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Gravitational-wave sleuths look for more cosmic crashes

Specialist checks beam alignment at LIGO
A specialist checks the alignment of a test beam at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. (NSF Photo)

After three years of upgrading and waiting, due in part to the coronavirus pandemic, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory has officially resumed its hunt for the signatures of crashing black holes and neutron stars.

“Our LIGO teams have worked through hardship during the past two-plus years to be ready for this moment, and we are indeed ready,” Caltech physicist Albert Lazzarini, the deputy director of the LIGO Laboratory, said in a news release.

Lazzarini said the engineering tests leading up to today’s official start of Observing Run 4, or O4, have already revealed a number of candidate events that have been shared with the astronomical community.

“Most of these involve black hole binary systems, although one may include a neutron star,” he said. “The rates appear to be consistent with expectations.”

One such event, called S230518h, was detected last week. Researchers say that if they can confirm the data, the event was most likely caused by the merger of a faraway black hole and a neutron star.

The twin LIGO gravitational-wave detectors at Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La., will be joined for O4 by the Virgo detector in Italy as well as the KAGRA observatory in Japan. Virgo is scheduled to take part in the run starting later this year. KAGRA will parallel LIGO’s observations for the next month, take a break for some upgrades, and then rejoin the run.

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Experiment blazes a trail for growing stem cells in space

Photomicrograph of induced pluripotent stem cells
A live colony of human induced pluripotent stem cells fills the screen of a microscope. (Allen Institute Photo)

Space: The final frontier … for stem cells? Seattle’s Allen Institute for Cell Science says cells from its collection are going into space for the first time on a private mission to the International Space Station.

The Allen Cell Collection’s assortment of human induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPSCs, will be the focus for one of more than 20 experiments being sent into orbit on a flight organized by Texas-based Axiom Space.

Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will command the Ax-2 mission — Axiom’s second trip to the space station — and her crewmates will include Tennessee business executive John Shoffner as well as Saudi astronauts Ali Alqarni and Rayyanah Barnawi.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will loft the crew into orbit in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for what’s expected to be a weeklong stay on the station. Liftoff is set for May 21 at 5:37 p.m. ET (2:37 p.m. PT) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The fare for each rider on last year’s Ax-1 mission was around $55 million, and although the ticket price for Ax-2 hasn’t been announced, it’s probably in a similar range.

The stem-cell study is part of a series of NASA-funded experiments led by researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. This experiment is expected to break new ground when it comes to growing IPSCs in space and modifying the cells’ DNA for therapeutic purposes.

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Fiction Science Club

How quantum tech could change everything everywhere

Illustration combining 1660 star atlas and picture of quantum computing hardware
Quantum computing could change our perspective on the cosmos. (Illustration: Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1660 / Microsoft, 2022)

What does quantum computing have in common with the Oscar-winning movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once”? One is a mind-blowing work of fiction, while the other is an emerging frontier in computer science — but both of them deal with rearrangements of particles in superposition that don’t match our usual view of reality.

Fortunately, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has provided a guidebook to the real-life frontier, titled “Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything.”

“We’re talking about the next generation of computers that are going to replace digital computers,” Kaku says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “Today, for example, we don’t use the abacus anymore in Asia. … In the future, we’ll view digital computers like we view the abacus: old-fashioned, obsolete. This is for the garbage can. That’s how the future is going to evolve.”

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Icebergs ahead? This year’s Titanic trips will start early

MV Polar Prince at sea
The MV Polar Prince will be OceanGate’s seagoing base of operations. (Copyright Miawpukek Horizon Marine Services)

OceanGate Expeditions, which has conducted dives to the site of the Titanic shipwreck in 2021 and 2022, says it will begin its trips a month earlier this year, in May — a schedule change that strikes a chord with history.

“May is still considered to be iceberg season in the North Atlantic where the shipwreck of the Titanic lies,” Stockton Rush, president of OceanGate Expeditions, noted in a news release. Rush is also the CEO and founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate Inc., which has OceanGate Expeditions as its exploration branch.

Almost exactly 111 years ago, the Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg during its first voyage, resulting in more than 1,500 deaths. The tragedy sparked one of history’s best-known tales of a disaster at sea — and also sparked interest in underwater shipwreck surveys like the ones organized by OceanGate.

Rush said he and his team were mindful of the potential hazard. “With this in mind, having a capable ship specifically designed for working in the icy Arctic regions is going to be very valuable for our extended crew of scientists, Titanic experts and mission specialists,” he said.

OceanGate Expeditions has signed a charter contract with Horizon Maritime and Miawpukek Horizon Marine Services for the use of the MV Polar Prince, which was previously operated by the Canadian Coast Guard as a light icebreaker known as the Sir Humphrey Gilbert. During most of its 64-year history, the ship cleared ice from harbors and guided other ships through ice-choked marine environments.

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Cosmic Science

Dinosaur super-necks, flipped fossils and other paleo bits

Illustration showing long-necked dinosaurs
An artist’s impression of Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum. (Illustration by Júlia d'Oliveira for Stony Brook U.)

Paleontologists find the darndest things — including evidence for the longest-known sauropod neck, and fossils that literally turn their assumptions upside down. Check out these fresh developments from the fossil record:

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Cosmic Science

Hidden passage discovered within Egypt’s Great Pyramid

Hidden passage
Endoscopic imagery shows a hidden passage within the Great Pyramid of Giza. (ScanPyramids / Egyptian Min. of Tourism and Antiquities)

Archaeologists have discovered a long-lost passageway within Egypt’s 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza, thanks to 21st-century technologies including muon tomography and endoscopy.

It’s the latest find made possible with the help of ScanPyramids, an international effort that started documenting Egypt’s best-known archaeological sites with high-tech tools in 2015.

Over the past eight years, ScanPyramids’ team has identified several voids within the Great Pyramid. The passageway described today lies just beneath the pyramid’s north face, about 23 feet (7 meters) above the main entrance. It’s 30 feet (9 meters) long, about 7 feet (2.1 meters) wide, and high enough for a person to stand in.

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Fiction Science Club

Get a reality check on supersized quantum mania

Multiple Ant-Men in scene from "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"
Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) faces proliferating quantum timelines in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania." (Marvel Studios via Cedric Dumler / IMDB)

Ant-Man may be getting small in Marvel’s latest superhero movie — but in the real world, quantum is getting big.

Quantum information science is one of the top tech priorities for the White House, right up there with artificial intelligence. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM and other tech heavyweights are closing in on the development of honest-to-goodness quantum processors. A company called IonQ has a billion-dollar plan to build quantum computers in the Pacific Northwest. The market for quantum computing is projected to hit $125 billion by 2030.

So you might think “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” will be going all-out to feature real-life advances in quantum physics.

If that’s what you’re expecting from the movie, think again. “There’s no connection to real physics, or our understanding of reality,” says Chris Ferrie, a quantum physicist at the University of Technology Sydney and the UTS Center for Quantum Software and Information.

Ferrie should know, and not just because he has a Ph.D.: His latest book, titled “Quantum Bullsh*t,” colorfully catalogs all the ways in which popular depictions of quantum physics go wrong. In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Ferrie explains why those depictions tend to focus on the B.S. rather than the theory’s brilliance.

“The reality .. that quantum physics is a tool for engineers to make predictions about their experiments … is really boring,” he says.

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OceanGate provides a guided video tour of the Titanic

Titanic's bow, as seen during OceanGate dive
An image from OceanGate’s Titanic expedition shows the shipwreck’s iconic bow. (OceanGate via YouTube)

The latest film about the Titanic doesn’t show Leonardo DiCaprio standing up on the bow’s railings — instead, a single slim filament of coral takes his place as the king of the world.

That’s just one of the scenes from “Titan — A Viewport to Titanic,” a newly released 20-minute video that recaps OceanGate Expeditions‘ dives to the world’s best-known shipwreck in 2021 and 2022.

The film was assembled from high-resolution video captured during a series of dives made by OceanGate’s Titan submersible — a vessel that was designed specifically to take its crews 12,600 feet deep in the North Atlantic Ocean to document the site, year over year.

“Mission specialists, scientists and Titanic experts helped OceanGate Expeditions capture over 50 hours of high-resolution 4K and 8K footage and images of the wreck site,” Stockton Rush, CEO and founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, said in a news release.

“Titan — A Viewport to Titanic” is narrated by Rory Golden, a veteran Titanic diver and explorer who’s part of the OceanGate team.

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Scientist’s tangle over the speed of a dinosaur’s tail

NPS illustration of Apatosaurus and its tail
Apatosaurus had a 50-foot-long tail. (National Park Service Illustration / Bob Walters / Tess Kissinger)

The dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurus could certainly do a lot of damage with its long tail — but just how fast could that tail whip?

Years ago, a team of researchers — including Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft executive who’s now the CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures — built a quarter-scale dinosaur tail from 3-D printed vertebrae and a bullwhip popper, and thrashed it around. Their aim was to show that the diplodocid dinosaur now known as Apatosaurus louisae could whip its tail with a supersonic crack more than 150 million years ago.

The team determined that the tail could indeed go supersonic, producing a crack as loud as the report of a naval gun and most likely scaring off potential predators. But now other researchers say their computer modeling shows that Apatosaurus’ tail wasn’t structurally strong enough to sustain a supersonic crack.

“Such an elongated and slender structure would allow achieving tip velocities in the order of 30 m/s, or 100 km/h (62 mph), far slower than the speed of sound,” a team led by Simone Conti of Portugal’s NOVA School of Science and Technology asserted this week in Scientific Reports.

Suffice it to say that Myhrvold isn’t convinced.

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Cosmic Science

If it looks like a duck, it might have been a dinosaur

Artist's impression of ducklike dinosaur
An artist's conception shows how Natovenator polydontis might have looked. (Yusik Choi Illustration)

It’s long been accepted that birds are essentially modern dinosaurs, but does that mean an ancient dinosaur could have looked and acted like a duck? Paleontologists are pointing to fossils from Mongolia’s Gobi Desert to make that argument.

In a study published by Communications Biology, researchers say that a well-preserved skeleton dated to the Upper Cretaceous period, between 100 million and 66 million years ago, exhibits streamlined features that would have been well-adapted to swimming. Back then, the region that’s now arid desert would have been much more hospitable to ducks and their kin — offering forests, streams and lakes.

The fossilized species was named Natovenator polydontus, a Latinized scientific name meaning “swimming hunter with many teeth.”

“This dinosaur, a carnivorous theropod that walked on two legs, is the first non-avian dinosaur to evolve into a streamlined body and start living in the water,” Yuong-Nam Lee, a vertebrate paleontologist at Seoul National University, told South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.

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