A new search for the elusive Planet Nine has once again yielded nary a sniff of a sneaky outer Solar System body.
Although the hypothetical object continues to evade detection, a six-year search in millimeter wavelengths has allowed astronomers to rule out an object with Planet Nine’s predicted properties in a large swathe of the southern sky.
The search also yielded some candidate objects that might be interesting to follow up in future surveys.
“No significant detections are found, which is used to place limits on the millimeter-wave flux density of Planet Nine over much of its orbit,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
“We also provide a list of the 10 strongest candidates from the search for possible follow-up. More generally, we exclude (at 95 percent confidence) the presence of an unknown solar system object within our survey area.”
Planet Nine is one of the more intriguing Solar System propositions in recent years. For decades, scientists have speculated about the existence of a hidden planet in the far reaches of the Solar System, but it reached a new pitch in 2016 with the publication of a paper by astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of Caltech.
In their paper, Brown and Batygin suggested that small objects in the outer Solar System’s Kuiper Belt were orbiting oddly, as though pushed into a pattern under the gravitational influence of something large. That something, they concluded, could be a previously unknown planet shepherding small rocks.
Neptune was predicted in a similar way, from calculations of Uranus’ orbit, before astronomers discovered it using telescopes. But finding Planet Nine is a lot more complicated than finding Neptune.
If Planet Nine is out there, calculations suggest it could be 5 to 10 times the mass of Earth, orbiting at a distance somewhere between 400 and 800 astronomical units (an astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the Sun; Pluto, for context, is around 40 astronomical units from the Sun).
That means it would take somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 years to go once around the Sun.
So, Planet Nine is very far away, quite small, and cold. As a result, it probably does not reflect much sunlight at all, or give off thermal radiation (heat).
Moreover, we don’t know precisely where it is in the very large sky. So the jury is out on whether it is real or not, and the topic is one of pretty intense and interesting debate.
Led by Sigurd Naess of the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics, astronomers tried to find a hint of the planet by poring over data collected by the 6-meter Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile.
This telescope is designed to detect a faint signal left over from the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background; however, it turns out it’s also sensitive enough to detect objects in the very far reaches of the Solar System.
Between 2013 and 2019 inclusive, the telescope scanned about 87 percent of the available southern sky, for distances between 300 and 2,000 astronomical units. Within that space, the telescope can detect a 5 Earth mass planet between 325 to 625 astronomical units; and a 10 Earth mass planet between 425 and 775 astronomical units.
Although the search yielded about 3,500 tentative candidates, none were statistically significant, and none could be confirmed.
Nevertheless, the team picked out the 10 strongest candidates for future study; even if they’re not Planet Nine, they could still be something interesting.
Previous searches for Planet Nine have yielded really distant Solar System rocks, as well as previously unknown moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
In addition, the team’s results only covered a segment of the sky and possibilities. There’s still an awful lot of space out there to be covered, and there are regions in its orbit that the telescope wouldn’t be able to see Planet Nine. So the non-detection isn’t surprising and can’t rule out the existence of the hypothetical object.
Future instruments, like the upcoming Simons Observatory in Chile, should be able to substantially widen the parameters of the search for Planet Nine, raising the possibility of detection, the researchers said.
The paper has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.
For more than half a century, the kinds of antisocial personality traits we think of as psychopathic – such as a lack of remorse, aggression, and disregard for the wellbeing of others – have been associated with mental illness.
The line between broken and useful traits can be hazy in biology, leaving open the possibility that what is now considered a malfunction might once have been promoted by natural selection.
We might find it tricky to think of evolution benefiting antisocial people, but nature has no problem leaving room for the occasional freeloader within otherwise cooperative species like our own. Those alternative traits that make psychopaths so despised could feasibly give them an edge in a world where competition for resources is intense.
A team of Canadian researchers explored this possibility in a study published last year in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, arguing psychopathy lacks certain hallmarks of a disorder, so should be considered more like a function operating as intended.
Their conclusion is based on an analysis of existing research containing validated measures of psychopathy together with details on the person’s handedness; however, this correlation echoes outdated science from the early days of criminal psychology.
Historically, links between being left-handed and a ‘sinister’ personality were all but given. Early models of mental illness and sociability regarded handedness as a convenient sign of an individual’s degeneracy.
Science no longer regards left-handed folk as ill-fated criminals, though the question of how handedness might pair with a litany of other physiological and psychological traits remains a common one in research.
Central to it all is the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Genetics does appear to play a role in handedness, if a rather complicated one. Cultural influences may also determine how much a person favors one hand over the other, allowing them to fit into communities that favor the right-handed.
There are also a vast mix of environmental nudges, such as stress or nutrition or exposure to pollution while in the womb, that can push a person’s genetic heritage for handedness into one direction or the other.
Since the researchers in this study found no clear evidence that psychopathic subjects were less likely to be right-handed, it might be assumed that their development hasn’t necessarily been affected by their environment to any significant extent.
This leaves open the possibility that whatever genes are at work are operating as evolution elected, providing (as the researchers describe it) an ‘alternative life history strategy’ for those who inherited them.
There are plenty of reasons to hold judgement one way or another on the entire debate. Specific to this study, just 16 studies ultimately informed the conclusion, combining data on just under 2,000 individuals, making it statistically weak.
Sample sizes aside, it’s hard to limit variables in studies like these, making it impossible to exclude the possibility of confounding conditions muddying the waters.
Beyond all of this, there is the more philosophical question over what makes differences in our form and function a disease in the first place. Whole books are written (one by the author of this very article) over the changing definitions of health and illness.
Psychopathy can at once be unwanted under one set of circumstances and prized in another, without invoking models of disease. It can be both an alternative strategy to survival, helping in some social contexts before becoming a disorder in another.
Like so many things in biology, disease is a convenient box we try to wrestle a complicated system into.
Psychopathy’s more clinical twin, antisocial personality disorder (APD), was officially given a place in the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II) in 1968. Even after a number of revisions, APD remains in the DSM, adjusted over time with criteria that can be observed and checked more objectively.
Whether we’ll continue to regard psychopathy as a disorder in the future will depend on a variety of considerations, not least the results of studies like this one.
No matter how we regard disorders like APD, psychopathy can play a role in behaviors that disrupt and destroy the wellbeing of many.
Knowing more about how it works, and how to help those with it, is an answer we could all benefit from.
This research was published in Evolutionary Psychology.
What happens to information after it has passed beyond the event horizon of a black hole? There have been suggestions that the geometry of wormholes might help us solve this vexing problem – but the math has been tricky, to say the least.
In a new paper, an international team of physicists has found a workaround for better understanding how a collapsing black hole can avoid breaking the fundamental laws of quantum physics (more on that in a bit).
Although highly theoretical, the work suggests there are likely things we are missing in the quest to resolve general relativity with quantum mechanics.
“We discovered a new spacetime geometry with a wormhole-like structure that had been overlooked in conventional computations,” says physicist Kanato Goto of Cornell University and RIKEN in Japan.
“Entropy computed using this new geometry gives a completely different result.”
The black hole information paradox is one of the unresolved tensions between Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Under general relativity, the event horizon of a black hole is a point of no return. Everything that passes beyond that critical point is inexorably slurped into the black hole’s gravity well, and no speed in the Universe, not even that of light in a vacuum, is sufficient for escape velocity. It’s gone, that’s it. Kaput. Irretrievable.
Then along came Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, suggesting that, when quantum mechanics is taken under consideration, black holes could emit radiation after all.
This, according to theory, occurs as a result of the black hole’s interference with surrounding particles’ wave-like properties, effectively making it ‘glow’ with a temperature that gets hotter as the black hole gets smaller.
Eventually, this glow should make a black hole shrink to nothing.
“This is called black hole evaporation because the black hole shrinks, just like an evaporating water droplet,” Goto explains.
Since the ‘glow’ doesn’t look like what went into the black hole in the first place, it would appear that whatever entered into the evaporated black hole is gone for good. But according to quantum mechanics, information cannot simply vanish from the Universe. Many physicists have explored the possibility that somehow, that information is encoded in Hawking radiation.
Goto and his team wanted to mathematically explore this idea by computing the entropy of Hawking radiation around a black hole. That’s the measure of disorder in a system, and can be used to diagnose information loss in Hawking radiation.
According to a 1993 paper by physicist Don Page, if disorder reverses and entropy drops down to zero as a black hole vanishes, the paradox of the missing information should be avoided. Unfortunately, there’s nothing in quantum mechanics that would allow this reversal to happen.
Enter the wormhole, or at least a mathematical replica of one under very specific models of the Universe. This is a connection between two regions of a curved sheet of spacetime, a bit like a bridge across a ravine.
Thinking of it this way in conjunction with black holes gives us a different means of calculating the entropy of Hawking radiation, Goto says.
“A wormhole connects the interior of the black hole and the radiation outside, like a bridge,” he explains.
When the team performed their calculations using the wormhole model, their results matched the Page entropy curve. This suggests that information hoovered beyond the event horizon of a black hole might not be lost forever after all.
But there are, of course, still some questions that remain. Until these are answered, we can’t consider the black hole information paradox definitively resolved.
“We still don’t know the basic mechanism of how information is carried away by the radiation,” Goto says. “We need a theory of quantum gravity.”
The research has been published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
The story was about how Serena Williams raised $111 million for a new venture fund, “Serena Ventures.” The incorrect photo did not appear in the online version of the story.
“No matter how far we come, we get reminded that it’s not enough,” Williams said on Twitter on Wednesday. “This is why I raised $111M for @serenaventures. To support the founders who are overlooked by engrained systems woefully unaware of their biases. Because even I am overlooked.”
Williams ended her tweet by saying, “You can do better, @nytimes.”
The Times responded on Twitter saying, “This was our mistake.”
“It was due to an error when selecting photos for the print edition, and it did not appear online,” the NYT Business account tweeted. “A correction will appear in tomorrow’s paper.”
Williams’ tweet, which included a picture of the incorrect photo, quickly racked up more than 3,000 retweets and more than 10,000 likes.
The Times reported that “Serena Ventures” will invest in founders with “diverse points of view” and that the firm led by Williams is “already an active angel investor with a portfolio of 60 companies that includes SendWave, MasterClass and Daily Harvest.”
There are countless examples of news outlets in recent years incorrectly and embarrassingly mixing up African Americans.
A KTLA journalist apologized to Samuel L. Jackson in 2014 after interviewing him and mistakenly thinking he was fellow actor, Laurence Fishburne.
And in 2018, Fox News apologized after using a photo of Patti LaBelle in a tribute to the late Aretha Franklin.
Huawei has announced its first ever e-reader, the MatePad Paper. But this is a little different from a typical Kindle. For starters, it’s compatible with Huawei’s M-Pencil stylus, so it can be used for taking notes in addition to just reading like the reMarkable 2 or Onyx Boox Note Air 2, and there’s also a built-in microphone for voice recording. It also has a larger 10.3-inch E Ink display compared to the roughly 7-inch screens found on most Kindles.
These specs mean that the MatePad Paper has the potential to be a productivity device, in addition to a device aimed purely at consumption. It’s almost more like an Android tablet that happens to be equipped with an E Ink screen, right down to the fact that it’s running Huawei’s HarmonyOS software and comes pre-installed with the company’s App Gallery.
If you’re looking to use the device purely as an e-reader, then Huawei advertises that it’s equipped with the company’s own Huawei Books store, which offers access to 2 million books. Huawei adds that it’s compatible with PDF files as well as other standard e-reader formats. But popular ebook marketplaces like Amazon’s Kindle app and Google Play Books aren’t currently listed on Huawei’s App Gallery, which might mean your existing library of e-books won’t seamlessly carry over.
Huawei says the MatePad Paper has a fingerprint sensor built into its power button, a USB-C port for charging and data transfer, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of built-in storage, and a backlight with 32 brightness levels. Its battery can last four weeks on standby, according to Huawei. The company hasn’t provided any specific details on which technology it’s using to allow the M-Pencil to write on the display, but given the stylus requires a charger, we’re assuming it’s using an AES-style drawing layer like an iPad, rather than EMR like its E-Ink rivals.
All these features don’t come cheap, with the Huawei MatePad Paper at a recommended retail price of €499 (around $558). That’s a lot compared to the starting price of around €90 for Amazon’s Kindles, but it’s more in line with a comparable Android tablet like the Onyx Boox Note Air 2, which retails for €499 in Europe. At least Huawei is including an M-Pencil and cover as standard with the MatePad Paper. Huawei has yet to announce a release date or markets for its debut e-reader, but a US release seems unlikely.
The MatePad Paper has been announced alongside a range of new Huawei devices at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. There’s the MateBook X Pro laptop, the MateBook E 2-in-1, the MateStation X all-in-one PC, a laser printer called the Huawei PixLab X1, and a portable Bluetooth speaker called the Sound Joy.
Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises Inc., a Chicago-based restaurant group, has added a 3% “processing fee” to checks at many of its restaurants.
Harley-Davidson Inc.
added a charge last year to its motorcycles to cover rising material costs.
Peloton Interactive Inc.
in January began charging $250 for delivery and setup of some of its indoor bikes, a service that was previously included free.
Companies are finding all kinds of ways to make consumers pay for rising costs. Often that is not reflected in the posted price.
The Labor Department’s consumer-price index, which measures how much consumers pay for goods and services, rose to 7.5% in January compared with the same month a year earlier—the biggest rise since February 1982.
The index accounts for some changes that raise consumers’ costs, such as smaller package sizes and some fees attached to hotel packages or car purchases. But it can miss other ways in which dollars don’t stretch as far– a hotel that changes sheets only between guests, a theme park that cancels its free airport shuttle, or an auto dealer that requires customers to buy a protective paint coating with a car.
With supply-chain challenges, pent-up demand and a tight labor market leading to inflation, businesses are looking for subtle ways to pass along rising costs. Particularly in the food business, companies have long used what the industry calls weight-outs, or shrinking package contents instead of raising prices, during economic distress periods such as the 2007-2009 recession.
“There is a lot more to come,” said
Doug Baker,
head of industry relations for FMI, a food-industry trade organization. “Everything is on the table in an effort to deal with those cost increases, and at the same time, not make it too difficult for consumers to shop.”
A global computer-chip shortage has reduced vehicle inventories just as Americans were buying cars in record numbers, pushing up prices for new vehicles. In many cases, they are selling for thousands of dollars above manufacturers’ suggested retail prices, said Tom McParland, founder of Automatch Consulting, which helps consumers find vehicles.
“They’re calling it a market adjustment fee,” said Mr. McParland. “That’s the new thing they are doing: hiding markups with substantially overpriced accessories like mud flaps and cargo protectors.”
Ford Motor Co.
and
General Motors Co.
have said they are cracking down on dealerships using that tactic.
Harley fees
Base prices on Harley-Davidson’s motorcycles haven’t gone up much in recent years, the Milwaukee company said. But to cover rising costs, it added a mandatory materials surcharge last year, which dealers are passing on to customers. Dealers said the fee, which varies based on the model, is easier for the company to adjust than base motorcycle prices when costs decrease.
Dealers said the fee is $850 to $1,500 a bike. Harley this week told analysts that the surcharges helped boost revenue during the fourth quarter last year.
Harley-Davidson added a fee to its motorcycles to cover rising material costs; a dealership in Louisville, Ky., this week.
Photo:
Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg News
Some restaurants are adding new fees in response to escalating costs for food and packaging, and for wage increases executives say are needed to keep cooks and servers.
Brinker International Inc.’s
Maggiano’s Little Italy in October 2020 started charging $5 for a second, to-go pasta dish offered as part of a two-entree deal. For about a decade before the pandemic, the chain had offered a second classic pasta dish free.
“We’ve had no push back,” Maggiano’s president Steve Provost told investors last October. A Brinker spokeswoman said the price change allowed the company to invest more in the value of its carry-out offerings.
When Michael Pfeifer, a marketing professional, picked up the check for his meal at
RPM
Seafood in Chicago this week, he was surprised to find a 3% Covid surcharge added to the bill. “What’s next?” he said. “A dishware rental fee?”
The fee, added in the spring of 2020, offsets the cost of pandemic-related government regulations and mandates, said RJ Melman, president of Lettuce Entertain You, which owns RPM. “These fees can be removed and refunded for any guest that requests,” he said, “no questions asked.”
Peloton, according to its website, is adding the new $250 fees on bikes and a $350 delivery-and-setup fee for some of its treadmills. It cut the price of its original stationary bike in August to $1,495 from $1,895. With the added fees, the total price is now back up to about $1,745, as the company dealt with slowing demand and its own rising costs.
Peloton declined to comment on the fees. In an earnings call on Tuesday, Peloton CFO
Jill Woodworth
said that the fees could cut into consumer demand but that they were part of a “critical learning” process as the company restructures and cuts costs for the post-pandemic era.
Walt Disney Co.
’s Disney World in Orlando stopped offering free airport shuttles—known as the Magical Express—this year, leaving Disney guests to pay for their own transportation. The parks added several fees last year while keeping the base ticket price at $109. A fast-pass system that let park guests make reservations for rides, which used to be free, was discontinued and replaced by a new system that costs $15. And some popular rides, like Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance and Space Mountain, now cost between $7 and $15, on top of the park admission ticket.
Disney offers “a wide range of options to match different budgets and interests,” said Disney spokesman Avery Maehrer.
At its theme-park restaurants, Disney is trying to avoid across-the-board price increases, Disney CFO
Christine McCarthy
told analysts in November. “We can substitute products. We can cut portion size, which is probably good for some people’s waistlines,” she said. “But we aren’t going to go just straight across and increase prices.”
Consumer backlash
Consumer pressure has led some companies to back off added fees, including
Frontier Group Holdings Inc.
The airline, which uses a la carte pricing that lets frugal travelers choose to forgo amenities, in May 2021 added a $1.59-per-flight-segment Covid-related fee. After consumer backlash, Frontier in June stopped breaking it out as a component of its base fare but it didn’t stop charging it. Frontier didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In a press release it said: “The charge, which was included in the airline’s total promoted fare versus an add-on fee, was meant to provide transparency and delineate what portion of the fare was going toward COVID-related business recovery.”
Some of
Marriott International Inc.’s
Autograph Collection hotels had been charging a “sustainability fee” of about $5 a night. The company that manages the properties, Innkeeper Hospitality Services LLC, says it covered things like more-efficient HVAC systems.
They stopped charging the fee several weeks ago, “because we understand that while we believe in environmentally responsible stewardship, not everyone cares about our planet’s health,” IHS CEO Amrit Gill said. He said Marriott had asked the company to stop charging the fee. Marriott declined to comment.
The Biden administration has begun to look into some forms of hidden fees, which it calls “junk fees.” The administration says the amount being charged is not always tied to the costs faced by the company providing the goods or services. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking public input on financial services, such as bank overdraft fees, while the Transportation Department is planning actions on airline baggage fees.
John Fiorello, a father of four in Torrington, Conn., was dismayed to see prices rising in his local grocery-store aisles but was initially pleased to see that the blocks of cheese he usually buys hadn’t gone up much in price—perhaps 10 cents, he said. Then he noticed that the package had shrunk, to 12 ounces from 16.
“I picked up the block and said, ‘this is definitely smaller,’ ” Mr. Fiorello said. “It just adds an extra layer of stress.”
Shrinkflation, as economists call it, tends to be easier for companies to pass on to consumers. Despite labels that show price by weight, research shows that most customers look at only the overall price.
The food industry has long shrunk package contents instead of raising prices during economic-distress periods; a Salt Lake City grocery store in October.
Photo:
George Frey/Bloomberg News
“There are sizes that people remember, like a half gallon of ice cream,” said John Gourville, a Harvard Business School professor. “Once you break from iconic sizes, it’s pretty easy to move from 13 ounces to 12 ounces.”
Over the years, tuna cans have come to contain less tuna and toilet-paper rolls less tissue, said
Burt Flickinger III,
managing director of Strategic Resource Group, a consulting firm that works with consumer-product companies. “Historically,” he said, “it’s called a ‘cheater pack.’ ”
Companies have become more sophisticated and use multiple tactics to protect their profitability, he said. They can pull back on discounts, stop making low-selling products and create new varieties that sell for higher prices
Downsized Oreos
Oreo-maker Mondelez International Inc. raised prices by an average of 6% to 7% in the U.S. last month, but it wasn’t enough to make up for its higher costs, the company said. So Mondelez has been introducing new sizes and flavors it says are more profitable.
Oreo’s new 110th Birthday chocolate confetti-cake cookies cost about 10 cents more than regular Double Stuf Oreos at several grocery stores, even though the new flavor comes in a slightly smaller package. At a
Target Corp.
store in Chicago, the limited-edition birthday Oreos, which came out January, cost $3.79 for a 24-cookie package and the Double Stuf ones cost $3.69 for a 30-cookie package.
Retailers set the final prices. Mondelez said it charges the same for the two products, and its limited edition flavors are typically different-sized packages than regular ones. A Target spokesperson said: “We’re priced competitively throughout the markets we do business.”
Economists and analysts at the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics monitor prices of thousands of goods and services. They can account for shrinkflation, because they track the cost of certain products by weight and quantity—so a cereal box that costs the same amount but now has 30% less volume would be registered as a price increase.
They said their efforts can’t identify every fee or dropped amenity, such as a hotel room rate that remains the same but that no longer includes fresh towels or a hot breakfast. “We do not capture the decrease in service quality associated with cleaning a room every two days rather than one,” said Jonathan Church, a BLS economist.
Disney World in Florida added several fees last year while keeping the base ticket price at $109; the Magic Kingdom last summer.
Photo:
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Associated Press
Jeremiah Mayfield and Carlos Larrea stayed at Alohilani Resort in Honolulu in December and opted for a $75 a-night upgrade to “club level” for free food and drinks. But they said they could rarely use it because the resort didn’t have enough staff to replenish the club-level amenities. After complaining, they were offered free dinner.
Alohilani General Manager Matthew Grauso said that quality and efficient guest service are top priorities and that he tries to remedy any shortfalls immediately, adding, “The pandemic has presented a unique set of challenges within the hospitality industry.”
“We gave them hell for it,” Mr. Mayfield said. “We paid $800 a night. We never expected it would be so scarce in terms of service and amenities.”
Many hotel chains are replacing complimentary hot breakfast buffets with a snack bag. Some fitness centers and pools remain closed, and housekeeping doesn’t refresh rooms daily. Some guests feel like they are getting less for their money.
InterContinental Hotels Group
PLC, which owns Holiday Inn, said it has been working with hotels to return amenities and make it right if guests aren’t satisfied. “Hotel teams have been overcoming many challenges including supply chain and labor shortages, changing health guidance and regulatory requirements,” an IHG spokesperson said.
On a recent trip to St. Louis, Meg Hinkley booked a Holiday Inn because it said online that it offered room service. When she arrived, the restaurant was closed, so there was no room service. She said she would have stayed at a lower-priced hotel if she had known. “I was paying for that convenience.”
—Heather Haddon and Bob Tita contributed to this article.
Write to Annie Gasparro at annie.gasparro@wsj.com and Gabriel T. Rubin at gabriel.rubin@wsj.com
Earth is far from a solid mass of rock. The outer layer of our planet – known as the lithosphere – is made up of more than 20 tectonic plates; as these gargantuan slates glide about the face of the planet, we get the movement of continents, and interaction at the boundaries, not least of which is the rise and fall of entire mountain ranges and oceanic trenches.
Yet there’s some debate over what causes these giant slabs of rock to move around in the first place.
Amongst the many hypotheses put forward over the centuries, convection currents generated by the planet’s hot core have been discussed as an explanation, but it’s doubtful whether this effect would produce enough energy.
A newly published study looks to the skies for an explanation. Noting that force rather than heat is most commonly used to move large objects, the authors suggest that the interplay of gravitational forces from the Sun, Moon, and Earth could be responsible for the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates.
Key to the hypothesis is the barycenter – the center of mass of an orbiting system of bodies, in this case that of Earth and the Moon. This is the point around which our Moon actually orbits, and it’s not directly in the center of mass of our planet, which we call the geocenter.
Instead, the location of the barycenter within Earth changes over the course of the month by as much as 600 kilometers (373 miles) because the Moon’s orbit around Earth is elliptical due to our Sun’s gravitational pull.
“Because the oscillating barycenter lies around 4,600 kilometers [2,858 miles] from the geocenter, Earth’s tangential orbital acceleration and solar pull are imbalanced except at the barycenter,” says geophysicist Anne Hofmeister, from Washington University in St. Louis.
“The planet’s warm, thick and strong interior layers can withstand these stresses, but its thin, cold, brittle lithosphere responds by fracturing.”
Further strain is added as Earth spins on its axis, flattening out slightly from a perfect spherical shape – and these three stresses from the Moon, Sun, and Earth itself combine to cause the shifting and the splitting of tectonic plates.
“Differences in the alignment and magnitude of the centrifugal force accompanying the solar pull as Earth undulates in its complex orbit about the Sun superimpose highly asymmetric, temporally variable forces on Earth, which is already stressed by spin,” the researchers write.
What’s happening underneath the surface is that the solid lithosphere and the solid upper mantle are being spun at different speeds because of these stresses and strains, the researchers report – all due to our particular Earth-Moon-Sun configuration.
“Our uniquely large Moon and particular distance from the Sun are essential,” says Hofmeister.
Without the Moon, and the shifts it causes between the barycenter and the geocenter, we wouldn’t see the tectonic plate activity we get on Earth’s surface, the researchers argue. As the Sun’s gravitational pull on the Moon is 2.2 times greater than Earth’s pull, it will get drawn away from our planet over the next billion years or so.
That said, the gravitational forces at play still need Earth’s hot interior for all this to work, the researchers argue.
“We propose that plate tectonics result from two different, but interacting, gravitational processes,” they write. “We emphasize that Earth’s interior heat is essential to creating the thermal and physical boundary layer known as the lithosphere, its basal melt, and the underlying low-velocity zone.”
To further validate the hypothesis outlined in their study, the researchers apply their analysis to several rocky planets and moons in the Solar System, none of which have had confirmed tectonic activity to date.
Their comparison between Earth and the other major celestial bodies in the Solar System reveals a potential explanation for why we haven’t detected tectonic activity on any of the major moons or rocky planets so far. The one closest to Earth in all the necessary parameters, however, is Pluto.
“One test would be a detailed examination of the tectonics of Pluto, which is too small and cold to convect, but has a giant moon and a surprisingly young surface,” says Hofmeister.
The research has been published in GSA Special Papers.
Ben Smith, the media columnist for The New York Times, is leaving the media outlet to start a new global news organization with Justin Smith, who is stepping down as chief executive of Bloomberg Media.
Ben Smith said in an interview that they planned to build a global newsroom that broke news and experimented with new formats of storytelling. He did not provide details on what beats or regions would be covered, how much money they planned to raise or when the new organization would start.
“There are 200 million people who are college educated, who read in English, but who no one is really treating like an audience, but who talk to each other and talk to us,” Ben Smith said. “That’s who we see as our audience.”
Justin Smith, 52, will lead the business side, and Ben Smith, 45, will be the top editor of the new venture.
Ben Smith joined the Times in 2020 after an eight-year tenure as editor in chief of Buzzfeed. He was previously a reporter at Politico.
The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that Justin Smith was leaving Bloomberg to found the news start-up.
Ben Smith said that he and Justin Smith had been discussing the fractured state of the news media for years, and began talking about starting a new company last fall. The new venture, he said, would aim to break news and offer nuance to complex stories, without falling into familiar partisan tropes.
“The pressures of social media and polarization have a lot of news organizations talking down to their audience,” he said.
Ben Smith also suggested that the new venture would focus on elevating the profiles of individual journalists.
“The talent model for journalism is pretty broken,” he added. “Audiences feel really connected to the person writing the story or making the video. That’s a challenge for big institutions.”
In a tweet announcing his departure from Bloomberg, Justin Smith said he was leaving “to pursue a personal dream, and a market opportunity.”
In his column for The Times, Ben Smith wrote a number of major articles, including one about harassment and abuse of power allegations against the chief editor of Bild, one of Germany’s most powerful newspapers, which is owned by Axel Springer, a giant global media company.
His column raising questions about the business practices of Ozy Media and its founder, Carlos Watson, rocked a start-up that had claimed it had large online audiences.
“What makes Ben special is that he is a commentator who also deeply reports,” Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times, said in a statement. “That’s a pretty rare combination in media writing today.”
At times, Mr. Smith was accused of having conflicts of interest while reporting on the media business, because he had stock in Buzzfeed when he joined The Times. In an interview, Mr. Smith said he had divested most of that stock.
Mr. Smith took over the media column at The Times from Jim Rutenberg. Before Mr. Rutenberg, the columnist position was held for years by David Carr, who died in 2015.
Mr. Smith has experience building a newsroom. He was hired by Jonah Peretti in 2012 to start Buzzfeed’s news division. When he left for The Times in 2020, Mr. Peretti credited him with turning Buzzfeed from a digital news start-up into “a world-class, global news organization in less than a decade.”
BuzzFeed News was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2018 for its work investigating operatives with apparent ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia engaging in targeted killings in Britain and the United States. In 2017, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer in international reporting for detailing how multinational corporations undermined environmental laws.
In January 2017, Mr. Smith was also the first editor to publish an unverified dossier containing salacious reports about President Donald J. Trump compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The decision to publish was hotly debated in the political and media worlds. Most of the important claims in the dossier have not been proven and some have been refuted, including by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who oversaw the inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Justin Smith joined Bloomberg in 2013 and helped push the news organization into live events and video.
“Justin helped transform Bloomberg Media into a modern, digital, media industry leader,” Michael Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg, said in a statement.
Before Bloomberg, he worked at Atlantic Media, where he started the business news site Quartz.
A summary of decades of research on a rather ‘out-there’ idea involving viruses from space raises questions on just how scientific we can be when it comes to speculating on the history of life on Earth.
It’s easy to throw around words like crackpot, rogue, and maverick in describing the scientific fringe, but then papers like this one, from 2018, come along and leave us blinking owlishly, unsure of where to even begin.
A total of 33 names were listed as authors on this review, which was published by Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology back in August 2018. The journal is peer reviewed and fairly well cited. So it’s not exactly small, or a niche pay-for-publish source.
Science writer Stephen Fleischfresser goes into depth on the background of two of the better known scientists involved: Edward Steele and Chandra Wickramasinghe. It’s well worth a read.
For a tl;dr version, Steele is an immunologist who has a fringe reputation for his views on evolution that relies on acquiring gene changes determined by the influence of the environment rather than random mutations, in what he calls meta-Lamarckism.
Wickramasinghe, on the other hand, has had a somewhat less controversial career, recognized for empirically confirming Sir Fred Hoyle’s hypothesis describing the production of complex carbon molecules on interstellar dust.
Wickramasinghe and Hoyle also happened to be responsible for another space biology thesis. Only this one is based on more than just the origins of organic chemistry.
The Hoyle Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology makes the rather simple claim that the direction of evolution has been significantly affected by biochemistry that didn’t start on our planet.
In Wickramasinghe’s own words, “Comets are the carriers and distributors of life in the cosmos, and life on Earth arose and developed as a result of cometary inputs.”
Those inputs, Wickramasinghe argued, aren’t limited to a generous sprinkling of space-baked amino acids, either.
Rather, they include viruses that insert themselves into organisms, pushing their evolution into whole new directions.
The report, titled “Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?”, pulls on existing research to conclude that a rain of extra-terrestrial retroviruses played a key role in the diversification of life in our oceans roughly half a billion years ago.
“Thus retroviruses and other viruses hypothesized to be liberated in cometary debris trails both can potentially add new DNA sequences to terrestrial genomes and drive further mutagenic change within somatic and germline genomes,” the authors wrote.
Let that sink in for a moment. And take a deep breath before continuing, because that was the tame part.
It was during this period that a group of mollusks known as cephalopods first stretched out their tentacles from beneath their shells, branching into a stunning array of sizes and shapes in what seemed like a remarkably short time frame.
The genetics of these organisms, which today include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, are as weird as the animals themselves, due in part to their ability to edit their DNA on the fly.
The authors of the paper make the rather audacious claim that these genetic oddities might be a sign of life from space.
Not of space viruses this time, but the arrival of whole genomes frozen in stasis before thawing out in our tepid waters.
“Thus the possibility that cryopreserved squid and/or octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted,” they wrote.
In his review of the paper, medical researcher Keith Baverstock from the University of Eastern Finland conceded that there’s a lot of evidence that plausibly aligns with the H-W thesis, such as the curious timeline of the appearance of viruses.
But that’s just not how science advances.
“I believe this paper justifies skepticism of the scientific value of stand alone theories of the origin of life,” Baverstock argued at the time.
“The weight of plausible, but non-definitive, evidence, great though that might be, is not the point.”
While the idea is as novel and exciting as it is provocative, nothing in the summary helps us better understand the history of life on Earth any better than existing conjectures, adding little of value to our model of evolution.
Still, with solid caveats in place, maybe science can cope with a generous dose of crazy every now and then.
Journal editor Denis Noble concedes that ‘further research is needed’, which is a bit of an understatement.
But given the developments regarding space-based organic chemistry in recent years, there’s room for discussion.
“As space chemistry and biology grows in importance it is appropriate for a journal devoted to the interface between physics and biology to encourage the debates,” said Noble.
“In the future, the ideas will surely become testable.”
Just in case those tests confirm speculations, we recommend being well prepared for the return of our cephalopod overlords. Who knows when they’ll want those eggs back?
This research was published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.
A version of this article was first published in August 2018.
