Our Moon's Hidden Resource

Alongside advances in space exploration, we’ve recently seen much time and money invested into technologies that could allow effective space resource utilisation. And at the forefront of these efforts has been a laser-sharp focus on finding the best way to produce oxygen on the Moon.

In October, the Australian Space Agency and NASA signed a deal to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon under the Artemis program, with a goal to collect lunar rocks that could ultimately provide breathable oxygen on the Moon.

Although the Moon does have an atmosphere, it’s very thin and composed mostly of hydrogen, neon, and argon. It’s not the sort of gaseous mixture that could sustain oxygen-dependent mammals such as humans.

That said, there is actually plenty of oxygen on the Moon. It just isn’t in a gaseous form. Instead, it’s trapped inside regolith — the layer of rock and fine dust that covers the Moon’s surface. If we could extract oxygen from regolith, would it be enough to support human life on the Moon?

THE BREADTH OF OXYGEN
Oxygen can be found in many of the minerals in the ground around us. And the Moon is mostly made of the same rocks you’ll find on Earth (although with a slightly greater amount of material that came from meteors).

Minerals such as silica, aluminium, and iron and magnesium oxides dominate the Moon’s landscape. All of these minerals contain oxygen, but not in a form our lungs can access.

On the Moon, these minerals exist in a few different forms including hard rock, dust, gravel, and stones covering the surface. This material has resulted from the impacts of meteorites crashing into the lunar surface over countless millennia.

Some people call the Moon’s surface layer lunar “soil”, but as a soil scientist, I’m hesitant to use this term. Soil as we know it is pretty magical stuff that only occurs on Earth. It has been created by a vast array of organisms working on the soil’s parent material — regolith, derived from hard rock — over millions of years.

The result is a matrix of minerals which were not present in the original rocks. Earth’s soil is imbued with remarkable physical, chemical, and biological characteristics. Meanwhile, the materials on the Moon’s surface is basically regolith in its original, untouched form.  READ MORE...

Talking to Voyager Again

NASA’S VOYAGER 1 is on a fraught and unknowable journey into deep space. Some 14.6 billion miles from Earth, it and its sister craft, Voyager 2, are the furthest human-made objects from our planet, having made it beyond the edges of the Solar System and out into the interstellar medium. 

At such distances, anything can go wrong. Add to that the fact that these are old craft: The Voyagers launched in the 1970s. 

So when Voyager 1 started to send home weird, garbled nonsense instead of telemetry data in May of this year, NASA engineers might have been forgiven for calling it a day and pouring one out for perhaps the most successful space mission of all time.


But that’s not how NASA works. Instead, they started working on a remote diagnosis and fix for the record-breaking spacecraft. Now, some four months later, they are triumphant. 

Voyager 1 is back online and communicating perfectly with ground control as if it never happened. In fact, the fix turned out to be relatively simple — or as simple as anything can be with a 22-hour communications lag in each direction and billions of miles of space in between.  READ MORE...

Creating Matrer

E = MC2 MAY BE the most quotidian equation in physics. Everyone’s heard of it and it’s been proven time and again. Did you convert mass into energy? Go tell it to the stars, whose light is generated from mass lost during nuclear fusion.

But there is another way to imagine this fundamental equation.

“You can actually look at this process from both sides,” Daniel Brandenburg, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, tells Inverse.

“In our case, we wanted to take light and convert it into matter.”

That it turns out is a lot less mundane.

On his 143rd birthday, Inverse celebrates the world’s most iconic physicist — and interrogates the myth of his genius. Welcome to Einstein Week.

Brandenburg is a member of the STAR collaboration, a group of more than 700 scientists from 15 countries who use BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC (pronounced “Rick”), to smash gold nuclei together at 99.995 percent the speed-of-light.

For this experiment, the researchers were more interested in the near misses than the hits. Ultra-high-energy photons encircle the gold nuclei like an aura, and auras collide as nuclei zoom past one another. When photons (particles of light; massless, pure energy) collide, they generate an electron and a positron, its antimatter counterpart — both particles that have a mass. This is known as the Breit-Wheeler Process.

“The part that makes the Breit-Wheeler process so hard to achieve is getting photons that have enough energy,” explains Brandenburg. “We’ve crossed this threshold where we can convert the photons into a real electron-positron pair. And that’s where we really can achieve what Einstein talked about, where we take the energy from the photons.”

THE EINSTEIN CONNECTION
E = mc2 is an outgrowth of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which says that an object’s speed affects how it experiences space and time relative to other objects. (His theory of general relativity adds gravity into the mix.) About two decades after Einstein’s seminal 1905 paper on the matter, two theoretical physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler took his by then famous and accepted equation and deduced the requirements for turning light into matter.  READ MORE...

Dark Energy On Earth

DARK ENERGY ISN’T just dark — it's nigh invisible.

Hypothesized by physicists to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe, dark energy has never been directly observed or measured. Instead, scientists can only make inferences about it from its effects on the space and matter we can see.


Finding measurable hints of dark energy’s effects on distance objects — and the shape of space itself — is a major goal of major NASA missions, such as the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

But in a new paper published September 15 in the journal Physical Review D a group of cosmologists suggests researchers might not need to peer deep into the cosmos to make second-hand observations of dark energy — it may have been detected right here on Earth.

WHAT’S NEW — In the paper, the researchers claim that hints of dark energy were detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy during an experiment designed to detect dark matter.

The team, comprised mostly of theorists, looked at data from the XENON1T, an experiment designed to detect rare interactions between hypothetical dark matter particles and components of the noble gas xenon held in a special detector.

The odds that dark energy has been detected directly are admittedly low, Jeremy Sakstein, assistant professor of theoretical physics at the University of Hawaii and one of the paper’s authors, tells Inverse.

“There are other explanations for this signal as well,” he says, and at the moment, “we don't know whether it's just a statistical anomaly.”

Statistically, there is a 5 percent chance the detection was an anomaly. The detection of the 2012 discovery Higgs Boson, by comparison, was much more certain — there was only a chance in about 3.5 million that detection was anomalous.  READ MORE...

Earth's Twin

THE EIGHT PLANETS of our Solar System aren’t the only ones we’ve ever had — they’re merely the survivors.

But that doesn’t mean the other planets were destroyed. Earth may have a long-lost sibling somewhere in interstellar space. At least one rocky planet, around the same mass as Mars, may have been booted out of the early Solar System.

These are just some of the findings compiled in a recent review paper in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, taking a look at the mysterious third zone of our Solar System, those points past Neptune and out into interstellar space.

Today, the planets in our Solar System are neatly sorted by size and composition:

• The four rocky inner planets orbit in the space between the Sun and the Asteroid Belt
• The outer Solar System is the realm of giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — which gathered enormous masses of gas and ice around their rocky cores
• Beyond Uranus and Neptune lies the realm of the dwarf planets, like Pluto, Eris, Sedna, and their even smaller neighbors, whether dwarf planet or comet

And that’s a little strange. As if something is missing.

“It seems unlikely that Nature created four giant planet cores, but then nothing else larger than dwarf planets in the outer Solar System,” planetary scientists Brett Gladman of the University of British Columbia and Kathryn Volk of the University of Arizona write in the review.  READ MORE

Gut Health

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER A “MIND-BLOWING” LINK BETWEEN GUT HEALTH AND AGE REVERSAL

“By restoring health in the microbiome we’re able to reverse age-related cognitive deficits,” scientists say about their new study in mice.

TO STAVE OFF THE EFFECTS OF AGING, ONE MIGHT USE RETINOL CREAMS OR PLAY SUDOKU.

But maybe we should be focusing on something different altogether.

Scientists have known for the past two decades that the metropolis home to trillions of bacteria in your belly — the gut microbiome — is also central to mental health, the immune system, and more.

One of the latest studies in gut health scrutinizes how our microbiome affects aging in mice, using a surprising transplant.

The research, published Monday in the journal Nature Aging, reveals that older mice who have received gut microbiota transplants from young mice show improved brain function and behavior.

This mouse model offers powerful insight into how diet and what populates our stomachs affect what our brains look like in old age.  READ MORE

WHAT’S NEW — Researchers have found that when they transplant microbiota of young mice into the intestines of older mice, the older mice display improved cognitive function. This is the first study that shows the correlation between transplantation of a gut microbiome from a younger mouse into an older one with improved brain abilities in the older mice.

Babylonian Tablet

TUCKED AWAY in a seemingly forgotten corner of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Daniel Mansfield found what may solve one of ancient math’s biggest questions.

First exhumed in 1894 from what is now Baghdad, the circular tablet — broken at the center with small perpendicular indentations across it — was feared lost to antiquity. 

But in 2018, a photo of the tablet showed up in Mansfield’s inbox.

Mansfield, a senior lecturer of mathematics at the University of New South Wales Sydney, had suspected the tablet was real. He came across records of its excavation and began the hunt. 

Word got around about what he was looking for, and then the email came. He knew what he had to do: travel to Turkey and examine it at the museum.

Hidden within this tablet is not only the oldest known display of applied geometry but a new ancient understanding of triangles. It could rewrite what we know about the history of mathematics, Mansfield argues.

These findings were published Wednesday in the journal Foundations of Science.

It’s generally thought that trigonometry — a subset of geometry and what’s displayed on the tablet in a crude sense — was developed by ancient Greeks like the philosopher Pythagoras. 

However, analysis of the tablet suggests it was created 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born.  READ MORE

Our Gut & Diet

YOUR GUT IS A THRIVING UNIVERSE UNTO ITSELF. This tiny cosmos is inhabited by thousands on thousands of microorganisms, which together make up your gut microbiome.

Among other things, this internal ecosystem contains bacteria that we rely on to help us break down and process the foods that we’re not readily equipped to digest. But a slew of recent scientific studies shows that our gut also connects more broadly to our holistic health, even to things that are seemingly unrelated, like our brains.

The science is preliminary, but there is compelling evidence that what you eat — and in turn, that changes the gut microbiome — has an outsized influence on your health. But not in the way you’d think.

WHAT’S NEW — A new study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances looks at how diet could alter multiple sclerosis (MS) symptoms via the gut microbiome. By feeding mice with an MS-like condition a specific diet, scientists were able to reprogram their gut bacteria — and reduce their symptoms.

The study started with the observation that the gut microbiomes of people with MS lack a kind of bacteria that, in most folks’ gut, breakdowns a nutrient called isoflavones. This nutrient is commonly found in everyday staple foods, like soy and beans.

So, the team hypothesized that MS might be related to the absence of these bacteria — and in turn, eating more foods with isoflavones in them could alleviate the symptoms.

From there, they were able to demonstrate the critical difference that the bacteria’s presence or absence can make in this disease.

WHY IT MATTERS — This study is so intriguing because it identifies a clear relationship between the gut, the food we eat, and our brain and body health.

In the new study, the researchers go further than past work by not only establishing a clear link between gut bacteria and diet, but also the mechanisms driving the relationship — and how to potentially game it to our advantage.

“The hypothesis has always been that bacterial composition is tightly linked to diet,” says Sergio Baranzini, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the research. While other studies have investigated this relationship, “what those studies fell short of is showing what could be the potential mechanism.”