Lisa Grossman, Author at ��è��Ƶ

What the end of the atomic renaissance means for nuclear power

Lisa Grossman — Wed, 17 May 2017 18:00:00 +0000

The next generation of nuclear reactors was meant to bring cheaper, safer power. Where are they, and can they save the industry from bankruptcy and closure?

On the ground in Washington at the March for Science

Chelsea Whyte — Sat, 22 Apr 2017 22:22:56 +0000

Marchers in front of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC

Lisa Grossman/��è��Ƶ

Jonathan Berman, the national co-chair of the , said his hopes for the day of the march were that it wouldn’t rain and that lots of people would show up. He got one of those wishes.

When we turned up to the National Mall in Washington, DC on Earth Day, we joined thousands of people gathering for a rally, a teach-in, and a march. The crowds streamed in through the gates for hours, standing in lines several city blocks long by midday.

The morning was devoted to talks from a lineup of speakers, which included scientists, science communicators – including Bill Nye and Michael Mann – and young students aspiring to become an astronaut, an engineer, and a clean energy researcher.

In the crowd, the feeling was jubilant and reverent. Cheers went up at the images of famous scientific pioneers and at every mention of a field of science from the podium. During a video showing images of the earth from space, rally-goers silently lifted their signs like lighters at a rock concert.

In fact, if it weren’t for the protest signs, you might think you were at a music festival. Jon Batiste, the bandleader for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, gave people something to dance to with funk, soul, and jazz music between speakers.

, the leader of The Roots, acted as emcee for part of the rally and spoke of his own support of science: “We need to make sure science belongs to the people. It should be out in the open.”

He wasn’t the only representative of the arts. As part of a teach-in co-hosted by the Earth Day Network, the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University had a tent where people could make blackout poetry from scientific texts.

First-time protesters

The crowd was full of people who work in the sciences, and those who don’t but came out to support the cause. We spoke to people who travelled from all over the country, ages 8 to 67, many of whom were attending their first rally.

Flying a kite in the rain

Chelsea Whyte/��è��Ƶ

One of those first-timers was Lauren Claeys, a high school senior from Mechanicsville, NY, drove to the march with her little sister, her mom, and her aunt.

“I hope it reminds people we vote for that science is important to us. This isn’t just a field we go into because we’re nerds. It’s important for everyone’s lives,” she said.

Carol Hopper Brill, a marine education specialists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences (VIMS), says, “��è��Ƶs have been so careful not to speak out in the past. ��è��Ƶs must be objective in the lab, but we need to break out of that when it comes to policy. We’re human beings, too.”

Her husband, Richard, a fishery biologist at VIMS and NOAA, chimes in. “The public needs to know that scientists need support. Not just science, but the people doing it.”

Soggy signs

For all the vocal concerns about diversity within the planning for the March for Science, the speakers and the messages they delivered included support for the LBGT community, people with disabilities, Native Americans, and people of all genders, races, and ages in the sciences.

As the morning wore on and the rain poured down, the four-hour rally felt over-programmed with its 55 speakers. By 2:00 p.m., the march from the Washington Monument to the US Capitol building was made up of soggy poncho-clad scientists carrying disintegrating signs. The umbrellas came out, and a few tentative chants began.

As we made our way down Constitution avenue, shoes entirely soaked, we heard the call and response: “Show me what a scientist looks like!” “This is what a scientist looks like!”

Here’s what to expect from Saturday’s March for Science

Chelsea Whyte — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 09:56:58 +0000

Placards at the ready

Chuck Nacke/Alamy

The is set for tomorrow, when thousands are expected to descend on the National Mall in Washington DC. Hundreds of satellite marches are set to take place around the globe. Despite criticisms of the organising committee and a perceived lack of a clear message, it could be a turning point for how scientists approach government. In the days after the 2017 US presidential inauguration, resistance to the anti-science stance trumpeted during the 2016 campaign grew in online discussions on Reddit. Several people, including physiologist Jonathan Berman, proposed a march on Washington similar to the Women’s March in January. “There was this building desire among scientists to become more willing to enter into the political discussion, and we sort of got the timing right to become the fulcrum for that,” says Berman, who became one of the national organisers of the March for Science. Within a week of launching a website, the movement had gained a Twitter following of more than a million people, he says. On the morning of 22 April, environmental group the Earth Day Network will co-host a teach-in and rally near the Washington Monument, followed by the march through the streets ending at the US Capitol.

Mainstream support

To grow their grass-roots effort, Berman and his co-organisers felt it was important to secure the backing of mainstream scientific organisations. “It was clear we needed to gain their expertise and support, and begin partnering with scientific societies,” he says. His first bite was from former congressperson and physicist Rush Holt, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “I got this middle-of-the-night call from Rush, and it was kind of like being called into the principal’s office,” Berman says. “But he was extremely supportive of our efforts, and once we reached an understanding of our non-partisan goals, Rush helped connect us to other scientific societies.” Partners of the march now include hundreds of universities and scientific societies. These have promoted the march to their members, suggested speakers for the teach-ins on the day, and will be key to rallying people for the science cause long after the march is over, says Berman. One such group is the Union of Concerned ��è��Ƶs (UCS), which will capitalise on the gathering to train scientists and science supporters to be more politically active.

Diversity controversy

Some of that energy is focusing back on the march itself, however. The march and its organisers have faced criticism for their approach to issues involving diversity of leadership and the inclusion of marginalised groups – problems that have long plagued scientific culture. Jacquelyn Gill, an ecologist at the University of Maine, last month over such issues. She said that initial resistance within the march’s leadership to issuing an internal statement that diversity and inclusion were core values had the effect of weakening the March and its goals by alienating those who stand to lose the most in the War on Science. “#ScienceMarch also represents a tragic lost opportunity to do better than science’s racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, oppressive past,” she tweeted. But Berman believes some of these issues have been addressed. “Science has done a bad job over time of being diverse and doing all the things it should to ensure that opportunities or scientific careers are equal, and making sure that science itself benefits from all communities,” Berman admits. “I had hoped that we would instigate some of that discussion, and I think to a degree we have.”

Looking forward

The long-term goals for the march are also a bit fuzzy – though Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the UCS, ��sees it as a chance to highlight the role of scientific evidence in public discussion and policy. While he admits that President Donald Trump may not be swayed by the protest, he says other elected officials and citizens will be listening. Berman says a key audience for the march is politicians themselves. But though there has been interest from US senators and members of the House of Representatives in speaking at the rally, the March for Science has not included any speaking spots for government officials. “We don’t want this to be a platform for someone to get elected by speaking at our event, says Berman.”We want this to be an opportunity to elevate the voices of actual scientists and people whose everyday lives are affected by science. We want to talk about science to the politicians.” Some have expressed concern that the march will politicise science, but Peter Frumhoff of the UCS rejects that dichotomy. He says science is inherently political because it affects policy. And besides, times have changed. “What we’re seeing in the Trump administration and Congress, the rejection of science, the rollback of funding, the efforts to roll back science-based regulations, folks are angry,” he says. “I think people are motivated like never before to speak out, and I think that’s all good.” Read more: How to protest against Trump in his expanded surveillance state; We mustn’t let a superpower turn its back on rationality

NASA orbiter shows Mars lost 90 per cent of its CO2 to space

Lisa Grossman — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 18:00:14 +0000

Main mission accomplished

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

It vanished into thin air. Around 90 per cent of the Red Planet’s atmosphere was probably lost to space over just a few hundred million years, according to a key measurement from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft.

Today Mars is a freezing, arid desert with an atmosphere 1 per cent as dense as Earth’s and its water mostly locked up in polar ice caps.

But most planetary scientists think it was not always so. Certain Mars soils contain minerals that on Earth are produced in the presence of water, and some Martian features seem to point towards ancient lakebeds and even fast-flowing rivers. To have retained this liquid water, the planet’s carbon dioxide-dominated atmosphere must once have been much thicker to limit surface evaporation.

MAVEN has been orbiting Mars since 2014 on a quest to find out where all that CO₂ went. It could have gone into the ice caps, into the rocks as carbonate minerals or it could have been lost to space.

Decades-long hunt

“People have spent decades looking for the carbonate minerals that would be the repository of CO₂ and they haven’t found them,” says MAVEN team leader at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado. “That’s what has pushed the community into considering the role of escape to space.”

The orbiter tracked two isotopes of argon in the atmosphere, argon-36 and argon-38. Because argon is unreactive, the only way it can leave Mars is when an ion smacks into one of its atoms and boots it off into space like a billiard ball, a process called sputtering.

The heavier isotopes are harder to remove this way so, over time, Mars has ended up with more argon-38 than argon-36 in its atmosphere. Measuring the ratio of these two isotopes can tell us exactly how much argon the planet has lost.

Assuming that the initial ratio was the same as on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system today – and accounting for other sources of argon like volcanic eruptions or incoming meteorites that would have returned some to the atmosphere – the MAVEN team worked out that about 66 per cent of the argon-36 that was ever in the Martin atmosphere has been sputtered away.

Sudden end

From that, they calculated that 10 to 20 per cent of CO₂ – equivalent to at least half a bar of atmospheric pressure – vanished through sputtering.

And this is only a lower limit as other processes can remove carbon dioxide��but leave argon unaffected, Jakosky says. Also considering these, he estimates that 80 to 90 per cent of the CO₂ atmosphere was lost.

It would have happened relatively quickly, too. Around 4.1 billion years ago, Mars’s magnetic field switched off for reasons we don’t understand. Without this field helping to hold it in place, the atmosphere became more vulnerable to sputtering from incoming charged particles from the solar wind. It may have taken just a few hundred million years for most of the atmosphere to be stripped away, the researchers say.

“I think this is the explanation of why Mars went from a planet that is habitable by microbes at the surface, with warm temperatures and liquid water, to the cold, dry planet we see today,” Jakosky says.

Science

LIGO strikes again

Lisa Grossman — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 18:00:00 +0000

The age of gravitational wave astronomy is truly here, says Lisa Grossman

LHC sees matter and antimatter misbehaving in alternate particle

Lisa Grossman — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 16:15:13 +0000

Spot the baryon

CERN/LHCb

A hint of matter and antimatter behaving differently to each other has been spotted in a new particle for the first time. If the find bears out, it could help explain the existence of all the matter in the universe, and why it was not snuffed out by antimatter long ago. Physicists think that the big bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But these contrasting particles annihilate each other in a puff of energy whenever they meet, so they should have destroyed each other long ago. The fact that there is enough matter in the universe today for us to exist and wonder why, means that some mechanism must have favoured matter over antimatter. “Today we have this complete imbalance between matter and antimatter. We have no evidence of antimatter in the universe,” says of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Milan, Italy. “This is one of the main questions we’d like to answer.” One way the two could differ is by violating a rule about the way the laws of physics affect particles and antiparticles known as CP symmetry. Previously, experiments showed that CP symmetry is in fact violated in particles called mesons, which are made up of a quark and an antiquark. Those results garnered two Nobel prizes, and . But it wasn’t enough. “The sources we’ve found so far are not sufficient to explain this huge imbalance,” Neri says.

Keep calm and baryon

Now, Neri and his colleagues have checked another kind of particle: baryons, which are made of three quarks and no antiquarks. Neutrons and protons, the building blocks of matter, are baryons. They watched for differences in the decay of baryons and their antimatter counterparts made of three antiquarks, and they were lucky. The particles decayed in a way that seems to violate CP symmetry. “This is the first hint, a sign that something is going on there,” Neri says. During the first run of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, between 2011 and 2012, the large international team used the LHCb experiment to watch the decay of heavy baryons called lambda-b particles, which are about six times heavier than a neutron. They observed about 6500 instances of lambda-b particles decaying into a proton and three particles called pions, and about 1000 instances of a different decay that included particles called kaons as well. Theory suggested that there should be a lot of CP violation in these events, but because they needed the extreme energies of the LHC to be produced, they had never been seen before. “It was not anticipated that we could have such a large signal yield,” Neri says. “That was a nice surprise.” The kaon decay looked normal. But the pion version showed a deviation from the standard predictions to a statistical significance of 3.3 sigma, meaning random fluctuations would produce a similar signal less than once every 1000 times.

Not a chance

Particle physicists consider that level of significance evidence that something strange is happening, but it’s not quite enough to declare discovery. That will have to wait for 5-sigma, when the odds of random fluctuations producing a similar signal are less than one in a million. But the LHC has been upgraded and collected more data since these measurements, and is still ramping up to its full potential. Neri expects to increase their data set by at least a factor of 10. And even if the signal goes away with more data, it’s still useful to be able to compare CP violation in baryons and mesons, Neri says. “We can do studies for the first time in baryon decays and make good comparisons with decays with similar quark transitions, and in that way get information on the underlying physics,” he says. “We are entering an era with LHCb where we can make precision measurements in CP violation in heavy baryons. You open a new series of measurements with this kind of result. That’s the excitement.” “It’s an important observation,” says at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, who was on the team that measured CP violation in mesons. “The more systems we see CP violations in, the more chance we have to understand whether the standard model is correct, or whether there are other sources.”

Nature Physics

Climate scientists brace themselves for a Trump-led witch-hunt

Lisa Grossman — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 15:00:00 +0000

You can count on us

AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

President Trump will be inaugurated on 20 January. We don’t yet know what a Trump presidency will look like, but some of the policies he and his team have already floated would have irreversible ramifications. But resistance is far from futile, as we explore in this four-part special.��

Read more about how to��resist the coming surveillance state

Read more about��how women can protect their reproductive rights��with contraception and abortion in doubt

Read more about the strange and surprising silver linings of��his chaotic nuclear policy

��

THE Climate forecast for the next four years is bleak. Donald Trump notoriously tweeted in 2012 that global warming was a hoax created by China to damage US manufacturing. As president-elect, he has chosen a to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and his pick for the helm of the energy department (DOE) is Rick Perry, who .

If CO₂ emissions rise faster as a result, the consequences for the global climate will be dire. “We can’t take a four-year break,” says Marcia DeLonge at the Union of Concerned ��è��Ƶs (UCS) in Washington DC.

But a Trump presidency won’t just be a problem for climate change – it could also spell trouble for the scientists trying to stave it off.

In December, the Trump transition team asked for a list of DOE employees and contractors who worked on climate change or had attended climate change meetings. The , but the incident has sent a chill through the scientific community, particularly in the light of the Republicans’ revival of the Holman rule, which means specific federal employees can have , effectively dismissing them.

Climate scientists’ fears of being targeted are legitimate. There has already been an uptick in Freedom of Information Act requests for their private emails, says Peter Fontaine, the lawyer who defended climate scientist Michael Mann in a high-profile case against the State of Virginia. If such tactics also came from within their own agencies, federal scientists might leave en masse.

Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the UCS in Cambridge, Massachussetts, says this would permanently erode federal agencies’ ability to use science to inform policy decisions. His message to scientists is unequivocal: “Please don’t leave,” he says. “If you leave we’ll lose your ability to know what’s going on.”

But if they do stay, they may be forced to stop pursuing certain lines of research anyway. The Trump transition team suggested as much when it said NASA should shift its focus away from “politically correct environmental monitoring”.

Fears that data could be misused or altered have prompted crowd-sourcing to back up federal climate and environmental data, including , a distributed volunteer effort supported by the Internet Archive and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto.

Can that work be done elsewhere? Several programmes are trying to decentralise the process of collecting new data. Even before the election, NASA was planning a programme to from commercial CubeSats, shoebox-sized satellites that can be built and launched cheaply. “We can do really serious science with CubeSats now,” MIT’s William Blackwell told (AGU).

At a pinch, some agency-level work could be done by individual states. “If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite,” California governor Jerry Brown told the AGU meeting. “We’re going to collect that data.”

One unexpected consequence of a Trump presidency is that it may spur more scientists to advocacy. Many are already circulating petitions and open letters, and organising groups. “We don’t want to be here. We want to be doing the work we were trained to do,” said Naomi Oreskes at Harvard University . “But we are at a moment in history where we have to stand up.”

Beating the heat

How can scientists protect themselves when their work comes under political fire?

Peter Fontaine at the recommends that researchers at public universities get to know their legal counsel, so that the school will back them if a suit is filed. Further legal assistance is available from organisations like Fontaine’s.

He also advises that scientists practice good email hygiene, writing them as if they’ll be shown in court, and scrupulously keeping personal and work emails separate. And adding a footer noting that the contents are exempt from freedom of information laws – if they are – may help too.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Climate scientists fight Trump’s chilling effects”

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US Congress just made it easier to ditch science for politics

Lisa Grossman — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 17:22:17 +0000

Two new bills could undermine safety and other regulations by giving politicians license to ignore evidence that runs counter to their ideas

Metal asteroid and Trojans selected for next NASA missions

Lisa Grossman — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 19:51:14 +0000

Asteroids ahoy. NASA just announced the destinations for its next low-cost space ventures: the Trojan asteroids that flank Jupiter and the large metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. Both targets will reveal secrets of the early solar system. The two missions, respectively called and , were chosen from five finalists for NASA’s . Lucy, scheduled to launch in October 2021, will arrive at a main belt asteroid in 2025, and continue on to Jupiter in 2027. Over the following six years, it will explore six Trojan asteroids, which orbit at the same distance from the sun as Jupiter in on either side of the gas giant. The Trojans are thought to be remnants from an earlier period of the solar system’s history, and so could hold clues as to how the planets formed. Psyche will launch to explore its namesake asteroid in October 2023 and arrive in 2030. 16 Psyche appears to be made mostly of iron and nickel rather than rock, which suggests it might be the core of a small rocky world that survived a collision with another planet or asteroid. “16 Psyche is the only known object of its kind in the solar system, and this is the only way humans will ever visit a core,” principle investigator at Arizona State University in Tempe said in a statement. “We learn about inner space by visiting outer space.” Discovery-class missions are relatively cheap – capped at $450 million – and have previously included the Messenger mission to Mercury, the Dawn mission to asteroids Vesta and Ceres, and the InSight Mars lander scheduled to launch in 2018. “This is what Discovery Program missions are all about – boldly going to places we’ve never been to enable groundbreaking science,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, in a .

Mars should have loads more water – so where has it all gone?

Lisa Grossman — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 18:00:00 +0000

Formed by water?

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

MARS has a real water shortage. It seems we have either misunderstood what its early years were like – or vast amounts of water are hiding beneath its surface.

A lot of evidence points towards Mars being warm and wet early in its history; features that look like rivers, lakes and outflows have been spotted both from orbit and by rovers on the surface, and a lot of the planet’s minerals contain water.

So where did all this water go? The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft was sent to find the answer. Since its arrival at Mars in 2014, it has been measuring how much atmosphere Mars is losing to space. From that, we can figure out how much it had in the past.

The orbiter keeps track of both the activity of the sun and the ions streaming away from the planet’s atmosphere to build up an inventory of everything that enters and leaves over time. It also estimates the total loss by measuring the fraction of heavier isotopes of certain atoms versus their lighter counterparts. As the lighter versions are easier to knock out into space with a stray cosmic ray or extra energy from solar photons, a higher fraction of heavy isotopes remaining in Mars’s present-day atmosphere means much of the original atmosphere has been lost.

MAVEN focuses on hydrogen and oxygen as ways to trace water and carbon dioxide, and neutral argon as a way to measure the sheer volume of atmosphere loss. Based on measurements of these taken over a full Martian year, the team concludes that about 4 billion years ago, the Red Planet’s atmospheric pressure – currently less than 1 per cent of Earth’s – was up to 1.5 times what Earth’s is today. They also found that it could have had the equivalent of a global ocean between 2 and 40 metres deep in its distant past.

“It’s a consistent story,” said team leader Bruce Jakosky at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado, who presented the findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December. “Loss of gas to space is likely a major if not the major process for changing the Mars climate through time.”

The trouble is, that’s less water than expected. In 2015, James Head at Brown University and Michael Carr at the US Geological Survey estimated that the equivalent of a global ocean a few hundred metres deep was needed to explain all the geological features that look like they were formed by water.

“We were counting on their loss rate to explain it,” Head says. “And they didn’t come through.”

One possible reason for the discrepancy is that the long-held notion of Mars being like Earth in the past is wrong. One theory has it that the planet was actually cold and dry, and that streams and rivers formed underneath the ice pack instead of via water flowing on the surface. All that would be needed is a slightly denser CO₂ atmosphere – which MAVEN’s measurements suggest you had.

“Loss of gas to space is likely a major process for changing the Mars climate through time”

The other option is that the water is hidden away somewhere, maybe underground. Dark streaks recently spotted on crater rims that look like they could be liquid water may be fed by underground aquifers, for instance.

“Either it’s hidden somewhere, or there wasn’t that much to start with,” says Carr.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Where did all the Martian water go?”

Lisa Grossman, Author at ��è����Ƶ