Science News Nov 2

Welcome everyone to this week’s science News. Today we’ll talk about space junk, the carbon footprint of a Higgs Boson, more evidence against dark matter, plans for a nuclear fusion plant in California, a new data transmission record, what Greenpeace has to say about plastic recycling, and whether cats understand you.

The International Space Station had to adjust course to avoid a cloud of space junk last Monday in an incident NASA called a “Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver.” The station activated its thrusters for five minutes and five seconds because debris from Russia’s Kosmos 1408 satellite came its way. This satellite was destroyed by the Russians themselves in an anti-satellite test in November last year. The ISS previously had to make a similar manoeuvre in June to avoid debris from the same satellite.

According to a 2021 report by NASA more than half a million pieces of debris larger than a marble are orbiting Earth, most of them from space junk. At least 26 thousand of them are bigger than softballs. They all pose major threats to spacecraft.

The ISS is due to be retired by 2031. Russia had warned earlier this year that they’d pull out of the International Space Station but last week some Russian officials have signalled that they might continue the collaborate after all. China has meanwhile built its own space station which is now almost complete.

I am most impressed by NASA’s command of language. Instead of writing “sorry for the late reply”, I’ll from now on call it a pre-determined deadline avoidance manoeuvre.

Physicists have estimated how much carbon dioxide is emitted in the production of a Higgs Boson. The Large Hadron Collider, LHC for short, is currently the world’s biggest particle accelerator, but physicists have plans to build a bigger one. There are several proposals on the table for both linear colliders and circular colliders. The proposal from CERN, which currently hosts the LHC, is called the Future Circular Collider, and it would have a ring tunnel with 100 kilometers circumference. Someone should have told them that a name with the word “Future” won’t age very well.

One of the goals of those bigger colliders is to produce Higgs bosons in particular, because it’s the so-far least studied elementary particle. But big particle accelerators require an enormous amount of energy. The LHC consumes about half as much energy per year as the nearby city of Geneva. The annual electricity bill of CERN was more than 65 million dollars per year before prices shot up. And they probably get a flat rate. In case your electricity bill makes you wince, this should put things into perspective.

In a paper which was recently published, two particle physicists evaluate how much energy the planned, new colliders would eat up, then they use the energy sources at the planned location to calculate how much carbon dioxide each of those mashines would produce. The by far best option is the Future Circular Collider planned at CERN. This isn’t so much because it’s energy efficient, but because more than 90 percent of the energy for CERN comes from nuclear, hydro-electric, solar, and wind.

They estimate that each Higgs boson would require about 3 Mega Watt hours. That could power an average American home for more than 4 months.

Hello Elon, I’ve heard you closed the deal on twitter.

No, I just checked this morning and it for all I can see it hasn’t saved the world. But worth trying.

Yes, we all love you. Bye-ee.

The California-based company General Atomics has announced a concept for a new nuclear fusion pilot plant. It’s supposed to be a tokamak, which is the well-trodden path to nuclear fusion by magnetic confinement. General Atomics have not put forward a time-plan, but they have developed a proprietary software system to study, monitor and optimize a fusion power plant that puts them in a good position to make this work.

Nuclear fusion would be a basically carbon neutral source of energy. In the past decade a number of companies have sprung up that develop new technologies, and government interest has also seen a revival. Making nuclear fusion work in whichever approach will ultimately require chaos control, a problem that scientists are now trying to tackle with advanced machine learning.

A group of astrophysicists has found more evidence that gravity does not work the way Einstein taught us. The group of researchers from the University of Bonn has published a paper showing that observations support modified Newtonian Dynamics, MOND for short. MOND is an alternative explanation for the observations usually attributed to dark matter.

The group is led by Pavel Kroupa, and has published numerous papers with observational evidence for MOND and against particle dark matter. In their new study, they looked at open star clusters, that are nearby collections of typically a few hundred up to a thousand stars. They did a numerical simulation using MOND and find that the results fit the observed velocity distribution of stars in the of clusters better than normal gravity. They say this result also explains why those star clusters seem to fall apart faster than expected.

MOND was proposed by Mordehai Milgrom already in the 1980s. But research on the topic has been hampered for decades because it was basically impossible to get funding for it. Galaxies and star clusters are complicated systems and advanced computer simulations are necessary to study them. The funding shortage meant that no such simulations have ever been done for MOND. The situation is slowly improving now. Einstein doesn’t like this modified gravity business at all but even he agrees that it should be further investigated.

I often read that MOND is supposedly “controversial among experts” but I’ve found that to be untrue. It’s only controversial among astrophysicists who never looked at MOND to begin with. Unfortunately, that’s most of them.

Researchers have broken the data transmission record, again. A team of scientists from Denmark, Sweden and Japan transferred one point eight four petabytes per second through an optical fibre cable, that’s twice as much as the total current internet traffic. The previous record was 1 point zero two petabits and had just been set in May by a group from Japan.

The new record became possible by using a particular optic chip. It splits the light from an infrared laser into 37 different frequencies at fixed distances from each other creating what’s called a “frequency comb”. All of those frequencies can then transfer data simultaneously. This record is exciting not just because it improves over the previous one, but because the method has the potential to increase data transmission to as much as 100 petabytes per second.

Hi Rishi, Congrats on the new job.

No, there’s not literally a black hole in the budget.

I know that because. Well.

If it was, why’d they need such a big telescope to take a picture of one. Yeah, it’s good to have a prime minister who understands science.

You’re welcome.

According to a new report from Greenpeace, plastic recycling in the United States is a failing industry. According to their numbers, US plastic recycling reached only five to six percent in 2021. Even if one looks only at the two types of plastics that are recycled most, the recycling rate reaches maximally 21 percent. One of the major problems is that plastic is made from fossil fuels and burning it is a great source of energy. Without heavy regulations, industry has little incentive to change anything about that.

While the recycling industry agrees that still far too little plastic is being recycled, they also say that the numbers in the Greenpeace report are misleading. Steve Alexander, president of the Association of Plastic Recyclers explains, that, to calculate the recycling rate, Greenpeace uses a baseline that includes goods you wouldn’t expect to show up in recycling any time soon. According to Alexander, “When determining recycling rates, we study the amount of consumer-facing packaging produced. Greenpeace is using all plastics created as a denominator. It is important to note that these statistics include plastic items such as durable goods, playground equipment, even toilet seats, that are meant to last many years, as well as nondurable goods not intended for recycling, such as garbage bags.”

For this reason, the European Union quotes its recycling rate as a percentage of plastic packaging waste. The percentage is above 30 percent for most of Europe except, France which presumably needs all that plastic to wrap their about 6 million types of cheese.

The OECD predicts that global plastic use and waste will almost triple by 2060 with minimal increases in plastic recycling capabilities. If this prediction turns out to be correct, this will lead to a doubling of plastic pollution worldwide. Greenpeace wants the world to stop using single use plastic, while industry leaders say it’s not going to happen, we need to ramp up recycle. I think we need both.

And finally some news from the lighter side of science. A new study published in Animal Cognition by researchers from France has found that cats are able to tell when their owners talk to them. They used a group of 16 cats, whose owners all seem to be students at their university and studied their responses to recorded voices. The results suggest that the cats are more attentive to the voices of their owners than to that of strangers.

And since we’re talking of animals already, a PhD student has found that 53 sea creatures previously thought to be silent can actually communicate. Scientists now hope the same method can be applied to teenagers.