Tag Archives: stars

Science

A curious observer’s guide to quantum mechanics, pt. 4: Looking at the stars

Leave a comment

Aurich Lawson / Getty Images

One of the quietest revolutions of our current century has been the entry of quantum mechanics into our everyday technology. It used to be that quantum effects were confined to physics laboratories and delicate experiments. But modern technology increasingly relies on quantum mechanics for its basic operation, and the importance of quantum effects will only grow in the decades to come. As such, physicist Miguel F. Morales has taken on the herculean task of explaining quantum mechanics to the rest of us laymen in this seven-part series (no math, we promise). Below is the fourth story in the series, but you can always find the starting story plus a landing page for the entire series thus far on site.

Beautiful telescopic images of our Universe are often associated with the stately, classical physics of Newton. While quantum mechanics dominates the microscopic world of atoms and quarks, the motions of planets and galaxies follow the majestic clockwork of classical physics.

But there is no natural limit to the size of quantum effects. If we look closely at the images produced by telescopes, we see the fingerprints of quantum mechanics. That’s because particles of light must travel across the vast reaches of space in a wave-like way to make the beautiful images we enjoy.

This week we’ll concentrate on how photons travel across light years, and how their inherent quantum waviness enables modern telescopes, including interferometric telescopes the size of the Earth.

Starlight

How should we think about the light from a distant star? Last week we used the analogy of dropping a pebble into a lake, with the ring of ripples on the water standing in for the wave-like motion of photons. This analogy helped us understand the length of a particle ripple and how photons overlap and bunch together.

We can continue that analogy. Every star similar to the Sun, in that it makes a lot of photons. As opposed to someone carefully dropping single pebbles into a mirror-smooth lake, it’s more like they poured in a bucket of gravel. Each pebble makes a ring of ripples, and the ripples from each stone spread out as before. But now the ripples are constantly mixing and overlapping. As we watch the waves lap against Earth’s distant shore, we don’t see the ripples from each individual pebble; instead the combination of many individual ripples have added together.

Enlarge / The chaotic waves from a gravel star crossing our pond. The ripples of many pebbles overlap, creating a complex set of waves.

Miguel Morales

So let’s imagine we’re standing on the shore of a lake as the waves wash in, looking at our gravel ‘star’ with a telescope for water waves. The lens of the telescope focuses the waves from the star onto a spot: the place on the camera sensor where the light from that star lands.

If a second bucket of gravel is dropped into the lake farther along the opposite shore, the ripples will overlap at our shore, but will be focused by the telescope into two distinct spots on the detector. Similarly, a telescope can sort the light from the stars into two distinct groups—photons from star A and photons from star B.

But what if the stars are very close together? Most of the ‘stars’ we see at night are actually double stars—two suns so close together they appear as one bright pinprick of light. When they’re in distant galaxies, stars can be separated by light years yet look like a single spot in professional telescopes. We’d need a telescope that could somehow sort the photons produced by the different stars to resolve them. Similar things apply if we want to image features like sunspots or flares on the surface of a star.

To return to the lake, there is nothing special about the ripples made by different pebbles—the ripples from one pebble are indistinguishable from the ripples made by another. Our wave telescope does not care if the ripples came from different pebbles in one bucket or different buckets altogether—a ripple is a ripple. The question is how far apart must two pebbles be dropped for our telescope to distinguish that the ripples came from different locations?

Sometimes when you’re stumped, it’s best to take a slow walk along the beach. So we’ll have two friends sit on the far shore dropping pebbles, while we walk along our shore, looking at the waves and thinking deep thoughts. As we walk along the beach we see that the waves from our friends overlap everywhere, and that the waves come in randomly. There appears to be no pattern.

  • The waves from two gravel “stars.” The waves from each star are circular (see next panels), but combine in an apparent jumble. However, we notice that while the wave train at each location is chaotic, at locations close to each other on the beach, the wave trains are very similar. At locations far down the beach, we see a completely different wave train.


    Miguel Morales

  • The waves from just one star.


    Miguel Morales

  • The waves from the other star. The waves can be combined to produce the wave pattern seen in the first panel.


    Miguel Morales

But on closer inspection, we notice that spots on the beach very near each other see nearly identical waves. The waves are random in time, but locations on the beach a few paces apart see the same random train of waves. But if we look at waves hitting far down the beach, that wave train is completely different than the one hitting near us. Any two places on the beach that are close together will see nearly identical wave trains, but widely separated locations on the beach see different wave trains.

This makes sense if we think of the waves on the beach as being the combination of little ripples from hundreds of pebbles. At nearby locations on the beach, the ripples from the pebbles dropped by both friends add up in the same way. But farther along the beach, the ripples from one friend will have to travel farther, so the ripples add up in a different way, giving us a new wave train.

While we can no longer see the ripples of individual pebbles once they have combined into waves, we can pace off how far we need to walk to see a new wave train. And that tells us something about how the ripples are adding together.

We can confirm this by asking our two pebble-dropping friends to move closer together. When our friends are close together, we notice that we have to walk a long way along our beach to see the ripples add up in a different way. But when our friends are far apart, just a few steps on our beach will make the wave trains look different. By pacing off how far we need to walk before the waves look different, we can determine how far apart our pebble-dropping friends are.

Enlarge / Large and small telescopes looking at the same two stars. Because the waves appear different at the far edges of the large telescope, it can sort the waves into two sources. For the small telescope, the waves look the same across the lens, so it sees the two stars as a single unresolved source.

Miguel Morales

The same effect happens with photon waves, which can help us understand the resolution of a telescope. Looking at a distant binary star, if the light waves entering opposite edges of the telescope look different, then the telescope can sort the photons into two distinct groups—the photons from star A and the photons from star B. But if the light waves entering opposite edges of the telescope look the same, then the telescope can no longer sort the photons into two groups and the binary star will look like one spot to our telescope.

If you want to resolve nearby objects, the obvious thing to do is to make the diameter of the telescope bigger. The farther apart the edges of the telescope, the more close the stars can be and still be distinguished. Bigger telescopes have better resolution than small telescopes, and can separate the light from more closely spaced sources. This is one of the driving ideas behind building truly enormous 30 or even 100 meter diameter telescopes—the bigger the telescope, the better the resolution. (This is always true in space, and true on the ground with adaptive optics to correct for atmospheric distortions.)

For telescopes bigger really is better.

Read original article here

Science

Family Photo Snapped by Solar Orbiter Shows Venus, Earth And Mars Gleaming Like Stars

Leave a comment

Every now and again, we get a little glimpse of just how far human ingenuity has gone.

Quite literally: The above image was taken by a spacecraft travelling through the Solar System while it was at a distance of 251 million kilometres (156 million miles) from Earth – more than the distance between Earth and the Sun by nearly half again.

 

It was snapped by NASA and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, a mission to study the Sun, on 18 November 2020, while en route to its destination. It joins a burgeoning tradition of photos of Earth taken by instruments far beyond where humans ourselves can venture.

But it’s not just Earth in Solar Orbiter’s image; Venus and Mars make an appearance, too, 48 million and 332 million kilometres from the spacecraft, respectively. It’s a lovely family portrait when you think about it – three rocky planets, so similar in many ways, but so very different from each other – seen through a scientific instrument – the Heliospheric Imager – designed to study the heart of the Solar System.

(ESA/NASA/NRL/Solar Orbiter/SolOHI)

The Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020, and its flight was planned to make several Venus flybys to take advantage of the planet’s gravity for a speed boost, a manoeuvre known as a gravity assist. The image of the planets was taken as the Solar Orbiter was moving towards Venus for one of these flybys.

By the time Solar Orbiter arrives in position around the Sun to start operations in November 2021, it will be swooping far outside the planetary plane to glimpse the Sun’s polar regions. This will be tremendously exciting since, due to our vantage point on Earth, we’ve never directly imaged the Sun’s poles.

 

While it is in transit, the Solar Orbiter is making observations. This helps the Solar Orbiter team back here on Earth calibrate and test the instruments on board, but that data can be used for scientific analysis, too, of planets, of the solar wind, of space weather.

It gives us a little inspiring reminder, too, of the fragility and resilience of our own existence. Such photos always call to mind the words of Carl Sagan, in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot, of a photo of Earth taken by Voyager 1 on its way out of the Solar System.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives,” he wrote.

“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

 

Read original article here

Science

Teen Interning at NASA Discovered a New Planet Which Orbits Two Stars

Leave a comment

Photo: screenshot from NASA GODDARD

During the summer of 2019, a 17-year-old high school student named Wolf Cukier arrived at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center ready for a summer of learning at their new prestigious, coveted internship. He was put in charge of examining data collected by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which searches the universe for systems with two stars. Only three days into his new job, the teen spotted a blip in the data of one system which indicated the presence of a previously unknown planet. A year and a half later, NASA has published what they know about this newly discovered planet named TOI-1338 b.

TOI-1338 b is considered a Neptune-like gas exoplanet, about 6.9 times larger than Earth. An exoplanet is a planet outside of our solar system. This example lies 1,317 light years away from Earth and orbits its two stars roughly every 95 days. Discovery of planets such as TOI-1338 b are a main function of NASA’s TESS. The system documents dual-star systems to track the variations in light. Known as an eclipsing binary, one star may at times block or eclipse the other from a viewpoint here on Earth.

While studying graphs of such interruptions in light in one particular eclipsing binary system—with one star larger than our sun and another smaller star orbiting each other—Cukier noticed an anomaly which could not be attributed to either star’s path. The blip was in fact caused by the path of TOI-1338 b, which is non-periodic and appears irregular because of the stars’ movement.

Paul Hertz, NASA astrophysics division director, told CBS News, “TESS was designed and launched specifically to find Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby stars.” Once the far-away world was suspected, NASA used a system known as Eleanor to analyze lots of data related to the TOI-1338 systems. The results proved the deviations in the starlight were in fact a planet rather than random asteroids. TOI-1338 b joins a roster of several other circumbinary planets (orbiting two stars) known to NASA. Many more are likely to be discovered as TESS continues to track fluctuations in starlight across the universe.

The discovery of TOI-1338 b was certainly a plus on one brilliant teen’s college application, but the new planet has also fascinated the internet. In NASA’s representation of the gas planet, the pastel colors of its surface have inspired admiration for the beautiful planet. The internet has particularly admired a painterly bot-created artistic interpretation of the new planet. While there may be ways to predict a planet’s appearance using data on its composition and size, it’s impossible to photograph or view a planet so far away using current technology. While we know TOI-1338 b is there from the data Cukier and NASA analyzed, for now we will just have to imagine the look of this new world.

A 17-year-old named Wolf Cukier discovered a new gas planet on his third day as a NASA intern in the summer of 2019.

TOI 1338 b with its two stars. (Photo: screenshot from NASA GODDARD)

Along with the discovery, image renderings of the planet were unveiled and they completely stunned the internet.

The planet, TOI-1338 b, is larger than Earth and so far away that its existence was only discovered by analyzing the light “blips” as it orbits in its system.

The orbit path of TOI 1338 b. (Photo: screenshot from NASA GODDARD)

TOI-1338 b adds to a growing list of circumbinary planets which orbit two-star systems.

An illustration of a light “blip” as the planet passes across its star. (Photo: screenshot from NASA GODDARD)

Learn more about TOI-1338 b with NASA.

Orbital path of the new planet. (Photo: screenshot from NASA GODDARD)

h/t: [NPR]

Related Articles:

NASA Confirms That There Is Actually Water on the Moon

NASA Shares Spectacular 10-Year Time-Lapse Video of the Sun

NASA Says About 300 Million Habitable Planets Could Exist in the Milky Way

NASA Releases 30 New Space Images for 30th Anniversary of the Hubble Telescope’s Launch

fbq('init', '438929739853889'); fbq('track', 'PageView');
Read original article here

Science

Bad Astronomy | A sextuple star system where all six stars undergo eclipses

Leave a comment

This deserves a “whoa”: Astronomers have found a sextuple (six-) star system where, if you watch it for a few days, every star in it will at some point undergo an eclipse.

Whoa.

Multiple stars are just intrinsically cool: Unlike our Sun, sailing alone through space, multiples are where two or more stars orbit each other in a stable, gravitationally bound system. Half the stars in the galaxy are in multiple systems like that. Most are binaries (two stars orbiting each other) and some in trinaries (three stars). Fewer yet are in higher-order systems.

That’s the first thing that makes TYC 7037-89-1 special: It’s a sextuplet, a six-star system. It’s a little over 1,900 light years away, so a fair distance, but it’s bright enough to be detected by TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. TESS scans the sky measuring the brightnesses of stars to look for transiting exoplanets, which make mini-eclipses on their host stars, revealing their presence.

But it can find lots of other interesting things, too. TYC 7037-89-1 looks like one star in TESS data, but one that changes its brightness — a variable star. The astronomers who found it look in TESS data for stars that change brightness in a certain way, indicating that they’re multiple star systems.

Video of Binary and Multiple Stars: Crash Course Astronomy #34

What they looked for are eclipsing binaries: Stars that not only orbit each other, but also ones where we see their orbits nearly edge-on, so that the stars appear to pass in front of on another. When that happens the total light from the pair drops a little bit in a characteristic way. The astronomers set up automated software to look for such stars, and out of nearly half a million they found 100 that appeared to be three-star systems or more.

And that’s what brings up the second cool thing about TYC 7037-89-1: It’s not just six stars all orbiting every which way, but they’re arranged in binaries: One pair of stars orbits another pair of stars, and a third pair orbits them both!

The binary pairs are named A, B, and C in order of brightness, and each star in them is given the number 1 or 2 (again in order of brightness). The two inner binaries are then A (made up of stars A1 and A2) and C (C1 and C2), orbited farther out by the binary B (B1 and B2). A and C are separated by about 600 million kilometers (very roughly the distance of Jupiter from the Sun), taking about 4 years to go around each other — this was determined using archival data from other telescopes, including WASP and ASAS-SN. B orbits them both at a distance of about 38 billion km, taking 2,000 years to complete one period.

And that now brings up the coolest thing about this system: All three pairs of stars are eclipsing binaries! We see all three binary orbits nearly edge-on. A1 and A2 undergo mutual eclipses (A1 eclipses A2, then half an orbit later A2 eclipses A1) every 1.57 days, so they’re very close together. C1 and C2 orbit each other every 1.31 days, and B1 and B2 take 8.2 days.

Because each star in any given pair eclipses the other, by measuring how long the eclipse takes as well as other parameters (including taking spectra) we can learn important things like how big the stars are, how hot they are, and more. And this yields another surprise: All three binaries are very similar. They’re triplets!

In each, the bigger star is about 1.5 times the diameter of the Sun, slightly hotter, and about 1.25 times the Sun’s mass. Also in each, the smaller stars are about the same as each other, too: about 0.6 times the Sun’s mass and 0.6 times its diameter. They vary a little, but the point is they’re pretty close, which is peculiar.

This sort of system is just ridiculously unlikely. Models of how stars form show that sextuples are far more often made up of two trinary systems orbiting each other, not three binaries. So that’s rare enough, but to have all three binaries be seen edge-on seems impossible.

… “seems.” In fact it’s likely they formed from a swirling disk of material, each star collapsing out of it. Because of that it’s actually likely that the three orbital planes of the binaries are the same. Therefore if we see one edge-on, we see all of them edge on, or nearly so. That makes it not as unlikely as you might think that all three are eclipsing.

I’ll also note the orbits of the binaries around each other are not edge-on. We see the orbit of A and C around each other from an angle of roughly 40°, even as we see the individual stars in the binaries edge-on. The inclination of the orbit of B around them both isn’t well constrained by the observations, though.

Hopefully longer-term study of this system will yield more information about how they formed. We don’t really know much about multiple systems like this one, so understanding under what conditions they form would be pretty interesting.

I know, this is headache-inducing. So many orbits, angles, stars… Sometimes nature is complex, and it’s hard to keep up. If it helps, I describe a similar fictional system that played a key role in the first season of Star Trek: Picard. And more systems a bit like TYC 7037-89-1 are known; for example CzeV1640 is a quadruple system with two pairs of eclipsing binaries. Nature is complex, but sometimes frugal, reusing the same idea over and again.

But oh my, would I like a ship like Enterprise right now! To be able to see such a thing up close for myself, watch as these six stars — six! — dance around each other…

Strange new worlds indeed.

Read original article here

Entertainment

WandaVision Clip Brings More MCU Stars to the Show

Leave a comment

WandaVision has released an extended clip for the Disney+ series, which features Monica Rambeau along with other Marvel Cinematic Universe stars.

An extended clip for WandaVision has been released, which introduces Marvel Cinematic Universe guest-stars Jimmy Woo and Darcy to the Disney+ series.

The clip picks up the day after Geraldine, aka Monica Rambeau, was expelled from Westview by Wanda Maximoff. As Jimmy Woo approaches Monica, she reaches out and touches the energy field surrounding Westview. After she touches it, Jimmy Woo refers to Monica as “Captain Rambeau,” which may be a subtle Easter egg to Monica’s previous role as Captain Marvel in the comics.

RELATED: Joss Whedon Insisted Avengers’ Vision Be Anatomically Correct

From there, we see a montage of scenes from the previous three episodes of WandaVision, along with the reveal that it was Jimmy Woo who was speaking to Wanda through the radio in WandaVision‘s second episode. Darcy from the Thor franchise also makes an appearance inside a possible S.W.O.R.D. compound as she sits with a headset on. Inside, photos of the various Westview residents/captives are also shown on a wall.

Aside from Wanda and Vision, the other Westview citizens have their driver’s licenses clipped to their black-and-white photos, which means S.W.O.R.D. already knows who they are. However, Agnes’ license is cryptically missing, which can lead to all sorts of speculation regarding Agnes’ real identity.

Wanda kicked Geraldine/Monica Rambeau out of Westview when the latter referenced Ultron and Wanda’s deceased brother, Pietro. Viewers never got to see how this happened, but when Vision returned to their residence, Monica was no longer there. The episode ended with Monica flying out of the energy barrier and landing on the ground in the dark night, as S.W.O.R.D. agents in vehicles and cars came rushing in.

Marvel Studios presents WandaVision, a blend of classic television and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in which Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) – two super-powered beings living idealized suburban lives – begin to suspect that everything is not as it seems. The new series is directed by Matt Shakman; Jac Schaeffer is head writer.

Written by Jac Schaeffer and directed by Matt Shakman, WandaVision stars Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, Paul Bettany as Vision, Randall Park as Agent Jimmy Woo, Kat Dennings as Darcy Lewis, Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau, and Kathryn Hahn as Agnes. New episodes air Fridays on Disney+.

KEEP READING: A WandaVision Guide: News, Easter Eggs, Reviews, Recaps, Theories and Rumors

Source: YouTube

Samuel L. Jackson Dons Avengers Mask to Get COVID-19 Vaccine


About The Author


Tim Adams
(3197 Articles Published)

Tim Adams is an Assistant Editor at CBR, with a focus on feature and news articles, previews and solicitations. He’s been a fan of comics since the 90’s, when his older brother introduced him to the medium. Some of his first memories include receiving a monthly subscription box with Amazing Spider-Man #353, the first part of “Round Robin: The Sidekick’s Revenge,” along with highly successful launches of X-Men #1 and X-Force #1. He hosts a weekly comic book video podcast called Comic Book Chronicles, and you can follow Tim on Twitter @timdogg98 where you can read his ramblings about comics, TV, movies, sports and wrestling.

More From Tim Adams



Read original article here

Sports

Tom Brady-Bill Belichick debate appears to be over for some after NFL star’s NFC Championship victory

Leave a comment

Who was responsible for the New England Patriots’ success? Was it Tom Brady or Bill Belichick?

That was the underlying question heading into the 2020 season after Brady moved on from the Patriots in the offseason to join the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on a 2-year deal. Brady won six Super Bowl championships in New England but when he left the debate raged with many asserting that it was Belichick’s system that made Brady what he was.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM

After an 11-5 record and an NFC Championship, the debate appeared to be settled for some. It was Brady all along.

The 2020 season didn’t start off great for Brady. The Buccaneers lost 34-23 to the New Orleans Saints while the Patriots, with Cam Newton at the helm, defeated the Miami Dolphins 21-11. But everything appeared to change after the first week of the season.

TOM BRADY HAS HEARTFELT MOMENT WITH SON FOLLOWING NFC CHAMPIONSHIP VICTORY

Tampa Bay would win seven of their next eight games while the Patriots would win only three of their next eight. The Buccaneers stayed in contention for the NFC South division title, only losing it by a game after getting swept by the Saints. The Patriots would lose three of their last four to end the season.

Brady would then lead Tampa Bay to three consecutive wins on the road to get to the Super Bowl and win his first NFC Championship, tying Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers’ totals.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Brady and the Buccaneers will have their hands full with the Kansas City Chiefs, but as far as the debate over who made who’s success, it appears Brady might have the upper hand.

Read original article here

Entertainment

Jason Segel stars in a sugarcoated cancer drama

Leave a comment

Casey Affleck and Jason Segel in Our Friend
Photo: Gravitas Ventures

The opening scene of Our Friend, a tender indie tearjerker built from the blueprint of a wrenching true story, finds a husband and wife on the precipice of a difficult conversation. It’s time for Nicole (Dakota Johnson) and Matt (Casey Affleck) to talk to their children. Nicole, we’ll soon learn, is sick, and though it’ll be another hour before the film reveals the specific nature of what they’ll disclose, it’s clear that the discussion won’t be an easy one. At least they have one helpful instruction from the doctors: Avoid euphemisms. Give it to them straight. Because there should be no misunderstanding about what’s coming. They have to face reality head on and together.

There’s a certain irony to this in media res prologue—one that will be clear to anyone who’s read the source material, Matthew Teague’s “The Friend: Love Is Not A Big Enough Word.” In his prizewinning essay, published in Esquire in 2015, the journalist recounts the time he spent caring for his wife after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and also how his best friend, Dane Faucheux, moved in to help out during this impossible crucible for the family. It’s an unflinchingly honest memoir, candidly cataloging every ugly detail—medical and psychological—to the point where a truly faithful adaptation would be more upsetting than any horror movie released last year. Our Friend is not that film. It’s sweet and involving and occasionally even moving, but also, in its selective dramatization, a lot easier. Which is to say, it approaches the story itself rather euphemistically, handling the audience with kid gloves by eliding the most unpleasant truths of the family’s experience.

Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, who pulled fewer punches in her documentary Blackfish, Our Friend doesn’t so much deviate from Teague’s account as supply it a new shape and a certain seriocomic Indiewood luster. As the title suggests, the focus is partially on Dane (Jason Segel), a close college friend of the couple who offers to come stay at their Alabama home for a few days after Nicole’s diagnosis—an arrangement that became indefinite, as those days bled into weeks and then months and then more than a year, Dane basically pausing (if not outright abandoning) his life in New Orleans to help look after their two daughters, Molly (Isabella Kai) and Evangeline (Violet McGraw). The script, by Brad Ingelsby, introduces a flashback structure, cutting away from present-day scenes of hospital visits and worsening conditions to fill in the history of a friendship en route to a medical crisis.

In his essay, Teague makes few attempts to crack or explain Dane’s sacrifice: Among other things, it’s an awed, grateful tribute to his friend’s selfless insistence on just being there through the whole gauntlet of heartache and horror. Divorced of a purely first-person perspective, Our Friend strains for understanding it doesn’t always find: One can admire its dramatic theories—the faint suggestion that Dane’s endless supportiveness stemmed partially from a desire to give more meaning to his own life, low on romantic or professional “success”—while still feeling that Segel is playing more saint than man. The flashbacks offer backstory but not a lot of extra dimension.

G/O Media may get a commission

Our Friend
Photo: Gravitas Ventures

Segel has, of course, spent much of his career exploring the vagaries of male bonding, from the goofy-sweet Apatovian bromance of I Love You, Man to the pricklier quasi-friendship of The End Of The Tour. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that Our Friend hits its stride when centering the relationship between Dane and Matt, finding conflict at its origins (the false alarm of romantic competition) and in its margins. Affleck, too, is in his wheelhouse: Four years after his tremendous, Oscar-winning performance of crystalized guilt and grief in Manchester By The Sea, he’s playing another man numbed by unfathomable hardship. (His voice, which ranges from whisper to mutter, is uniquely suited to characters almost choked silent by their feelings.)

Yet Our Friend keeps us on the outside of that pain, never offering the kind of window into Teague’s heart and mind that his writing intrinsically could. Is this a case of a story perfected in its original format—a personal essay molded imperfectly into cinema? The film fares best when at its most specific, zeroing in on the dismaying inevitability of well-meaning friends disappearing when the going gets tough or moments of casual tragedy, like Matt taking note of what braiding is in anticipation of having to do that for his daughter. Other times, Cowperthwaite’s approach suggests an elegant yada yada: Rather than steep us in the nitty-gritty, the film often flutters through a vaguely Malickian montage of bucket-list excursions and anguished embraces.

One begins to wonder if the achronological structure is just a way to put off everything inconveniently messy in Teague’s essay, like a tough conversation it’s trying to avoid. “We don’t tell each other the truth about dying,” the author writes, early into his article. “It’s grotesque. It’s undignified.” But Our Friend spares us the gory details at almost every turn, cleaning up a story whose power stemmed, heavily, from its willingness to be gruelingly truthful about what cancer can do to the body. Cowperthwaite barely seems willing to even deglamorize Johnson, who never really loses her movie-star glow, even when her character—the most underdeveloped of the film’s trio—becomes unrecognizable to those in her life. At one point, Nicole begins wearing a wig around the house to entertain visitors, doing a performance of good health rather than let anyone see the reality of her condition. It’s as good a metaphor as any for the way Our Friend softens its own blows.

Read original article here

Science

A Horrible Condition Turning Starfish Into Goo Has Finally Been Identified

Leave a comment

In 2013, the lives of millions of sea stars were mysteriously extinguished. Limbs that were once strong, probing arms searching for sustenance, shrivelled and tore themselves away from the rest of their bodies and melted into a sickly goo.

 

“There were arms everywhere,” ecologist Drew Harvell told The Atlantic‘s Ed Yong last year. “It looked like a blast zone.”

The dismal remains of these animals, who are usually capable of regenerating their own limbs, were strewn along the entire West Coast of North America, in one of the largest mass wildlife mortality events ever recorded. Over 20 species of sea stars were perishing.

In some areas, sunflower star (Pycnopodia helianthoides) populations dropped by an average of around 90 percent in weeks, a loss that saw this once common and abundant species vanish from most of its range in just a few years.

The culprit causing this sea star wasting (SSW) even got to starfish in captivity, killing individual animals within days.

Leg of Pisaster ochraceus disintegrating from sea star wasting syndrome. (Elizabeth Cerny-Chipman/Oregon State University/CC BY-SA 2.0)

This led scientists to suspect some sort of pathogen, like a virus or bacterium, was infecting these stunning sea creatures. However, subsequent studies exonerated the lead viral suspect.

Meanwhile, more sea star deaths followed around the globe, including half a world away in Port Phillip Bay, Australia.

 

Now, San Francisco State University marine biologist Citlalli Aquino and colleagues have finally unravelled the mystery, showing something much more complicated was going on. 

By comparing the types of bacteria within healthy sea stars and those suffering from the wasting disease, the researchers found bacteria that thrive in low oxygen environments were abundant in the sick animals, as were copiotrophs – bacteria that like high-nutrient environments.

Experiments back in the lab confirmed that depleting water of oxygen caused tissue-melting lesions in 75 percent of sea stars. Adding excess nutrients or phytoplankton to the water also caused the sea star’s health to decline.

Re-analysing tissue samples from the 2013 event, the researchers detected excess nitrogen – a sign these animals suffocated to death. 

“Sea stars diffuse oxygen over their outer surface through little structures called papulae, or skin gills,” explained Cornell University marine microbiologist Ian Hewson. “If there is not enough oxygen surrounding the papulae, the starfish can’t breathe.”

These microorganisms aren’t directly causing disease, but stealing the sea stars’ oxygen supply when increased levels of organic matter are triggering the microbes to bloom. As a result, the sea stars literally drown in their own environment. Then their decaying bodies further increase nutrients for the microbes, creating a horrible feedback loop of sea star death.

 

Aquino and team noted most SSW events are reported in late fall or summer, when phytoplankton that increase levels of nutrients in the water via photosynthesis are more abundant.

Warmer temperatures are known drivers of phytoplankton blooms, and the sea star wasting event in Australia followed the longest and most intense heat wave on record. Sea star wasting events elsewhere have also followed increased sea temperatures.

“Warmer waters can’t have as much oxygen [compared with colder water] just by physics alone,” Hewson told Erin Garcia de Jesus at Science News.

None of this bodes well for our future on a warming planet.

University of Vermont biologist Melissa Pespeni, who was not involved in the study, told Science News this complicated tangle of biological and environmental factors is “a new kind of idea for [disease] transmission.”

Devastating repercussions from the loss of these precious stars of the sea have already echoed out across entire ecosystems. The sunflower star is a voracious predator with up to 24 arms that span as far as 1 metre (3.3 ft), feeling their way across the seafloor for sea urchins, snails, and other invertebrates to devour.

Without the sunflower and other sea stars keeping sea urchins in check, these herbivores are eating their way through giant kelp forests. By 2016, sea urchins had already reduced kelp populations by 80 percent in some areas, decimating these once thriving underwater forests.

“This is a very clear example of a trophic cascade, which is an ecological domino effect triggered by changes at the end of a food chain,” said Simon Fraser University marine ecologist Isabelle Côté, who investigated the environmental aftermath last year. 

“It’s a stark reminder that everything is connected to everything else.”

This research was published in Frontiers in Microbiology.

 

Read original article here