Andrea Ghez Nobel Prize Winner

 

UCLA astrophysics professor Andrea Ghez is honored for her pioneering research on the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole.

Ghez shares half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel of UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. The Nobel committee praised them for “the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.” The other half of the prize was awarded to Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”

In July 2019, the journal Science published a study by Ghez and her research group that is the most comprehensive test of Albert Einstein’s iconic general theory of relativity near the monstrous black hole at the center of our galaxy. Although she concluded that “Einstein’s right, at least for now,” the research group is continuing to test Einstein’s theory, which she says cannot fully explain gravity inside a black hole.

Ghez studies more than 3,000 stars that orbit the supermassive black hole. Black holes have such high density that nothing can escape their gravitational pull, not even light. The center of the vast majority of galaxies appears to have a supermassive black hole, she said.

“I’m thrilled and incredibly honored to receive a Nobel Prize in physics,” said Ghez, who is director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group. “The research the Nobel committee is honoring today is the product of a wonderful collaboration among the scientists in the UCLA Galactic Center Orbits Initiative and the University of California’s wise investment in the W.M. Keck Observatory.

“We have cutting-edge tools and a world-class research team, and that combination makes discovery tremendous fun. Our understanding of how the universe works is still so incomplete. The Nobel Prize is fabulous, but we still have a lot to learn.”

Source: UCLA Newsroom

Spinach Power!

 

"Eat your spinach," is a common refrain from many people's childhoods. Spinach, the hearty, green vegetable chock full of nutrients, doesn't just provide energy in humans. It also has potential to help power fuel cells, according to a new paper by researchers in AU's Department of Chemistry. Spinach, when converted from its leafy, edible form into carbon nanosheets, acts as a catalyst for an oxygen reduction reaction in fuel cells and metal-air batteries.

An oxygen reduction reaction is one of two reactions in fuel cells and metal-air batteries and is usually the slower one that limits the energy output of these devices. Researchers have long known that certain carbon materials can catalyze the reaction. But those carbon-based catalysts don't always perform as good or better than the traditional platinum-based catalysts. The AU researchers wanted to find an inexpensive and less toxic preparation method for an efficient catalyst by using readily available natural resources. They tackled this challenge by using spinach.

Read it all here.

Failure to Preserve Science Journals

 

Today online research can supplement field and lab research in multiple sciences, but a study suggests that some potentially important findings are no longer available because they have not been preserved.

The work of archiving and preserving science journals is time consuming and there is no uniformly applied process to preserve free downloadable journal articles. If the publisher ceases to exist, the journals may vanish. 

Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities, have disappeared from the internet over the past 20 years as publishers stopped maintaining them. The average duration of online access appears to have been about 10 years.

“The analysis demonstrates that research integrity and the scholarly record preservation … are at risk across all academic disciplines and geographical regions," says Andrea Marchitelli, managing editor of JLIS.it, the Italian Journal of Library, Archives, and Information Science.

The authors of the study are Mikael Laakso (Hanken School of Economics), Lisa Matthias (Free University of Berlin), and Najko Jahn (University of Göttingen). To determine the list of the 176 vanished journals, they did some digital detective work because clues about them are fragmentary. After the journals go dark their names no longer appear in bibliometric databases.

The authors defined a vanished journal as one that published at least one complete volume as immediate OA, and less than 50% of its content is now available for free online. Some of the content may be accessible as printed copies or in paywalled commercial services.

They used a historical archive of internet content, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, to determine when production ceased and when content disappeared from the internet (within 5 years for three-quarters of the journals). The journals had been based in 50 different countries. Most of the now dark journals published articles only in English.

The study found that only about one-third of the 14,068 journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals in 2019 ensure the long-term preservation of their content. Some commercial services offer it, and the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network, does so for free.

Source: Dozens of Internet Journals Have Vanished; How Open Access Journals are Transforming Science

The Moon is Rusting

 

Map of hematite on the moon—redder color means more hematite. 

(Photo credit: Shuai Li)

Planetary scientists are amazed to find the oxidized iron mineral hematite at high latitudes on the Moon. That’s according to a study published in Science Advances led by Shuai Li, an assistant researcher at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP) in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).

When iron reacts with oxygen it forms reddish rust. However, the Moon's surface is virtually devoid of oxygen, which accounts for he pristine metallic iron that is prevalent on the Moon. Also highly oxidized iron has not been confirmed in samples acquired from the Apollo missions. 

In addition, solar wind blasts the lunar surface with hydrogen, which acts in opposition to oxidation. Thus, the presence of highly oxidized iron-bearing minerals, such as hematite, on the Moon was an unexpected discovery.

“Our hypothesis is that lunar hematite is formed through oxidation of lunar surface iron by the oxygen from the Earth’s upper atmosphere that has been continuously blown to the lunar surface by solar wind when the Moon is in Earth’s magnetotail during the past several billion years,” said Shuai Li.

This new research was inspired by Li’s previous discovery of water ice in the Moon’s polar regions in 2018.

Related reading:  Has Earth's oxygen rusted the Moon for billions of years?

Corn Moon Rising

 

On Wednesday, September 2 the full moon, called the Corn Moon - will reach peak fullness at 1:22 a.m. EDT (5:22 UTC). The Moon will appear full for about three days, from Monday evening through Thursday morning. The Corn Moon occurs every 3 years.

In Europe, the Corn Moon is called the Fruit Moon, as fruits ripen around this time, and the Barley Moon, from the barley harvest.

Coming so early in the month, this sets the stage for two full moons in October. The second full moon - called the Harvest Moon - will shine on Oct. 31.

The Algonquin tribes called this the Corn Moon, as this was the time for gathering their main staple crops of corn, pumpkins, squash, beans, and wild rice.

Related reading:  September 2020: The Next Full Moon

Kilauea's Bubbling Lake

 

According to the U.S. Geological Survey Hawaiian Volcano Observatory the newly-formed lake inside Kilauea volcano is almost 130 feet deep, 880 feet long and 430 feet wide. The temperature of the water at the surface is now between 160 and 180 F, with temperatures beneath potentially higher. This makes the lake one of the world's hottest bodies of water. Scientists are using thermal cameras to monitor temperatures.

The water in the volcano's belly began to form a lake after the volcano erupted in 2018. In July 2019, helicopter pilots began to notice water pooling in the lowest part of the crater. Since then, water levels have risen steadily. Today, the lake has an area larger than five combined football fields. The water color is rust brown due to chemical reactions.

In May 2018, lava poured from fissures to the east, the lake swiftly drained and part of the caldera floor collapsed. This lowered the base of the volcano to the level of the water table. Don Swanson, at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory explains, “We know that the crater floor dropped a little more than 70 meters below the water table in 2018. Any time that you punch a hole below the level of the water table, water is eventually going to come in and fill that hole.”

Kilauea has an explosive history. Now scientists are concerned about the possible effects of the water coming into contact with the magma. The magma could rise up the conduit and intersect with the lake, causing a steam explosion. Or the crater floor could collapse and the water drop to a zone where it would become steam. Either scenario is likely to produce a steam explosion.

Related reading: Deadly Lava Lake is Bubbling; Volcanic Eruptions and Climate

A Late Neolithic Structure at Durrington Walls

 

How Durrington Walls might have looked with this structure at the exact center. 

Durrington Walls in the parish of Durrington, England is the site of a large Neolithic settlement and later henge enclosure located in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. It lies 2 miles north-east of Stonehenge. Researchers have been studying ancient shafts there.

There are at least 20 shafts or pits that formed a circuit exceeding 1 mile (over 2 kilometers) in circumference. There is evidence that an inner post may have existed within the circuit of pits. 

The circle of pits is much larger than any comparable prehistoric monument in the UK. The team of archaeologists estimates there may have been more than 30 post holes originally.

The researchers believe that one of the pits (5A) was recut during the Middle Bronze Age, suggesting that the site continued to be important long after the major period of development and modification of the henge at Durrington Walls.

Testing of the shafts indicates that they were dug more than 4500 years ago, around the time Durrington Walls and Stonehenge were built. The Late Neolithic was a period when ritual structures of an enormous scale were built in various parts of he world.

Source: A Massive Pit Structure at Durrington Walls