Blazing across the sky for mere milliseconds, fast radio bursts (FRBs) are among the newest and most puzzling astronomical phenomenon. They come from extreme distances and appear without any known rhyme or reason, making them almost impossible to study in detail.
But luckily, artificial intelligence is helping researchers learn about this mysterious occurrence. By using machine learning technology, a team of astronomers was able to study 72 new radio bursts blasting from FRB 121102 — the
A nearly 2,000-foot-long tube is towed offshore from San Francisco Bay on Saturday. It’s a giant garbage collector, and the brainchild of 24-year-old Boyan Slat, who aims to remove 90 percent of ocean plastic by 2040.
The Ocean Cleanup
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The Ocean Cleanup
A nearly 2,000-foot-long tube is towed offshore from San Francisco Bay on Saturday. It’s a giant garbage collector, and the brainchild of 24-year-old Boyan Slat, who aims to remove 90 percent of ocean plastic by 2040.
The Ocean Cleanup
We humans have deposited a huge amount of plastic in Earth’s waters. There are now five garbage-filled gyres in the world’s oceans — the largest and most notorious being the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, with its estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, spread across an area twice the size of Texas.
One of the people trying to figure out how to clean up the ocean is Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old Dutch social entrepreneur who has been working to invent a solution since he was 17. His idea — for a giant floating system that would corral the plastic so it can be scooped out — is on the verge of reality.
He founded a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup, and picked up a major environmental award from the United Nations along the way. Tech investors including Peter Thiel and Marc Benioff got behind his go-big ethos, and Slat raised a reported $35 million to get his idea afloat.
On Saturday, a vessel that usually tows oil rigs instead towed Slat’s giant garbage-catcher some 300 miles offshore from San Francisco Bay. For two weeks, engineers will monitor how the system handles the battering waves in the Pacific before towing it 1,100 more miles to the patch.
The system‘s centerpiece is a nearly 2,000-foot-long plastic tube with a 10-foot skirt attached beneath, forming a U-shaped barrier designed to be propelled by wind and waves. Its aim is to collect plastic as it floats — and then every few months, a support vessel would come by to retrieve the plastic, like an oceanic garbage truck. The plastic would then be transported back to land for recycling.
If it works, The Ocean Cleanup plans to deploy a fleet of 60 such devices, which the group projects can remove half the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years’ time.
But will it actually work? Slat doesn’t know.
The Ocean Cleanup YouTube
His team has changed its concept over time, switching from a moored system to a drifting one, in order to act more like the plastic it’s trying to catch. They tested a prototype on the North Sea but say the Pacific will be the real challenge.
“We believe that every risk that we can eliminate in advance we have been able to eliminate,” he said in a video prior to Saturday’s launch. “But that doesn’t mean that all risks have been eliminated. Truly, the only way to prove that we can rid the oceans of plastic is to actually go out there and deploy the world’s first ocean-cleaning system.”
The Ocean Cleanup hopes to reduce the amount of plastics in the world’s oceans by at least 90 percent by 2040. But many experts on plastic pollution have expressed concerns about whether the project will be effective.
For one thing, most of the plastic that ends up in the ocean doesn’t end up in these garbage gyres.
The Ocean Cleanup YouTube
“Based on the latest math, we think that about 8 million metric tons of plastic is flowing in to the ocean from land around the world,” says George Leonard, chief scientist at Ocean Conservancy. And he says that only around 3 to 5 percent of that total amount of plastic actually winds up in the gyres.
“So if you want to clean up the ocean,” Leonard says, “it may in fact be that the open ocean is not the place to look.”
Part of the issue is that not all plastic is buoyant. A lot of it sinks immediately — and thus won’t be captured by this floating boom, said Eben Schwartz, marine debris program manager for the California Coastal Commission.
“It would be wonderful if we can clean up the surface of the gyre, but since so much more of the trash in the ocean actually doesn’t end up on the surface of the gyre, it’s even more critical that we address where it’s coming from and try to stop it at its source,” Schwartz recently told NPR’s Here and Now.
Then there’s the question of whether the project might cause unintended environmental consequences. Specifically: Can you capture plastics without ensnaring marine life?
“We know from the fishing industry that if you put any kind of structure in the open ocean, it will attract a whole community of animals, both large and small, to that particular piece of structure,” Leonard says.
Fishermen sometimes create fish aggregating devices (FADs) that intentionally create little floating ecosystems to attract fish. “There’s a worry that this could become a very large FAD and attract a whole number of larger fish and marine mammals and seabirds that might be impacted by it,” he says.
Plus, the Ocean Cleanup’s system is made of high-density polyethylene, a kind of plastic — what if it becomes part of the problem it’s trying to solve?
“I sort of wonder what kinds of microplastics this thing is going to be generating on its own, assuming that it’s even functioning exactly as designed,” oceanographer Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association told Wired. And if the boom gets busted in a big storm, well: “If it’s shedding nano-size particles and then gets smashed into 200-meter-long pieces, you’re really covering the whole size range there.”
And then there’s the worry that a big, expensive project like The Ocean Cleanup diverts money and attention away from other efforts that are known to be effective — such as waste management policies to keep the garbage from getting into the ocean in the first place.
A 2015 study found that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand were the leading sources of plastic waste in the world’s oceans.
“The science points to about a half a dozen countries in Southeast Asia which are rapidly developing economies that are heavily reliant on plastic, and lack the kind of waste management infrastructure that I think many of us in the U.S. take for granted,” Leonard says.
He points to one low-tech way to help fight plastics in the ocean: picking up trash in your own local waterways. His organization’s annual International Coastal Cleanup takes place Sept. 15, when he says nearly a million people are expected to work to remove some 20 million pounds of trash from beaches and waterways around the world.
Leonard says the Ocean Conservancy is skeptical that the giant trash collector will work, “but we’re being enthusiastic, and we hope it does.”
The British Airways web hack wasn’t an isolated incident. Analysts at RiskIQ have reported that the breach was likely perpetrated by Magecart, the same criminal enterprise that infiltrated Ticketmaster UK. In both cases, the culprits used similar virtual card skimming JavaScript to swipe data from payment forms. For the British Airways attack, it was just a matter of customizing the scripts and targeting the company directly instead of going through compromised third-party customers.
RiskIQ also suspected that BA may have fallen victim earlier than claimed. While the air carrier said the data was compromised starting August 21st, Magecart received the SSL certificate used in the hack (to pose as a legitimate operation) on August 15th. Unless it simply waited to act, there’s a chance it could have been active on the 15th, if not earlier.
It may be difficult to catch the intruders. The hacks have relied on service providers in Lithuania and Romania, and there’s a good possibility the culprits are located somewhere else. This shows that the attacks are likely part of a coordinated campaign, however, and suggests that you could see comparable high-profile breaches in the near future.
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If a shooter uses a semiautomatic rifle instead of another type of gun, it appears to roughly double the chances of victims being wounded and killed.
Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) came to this conclusion about “active shooters”—people who attempt to kill or hurt others with a gun in a populated area—in a paper published Tuesday. The work analyzed more than 200 such incidents in the U.S.
A 1994 federal assault weapons ban prohibited manufacturing, transferring or possessing certain semiautomatic firearms for civilian use. But that legislation expired in 2004, and gun control advocates have since been lobbying hard to reintroduce such limitations alongside other more expansive gun reform.
Semiautomatic rifles, which include assault weapons like the AR-15 and its variants, are relatively easy to operate and capable of firing very quickly. They can be used with large magazines and high-velocity ammunition, and are infamous for causing egregious damage to soft tissue and bone. In recent years mass shooters wielded them in Aurora, Colo., Orlando, Fla., and Newtown, Conn., among other places. Yet there had been no comprehensive assessment of injuries from the different types of firearms used in such situations, notes Adil Haider, a trauma and critical care surgeon who directs the Center for Surgery and Public Health at BWH. He and his colleagues aimed to address that gap in their study, published in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association. “The biggest take-home message is that in an active shooter incident, an assailant with a semiautomatic rifle may be able to hurt and kill about twice the number of people compared to if they had a non-semiautomatic rifle or a handgun,” he says.
The new study from Haider and colleagues compares the number of people hurt or killed in 248 active shooter incidents from 2000 through 2017, using FBI data. The scientists cross-referenced those incidents with court records and media reports to determine whether the weapon was a semiautomatic rifle. They found about a quarter of all those shootings involved such weapons whereas the rest involved handguns, shotguns and non-semiautomatic rifles. In total, these shootings wounded almost 900 people and killed more than 700.
The researchers’ records do not include every shooting with mass casualties during that 17-year period, and the definition of “active shooter” may have missed instances of gang violence, Haider says. The JAMA analysis also did not include situations with multiple shooters or extremely large death tolls because these would skew their results, Haider says. “We wanted to make sure we were comparing like with like incidents to truly get at the question about injuries and deaths from semiautomatic rifles versus other guns with a single active shooter,” he says.
The analysis found a shooting involving a semiautomatic rifle was associated on average with five injuries versus three if a different kind of gun was used. Similarly, the presence of the semiautomatic rifle was associated with four deaths instead of two.
Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Lethality of Civilian Active Shooter Incidents with and without Semiautomatic Rifles in the United States,” by Elzerie de Jager et al., in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 320, No. 10; September 11, 2018
When people were injured with semiautomatic firearms as compared with other types of guns, however, it appeared the proportion of people who eventually died was roughly equal—leading to fatalities around 44 percent of the time regardless of weapon used. Haider attributes the similar rate to the fact that in each of these incidents an active shooter would likely be shooting at close range in a confined space. Although death rates were similar when people were shot, he says, semiautomatic rifles would increase the chance of getting hit at all.
Using the FBI database of active shooters underrepresents mass shootings and other public shootings, says Philip Cook, a professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University who was not involved with the JAMA paper. He also believes the new BWH work has limited policy applications, because it looks at all semiautomatic rifles—instead of limiting the study to “assault weapons” as defined in the 1994 legislation. From a policy perspective, he says, “The possibility of banning all semiautomatic rifles is nil, since they are such a common type of rifle.”
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the agency has previously defined “mass shootings” as incidents with several fatalities—thus not all active shooting incidents would qualify as mass shooting events. The FBI has also said it excludes shootings that resulted primarily from gang or drug violence from its active shooter reports.
Physicists have revealed that just seven quantum particles can behave as if they were in a crowd of billions.
At larger scales, matter goes through changes, called phase transitions, in which (for example) water turns into a solid (ice) or a vapor (steam). Scientists were used to seeing this behavior in large masses of molecules, but never in such a tiny cluster.
In a new study, detailed today (Sept. 10) in the journal Nature Physics, researchers witnessed these phase transitions in systems made up of just seven light particles, or photons, which took on an exotic physical state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). That’s the physical state that matter can reach at ultracold temperatures, in which particles begin to blend together and act in unison.
Because photons are packets of light, they’re made of energy, not matter, which makes the idea of them going through a phase transition strange. But back in 2010, a team of German researchers showed that light particles could be induced to behave as a BEC would, just like their matter-particle cousins.
To trap the photons, those researchers built a small mirrored chamber and filled it with a colored dye. When the light particles banged into the dye particles, the dye particles would absorb them and re-emit them, so the photons took longer to move through the chamber — effectively slowing them down. When the photons struck the chamber’s mirrored walls, the photons would bounce off without being absorbed or escaping. So the chamber was effectively a space where researchers could make photons sluggish and put them in close quarters. And in that situation, the physicists found, the photons would interact with one another like matter, and exhibit behaviors recognizable as those of a BEC.
In the more recent experiment, the researchers wanted to figure out the minimum number of photons necessary for that to happen. Using a fine-tuned laser, they pumped photons into a similar dye-filled mirror trap one at a time and observed the concoction to figure out when a BEC would emerge. They found that after an average of just seven photons, the photons formed a BEC — they began acting like one particle. That’s a new low bar for particle counts necessary for a phase transition. [The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]
“Now that it’s confirmed that ‘phase transition’ is still a useful concept in such small systems, we can explore properties in ways that would not be possible in larger systems,” lead author Robert Nyman, a physicist at Imperial College London, said in a statement.
There were some differences between the micro-BEC and phase transitions involving larger groups of particles, the researchers noted. When ice heats up past its melting point, it seems to go from solid to liquid form instantly, without any in-between stage. The same is true for most phase transitions of most chemicals. But the seven-photon BEC seemed to form a bit more gradually, the researchers said in the statement, rather than all at once.
Still, they wrote in the paper, the photon phase transition showed that even at very small scales, phase transitions are remarkably like what’s common at larger scales. Physics is physics, all the way down.
