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Science News Dec 7
🕑 Added 2022-12-07 16:00:07 +0000 UTC[This is a transcript with references.]
Welcome to this week’s science news. Today we’ll talk about zink batteries, regulations for StarLink satellites, find out how birds feel about fireworks, learn about a new way to detect sugars, thirty thousand molecules that could make better batteries, and more efficient photosynthesis. I’ll also briefly have to comment on wormholes, again. I’m sorry but a woman must do what a woman must do. And of course, the telephone will ring.
Wind turbines and solar panels are great so long as the wind blows and the sun shines. But if those renewables are to ever replace fossil fuels, we need affordable batteries that can store energy reliably. The currently most widely used batteries are lithium ion, but lithium is both expensive and explosive, which makes it somewhat of a pain to handle, a problem that my husband is very sympathetic to.
Engineers have put a lot of hope on zinc-ion batteries, because zinc is more abundant and easier to handle. But according to a new paper and a press release from the Argonne National Laboratory, it may be a while before the technology can be realized.
When the zinc batteries charge and discharge, zinc tends to grow in the form of spiky crystals that can cause short circuits. This problem has been known for a long time, but University of Waterloo Professor Linda Nazar, who led the new study, says that “Although many strategies have been reported to solve the [problem], only few of them can address the requirements of practical applications.” According to the paper, researchers have “mistakenly overestimated” progress in making zinc batteries.
A lot of people asked me to comment on the recent wormhole headlines in Quanta Magazine and the New York Times and New Scientist and The Guardian and so on. I guess the polite thing to say would be that they have “mistakenly overestimated” progress in making wormholes. I’ve been warning of this for several years, I mentioned this in my video about quantum hype, and it’s the same nonsense that I talked about in my science news just two months ago.
These headlines refer to a paper that was, unfortunately, published in nature. I say unfortunately, not because the paper is wrong, it’s all well and fine, but because a lot of people think if it was published in nature it must be some ground-breaking discovery. What is the paper about? A group of researchers entangled 9 qubits, did some operations on them, and confirmed that the results agree with quantum mechanics. The rest is words.
Those words say that the mathematics which describes the qubits can be interpreted as a low resolution simulation of a dual of a wormhole in an abstract 2-dimensional space. It has nothing whatsoever to do with wormholes in our universe.
What’s the big deal? There isn’t one. Did it teach us anything new about quantum mechanics? No, it didn’t. Did they break some record with the calculation. No, they didn’t. Can we learn something from that about quantum gravity? No, we can’t. Why? Because we’re interested in quantum gravity in our own universe. Not in an approximate dual of a simulated 2-dimensional anti-de Sitter space.
The best thing you can do with those headlines is to ignore them. See the word “wormhole” in a headline? Just keep on scrolling. If they one day actually make a wormhole, rest assured I’ll tell you about it. What do you think Albert, is this a good deal?
The United States is reconsidering how to deal with large satellite constellations.
The best known of such satellite constellations may be Elon Musk’s Starlink fleet, which by now counts about 3000 satellites. But in the coming decade more than a dozen other providers want to launch their satellites into orbit, among others OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper, and Telesat. By 2030 we’ll probably have tens of thousands of them circling around the planet. These satellites are placed in low earth orbits, which NASA defines as altitudes up to 2,000 kilometres.
At the moment, the launches of those satellites aren’t regulated in the US because the Federal Communications Commission Commission says they fall under a “Categorical Exclusion”. The United States Government Accountability Office has now recommended that the Federal Communications Commission reexamines its review process for those satellites.
The accountability office points out that the exclusion rule dates back to 1986, predates the idea of large satellite constellations, and has to be revisited. They point out five problems that those satellite fleets can cause that’s 1) rocket launch emissions 2) radio transmissions 3) sunlight reflections 4) orbital debris and 5) emissions and debris from satellite reentry. They then identify who is responsible for evaluating the consequences of each.
They recommend periodically reviewing whether the exclusion from regulation is justified. That sounds surprisingly reasonable. But it’s easier said than done. Because the FCC is currently sitting on more than 60 thousand applications for satellite launches that they have to process, and their preferred method is basically to yell “categorical exclusion”. In response to the new report, the FCC now proposed the creation of a new Bureau for Space Activities, so basically they’re hoping someone else will sort it out.
Astronomers all over the world are decidedly unhappy about the increasing number of satellites in low earth orbit because they reflect sunlight and screw up astronomy pics. I talked about this in an earlier video, but luckily they now have something better to complain about. In September, the company AST SpaceMobile launched the satellite BlueWalker 3. By last month, the spacecraft had fully deployed its array which is almost 600 square feet in size. With that size, BlueWalker 3 is the currently largest commercial telecommunications array in low Earth orbit and, because of that, it’s now one of the brightest objects in the night sky.
The company’s mission is to build the first global cellular broadband network in space that communicates directly with mobile devices. But scientists are worried that the signals from this space network will affect radio telescopes on Earth. In case you think that’s another reason to build a radio telescope on the moon, let me mention that the European Space Agency wants to put several satellites in orbit around the moon. It’s really hard to find a quiet place these days.
Scientists have found, again, that cannabis is no better at relieving pain than a placebo.
A recent study on the use of cannabis oil for palliative (‘palli-a-tiv) care patients with advanced cancer in Australia found that cannabis did not relieve either pain, depression, or anxiety, and it didn’t improve quality of life either. In addition, a new meta-analysis on cannabis was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
For this meta-analysis, the authors looked at 20 different studies with a total of about 1500 participants. These studies covered a variety of pain conditions and different types of cannabis products in comparison to placebos. Both cannabis and placebos led to some pain relief, but the difference between them was not statistically significant. The results of this new meta-analysis largely agree with results found in a meta-analysis from last year, though the earlier study had actually found that the pain relief worked somewhat better for the placebo. Maybe because people don’t immediately forget they’ve taken it?
Interestingly, the authors of the new meta-analysis point out that many participants of those trials were able to distinguish between active cannabis and a placebo though those products were designed to have the same odour, taste, and appearance. So, the placebo worked even though they knew it was a placebo. Was that because they knew placebos work even if you know they’re placebos? More meta-analyses are needed…
New Year’s fireworks are a spectacle for people, but they really freak out animals. If you’re a dog owner this probably won’t surprise you. A paper just published in the journal Conservation Letters has shown that fireworks also scare the hell out of birds.
This study was done by an international team of researchers that used data from 347 migratory (‘mai-gret-ree) geese that have GPS trackers, and looked at three weeks around New Year 8 years, in a row. In that period, the geese were mostly in Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The GPS data revealed clearly that when the clocks strike midnight at New Year’s Eve, the birds were much more likely to fly at night than normal, and more likely to fly at high altitude. Some geese were so upset they flew up to 500 kilometres nonstop.
In 2020 and 2021, due to the COVID pandemic, fireworks were largely banned in the countries that were subject of the study to prevent large gatherings. But the little fireworks that took place in those years still noticeably disturbed the birds. Don’t worry too much about the geese because fireworks will soon be replaced by drone swarms anyway and then the only problems will then be that the geese will try to mate with them.
Scientists have developed a new way for detecting and telling apart different types of sugar. For this to work, you mix the substance that contains the sugar with some chemicals and drop it on a stretchy film. When you stretch the film, the colours you see reveal what types of sugars were in the sample. At the moment, they can tell apart 14 sugars that attach to the dyes. This method might one day become a simple and useful help for people who have an intolerance to specific types of sugar.
Scientists have used artificial intelligence to identify more than 30 thousand molecules that could be used in batteries.
This study was done by a group at the Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research where they looked for molecules that have the potential to be used in high-performance redox-flow (‘ree-dox) batteries. Redox flow batteries are a type of electrochemical cell in which chemical energy is provided by two chemical components dissolved in liquids that are pumped through the system. Some put hope into those batteries as the energy storage that will make intermittent renewables reliable.
To create their database, they broke the process down into 4 steps. They first created virtual molecules from simpler, smaller parts of molecules. Then they used supercomputers to calculate nearly 300 different chemical properties of each molecule. Next, they used machine learning to predict whether the molecules dissolve in water. And finally, they created a database that’s readable by both humans and machines.
This study is another example for how big of an impact supercomputing and artificial intelligence have on material science.
Hello? Bonjour Emmanuel,
Yes, I read with much relief that the world is finally taking action to address the threat to the French baguette.
I hope you can negotiate a ceasefire with Ciabatta. Salut.
Researchers at Lund University in Sweden are studying a simple way to make photosynthesis more efficient. Photosynthesis in plants removes carbon dioxide from the air by using energy from sunlight, and finding a technology that does the same, but more efficiently, would be a much welcome method to fight climate change.
The researchers from Lund extracted proteins that can do photosynthesis from bacteria and put them between microscopic mirrors. The mirrors are made of gold and just a few nanometres apart. They create a tiny optical cavity that traps light in a frequency range that the proteins can work with. In a new paper the researchers showed that this creates a strong coupling between laser light and the proteins. They hope that this method will make photosynthesis more efficient, though further studies are needed to see how well it works.
Hi Elon,
Nah, I don’t want to run ads on twitter, not enough people there. But I can make you a special deal for next week’s video.
Elon?
Comments
Rad Antonov
Hi Colleen, my pleasure and in all fairness, I am not the right person to do it justice. The real question though is what, if anything, this fancy duality math is good for? In other words, can it make any predictions? Like, here are a bunch of quarks and gluons, tell me what the mass of the bound state is. Or, how about take some fancy alloy and figure out whether it goes superconducting and at what temperature. Hard but practical questions that if we could answer would represent progress, at least to me.
Hi Rad, I didn't know that duality was the framework that these experiments have been carried out within, or how it related to digital & quantum computational experiments and modelling, so thanks for explaining that. We without deep physics knowledge haven't had that explained with the descriptions of the research as far as I can tell, which doesn't help anything.
Rad Antonov
Luckily, we have our own blog here and that’s good enough for. Thanks for replying Tracey!
Everything you point out, Rad, is exactly what I found when I went to the science blogs that addressed the issue. It's a real shame that blogs are slowly fading away since they provide valuable commentary beyond the over-hyped headlines. I followed the commentary on Twitter, which resulted in the baby being thrown out with the bathwater. I had wondered if this is a special new reality of social media or it has always been this way. I think that it has always been this way. So few people read beyond the headline and into the guts of a news article -- i.e. regular people have only ever read tweet-sized information whether in print or online.
Rad Antonov
Semantics and salesmanship aside, the AdS/CFT paper merits more discussion than the perfunctory put down we, regulars, rely on. Duality has been all the rage for 20+ years, but the idea that it can be seen in the lab is recent. The claim that it has been observed raises legitimate questions. Is this a path to testing new physics that we think may govern systems we couldn’t possibly conceive of doing experiments with, like black holes? If not that, can it teach us something about other topics, like entropy or emergent phenomena? Phil Anderson wrote a whole essay harping on how difficult it is to go from a simple, single particle understanding to modeling many body effects. Condensed matter physics is especially rich in that department and it is note able that a Hamiltonian for strongly correlated electrons made this work possible. There are in fact other proposals for implementing quantum holography in the lab, such as this [https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.00802] “Quantum holography in a graphene flake with an irregular boundary” paper suggests. Now, what I feel the jury really needs to deliberate is whether this particular work is an experimental breakthrough. I would say no, it is not. The AI optimization was neat and made the measurement possible, but it doesn’t look like they did anything on the instrumentation front. Contrast this study with another recent Nature paper about entanglement enhanced matter wave interferometry https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05197-9: 700 atoms all in a coherent state. That to me reads like an experimental tour de force.
Rad, yes, we should have reinstated Glass-Steagall instead of Dodd-Frank, but I think that the problem was that Glass-Steagall would have prohibited commercial banks from participating in investment banking activities and Dodd-Frank continued to allow it but with some constraints, to make the financial industry happy, which is the fundamental problem. From what you say, we're at or near a "irrational exuberance" crash point with regards to satellite systems. The orbital space is like the RF spectrum, limited and so needs more controls over how competition plays out. Unlike fiber, we really can't have players taking up finite orbits in their competition, but due to the stupid "market ideology", IMO, government has been designed to not regulate to avoid chaos and its negative impacts to global systems when catastrophe occurs.
More seriously, I read those comments too and seeing how much interest there is in the topic, we'll be doing a longer video on cannabis.
Ah, but we already have that, it's called homeopathy ;)
Tracey, your point about the US having no control could have been handled by international treaty a long time ago, but it never seemed a priority for whatever reason. I think that even today there is a good chance for a treaty because there are more space powers that have a stake in a functional system. We need better foreign policy that focuses on common ground issues, such as the nonexistent satellite "system", that has produced overcrowding and risk of catastrophe due to debris.
Armando Mistral
I just look at the core Snopes site and avoid the "Snopes-lite" spin-offs where they take (allegedly) edited inputs. Almost all my Snopes-ing is in search of black/white yes/no facts with documentary evidence. I've found them to be pretty fair when it comes to 'indeterminate' cases, so, yeah I think they're still reliable. Buuuut: always Trust But Verify.
Rad Antonov
Ironically, the banks got Dodd-Frank and SIB supervision now. Maybe should’ve stuck with Glass-Steagall. As for the satellite crowd, Telesat’s debt is already deeply distressed, even though the company has yet to launch a single bird for its LEO constellation. Starlink’s head honcho will be hard pressed to find a bank willing to give him money after torching the Street with the financing for his foray into social media. Point is, it won’t be long before the economic rationale for these constellations is put to the test. Is all this capital spending going to be a repeat of the fiber laying craze at the turn of the century? XO Communications and Global Crossing anyone? As Tracey points out, there are state actors that won’t care about economics, but the FCC wouldn’t be able to do anything about them anyway.
Hmmm... cannabis vs placebo... That's it, I'm going to develop and market placebo pills for the general public. There will be cannabis placebos, sleeping pill placebos, medicinal herb placebos, etc. The advantage of these placebos is that there are no side effects and you will not have to worry about drug tests required by your employer. These are guaranteed to sell like hotcakes (Liver King or Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, anyone). Who's with me? More seriously, I found it illuminating to read the YouTube comments about marijuana use and perceived pain management. Yeah, I understand that pain management might depend on the one or two specific compounds in marijuana and different studies looked at different compounds, so it is a little unfair to just say "cannabis"=no pain relief. However, of the commenters who said they smoked marijuana -- all compounds in play -- some agreed that there was no easing of pain at all (although some no longer cared about the pain) and others were adamant they got total pain relief and it is definitely not a placebo effect. How could we tell the difference between the placebo effect and variations between people such that the drug is only actually helpful for about half of the people? Just a thought...
Well said, Jeffery! I had not heard about that 600 sq ft monstrosity -- and they're planning more? There are no curse words powerful enough to express how I feel. Even if the US had strong, enforced regulations for both what can be launched and the "cleanup" at the end of a satellite's life, we have no control of any other nation. Even an international treaty wouldn't stop, say, China, if they don't sign on (hell, even if they do sign on).
Hi Tracey, yeah I saw that go down on Twitter. Wolchover responded but whatever her intentions were she over-egged it. Like, even I read stuff like that (or just look at the title + synopsis) and think, but that's not actually a wormhole/portal to a parallel dimension/actual black hole, or am I missing something? 🧐🤔 to later find Sabine and/or another physicist on Twitter bagging the whole thing out. I hope that quantum wormhole chip shemozzle is a lesson for at least Quanta if not more outlets.
Hey Armando, how do you feel about Snopes these days? Snopes has always been my goto as well, especially when I need to refute some BS my friends and family post on Facebook. In the last few years, it has been attacked as a left-wing, biased site. Is this true, or is Snopes still trustworthy?
Quanta Magazine and their reporter, Natalie Wolchover, got a pretty good reaming on social media and popular science blogs about this. Quanta distributed a YouTube video and their news story really had an overhyped title. No doubt that simulations with qubits are difficult and this research represents a step forward for such computing tasks, but this is nowhere near producing a useful physics result.
Regarding the "exclusion from regulation" it should be obvious that without proper regulation conditions go to poop because markets, such as satellite launchers and companies that use satellites, do not concern themselves with the mess that they make. In fact, markets have never solved any problem it took law, as in regulation, to do that with proof being the reduction in bank failures and economic crises after Glass-Steagall and their increase after Gramm-Leach-Bliley, such as the subprime mortgage crisis. Of course there is the problem of regulatory capture by special interests that must be dealt with, but some believe that that is a feature and not a bug. That said, there is a problem with space debris that has never been dealt with that has resulted in more of a problem than if it had. It seems that some regulation must be put in place to clean up the low earth orbit space now, before things get even more crowded. That it hasn't to a large degree can be attributed to failed leadership due to the the belief in the "markets" myth.
Armando Mistral
See, that's the thing. The gold that Sabine reliably delivers to us every week is not just the "science news", but is slyly *teaching* us to sniff out and reject BS. She is a worthy successor of Carl Sagan (may his memory last forever) and his Baloney Detection method.
Armando Mistral
Oh, yeah, even better. But at least horsing around with faux quantum nonsense won't make my jaw fall off.
Maybe 'quantum' now is what Radium was with woo-mongers and charlatans.
One of my favourite television shows in childhood/teens was an Australian program about new science and technology developments, called 'Quantum'. It was a pretty straightforward and enjoyable show. I miss that. There's a lot of great videos on YouTube but the writing about physics topics seems to be not up to that standard as far as I can tell. I appreciate the lessons in discernment.
Armando Mistral
I think people are getting kind of jaded. Time was, everything was called "quantum", especially when it wasn't. The Woo crowd is moving in fast and will kill this nonsense by flooding the zone with their shit. But I'm not bitter.
Armando Mistral
Look, years ago I put an icon to Snopes on my desktop for fast access when BS came my way that I needed to squash. I now have Sabine's Science News up there. If wormholes raise their ugly heads again, I'll check with her first, even before she suggested we do that. Ain't nobody got time for that!
I anticipate more incoming pandemonium online after that synopsis of the 'quantum wormhole' that wasn't.😆
