER OF THE ERODED VOLCANO, MAKING THE AREA ATTRACTIVE FOR THE SEARCH FOR LIFE AND FUTURE ROBOTIC AND HUMAN EXPLORATION.
CREDIT: BACKGROUND IMAGE: NASA/USGS MARS GLOBE. GEOLOGIC INTERPRETATION AND ANNOTATIONS BY PASCAL LEE AND SOURABH SHUBHAM 2024
March 13, 2024, Mountain View, California – In a groundbreaking announcement at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held in The Woodlands, Texas, scientists revealed the discovery of a giant volcano and possible sheet of buried glacier ice in the eastern part of Mars’ Tharsis volcanic province, near the planet’s equator. Imaged repeatedly by orbiting spacecraft around Mars since Mariner 9 in 1971 - but deeply eroded beyond easy recognition, the giant volcano had been hiding in plain sight for decades in one of Mars’ most iconic regions, at the boundary between the heavily fractured maze-like Noctis Labyrinthus (Labyrinth of the Night) and the monumental canyons of Valles Marineris (Valleys of Mariner) (Fig. 1).
Provisionally designated “Noctis volcano” pending an official name, the structure is centered at 7° 35' S, 93° 55' W. It reaches +9022 meters (29,600 feet) in elevation and spans 450 kilometers (280 miles) in width. The volcano’s gigantic size and complex modification history indicate that it has been active for a very long time. In its southeastern part lies a thin, recent volcanic deposit beneath which glacier ice is likely still present. This combined giant volcano and possible glacier ice discovery is significant, as it points to an exciting new location to study Mars’ geologic evolution through time, search for life, and explore with robots and humans in the future (Fig.2).
“We were examining the geology of an area where we had found the remains of a glacier last year when we realized we were inside a huge and deeply eroded volcano,” said Dr. Pascal Lee, planetary scientist with the SETI Institute and the Mars Institute based at NASA Ames Research Center, and the lead author of the study.
Several clues, taken together, give away the volcanic nature of the jumble of layered mesas and canyons in this eastern part of Noctis Labyrinthus. The central summit area is marked by several elevated mesas forming an arc, reaching a regional high and sloping downhill away from the summit area. The gentle outer slopes extend out to 225 kilometers (140 miles) away in different directions. A caldera remnant – the remains of a collapsed volcanic crater once host to a lava lake – can be seen near the center of the structure. Lava flows, pyroclastic deposits (made of volcanic particulate materials such as ash, cinders, pumice and tephra) and hydrated mineral deposits occur in several areas within the structure’s perimeter (Figs. 3, 4 and 5).
“This area of Mars is known to have a wide variety of hydrated minerals spanning a long stretch of Martian history. A volcanic setting for these minerals had long been suspected. So, it may not be too surprising to find a volcano here,” explained Sourabh Shubham, a graduate student at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology and the study’s co-author. “In some sense, this large volcano is a long-sought ‘smoking gun’”.
In addition to the volcano, the study reports the discovery of a large, 5000 square kilometer (1930 square mile) area of volcanic deposits within the volcano’s perimeter presenting a large number of low, rounded and elongated, blister-like mounds. This “blistered terrain” is interpreted to be a field of “rootless cones,” mounds produced by explosive steam venting or steam swelling when a thin blanket of hot volcanic materials comes to rest on top of a water or ice-rich surface (Figs. 3 and 6).
Just a year ago, Lee, Shubham and their colleague John W. Schutt had identified the spectacular remains of a glacier - or “relict glacier” - through a sizeable erosional opening in the same volcanic blanket, in the form of a light-toned deposit (LTD) of sulfate salt with the morphologic traits of a glacier. The sulfate deposit, made mainly of jarosite, a hydrous sulfate, was interpreted to have formed when the blanket of volcanic pyroclastic materials came to rest on a glacier and reacted chemically with the ice. Breached rootless cones identified in the current study show similar occurrences of polyhydrated sulfates, further suggesting the blistered volcanic blanket may be hiding a vast sheet of glacier ice underneath it (Fig. 6).
The Noctis volcano presents a long and complex history of modification, possibly from a combination of fracturing, thermal erosion, and glacial erosion. Researchers interpret the volcano to be a vast shield made of layered accumulations of pyroclastic materials, lavas, and ice, the latter resulting from repeated buildups of snow and glaciers on its flanks through time. As fractures and faults eventually developed, in particular in connection with the uplift of the broader Tharsis region on which the volcano sits, lavas began to rise through different parts of the volcano, leading to thermal erosion and removal of vast amounts of buried ice and the catastrophic collapse of entire sections of the volcano.
Subsequent glaciations continued their erosion, giving many canyons within the structure their present distinctive shape. In this context the “relict glacier” and the possible buried sheet of glacier ice around it, might be remnants of the latest glaciation episode affecting the Noctis volcano.
But much about the newly discovered giant volcano remains a mystery. Although it is clear that it has been active for a long time and began to build up early in Mars’ history, it is unknown how early exactly. Similarly, although it has experienced eruptions even in modern times, it is unknown if it is still volcanically active and might erupt again. And if it has been active for a very long time, could the combination of sustained warmth and water from ice have allowed the site to harbor life?
As mysteries surrounding the Noctis volcano continue to puzzle scientists, the site is already emerging as an exciting new location to study Mars’ geologic evolution, search for life, and plan future robotic and human exploration. The possible presence of glacier ice at shallow depths near the equator means that humans could potentially explore a less frigid part of the planet while still being able to extract water for hydration and manufacturing rocket fuel (by breaking down H2O into hydrogen and oxygen).
“It’s really a combination of things that makes the Noctis volcano site exceptionally exciting. It’s an ancient and long-lived volcano so deeply eroded that you could hike, drive, or fly through it to examine, sample, and date different parts of its interior to study Mars’ evolution through time. It has also had a long history of heat interacting with water and ice, which makes it a prime location for astrobiology and our search for signs of life. Finally, with glacier ice likely still preserved near the surface in a relatively warm equatorial region on Mars, the place is looking very attractive for robotic and human exploration,” said Lee.
This study was conducted using data from NASA’s Mariner 9, Viking Orbiter 1 and 2, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter missions, as well as ESA’s Mars Express mission. Special appreciation is expressed to their instrument teams for acquiring the various datasets used in this study. Use of the open NASA Planetary Data System, Mars Quickmap, Mars Trek, and Google Mars online data visualization tools was also key in enabling the study.
About the SETI Institute Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute is a non-profit, multidisciplinary research and education organization whose mission is to lead humanity’s quest to understand the origins and prevalence of life and intelligence in the universe and share that knowledge with the world. Research at the SETI Institute encompasses the physical and biological sciences and leverages expertise in data analytics, machine learning and advanced signal detection technologies. The SETI Institute is a distinguished research partner for industry, academia and government agencies, including NASA and NSF.
About Mars Institute The Mars Institute is a non-profit research organization dedicated to the advancement of Mars science, exploration, and the public understanding of Mars. Research at the Mars Institute focuses Mars and other planetary destinations that may serve as stepping-stones to Mars, in particular Mars’ moons, our Moon, and near-Earth objects. The Mars Institute investigates the technologies and strategies that will enable and optimize the future human exploration of Mars. The Mars Institute operates the Haughton-Mars Project Research Station on Devon Island, High Arctic.
Figure 2. Newly discovered giant volcano is located in the “middle of the action” on Mars. Topographic map showing the iconic location of the Noctis volcano between the largest volcanic and canyon provinces on Mars.
CREDIT
Background image: NASA Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) digital elevation model. Geologic interpretation & annotations by Pascal Lee and Sourabh Shubham 2024
Figure 3: Topographic map of the Noctis volcano. The Noctis volcano does not present the conventional cone shape of a typical volcano because a long history of deep fracturing and erosion has modified it. However, upon close inspection, key features indicative of a volcano are recognizable. Within the “inner zone” delineating the highest elevation remains of the volcano, an arc of high mesas marks the central summit area, culminating at +9022 m (29,600 ft). Preserved portions of the volcano’s flanks extend downhill in different directions to the outer edge of the “outer zone,” 225 km (140 miles) away from the summit area. A caldera remnant – the remains of a collapsed volcanic crater once host to a lava lake – can be seen near the center of the structure. Lava flows, pyroclastic deposits (made of volcanic particulate materials such as ash, cinders, pumice and tephra) and hydrothermal mineral deposits occur in several areas within the perimeter of the volcanic structure. The map also shows the rootless cone field and possible extent of shallow buried glacier ice reported in this study, in relation to the “relict glacier” discovered in 2023. Noctis Landing, a candidate landing site for future robotic and human exploration, is also shown.
CREDIT
Background images: NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) Context Camera (CTX) mosaic and Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) digital elevation model. Geologic interpretation & annotations by Pascal Lee & Sourabh Shubham 2024
Figure 4: Detailed Mars data analysis revealed the Noctis volcano. Detailed analysis of the altimetry of the region using NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) data, in combination with high resolution imaging data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and Context Imager (CTX), and from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express (MEX) High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) enabled the discovery of the Noctis volcano. In addition to the volcano’s summit, caldera remnant, and inner and outer zones, the topographic map on the right shows the “relict glacier” discovered in 2023 and Noctis Landing, a candidate landing site for future robotic and human exploration.
Figure 5: Noctis volcano in 3D. Anaglyph image showing portions of the Noctis volcano’s 250 km (155 mile) diameter inner zone of high elevation remains, and 450 km (280 mile) diameter outer zone of other remains associated with the volcano. In addition to the volcano’s summit, caldera remnant, and inner and outer zones, this 3D map shows the “relict glacier” discovered in 2023 and Noctis Landing, a candidate landing site for future robotic and human exploration.
Figure 6: Possible buried glacier ice near the base of the Noctis volcano. A well-preserved volcanic lava flow and pyroclastic deposit in the southeastern part of the Noctis volcano suggest that the volcano remained active even in relatively recent times. The pyroclastic deposit presents “blisters” at its surface, interpreted as “rootless cones” or steam vents produced when the hot pyroclastic materials came in contact with H2O ice. Breaches in the pyroclastic deposit reveal light-toned deposits (LTDs) of sulfate salts, expected products of chemical reactions between pyroclastic materials and H2O ice. The largest LTD of sulfates in this area had already been described as a “relict glacier,” as it presents a wide range of morphologic traits specific to glaciers, suggesting that glacier ice might still be preserved, only protected under a thin layer of sulfate salts. By extension, the rootless cones and other sulfate deposits in this area may be blanketing even more glacier ice.
CREDIT
Background images: NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), Context Imager (CTX), and Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM). Geologic interpretation and annotations by Pascal Lee and Sourabh Shubham 2024
Cheers! NASA’s Webb finds ethanol, other icy ingredients for worlds
THIS IMAGE AT A WAVELENGTH OF 15 MICRONS WAS TAKEN BY MIRI (THE MID-INFRARED INSTRUMENT) ON NASA’S JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE, OF A REGION NEAR THE PROTOSTAR KNOWN AS IRAS 23385. IRAS 23385 AND IRAS 2A (NOT VISIBLE IN THIS IMAGE) WERE TARGETS FOR A RECENT RESEARCH EFFORT BY AN INTERNATIONAL TEAM OF ASTRONOMERS THAT USED WEBB TO DISCOVER THAT THE KEY INGREDIENTS FOR MAKING POTENTIALLY HABITABLE WORLDS ARE PRESENT IN EARLY-STAGE PROTOSTARS, WHERE PLANETS HAVE NOT YET FORMED.
CREDIT: NASA, ESA, CSA, W. ROCHA (LEIDEN UNIVERSITY)
What do margaritas, vinegar, and ant stings have in common? They contain chemical ingredients that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has identified surrounding two young protostars known as IRAS 2A and IRAS 23385. Although planets are not yet forming around those stars, these and other molecules detected there by Webb represent key ingredients for making potentially habitable worlds.
An international team of astronomers used Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) to identify a variety of icy compounds made up of complex organic molecules like ethanol (alcohol) and likely acetic acid (an ingredient in vinegar). This work builds on previous Webb detections of diverse ices in a cold, dark molecular cloud.
What is the origin of complex organic molecules (COMs) ?
“This finding contributes to one of the long-standing questions in astrochemistry,” said team leader Will Rocha of Leiden University in the Netherlands. “What is the origin of complex organic molecules, or COMs, in space? Are they made in the gas phase or in ices? The detection of COMs in ices suggests that solid-phase chemical reactions on the surfaces of cold dust grains can build complex kinds of molecules.”
As several COMs, including those detected in the solid phase in this research, were previously detected in the warm gas phase, it is now believed that they originate from the sublimation of ices. Sublimation is to change directly from a solid to a gas without becoming a liquid. Therefore, detecting COMs in ices makes astronomers hopeful about improved understanding of the origins of other, even larger molecules in space.
Scientists are also keen to explore to what extent these COMs are transported to planets at much later stages of protostellar evolution. COMs in cold ices are thought to be easier to transport from molecular clouds to planet-forming disks than warm, gaseous molecules. These icy COMs can therefore be incorporated into comets and asteroids, which in turn may collide with forming planets, delivering the ingredients for life to possibly flourish.
The science team also detected simpler molecules, including formic acid (which causes the burning sensation of an ant sting), methane, formaldehyde, and sulfur dioxide. Research suggests that sulfur-containing compounds like sulfur dioxide played an important role in driving metabolic reactions on the primitive Earth.
Similar to the early stages of our own solar system?
Of particular interest is that one of the sources investigated, IRAS 2A, is characterized as a low-mass protostar. IRAS 2A may therefore be similar to the early stages of our own solar system. As such, the chemicals identified around this protostar were likely present in the first stages of development of our solar system and later delivered to the primitive Earth.
“All of these molecules can become part of comets and asteroids and eventually new planetary systems when the icy material is transported inward to the planet-forming disk as the protostellar system evolves,” said Ewine van Dishoeck of Leiden University, one of the coordinators of the science program. “We look forward to following this astrochemical trail step-by-step with more Webb data in the coming years.”
These observations were made for the JOYS+ (James Webb Observations of Young ProtoStars) program. The team dedicated these results to team member Harold Linnartz, who unexpectedly passed away in December 2023, shortly after the acceptance of this paper.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) has identified a variety of complex organic molecules that are present in interstellar ices surrounding two protostars. These molecules, which are key ingredients for making potentially habitable worlds, include ethanol, formic acid, methane, and likely acetic acid, in the solid phase. The finding came from the study of two protostars, IRAS 2A and IRAS 23385, both of which are so young that they are not yet forming planets.
CREDIT
Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, L. Hustak (STScI). Science: W. Rocha (Leiden University).
JWST Observations of Young protoStars (JOYS+): Detecting icy complex organic molecules and ions
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
13-Mar-2024
Study brings scientists a step closer to successfully growing plants in space
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, NEWS BUREAU
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RESEARCH LED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGN USES POLYMER-BASED STRETCHABLE ELECTRODES TO REMOTELY MONITOR PLANT GROWTH, BRINGING SCIENTISTS A STEP CLOSER TO GROWING PLANTS IN SPACE TO FEED ASTRONAUTS DURING LONG MISSIONS.
New, highly stretchable sensors can monitor and transmit plant growth information without human intervention, report University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers in the journal Device.
The polymer sensors are resilient to humidity and temperature, can stretch over 400% while remaining attached to a plant as it grows and send a wireless signal to a remote monitoring location, said chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Ying Diao, who led the study with plant biology professor and department head Andrew Leakey.
The study details some of the early results of a NASA grant awarded to Diao to investigate how wearable printed electronics will be used to make farming possible in space.
“This work is motivated by the needs of astronauts to grow vegetables sustainably while they are on long missions,” she said.
Diao’s team approached this project using an Earth-based laboratory to create a highly dependable, stretchable electronic device – and its development did not come easily, she said.
“Honestly, we began this work thinking that this task would only take a few months to perfect. However, we quickly realized that our polymer was too rigid,” said Siqing Wang, a graduate student and first author of the study. “We had to reformulate a lot of the components to make them more soft and stretchable and adjust our printing method to control the assembly of the microstructures inside the device so that they did not form large crystals during the printing and curing process.”
The team landed on a very thin film device that helps restrain the crystal growth during assembly and printing.
“After addressing the stretchability and assembly issues, we had to tackle the problems that come with working with wearable electronics in high humidity and under rapid growth rates,” Wang said. “We needed reproducible results so we could not have the sensors fall off or electronically fail during the growth experiments. We finally came up with a seamless electrode and interface that was not affected by the demanding conditions.”
The ‘Stretchable-Polymer-Electronics-based Autonomous Remote Strain Sensor,’ or SPEARS2 – is the product of three years of hard work, proving that applied science rarely experiences eureka moments.
“It is an exciting technical advance in our ability to perform precise, noninvasive measurements of plant growth in real-time. I look forward to seeing how it can complement the latest tools for interrogating genomic and cellular processes,” Leakey said.
Diao also said she is excited to uncover all of the ways this research will continue to progress.
For example, this study looks at plants like corn that grow primarily upward. However, the researchers plan to advance their electronics printing methodology to create a system that can monitor upward and outward growth.
The team said they are also working toward the ability to sense and monitor chemical processes remotely.
“I think the wearable electronics research community has ignored plants for too long,” Diao said. “We know that they are experiencing a lot of stress during climate adaptation, and I think soft electronics can play a bigger role in advancing our understanding so we can ensure that plants are healthy, happy and sustainable in the future – whether that is in space, on other planets or right here on Earth.”
The paper “Highly stretchable, robust and resilient wearable electronics for remote, autonomous plant growth monitoring” is available online. DOI:10.1016/j.device.2024.100322
Highly stretchable, robust and resilient wearable electronics for remote, autonomous plant growth monitoring
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
13-Mar-2024
Do astronauts experience “space headaches”?
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF NEUROLOGY
MINNEAPOLIS – Space travel and zero gravity can take a toll on the body. A new study has found that astronauts with no prior history of headaches may experience migraine and tension-type headaches during long-haul space flight, which includes more than 10 days in space. The study was published in the March 13, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
“Changes in gravity caused by space flight affect the function of many parts of the body, including the brain,” said study author W. P. J. van Oosterhout, MD, PhD, of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “The vestibular system, which affects balance and posture, has to adapt to the conflict between the signals it is expecting to receive and the actual signals it receives in the absence of normal gravity. This can lead to space motion sickness in the first week, of which headache is the most frequently reported symptom. Our study shows that headaches also occur later in space flight and could be related to an increase in pressure within the skull.”
The study involved 24 astronauts from the European Space Agency, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. They were assigned to International Space Station expeditions for up to 26 weeks from November 2011 to June 2018.
Prior to the study, nine astronauts reported never having any headaches and three had a headache that interfered with daily activities in the last year. None of them had a history of recurrent headaches or had ever been diagnosed with migraine.
Of the total participants, 22 astronauts experienced one or more episode of headache during a total of 3,596 days in space for all participants.
Astronauts completed health screenings and a questionnaire about their headache history before the flight. During space flight, astronauts filled out a daily questionnaire for the first seven days and a weekly questionnaire each following week throughout their stay in the space station.
The astronauts reported 378 headaches in flight.
Researchers found that 92% of astronauts experienced headaches during flight compared to just 38% of them experiencing headaches prior to flight.
Of the total headaches, 170, or 90%, were tension-type headache and 19, or 10%, were migraine.
Researchers also found that headaches were of a higher intensity and more likely to be migraine-like during the first week of space flight. During this time, 21 astronauts had one or more headaches for a total of 51 headaches. Of the 51 headaches, 39 were considered tension-type headaches and 12 were migraine-like or probable migraine.
In the three months after return to Earth, none of the astronauts reported any headaches.
“Further research is needed to unravel the underlying causes of space headache and explore how such discoveries may provide insights into headaches occurring on Earth,” said Van Oosterhout. “Also, more effective therapies need to be developed to combat space headaches as for many astronauts this a major problem during space flights.”
This research does not prove that going into space causes headaches; it only shows an association.
A limitation of the study was that astronauts reported their own symptoms, so they may not have remembered all the information accurately.
The study was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
Learn more about headaches at BrainandLife.org, home of the American Academy of Neurology’s free patient and caregiver magazine focused on the intersection of neurologic disease and brain health. Follow Brain & Life® on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
When posting to social media channels about this research, we encourage you to use the hashtags #Neurology and #AANscience.
The American Academy of Neurology is the world’s largest association of neurologists and neuroscience professionals, with over 40,000 members. The AAN is dedicated to promoting the highest quality patient-centered neurologic care. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, migraine, multiple sclerosis, concussion, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.
It looks like the same mechanism that breaks up airplane contrails might be at play in forming the clumps of hydrogen gas that ring the remnant of supernova 1987A
Physicists often turn to the Rayleigh-Taylor instability to explain why fluid structures form in plasmas, but that may not be the full story when it comes to the ring of hydrogen clumps around supernova 1987A, research from the University of Michigan suggests.
In a study published in Physical Review Letters, the team argues that the Crow instability does a better job of explaining the "string of pearls" encircling the remnant of the star, shedding light on a longstanding astrophysical mystery.
"The fascinating part about this is that the same mechanism that breaks up airplane wakes could be in play here," said Michael Wadas, corresponding author of the study and a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the time of the work.
In jet contrails, the Crow instability creates breaks in the smooth line of clouds because of the spiraling airflow coming off the end of each wing, known as wingtip vortices. These vortices flow into one another, creating gaps—something we can see because of the water vapor in the exhaust. And the Crow instability can do something that Rayleigh-Taylor could not: predict the number of clumps seen around the remnant.
"The Rayleigh-Taylor instability could tell you that there might be clumps, but it would be very difficult to pull a number out of it," said Wadas, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology.
Supernova 1987A is among the most famous stellar explosions because it's relatively close to Earth at 163,000 light years away, and its light reached Earth at a time when sophisticated observatories existed to witness its evolution. It is the first supernova visible to the naked eye since Kepler's supernova in 1604, making it an incredibly rare astrophysical event that has played an outsized role in shaping our understanding of stellar evolution.
While much is still unknown about the star that exploded, it is believed that the ring of gas surrounding the star ahead of the explosion came from the merger of two stars. Those stars shed hydrogen into the space around them as they became a blue giant tens of thousands of years before the supernova. That ring-shaped cloud of gas was then buffeted by the stream of high-speed charged particles coming off the blue giant, known as a stellar wind. The clumps are believed to have formed before the star exploded.
The researchers simulated the way the wind pushed the cloud outward while also dragging on the surface, with the top and bottom of the cloud being pushed out faster than the middle. This caused the cloud to curl in on itself, which triggered the Crow instability and caused it to break apart into fairly even clumps that became the string of pearls. The prediction of 32 is very close to the observed 30 to 40 clumps around the supernova 1987A remnant.
"That's a big piece of why we think this is the Crow instability," said Eric Johnsen, U-M professor of mechanical engineering and senior author of the study.
The team saw hints that the Crow instability might predict the formation of more beaded rings around the star, further out from the ring that appears brightest in telescope images. They were pleased to see that more clumps seem to appear in the shot from the James Webb Space Telescope's near-infrared camera, released in August last year, Wadas explained.
The team also suggested that the Crow instability might be at play when the dust around a star settles into planets, although further research is needed to explore this possibility.
The study was supported by the Department of Energy, with computing resources provided by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment
Co-authors of the study are: William White and Aaron Towne, a graduate student and an assistant professor in mechanical engineering, respectively; and Heath LeFevre and Carolyn Kuranz, a research fellow and an associate professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, respectively; all at U-M.
AI for astrophysics: Algorithms help chart the origins of heavy elements
Machine learning predictions successfully model atomic masses of nuclide chart
DOE/LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
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A LOS ALAMOS SIMULATION OF AN ACCRETION DISK AFTER THE COLLISION OF TWO NEUTRON STARS. THIS EVENT GENERATES BOTH LIGHT (BLUE) AND HEAVY (RED) ELEMENTS.
The origin of heavy elements in our universe is theorized to be the result of neutron star collisions, which produce conditions hot and dense enough for free neutrons to merge with atomic nuclei and form new elements in a split-second window of time. Testing this theory and answering other astrophysical questions requires predictions for a vast range of masses of atomic nuclei. Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists are front and center in using machine learning algorithms (an application of artificial intelligence) to successfully model the atomic masses of the entire nuclide chart — the combination of all possible protons and neutrons that defines elements and their isotopes.
“Many thousands of atomic nuclei that have yet to be measured may exist in nature,” said Matthew Mumpower, a theoretical physicist and co-author on several recent papers detailing atomic masses research. “Machine learning algorithms are very powerful, as they can find complex correlations in data, a result that theoretical nuclear physics models struggle to efficiently produce. These correlations can provide information to scientists about ‘missing physics’ and can in turn be used to strengthen modern nuclear models of atomic masses.”
Simulating the rapid neutron-capture process
Most recently, Mumpower and his colleagues, including former Los Alamos summer student Mengke Li and postdoc Trevor Sprouse, authored a paper in Physics Letters B that described simulating an important astrophysical process with a physics-based machine learning mass model. The r process, or rapid neutron-capture process, is the astrophysical process that occurs in extreme environments, like those produced by neutron star collisions. Heavy elements may result from this “nucleosynthesis”; in fact, half of the heavy isotopes up to bismuth and all of thorium and uranium in the universe may have been created by the r process.
But modeling the r process requires theoretical predictions of atomic masses currently beyond experimental reach. The team’s physics-informed machine-learning approach trains a model based on random selection from the Atomic Mass Evaluation, a large database of masses. Next the researchers use these predicted masses to simulate the r process. The model allowed the team to simulate r-process nucleosynthesis with machine-learned mass predictions for the first time — a significant feat, as machine learning predictions generally break down when extrapolating.
“We’ve shown that machine learning atomic masses can open the door to predictions beyond where we have experimental data,” Mumpower said. “The critical piece is that we tell the model to obey the laws of physics. By doing so, we enable physics-based extrapolations. Our results are on par with or outperform contemporary theoretical models and can be immediately updated when new data is available.”
Investigating nuclear structures
The r-process simulations complement the research team’s application of machine learning to related investigations of nuclear structure. In a recent article in Physical Review C selected as an Editor’s Suggestion, the team used machine learning algorithms to reproduce nuclear binding energies with quantified uncertainties; that is, they were able to ascertain the energy needed to separate an atomic nucleus into protons and neutrons, along with an associated error bar for each prediction. The algorithm thus provides information that would otherwise take significant computational time and resources to obtain from current nuclear modeling.
In related work, the team used their machine learning model to combine precision experimental data with theoretical knowledge. These results have motivated some of the first experimental campaigns at the new Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, which seeks to expand the known region of the nuclear chart and uncover the origin of the heavy elements.
Papers: “Atomic masses with machine learning for the astrophysical r process,” Physics Letters B. DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2023.138385
“Bayesian averaging for ground state masses of atomic nuclei in a Machine Learning approach,” Frontiers in Physics. DOI: 10.3389/fphy.2023.1198572
“Physically interpretable machine learning for nuclear masses,” Physical Review C. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.106.L021301
“Nuclear masses learned from a probabilistic neural network,” Physical Review C. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.106.014305
Funding: This work was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at Los Alamos and by the NASA Emerging Worlds program.
Atomic masses with machine learning for the astrophysical r process
SwRI receives $2 million NASA grant to develop lunar-regolith-measuring instrument
SPARCI instrument to make the first measurements of
the Moon’s megaregolith
SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE
IMAGE:
THE SYNTHETIC PULSE ARTEMIS RADAR FOR CRUSTAL IMAGING (SPARCI, PRONOUNCED “SPARKY”) IS DESIGNED TO MEASURE THE DEPTH AND STRUCTURE OF THE LUNAR REGOLITH. SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE HAS RECEIVED A $2 MILLION GRANT FROM NASA’S DEVELOPMENT AND ADVANCEMENT OF LUNAR INSTRUMENTATION (DALI) PROGRAM TO DEVELOP THE NOVEL GROUND-PENETRATING RADAR INSTRUMENT. THIS IMAGE SHOWS THE SPARCI RECEIVER PROTOTYPE IN OPERATION ON A LUNAR ANALOG ON EARTH.
SAN ANTONIO — March 13, 2024 —Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has been awarded a three-year, $2,041,000 grant from NASA’s Development and Advancement of Lunar Instrumentation (DALI) program to further develop a novel ground-penetrating radar instrument. The Synthetic Pulse Artemis Radar for Crustal Imaging (SPARCI, pronounced “sparky”) instrument is designed to characterize the depth of the regolith and upper megaregolith, the upper broken-up layers of lunar crust associated with impact cratering.
SwRI is one of five teams awarded funding by NASA’s DALI program, which supports the development of instruments for future lunar missions, including Commercial Lunar Payload Services and Artemis. DALI’s goal is to develop and demonstrate instruments that are technically ready to propose for upcoming flight opportunities. These instruments must demonstrate new technologies that significantly improve instrument measurement capabilities for addressing high-priority lunar science questions.
When astronauts return to the Moon during the second half of this decade their tasks will include deploying lunar instruments and using new technology to characterize the Moon. SPARCI’s two large transmitting antennas that are 172 and 40 meters in length are designed to be deployed by astronauts. A robotic rover with much smaller antennas will then receive radar signals that penetrate the Moon’s subsurface. The ground-penetrating radar will measure the thickness and structure of the lunar megaregolith. Believed to be between 0.4 and 5 kilometers deep, the megaregolith formed just after the Moon solidified and likely experienced heavy bombardment from other objects during the early formation of the solar system.
“Learning more about the lunar megaregolith will help us gain a wider understanding of the Moon’s formation and that of similar bodies with thin, sparse atmospheres,” said SwRI’s Dr. David Stillman, the project’s principal investigator. “If we are able to pinpoint exactly where this layer begins, we can use that to create more accurate formation and evolution models.”
SPARCI’s design was inspired by Apollo 17’s Surface Electrical Properties (SEP) experiment, which collected subsurface data on the Moon while attached to the Lunar Roving Vehicle. Like SEP, SPARCI uses two stationary transmitting antennas and a mobile receiver but attached to a robotic rover instead of an astronaut-driven vehicle.
“SPARCI uses much wider bandwidth and electronics that are 50 years more advanced than the SEP, enabling both deeper and higher-resolution imaging,” Stillman said. “SPARCI will determine the thickness and density of the overall regolith, measuring the structure of the upper megaregolith and the depth of the lower regolith. This information will help advance understanding of impact processes on the Moon and other bodies that don’t have significant atmospheres. If we can pinpoint exactly where this layer below the landing site, we can use other global datasets to better constrain the structure of the megaregolith globally.”
