Scientists started on Friday casting one of the largest telescope mirrors ever made on Earth for the Giant Magellan Telescope being built in Chile.
Why it matters: The huge telescope is designed to one day peer into the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets around far-off stars, learn more about early galaxies and study other objects of interest.
What’s happening: The mirror is being crafted in Arizona using the only spinning furnace in the world designed for this kind of casting.
On Saturday, the furnace will hit “high fire,” spinning at five revolutions per minute and heating the glass to 2,129 degrees Fahrenheit for about five hours to liquify it.
After that peak in heating, the glass will gradually cool for about a month while the furnace spins more slowly, eventually reaching room temperatureabout 2.5 months after high fire.
“Once cooled, the mirror will be polished for two years before reaching an optical surface precision of less than one thousandth of the width of a human hair or five times smaller than a single coronavirus particle,” the GMT organization wrote in a press release.
What’s next: The GMT’s first two mirrors are ready and in storage, with three others still in process. The seventh — and last — mirror is scheduled to be cast in 2023.
The team behind the telescope is also planning on crafting an eighth mirror as a spare.
The telescope is expected to see first light in 2029.
Scientists have long suspected conditions in space could create storm-like conditions above Earth but now they have picture proof of what researchers are calling a plasma space hurricane.
The authors of a new paper published this week in Nature Communicationssay they have the first observations of a swirling mass of plasma above the North Pole resembling a hurricane.
Using satellite imagery in 2014, the teams at the University of Reading and Shandong University were able to create a 3D image of the 1,000 km-wide mass that rains down electrons instead of water. The space storms above Earth are created when solar wind from the sun smacks into Earth’s atmosphere.
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“Tropical storms are associated with huge amounts of energy, and these space hurricanes must be created by unusually large and rapid transfer of solar wind energy and charged particles into the Earth’s upper atmosphere,” Professor Mike Lockwood, space scientist at the University of Reading, said in a news release.
A 3D image of a Space hurricane (WKMG 2021)
Lockwood and his team believe these space hurricanes could also be created beyond our solar system.
“Plasma and magnetic fields in the atmosphere of planets exist throughout the universe, so the findings suggest space hurricanes should be a widespread phenomena,” Lockwood said.
What makes this find so special is that hurricanes have also been observed in the lower atmospheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn but the existence of space hurricanes in the upper atmosphere of planets has not been detected before.
Hurricanes occur in Earth’s oceans over warm bodies of water. When warm, moist air rises, it creates an area of low pressure near the surface that sucks in the surrounding air, causing extremely strong winds and creating clouds that lead to the hurricane conditions we are used to.
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But in the upper atmosphere, solar wind is responsible for creating space hurricanes.
The solar wind is a stream of charged particles that emanate from the corona or sun’s atmosphere. The particles travel in all directions and interact with anything they encounter, even Earth. Thankfully, our planet has a shield, the magnetosphere. If it wasn’t for this magnetic field, Earth would be in big trouble. Instead, most of the solar wind is deflected safely away and continues on its journey through space. If there was no magnetic field, harmful radiation carried by the solar wind would make it to the surface, threatening life.
Some of the particles that don’t get deflected into space are guided toward the north and south poles. Those particles then interact with gases in our atmosphere causing those gases to move into a higher-energy state, producing vibrant displays of light, or the Auroras, also known as the northern or southern lights.
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How solar wind interacts with Earth (WKMG 2021)
The auroral oval is the footprint in the atmosphere of the boundary between the highly stretched field lines of the polar cap and the more normal field lines at lower latitudes. When the solar wind is strong, this boundary moves closer to the equator.
The auroral oval typically clings close to the poles, but space hurricanes occur even closer to the pole.
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A small group of scientists and others who believe the novel coronavirus that spawned the pandemic could have originated from a lab leak or accident is calling for an inquiry independent of the World Health Organization’s team of independent experts sent to China last month.
While many scientists involved in researching the origins of the virus continue to assert that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic almost certainly began in a leap from bats to an intermediate animal to humans, other theories persist and have gained new visibility with the W.H.O.-led team of experts’ visit to China. Officials with the W.H.O. have said in recent interviews that it was “extremely unlikely” but not impossible that the spread of the virus was linked to some lab accident.
The open letter, first reported in The Wall Street Journal and the French publication Le Monde, lists what the signers see as flaws in the joint W.H.O.-China inquiry, and state that it could not adequately address the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab. The letter further posits the type of investigation that would be adequate, including full access to records within China.
The W.H.O. mission, as with everything involving China and the coronavirus, has been political from the start as the international team’s members acknowledged.
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and one of the scientists who signed the letter, said it grew out of a series of online discussions among scientists, policy experts and others who came to be known informally as the Paris group. Many of those who signed the letter were based in France and Dr. Ebright, who has been outspoken about the need to investigate a possible laboratory leak, said such discussion had been less vigorous in the United States.
He said that no one in the group thought that the virus had been intentionally created as a weapon, but they were all convinced that an origin in a lab through research or by accidental infection was as likely as a spillover occurring in nature from animals to humans.
Dr. Ebright said the letter was released because the Paris group expected to see an interim report from the W.H.O. on Thursday. The letter, he added, “was communicated to high levels of the W. H.O. on Tuesday.”
Asked to respond to the letter, Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the W.H.O., replied in an email that the team of experts that had gone to China “is working on its full report as well as an accompanying summary report, which we understand will be issued simultaneously in a couple of weeks.”
The open letter noted that the W.H.O.’s study was a joint effort by a team of outside experts, selected by the global health organization, who worked along with Chinese scientists, and that the team’s report must be agreed on by all. The letter emphasized that the team was denied access to some records and did not investigate laboratories in China.
Findings by the team, the letter stated, “while potentially useful to a limited extent, represent neither the official position of the W.H.O. nor the result of an unrestricted, independent investigation.”
Without naming him, the letter criticized Peter Daszak, an expert in animal diseases and their connection to human health, who is the head of EcoHealth International. The letter linked to articles about Dr. Daszak and said he had previously stated his conviction that a natural origin of the virus was most likely.
Dr. Daszak said the letter’s push to investigate a lab origin for the virus was a position “supported by political agendas.”
“I strongly urge the global community to wait for the publication of the report from the W. H.O. mission,” he added.
Filippa Lentzos, a senior lecturer in science and international security, at King’s College London, and one of the signers of the letter, said, “I think in order to get a credible investigation, it has to be more of a global effort in the sense that it should be taken to the U.N. General Assembly where all the nations of the world are represented and can vote on whether or not to give a mandate to the U.N. secretary general, to carry out this kind of investigation.”
Dr. David A. Relman, a professor of medicine and microbiology at Stanford University and a member of the intelligence community studies board at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, an advisory body to the federal government, said he was “quite supportive” of the open letter.
“I completely agree, based on what we know so far, that the W.H.O. investigation appears to be biased, skewed, and insufficient,” he said in an email. “Most importantly, without full transparency and access to the primary data and records, we cannot understand the basis for any of the comments issued so far on behalf of the investigation or by W.H.O.”
At the same time, scientists working on coronaviruses continue to unearth and report evidence to support the natural evolution and spillover of the virus from animals.
Robert F. Garry, a virologist at Tulane University Medical Center, recently posted on the website Virological a report that is not yet peer-reviewed that described new evidence that aspects of the virus that seemed unusual at first had been found in new viruses in Japan, Thailand and Cambodia. He and his co-authors concluded, “These observations are consistent with the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 and strongly inconsistent with a laboratory origin.”
He said that he was familiar with some of the views of the letter signers expressed in previous media appearances or on social media, involving speculation about ways the virus could have come from laboratory work, and that none of those views appeared in the letter.
Dr. Garry said the possible scenarios described in the letter were that “the Wuhan Institute of Biology either had SARS-CoV-2 or something very close to it before the outbreak. And for whatever reason, some grand conspiracy, they just didn’t want to tell anybody about it.”
He said he continued to believe that a lab origin was “next to impossible.” He said, “We need to look in animals.”
That seems to strike at the heart of the concerns of the Paris group, which is the nature of future research. Dr. Ebright said that everyone in the group was concerned about both wildlife surveillance and laboratory research into viruses as potentially increasing, not lessening the likelihood of future pandemics.
If either collecting samples in the wild or work with those samples in labs were implicated in the origin of the pandemic, he said, the need would be urgent “to assess whether benefits outweigh risks and if not to restrict those activities.”
The idea that the Earth has four layers has long been considered a basic tenet of geology, taught to schoolchildren around the globe. Think of it like an onion: First there is the crust, which is where we live and contains of water, soil and various layers of rock. Next comes the mantle, the thickest layer, which makes up 67% of the Earth’s mass. Then there is a liquid outer core, comprised mostly of iron and nickel. Finally there is an inner core, which is believed to be solid and mainly comprised of an iron-nickel alloy.
Scientists were certain that these four discernible layers comprised the innards of our planet. But that appears to be suddenly called into question thanks to new study, which provides evidence that the Earth’s inner core may actually have two distinct layers.
The paper, which was written by scientists at Australian National University, describes how researchers analyzed thousands of models of Earth’s inner core using a special search algorithm. Their goal was to study how long it took seismic waves to travel through the planet based on decades of data compiled by the International Seismological Centre. By doing this, they could learn more about the inner core’s anisotropy, a term that refers to how the differences in a given substance’s make-up alters the properties of seismic waves.
In the process, the scholars discovered that although there is not much variation when it comes to the inner core’s depth, slower seismic waves changed at a 54 degree angle and faster waves ran parallel to the Earth’s rotational axis.
“We found evidence that may indicate a change in the structure of iron, which suggests perhaps two separate cooling events in Earth’s history,” the study’s lead author, PhD researcher Joanne Stephenson, said in a statement.
Stephenson added, “The details of this big event are still a bit of a mystery, but we’ve added another piece of the puzzle when it comes to our knowledge of the Earths’ inner core.”
Writing to Salon, Stephenson explained that “our study confirms that there is a change at about 650 km in the inner core — adding another piece to the puzzle. Importantly, what makes this study unique, is the vigorous treatment of uncertainty and the methods we used — we wanted to make sure what we saw in the inner was definitely a change and not just noise in the data.”
She added that while it is “incredibly difficult to know exactly what it looks like inside,” the scientists’ results suggest that “perhaps there is a change from one form of iron to another deep within the [inner core]. Potentially due to some kind dramatic event in Earth’s history which happened as the Earth cooled.”
Stephenson and the ANU team are not the first scholars to suggest that there might be layers to the Earth’s inner core. Stephenson herself acknowledged that it was “proposed a couple of decades ago, but the data has been very unclear,” pointing out that the team used “a very clever search algorithm to trawl through thousands of the models of the inner core.”
She added, “It’s very exciting — and might mean we have to re-write the textbooks.”
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While most of us take the ground beneath our feet for granted, written within its complex layers, like pages of a book, is Earth’s history. Our history.
Now researchers have found more evidence for a whole new chapter deep within Earth’s past – Earth’s inner core appears to have another even more inner core within it.
“Traditionally we’ve been taught the Earth has four main layers: the crust, the mantle, the outer core and the inner core,” explained Australian National University geophysicist Joanne Stephenson.
Our knowledge of what lies beneath Earth’s crust has been inferred mostly from what volcanoes have divulged and seismic waves have whispered. From these indirect observations scientists have calculated that the scorchingly hot inner core, with temperatures surpassing 5,000 degrees Celsius (9,000 Fahrenheit), makes up only one percent of Earth’s total volume.
Now Stephenson and colleagues have found more evidence Earth’s inner core may have two distinct layers.
“It’s very exciting – and might mean we have to re-write the textbooks!” she added.
The team used a search algorithm to trawl through and match thousands of models of the inner core with observed data across many decades about how long seismic waves take to travel through Earth, gathered by the International Seismological Centre.
Differences in seismic wave paths through layers of Earth. (Stephenson et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 2021)
So what’s down there? The team looked at some models of the inner core’s anisotropy – how differences in the make-up of its material alters the properties of seismic waves – and found some were more likely than others.
While some models think the material of the inner core channels seismic waves faster parallel to the equator, others argue the mix of materials allows for faster waves more parallel to Earth’s rotational axis. Even then, there’s arguments about the exact degree of difference at certain angles.
This study failed to show much variation with depth in the inner core, but did find there was a change in the slow direction to a 54 degree angle, with the faster direction of waves running parallel to the axis.
“We found evidence that may indicate a change in the structure of iron, which suggests perhaps two separate cooling events in Earth’s history,” Stephenson said.
“The details of this big event are still a bit of a mystery, but we’ve added another piece of the puzzle when it comes to our knowledge of the Earths’ inner core.”
These new findings may explain why some experimental evidence has been inconsistent with our current models of Earth’s structure.
The presence of an innermost layer has been suspected for some time now, with hints that iron crystals which compose the inner core have different structural alignments.
“We are limited by the distribution of global earthquakes and receivers, especially at polar antipodes,” the team wrote in their paper, explaining the missing data decreases the certainty of their conclusions. But their conclusions align with other recent studies on the anisotropy of the innermost inner core.
A new method currently under development may soon fill in some of these data gaps and allow scientists to corroborate or contradict their findings and hopefully translate more stories written within this early layer of Earth’s history.
This research was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Covid-19 has already left a trail of death and despair in Brazil, one of the worst in the world. Now, a year into the pandemic, the country is setting another wrenching record.
No other nation that experienced such a major outbreak is still grappling with record-setting death tolls and a health care system on the brink of collapse. Many other hard-hit nations are, instead, taking tentative steps toward a semblance of normalcy.
But Brazil is battling a more contagious variant that has trampled one major city and is spreading to others, even as Brazilians toss away precautionary measures that could keep them safe.
On Tuesday, Brazil recorded more than 1,700 Covid-19 deaths, the highest single-day toll of the pandemic.
“The acceleration of the epidemic in various states is leading to the collapse of their public and private hospital systems, which may soon become the case in every region of Brazil,” the national association of health secretaries said in a statement. “Sadly, the anemic rollout of vaccines and the slow pace at which they’re becoming available still does not suggest that this scenario will be reversed in the short term.”
And the news just got worse for Brazil — and possibly the world.
Preliminary studies suggest that the variant that swept through the city of Manaus is not only more contagious, but it also appears able to infect some people who have already recovered from other versions of the virus. And the variant has slipped Brazil’s borders, showing up in two dozen other countries and in small numbers in the United States.
Although trials of a number of vaccines indicate they can protect against severe illness even when they do not prevent infection with the variant, most of the world has not been inoculated. That means even people who had recovered and thought they were safe for now might still be at risk, and that world leaders might, once again, be lifting restrictions too soon.
“You need vaccines to get in the way of these things,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, speaking of variants that might cause reinfections. “The immunity you get with your cemeteries running out of room, even that will not be enough to protect you.”
That danger of new variants has not been lost on scientists around the world. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pleaded with Americans this week not to let their guards down. “Please hear me clearly,” she said. “At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we’ve gained.”
Brazilians hoped they had seen the worst of the outbreak last year. Manaus, capital of the northern state of Amazonas, was hit so hard in April and May that scientists wondered if the city might have reached herd immunity.
But then in September, cases in the state began rising again, perplexing health officials. An attempt by Amazonas governor Wilson Lima to impose a new quarantine ahead of the Christmas holiday was met with fierce resistance by business owners and prominent politicians close to President Jair Bolsonaro.
By January, scientists had discovered that a new variant, which became known as P.1, had become dominant in the state. Within weeks, its danger became clear as hospitals in the city ran out of oxygen amid a crush of patients, leading scores to suffocate to death.
Doctor Antonio Souza remains haunted by the horrified faces of his colleagues and relatives of patients when it became clear his Manaus hospital’s oxygen supply had been exhausted. He thinks about the patient he sedated, to spare her an agonizing death, when the oxygen ran out at another clinic.
“Nobody should ever have to make that decision,” he said. “It’s too terrible.”
Maria Glaudimar, a nurse in Manaus, said she felt trapped in a nightmare early this year with no end in sight. At work, patients and their relatives pleaded for oxygen and all the intensive care beds were full. At home, her son caught tuberculosis after contracting Covid-19 and her husband shed 22 pounds as he fought the virus.
“No one was prepared for this,” Ms. Glaudimar said. “It was a horror film.”
Since then, the coronavirus crisis has eased somewhat in Amazonas, but worsened in most of Brazil.
Scientists have scrambled to learn more about the variant and to track its spread across the country. But limited resources for testing have kept them behind the curve as they try to determine what role it is playing.
Anderson Brito, a Brazilian virologist at Yale University, said his lab alone sequenced almost half as many coronavirus genomes as all of Brazil had. While the United States has done genetic sequencing on roughly one in 200 confirmed cases, Brazil sequences about one in 3,000.
The variant spread quickly. By the end of January, a study by government researchers found it was present in 91 percent of samples sequenced in the state of Amazonas. By the end of February, health officials had reported cases of the P.1 variant in 21 of 26 Brazilian states, but without more testing it is hard to gauge its prevalence.
Throughout the pandemic, researchers have said that Covid-19 reinfections appear to be extremely rare, which has allowed people who recover to presume they have immunity, at least for a while. But that was before P.1 appeared and doctors and nurses began to notice something strange.
João Alho, a doctor in Santarém, a city in Amazonas, said several colleagues who had recovered from Covid-19 months ago got ill again and tested positive.
Juliana Cunha, a nurse in Rio de Janeiro who has been working at Covid-19 testing centers, said she assumed she was safe after catching the virus last June. But in November, after experiencing mild symptoms, she tested positive again.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Ms. Cunha, 23, said. “It must be the variants.”
But there is no way to be sure what is happening to people who are reinfected, unless both their old and new samples are kept, genetically sequenced and compared.
One way to tamp down the surge would be through vaccinations, but the rollout in Brazil, as in so many countries, has been slow.
Brazil began vaccinating priority groups, including health care professionals and the elderly, in late January. But the government has failed to secure a large enough number of doses. Wealthier countries have snapped up most of the available supply, while Mr. Bolsonaro has been skeptical both of the disease’s impact, and of vaccines.
Just over 5.8 million Brazilians — roughly 2.6 percent of the population — had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine as of Tuesday, according to the health ministry. Only about 1.5 million had received both doses. The country is currently using the Chinese-made CoronaVac — which laboratory tests suggest is less effective against P.1 than against other variants — and the one made by the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
Margareth Dalcolmo, a pulmonologist at Fiocruz, a prominent scientific research center, said Brazil’s failure to mount a robust vaccination campaign set the stage for the current crisis.
“We should be vaccinating more than a million people per day,” she said. “That is the truth. We aren’t, not because we don’t know how to do it, but because we don’t have enough vaccines.”
Other countries should take heed, said Ester Sabino, an infectious disease researcher at the University of São Paulo who is among the leading experts on the P.1 variant.
“You can vaccinate your whole population and control the problem only for a short period if, in another place in the world, a new variant appears,” she said. “It will get there one day.”
Health minister Eduardo Pazuello, who called the variant a “new stage” of the pandemic, said last week that the government was ramping up its efforts and hopes to vaccinate roughly half of its population by June and the rest by the end of the year.
But many Brazilians have little faith in a government led by a president who has sabotaged lockdowns, repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus and promoted untested remedies long after scientists said they clearly did not work.
Just last week, the president spoke dismissively of masks, which are among the best defenses to curb contagion, claiming that they are harmful to children, causing headaches and difficulty concentrating.
Mr. Pazuello’s vaccine projections have also been met with skepticism. The government last week placed an order for 20 million doses of an Indian vaccine that has not completed clinical trials. That prompted a federal prosecutor to argue in a legal filing that the $286 million purchase “puts millions of lives at risk.”
Even if it proves effective, it will be too late for many.
Tony Maquiné, a 39-year-old marketing specialist in Manaus, lost a grandmother, an uncle, two aunts and a cousin, in the span of a few weeks during the latest surge of cases. He says time has become a blur of frantic efforts to find hospitals with free beds for the living, while arranging funerals for the dead.
“It was a nightmare,” Mr. Maquiné said. “I’m scared of what lies ahead.”
Manuela Andreoni and Ernesto Londoño reported from Rio de Janeiro and Letícia Casado from Brasília. Carl Zimmer contributed reporting from New Haven, Conn.
Scientists are using technology to read centuries-old letters sealed using “letterlocking.”
Nature Communications
The contents of a handwritten European letter sealed for 300 years are no longer a secret, thanks to a technique that let scholars peek inside virtually without damaging the intricately folded historical document.
In the letter, dated July 31, 1697, Jacques Sennacques asks his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant in The Hague, for a certified copy of a death notice for Daniel Le Pers. That’s no history-making revelation, but the technique that revealed the request could hold promise for unlocking sealed correspondence containing historical gems across time and place.
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All those years ago, Sennacques’ letter was closed using a process called “letterlocking,” a complex folding technique used globally to secure post before the invention of envelopes. Think of it like ancient encryption: Letters sealed this way couldn’t be opened without getting torn, and rips indicated a note had been tampered with before reaching the intended recipient.
“Letterlocking was an everyday activity for centuries, across cultures, borders and social classes,” said Jana Dambrogio, the Thomas F. Peterson Conservator at MIT Libraries and one of the authors of a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications that details the virtual unlocking technique.
No paper was damaged in the reading of this letter: It was unfolded virtually.
Nature Communications
Letterlocking played an integral role in securing physical communications before the age of modern digital cryptography. Some of the earliest letterlocking examples can be found in the Vatican Secret Archives dating back to 1494. Researchers could have just torn the letter open, but they wanted to conserve all of its folds and creases, which themselves amount to evidence about communications practices.
“This research takes us right into the heart of a locked letter,” Dambrogio said in a statement.
To unlock the letter, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from MIT and King’s College London turned to advanced X-ray machines designed for dentistry to produce high-resolution 3D scans that showed exactly how the paper is configured. An automated computational algorithm developed by one former and one current MIT student then produced legible images of the letter’s contents and intricate crease patterns.
“Virtual unfolding is a computational process that analyzes CT scans of folded letterpackets and creates a flattened image of their contents,” the team said. “Our virtual unfolding pipeline generates a 3D reconstruction of the folded letter, a corresponding 2D reconstruction representing its flat state and flat images of both the surface … and each letterpacket’s crease pattern.”
Computational algorithms have been successfully applied to scans of scrolls, books and documents with one or two folds. But the complexity of the letterlocked documents posed their own challenges.
The letter came from the Brienne Collection, a European postmaster’s wooden trunk that contained 3,148 items, including 577 letters that were never unlocked. The research team unlocked several letters using their new technique and believes it holds promise for many other unopened letters.
“One important example is the hundreds of unopened items among the 160,000 undelivered letters in the Prize Papers, an archive of documents confiscated by the British from enemy ships between the 17th and 19th centuries,” the study reads. “If these can be read without physically opening them, much rare letterlocking data can be preserved.”
Before the researchers’ computational analysis, they only knew the name of the intended recipient written on the outside of the locked letter.
“When we got back the first scans of the letter packets, we were instantly hooked,” said Amanda Ghassaei, who helped write the publicly available code for virtually unfolding the letters. “Sealed letters are very intriguing objects, and these examples are particularly interesting because of the special attention paid to securing them shut.”
Let the epistolary history unfold.
CNET’s Corinne Reichert contributed to this report.
More than 600 years ago, someone intricately folded, sealed and posted a letter that was never delivered. Now, scientists have digitally “unfolded” this and other similarly locked letters found in a 17th-century trunk in The Hague, using X-rays.
For centuries prior to the invention of sealed envelopes, sensitive correspondence was protected from prying eyes through complex folding techniques called ‘letterlocking’, which transformed a letter into its own secure envelope.
However, locked letters that survive to the present are fragile and can be opened physically only by slicing them to pieces.
The new X-ray method offers researchers a non-invasive alternative, maintaining a letterpacket’s original folded shape.
For the first time, scientists applied this method to “locked” letters from the Renaissance period, kept in a trunk that had been in the collection of the Dutch postal museum in The Hague, The Netherlands, since 1926.
Computer-generated unfolding animation of sealed letter DB-1538. (Unlocking History Research Group archive)
Related: Photos: Treasure trove of unopened 17th-century letters
The trunk’s contents include more than 3,100 undelivered letters, of which 577 were unopened and letterlocked. Known as the Brienne Collection, the letters were written in Dutch, English, French, Italian, Latin and Spanish.
For unknown reasons, once the missives reached The Hague they were never delivered to their intended recipients, and were instead kept by a postmaster named Simon de Brienne, Live Science previously reported.
Locked letters used different mechanisms to stay securely closed, including folds and rolls; slits and holes; tucks and adhesives; and a variety of cleverly constructed locks, according to a study published online March 2 in the journal Nature Communications.
To penetrate the layers of folded paper, the study authors used an X‐ray microtomography scanner engineered in the dental research labs at Queen Mary University of London (QMU).
Researchers designed the scanner to be exceptionally sensitive so that it could map the mineral content of teeth, “which is invaluable in dental research,” study co-author Graham Davis, a QMU professor of 3D X-ray imaging, said in a statement.
“But this high sensitivity has also made it possible to resolve certain types of ink in paper and parchment,” Davis added.
The trunk filled with sealed letters. (Unlocking History Research Group archive)
“The rest of the team were then able to take our scan images and turn them into letters they could open virtually and read for the first time in over 300 years,” study co-author David Mills, an X-ray microtomography facilities manager at QMU, said in the statement.
From the scans, the team built 3D digital reconstructions of the letters, and then created a computational algorithm that deciphered the sophisticated folding techniques, crease by crease, opening the letters virtually “while preserving letterlocking evidence”, according to the study.
The scientists digitally opened four letters using this groundbreaking method, deciphering the contents of one letter, DB-1627.
Penned on July 31, 1697, it was written by a man named Jacques Sennacques to his cousin Pierre Le Pers, who lived in The Hague. Sennacques, a legal professional in Lille, France, requested an official death certificate for a relative named Daniel Le Pers, “perhaps due to a question of inheritance”, the scientists wrote.
“His request issued, Sennacques then spends the rest of the letter asking for news of the family and commending his cousin to the graces of God,” the authors wrote. “We do not know exactly why Le Pers did not receive Sennacques’ letter, but given the itinerancy of merchants, it is likely that Le Pers had moved on.”
(Unlocking History Research Group archive)
Tens of thousands of such sealed documents can now be unfolded and read virtually, the researchers reported.
“This algorithm takes us right into the heart of a locked letter,” the research team said in the statement. “Using virtual unfolding to read an intimate story that has never seen the light of day — and never even reached its recipient — is truly extraordinary.”
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.
This illustration visualizes the form of the space hurricane observed in 2014 satellite data.
Qing-He Zhang/Shandong University
Somebody call up the SyFy channel, we’re going to need a whole series of Spacenado movies now.
This week, a team of researchers unveiled the results of a study that highlights the first-ever observation of a space hurricane in our planet’s upper atmosphere. Unlike the infamous cyclones that wreak havoc closer to Earth’s surface, the space hurricane was made up of swirling plasma and “rained” electrons.
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“Until now, it was uncertain that space plasma hurricanes even existed, so to prove this with such a striking observation is incredible,” University of Reading space scientist Mike Lockwood said in a statement Monday. Lockwood is co-author of a paper on the phenomenon published in the journal Nature Communications in late February.
Scientists discovered the event after reanalyzing data collected by satellites in August 2014. Researchers at Shandong University in China led the team that made the discovery. The data showed a 620-mile-wide (1,000-kilometer) plasma mass swirling above the North Pole. It had spiral arms and lasted for nearly eight hours.
Plasma is a hot area of study. NASA, which has investigated plasma space tornadoes, describes space plasma as “charged particles, like electrons and ions.” These particles shoot through space and can cause issues for satellites and astronauts. The space agency was also behind a 2019 paper on “plasma tsunamis” on the sun.
Lockwood pointed to an “unusually large and rapid transfer of solar wind energy and charged particles into the Earth’s upper atmosphere” as what fed the space hurricane. The existence of at least one known space hurricane under these circumstances suggests they might be common in the atmospheres of other planets.
Understanding Earth’s very own space hurricane could help scientists gain a deeper understanding of space weather and how it can impact systems we rely on, like GPS. As a bonus, it just sounds cool to say “space hurricane.”
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Three hundred years ago, before envelopes, passwords and security codes, writers often struggled to keep thoughts, cares and dreams expressed in their letters private.
One popular way was to use a technique called letter locking — intricately folding a flat sheet of paper to become its own envelope. This security strategy presented a challenge when 577 locked letters delivered to The Hague in the Netherlands between 1689 and 1706 were found in a trunk of undelivered mail.
The letters hadnever reached their final recipients, and conservationists didn’t want to open and damage them. Instead, a team has found a way to read one of the letters without breaking its seal or unfolding it in any way. Using a highly sensitive X-ray scanner and computer algorithms, researchers virtually unfolded the unopened letter.
This is a computer-generated unfolding sequence of a sealed letter from 17th-century Europe. Virtual unfolding was used to read the letter’s contents without physically opening it. Credit: Courtesy of the Unlocking History Research Group archive
“This algorithm takes us right into the heart of a locked letter,” the research team said in a statement.
“Sometimes the past resists scrutiny. We could simply have cut these letters open, but instead we took the time to study them for their hidden, secret, and inaccessible qualities. We’ve learned that letters can be a lot more revealing when they are left unopened.”
The technique revealed the contents of a letter dated July 31, 1697. It contains a request from Jacques Sennacques to his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant in The Hague, for a certified copy of a death notice of Daniel Le Pers.
The details may seem prosaic, but the researchers said the letter gives fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary people — a snapshot of the early modern world as it went about its business.
This 17th century trunk of undelivered letters was bequeathed to the Dutch postal museum in The Hague in 1926. A letter from this trunk was scanned by X-ray microtomography and virtually unfolded to reveal its contents for the first time in centuries. Credit: Courtesy of the Unlocking History Research Group archive
The trunk of correspondence belonged to a postmaster called Simon de Brienne and his wife, postmistress Marie Germain. It was acquired by the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague in 1926.
In addition to the unopened letters, it contains 2,571 opened letters and fragments that for one reason or another never reached their destination.
At that time, there was no such thing as a postage stamp and recipients, not senders, were responsible for the postal and delivery charges. If the recipient was deceased or rejected the letter, no fees could be collected and the letters weren’t delivered.
A new way to mine historical documents
The X-ray scanners were originally designed to map the mineral content of teeth and have been used in dental research — until now.
“We’ve been able to use our scanners to X-ray history,” said study author David Mills, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London, in a statement.
“The scanning technology is similar to medical CT scanners, but using much more intense X-rays which allow us to see the minute traces of metal in the ink used to write these letters. The rest of the team were then able to take our scan images and turn them into letters they could open virtually and read for the first time in over 300 years.”
The letter contains a message from Jacques Sennacques dated July 31, 1697, to his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant. Also visible is a watermark in the center containing an image of a bird. Credit: Courtesy of the Unlocking History Research Group archive
The new technique has the potential to unlock new historical evidence from the Brienne trunk and other collections of unopened letters and documents, the study said.
One tantalizing application could be to virtually unfold sealed items and letters in the Prize Papers — an archive of documents confiscated by the British from enemy ships between the 17th and 19th centuries.
“Using virtual unfolding to read an intimate story that has never seen the light of day — and never even reached its recipient — is truly extraordinary,” the researchers said in the statement.
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.
