Science Over the Edge

A Roundup of Strange Science for the Month

Jan/Feb 2020

In the News:

Lasers Learn To Accurately Spot Space Junk - "The possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to one!" exclaimed C-3PO as Han Solo directed the Millennium Falcon into an asteroid field in "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back." Earth's orbit is nowhere near as dangerous, but after more than half a century of space activity, collisions between jettisoned engines and disintegrated spacecraft have formed a planetary scrapheap that spacecraft need to evade. Scientists have developed space junk identification systems, but it has proven tricky to pinpoint the swift, small specks of space litter. A unique set of algorithms for laser ranging telescopes, described in the Journal of Laser Applications, by AIP Publishing, has significantly improving the success rate of space debris detection. "After improving the pointing accuracy of the telescope through a neural network, space debris with a cross sectional area of 1 meter squared and a distance of 1,500 kilometers can be detected," said Tianming Ma, from the Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping, Beijing and Liaoning Technical University, Fuxin. Laser ranging technology uses laser reflection from objects to measure their distance. But the echo signal reflected from the surface of space debris is very weak, reducing the accuracy. Previous methods improved laser ranging pinpointing of debris but only to a 1-kilometer level. Application of neural networks - algorithms modeled on the human brain's sensory inputs, processing and output levels - to laser ranging technologies has been proposed previously. However, Ma's study is the first time a neural network has significantly improved the pointing accuracy of a laser-ranging telescope. Ma aims to further refine the method. "Obtaining the precise orbit of space debris can provide effective help for the safe operation of spacecraft in orbit."

Closest-Ever Approach To The Sun Gives New Insights Into The Solar Wind - The Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, which has flown closer to the Sun than any mission before, has found new evidence of the origins of the solar wind. NASA's Parker Solar Probe was launched in August 2018. Its first results are published today in a series of four papers in Nature, with Imperial College London scientists among those interpreting some of the key data to reveal how the solar wind is accelerated away from the surface of the Sun. The solar wind is a stream of charged particles released by the Sun that fills our Solar System. It is responsible for the North and Southern lights, but can also cause disruption during violent episodes like solar flares and coronal mass ejections, knocking out power grids and satellites. Now, an international team have shown that bursty 'spikes' of solar wind originate in holes in the Sun's outer atmosphere near its equator, and are accelerated by magnetic phenomena as they flow away into deep space and past the Earth. The new research suggests that the spikes are generated by 'magnetic reconnection' near the Sun, a process that pulls on the tense lines of the Sun's magnetic field creates folds or 'switchbacks'. These events last only a couple of minutes but release lots of energy, accelerating the solar wind away in long tubes that are approximately the diameter of the Earth. The finding builds on data from the HELIOS missions, launched in the 1970s, the previous record-holders for the closest approach to the Sun. Professor Tim Horbury from Imperial's Department of Physics is a co-investigator on Parker Solar Probe's FIELDS instrument, which is led by the University of California, Berkeley. He said: "From HELIOS data we could see what might be 'spikes' of faster solar wind, and now we have been able to confirm their existence in striking detail with Parker Solar Probe. "We usually think of the fast solar wind as very smooth, but Parker Solar Probe saw surprisingly slow wind with a large number of these little bursts and jets of plasma, creating long tubes of fast wind containing plasma with around twice the energy of the background solar wind."

Scientists Uncover World's Oldest Forest - Scientists have discovered remnants of the world's oldest fossil forest in a sandstone quarry in Cairo, New York. It is believed the extensive network of trees, which would have spread from New York all the way into Pennsylvania and beyond, is around 386 million years old. This makes the Cairo forest around 2 or 3 million years older than what was thought to be the world's oldest forest at Gilboa, also in New York State and around 40 km away from the Cairo site. The new findings, which have been published today in the journal Current Biology, have thrown new light on the evolution of trees and the transformative role they played in shaping the world we live in today. A team led by scientists at Binghamton University, New York State Museum and Cardiff University have mapped over 3,000 square meters of the forest at the abandoned quarry in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains in the Hudson Valley. Their investigations showed that the forest was home to at least two types of trees: cladoxylopsids, primitive tree-fern-like plants, which lacked flat green leaves, and which also grew in vast numbers at Gilboa; and Archaeopteris, which had a conifer-like woody trunk and frond-like branches which had green flattened leaves. A single example of a third type of tree was also uncovered, which remained unidentified but could possibly have been a lycopod. All these trees reproduced using only spores rather than seeds. The team also reported a 'spectacular' and extensive network of roots which were more than eleven meters in length in some places which belonged to the Archaeopteris trees. "It is surprising to see plants which were previously thought to have had mutually exclusive habitat preferences growing together on the ancient Catskill delta," said co-author of the study Dr Chris Berry from Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences. "This would have looked like a fairly open forest with small to moderate sized coniferous-looking trees with individual and clumped tree-fern like plants of possibly smaller size growing between them." The research team say that the Cairo forest is older than the one at Gilboa because the fossils were lower down in the sequence of rocks that occur in the Catskill mountains.

Archaeologists Find Bronze Age Tombs Lined With Gold - Archaeologists with the University of Cincinnati have discovered two Bronze Age tombs containing a trove of engraved jewelry and artifacts that promise to unlock secrets about life in ancient Greece. Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, archaeologists in UC's classics department, found the two beehive-shaped tombs in Pylos, Greece, last year while investigating the area around the grave of an individual they have called the "Griffin Warrior," a Greek man whose final resting place they discovered nearby in 2015. Like the Griffin Warrior's tomb, the princely tombs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea also contained a wealth of cultural artifacts and delicate jewelry that could help historians fill in gaps in our knowledge of early Greek civilization. UC's team spent more than 18 months excavating and documenting the find. The tombs were littered with flakes of gold leaf that once papered the walls. "Like with the Griffin Warrior grave, by the end of the first week we knew we had something that was really important," said Stocker, who supervised the excavation. "It soon became clear to us that lightning had struck again," said Davis, head of UC's classics department. The Griffin Warrior is named for the mythological creature -- part eagle, part lion -- engraved on an ivory plaque in his tomb, which also contained armor, weaponry and gold jewelry. Among the priceless objects of art was an agate sealstone depicting mortal combat with such fine detail that Archaeology magazine hailed it as a "Bronze Age masterpiece." Artifacts found in the princely tombs tell similar stories about life along the Mediterranean 3,500 years ago, Davis said. A gold ring depicted two bulls flanked by sheaves of grain, identified as barley by a paleobotanist who consulted on the project.

Paving The Way For Spintronic Rams: A Deeper Look Into A Powerful Spin Phenomenon - Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology(Tokyo Tech) explore a new material combination that sets the stage for magnetic random access memories, which rely on spin--an intrinsic property of electrons-- and could outperform current storage devices. Their breakthrough published in a new study describes a novel strategy to exploit spin-related phenomena in topological materials, which could spur several advances in the field of spin electronics. Moreover, this study provides additional insight into the underlying mechanism of spin-related phenomena. Spintronics is a modern technological field where the "spin" or the angular momentum of electrons takes a primary role in the functioning of electronic devices. In fact, collective spin arrangements are the reason for the curious properties of magnetic materials, which are popularly used in modern electronics. Researchers globally have been trying to manipulate spin-related properties in certain materials, owing to a myriad of applications in devices that work on this phenomenon, especially in non-volatile memories. These magnetic non-volatile memories, called MRAM, have the potential to outperform current semiconductor memories in terms of power consumption and speed. A team of researchers from Tokyo Tech, led by Assoc. Prof. Pham Nam Hai, recently published a study in Journal of Applied Physics on unidirectional spin Hall magnetoresistance (USMR), a spin-related phenomenon that could be used to develop MRAM cells with an extremely simple structure. The spin Hall effect leads to the accumulation of electrons with a certain spin on the lateral sides of a material. The motivation behind this study was that the spin Hall effect, which is particularly strong in materials known as "topological insulators", can results in a giant USMR by combining a topological insulator with a ferromagnetic semiconductor.

Science Quote of the Month - "I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." - Isaac Newton

What's New at the Museum:

Bomarzo: Grove of the Monsters - Gardens come in many varieties. Some are minimalist like the famous Zen garden at the Ryoan-ji temple in Kayoto, Japan. Others have fantastically intricate designs, like the French formal gardens at the Palace of Versailles in France. Perhaps the weirdest garden, however, is located just outside the small village of Bomarzo, in Italy. It contains some of the most horrific statuary that one can imagine. >Full Story

Mysterious Picture of the Month - What is this?

Ask the Curator:

Vallée and Bostrom - Is the idea that we are all just living in a big computer simulation related to what Jacques Vallée and people like that are talking about when they try to explain UFO's as not extraterrestrial craft but "control devices" and so on? That is, do they mean that the ones behind the UFO's are the programmers of this big simulation we're living in, who are doing experiments on us by sending these weird, anomalous phenomena and seeing how we deal with them? I never really understood what Vallée was getting at till I read the article on the world as a computer simulation in the current edition of the Museum of Unnatural Mystery. Thanks. - Alan Meyers

Dr. Jacques F. Vallée, a computer scientist, venture capitalist and former astronomer, has long been one of the "deep thinkers" in the arena of Ufology. Born in France in 1939 he became interested in the subject when he observed a UFO in 1955. At first Vallée was convinced that UFOs were extraterrestrial spacecraft and published his ideas in his book Anatomy of a phenomenon: unidentified objects in space--a scientific appraisal. By 1969, however, his thinking had changed and he began to see UFOs and alien abduction reports as part of a much larger phenomenon that included other paranormal events. He outlined his thinking for this in his book Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Vallée suggested in his book that flying saucers and alien visitors might not be from other planets, but from other dimensions or even different time periods. These ideas did not sit well with many UFO enthusiasts and Vallée soon found himself an outcast among their ranks, or as he put it a "heretic among heretics".

Vallée sees one possible explanation of the UFO phenomenon as that of a "control mechanism " with incidents as deceptions created to manipulate people and society. Sometimes this is done by other humans. For example, we know the US Air Force encouraged UFO reports to hide the flights of SR-71 Blackbird spy aircraft in the 80's. The Soviet Union also did the same thing to cover the launch of rockets that were not in compliance with the SALT treaty they had signed.

Much of the social manipulation caused by UFOs reports, however, Vallée suggests are done by non-human entities who have an agenda of which we are totally unaware. Vallée's initial thinking was that these entities were from another dimension, and were not operators of a simulated world that we are living in (See last month article on Living in a Video Game). "There is a distinction to be made between a Matrix-like virtual world and what I first proposed in 'Messengers,' [Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults his 1979 book] namely an information multiverse with fully physical manifestations" said Vallée, in an interview with SUB ROSA online magazine.

The multiverse he is thinking about is related to some of the interpretations of quantum theory which suggest that reality consists of many nearly parallel universes. If beings from one universe successfully figured out how to cross to another universe we might interpret them as extra terrestrials. A visitor moving from one quantum parallel universe to another also might be jumping in time also leading to the suggestion that flying saucers are our ancestors' attempts to manipulate their past.

Even though Vallée initial ideas with control mechanisms didn't involve our living in a simulated universe, in my opinion the idea that UFO incidents (and other paranormal experiences) are attempts by those outside the simulation to influence our society seem to make just as much sense as the multi-dimensional approach. Remember Vallée's initial thinking on this subject was published in 1979 long before Bostrom's 2002 paper on the simulation argument came out. Perhaps Vallée, after pondering Bostrom's thinking, will address this possibility directly in some future book.

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First Northern Light Photo Made - On January 5th in 1892, the first successful auroral (the northern lights) photograph was captured by the German physicist Martin Brendel. Though it was a blurred, low-contrast picture, it did convey some sense of the nature of the aurora. Photographing the aurora in those days was a difficult task as the light is generally feeble and flickering and photographic materials of the time required a long exposures.

In the Sky:

January Meteor Shower - The early morning of 1/4/2020 will feature a brief but sometimes spectacular meteor shower named after the northern constellation Quadrans Muralis. The Quadrantids can sometimes produce more than 100 meteors per hour. It appears that viewing conditions this year will be good as the first-quarter Moon sets around 1 a.m. local time and the shower will peak near 2-3 AM. You should be able to see them anywhere in the sky.

Observed:

Pilot that Recorded a UFO Speaks - Chad Underwood a Navy pilot who recorded an UFO object in 2004 incident talked about the encounter in an interview with New York magazine last week, but he said that he didn't want his name attached to speculation about it being an alien spaceship. Instead he insisted that he just thought of the object as a UFO (Unknown Flying Object). The incident occurs on November 10, 2004 and Underwood recorded the encounter using an infrared camera. David Fravor, his commanding officer, spotted the unusual shape during a flight-training exercise. For over a decade, Underwood has refused to speak about the encounter, however, in an interview with New York magazine, he exposed what it was like to capture the UFO on video. "At no point did I want to speculate as to what I thought this thing was - or be associated with, you know, 'alien beings' and 'alien aircraft' and all that stuff," Underwood told the magazine. "It is just what we call a UFO. I couldn't identify it. It was flying. And it was an object. It's as simple as that." His encounter is only one of three known instances in which Navy pilots caught an unknown aerial object (the Navy prefers that term over UFO) on camera.

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