Monthly Archives: February 2021

A fifth dimension could finally explain the mysteries of dark matter.5D Everything

A team of German and Spanish scientists says theyve found a natural explanation for dark matter and other unresolved scientific mysteries but their work depends on the existence of a new theoretical subatomic particle and an entire fifth dimension of the universe.

The new particle, a yet-undiscovered type of fermion, would be able to traverse this new dimension and bind dark matter to the luminous matter that makes up everything in the universe we can see or touch, Motherboard reports, in a way that doesnt contradict any of the other models we have on how dark matter behaves. Its seems a bit far-fetched physicists creating new rules for the universe in order to explain their own theory but if it pans out, it could vastly improve our understanding of the cosmos.

The scientists explained to Motherboard that this new particle would likely be similar to and interact with the Higgs Boson, but that it would be too heavy to detect with the current generation of particle accelerators and colliders.

But assuming the particle and the fifth dimension it navigates both exist, it represents a unique window into dark matter, according to the teams paper, published in The European Physical Journal C last month.

If this heavy particle exists, it would necessarily connect the visible matter that we know and that we have studied in detail with the constituents of the dark matter, assuming that dark matter is composed out of fundamental fermions, which live in the extra dimension, a member of the team told Motherboard.

In lieu of a tangible way to prove that this mysterious particle or the fifth dimension exists, the researchers told Motherboard they hope that other scientists keep their model in mind as they continue to study particle physics and cosmology.

This could also eventually lead to an interesting cosmological history of the universe and might lead to the production of gravitational waves, the team told Motherboard. This is an interesting line of research, which we plan to follow in the months ahead.

READ MORE: Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension [Motherboard]

More on dark matter: Astronomers Find Over 1,200 Dark Matter Hot Spots

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The Universe May Have a Fifth Dimension, According to New Research - Futurism

Image by Hakan Nural via Unsplash / Futurism

The United Kingdom is beginning an unusual new experiment. Government scientists want to know what happens if patients mix and match vaccines made by two different pharmaceutical companies.

Right now, the coronavirus vaccines developed by Moderna, Pfizer, and Oxford University all require two spaced-out doses to maximize their protective abilities. Requiring everyone to show up to two appointments and securing enough of the correct vaccine has been a logistical challenge, so the UK government is exploring whether it really matters which vaccine people get for their second injection, according to Axios.

If two doses from different pharmaceuticals are effective, distributing coronavirus vaccines could become far simpler but its far too soon to make any guesses.

If we do show that these vaccines can be used interchangeably in the same schedule this will greatly increase the flexibility of vaccine delivery, Oxford University virologist and project leader Matthew Snape said in a press release.

The experiment will test eight different possible vaccination combinations, according to the press release. Study participants will either get two doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, or one of each before the other.

Then, within those four groups, half of the participants will get the two doses four weeks apart and the rest will get them 12 weeks apart. In other words, theyre trying as many combinations as logically possible and tracking what happens.

The work is speculative for now, scientists said in the press release, but they think its worth investigating in hopes of simplifying the vaccine rollout.

This study will give us greater insight into how we can use vaccines to stay on top of this nasty disease, flu expert and Englands Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam said in the release.

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Scientists Are Sticking the Same People With Multiple Vaccines - Futurism

"Certainly, we support this effort and endeavor."To the Moon

Senate Democrats and the White House have reiterated their support for NASAs Artemis program, which has the goal of returning the first human astronauts to the surface of the Moon as soon as 2024.

Press secretary Jen Psaki said during a conference today that the government will work with industry leaders to send another man and a woman to the Moon, which is very exciting. Psakis also called the Moon a waypoint to Mars.

Certainly, we support this effort and endeavor, she added.

In a Wednesday letter signed by 11 Democratic senators, lawmakers urged the Biden administration to fully fund the human landing system initiative.

Developing the next generation crewed lunar lander is an essential step in returning astronauts to the Moon for the first time in half a century, including the historic milestone of landing the first woman on the Moon, reads the letter.

The senators also urged NASA to proceed with the planned selection and to include all necessary funding for [the Human Landing System] in your FY 2022 budget request.

Overall, significant budget constraints have put a squeeze on the space agencys efforts to develop a human landing system capable of lowering astronauts to the Moons surface, as Ars Technica reports.

That tracks with what the new head of NASA, Steve Jurczyk, told Futurism earlier this week: that without full funding for the human landing system, a 2024 Moon landing will be logistically challenging.

READ MORE: Senate Democrats send a strong signal of support for Artemis Moon program [Ars Technica]

More on Artemis: NASA Boss: We Have Every Indication That Artemis Is Safe Under Biden

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It's Official: Biden Admin Fully Supports the Artemis Moon Program - Futurism

The seas are rising faster than even the most pessimistic scientists estimated.High Tide

Bad news for the roughly 40 percent of humanity that lives near a coastline: A study shows that the sea level is rising faster than even the most pessimistic climate change models predicted.

Scientists from the University of Copenhagen and Norways Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research came up with a new way to measure the sea levels sensitivity to increasing temperature, which they published Tuesday in the journal Ocean Science. And looking ahead, they predicted that the water will rise far higher than experts expected it to, adding an even greater sense of urgency to the fight against climate change.

If we want to stay on track with existing climate models and forecasts, the global economy will need to reduce carbon emissions by an additional 200 billion metric tons which is roughly five years worth beyond what experts had already accounted for in order to meet climate goals over the next century, study coauthor and Copenhagen geophysicist Aslak Grinsted told Bloomberg.

It means our carbon budget is even more depleted, Grinsted said.

The new study says that the sea level could rise by half a meter by the end of the century if temperatures increase by just half a degree Celsius. At two degrees Celsius a level of warming thats likely at this point the seas could rise by a full meter.

The scenarios we see before us now regarding sea-level rise are too conservative the sea looks, using our method, to rise more than what is believed using the present method, Grinsted told Bloomberg.

READ MORE: Sea Levels Are Rising Faster Than Most Pessimistic Forecasts [Bloomberg]

More on sea level: A Melting Antarctica Could Raise the Sea Level More Than Expected

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The Ocean Is Rising Faster Than Anyone Feared - Futurism

Its biofuel can be grown on a farm.Astronaut Farmer

The space startup bluShift Aerospace successfully launched a low-flying rocket on Sunday using a kind of fuel that the company says can be grown on a farm.

The company plans to become the first private aerospace company to launch a single-engine biofuel-powered rocket, according to Space.com, though theres a long way to go in order to reach that point from its mile-high test. But if it works out, the more-sustainable rocket fuel could go a long way to helping clean up an environmentally-destructive industry.

As far as the test itself goes, Space News senior writer Jeff Foust tweeted that it took three tries to get the rocket off the ground. It never quite reached its goal of one mile in altitude, according to Space.com.

BluShift CEO Sascha Deri told reporters that he felt the flight went perfectly, according to Space.com. The company now wants to ramp up its tests and launch a suborbital rocket later on this year.

It landed right where we were hoping for and where we were planning for, Deri added. It couldnt have been better than that.

The tiny rocket carries just 17 pounds of cargo, according to Space.com, but the test is still a solid showing for the prospects of environmentally-friendlier biofuel. The company claims that its proprietary biofuel is non-toxic, carbon-neutral, and can be cheaply sourced from farms across America, according to Space.com.

Future tests will show whether the fuel and the rockets it propels are ready to make a dent in conventional rocket fuels, but Deri said that hes delighted with the recent test and remains optimistic for the next.

READ MORE: Startup bluShift Aerospace launches its 1st commercial biofuel rocket from Maine [Space.com]

More on biofuel: The Worlds First US-to-Australia Biofuel Flight Was Powered by Mustard Seeds

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Startup Tests Spacecraft That Runs on Farm-Grown Rocket Fuel - Futurism

It was an otherwise non-notable day in October 2017 when Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk made an astonishing discovery.

Thanks to data from the University of Hawaiis Pan-STARRS1 telescope at the Kaleakala Observatory in Hawaii, Weryk spotted an unusual object, oblong and approximately the size of a football field, screaming through the solar system at 196,000 miles per hour. Strangest of all was that it seemed to be accelerating slightly, pushed by an invisible force that has yet to be fully explained.

Its highly unusual trajectory caused it to slingshot past our Sun, leading scientists to believe that the space object later dubbed Oumuamua, or scout in Hawaiian was the first ever visitor from outside our solar system to be observed directly.

Over the last three years, countless attempts have been made to explain Oumuamuas unprecedented characteristics. Some speculated that it was hydrogen iceberg, while others suggested it was a traveling space rock covered in a layer of organic sunscreen.

To Avi Loeb, astrophysicist and professor of science at Harvard University, the answer could be a tantalizing one. His controversial argument is that Oumuamua may have been a probe sent by an extraterrestrial civilization an explanation thats garnered enormous attention in the media and, unsurprisingly, proved divisive among experts.

In his new book, titled Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Loeb explores his provocative hypothesis, using the story of Oumuamua to lay the groundwork of a much greater conversation: the struggle to be taken seriously within a scientific community that has historically held the discussion surrounding the search for the existence of terrestrial intelligence at arms length.

During an interview with Futurism, Loeb argued that scientists explanations fell short of explaining Oumuamuas many quirks and eccentricities. The scientific community advocated for something that we have never seen before, he said.

One example of this was what Loeb referred to as the dust bunny hypothesis, which theorized that Oumuamuas odd trajectory could be explained by a very low density.

The problem with that is I dont think something of the size of a football field that is a dust bunny would survive a journey of millions of years through interstellar space, Loeb said, vacuuming up that hypothesis. I mean, I just dont think that it can hold itself together.

To Loeb, scientific explanations that attempted to squeeze Oumuamua into an existing scientific framework just didnt make sense.

The point is, you cant on the one hand say its natural, Loeb argued, and then whenever you try to actually explain it with natural processes, you come up with something that we have never seen before.

And thats how he ended up at aliens.

At the root of Loebs alien theory is that Oumuamua may have been a solar sail sent to us from another star system.

In the simplest terms, a solar or light sail is a form of spacecraft propulsion that turns the low pressure of solar radiation into movement. Earthling scientists have already experimented with the concept; in 2019, the non-profit Planetary Societylaunched a craft called LightSail-2,which uses 340 square feet of an extremely thin layer of reflective polyester film to gradually propel itself.

To Loeb, a solar sail being pushed by starlight could explain Oumuamuas unexpected acceleration. If its solid and isnt a dust bunny, the astrophysicist concluded that the interstellar visitor must also be shockingly thin perhaps, according to his calculations, less than a millimeter thick.

To the astronomer, the solar sail conclusion was following footsteps, just like detective Sherlock Holmes. When you rule out all other possibilities, whatever youre left with must be the truth.

That conclusion is a stretch to many astronomers in the field, who have repeatedly challenged Loebs conclusion.

In a 2019 study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers argued that they found no compelling evidence to favor an alien explanation for Oumuamua.

Oumuamuas properties are consistent with a natural origin, University of Maryland astronomer Matthew Knight, co-author of the study, toldReuters at the time, and an alien explanation is unwarranted.

Their argument was that Oumuamua is a planetesimal, or a small fragment of a planetary building block that just happened to drift through our star system.

Weryk,who discovered the object in the first place, had no kind words for Loebs hypothesis. Honestly, thats a bit of wild speculation, he told the CBC in 2018.

I think its a remnant from another solar system, Weryk added. Its just something that happened to run into us, and we were very lucky to have been operating the telescope that night and looking in that direction.

These rebuttals appear to have only emboldened Loebs investigations into the alien origins of Oumuamua as well as leading him to make a passionate plea to the scientific community, as outlined in his book, to take SETI research seriously.

To Loeb, its all about reading the stars with an open mind.

My guiding principle is modesty, he told Futurism. If we are not arrogant, if we are modest, we would say that life, the way we have it, must be common.

We now know from the Kepler satellite data that about half of the Sun-like stars have a planet like the Earth, roughly at the same distance, so that it can have liquid water and the chemistry of life as we know it, Loeb said, referring to the habitable zone of a star system within which life can theoretically could be supported.

So we know that the dice was rolled billions of times in the galaxy, he said. And if you arrange for similar circumstances like we have on Earth, you would get a similar outcome.

To Loeb, this simple calculation is conservative, not speculative, and that it should be the mainstream view. But proposing that we are not alone in the universe is seen as a fringe view and the mainstream claims there should be a taboo.

The scientific community can address a topic even if other people address it in a way that is not scientific and doesnt make much sense, Loeb argued.

So my point is the existence of the literature on science fiction or the existence of unsubstantiated UFO reports should not eliminate this subject from being part of the mainstream discussion, he added.

In fact, Loeb contended that it is less speculative than other areas of study, from the study of dark matter to multiverse and string theories.

All of these hypothetical concept for which we have no basis, he said. And you have communities of hundreds of scientists working on giving each other awards and honors and so forth, he added in a slightly derisive tone.

To him, the refusal to believe we are not alone in the universe is a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies.

When you put blinders on, youre not searching for anyone else, you might think that youre special, he said.

The only way to break that taboo, to break that state of mind, is to find evidence for others, Loeb argued. But, if you dont search, you will never find it, closing the cycle.

Worst of all, a lack of funding for SETI research only ends up deterring young people from entering this field, Loeb said.

So the search for life beyond the Earth must go on and Loeb has plenty of ideas on how to do so.

Arguably the most ambitious plan hes involved with, a project called Breakthrough Starshot, is a proof-of-concept interstellar probe project by Breakthrough Initiativesthat involves sending an army of small light sails called Starchips as far as Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own at just over four light years away.

TheCentauri system contains a promising planetary candidate called Proxima b, a tantalizingly Earth-like planet.

Four light year may not sound like much on paper, but the distances that the sails would have to cover are immense. Rather than harnessing the solar radiation from the Sun, the project is investigating if we can shoot an extremely powerful laser at these spacecraft from here on Earth to provide enough acceleration.

Its an endeavor that involves near-insurmountable hurdles. In fact, Loeb isnt sure if the Starshot project will materialize in his lifetime and Breakthrough Initiatives estimates that it could take 20 years for the mission to reach Alpha Centauri after launch.

But I think we have to do it as a civilization, Loeb told Futurism. We have to go in that direction and consider how to visit other stars, because currently all our eggs are in one basket here on Earth and we cant ignore the risk from a catastrophe.

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Avi Loeb and the Great Unknown - Futurism

New York

These days when modernism is coupled with utopian or idealistic, its with a disparaging tone meant to emphasize the navet of the idea. Yet in the early 20th century, in a society transformed by the Russian Revolution and World War I, modernism seemed to embody hope for a better future and to repudiate a problematic past. For many artists, a new pared-down aesthetic and a bold, experimental embrace of the latest technologies, materials and techniques aptly expressed the aspirations of a startlingly altered world.

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, at the Museum of Modern Art, explores the ways, in the 1920s and 30s, adventurous art was put into the service of politics and social change in Soviet Russia, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Futurism, and Dada are all represented by posters, advertisements, magazine layouts, books, typography, films, broadsides, theater design, and just plain propaganda, sparsely punctuated by paintings and prints that provide welcome refreshment from the commercial inclusions. Much of the exhibition celebrates the 2018 gift of more than 300 early 20th-century works on paper from the Merrill C. Berman collection, with selections of similarly functional works from MoMAs holdings.

We are reminded that after the cataclysms of revolution and war, some artists began to question not only the nature of what they did, but also its necessity. The pragmatic dominated. We learn that the Latvian graphic designer Gustav Klutsis posited an artist of an entirely new typea public person, a specialist in political and cultural work with the masseswhile the Russian painter Liubov Popova, who said she desired to translate the aesthetic to the production plane, abandoned the easel for agitprop theater sets, costume design, and other useful projects. (A couple of abstract, colored linoleum cuts, with bold jostling planes, make us wish she hadnt.)

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Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented Review: Modernists of the World, Unite! - The Wall Street Journal