The Problem of an Expanding Universe

A new, precise measurement of the expansion rate of the Universe is in, and it's serving up a huge cosmic pickle.


Using Hubble data and new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team led by physicist Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University has confirmed that previous measurements are correct after all, despite years of debate.


Based on immense distances from our Solar System to Cepheid variable stars and Type Ia supernovae, which are used to create a 'cosmic distance ladder', our Universe does indeed appear to be expanding at 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec – a rate known as the Hubble constant.  READ MORE...

Scientist Left Out Truth About Climate Change

A California scientist admitted that he "left out the full truth" about climate change, blaming it primarily on human causes, to get his study published in a prestigious science journal.

Patrick T. Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and doctor of earth and climate sciences, admitted in an online article in The Free Press, a blog post and a series of social media posts that he distorted the findings of his studies to appeal to the editors at Nature and Science magazines, which are prestigious online science journals.

"And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society," Brown wrote in The Free Press.

Brown's study published in Nature on Aug. 30 stated that climate change affected extreme wildfire behavior like the devastating fires in California and Maui. The established scientist now admits that he "focused narrowly" only on the human influence of wildfires, instead of focusing broadly on the complexities of other "obviously relevant factors."

He blamed his angle on the pressure scientists face to get their studies published in prestigious articles and the need to create catchy abstracts that can be turned into headlines.

Brown said in The Free Press he is not "disowning" his paper by criticizing how he chose to approach the piece, but admitting it is less "useful than it could have been."

"You might be wondering at this point if I’m disowning my own paper. I’m not," Brown wrote. "On the contrary, I think it advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior. It’s just that the process of customizing the research for an eminent journal caused it to be less useful than it could have been."  READ MORE...

Relieve Headaches Faster

According to a recent Johns Hopkins study, how you swallow pills can impact how quickly your body absorbs the medicine.

You probably don’t consider your body posture while taking pills when you have a headache. However, recent research from Johns Hopkins University discovered that your posture can significantly impact how quickly your body absorbs the medication, as much as an hour longer.

The conclusions are based on what is thought to be the first model to replicate how a drug dissolves in the human stomach.

“We were very surprised that posture had such an immense effect on the dissolution rate of a pill,” said senior author Rajat Mittal, a Johns Hopkins engineer and an expert in fluid dynamics. “I never thought about whether I was doing it right or wrong but now I’ll definitely think about it every time I take a pill.”

Their findings were recently published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

In recent years, models that accurately represent the working of various important organs, most notably the heart, have been developed. The team’s model, StomachSim, appears to be one of the first to be able to conduct realistic simulations of the human stomach. StomachSim simulates what happens within a stomach as it breaks down food or, in this instance, medicine by fusing physics, biomechanics, and fluid mechanics.  READ MORE...

Recession Proof Industries

Warnings about a looming recession have reached a fever pitch. Inflation continues to soar, causing chaos in the stock market, and companies are starting to prepare for the worst with layoffs, hiring freezes and, in some extreme cases, rescinding job offers.

The sudden shift in labor market dynamics — after months of strong job prospects and rising wages for employees — has left many working Americans scratching their heads.

“Job prospects are going to get much worse” in the next few months, Laurence Ball, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University, tells CNBC Make It. “The question is: ‘How much worse?’”

If you’re thinking of changing roles soon, you should know that while no job is completely recession-proof, certain industries tend to fare worse than others during a downturn.

During the Great Recession, which lasted from 2007 to 2009, the construction and manufacturing sectors experienced sizable dips in employment, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That’s because during an economic downturn, people usually limit their discretionary spending and delay big purchases, including cars and new homes, says Karen Dynan, an economics professor at Harvard University and former chief economist at the U.S. Treasury. She predicts that these industries will see similar patterns if a recession were to occur soon.  READ MORE...

Universe Expanding Faster Than Expected

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy Markarian 1337, which is roughly 120 million light-years away from Earth. In 2006, astronomers saw a certain kind of supernova explode in this galaxy, providing researchers with some of the data nee...IMAGE BY ESA/HUBBLE & NASA, A. RIESS ET AL.

The latest measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope suggest the universe is expanding faster than scientists' models predict—a hint that some unknown ingredient could be at work in the cosmos.

It’s one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy: Based on multiple observations of stars and galaxies, the universe seems to be flying apart faster than our best models of the cosmos predict it should. Evidence of this conundrum has been accumulating for years, causing some researchers to call it a looming crisis in cosmology.

Now a group of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope has compiled a massive new dataset, and they’ve found a-million-to-one odds that the discrepancy is a statistical fluke. In other words, it’s looking even more likely that there’s some fundamental ingredient of the cosmos—or some unexpected effect of the known ingredients—that astronomers have yet to pin down.

“The universe seems to throw a lot of surprises at us, and that’s a good thing, because it helps us learn,” says Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who led the latest effort to test the anomaly.

The conundrum is known as the Hubble tension, after astronomer Edwin Hubble. In 1929 he observed that the farther a galaxy is from us, the faster it recedes—an observation that helped pave the way toward our current notion of the universe starting with the big bang and expanding ever since.

Researchers have tried to measure the universe’s current rate of expansion in two primary ways: by measuring distances to nearby stars, and by mapping a faint glow dating back to the infant universe. These dual approaches provide a way to test our understanding of the universe across more than 13 billion years of cosmic history. The research has also uncovered some key cosmic ingredients, such as “dark energy,” the mysterious force thought to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.

But these two methods disagree on the universe’s current expansion rate by about 8 percent. That difference might not sound like much, but if this discrepancy is real, it means the universe is now expanding faster than even dark energy can explain—implying some breakdown in our accounting of the cosmos.  READ MORE...

Ridiges of South Seitah

NASA’s Perseverance rover captures a geologic feature with details that offer clues to the area’s mysterious past.

Ask any space explorer, and they’ll have a favorite photograph or two from their mission. 

For Jorge Núñez, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist working on the science team of NASA’s Perseverance rover, one of his current favorites is a rover’s-eye panorama of the “South Séítah” region of Mars’ Jezero Crater. 

Exploring the geologic unit was among the major objectives of the team’s first science campaign because it may contain some of the deepest, and potentially oldest, rocks in the giant crater.

“Just like any excited tourist approaching the end of a major road trip, we stopped at a lookout to get a first view of our destination,” said Núñez, who is based at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. 

“This panorama is spectacular because you feel like you are there. It shows not only the incredible scale of the area, but also all the exploration possibilities South Séítah has to offer. With multiple intriguing rocky outcrops and ridgelines, each one is seemingly better than the last. If it’s not a field geologist’s dream, it’s pretty close.”

Composed of 84 individual enhanced-color images that were later stitched together, the mosaic was taken on September 12 (the 201st Martian day, or sol, of the mission) by the Mastcam-Z camera system as the rover was parked on an elevated overlook just outside its entry point into South Séítah. 

Perseverance had just completed a record 190-yard (175-meter) drive the previous sol.  READ MORE...