Using Nuclear Rockets to get to MARS

Scientists have long proposed nuclear fission-fueled rockets to get to Mars fast — but one is warning that making it happen will be an uphill battle.

In an explainer for The Conversation, nuclear engineering expert Dan Kotlyar noted that fueling rockets with nuclear fission, which results from the energy emanated from splitting atoms, will indeed cut the years-long journey to and from Mars by a wide margin.

One of the chemical compounds that goes into the production of nuclear fuel, however, makes those dreams difficult to achieve.

Kotlyar, a nuclear and radiological engineering assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, pointed out that the United States government and major companies like General Electric funded development into nuclear thermal propulsion technology.   READ MORE...

Our Social Survival was Consciousness

Key Facts:

• Social Purpose: Consciousness evolved to facilitate social interactions and communication.
• Intuition’s Role: Intuitive beliefs shape our understanding of consciousness, often complicating scientific explanations.
• Species Benefit: Subjective awareness helps broadcast ideas and emotions, benefiting species survival and wellbeing.

Source: The Conversation

Why did the experience of consciousness evolve from our underlying brain physiology? Despite being a vibrant area of neuroscience, current research on consciousness is characterised by disagreement and controversy – with several rival theories in contention.

A recent scoping review of over 1,000 articles identified over 20 different theoretical accounts. Philosophers like David Chalmers argue that no single scientific theory can truly explain consciousness.

We define consciousness as embodied subjective awareness, including self awareness. In a recent article published in Interalia (which is not peer reviewed), we argue that one reason for this predicament is the powerful role played by intuition.


We are not alone. Social scientist Jacy Reese Anthis writes “much of the debate on the fundamental nature of consciousness takes the form of intuition jousting, in which the different parties each report their own strong intuitions and joust them against each other”.         READ MORE...

Evidence We Live in a Simulation

In the 1999 film The Matrix, Thomas Anderson (a.k.a. Neo) discovers a truth to end all truths—the universe is a simulation. While this premise provides fantastic sci-fi fodder (and explains how Neo can learn kung-fu in about five seconds), the idea isn’t quite as carefully relegated to the fiction section as one might expect.

University of Portsmouth scientist Melvin Vopson, who studies the possibility that the universe might indeed be a digital facsimile, leans into the cinematic comparison. In an article published on website The Conversation this past October, Vopson invoked the Wachowskis’ sci-fi masterpiece, and around the same time, he published a book on the subject—Reality Reloaded, a subtle hat tip to the title of the less successful Matrix sequel. While he is just one among many who’ve contemplated the idea, Vopson claims to have one thing that those before him lacked: evidence.                READ MORE...

Underwater Structures Reveal How Life Began

Scientists believe they’ve found a window into the dawn of time on Earth, and it’s hidden beneath the Pacific Ocean.

A team led by geophysicist Simon Lamb, of the University of Wellington and scientist Cornel de Ronde, of GNS Science, said the key to our past lies in a remote corner of South Africa and way down on the seafloor off the coast of New Zealand.

So what do these two sites, on opposite sides of the world, have in common?

Writing for The Conversation, the scientists explained that their work began after de Ronde created a new, detailed geological map of an area known as the Barberton Greenstone Belt, which lies in South Africa’s highveld region.

“The geological formations in this region have proved difficult to decipher, despite many attempts,” the pair write.     READ MORE...

Your COVID Protection

A used mask is seen on beach at marine protected area located in St. Martin's Island, Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh on March 13. Greater COVID transmissibility due to Omicron variants means greater transmissibility in any setting, indoors or outdoors—even if outside is still safer, experts say.

MOHAMMAD SHAJAHAN—ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES

The outdoors have always been a sanctuary—even more so since the advent of the pandemic.

Spreading COVID outside was possible, but not probable, experts advised in 2020, urging cooped-up citizens to turn to Mother Nature as an antidote to the isolation of lockdowns. Events, dining, and even entire classrooms were moved outside, when feasible.

But Omicron was a game changer, in more ways than one.

The original Wuhan strain of COVID-19 had a reproductive rate—also known as an R0 or R-naught value—of around 3.3, meaning that each infected person infected another 3.3 people, on average. That put COVID-19 among the least transmissible human diseases.

Slightly less transmissible were the 1918 pandemic strain of flu, which had an estimated R0 of 2, as does Ebola. On the higher end of the spectrum, mumps has an R0 of 12; measles tops the list at 18.

In order to outcompete, successful COVID variants have become more transmissible with time. Delta had a slightly higher reproductive rate of around 5.1. Then came Omicron, with an reproductive rate almost twice as large: 9.5.

So called “stealth Omicron,” nicknamed for its ability to evade detection on PCR tests, was about 1.4 times more transmissible than BA.1, so its reproductive rate was around 13.3, Adrian Esterman, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of South Australia, recently wrote on academic news website The Conversation.

New studies suggest that BA.4 and BA.5, currently sweeping the U.S. and countries around the globe, have a growth advantage over BA.2 similar to the growth advantage BA.2 had over BA.1. Thus, the latest dominant COVID subvariants have a reproductive rate of around 18.6, tying or surpassing measles, the world’s most infectious viral disease, according to Esterman.

Greater transmissibility means greater transmissibility in any setting, indoors or outdoors—even if outside is still safer, Maimuna Majumder, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, recently told NPR.

Upping the ante is the fact that recent subvariants like BA.4 and BA.5 are the most immune-evasive yet, with the ability to dodge antibodies from both vaccines and prior infection.

All this to say your protection outdoors isn’t what it was in 2020—and it may be time to begin thinking more critically about outdoor gatherings.  READ MORE...

Living to 150

Humans could live until the ripe old age of 150 years according to recent research – and scientists are racing to work out how.

Harvard geniuses, biohackers and internet billionaires are all looking for ways that humans can crack the code on aging.

WaitButWhy blogger Tim Urban writes “the human body seems programmed to shut itself down somewhere around the century mark, if it hasn’t already”.

And Urban is right! There are no verified cases of a person living to be older than 122, though the oldest living person is on their way at age 119.

Researchers at GERO.AI concluded the “absolute limit” of the human lifespan to be between 100 and 150 – they came to this conclusion by analyzing 70,000 participants up to age 85 based on their ability to fight disease, risk of heart conditions and cognitive impairment.

The Conversation reported that not a single participant showed the biological resiliency to live to 150 – but notes the study is limited by today’s medical standards.

Will improvements in medicine, environment and technology to drastically lengthen the average lifespan and make 150 a reality?

Humans could live until the age of 150, according to a new study.  Shutterstock  Brutal biology

The human body is made up of about 30 trillion cells. Cells are constantly dying and being replaced by replicants.

Within the cell body there are chromosomes – these are DNA strands with the code written for humans within them.

At the end of a DNA strand is a microscopic bundle of non-crucial DNA, so that none of the important stuff gets snipped off when the cell divides.

A cell can divide itself about 50 times before it’s lost its ability to replicate.

As more and more cells become ineffective and die, the signs of aging start to show in gray hair, weaker bones and vision loss.

Some theorize this process can be stopped or reversed.  READ MORE...

Consciousness

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. 

The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells – known as neurons – each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve connections.

We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behaviour. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. 

How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?

There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.

For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the mysterious inner world of consciousness – it was not taken to be a fitting topic for “serious science”. Things have changed a lot, and there is now broad agreement that the problem of consciousness is a serious scientific issue. 

But many consciousness researchers underestimate the depth of the challenge, believing that we just need to continue examining the physical structures of the brain to work out how they produce consciousness.  READ MORE...

Becoming Human

READER QUESTION:   We now know from evolutionary science that humanity has existed in some form or another for around 2 million years or more. Homo sapiens are comparatively new on the block. There were also many other human species, some which we interbred with. The question is then inevitable – when can we claim personhood in the long story of evolution? Are Chimpanzees people? Did Australopithecine have an afterlife? What are the implications for how we think about rights and religion? Anthony A. MacIsaac, 26, Paris, France.

In our mythologies, there’s often a singular moment when we became “human”. Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge and gained awareness of good and evil. Prometheus created men from clay and gave them fire. But in the modern origin story, evolution, there’s no defining moment of creation. Instead, humans emerged gradually, generation by generation, from earlier species.

As with any other complex adaptation – a bird’s wing, a whale’s fluke, our own fingers – our humanity evolved step by step, over millions of years. Mutations appeared in our DNA, spread through the population, and our ancestors slowly became something more like us and, finally, we appeared.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

SEX in SPACE

Houston, we have a problem! Love and sex need to happen in space if we hope to travel long distances and become an interplanetary species, but space organizations are not ready.

National agencies and private space companies — such as NASA and SpaceX — aim to colonize Mars and send humans into space for long-term missions, but they have yet to address the intimate and sexual needs of astronauts or future space inhabitants.

This situation is untenable and needs to change if we hope to settle new worlds and continue our expansion in the cosmos — we’ll need to learn how to safely reproduce and build pleasurable intimate lives in space. To succeed, however, we also need space organizations to adopt a new perspective on space exploration: one that considers humans as whole beings with needs and desires.

As researchers exploring the psychology of human sexuality and studying the psychosocial aspects of human factors in space, we propose that it is high time for space programs to embrace a new discipline: space sexology, the comprehensive scientific study of extraterrestrial intimacy and sexuality.

The final, intimate frontier
Love and sex are central to human life. Despite this, national and private space organizations are moving forward with long-term missions to the International Space Station (ISS), the moon and Mars without any concrete research and plans to address human eroticism in space. It’s one thing to land rovers on another planet or launch billionaires into orbit — it’s another to send humans to live in space for extended periods of time.

In practice, rocket science may take us to outer space, but it will be human relations that determine if we survive and thrive as a spacefaring civilization. In that regard, we argue that limiting intimacy in space could jeopardize the mental and sexual health of astronauts, along with crew performance and mission success. On the other hand, enabling space eroticism could help humans adapt to space life and enhance the well-being of future space inhabitants.  READ MORE...

NOTE:
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Simon Dubé, PhD candidate, Psychology of Human Sexuality, Erobotics & Space Sexology, Concordia University

Dave Anctil, Chercheur affilié à l'Observatoire international sur les impacts sociétaux de l’intelligence artificielle et du numérique (OBVIA), Université Laval

Judith Lapierre, Professor, Faculty of Nursing Science, Université Laval

Our Consciousness

When I see red, it’s the most religious experience. Seeing red just results from photons of a certain frequency hitting the retina of my eye, which cascades electrical and biochemical pulses through my brain, in the same way a PC runs. But nothing happening in my eye or brain actually is the red colour I experience, nor are the photons or pulses. This is seemingly outside this world. Some say my brain is just fooling me, but I don’t accept that as I actually experience the red. But then, how can something out of this world be in our world? Andrew Kaye, 52, London.

What’s going on in your head right now? Presumably you’re having a visual experience of these words in front of you. Maybe you can hear the sound of traffic in the distance or a baby crying in the flat next door. Perhaps you’re feeling a bit tired and distracted, struggling to focus on the words on the page. Or maybe you’re feeling elated at the prospect of an enlightening read. Take a moment to attend to what it’s like to be you right now. This is what’s going on inside your head.

Or is it? There’s another, quite different story. According to neuroscience, the contents of your head are comprised of 86 billion neurons, each one linked to 10,000 others, yielding trillions of connections.

A neuron communicates with its neighbour by converting an electrical signal into a chemical signal (a neurotransmitter), which then passes across the gap in between the neurons (a synapse) to bind to a receptor in the neighbouring neuron, before being converted back into an electrical signal. From these basic building blocks, huge networks of electro-chemical communication are built up.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...