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Using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in Western Australia, it has been done the deepest and widest search at low frequencies for alien technologies.

After searching a patch of sky known to include at least 10 million stars, around the constellation Vela, no trace of them has been found. The telescope searched for powerful radio emissions at frequencies similar to those of FM, that could indicate the presence of an intelligent source.

Murchison Widefield Array

The MWA is an inherently versatile instrument with a very large field of view (on the order of 30 degrees wide) capable of covering a wide range of scientific objectives. An MWA antenna consists of a regular four-by-four grid of dual-polarized dipole elements arranged on a 4 m x 4 m steel mesh ground plane. Each antenna (with its 16 dipoles) is known as a "mosaic".

He cited study was carried out by CSIRO astronomer Chenoa Tremblay and Steven Tingay, from the Curtin University node of the Centre, and has been published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

As Tremblay explains:

We watched the sky around the Vela constellation for 17 hours, looking more than 100 times wider and deeper than ever before. With this data set, we found no technological signatures, no signs of intelligent life.

The MWA is a precursor to the next instrument, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a €1.7 billion observatory with telescopes in Western Australia and South Africa.

The SKA will be built in the same location as the MWA, but will be 50 times more sensitive and will be able to conduct much deeper SETI experiments, which is equivalent to saying that will be able to detect Earth-like radio signals from relatively nearby planetary systems. Let's keep our fingers crossed for then.

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The news

In the sky around the Vela constellation, with at least ten million stars, no trace of civilization is detected

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

According to a new study, blue jeans are a major source of microfiber pollution in oceans and lakes.

A pair of jeans can release more than 50,000 microfibers per wash. Which is a relevant environmental problem if we take into account that Approximately half of the world's population wears this item of clothing.

polluting clothing

Yves Saint Laurent would like to have invented jeans, as he confessed in 1983 to The New York Times: "They have expression, modesty, sex appeal and simplicity, everything I want in my clothes." Not in vain, blue jeans are the most popular garment in the world.

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Thousands of masks are beginning to be found in the sea: what should we do with the used masks?

The microfibers included between 87% and 90% of anthropogenic particles found in sediments of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, the Laurentian Great Lakes, and shallow suburban lakes in southern Ontario. Twenty-one to fifty-one percent of all microfibers in the sediments were anthropogenically modified cellulose (AC), of which 40-57% were indigo denim microfibers (12-23% of all microfibers analyzed).

Microfibers from washed jeans were consistent in chemical composition and morphology with those found in the environment.

In Xataka Science

What you consume, especially what you eat, is much more important for the environment than you think

Thus, the study concludes, blue jeans are an indicator of the widespread burden of anthropogenic pollution by significantly increasing the environmental accumulation of microfibers from temperate to arctic regions.

Furthermore, as indicated Dana Thomas in his book Fashionopolis, making a pair of jeans requires 70 liters of water, 1.5 kilo-watts of energy and 150 grams of chemicals. More than 4 billion pieces of denim leave textile factories every year, most dyed blue with synthetic indigo fixed with a powerful bleach that makes it highly polluting.

In Xataka Science

Nine million people die annually due to pollution

Indigo is the only pigment capable of giving jeans their unmistakable bluish color. It is currently synthesized chemically on a global scale and it is estimated that around 45,000 tons are produced annually, of which 95 % are used to dye jeans.

Thus, More ecological alternatives are being sought for the manufacture of this textile, like the one proposed by a group from the University of Berkley (USA) could have been achieved, according to A study recently published in Nature Chemical Biology.

Clothing is the second cause of pollution on the planet, to the point that in 2015 textile production emitted into the atmosphere 1.2 million tons of CO2That is, more than all the ships and planes on the planet emitted that year, according to data from the International Energy Agency.

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The news

Blue jeans are a major source of microfiber pollution in oceans and lakes

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

Until the arrival of the French philosopher Rene Descartes, there was nothing conceptually similar to a universal law of nature, a set of instructions that are always the same under all conditions and serve to predict what is going to happen.

The modern idea of the laws of nature, then, was not only a byproduct of Descartes' philosophy, but it constituted an impressive undertaking that It started during the Scientific Revolution and that allowed us to unravel the Matrix-type code that underlay nature.

The laws of the Revolution

The ancients had known, according to estimates, only four physical laws: the law of the lever, the optical law of reflection, the law of buoyancy and the parallelogram law of velocities. That is, rather, four principles that we call laws had been discovered.

While they referred to these "laws" as evidence that nature was sometimes regular and predictable, They never identified any specific scientific principle as law.

But, for example, the Romans talked a lot about the law of nature (lex naturae), but they generally meant moral law. And, although Galileo, Harriot and Beeckman had each independently discovered the so-called "law of the fall", none of them had used the term "law" in this context. The identification of laws in its strict sense was born with the Scientific Revolution, among which the following were deciphered:

• Stevin's law of hydrostatics.
• Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
• Snell's law of refraction.
• Boyle's gas law.
• Hooke's law of elasticity.
• Huygens's pendulum law.
• Torricelli's law of flow.
• Pascal's law of fluid dynamics.
• Newton's law of gravitation.

Only a minority of these laws had already acquired eponymous labels: the rest had yet to be named after their discoverers. Just as he wrote Isaac Newton to define his aims when, in 1703, he became president of the Royal Society:

Natural philosophy consists in discovering the structure and operations of nature, and reducing them, as far as possible, to general rules or laws, establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and from thence deducing the causes and effects of things. .

The physicist-mathematician Henri Poincare (provides a similar definition: "What is a law? It is a constant link between an antecedent and a consequent, between the current state of the world and its immediately subsequent state."

Given this, the certainty began to emerge that, if everything is governed by laws, everything can be predictable (even if it were not computable) and therefore We lived in a deterministic universe where free will was only a cognitive illusion. You can delve deeper into this difficult topic in the following video:

Nowadays it is known that there are scientific laws that are both causal and probabilistic or stochastic. Hence, in the concept of scientific law, both types of law (deterministic and stochastic) must be considered. but it is based on four principles:

1. Everything that exists is governed by natural laws
2. These laws are invariant in time and space.
3. The scientist's activity consists of describing them
4. The existence of these laws is independent of whether the human being describes them or not.
5. It is possible, in principle, to know all the laws

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The news

The discoverers of the first laws of nature

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

It is often rumored that NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen that would write in the absence of gravity, but that The Russians solved the problem using a simple pencil. However, It's nothing more than an urban legend.

Right now, on the International Space Station (ISS), astronauts use pencils. Still, concerns about its flammability in a pure oxygen atmosphere and the threat of tiny floating pieces of graphite inspired Paul Fisher to develop the Space Pen in 1965, a fairly cheap invention.

Back to pencils

Both American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts initially used pencils on space flights, but those writing instruments were not ideal: pencil tips can chip and break, and have such objects floating around space capsules in near-zero gravity. represents potential harm to astronauts and equipment.

NASA began developing a space pen, but project costs rose, so the project was canceled and the astronauts used pencils like the Russians again. NASA never contacted Paul Fisher to develop a pen, just as he did not receive any funding from the government to develop it.

The curious thing about the whole thing is that to write in space you don't need a special pen. Sometimes special pens are used, but also normal ones, as As it explains in Spanish astronaut Pedro Duke:

I'm writing these notes on the Soyuz with a cheap pen. Why is that important? It turns out that I have been working in space programs for seventeen years, eleven as an astronaut, and I have always believed, because it was explained to me, that normal pens do not write in space.

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The news

Despite all the technology available, normal pens are still used in space

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

The last four decades have shown a relative decline of Marxist thought in universities. Their influence has been replaced by “poststructuralist” (or “postmodernist”) thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Deleuze.

Poststructuralism is mainly indebted to the thinkers of the European 'conservative revolution' led by Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Quotes

Marxism survived in the structuralist moment in France (1950s and 1960s) through Louis Althusser, but not as the post-structuralism of Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, none of whom can be called Marxist. The starting point for poststructuralists is Nietzsche. For classical Marxism it is clearly Hegel. These, intellectually speaking, are two different languages or thoughts.

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Those leftover humanities intellectuals and their intellectual impostures

Furthermore, we can verify this paradigm shift in the number of citations of the references of Marxism and postmodernism.

In a Quantitative investigation From the JStor academic database, which tracks the frequency of names and key ideas in all academic articles and chapter titles published globally between 1980 and 2019, we discovered that the alleged mastermind of Cultural Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, starred in 480 publications. Friedrich Hayek, possibly the main influence on the neoliberal free market reforms of recent decades, starred in 407.

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I don't understand anything you say or the conclusions of the Vienna Circle

The “Frankfurt School” appeared in fewer than 200 titles, and the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (identified as a key transmitter of the cultural Marxist “virus” in the United States) was the subject of just over 220.

However, in the last decade, the most cited thinker was the neo-Nietzschean theorist, Giles Deleuze, which appeared in 770 titles during 2010-19. That is to say, political and economic Marxism seems, judging by the quotes, in clear decline, What has gained strength is cultural Marxism or postmodernism. Which will be good news for liberals or some economists, but it is bad news for epistemologists who love positivism and the expository clarity of science.

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The news

In the last 40 years, Marxist authors have given way to postmodernists in the university

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

An experiment, a year ago, the existence was confirmed of 'superionic ice', a strange form of water that could comprise most of the giant icy planets in the entire universe.

In 1988, computer simulations predicted that water would take on a strange, metal-like shape if pushed beyond the surface. map of known phases of ice.

superionic ice

30 years ago a theory emerged that seems contradictory: there is a state of water that is solid and liquid at the same time. According to theoretical scientists, The so-called superionic ice would help explain the strange magnetic field of Uranus and Neptune.

In Xataka

Superionic ice, both liquid and solid, can exist, but at 5,000ºC and extremely high pressure

The experimental confirmation came at the Laser Energy Laboratory in Brighton, New York, where one of the most powerful lasers in the world operates. It was fired at a drop of water, creating a shock wave that raised the pressure of the water to millions of atmospheres and its temperature to thousands of degrees. X-rays that passed through the droplet in the same fraction of a second revealed that within the shock wave it did not become a superheated liquid or gas. Paradoxically, but just as the physicists looking at the screens in an adjacent room expected, The atoms froze and formed crystalline ice.

The discovery of superionic ice potentially resolves some doubts about the composition of the so-called 'ice giants'. So knowing more about this substance can give us more clues about how the structure of these planets and their magnetic field work, and how it compares to that of the Earth.

Including the hexagonal arrangement of water molecules found in common ice, known as 'Ih ice', scientists had already discovered 18 puzzling ice crystal architectures. After ice I, which occurs in two forms, Ih and Ic, the rest are numbered from II to XVII in the order of their discovery.

Superionic ice can now claim the title of ice XVIII. It is a new crystal, but with a different touch. All previously known water ices are made of intact water molecules, each with an oxygen atom bonded to two hydrogens. But superionic ice is not like that. It exists in a kind of limbo, part solid and part liquid. Individual water molecules break apart. Oxygen atoms form a cubic lattice, but the hydrogen atoms spill out freely, flowing like a liquid through the rigid box of oxygens.

In conclusion, water is a very simple substance in appearance, but its phase diagram at high pressures still holds many mysteries for us. Also about the planets that we are going to explore in the future.

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The news

This new type of black ice is probably more common in the universe than previously assumed

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.