Live-cell pig skin successfully used to treat human burn wound – New Atlas

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When someone has a severe burn, a protective covering needs to be temporarily grafted onto the wound site and as soon as possible. Although that covering typically consists of skin from a human cadaver, genetically-engineered live-cell pig skin has now been used on a patient for the first time.

Applied to second- and third-degree burns, sheets of human cadaveric skin also known as allografts initially help to protect wounds against infection and fluid loss, along with the potentially-lethal complications that could follow. Once the recipient has stabilized, the allograft is removed and a piece of the patient's own skin is permanently transplanted onto the wound, from another part of their body.

Unfortunately, though, allografts are often in short supply, plus they can be expensive. With that in mind, scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) developed a genetically-modified line of pigs, back in the 1990s. Those animals lack a gene that is ordinarily present in pigs but not in humans, allowing skin grafts from the pigs to appear less "foreign" to a human patient's immune system.

The technology has since been commercialized by spinoff company XenoTherapeutics, in the form of live-cell tissue grafts known as Xeno-Skin. In a recent clinical trial, MGH surgeon Jeremy Goverman used one of those "xenografts" on a human recipient for the first time.

Measuring 5 by 5 cm (2 by 2 inches), the Xeno-Skin was applied to a burn alongside a larger conventional allograft. Both were secured in place using surgical staples and gauze bandages, and then removed five days later. At that point, the two coverings were found to be "indistinguishable from each other" in appearance, having performed equally well at protecting the underlying wound by temporarily adhering to it as the patient stabilized.

A skin graft from the recipient's own thigh was then permanently applied to the wound, with healing now progressing as anticipated. Importantly, the scientists detected no transmission of porcine endogenous retroviruses, the risk of which has previously limited the viability of transplanting live tissue or organs from pigs to humans.

"This small step we took today, represents a massive number of hours spanning decades of research in a multitude of fields including transplantation biology, immunology and genetic engineering," says Goverman. "Additionally, rapid advancements in gene-editing technology open a vast new avenue for genetically modifying pig skin that isnt rejected, representing the next chapter in standards of care for burn and transplant patients alike."

Sources: Massachusetts General Hospital, XenoTherapeutics

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Live-cell pig skin successfully used to treat human burn wound - New Atlas

Three-day conference on biotechnology begins – The News International

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Three-day conference on biotechnology begins

PESHAWAR: The first three-day international conference organised by the Department of Biotechnology, Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan (Awkum), began at Allama Iqbal Open University Islamabad on Wednesday.

According to a press release, the event is meant to discuss the recent advances in the field of biotechnology.

Dr Masoom Yasinzai, Rector, International Islamic University, was the chief guest, accompanied by Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan Vice-Chancellor Prof Dr Khurshid Khan.

Agriculture University Peshawar Vice-Chancellor Prof Dr Bakht Jahan, Dean of Life Sciences Prof Dr Sultan Ayaz, head of Botany Department Prof Dr Humayun, Prof Dr Raham Sher Khan, Associate Prof and HOD of Biotechnology Dr Ayaz Associate Professor Dr Nazifullah Khattak, Dr Amjad, Dr Mubarak Ali Khan, Dr Ziaul Islam and a number of students were present.

Dr Masoom Yasinzai spoke about the rapid development of the biotechnology and genetic engineering tools and how the research changed the trends not only in the agriculture and the economy but also the changes within the science itself.

We have to work hard to practically implement this technology and get revolutionary benefits, he added.

Dr Nazifullah Khattak, the chief organiser of the conference, said that the conference would present 213 research papers from 58 countries, both domestic and foreign.

In the end, Prof Dr Khurshid Khan said that the most encouraging results of the international conference would directly benefit the students, researchers, academicians and society. He also distributed shields of appreciation to the chief guest and others.

Declamation contest on child marriages held

A non-governmental organisation, Blue Veins, organised a declamation contest on child marriages at the Peshawar Press Club on Wednesday.

The programme coordinator, Qamar Naseem, District Education Officer Irshad, Fida Jan, Taimur Kamal and members from the civil society attended the function, besides students from various colleges.

Speaking on the occasion, Qamar Naseem said that underage marriages make life difficult for girls.

He said voice had been raised against child marriages on each forum and now it was likely to be banned after proper legislation.

Later, prizes and certificates were distributed among the first, second and third position-holders of the contest.

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Three-day conference on biotechnology begins - The News International

The Sky This Week from October 11 to 20 – Astronomy Magazine

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Sunday, October 13Full Moon officially arrives at 5:08 p.m. EDT, but it will look completely illuminated all night. You can find it rising in the east shortly after sunset and peaking high in the south around 1 a.m. local daylight time. It dips low in the west by the time morning twilight starts to paint the sky. The Moon lies in southeastern Pisces near that constellations border with Cetus. Octobers Full Moon also goes by the name Hunters Moon. In early autumn, the Full Moon rises about half an hour later each night compared with a normal lag close to 50 minutes. The added early evening illumination supposedly helps hunters track down their prey.

Monday, October 14Although autumn began three weeks ago and the stars of winters Orion now rule the morning sky, the Summer Triangle remains prominent on October evenings. Look high in the west after darkness falls and your eyes will fall on the brilliant star Vega in the constellation Lyra the Harp. At magnitude 0.0, Vega is the brightest member of the triangle. The second-brightest star, magnitude 0.8 Altair in Aquila the Eagle, lies some 35 southeast of Vega. The asterisms dimmest member, magnitude 1.3 Deneb in Cygnus the Swan, stands about 25 east-northeast of Vega. For observers at mid-northern latitudes, Deneb passes through the zenith around 8 p.m. local daylight time, just as the last vestiges of twilight disappear.

Tuesday, October 15After a three-month hiatus lost in the Suns glare, Venus returns to view after sunset in mid-October. Its not easy to see, however it stands just 2 high in the west-southwest a half-hour after sundown. Luckily, the inner planet shines brilliantly at magnitude 3.8 and should show up if you have a haze-free sky and unobstructed horizon. Despite this pedestrian start to its evening apparition, Venus will be a glorious sight this coming winter and spring.

Wednesday, October 16Uranus reaches opposition in just two weeks, and it is already a tempting evening target. The ice giant world rises during twilight and climbs 30 above the eastern horizon by 9:30 p.m. local daylight time. The magnitude 5.7 planet lurks among the background stars of southern Aries. Use binoculars to find the planet 2.7 south of the similarly bright star 19 Arietis. A telescope reveals Uranus blue-green disk, which spans 3.7". To learn more about viewing Uranus and its outer solar system cousin, Neptune, see Observe the ice giants in Octobers Astronomy.

Thursday, October 17The variable star Algol in Perseus reaches minimum brightness at 5:27 a.m. EDT. If you start watching it late yesterday evening, you can see its brightness diminish by 70 percent (its magnitude drops from 2.1 to 3.4) over the course of about five hours. This eclipsing binary star runs through a cycle from minimum to maximum and back every 2.87 days. Algol appears in the northeast during the evening hours and passes nearly overhead around 2 a.m. local daylight time.

Friday, October 18Saturn remains a glorious sight this week. The ringed planet resides among the background stars of Sagittarius the Archer, a region that appears 25 high in the south-southwest as twilight fades to darkness and doesnt set until close to 11 p.m. local daylight time. Saturn shines at magnitude 0.5 and appears significantly brighter than any of its host constellations stars. Although a naked-eye view of the planet is nice, seeing it through a telescope truly inspires. Even a small instrument shows the distant worlds 16"-diameter disk and spectacular ring system, which spans 37" and tilts 25 to our line of sight.

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The Sky This Week from October 11 to 20 - Astronomy Magazine

Astronomy ed event turns the telescope on Earth – SF State News

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If you could take a tour of our cosmic neighborhood, what would be on your itinerary? The massive geysers of the ice moon Enceladus? A lava channel on Venus longer than the Nile River? What about the 12-mile high Verona Rupes on Uranus moon, Miranda the tallest cliff in the solar system? While these destinations may be out of reach, the astronomers who study them will be near at hand Oct. 18 for the Astronomical Society of the Pacifics Earth to Space event at San Francisco State University.

The days activities are free and open to the public and will feature a talk on the top tourist attractions of the solar system along with other space-focused educational talks and activities. The conference will also highlight the uncertain future of one particular planet: our own.

We want to bring the astronomical perspective to issues of climate change and the Earth, said Professor of Physics and Astronomy Adrienne Cool, an event organizer. Earth is a planet its the only planet were ever going to have, actually.

Cool says astronomers offer unique insight into the urgency of climate change. Astronomers are extremely conscious of the fact that we are a tiny, tiny mote in very empty space, she explains. We deal with that all the time: the extraordinary isolation and vulnerability of this planet that we all live on. Sharing that perspective is one of the ways the Astronomical Society of the Pacific aims to connect people with science at this conference.

Linda Shore, CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and an SF State alumna (B.A., 63; M.S., 86), says she expects the event will help the public see the relevance of astronomy to their everyday lives, encourage scientists to engage with their communities and help science educators expand their own knowledge and improve how they facilitate science learning. Thats always been the mission of the society, Shore explains: bringing together people from all walks of life to celebrate the awe and wonder of the night sky.

To spread that wonder, scientists and environmental policy experts will give talks at the event on topics ranging from the history of lunar exploration to the search for distant planets. Attendees will be able to hunt for sunspots with solar telescopes, experience a planetarium show and visit the Universitys observatory after dark to view planets and galaxies in the sky (weather permitting). Students in SF States Department of Physics and Astronomy will also host Astronomy on Tap, a series of short talks about their own research.

As we face the crisis of climate change in our own little corner of the sky, creating a community of shared wonder may be more important than ever, Cool explains. I think thats my hope for this conference, she said. That it will make us all realize that we have lots in common, lots to talk about and lots we can help each other with.

The conference will be held from 1 to 10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 18, across SF States main campus. For details, see the Astronomical Society of the Pacifics webpage.

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Astronomer L. Ilsedore Cleeves Joins the Ranks of UVA’s Packard Fellows – University of Virginia

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L Ilsedore Cleevess fascination with the origins of the universe began with an elementary school field trip to Sapelo Island, Georgia, where she and her classmates studied the night sky from the beaches of the barrier island. She went on to earn international headlines as a Ph.D. student, when she was the lead author of a 2014 Science journal article that concluded that as much as half of the water present in the solar system is older than the sun itself.

Five years later, the University of Virginia assistant professor of astronomy is considered one of the worlds leading experts in theoretical astrochemistry and its applications to newly forming and formed planets. Her work on the dusty disks around young stars where planet formation takes place has earned her a prestigious Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

Announced this morning by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the program for early-career scientists and engineers offers $875,000 over five years for each of this years 22 fellows to pursue their research.

For Cleeves, who came to the University in 2018 from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where she was a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow, that means advancing our understanding of the molecular and physical origins of planetary systems, including our own. Using clues from interstellar molecular emission, Cleeves and her research group study young planetary systems in formation around low-mass stars. These protoplanetary disks represent the very materials from which planets, comets and other solar system bodies eventually form.

The announcement of Cleevess fellowship comes a week after the announcement of this years Nobel Prize in Physics, which went to James Peebles, an astrophysicist who helped to explain how matter in the young universe swirled into galaxies, and Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, the first astronomers to discover a planet circling around a distant sun-like star, showing that other stars similar to the sun also possess planets.

Given the recent advances in exoplanet [planets beyond our solar system] and planet formation science, its an awesome time to be doing origins research, said Cleeves, who also holds a joint faculty appointment within the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, in the Department of Chemistry.

The Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering are among the nations largest nongovernmental fellowships, designed to allow maximum flexibility in how the funding is used. Since 1988, this program has supported opportunities for young investigators to conduct unencumbered research under the belief that their research over time will lead to new discoveries that improve peoples lives and enhance our understanding of the universe.

Cleeves joins two of her department colleagues as a Packard Fellow and is one of seven at UVA, which joins an elite group of universities with an astronomy department featuring three or more Packard Fellows.

Packard Fellows have gone on to receive a range of accolades, including Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics, the Fields Medal, the Alan T. Waterman Award, MacArthur Fellowships, and elections to national academies. Packard Fellows also gather at annual meetings to discuss their research, where conversations have led to unexpected collaborations across disciplines.

Cleeves joins two of her department colleagues as a Packard Fellow and is one of seven at UVA, which joins an elite group of universities with an astronomy department featuring three or more Packard Fellows.

Craig Sarazin, W.H. Vanderbilt Professor of Astronomy and chair of the Department of Astronomy, said Cleeves has already established herself as a brilliant and productive scientist who is making important contributions to our understanding of astrochemistry and the origin of planets.

Ilses work can help to answer the question: How much is the evolution toward life on planets aided by organic materials delivered to planets as they form, or shortly thereafter? Sarazin said. In just one year at UVA, Ilse has built a very strong group of post-docs, grad students and undergraduates,whom she is mentoring.

Cleeves uses both computer models and observations in her study of the dusty disks around young stars where planet formation happens. Her groups research aims to figure out how the properties of these disks lead to robust planet formation, especially with respect to potentially habitable planets.

While she focuses on the theoretical modeling of these systems, her work is guided by observational results from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array in Chile the largest radio astronomy observatory in the world as well as data from other observatories.

Were really fortunate to be next door to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which maintains a close partnership with the University of Virginia, Cleeves said. Having this expertise nearby has been an incredibly productive relationship. In terms of the molecules we can detect in space, we use radio telescopes to observe and even map them.

But thats just half of the challenge. Even with ALMA, we cant see everything thats going with the discs that are forming planets. So that requires interpreting what we see with ALMA when we measure a certain molecule, and that depends heavily on chemical modeling. We continually need to improve our models, since they are only as good as the information they are based on.

Cleeves also serves on the management committee for the Virginia Initiative on Cosmic Origins, a UVA research initiative hosted by the departments of Astronomy, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Sciences, and Materials Science & Engineering, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Established in 2017 with a grant from the UVA Strategic Investment Fund, VICO is exploring fundamental questions about the formation of galaxies, stars, planets and life in the universe.

Cleeves said our knowledge of exoplanets planets that orbit around other stars beyond the solar system has expanded to the point where they may seem ubiquitous. The challenge remains, however, to understand the diversity in their composition and how they formed.

Were seeing exoplanets with a wide variety of compositions, with water, and carbon, and so where I come into this is wanting to understand how all of this material got there, Cleeves said. Where did all of this diversity in the architectures of these exoplanets come from? Where did their water come from? Is water a common ingredient of forming planets? What is the role of organic material? We want to understand what fundamentally drives the chemistry of planet formation, and eventually, planets.

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Astronomer L. Ilsedore Cleeves Joins the Ranks of UVA's Packard Fellows - University of Virginia

A Second Interstellar Visitor Has Arrived in Our Solar System. This Time, Astronomers Think They Know Where It Came From – Space.com

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For the second time ever, astronomers have detected an interstellar object plunging through our solar system. But this time, researchers think they know where it came from.

Gennady Borisov, an amateur astronomer working with his own telescope in Crimea, first spotted the interstellar comet on Aug. 30. His find made the object the first interstellar visitor discovered since oblong 'Oumuamua flashed through our solar neighborhood back in 2017. Now, in a new paper, a team of Polish researchers has calculated the path this new comet known as Comet 2I/Borisov or (in early descriptions) as C/2019 Q4 took to arrive in our sun's gravity well. And that path leads back to a binary red dwarf star system 13.15 light-years away, known as Kruger 60.

When you rewind Comet Borisov's path through space, you'll find that 1 million years ago, the object passed just 5.7 light-years from the center of Kruger 60, moving just 2.13 miles per second (3.43 kilometers per second), the researchers wrote.

Related: 11 Fascinating Facts About Our Milky Way Galaxy

That's fast in human terms about the top speed of an X-43A Scramjet, one of the fastest aircraft ever built. But an X-43A Scramjet can't overcome the sun's gravity to escape our solar system. And the researchers found that if the comet were really moving that slowly at a distance of no more than 6 light-years from Kruger 60, it probably wasn't just passing by. That's probably the star system it came from, they said. At some point in the distant past, Comet Borisov lively orbited those stars the way comets in our system orbit ours.

Ye Quanzhi, an astronomer and comet expert at the University of Maryland who wasn't involved in this paper, told Live Science that the evidence pinning Comet 2I/Borisov to Kruger 60 is pretty convincing based on the data available so far.

"If you have an interstellar comet and you want to know where it came from, then you want to check two things," he said. "First, has this comet had a small pass distance from a planetary system? Because if it's coming from there, then its trajectory must intersect with the location of that system."

Though the 5.7 light-years between the new comet and Kruger may seem bigger than a "small gap" nearly 357,000 times Earth's distance from the sun it's close enough to count as "small" for these sorts of calculations, he said.

"Second," Ye added, "usually comets are ejected from a planetary system due to gravitational interactions with major planets in that system."

In our solar system, that might look like Jupiter snagging a comet that's falling toward the sun, slingshotting it around in a brief, partial orbit and then flinging it away toward interstellar space.

"This ejection speed has a limit," Ye said. "It can't be infinite because planets have a certain mass," and the mass of a planet determines how hard it can throw a comet into the void. "Jupiter is pretty massive," he added, "but you can't have a planet that's 100 times more massive than Jupiter because then it would be a star."

Related: 15 Amazing Images of Stars

That mass threshold sets an upper limit on the speeds of comets escaping star systems, Ye said. And the authors of this paper showed that Comet 2I/Borisov fell within the minimum speed and distance from Kruger 60 to suggest it originated there assuming their calculations of its trajectory are correct.

Studying interstellar comets is exciting, Ye said, because it offers a rare opportunity to study distant solar systems using the precise tools scientists employ when examining our own. Astronomers can look at Comet 2I/Borisov using telescopes that might reveal details of the comet's surface. They can figure out whether it behaves like comets in our own system (so far, it has) or does anything unusual, like 'Oumuamua famously did. That's a whole category of research that usually isn't possible with distant solar systems, where small objects only ever appear if they're visible at all as faint, discolored shadows on their suns.

This research, Ye said, means that anything we learn about Comet Borisov could be a lesson about Kruger 60, a nearby star system where no exoplanets have been discovered. 'Oumuamua, by contrast, seems to have come from the general direction of the bright star Vega, but according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, researchers don't believe that's where the object originally came from, instead suggesting it likely came from a newly-forming star system (though researchers aren't sure which one).. That would make Comet Borisov the first interstellar object ever traced to its home system, if these results are confirmed.

However, the paper's authors were careful to point out that these results shouldn't yet be considered conclusive. Astronomers are still collecting more data about Comet 2I/Borisov's path through space, and additional data may reveal that the original trajectory was wrong and that the comet came from somewhere else.

The paper tracing the comet's origin has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but it's available on the preprint server arXiv.

Originally published on Live Science.

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The Milky Way’s supermassive black hole erupted with a violent flare – Astronomy Magazine

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Some clues suggest that a flare of energetic radiation burst from our galaxys center within the last few million years. Now, in a new study, a team of researchers describes another piece of evidence that the Milky Way burped out such a flare. The research also points to the supermassive black hole in our galaxys center, called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*, as the responsible party.

The team also estimated when this event occurred. Their data put the outburst at 3.5 million years ago, give or take a million years. That would mean that the Milky Ways center transitioned from an active to a quiet phase pretty recently in Earths history, possibly when early human ancestors were roaming the planet.

The flare would have been visible to the naked eye, shining about 10 times fainter than the Full Moon across a broad spectrum of light wavelengths.

It would look like the cone of light from a movie projector as it passes through a smoky theater, University of Sydney astrophysicist and lead study author Jonathan Bland-Hawthorn said in an email.

The researchers describe their findings in an upcoming paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

This new piece of evidence comes from examining a stream of gas that arcs around the Milky Way. This stream of gas is like a trail that two dwarf galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, leave as they orbit the Milky Way. The research team studied ultraviolet (UV) light coming from this gas trail, called the Magellanic Stream.

The characteristics of the UV light indicate that gases in some sections of the stream are in an excited state. Only a very energetic event, like a beam of radiation from an active galactic nucleus, could have done this, according to Bland-Hawthorn. This means that our own home galaxy had an active galactic nucleus phase in the past.

I think AGN flickering is what goes on for all of cosmic time, Bland-Hawthorn said. All galaxies are doing this, he said, like volcanoes that can lie quietly for long stretches of time but suddenly erupt.

Learning more about the central black hole of our galaxy is an exciting area of research, he added.

I think Sgr A* is the future of astrophysics, like searching for life signatures around planets, Bland-Hawthorn said. I am excited by what we will learn over the next 50 years.

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Student from Pune-based Astronomy Institution Captures Unprecedented Details of Black Hole in a Movie – The Weather Channel

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Image of black hole MAXI J1820+070

John Paice, a student from Pune-based Inter-University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics (IUCAA) as well as the University of Southampton, has created a movie of a growing black hole system with details that were never seen before.

The black hole studied by Paice and his fellow astronomers is named MAXI J1820+070. Discovered in the year 2018, it resides in our own Milky Way galaxy, merely 10,000 light-years away from Earth, and has a mass of seven Suns.

While far from being the biggest black hole around, the interesting thing about MAXI J1820+070 is that it produces flickering electromagnetic radiation.

Southampton University released the artist's impression of the event on the popular video-sharing platform YouTube last Friday. The video has already garnered over one lakh views on the site.

The black hole in the movie is in the process of eating up a star from its binary system, with the debris material forming a spinning accretion disc around it. Frictional, magnetic and gravitational forces are constantly compressing the black hole, thereby producing an incredible amount of heat and giving rise to flickering electromagnetic radiationa phenomenon that has been captured by the astronomers in splendid detail.

The astronomers used data from HiPERCAM instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias at La Palma and the X-ray-sensitive NICER instrument aboard the International Space Station for the movie. A high frame-rate visualisation (more than 300 frames per second) was created based on the observed visible and X-ray light emitted by the black hole system.

The astronomers confirmed that the movie is made using real data, but slowed down to 1/10th of its original speed, so as to allow the human eye to discern the rapid flares.

The debris material surrounding the black hole is so bright, it even outshines the star that is being consuming. Moreover, the fastest flickers only last for a few milliseconds, with an intensity equivalent to more than a hundred Suns emitting light in the blink of an eye.

Through this research, the team of astronomers has uncovered new clues that can help understand the immediate surroundings of black holes, including violent flaring at the heart of a black hole system. The observations also shed light on the operation of plasma flows around black holes.

The research paper was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Weather Companys primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

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North Platte native documents the work of a pioneering astronomer – North Platte Telegraph

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Astronomers have long searched the universe for planets, and in his new book The Lost Planets, North Platte native John Wenz discusses the account of Peter van de Kamp, who was one of the first to claim discovery of exoplanets.

Wenz is digital producer at Knowable Magazine, a science magazine based in Palo Alto, California. His writings have appeared in publications including Scientific American, Discover, New Scientist, Daily Beast, Vice Magazine, Wired and the Atlantic.

Wenz said he has always been interested in science, especially with both the planets of our solar system and those beyond it.

I can distinctly remember poring over the various science magazines at the North Platte Public Library and St. Patrick High Schools library just for any morsel of news coming out of space, Wenz said. Its always just been something thats captivated my interest going way, way back, even into childhood.

After graduating from St. Patrick in 2002, Wenz went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he received a degree in English in 2007.

I lived in Philadelphia for a bit, Washington, D.C., back to Philly and then to Madison, Wisconsin, for a couple of years, Wenz said. Ive kind of been all over the board.

He had been writing freelance articles for websites and other publications, but his focus shifted when he started freelancing for Popular Mechanics.

In 2013, it was when I started writing for Popular Mechanics that I connected that this is a way to channel my obsession with keeping up with space and science news into something that I could actually make a career out of, Wenz said. That both led to me working as a full-time contributor to Popular Mechanics for their online team, as well as branching out into other publications.

His work has appeared in most of the big science magazines, he said.

It kind of really opened the door from there, Wenz said. I started working on the book proposal while I was an editor at Astronomy Magazine.

The discovery of planets outside Earths solar system has long fascinated Wenz.

In 1995, we confirmed the first planet outside our solar system that orbited a star like the sun, Wenz said. That, obviously, had a lot of history leading up to it, but a lot of books Id read didnt really talk about the missteps along the way.

He said they would briefly mention it, but mostly in passing.

It was as if it didnt have its own history and its own importance, even if the people trying to discover these planets werent correct, Wenz said. They were certainly on to something, and thats something I certainly hope shows through in the book. These early efforts werent nothing they were helping point things in the right direction.

The problem, Wenz said, was that the technology to do the research well didnt come into maturity until the 1980s.

The astronomer Wenz features in his book announced in 1963 that he had identified a planet around Barnards Star, the second closest star system to the sun.

Van de Kamp was an astronomer at the Sproul Observatory at Swarthmore College, Wenz said. He had devoted his career to studying double stars and binary stars, oftentimes looking for a dimmer star that you cant quite make out because of the light of another star, but you can kind of tell that its wobbling in place in the sky.

From there, van de Kamp tried to move toward finding planets, especially around smaller stars where a planet would make a more profound effect on a star.

A planet doesnt just do a clean orbit around a star, they kind of tug on each other, Wenz said. Theres a little bit of a tug of war where the star is actually pulled slightly off its center position by the presence of a planet.

Thus, the wobble van de Kamp saw was something he used to claim his discovery. However, the planet that van de Kamp thought he had discovered does not actually exist as verified by subsequent research by other astronomers.

Still, Wenz, wanted to tell van de Kamps story, and tell people about his work in the development of astronomy. Since van de Kamps time, technology has improved and scientists have discovered about 4,000 planets.

The book is published by MIT Press and can be found on most online book stores, as well as in some brick and mortar stores, Wenz said.

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Astronomers Zoom in on a Galaxy 9 Billion Light-years Away Thanks to Gravitational Lensing – D-brief – Discover Magazine

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(Credit: MIT/Image courtesy of the researchers)

When even the most powerful telescopes cant capture the views you want, it helps to have natural magnifying glasses to rely on.In a paper published Monday in Nature Astronomy, researchers describe how they zoomed in to capture a young, star-forming galaxy roughly 9 billion light-years away in X-ray light.

To study such a distant galaxy, the researchers took advantage of the fact that massive objects can warp space-time around them and magnify light from background objects.Astronomers have used this effect, called gravitational lensing, to study distant galaxies in various wavelengths of light before. But this is one of the first times researchers using this technique have been able to capture a distant star-forming galaxy in X-rays.

The teams work demonstrates that this technique is possible with existing telescopes, and shows that it can be a powerful new tool for studying star formation in faraway galaxies.

To use gravitational lensing, astronomers need to find massive objects that are aligned just right with distant galaxies in the background. They call the intervening massive object, often a galaxy or galaxy cluster, a gravitational lens. This massive lens warps the space-time around it; light from the distant galaxy in the background, which would otherwise be blocked by the intervening object, follows the warping and appears to us like an arc of light stretched around the lens.

The team, led by astronomer Matthew Bayliss, then at MIT, pointed NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory at the so-called Phoenix Cluster. This group of galaxies sits 5.7 billion light-years away and is one of the largest galaxy clusters known. Researchers already knew that this monster lenses some background galaxies, but Bayliss team was excited to find that they picked up magnified X-ray light from a background galaxy, too.

They discovered that this distant dwarf galaxy, roughly 9 billion light-years away, has two distinct clumps of newly forming stars.

Seeing star formation happening in galaxies with X-rays is difficult because galaxies where stars and star formation make up most of the light are relatively faint. Galaxies whose light mostly comes from the activity of their central black holes, or active galactic nuclei, are generally much brighter and easier to observe.

Observing a faraway star-forming galaxy in X-rays is exciting because those X-rays come from the most massive stars. Specifically, they come from binary systems of massive stars in which one has collapsed into a black hole or neutron star and is consuming matter from the other.

Studying these distant galaxies in X-ray light may help scientists answer outstanding questions about massive stars. Astronomers know massive stars are often in binary systems, but do they always form in pairs or not? Massive stars shed a lot of gases throughout their lives, but in what ways does that affect their environments and how other stars form?

Its really a new window into studying the properties of the most massive stars that form in the distant universe, Bayliss said.

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Astronomers Zoom in on a Galaxy 9 Billion Light-years Away Thanks to Gravitational Lensing - D-brief - Discover Magazine

Northeast Ohio astronomers report more funding needed to track asteroids – News 5 Cleveland

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CLEVELAND Northeast Ohio astronomers believe more funding is needed to keep track of a growing number of near-earth asteroids that are being discovered and tracked on a daily basis.

Astronomers started talking about funding concerns after an asteroid, about the size of a football field, did a fly-by five times closer to earth than our moon in July, at speeds of over 55,000 miles-an-hour.

Scientists said it was the largest space rock to come so close to earth in 100 years and NASA admitted it didnt see it until it was just 24 hours away.

Cleveland State University Astronomer Jay Reynolds told News 5 it's basically a million-to-one probability that an asteroid could hit the Earth and cause a catastrophic event, but said additional funding is needed to track near-earth asteroids and collect critical data.

The item that were talking about is roughly less than 200 feet across, Reynolds said.

A 200-footer, thats it, thats all you need to destroy a city."

Reynolds said new photographic technology, coupled with high powered telescopes, is helping astronomers discover more and more near-earth asteroids, and it has NASA and the European Space Agency working on ways to create a planetary defense system.

He said NASA has been sending spacecrafts to asteroids to collect samples and determine how to create a planetary defense system, utilizing concepts like a gravity tractor or other ideas to change the trajectory of asteroids that could potentially threaten the earth.

"You have to come up with a plan to deflect an asteroid that it threatening the Earth when it's 20 to 50 years away, not just six months away, like you see in science fiction movies," Reynolds said.

"The earlier you catch the asteroid the easier it is to change its trajectory."

Do you blow it up, no. Maybe paint one side of it black, so that the sunlight will actually push it into a different orbit. Or do we put charges on it, basically engines and thrust this in a way.

Mark Peter with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Ohio Geological Survey told News 5 space rocks fall to the ground as meteorites and can cause bright flashes of light and sonic booms as bolides streaking across the sky.

Peter said there have been 13 confirmed meteorites that have hit land here in Ohio, including the Serpent Mound Crater site in southern Ohio.

That event took place about 300 million years ago, right at the junction of Highland, Adams and Pike County, and left deformed rock over an area of seven-and-a-half miles," Peter said.

Peter also outlined the New Concord meteorite strike of 1860, an event he said produced a sonic boom and shock waves that stunned area farmers.

This explosion that took place high in the atmosphere above them spread out, the boom was heard as far away as Wheeling, West Virginia, Peter said.

Peter and members of the Richland Astronomical Society, at Warren Rupp Observatory near Mansfield, also stressed the need for additional funding in tracking near-earth asteroids.

Observatory President Dan Everly said the society works hard at introducing young people to astronomy, at Friendly House Hidden Hollow Camp.

They really need to get onboard with this and learn how to get out there in space and push them out of the way, Everly said.

Richland Astronomical Society Outreach Coordinator Delores Maly told News 5 teaching astronomy to our youth is important, they could play a role in the future of asteroid tracking.

The people in our group, they are willing share, theyre willing to teach, theyre willing to help," Maly said.

Asteroid tracking is important, because one of these times were going to face it, so we need to be prepared.

If you think you may have found a meteorite, you can have your rock identified by the ODNR Ohio Geological Survey through this web page .

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Northeast Ohio astronomers report more funding needed to track asteroids - News 5 Cleveland

Student of the stars: How do you become an astronomer? – Big Think

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MICHELLE THALLER: There are a lot of people that are fascinated by astronomy, and they think, hey, you can actually get a job where it's your life to make new discoveries, to actually work with larger NASA missions. So how do you get this gig? How do you become an astronomer?

For some strange reason, I always wanted to be an astronomer, ever since I was a very small child. I think for a while I wanted to be an astronaut, and then I actually realized I was afraid of flying and I did not want to be an astronaut. But I loved space, and I could just never get the questions out of my head. I was told many times I didn't have the right personality to be a scientist. That really didn't matter at all. That turned out not to be true.

But here are some of the things that kind of need to happen. So if you want to become a professional research astronomer, one of the things you will have to have is a doctorate in astronomy.

Now, there are a lot of other ways to be involved in astronomy. I work with a lot of people who are engineers who help us build the telescopes or the instruments that we use. They, for the most part, do not have PhDs. They may have an undergraduate degree in engineering. Some of them have master's degrees. But usually, they actually start working in a more practical way, building the instruments, doing some testing. They start that fairly early in their careers.

But to be an astronomer, you do have to get a doctorate. So there is a fairly well-defined path for that. So you go through high school, and after high school, you can apply to any number of colleges that have degree programs in either physics, or mathematics, or computer science. Or, in some cases, they'll actually have full degree programs in astronomy or astrophysics. And these days, those two words, astronomy and astrophysics, are used fairly interchangeably in a professional setting. So if you're majoring in astronomy, you're basically a physicist majoring in things that are in the sky. So astrophysicist, astronomer, pretty much the same thing.

So what I did is, I actually did go to a universityI went to Harvard Universitythat had a major in astrophysics as an undergrad. And so we took pretty much all of the physics requirements for a physics degree, all the math that's involved in that, too, but then there were specialized classes in topics in astronomy. We'd read papers about the Big Bang. We'd get together and we'D go to observatories to learn how telescopes work. And there were classes in things like how does a star work, how does a supernova explosion work, what is a galaxy like?

And these really are physics classes. They involve a lot of math, usually calculusfiguring out how a galaxy evolves over time, how all the different stars work, how gravity affects everything. So there certainly is a good deal of math and physics involved.

But then, as you become a professional astronomer, while you certainly know the basics of that and you use that in your career, there's a lot more emphasis on being able to, interestingly enough, write. And so I think one of the things people don't realize is, don't just get all the physics and math that you can, also become very good at writing. And if you can, I think the most useful thing I did as a younger studentlike high school and undergradis I joined the debate club. Because one of the things you're going to have to do is write proposals. Astronomers need funding and time on telescopes.

So let's say you want to use the Hubble Space Telescope, you want to observe something in the sky. The way that happens is that youand not just you, a team of people togetherwill actually write a proposal to the Hubble Space Telescope and say, this is the object we'd like to observe, and here's why we think that's interesting, and these are the instruments we want to use, and we've done the calculations, this is how much time we need. And so you present this paper, basically. You send it in.

And once a year, astronomers from all over the world send their papers in to the Hubble Space Telescope, or maybe to the Peak Observatory in Arizona, or maybe the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. And those telescopes assemble a panel of experts, and these people, they may get many, many thousands of applications, so the panels may be hugedozens or up to 100 different scientists go through, and they read all the proposals, and they rank them in terms of what they think are the best ideas. Who has the most dramatic idea, but theyyou have to prove you can do it. You understand what's going on. You understand the telescope, what it can do. Maybe you've published other papers before, and you actually can reference that and say, look, I used this before, and I made some good discoveries.

So you have to be good at writing an argument. And now that I'm sort of on the other side of that, where I've been on panels that decide who gets time on telescopes, I can tell you I have read so many bad proposals, so learning how to write, learning how to make a case for what you want to do and having a really good narrative is a huge advantage in being an astronomer.

Some people have the idea of an astronomer being kind of a lone person, at night, at a telescope, just doing their own thing. And that's very intimidating. I mean, how do you know what to observe? How do you know what questions to ask?

When you are an undergraduate in college, you will probably start working with some of your professors as an assistant. They will actually have you help set up their experiments. They'll explain to you why they want to look at a certain type of star, or what sort of question that they want to answer. Maybe, as they write papers, they'll ask you to contribute something to the paperwrite a section of it, write a description of an instrument that you're building, whatever.

And you start working with a group of people. And then, as you become a more senior student, going on past your undergrad, getting your doctorate, you meet people all over the world, at conferences that the university will send you toand they'll pay for it. Don't worry, you don't have to have the money to traveland you will meet people working on similar things that you are, and you'll start working together.

You'll understand what you want to observe because all these people have had more experience than you, and they'll take you along with them as sort of an apprentice. So it's never just you trying to think, off the top of your head, what should I discover? It doesn't work that way. There are always people there with you, and you're always working in groups, trying to get money and time on the telescopes, funding to support your time to analyze that data. And you'll work together on those proposals.

So eventually, what happens is, after you get your doctorate, usually you will take a-couple-year temporary appointments where you basically help with research. You do your own research. These are called post-doctoral research fellowships. And they can be a lot of fun, but they're temporarythey usually last about three yearsand they don't pay very well, just enough to live on.

And then, if you're fairly successful as a postdoc, the next step is to get a permanent job, either at a university as a young professor, or at a large government laboratory, like where I work. I work at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which has about 10,000 people. And, of those, there are a couple hundred people that are professional astronomers. So some of these big government labs do hire many hundreds of astronomers at once.

Then you have a job. And you still have to bring in your funding to actually have time to do your work to actually make observations on different telescopes. So I get a government salary. And that's actually defined just by my seniority in the government. There is a very, very strict regulation as to how much government workers are paid, and that's what I get paid. But you still need to win proposals to support your time and actually sort of buy your time back from NASA to have time to work on your research. So in a way, you never stop asking for money, writing proposals.

I think one of the things that a lot of young people don't realize is that being a scientist is much more about that social aspectwriting, finances, budgets, plans, being able to work in a large group. Honestly, the thing I spend the single most amount of time on is attending meetings.

So yes, I do go out to telescopes, and that's wonderful. And you spend time working at computers. Of course computer skills are paramount, being able to analyze that data and discover things from it. But the most amount of time is looking for funds, trying to figure out how to work with everybody that's in your team, and getting organized, and then writing reports back to the people that are paying you to make sure that they know you're doing good work.

That doesn't have to be a bad thing. I've had many proposals rejected, and I've had many proposals accepted. That's part of life. You will learn to deal with that. And I love working with the people. People that are passionate about what they do and really enjoy it are just a joy.

So I hope that gives you some idea. You can major in physics, you can major in astrophysics, you can come at it from more of a computer science specialist. But once you get your doctorate and then you become part of a research group, you're sort of on the path to becoming a professional astronomer. And this is something I have enjoyedI'm now looking back on a career of more than 20 yearssomething that I enjoy to this day.

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Student of the stars: How do you become an astronomer? - Big Think

Nobel Prize-Winning Astronomer Says We Will Likely Find Aliens in 30 Years – Newsweek

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A cosmologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics Tuesday has said he is convinced extraterrestrial life exists and that we will likely find evidence of it within 30 years.

Speaking at an event in London earlier this week, Swiss researcher Didier Queloz, 52, suggested that the odds of finding life beyond our planet were strongly in our favor, The Telegraph reported.

"I can't believe we are the only living entity in the universe," Queloz said. "There are just way too many planets, way too many stars, and the chemistry is universal. The chemistry that led to life has to happen elsewhere."

He added that within the next 30 years, we will have built more advanced technology that can better detect signs of biological activity on distant worlds.

Quelozwho currently works at the University of Cambridge in the U.K.was awarded the Nobel Prize this year for discovering the first planet outside our solar system nearly a quarter of a century ago.

In 1995, Queloz and his Ph.D. supervisor at Princeton, Michel Mayorwho he shared this year's Nobel Prize withdiscovered the Jupiter-like exoplanet 51 Pegasi b orbiting a star around 50 light-years away. They identified the planet using a now-tried-and-tested method, known as Doppler spectroscopy, which looks for the tiny wobbles that a star makes as a planet orbits around it.

Since the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, more than 4,000 confirmed exoplanets have been found, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe and boosting hopes for finding life beyond our solar system. As evidence of his influence on the field, Queloz currently has more than 100 astronomical objects named after him.

"We opened a new window in astrophysicswe demonstrated that there are other planets like the ones we have orbiting our solar system," he said. "It was expanding our horizons, and once you start doing that there are a lot of questions you can start asking... why are we like we are?"

Lisa Kaltenegger, director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute and one of the world's leading exoplanet experts, said that the discovery of these distant worlds has paved the way for new methods of finding if alien life exists.

"The discovery opened our exploration of these brand-new worlds, and now 24 years later we are at the verge of finding out if we are alone in the universe," she said in a statement. "We have discovered that every fifth star has a planet that could be just like our own. With 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone, I really like our chances of finding life in the universe."

"The next step is to collect enough light from these small planets in the habitable zone to figure out if there are signs of life in their atmosphere," she said. "We are already building the telescopes that can collect enough light to answer the fundamental question of whether we are alone in the universeor not."

These telescopes include the next-generation James Webb Telescopescheduled for launch in 2021which will have the power to reveal intricate details about the properties of planets.

Just recently, scientists searching for life in the universe welcomed the announcement that water vapor had been detected for the first time in the atmosphere of an exoplanetthe "super-Earth" K2-18b, located around 110 light-years away from us.

We don't know whether life does or does not exist there. But the traces of water in the atmosphere and the fact that the planet lies in the habitable zonethe region around a host star within which liquid water, a key component for life as we know it, could exist on the surfacecertainly makes it a promising candidate.

Alongside Michel Mayor, Queloz also shared this year's physics prize with Canadian scientist James Peeble at Princeton for his work in the field of physical cosmology, which casts new light on the very beginnings of the universe.

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Nobel Prize-Winning Astronomer Says We Will Likely Find Aliens in 30 Years - Newsweek

What Astronomers Can Learn From Hot Jupiters, the Scorching Giant Planets of the Galaxy – Smithsonian

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In 1995, after years of effort, astronomers made an announcement: Theyd found the first planet circling a sun-like star outside our solar system. But that planet, 51 Pegasi b, was in a quite unexpected place it appeared to be just around 4.8 million miles away from its home star and able to dash around the star in just over four Earth-days. Our innermost planet, Mercury, by comparison, is 28.6 million miles away from the sun at its closest approach and orbits it every 88 days.

Whats more, 51 Pegasi b was big half the mass of Jupiter, which, like its fellow gas giant Saturn, orbits far out in our solar system. For their efforts in discovering the planet, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics alongside James Peebles, a cosmologist. The Nobel committee cited their contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earths place in the cosmos.

The phrase hot Jupiter came into parlance to describe planets like 51 Pegasi b as more and more were discovered in the 1990s. Now, more than two decades later, we know a total of 4,000-plus exoplanets, with many more to come, from a trove of planet-seeking telescopes in space and on the ground: the now-defunct Kepler; and current ones such as TESS, Gaia, WASP, KELT and more. Only a few more than 400 meet the rough definition of a hot Jupiter a planet with a 10-day-or-less orbit and a mass 25 percent or greater than that of our own Jupiter. While these close-in, hefty worlds represent about 10 percent of the exoplanets thus far detected, its thought they account for just 1 percent of all planets.

Still, hot Jupiters stand to tell us a lot about how planetary systems form and what kinds of conditions cause extreme outcomes. In a 2018 paper in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, astronomers Rebekah Dawson of the Pennsylvania State University and John Asher Johnson of Harvard University took a look at hot Jupiters and how they might have formed and what that means for the rest of the planets in the galaxy. Knowable Magazine spoke with Dawson about the past, present and future of planet-hunting, and why these enigmatic hot Jupiters remain important. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What is a hot Jupiter?

A hot Jupiter is a planet thats around the mass and size of Jupiter. But instead of being far away from the sun like our own Jupiter, its very close to its star. The exact definitions vary, but for the purpose of the Annual Review article we say its a Jupiter within about 0.1 astronomical units of its star. An astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the sun, so its about 10 times closer to its star or less than Earth is to the sun.

What does being so close to their star do to these planets?

Thats an interesting and debated question. A lot of these hot Jupiters are much larger than our own Jupiter, which is often attributed to radiation from the star heating and expanding their gas layers.

It can have some effects on what we see in the atmosphere as well. These planets are tidally locked, so that the same side always faces the star, and depending on how much the heat gets redistributed, the dayside can be much hotter than the nightside.

Some hot Jupiters have evidence of hydrogen gas escaping from their atmospheres, and some particularly hot-hot Jupiters show a thermal inversion in their atmosphere where the temperature increases with altitude. At such high temperatures, molecules like water vapor and titanium oxide and metals like sodium and potassium in the gas phase can be present in the atmosphere.

Between 2009 and 2018, NASA's Kepler space telescope discovered thousands of planets. But exoplanetsplanets outside the solar systemappeared in science fiction before they appeared in telescopes. Astronomers in the early decades of the twentieth century spent entire careers searching for planets in other stellar systems. In The Lost Planets, John Wenz offers an account of the pioneering astronomer Peter van de Kamp, who was one of the first to claim discovery of exoplanets.

What might explain how a planet ends up so close to its star?

There are three categories of models that people have come up with. One is that maybe these planets form close to their stars to begin with. Originally, people sort of dismissed this. But more recently, astronomers have been taking this theory a bit more seriously as more studies and simulations have shown the conditions under which this could happen.

Another explanation is that during the stage when the planetary system was forming out of a disk of gas and dust, the Jupiter was pulled in closer to its star.

The last explanation is that the Jupiter could have started far away from the star and then gotten onto a very elliptical orbit probably through gravitational interactions with other bodies in the system so that it passed very close to the host star. It got so close that the star could raise strong tides on the Jupiter, just like the moon raises tides on the Earth. That could shrink and circularize its orbit so that it ended up close to the star, in the position we observe.

Are there things we see in the planetary systems that have hot Jupiters that other systems dont have?

There are some trends. One is that most hot Jupiters dont have other small planets nearby, in contrast to other types of planetary systems we see. If we see a small hot planet, or if we see a gas giant thats a bit farther away from its star, it often has other planets nearby. So hot Jupiters are special in being so lonely.

The loneliness trend ties in to how hot Jupiters formed so close to their stars. In the scenario where the planet gets onto an elliptical orbit that shrinks and circularizes, that would probably wipe out any small planets in the way. That said, there are a few systems where a hot Jupiter does have a small planet nearby. With those, its not a good explanation.

Planetary systems with hot Jupiters often have other giant planets in the system farther away out beyond where the Earth is, typically. Perhaps, if hot Jupiters originated from highly eccentric orbits, those faraway planets are responsible for exciting their eccentricities to begin with. Or there could have been responsible planets that got ejected from the system in the process, so we dont necessarily have to still see them in the system.

Another big trend is that hot Jupiters tend to be around stars that are more metal-rich. Astronomers refer to metals as any element heavier than hydrogen or helium. Theres more iron and other elements in the star, and we think that this may affect the disk of gas and dust that the planets formed out of. There are more solids available, and that could facilitate forming giant planets by providing material for their cores, which would then accrete gas and become gas giants.

Having more metals in the system could enable the creation of multiple giant planets. That could cause the type of gravitational interaction that would put the hot Jupiter onto a high eccentricity orbit.

Hot Jupiters like 51 Pegasi b were the first type of planet discovered around sun-like stars. What led to their discovery?

It occurred after astronomers started using a technique called the radial velocity method to look for extrasolar planets. They expected to find analogs to our own Jupiter, because giant planets like this would produce the biggest signal. It was a very happy surprise to find hot Jupiters, which produce an even larger signal, on a shorter timescale. It was a surprising but fortuitous discovery.

Can you explain the radial velocity method?

It detects the motion of the host star due to the planet. We often think of stars sitting still and theres a planet orbiting around it. But the star is actually doing its own little orbit around the center of mass between the two objects, and thats what the radial velocity method detects. More specifically, it detects the doppler shift of the stars light as it goes in its orbit and moves towards or away from us.

One of the other common ways to find planets is the transit method, which looks for the dimming of a stars light due to a planet passing in front of it. Its easier to find hot Jupiters than smaller planets this way because they block more of the stars light. And if they are close to the star they transit more frequently in a given period of time, so were more likely to detect them.

In the 1990s, many of the exoplanets astronomers discovered were hot Jupiters. Since then, weve found more and different kinds of planets hot Jupiters are relatively rare compared with Neptune-sized worlds and super-Earths. Why is it still important to find and study them?

One big motivation is the fact that theyre out there and that they werent predicted from our theories of how planetary systems form and evolve, so there must be some major pieces missing in those theories.

Those missing ingredients probably affect many planetary systems even if the outcome isnt a hot Jupiter a hot Jupiter, we think, is probably an extreme outcome. If we dont have a theory that can make hot Jupiters at all, then were probably missing out on those important processes.

A helpful thing about hot Jupiters is that they are a lot easier to detect and characterize using transits and radial velocity, and we can look at the transit at different wavelengths to try to study the atmosphere. They are really helpful windows into planet characterization.

Hot Jupiters are still going to always be the planets we can probe in the most detail. So even though people dont necessarily get excited about the discovery of a new hot Jupiter anymore, increasing the sample lets us gather more details about their orbits, compositions, sizes or what the rest of their planetary system looks like, to try to test theories of their origins. In turn, theyre teaching us about processes that affect all sorts of planetary systems.

What questions are we going to be able to answer about hot Jupiters as the next-generation observatories come up, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and larger ground-based telescopes?

With James Webb, the hope is to be able to characterize a huge number of hot Jupiters atmospheric properties, and these might be able to help us test where they formed and what their formation conditions were like. And my understanding is that James Webb can study hot Jupiters super quickly, so it could get a really big sample of them and help statistically test some of these questions.

The Gaia mission will be really helpful for characterizing the outer part of their planetary systems and in particular can help us measure whether massive and distant planets are in the same plane as a transiting hot Jupiter; different theories predict differently on whether that should be the case. Gaia is very special in being able to give us three-dimensional information, when usually we have only a two-dimensional view of the planetary system.

TESS [the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite space telescope] is going on right now and its discoveries are around really bright stars, so it becomes possible to study the whole system that has a hot Jupiter using the radial velocity method to better characterize the overall architecture of the planetary system. Knowing whats farther out will help us test some of the ideas about hot Jupiter origins.

TESS and other surveys also have more young stars in the sample. We can see what the occurrence rate and properties are of hot Jupiters closer to when they formed. That, too, will help us distinguish between different formation scenarios.

Theyre alien worlds to us, but what can hot Jupiters tell us about the origins of our own solar system? These days, many missions are concentrating on Earth-sized planets.

What were all still struggling to see is: Where does our solar system fit into a bigger picture of how planetary systems form and evolve, and what produces the diversity of planetary systems we see? We want to build a very complete blueprint that can explain everything from our solar system, to a system with hot Jupiters, to a system more typical of what [the retired space telescope] Kepler found, which are compact, flat systems of a bunch of super-Earths.

We still dont have a great explanation for why our solar system doesnt have a hot Jupiter and other solar systems do. Wed like some broad theory that can explain all types of planetary systems that weve observed. By identifying missing processes or physics in our models of planet formation that allow us to account for hot Jupiters, were developing that bigger picture.

Do you have any other thoughts?

The one thing I might add is that, as we put together all the evidence for our review, we found that none of the theories can explain everything. And that motivates us to believe that theres probably multiple ways to make a hot Jupiter so its all the more important to study them.

Knowable Magazine is an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

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What Astronomers Can Learn From Hot Jupiters, the Scorching Giant Planets of the Galaxy - Smithsonian

Basic Income as 40 Acres and a Mule – Basic Income News

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This whole program is voluntaryThe men dont have toif they dont want to. But we need you to starve them to death if they dont.

Milo Minderbinder, Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Basic Income does something virtually no other policy in the modern economy can do: it protects your status as a free person.

What does it mean to be a free person? Consider an answer given by someone who experienced chattel slavery. Garrison Frazier was the spokesperson for a delegation of former slaves called freedmen (although many were women) who met with General Sherman on January 12, 1865, before the end of the U.S. Civil War.

Asked what he understood by slavery, Frazier replied, Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent.

He defined freedom as, taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor [and] take care of ourselves.

Asked how best to secure their freedom, Frazier said, The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.

The story of what happened after the meeting has come to symbolize broken promises to African Americans, but it has much greater significance for everyone. Sherman distributed land seized from former slave owners to freedmen in a large area of the southeastern coast, sometimes along with surplus army mules. Rumors spread that all freedmen would receive 40 acres and a mule. Less than a year later, the Federal Government reversed Shermans order, restored the prewar property rights of former slaveholders, and forcibly evicted the freedmen, many of whom had to work for their former masters, taking the least desirable jobs and the lowest pay. Some descendants of slaves continue to serve the holders of those property rights to this day.

The significance of Fraziers request for land to secure his freedom is not that freedom requires the opportunity to become a subsistence farmer; it requires the freedom from indirectly forced labor. Frazier recognized that the legal self-ownership slaves were granted at the close of the war was not enough to make the fully free. It does not free an individual from the irresistible power to do the bidding of others. Individuals who are prevented from working for themselves alone (and not sufficiently compensated for being denied that option) are forced to work for someone who controls access to resources. Forced labor is unfreedom whether that force is direct or indirect.

The freedom from indirectly forced labor has been taken away from the vast majority of people in the world todaywhen governments forcibly took control of the resources of the Earth to give them to their most privileged citizens. These newly established property rights not only gave privileged citizens control over resources: it gave them control over people. People who had shared access to those resources for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years were now forced to provide services for the wealthy to maintain their most basic subsistence. Eliminating indirectly forced labor is not all there is to ensuring everyone is fully free, but its an essential step.

We have owed each other a Basic Income since we enclosed the commons, since we abducted the slaves, since we killed the Buffalo.

NOTE: this essay includes a long excerpt from Chapter 2 of my book, Freedom as the Power to Say No: Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income

40 acres and a mule

Karl Widerquist has written 969 articles.

Karl Widerquist is an Associate Professor of political philosophy at SFS-Qatar, Georgetown University, specializing in distributive justicethe ethics of who has what. Much of his work involves Universal Basic Income (UBI). He is a co-founder of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG). He served as co-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) for 7 years, and now serves as vice-chair. He was the Editor of the USBIG NewsFlash for 15 years and of the BIEN NewsFlash for 4 years. He is a cofounder of BIENs news website, Basic Income News, the main source of just-the-facts reporting on UBI worldwide. He is a cofounder and editor of the journal Basic Income Studies, the only academic journal devoted to research on UBI. Widerquist has published several books and many articles on UBI both in academic journals and in the popular media. He has appeared on or been quoted by many major media outlets, such asNPRs On Point, NPRs Marketplace,PRIs the World,CNBC,Al-Jazeera,538,Vice,Dissent,the New York Times,Forbes,the Financial Times, andthe Atlantic Monthly, which called him a leader of the worldwide basic income movement.Widerquist holds two doctoratesone in Political Theory form Oxford University (2006) and one in Economics from the City University of New York (1996). He has published seven books, including Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press 2017, coauthored by Grant S. McCall) and Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No (Palgrave Macmillan 2013). He has published more than a twenty scholarly articles and book chapters. Most Karl Widerquists writing is available on his Selected Works website (works.bepress.com/widerquist/). More information about him is available on his BIEN profile and on Wikipedia. He writes the blog "the Indepentarian" for Basic Income News.

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Basic Income as 40 Acres and a Mule - Basic Income News

‘Most Americans Don’t Want To Work for the Federal Government’ Says Andrew Yang, Trashing Federal Jobs Guarantee – Reason

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Andrew Yang continues to clear the low bar of being the Democratic presidential candidate most skeptical of government power, if not government spending.

In response to a question about whether he would support a federal jobs guarantee at tonight's Democratic debate, the former entrepreneur argued that the feds were not going to be very good at providing people with meaningful work.

"I am for the spirit of a federal jobs guarantee, but you have to look at how it would materialize in practice. What are the jobs? Who manages you? What if you don't like your job? What if you're not good at your job?" said Yang, distinguishing himself from Sen. Bernie Sanders (IVt.) who had reiterated his support for the idea of a jobs guarantee tonight.

"Most Americans don't want to work for the federal government," Yang bluntly put it, saying a jobs guarantee would replicate the results of failed government retraining programs and produce "jobs that no one wants."

Instead, the presidential candidate made the pitch for his Freedom Dividend, his universal basic income proposal that would provide every American with $1,000 a month.

This, said Yang, would benefit people like his wifecurrently at home raising two children, one of whom is autisticwho are unable to work, and therefore would not benefit from a jobs guarantee.

A universal basic income would "put the money into our hands so we can build a trickle up economy" and "enable us to do the kind of work that we want to do," said Yang.

Some libertarian thinkers have argued for some form of UBI as a more efficient, less paternalistic form of the current welfare state. Yang interestingly makes the pitch for his Freedom Dividend in individualistic, if not necessarily libertarian, terms: A universal basic income allows you to decide how to spend your money, and do what you want with your life.

The math for Yang's Freedom Dividend doesn't quite work out. Skeptical free marketers will note that it has the potential to disincentivize work, and will always rely on coercive taxation.

Nevertheless, in a debate that's mostly been candidates arguing they would be the best philosopher king (or queen), it's nice to hear at least someone on stage to express a little faith in the ability of individuals to run their own lives (even if taxpayers are still paying the bills).

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'Most Americans Don't Want To Work for the Federal Government' Says Andrew Yang, Trashing Federal Jobs Guarantee - Reason

Democratic debate highlights: best and most substantive answers of the night – Vox.com

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Health care has been a major feature of every Democratic debate this election cycle. A major plank of that womens access to health care has not. And Sen. Kamala Harris has had enough of it.

That the issue has come up so little in past debates is outrageous, the California senator said, in one of the most moving moments of Tuesdays three-hour debate.

There are states that have passed laws that will virtually prevent women from having access to reproductive health care, and it is not an exaggeration to say women will die, Harris said. Poor women, women of color will die because these Republican legislatures in these various states who are out of touch with America are telling women what to do with their bodies.

Harriss response was echoed by Sen. Cory Booker soon after, noting that two Planned Parenthood clinics had recently closed in Ohio, where the debate was being held. We are seeing all over this country womens reproductive rights under attack, he said. God bless Kamala. Women should not be the only ones taking up this cause and this fight.

Harriss shift of the conversation and Bookers follow-up were among the most attention-grabbing moments of Tuesdays latest round of Democratic debates. But they werent the only ones. From Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on taxing the wealthy to Andrew Yang on universal basic income, here are some of the most significant and substantive responses of the night.

When the debate moderators brought up income inequality, Sen. Bernie Sanders smiled.

The question was designed as yet another progressive policy litmus test, and that puts him and Sen. Elizabeth Warren center stage.

Both have proposed wealth taxes to address rampant inequality in the United States. Warren sells it as a two-cent tax on the 75,000 wealthiest families in the country: Shes proposing a 2 percent tax on household assets above $50 million and 3 percent for households with assets worth more than $1 billion. Sanders has come out with his own version of the proposal, one that starts with a 1 percent tax on wealth above $32 million and slowly increases the tax rate on the larger the sum of assets.

Taxing the ultra-rich has become increasingly popular in Democratic circles. This is in part a reaction to the drastic Trump tax cuts, which have not led to the kind of middle-class income growth that was promised. But few have called for going as far as Warren and Sanders.

The moderators asked Sanders: Is the goal of your plan to tax billionaires out of existence?

Heres what Sanders said:

When you have a half a million Americans sleeping out on the street today, when you have 87 people 87 million people uninsured or underinsured, when you have hundreds of thousands of kids who cannot afford to go to college and millions struggling with the oppressive burden of student debt, and then you also have three people owning more wealth than the bottom half of American society, that is a moral and economic outrage.

And the truth is, we cannot afford to continue this level of income and wealth inequality. And we cannot afford a billionaire class whose greed and corruption has been at war with the working families of this country for 45 years. So if you are asking me, do I think we should demand that the wealthy start paying the wealthiest top 1 percent start paying their fair share of taxes so we can create a nation and a government that works for all of us, yes, thats exactly what I believe.

This question sparked a debate about whether a wealth tax was the best method to address inequality. Beto ORourke called instead for an earned income tax credit, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said she would repeal the recent cuts to the corporate tax rate (which Sanders has also supported in addition to his wealth tax).

Warren got a chance to respond:

I think this is about our values as a country. Show me your budget, show me your tax plans, and well know what your values are. And right now in America the top 1/10th of 1 percent have so much wealth, understand this, that if we put a 2 cent tax on their 50 millionth and first dollar and on every dollar after that, we would have enough money to provide universal childcare for every baby in this country age zero to five.

Universal pre-K for every child, raise the wages of every childcare worker and preschool teacher in America, provide for universal tuition-free college, put $50 billion into historically black colleges and universities And cancel student loan debt for 95 percent of the people who have it. My question is not why do Bernie and I support a wealth tax, its why does everyone else on the stage think its more important to protect billionaires than it is to invest in an entire generation.

Tara Golshan

Amid back-and-forth about gun laws among multiple candidate, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro invoked an often-overlooked potential consequence of the prospect of mandatory gun buybacks: it could mean police officers going door to door to collect peoples firearms. Thats an aspect that can be particularly distasteful to communities of color, which disproportionately bear the weight of police scrutiny and violence.

In the places I grew up in, we werent exactly looking for another reason for the cops to come banging on the door, Castro said. He brought up the weekend shooting of Atatiana Jefferson, a 28-year-old black woman who was shot in her home by a white police officer performing a welfare check. The officer has been charged with murder.

I am not going to give these police officers another reason to go door to door in certain communities, because police violence is also gun violence, and we need to address that, Castro said. According to data from Twitter, Castros remark was the most tweeted-about moment of the night.

In June, Castro rolled out a sweeping plan to reform policing; he was the first one to do so of the 2020 Democrats. Among his proposals are putting an end to overly aggressive and biased policing and holding the police accountable for misconduct.

I grew up in neighborhoods where it wasnt uncommon to hear gunshots at night. I can remember ducking in the back seat of a car as a freshman in high school across the street from my school, a public school, because folks were shooting at each other. Let me answer voluntary versus mandatory [gun buybacks]. There are two problems with mandatory buybacks. Number one, folks cant define it, and if youre not going door to door, its not really mandatory.

But also, in the places I grew up in, we werent exactly looking for another reason for cops to come banging on the door, and you all saw a couple days ago what happened to Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth. A cop showed up at 2 in the morning at her house when she was playing video games with her nephew, he didnt even announce himself, and within four seconds he shot her and killed her through her own window. She was in her own home. I am not going to give these police officers another reason to go door to door in certain communities because police violence is also gun violence and we need to address that.

Emily Stewart

After Bernie Sanders said hell respond to automation-induced job loss by giving Americans a federal jobs guarantee, Andrew Yang insisted he had a better idea: universal basic income the idea that the government should dispense a regular stipend to every single citizen, no strings attached.

Yang has promised that if he becomes president, the government will send a check for $1,000 per month ($12,000 annually) to every American adult above age 18. He calls it the Freedom Dividend.

On Tuesday night, he successfully played up two of the appeals of UBI: its simplicity and its directness. His emphasis on putting money straight in peoples pockets and trusting them to know how best to spend it helped him stand out and may have made his proposal more palatable to a broadly individualistic American electorate.

What was most interesting was the way Yang made the case that a UBI is better than a Sanders-style jobs guarantee. He noted its important not only that people have jobs but that theyre able to pursue the work thats right for them. Heres what he said:

I am for the spirit of a federal jobs guarantee, but you have to look at how it would actually materialize in practice. What are the jobs? Who manages you? What if you dont like your job? What if youre not good at your job? The fact is most Americans do not want to work for the federal government. And saying that that is the vision of the economy of the 21st century to me is not a vision that most Americans would embrace.

Also Senator Sanderss description of a federal jobs guarantee does not take into account the work of people like my wife, whos at home with our two boys, one of whom is autistic. We have a Freedom Dividend of $1,000 a month, it actually recognizes the work that is happening in our families and our communities. It helps all Americans transition.

Because the fact is, and you know this in Ohio, if you rely upon the federal government to target its resources, you wind up with failed retraining programs and jobs that no one wants. When we put the money into our hands, we can build a trickle-up economy from our people, our families, and our communities up. It will enable us to do the kind of work that we want to do. This is the sort of positive vision in response to the Fourth Industrial Revolution that we have to embrace as a party.

Sigal Samuel

At the third presidential debate in September, reproductive rights werent mentioned at all. Sen. Kamala Harris objected at the time, tweeting that the debate was three hours long and not one question about abortion or reproductive rights.

This time, she took matters into her own hands. During a discussion about taxes under Medicare-for-all (something thats gotten a lot of attention at previous debates, to say the least), Harris turned the conversation to another aspect of health care: abortion. Heres what she said:

This is the sixth debate we have had in this presidential cycle and not nearly one word with all of these discussions about health care on womens access to reproductive health care, which is under full-on attack in America today. And its outrageous. There are states that have passed laws that will virtually prevent women from having access to reproductive health care, and it is not an exaggeration to say women will die.

Poor women, women of color will die because these Republican legislatures in these various states who are out of touch with America are telling women what to do with their bodies. Women are the majority of the population in this country. People need to keep their hands off of womens bodies and let women make the decisions about their own lives.

Harris is one of several Democratic presidential candidates with robust plans for maintaining and expanding abortion access around the country, even as Republican-controlled state legislatures pass near-total bans and other restrictions on reproductive care. But they havent had much of a chance to talk about them at the previous debates. Harris brought up the oversight, making the point that abortion is a significant health care issue in America today.

Anna North

Trump abandoned Americas Kurdish allies when he made the abrupt decision to withdraw US forces from northeastern Syria, clearing the way for Turkey to invade. In the seven days since, Turkeys incursion has unleashed a humanitarian crisis, created an opening for ISIS, and reshuffled alliances in the Syrian war, leaving the US with no leverage in Syria and again badly damaging American credibility with allies.

So its no surprise Syria came up in Tuesdays debate. Democrats have largely embraced the stance of ending Americas forever wars in the Middle East, but here they were confronted with the complicated reality of what can happen when America does leave.

Buttigiegs foreign policy plan straddles that line too: It calls for limiting Americas endless engagement overseas, including repealing and replacing the 2011 Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which was intended for al-Qaeda after 9/11 but has ultimately given presidents broad authority to go after terrorism everywhere. Buttigieg has also said that the US should continue to provide security assistance to those fighting terrorists which sounds a lot like what the US was doing in Syria, up until last week.

His response to Tuesday nights question, however, was a clear, forceful takedown of Trumps Syria policy and an impassioned defense of the importance of American leadership.

In doing so, he touted his own military service, showed off his foreign policy credentials (not bad for a small-town mayor!), and probably got the attention of a lot of people who worry that another four years of Trump will irrevocably damage US standing in the world:

Well, respectfully, congresswoman, I think that is dead wrong. The slaughter going on in Syria is not a consequence of American presence, it a consequence of a withdrawal and a betrayal by this president of American allies and American values.

Look, I didnt think we should have gone to Iraq in the first place. I think we need to get out of Afghanistan, but its also the case that a small number of specialized, special operations forces and intelligence capabilities were the only thing that stood between that part of Syria and what were seeing now, which is the beginning of a genocide and the resurgence of ISIS.

Meanwhile, soldiers in the field are reporting that, for the first time, they feel ashamed ashamed of what their country has done. We saw the spectacle, the horrifying sight of a woman with the lifeless body of her child in her arms asking what the hell happened to American leadership.

When I was deployed, I knew one of the things keeping me safe was the fact that the flag on my shoulder represented a country known to keep its word. And our allies knew it. And our enemies knew that. You take that away, you are taking away what makes America America. It makes the troops and the world a much more dangerous place.

Jen Kirby

In terms of executive experience, the most important piece of Sen. Warrens resum is her work in championing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And on Tuesday evening, she reminded voters of that.

Warren first conceived of the agency as a Harvard professor in 2007. After the financial crisis, she went to Washington, DC, to help get it codified into the Dodd-Frank reform bill, and she spent nearly a year setting the consumer agency up.

Its one of the central arguments for her candidacy, though its not one she makes often: she has experience in the executive branch and she understands the levers of power, including when it comes to regulation. The Massachusetts Democrat jumped at the opportunity to point that out. I know what we can do by executive authority, and I will use it, Warren said.

So you started this question with how you got something done. Following the financial crash of 2008, I had an idea for a consumer agency that would keep giant banks from cheating people. And all of the Washington insiders and strategic geniuses said, dont even try because you will never get it passed.

And sure enough, the big banks fought us. The Republicans fought us. Some of the Democrats fought us. But we got that agency passed into law. It has now forced big banks to return more than $12 billion directly to people they cheated. I served in the Obama administration. I know what we can do by executive authority, and I will use it. In Congress, on the first day, I will pass my anti-corruption bill, which will beat back the influence of money and repeal the filibuster. And the third, we want to get something done in America, we have to get out there and fight for the things that touch peoples lives.

Former Vice President Joe Biden interjected to note that he had backed the CFPB and helped it to gain support in Congress to which Warren responded with a dig redirecting credit, too, thanking former President Barack Obama for championing the agency.

She then brought it back to her fight to get the bureau in place. Understand this: it was ... dream big, fight hard, she said. People told me, Go for something little, go for something small, go for something that the big corporations will be able to accept. I said no. Lets go for an agency that will make structural change in our economy.

Emily Stewart

Author and activist Marianne Williamson wasnt onstage on Tuesday, but there is another candidate running on a message of love: Sen. Cory Booker. And in his last response of the evening, the New Jersey Democrat returned to that theme that is a core part of his candidacy.

I believe in the values of rugged individualism and self-reliance, but think about our history. Rugged individualism didnt get us to the moon, it didnt beat the Nazis, it didnt map the human genome, it didnt beat Jim Crow, he said.

He noted that among his fellow primary contenders are an openly gay man and a black woman, the result of a common struggle and a common purpose. It might have come off as a little sappy, but it was also moving.

You cannot love your country unless you love your fellow countrymen and women, Booker said. Love is not sentimentality, its not anemic. Love is struggle, love is sacrifice.

Well look, I have so many, I dont even know where to count. I was the mayor of a large city with a Republican governor. He and I had to form a friendship even though I can write a dissertation on our disagreements. When I got to the United States Senate, I went there with the purpose of making friendships across the aisle.

I go to bible study in Chairman Inhofes office. He and I passed legislation together to help homeless and foster kids. I went out to try to invite every one of my Republican colleagues to dinner. And let me again say, finding a dinner in a restaurant agreeing on one with Ted Cruz was a very difficult thing. Im a vegan, and hes a meat-eating Texan. But Ill tell you this right now. This is the moment in America that this is our test. The spirit of our country I believe in the values of rugged individualism and self-reliance.

But think about our history. Rugged individualism didnt get us to the moon. It didnt beat the Nazis. It didnt map the human genome. It didnt beat Jim Crow. Everything we did in this country big ... and we have done so many big things. The fact that theres an openly gay man. A black woman. All of us on this stage are because we in the past are all inheritors of a legacy of common struggle and common purpose. This election is not a referendum on one guy in one office. Its a referendum on who we are and who we must be to each other. The next leader is going to have to be one amongst us Democrats that can unite us all.

Emily Stewart

In the fourth Democratic debate, the candidates treated Elizabeth Warren as the frontrunner. Voxs Ezra Klein explains what that means for the race ahead.

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Democratic debate highlights: best and most substantive answers of the night - Vox.com

Sanders: ‘Damn right we will’ have a job for every American | TheHill – The Hill

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Sen. Bernie SandersBernie SandersWarren defends, Buttigieg attacks in debate that shrank the field Five takeaways from the Democratic debate in Ohio New study: Full-scale 'Medicare for All' costs trillion over 10 years MORE (I-Vt.) defended his calls for a universal jobs guarantee during Tuesday's Democratic primary debate, telling viewers that a Green New Deal he has advocated would create millions of jobs for Americans looking for work.

Questioned whether he was sure that the federal government could adequately provide jobs for all adults in the workforce, Sanders replied, "Damn right we will."

Damn right,we will," Sanders responded. "A Green New Deal that I have advocated for, will create 20 million new jobs as we move from fossil fuels to sustainability.

We will guarantee every American a job through a #GreenNewDeal.

There are so many Americans in need of good work, and there is so much good work to be done to stop the climate crisis.

Thank you @BernieSanders for leading the way. pic.twitter.com/lXIPqP9vBp

Sanders is one of several contenders in the 2020 primary field who have endorsed a framework unveiled by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-CortezAlexandria Ocasio-CortezFive takeaways from the Democratic debate in Ohio Democrats debate in Ohio: Who came out on top? Ocasio-Cortez to endorse Sanders for president MORE (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed MarkeyEdward (Ed) John MarkeySanders: 'Damn right we will' have a job for every American Democrats urge Rick Perry not to roll back lightbulb efficiency rules Ocasio-Cortez taps supporters for donations as former primary opponent pitches for Kennedy MORE (D-Mass.), dubbed the Green New Deal.

Green New Dealintends to rapidly shift America's energy grid to sustainable forms of energy, while simultaneously upgrading U.S. infrastructure and implementing energy-efficient improvements to the U.S. transportation grid.

The plan, announced earlier this year, also included a federal jobs guarantee, which has drawn fire from Sanders's fellow 2020 contender Andrew YangAndrew YangWarren defends, Buttigieg attacks in debate that shrank the field Warren leads in speaking time during debate Democrats debate in Ohio: Who came out on top? MORE, a supporter of a universal basic income (UBI).

Yang criticized Sanders's plan again Tuesday night, claiming that it did not take into account people like his wife, a stay-at-home mother who tends to the couple's sons, one of whom is autistic.

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Sanders: 'Damn right we will' have a job for every American | TheHill - The Hill

Assembly Elections 2019: Why is the Congress evasive about NYAY scheme this poll season? – Moneycontrol.com

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Ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, former Congress President Rahul Gandhi had pitched for a surgical strike on poverty. Gandhi had said if the Congress was voted to power at the Centre, his government will transfer Rs 72,000 a year into the accounts of the countrys five crore poor.

The Congress named the scheme NYAY, or Nyuntam Aay Yojana (Minimum Income Scheme), in an attempt to deliver justice to the countrys poorest poor.

The scheme was also seen as a rejoinder to PM Modis KISAN Yojana, wherein he promised to transfer Rs 6,000 annually (in three equal installments) to the countrys over 12 crore farmers.

Rahul Gandhi, along with other party leaders, used the NYAY Scheme extensively during his campaign trail ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. However, after the Congress drubbing, the party has hardly used NYAY as a poll plank for the upcoming Maharashtra and Haryana Assembly Polls.

Why has the Congress been evasive about the NYAY scheme and did it really help the party pick up steam, lets find out.

Did NYAY resonate with the voters?

NYAY was launched by the Grand Old Party on March 25, weeks before the polling for Lok Sabha elections began, in an attempt to counter the hyper nationalistic agenda being promulgated by the BJP after the Pulwama terror attack and the Balakot airstrike.

Even though the announcement was late, the Congress hoped to draw attention on the issues of poverty and unemployment through the scheme and project itself as pro-poor.

A post-poll survey by Lokniti showed that among the poor voters who would have been the beneficiary of the scheme only 46 percent were aware about NYAY, a marginal increase from 44 percent recorded in the pre-poll survey.

This meant that despite trying to popularize the scheme through ads, hoardings, etc, awareness about NYAY missed a significant chunk of the target audience.

The post-poll survey also pointed out that respondents had a mixed opinion of the scheme. Around 36% thought the Congress would be able to implement the scheme if it came to power, and an equal proportion thought otherwise. Moreover, around 25%, or one-fourth, were not sure or could not say whether the Congress would be able to keep its promise.

Experts believe that PM Modis KISAN scheme overshadowed NYAY as by the time Congress announced it, farmers had already received the first installment. In addition, reports of the Congress not fulfilling their promise of increasing the minimum support price in Chhattisgarh and Haryana dissuaded the voters from choosing the Congress.

Fiscally irresponsible?

Many were of the opinion that the NYAY scheme was commissioned in haste, not considering Indias fiscal situation at the moment. The scheme involved uniform cash transfers of Rs 72,000 a year, or Rs 6,000 a month, to the poorest 20 percent households, or about 50 crore households based on 2011 Census data.

Which meant, the scheme required a mind-boggling sum of Rs 360,000 crore a year, or close to 2 percent of Indias current GDP.

However, the Congress claimed that it was feasible. They had taken inputs from noted MIT professor Abhijit Banerjee, who is a staunch supporter of Universal Basic Income. Although he had suggested a minimum income guarantee of Rs 2,500 a month keeping in mind fiscal discipline. The scheme would have the cost the exchequer Rs 1.50 lakh crore.

While being cautious about the tax reforms that the incoming government would have to introduce to fund the NYAY scheme, Banerjee had said it would only be the first step and eventually central subsidies can be withdrawn.

On October 14, 2019, Abhijit Banerjee, along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.

Why is the Congress evasive about NYAY?

Congress' chief spokesperson for Maharashtra, Sachin Sawant, told Moneycontrol that NYAY could be implemented only at the Central level, and is not feasible at the state level.

He said, "NYAY was a part of the manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections, and we would have implemented it had we formed the government at the Centre. [It cannot be implemented in Maharashtra or Haryana] Because the state cannot afford to put Rs 72,000 in every account."

"Instead of that, today we have brought in other schemes such as Rs 1,500 for senior citizens' accounts as a pension. NYAY was necessary for the national economy, and it was mocked at by the BJP. But you see now that person who was a part of formulating it has got a Nobel today," Sawant added.

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Letter to the Editor: Universal basic income is inevitable as we head toward a fully automated society – The Post

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The industrial revolution, which started with the invention of the first commercially successful steam engine in Britain in the 18th century, allowed Britain to literally conquer the world. All the other advancements were built on what was started in the 18th century.

Today, we are witnessing another technological shift or revolution in the sciences: the Digital Revolution, which started in the 1960s with the implementation and adoption of digital data and digital computers (as opposed to human computers, who would run calculations by hand) from transistors and integrated circuits.

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) and data mining techniques are being implemented in the physical and natural sciences, engineering, medicine, the finance industry and even in music. Mini-robots are literally taking our jobs; a quick (and free) tour of the Amazon warehouse in Columbus will show you how few employees and many robots are running a facility thats over-1 million square feet.

AI is now used to discover new drugs, predict stock prices, control robots, defeat chess champions and generate musical pieces. But the World Economic Forum and many scientists will tell you not to worry and claim they are just technological advancements and nothing disruptive.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn predicts that fundamental inventions and new theories will be carried by young scientists or those new to the field. It is only natural that older scientists will resist change that may threaten their research.

A McKinsey analysis on this issue concluded that 45% of work activities could be automated using already demonstrated technology.

That decrease in the demand for human jobs does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. In The German Ideology, Karl Marx says that in an ideal, technologically developed society, nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow.

It is inevitable that leisure time will increase as technological advancements increase and the economy becomes more saturated.

In the same way that our government bribes corrupt and poor countries through USAid to keep their citizens from rioting, we must guarantee every American a universal basic income (UBI) to avoid a feudalistic outcome.

As the population increases and job availability decreases, fewer people will be employed simply because of the automation and digitalization occurring. We are witnessing political and economic chaos around the world, not simply due to the failure of neoliberalism, but also due to this revolution that is readily changing the world.

Andrew Yangs proposal to give every American a UBI must be taken seriously. Older progressives, like Bernie Sanders, still believe that it is possible to give every person a job. Sanders Green New Deal may indeed boost employment and create 20 million green good paying jobs by investing in the rebuilding of the nations infrastructure.

But it will not be effective in addressing the issue of automated jobs in the long run. As we move forward, we must start exploring the UBI option and not ostracize those that cannot find a job at this inflection point in human development.

Mahmoud Ramadan is a senior studying chemical engineering at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Do you agree? Tell Mahmoud by emailing him him at mr612615@ohio.edu.

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Letter to the Editor: Universal basic income is inevitable as we head toward a fully automated society - The Post