Tag Archives: Michael Nielsen

Interplanetary invaders (dust particles) may be delivery system for water and organics to earth

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Researchers at the University of Hawaii and their colleagues in other institutions have determined that interplanetary dust particles (IDP) can deliver solar wind-generated water in addition to the organics which it is known they carry according to a Jan. 24, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily,

Researchers from the University of Hawaii — Manoa (UHM) School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and University of California — Berkeley discovered that interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) could deliver water and organics to Earth and other terrestrial planets.

Interplanetary dust, dust that has come from comets, asteroids, and leftover debris from the birth of the solar system, continually rains down on Earth and other Solar System bodies. These particles are bombarded by solar wind, predominately hydrogen ions. This ion bombardment knocks the atoms out of order in the silicate mineral crystal and leaves behind oxygen that is more available to react with hydrogen, for example, to create water molecules.

“It is a thrilling possibility that this influx of dust has acted as a continuous rainfall of little reaction vessels containing both the water and organics needed for the eventual origin of life on Earth and possibly Mars,” said Hope Ishii, new Associate Researcher in the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP) at UHM SOEST and co-author of the study. This mechanism of delivering both water and organics simultaneously would also work for exoplanets, worlds that orbit other stars. These raw ingredients of dust and hydrogen ions from their parent star would allow the process to happen in almost any planetary system.

The Jan. 24, 2013 University of Hawaii news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the implications of the research,

Implications of this work are potentially huge: Airless bodies in space such as asteroids and the Moon, with ubiquitous silicate minerals, are constantly being exposed to solar wind irradiation that can generate water. In fact, this mechanism of water formation would help explain remotely sensed data of the Moon, which discovered OH and preliminary water, and possibly explains the source of water ice in permanently shadowed regions of the Moon.

“Perhaps more exciting,” said Hope Ishii, Associate Researcher in HIGP and co-author of the study, “interplanetary dust, especially dust from primitive asteroids and comets, has long been known to carry organic carbon species that survive entering the Earth’s atmosphere, and we have now demonstrated that it also carries solar-wind-generated water. So we have shown for the first time that water and organics can be delivered together.”

The news release provides some background information and a few details about how the research was conducted,

It has been known since the Apollo-era, when astronauts brought back rocks and soil from the Moon, that solar wind causes the chemical makeup of the dust’s surface layer to change. Hence, the idea that solar wind irradiation might produce water-species has been around since then, but whether it actually does produce water has been debated.  The reasons for the uncertainty are that the amount of water produced is small and it is localized in very thin rims on the surfaces of silicate minerals so that older analytical techniques were unable to confirm the presence of water.

Using a state-of-the-art transmission electron microscope, the scientists have now actually detected water produced by solar-wind irradiation in the space-weathered rims on silicate minerals in interplanetary dust particles.  Futher, on the bases of laboratory-irradiated minerals that have similar amorphous rims, they were able to conclude that the water forms from the interaction of solar wind hydrogen ions (H+) with oxygen in the silicate mineral grains.

This recent work does not suggest how much water may have been delivered to Earth in this manner from IDPs.

“In no way do we suggest that it was sufficient to form oceans, for example,” said Ishii. “However, the relevance of our work is not the origin of the Earth’s oceans but that we have shown continuous, co-delivery of water and organics intimately intermixed.”

Here’s a citation for the paper and a link to the abstract,

Detection of solar wind-produced water in irradiated rims on silicate minerals by John Bradley, Hope Ishii, Jeffrey Gillis-Davis, James Ciston, Michael Nielsen, Hans Bechtel, and Michael Martin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1320115111

I believe this paper is behind a paywall.

Disrupting scientific research

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Michael Nielsen (mentioned in my May 19, 2011 posting) is making the rounds now that his book, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, has been published. Mathew Ingram in his Oct. 31, 2011 article for gigaom provides some context for the ‘discussion’ about networked science and disruption,

Traditional media players such as newspapers, magazines and book publishers often get criticized for being slow to change and uninterested in technological progress, but as we’ve pointed out before, there is another world that makes these industries look like the most enthusiastic of early adopters: namely, academic research. Award-winning quantum physicist Michael Nielsen says that the closed and disconnected nature of most research is holding back scientific progress in important ways, and that we need to foster a new kind of “networked science” if we want to make new discoveries faster.

…

David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and co-author of a number of books including “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” has his own take on networked knowledge in a new book called “Too Big to Know,” which is to be published later this year. Weinberger argues that the way we structure and achieve knowledge itself is being changed by digital networks, and that much of the existing ways in which knowledge is written down and maintained — from journals and peer review to libraries and copyright — is driven by the needs of a world based on paper …

Weinberger is later quoted as saying, “Traditional knowledge has been an accident of paper.” I disagree with this statement as it stands. There is always traditional knowledge and it is always controlled. However, there are disruptive periods when access become more unfettered. For example, the printing press was highly disruptive. Science or its predecessor, alchemy, was practised in extreme secrecy; information, if shared at all, was available in encrypted documents. It was the advent of paper and printing (amongst other things), which freed access to information and led to the notion of sharing information and the growth of knowledge.

Things have changed and we have a new disruptive technology, digital networks/internet and a very exciting time ahead. Not to forget though that one day, this too will no longer be a disruptive technology; it will be the old way, the traditional way.

In the meantime, we can enjoy stories like this one about Dr. Jay Bradner and his open-source cancer research. From the Nov. 3, 2011 posting by GrrlScientist (on the Guardian science blogs),

How does cancer know it’s cancer?

This is the question that cancer researcher, Jay Bradner and his colleagues have focused on in their research, and they think they may have found the answer: a molecule, which they call JQ1. …  Engaging in an enlightened social experiment, they shared the news of this molecule by publishing their findings — and they mailed samples to 40 other labs to work with. In short, they open-sourced the information about this molecule and they crowd-sourced the testing and research.

If you visit the posting, you will find a video of Dr. Jay Bradner discussing his work at a TEDxBoston event recorded in June 2011.

Math, YouTube, and opening science

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There’s a charming post (May 17, 2011) by James Grime, mathematician, at the Guardian Science Blogs about his and other science communicators’ YouTube videos. From the posting,

I’m a mathematician – and have the chalk marks to prove it – but I do not come from a family of academics. Growing up, my only access to that world was through the television. I remember Johnny Ball jumping up and down talking excitedly about the parabolic path of projectiles; Horizon’s documentary on the Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem; and at Christmas the theme music of the Royal Institution’s Christmas Lectures filled me with even more excitement than the bike that came with six sound effects.

Today the profile of science communication on TV may be at an all time high. My mum may not know what the Large Hadron Collider does, but she knows who Brian Cox is. But television remains a very 20th century method of communication. A channel will gear their science programming towards their perceived audience, be that BBC1 , BBC4 or a Channel 4 audience.

However, with the rise of new media, like YouTube, you no longer need to chase the audience. They find you.

He goes on to share one of his videos and a selection from other science communicators. It’s a great read and has attracted comments that include links to even more science videos.

Clearly, Grime’s main focus in this post is educational/popularizing/awareness raising for the general public.

Some scientists are trying to use social media such as YouTube to better communicate with each other. There are science videos (not many) wherein scientific papers are given video abstracts. For example materials scientists are doing this on their Materials’s Views Channel on YouTube. This is all part of a movement to make science more open through social media.

Science has been been opened up before according to the Open Science Manifesto,

In 1665, the first two scientific journals were published, and science was dragged out of its dark age of cryptic anagrams, secret discoveries, and bitter turf wars. Today we are living in another dark age of science: pay-per-access journals, unreleased code and data, prestige-based metrics, and irreproducible experiments.

As I kept on digging (clicking on the link to the dark ages reference), I found Michael Nielsen, previously an academic working in quantum computation (he has a PhD in physics according to Wikipedia) and now the writer of a forthcoming book, Reinventing Discovery, from the Princeton University Press in November 2011. He advocates strongly for the use of social media amongst scientists as you can see in this approximately 16 mins. March 2011 TED talk at Waterloo (Ontario, Canada),

I notice that his focus is on scientists using social media as a means of communication amongst themselves (and anyone else who may choose to join in) but control remains firmly with the scientists. In other words, science is practiced by scientists and there’s no discussion of citizen scientists where people reach beyond their general science awareness for some form of science activity. I believe it’s an unconscious assumption that the experts (scientists) are the only ones expected to participate while the rest of us gaze on. This is true too of James Grime’s piece where the rest of us are more or less passive viewers of his science videos and not expected to practice science.

There’s nothing wrong with these approaches and, most of the time, I’m perfectly to have scientists do their work and I’m hugely happy when they choose to share it with me.

However, when scientists talk about opening up science they usually mean that the public should learn more about their work (i.e. we are the tabula rasa and not expected to be able to reciprocate; our role is to listen and to be educated by the expert) or that research should be more easily available (mostly amongst themselves). There are some crowdsourced science projects (e.g. Foldit, which boasted some 50,000 authors and there’s also the recently launched Phylo at McGill University [my most recent posting on these projects] amongst others) where members of the public are invited to participate in science activities directly related to answering research questions.

My point is that ‘open science’ means more than one thing.