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Cosmic Science

Grand and Egyptian: A tale of two great museums

Ramesses II statue and Tutankhamun golden mask
Left: Ramesses II statue at Grand Egyptian Museum. Right: Tutankhamun golden mask at Egyptian Museum. (Composite by Alan Boyle)

GIZA, Egypt — Twenty years may sound like a long time for building a monument like the Grand Egyptian Museum, but if you visit, all you have to do is look out the window to spot a historical precedent.

The Great Pyramid of Giza, which is a mile and a half away, took about the same amount of time to build 4,500 years ago. Now it’s the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that’s still standing.

Will the billion-dollar Grand Egyptian Museum be seen as a wonder as well? Just three months after its soft opening, the GEM has established its status as a must-see jewel for fans of ancient Egypt. But if you want to see the greatest hits of Egyptian archaeology, one museum — even a museum with more than 5 million square feet of floor space and 100,000 artifacts destined for display — still isn’t enough.

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Cosmic Science

Oops! That’s not Amelia Earhart’s plane — it’s a rock

Airplane-shaped rock formation
A sonar image shows a rock formation previously thought to be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's airplane. (Credit: Deep Sea Vision)

Once again, a seemingly promising lead in the search for traces of missing aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and her plane has fizzled out.

Hopes of solving the 87-year-old mystery were raised in January when Deep Sea Vision, a team of underwater archaeologists and robotics experts led by former Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo, said they captured a fuzzy sonar image that looked like an airplane.

Deep Sea Vision said the find was notable because the shape was detected about 100 miles from Howland Island, in an area of the Pacific Ocean where the team suspected Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, may have gone down during their attempt to fly around the globe in 1937.

“You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that’s anything but an aircraft, for one; and two, that it’s not Amelia’s aircraft,” Romeo said on NBC’s “Today” show when the discovery was announced.

Unfortunately for Romeo and his team, higher-resolution sonar imagery revealed that the shape was merely a natural rock formation lying more than 16,000 feet beneath the ocean surface. The new sonar view was captured this month by an autonomous underwater vehicle.

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Universe Today

America’s particle physics plan gets a status update

Illustration with subatomic particles and galaxy bubbles
Physics experiments address mysteries at subatomic and astronomical levels. (Illustration by Olena Shmahalo for U.S. Particle Physics)

RALEIGH, N.C. — Particle physicist Hitoshi Murayama admits that he used to worry about being known as the “most hated man” in his field of science. But the good news is that now he can joke about it.

Last year, the Berkeley professor chaired the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, which drew up a list of multimillion-dollar physics experiments that should move ahead over the next 10 years. The list focused on phenomena ranging from subatomic smash-ups to cosmic inflation. At the same time, the panel also had to decide which projects would have to be left behind for budgetary reasons, which could have turned Murayama into the Dr. No of physics.

Although Murayama has some regrets about the projects that were put off, he’s satisfied with how the process turned out. Now he’s just hoping that the federal government will follow through on the P5’s top priorities.

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GeekWire

Stealthy startup builds ‘Antibody Cages’ to fight diseases

Archon co-founders James Lazarovits and George Ueda
Archon Biosciences’ co-founders, James Lazarovits and George Ueda, lead a tour through their Seattle lab. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Three weeks after University of Washington biochemist David Baker won a Nobel Prize, the latest venture to spin out from his lab — Archon Biosciences — has emerged from stealth mode with $20 million in financing for a technology that uses computationally designed protein structures to treat cancer and other diseases.

The seed funding round was led by Madrona Ventures, with participation from DUMAC Inc., Sahsen Ventures, WRF Capital, Pack Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments and Cornucopian Capital.

Archon’s proprietary protein structures, known as Antibody Cages or AbCs, have been years in the making. Archon’s CEO and co-founder, James Lazarovits, said the Nobel Prize that Baker won for his pioneering work in the field of protein design confirms his view that the newly unveiled startup is on the right track.

“It’s reaffirmed our conviction for why we’re in this place to begin with,” Lazarovits told me during a tour of Archon’s Seattle lab. “It’s doing things that were not possible before. … You could not do anything that we’re doing unless there was the convergence of all these different fields at this moment in time.”

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GeekWire

Scientists turn to the cloud for computational chemistry

Illustration: Fanciful view of cloud containing molecular structures, circuitry and test tubes
Researchers are finding ways to speed up computational chemistry through cloud computing. (Illustration by Nathan Johnson / PNNL)

A team led by researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is finding new ways to accelerate the pace of computational chemistry, by making tools for quantum computing and AI-assisted data analysis available via the cloud.

Their effort to make supercomputer-scale resources more widely available through cloud computing could aid in the search for methods to break down toxic “forever chemicals” that are currently hard to get rid of. And that’s just one example.

The researchers describe their progress on the project — known as Transferring Exascale Computational Chemistry to Cloud Computing Environment and Emerging Hardware Technologies, or TEC4 — in a study published today in the Journal of Chemical Physics.

“This is an entirely new paradigm for scientific computing,” PNNL computational chemist Karol Kowalski, who led the cross-disciplinary effort, said in a news release. “We have shown that it’s possible to bundle software as a service with cloud computing resources. The initial proof of concept shows that cloud computing can provide a menu of options to complement and supplement high-performance computing for solving complex scientific problems.”

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GeekWire

Nobel Prize in chemistry puts protein design in spotlight

Biochemist David Baker at home
Biochemist David Baker chats with a journalist online about his Nobel Prize. (Photo by Ian C Haydon / UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design)

University of Washington biochemist David Baker has won a share of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for more than two decades of discoveries about the molecular structure of proteins — discoveries that have led to new medical therapies, new materials and new startups.

“I’m very, very excited about the future,” Baker, who is the director of the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design, said today during a Seattle news briefing. “I think protein design has huge potential to make the world a better place, and I really do think we’re just at the very, very beginning.”

Baker shares the prize with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who have also pioneered computational techniques for predicting protein structure. They will be awarded their medals at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10.

In a news release, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Baker “has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins.”

“His research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors,” the academy said.

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Cosmic Science

Scientists map a fruit fly’s brain — and are thinking ahead

Fruit fly connectome
This image shows how a fruit fly's neurons are connected. (Credit: Amy Sterling and Julia Kuhl for FlyWire, Princeton University / Dorkenwald et al., Nature)

Researchers say they have created a complete map of an adult fruit fly, showing how almost 140,000 individual neurons are linked up to each other and turn sensory inputs into behavioral responses.

The connectome — basically, a wiring diagram that traces the connections between brain cells — is the subject of a flurry of research papers published today by the journal Nature.

It’s not the first such brain wiring diagram, or connectome, to be traced out: Previous projects have charted the brain of a roundworm (302 neurons), plus the brains of a larval sea squirt and a larval marine worm, as well as the brain of a larval fruit fly (3,016 neurons).

But the adult fruit fly connectome, encompassing 139,255 neurons and roughly 50 million connections — raises the bar considerably. And it’s getting scientists thinking about what it will take to achieve a similar feat focusing on the human brain.

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GeekWire

OceanGate tale gets new twists as hearings wrap up

Coast Guard's Jamie Frederick at hearing
Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick, at center, testifies at a hearing looking into last year’s loss of the Titan sub. (Coast Guard Photo)

The tragic tale of OceanGate’s Titan submersible took on a few added twists today as the U.S. Coast Guard concluded two weeks of public hearings into last year’s catastrophic loss of the sub and its crew.

One former employee of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate quoted the company’s CEO as saying years earlier that he’d “buy a congressman” if the Coast Guard stood in the way of Titan’s development. And the master of Titan’s mothership told investigators that he felt a “shudder” on the sea around the time that the sub imploded on June 18, 2023.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, the sub’s pilot, was among the five who died as Titan made its last descent to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The others were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; British aviation executive and citizen explorer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business magnate Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Rush’s determination to dive to the Titanic, despite the warnings he received from OceanGate employees and outside engineers, emerged as a major theme during this month’s hearings in South Carolina. Matthew McCoy, a Coast Guard veteran who worked as an operations technician at OceanGate for five months in 2017, reinforced that theme today.

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GeekWire

After Titan sub’s loss, Coast Guard reviews regulations

John Winters at Coast Guard's Titan sub hearing
Coast Guard inspector John Winters, at right, and Coast Guard attorneys face a panel looking into the loss of the Titan sub. (Coast Guard Photo)

The U.S. Coast Guard took a deep dive into the regulations governing submersibles today at a public hearing looking into the causes of last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan sub and its crew. And the issues raised sometimes got as murky as the depths of Puget Sound, where Titan underwent its first tests.

Among the witnesses who testified at the hearing in South Carolina was John Winters, the master marine inspector for Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound. For more than a decade, Winters worked with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush on the regulatory requirements for two of the Everett, Wash.-based company’s subs, known as the Antipodes and Cyclops 1. But today he told the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation that he had nothing to do with Titan.

Winters recalled a time, about two years ago, when he was at OceanGate’s headquarters on the Everett Marina to check on one of the two submersibles in the Coast Guard’s records. He said he saw the three subs on a barge, and someone told him, “We finally got our submarine to go to the Titanic.”

“But that was the only thing in passing,” Winters said. “Nothing about what it was constructed to, who witnessed it. None of that stuff. Just, ‘Here it is, look at the outside.’ … That’s as far as it went.”

In the wake of the Titan tragedy, the Coast Guard is likely to go further. One of the objectives of this month’s hearings is to lay the groundwork for regulatory changes that would help head off future fatal incidents involving submersibles.

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GeekWire

Investigators identify problems with Titan sub’s hull

Underwater image of Titan wreckage, with labels
Layers of the Titan sub's hull are labeled in this image of debris on the seafloor. (Pelagic Research Services via NTSB)

A pair of reports by the National Transportation Safety Board found evidence of imperfections in the carbon-fiber hull that was made for OceanGate’s Titan submersible — plus indications that the hull behaved differently after a loud bang was heard at the end of a dive in mid-2022.

At the time, OceanGate team determined that the loud bang was not a serious problem, but less than a year afterward, the sub and its crew were lost in a catastrophic implosion during a trip to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic,

Donald Kramer, an senior materials engineer who presented NTSB’s findings today at a Coast Guard hearing in South Carolina, declined to go beyond the data and speculate on whether the imperfections or the bang figured in Titan’s doom. But one leading theory for the sub’s failure suggests that weaknesses in the hull gave way under the extreme pressure of the deep ocean.

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