Monthly Archives: July 2021

If there was one motivational factor for Matt Olson to reboot his career, to turn himself into an all-around fabulous player, to earn the right to be selected an All-Star for the first time, it was this basic eight-word premise:

As manager Bob Melvin said it, and it makes perfect sense when examining how Olson evolved from his disappointing 2020 to his inclusion in the American League MVP conversation, at least beyond Shohei Ohtani and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

Olson, the multifaceted 6-foot-5 first baseman, arrived in the majors with power and Gold Glove skills, but he always knew he could take his game to the next level by making more solid contact. More contact, period.

Olsons first three full seasons, he struck out roughly once every four plate appearances 27.8%, 24.7%, 25.2% but the swings and misses came far more frequently last year when his strikeout rate soared to 31.4%, the ninth highest rate in the majors among hitters with enough plate appearances to qualify for the leader board.

Those days are gone. Olson has turned himself into an exceptional contact hitter while maintaining his power stroke. He strikes out just 16.5% of the time, and only 31 qualified batters whiff less.

The transformation is evident throughout Olsons stat line, and hes using all fields and beating the shift, a true all-around hitter and centerpiece of a team that has led the AL West for most of the season.

Pretty much my whole baseball career, Ive been a slow starter and kind of a second half guy, Olson said. This year, even from spring training, I felt I was in a better place after addressing some things in the offseason.

Matt Olson (28) is high fived in the dugout in the ninth inning after being taken out for a pinch runner as the Oakland Athletics played the Boston Red Sox at the Coliseum in Oakland, Calif., on Sunday, July 4, 2021. The As were defeated 0-1.

Aside from an improved mental approach at the plate It really got away from me. I honestly had a bad attitude Olson has been doing a couple of things that have made a difference. Hes religiously using a high-velocity pitching machine and also choking up on the bat.

That latter practice is an old-school technique batters used to assure making contact, especially with two strikes. It has become a rarity over the years as hitters dumped their two-strike approach and tried to power up on every pitch.

Olson can be seen these days choking up at least an inch, as Barry Bonds did, which gives him more control of the bat and a quicker swing through the zone.

Hes not missing the high fastballs as he did in 2020. Hes either fouling off those pitches or knocking them into left field for base hits.

I played around with it in the spring and in the offseason, and I didnt see a ton of power difference, Olson said. I cant say Ill be doing it forever. Its honestly just a big feel thing. Im always moving around in the box, up and back and away from the plate, and changing grip on the bat is just one of those things where if it aint broke, dont fix it.

But well see how long it sticks.

Not many people know Olsons swing like Eric Martins, the As assistant hitting coach who worked with Olson in the minors and has had a front-row seat to the lefty swingers evolution of hitting.

Now he has confidence he can use the whole field, Martins said, and when he hits balls to left field and center field and left-center, thats a dangerous man right there.

Olson is hitting to the opposite field like never before. Of the balls he puts in play, 52.7% have gone to center field, up from 45.1% last year, and a career-high 15.9% have gone to left.

He pulls the ball 31.4% of the time, a career low.

Oakland Athletics' Matt Olson, left, rounds the bases after hitting a solo home run during the first inning of the team's baseball game against the Houston Astros, Wednesday, July 7, 2021, in Houston. (AP Photo/Eric Christian Smith)

Olys trying to take advantage of what the defense is giving him. He was getting tired of hitting it to that rover out in short right field, said Melvin, adding the 2020 season wasnt kind to Olson and some of the games other top hitters because it was so short.

He got off to a slow start, and it was tough catching up because there wasnt enough time. Now hes just trying to become a better hitter, hit the ball the other way, let the ball travel a little bit more in the zone, cut down on his strikeouts.

Mission accomplished. Aside from choking up, a major difference in Olsons approach is the constant use of a velo machine with dimpled balls that are rubbery and a bit lighter than baseballs, delivering them through a horn-shaped apparatus.

Its made by Power Alley, and the As call it the little red machine because, well, its red. Tommy La Stella, whos known for rarely striking out, brought one with him from Anaheim when the As traded for him last season, and it caught on.

The As bought a few of the machines to accommodate those who like the ball whizzing toward them from short range without the fear of cracking a bat. Matt Chapman and Ramon Laureano are users.

One of the benefits for Olson is practicing hitting the high cheese with his long swing. The machine can make pitches have a rising effect, which resembled pitches thrown when MLB wasnt policing pitchers using illegal substances on the ball.

He uses that thing every single day and used it the whole offseason, Martins said. In the sticky era, thats what guys were throwing, fastballs that were rising. He worked on combating that pitch, which was giving him trouble. In turn, it has cleaned up his path and ability to handle all pitches and hit it anywhere.

Oakland Athletics first baseman Matt Olson before a baseball game against the Texas Rangers in Oakland, Calif., Wednesday, June 30, 2021. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

Despite a recent funk, Olson is hitting .283 with a .372 on-base percentage and .552 slugging percentage, a huge upgrade over his 2020 slash line: .195/.310/.424.

He has 20 homers and 53 RBIs. And 56 strikeouts in 80 games, a far cry from last year when he had 77 Ks in 60 games, fifth most in the majors.

Nowadays, once hes done with his prep work, hes not caught up with mechanics. He doesnt go overboard with video. Hes able to walk to the plate and let his baseball instincts guide him. As any premier hitter would. See ball, hit ball.

Last year, if I put together a few bad games, I felt I needed to make a big change, Olson said. You just cant be successful in the box thinking about where my hands are, when do I start, all these things.

Just get in there, even if you dont feel you have youre A swing, and compete. Sometimes you get rolling that way just by barreling up a couple of pitches.

John Shea is The San Francisco Chronicles national baseball writer. Email: jshea@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnSheaHey

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Evolution of A's Matt Olson: From swinging and missing to landing in All-Star Game - San Francisco Chronicle

By definition, the MIKE linebacker is the middle defender in the trio of base off-the-ball linebackers commonly seen in a even front (4-3 base), or the shifted strong side backer in an odd front (3-4 base). This player is often known as the quarterback of the defense, and is usually responsible for setting the unit based on the offensive formation, personnel grouping and down and distance.

In the past, the MIKE linebacker was known as the downhill thumper, who was excellent in run support, but was not the best when in came to defending the pass. You would often see guys hover in the 245-260 range, and their common pass responsibility was high-hole deep sit, intermediate hook-to-curl, or spy the quarterback in case he took off running. Over the year the position as evolved, and in todays NFL, its almost impossible for the defense to have a run-only type of defender, who is a liability against the pass, manning the middle.

The first major change we have seen in this dynamic shift, is the size and speed of todays NFL MIKE linebacker. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the top MIKE linebackers in the game were players like Junior Seau, Ray Lewis, Brian Urlacher, Patrick Willis and Levon Kirkland. Each was 245 plus pounds. Guys like the Seahawks Bobby Wagner, the 49ers Fred Warner, the Bucs Lavonte David and Devin White (both interchangeable as the MIKE), and the Bears Roquan Smith are the new prototype NFL MIKE linebacker.

Some of the NFL top MIKE linebackers (H/W/S):

- Eric Kendricks: 60 232 4.61 40

- Lavonte David: 61 233 4.65 40

- Devin Bush: 60 234 4.43 40

- Roquan Smith: 61 236 4.51 40

- Fred Warner: 63 236 4.64 40

- Devin White: 60 237 4.42 40

- Bobby Wagner: 60 240 4.46 40

The second major change with todays MIKE linebackers, is run fits. Its no secret teams pass the ball a lot more today than even a decade ago. The NFL pass/run average is 62/38, with some teams getting as high as 70 percent passing. Due to the heavy passing schemes, more defense are in nickel packages, which usually have just two linebackers on the field (a MIKE and WILL), and will sub in a extra defensive back or hybrid defender (often call a Dime LB or as Jack Del Rio likes to say, the Buffalo Nickel). Make no mistakes that savvy offensive coordinators will try to take advantage of this even out of 11 personnel, using inside and outside zone running schemes in an attempt to crease a nickel defense.

Because of this dynamic, todays MIKE linebackers need to be complete sideline-to-sideline defenders, able to stack and shed interior lineman, but also beat a guard to the lane, and even shoot gaps in a even front where gap-stack alignments and one-gapping techniques are prevalent.

Essentially, todays unique MIKE has to be able to run-and-chase AND tackle in a phone booth.

The biggest change we see in todays NFL MIKE linebackers is coverage responsibilities. In the past, you mostly saw MIKEs dropping into an underneath zone or deep high-hole. Today, due to the prevalence of nickel looks, the MIKE often has to carry a tight end vertically on the seam, cover running backs out of the backfield and even match up one-on-one in cover zero with slot receivers - along with their periodic blitzing responsibilities.

This is the most difficult responsibility the MIKE has, as they are still a run-first defender, and frequent play-action can cause that one second pause that allows a receiver, tight end or running back to gain space. Because of this, todays MIKE has to be able to read/diagnose, open the hips, and get into his responsible zone or turn and run with his man.

Make no mistake, this is no easy task, and requires a certain breed of athlete at the position.

For the first time in what feels like decades (and it may truly have been that long), we now have a linebacker with the unique skill set that matches todays new MIKE linebacker. The Washington Football Teams 2021 first round draft pick, Jamin Davis, has every intangible you look for in todays off-the-ball linebacker.

First, at 63 234 pounds and running a 4.37 40 with a 39.5 inch vertical, Davis has a ridiculous athletic profile made for todays game.

Jamin can effectively play the stack-and-shed run game (although some say its not his strength), shoot a gap and make a tackle in the backfield, or peruse a ball carrier sideline-to-sideline.

What truly makes Davis special is his coverage ability from both inside and outside the box. This is extremely rare to see from a man his size.

With Jamin manning the middle of Washingtons defense, and being kept clean by one of the best defensive fronts in the entire league, offensive coordinators wont be able to single our middle linebacker out, and try to force mismatches against more athletic pass catchers like we saw last year with Jon Bostic inside.

Much like the new-age MIKE linebackers I mentioned earlier in this article, Jamin can certainly do it all!

Ideally, what I think Jack Del Rio would like to do, is similar to what they did in Tampa last year - essentially making Devin White and Levonte David your two interchangeable inside linebackers based on the offensive formation.

In Washingtons sub-grouping, it would be ideal to have both Davis and Holcomb as the two linebackers on the field together, as both players have the size, speed and athleticism to effectively play the run or pass, and could be identified by the offense in any set at the MIKE depending on formation and personnel groupings.

By doing this, it would not only allow Del Rio the advantage of disguising coverages based on HIS personnel; causing some confusion for the offense, but it could eliminate the offense from singling out what would be perceived as a weak link on the defense, while also providing the needed skill set for two every-down off-the-ball box linebackers.

Here are some potential looks from both base and nickel.

Base Even Front 7:

- 1-technique: Payne/Settle

- 3-technique: Allen/Ioannidis

- Left EDGE: Sweat

- Right EDGE: Young

- MIKE: Davis

- WILL: Holcomb/Hudson

- SAM: Bostic/Toney

Base 4-3 Under Front 7:

- 1-technique: Payne/Settle

- 3-technique: Ioannidis

- 5-technique: Allen

- Wide-9: Young/Sweat

- Walked-Up SAM: Toney

- MIKE: Davis

- WILL: Holcomb/Hudson

Nickel Even Front 7:

- 1-technique: Payne/Settle

- 3-technique: Allen/Ioannidis

- Left EDGE: Sweat

- Right EDGE: Young

- MIKE: Davis/Holcomb

- WILL: Holcomb/Davis

- Buffalo Nickel: Collins/Curl, Hudson

Make no mistake, the future is bright for this young defense, and its next rising star may just be the rookie Davis - who CERTAINLY looks the part of todays new NFL MIKE linebacker.

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The Evolution of Todays MIKE Linebacker in the NFL - Will Washington Follow Suit? - Hogs Haven

Issued on: 05/07/2021 - 16:45

You thought dinosaurs became extinct after a meteor hit the Yucatan region of Mexico some 66 million years ago?Think again!A new study suggests theimpact did indeed doom the animals, but that they were already on their way out due to a drop in temperatures. In this edition, we discussthis groundbreaking discovery with the co-author of the study,Fabien Condamine.

We all know that some 66 million years ago, a six-mile-wide space rock hit the Yucatan region of Mexico, wiping dinosaurs off the face of the Earth. But would they have survived without it? New groundbreaking research suggests otherwise. Scientists at the Institute of Evolutionary Science in Montpellier have studied 1,600 fossils from 247 dinosaur species that lived during the late Cretaceous period. They found that some dinosaurs had already started to become extinct before the impact occurred.

We talk to Fabien Condamine, the co-author of the study,and ask him how it's changing the way we view evolutionary theory and the need to constantly keep an open mind and revisit past beliefs.

Our tech editor Peter O'Brien tells us how this applies not just to dinosaurs, but to our own species too. In fact, even Charles Darwin may not have had all the answers.

Plus, the source code for the World Wide Web has been auctioned off at Sotheby's in New York for $5.4 million in the form of an NFT. The programme paved the way for the internet as we know it today.

And in Test 24, wetake a look at how far underwater drones have come,from those that pilot themselves to one that anyone can pilot from home.

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Tech 24 - Revisiting evolution theories: Dinosaurs were on way out before meteor hit - FRANCE 24

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

Given evolutions racist baggage, you might think the theorys proponents would be somewhat abashed to accuse the critics of Darwin of white supremacy.Apparently not. Writing inScientific American, Allison Hopper goes there: Denial ofEvolution Is a Form of White Supremacy. Who isAllison Hopper? She is a white lady, a filmmaker and designer with a masters degree in educational design from New York University. Early in her career, she workedon PBS documentaries. Ms. Hopper has presented on evolution at the Big History Conference in Amsterdam and Chautauqua, among other places. Having been handed a platform by Americas foremost popularscience publication, she writes:

I want to unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies.

White people like this always talk about Black bodies instead of Black (or black) people. The idea here is that our human ancestors, who created the first cultures, came out of Africa and were dark-skinned. Supposedly evolution skeptics wish to deny this history, holding that a continuous line of white descendants segregates white heritage from Black bodies. In the real world, this mythology translates into lethal effects on people who are Black. Fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible are part of the fake news epidemic that feeds the racial divide in our country.

She concludes,

As we move forward to undo systemic racism in every aspect of business, society, academia and life, lets be sure to do so in science education as well.

Of course there have been, and still are, religious people who doubted evolution for religious rather than scientific reasons while at the same time holding racist views. The idea, though, that racism can be logically supported from the Bible is ludicrous. As the biblical story goes, writes Ms. Hopper, the curse or mark of Cain for killing his brother was a darkening of his descendants skin. Theres nothing whatsoever in the biblical story to that effect. Handed a copy of the Bible, no reasonable person would come away with a conclusion of white supremacy.

A person who absorbed the history of evolutionary thinking from Charles Darwin to today, and took it all as inerrant, would be an entirely different story. If you had nothing more to go on than Darwins legacy, a conclusion of white supremacy would follow as a matter of course.

Ms. Hopper is concerned about children and their education, but, in concealing Darwinisms foul past, her version of history is wildly inaccurate. From not long after the theory of evolution by natural selection was first proposed by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, evolution took two different paths. That of Wallace, who split with Darwin over human exceptionalism and came to espouse a proto-intelligent design view, supported equal human dignity regardless of skin color.

That of Darwin followed the pseudo-logic of the purposelessly branching tree. Humanity did not advance all as one, equally, Darwin taught. Instead, as he explained in theDescent of Man, Africans were caught somewhere between ape and human, destined to be liquidated by the more advanced peoples: The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world. Darwin did not celebrate this, but he recognized it as what he saw to be a fact.

His cousin Francis Galton drew from Darwins work the pseudo-scientific idea that races could be improved through eugenics. That became mainstream science right up until it was embraced and put into practice by the Nazis, who justified a Final Solution with scientific evolutionary arguments. Eugenic solutions put into place in the United States against African-Americans, and others, including mass forced sterilizations, provided a warm-up and education for the Nazis.

In the U.S. from the start of the 20th century, respectable scientists at top universities, echoed by theNew York Times, supported caging and displaying Africans and others to educate the public about the truths of Darwinism. Before Hitler, Germans committed genocide in Africa, citing Darwinian theory as their justification. Political scientist John West tells these stories in a pair of widely viewed and critically recognized documentaries,Human ZoosandDarwin, Africa, and Genocide. Speaking of racism and eugenics, West has also traced The Line Running from Charles Darwin through Margaret Sanger to Planned Parenthood. As to education, the biology textbook at the center of the 1925 Scopes trial taught both Darwinism and white supremacy.

Todays actual white supremacists, represented by the Alt-Right and various neo-Nazi groups, are warmly disposed to Darwinism, as a glance at their websites will show. Like Hitler before them, they see in evolutionary theory a justification for racial hatred. Allison Hopper leaves ALL OF THIS OUT, both from herScientific Americanarticle and from a simplistic video on YouTube, aimed at kids, Human Evolution and YOU! And she has the nerve to smear skepticism about Darwinian theory as white supremacist.

I am only skimming through a few points of the relevant history. There is much more. Ms. Hopper is either deeply ignorant or deeply dishonest. Ill assume the former. Her concern for Black bodies is well and good. What about a concern for the truth, which matters, or should matter, to people of all skin colors?

This is important. In coming days atEvolution News, we will be sharing some of our past coverage of evolution and its racist past and present. The phrase white supremacy has already been weaponized in politics. Now it is going to war in science education. The aim is to feed children their minds, not their bodies a massive falsehood. This must be resisted.

Originally posted here:

On Evolution and Racism, Scientific American Goes to War Against the Truth - Discovery Institute

Programming is an ever-evolving discipline. In some respects, it evolves in ways that make coding more difficult. The shift to cloud-native architectures, pressure to achieve flawless software performance and similar trends have made the job of programmers more difficult today than ever before. Yet, in other ways, programming has become easier, especially during the past decade or so. To understand what it means to be a programmer today, it's worth surveying programming evolution in recent years to appreciate which aspects of a coder's job have grown much simpler.

One programming evolution trend that has simplified programming is the proliferation of open source code.

There are now millions of repositories of source code out there that anyone can legally download, modify and incorporate into their own programs. For some programmers, this means it is easier than ever to build out applications quickly by borrowing code written by others.

Doubling down on this trend is the fact that open source today tends to be governed by relatively liberal licenses that give programmers maximum freedom to reuse it in any ways they want. That was not the case 10 years ago, when stricter licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL) predominated.

The reuse of open source code does come with its downsides, of course. It's impossible to guarantee the quality and security of code written by third parties unless you vet it yourself. In that respect, programmers who borrow from open source projects face more work.

Still, it's hard to deny that the ready availability of such an astounding amount of open source code hasn't made programmers' lives easier in some core respects.

What if you want to build an application quickly, but you can't find ready-made open source code to do it with?

The solution may be low-code (or no-code) programming techniques, which allow developers to write applications quickly by taking advantage of prebuilt modules and automatically generated code.

To be sure, low code isn't the right approach for every project. Low-code applications tend not to achieve optimal performance, and, as with the reuse of open source, developers need to manage the security issues that may arise when they use code generated by low-code platforms.

Nonetheless, if you had asked developers 10 years ago to imagine a programming evolution in which programmers could automatically generate much of the code they need to build their applications, they probably would have been incredulous. After all, earlier efforts to create something resembling low-code platforms enjoyed little success. But, today, that approach has become routine for many programming teams.

In the past decade, APIs have played a huge role in the programming evolution. It's easy for developers to have a love-hate relationship with APIs. APIs create additional security risks that programmers need to manage. They often place limits on which functionality you can implement within an API-dependent app because you can only do whatever the API supports. And APIs can become single points of failure for applications that depend centrally on them.

On the other hand, APIs make the lives of programmers easier in the sense that they make it fast and simple to integrate disparate services and data. Until about 10 years ago, if you wanted to import data from a third-party platform into your app, you probably would have had to resort to an "ugly" technique--such as scraping the data off of a web interface. Today, you can easily and systematically import the data using the platform's API (assuming it offers one, which most major platforms do today).

In short, while you could argue that APIs have complicated the work programmers do, they have done much to simplify the implementation of applications that need to integrate or interact with multiple external resources.

Perhaps the biggest driver of programming evolution has been the rise of modern standards.

Until about a decade ago, not only were there relatively few open standards that major vendors supported, but companies often went out of their way not to make their platforms compatible with those of external organizations. This meant that programmers had to write different code for each platform that their apps needed to support.

Fast forward to the present, and even companies that were once stalwart opponents of shared, open standards have changed their ways, making it much easier to build applications around a core set of standard frameworks.

For example, take OpenTelemetry, a framework for exposing and collecting observability data from applications. Using OpenTelemetry, developers can write applications that work seamlessly with any monitoring software that supports OpenTelemetry. That beats having to implement different instrumentation for each observability platform that you want to work with.

Another example is Open Policy Agent, or OPA, which provides a single policy-as-code framework that can be used across most mainstream platforms. Instead of having to use a different policy framework for each service, developers can standardize around OPA.

For some programmers--some of the time, at least--programming today is considerably faster and easier than it would have been just 10 years ago. Despite the ever-increasing complexity of applications themselves in the last decade of programming evolution, developers today can lean heavily on open source, low-code platforms, APIs and open standards to make some core aspects of their jobs easier.

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Programming Evolution: How Coding Has Grown Easier in the Past Decade - ITPro Today

Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, died on July 4 at the age of 92, according to an obituary. Mary Jane Lewontin, his wife of more than 70 years, died three days prior on July 1. Lewontin studied genetic diversity within populations and helped develop the use of protein gel electrophoresis to examine this at a molecular level.

Hes considered one of the evolutionary biology greats, Adriana Briscoe, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was a graduate student in Lewontins lab from 1993 until 1998, tells The Scientist. Hes considered a giant in his field.

Born in New York City in 1929, Lewontin graduated with a bachelors degree in biology from Harvard University in 1951 and then went to Columbia University to study fruit fly population density with his graduate advisor, Theodosius Dobzhansky, according to The New York Times. He graduated with a masters degree in 1952 and a doctorate in zoology in 1954.

In 1966, at the University of Chicago, Lewontin and John Hubby published two papers that pioneered the use of protein gel electrophoresis to study genetic variation within populations of wild fruit flies. Not only did the technique lay the groundwork for the field of molecular genetics, but it revealed a surprising amount of genetic diversity within the population.

He joined Harvard in 1973 as a professor, and remained there until his retirement in 2003, according to a memoriam written by Harvards Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Lewontin was well-known for his critiques of adaptationist programsthe idea that all organismal traits have been optimized due to natural selection. Rather, he argued that genetic variation within a population could also be the product of random chance, or due to selection on linked loci on the genome.

He also wrote a seminal 1972 paper in which he argued there is more genetic variation within members of a population of humans than there is between members of different groups, undermining the idea that there is a genetic basis for the idea of race.

Richard Dick Lewontin was [a] foundational scholar in the field of evolutionary genetics and evolution writ large whose impact on the field is hard to over-estimate, writes Elena Kramer, the department chair in Harvards Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, in an email to The Scientist. He is recognized as a phenomenal scholar but also a talented communicator, both as a teacher and writer, whose fluency in communicating science was underpinned by a deep understanding of his material and the practice of teaching.

Lewontin won numerous awards and honors, including a the Sewall Wright Award in 1994, honorary lifetime membership in the American Society of Naturalists, the 2015 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, and the 2017 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal from the Genetics Society of America.

Briscoe says Lewontin expected his graduate students to come up with their own ideas, which could be intimidating. But that also meant that at the end of your PhD, you really own your intellectual labor, she adds, noting that Lewontin was concerned about how some academics would appropriate their students work. She says he wouldnt even put his name on one of his students papers unless he felt he had contributed to the study.

He was blunt and gruff, the kind of person who did not suffer fools gladly, but he also had a sense of humor, a lot of fondness for his students, and he told entertaining stories, says Briscoe. Scientists, philosophers, and historians of science flocked to his lab to participate in the labs lively seminars, and of course, to speak with him about ideas.

Lewontin and his wife are survived by four sons, seven grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

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Evolutionary Biologist Richard Lewontin Dies at 92 - The Scientist

Caltech Professor of planetary astronomy Mike Brown, pictured in an undated photo provided by the institution.

A group of curious Caltech scientists are looking to other planets in our solar system and beyond in order to learn more about the cosmic history of Earth, and potentially its future.

The recently formed Caltech Center for Comparative Planetary Evolution, or 3CPE, brings together experts from an array of different fields to study how planetary systems work, according to the institution..

The goal of the 3CPE is to merge the fields of astronomy, geology, and biology to explore the origin and evolution of planetary systems and their biospheres. Addressing these questions requires research and insight which crosses traditional discipline boundaries, Caltech said in a written statement.

The 3CPE will be a catalyst for driving collaborations and forming a community spanning these disciplines, according to the statement. We will seed innovative partnerships bridging fields, provide opportunities for young scientists to expand their training into new areas, and help to develop a common culture linking these often well-separated disciplines.

Rather than occupying a building on campus, the center is operated in a virtual format, said 3CPE Director and Caltech Professor of Planetary Astronomy Mike Brown.

The first Planetary Science Department was founded at Caltech in the 1960s, he said.

What we have learned over the course of those now nearly 50 years is that the way to make progress on understanding, in particular, the earliest history of the earth, and the way that our entire planetary system got here, is by looking at other planets to try to compare: Why? Why is the Earth this way? Why is Mars this way? Why is Venus this way?

In recent decades, advances in science have allowed scientists to study planets orbiting other stars, or expoplanets, Brown added.

We can now look at planets throughout the galaxy, planetary systems throughout the galaxy, and start to ask the question not just, Why are we here on Earth? but, Why is the Earth here? Why is there even a solar system here? he said. And we can compare that to other planetary systems and really understand our entire context of how we fit in with the galaxy and with the universe.

The researchers are working to answer some of the big questions, according to Brown.

This is why this new center is both a compelling thing for people to want to work in, but also just fun and exciting, he said. And Im just as excited as can be to work in this area.

Our neighbors Mars and Venus could have a lot to teach us about our own planets past, and possibly shed insight on how to avoid their unfortunate fates.

Venus could have once been much different that it is today, before runaway greenhouse gases turned it into a high-pressure inferno, Brown explained.

How we first started to even understand about climate change, about global warming, is by understanding that things like this have happened on Venus, he said.

Mars is believed to have once been far warmer and wetter, compared with the dusty and desolate terrain visible today. It has dried out and frozen, Brown said. So understanding that these planets that are all relatively closely packed together here in the solar system can go very divergent with small changes really helps us understand what we need to do to make sure that we dont do either of those things on our own planet.

Brown said he and his team were eagerly anticipating findings from Jet Propulsion Laboratorys Perseverance Mars Rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February.

The environment at Jezero Crater, where Perseverance landed, is an interesting and weird environment, he said. Its an ancient river delta, and it has some interesting chemistry in it thats unlike the chemistry on most of the Earth.

The Earth can teach scientists about other planets, as well.

In another 3CPE endeavor, a team is planning to travel to Australia to study rocks in hopes of gaining insights into how to conduct better geology on other worlds.

Theres a specific spot in Australia that has similar chemistry to the chemistry thats happening in Jezero Crater, according to Brown. The Australia-bound team will study the Australian features to better prepare them to encounter similar samples on Mars.

More information on the Caltech Center for Comparative Planetary Evolution can be found on the centers website at http://cpe.caltech.edu.

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Caltech's Center for Comparative Planetary Evolution Looks to the Sky For Answers About Earth Pasadena Now - Pasadena Now