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Duke University researchers have engineered rhodium nanoparticles (blue) that can harness the energy in ultraviolet light and use it to catalyze the conversion of carbon dioxide to methane, a key building block for many types of fuels.

Courtesy of Duke University, Chad Scales

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and Kaleideum, formerly the Children's Museum of Winston-Salem and SciWorks.

A metal made inside of a star billions of years ago may help feed a growing population here on Earth, while helping to slow or reverse climate change in the process! And it’s all kind of by accident.

Rhodium is one of many metals often used as a catalyst, meaning that it helps encourage chemical reactions - like a molecular wingman.

Dr. Henry Everitt, an adjunct professor of physics at Duke University, is co-author of a paper recently published in Nature Communications detailing their discovery that rhodium’s ability to use light instead of heat in catalysis allows for the manipulation of the chemical reaction.

Dr. Henry Everitt interviews for SciWorks Radio from the media studios at Duke University. Credit: Duke University Staff.

The specific reaction that we happened to choose takes carbon dioxide, mixes it with hydrogen, and if you use heat you get about an equal mixture of carbon monoxide and methane.

Carbon monoxide is a poisonous gas, but...

...we discovered that when we add light to rhodium, rather than heat, we make only methane. That’s exciting because methane is a fuel.

In theory, this could help limit carbon dioxide output by recycling it. Imagine CO2 is captured at a power plant, converted to fuel, and used in your car.

This process uses nanotechnology; technology at the atomic scale.

We took rhodium, which is a very rare element, and turned it into nano-particles. Typically these nanoparticles are 10, 20, 30 nanometers across. [This] is 20, 40 maybe 60 atoms across, so they’re very small particles.

The nanoparticles act kind of like an antenna for the light, allowing the reaction to be manipulated.

Rhodium is rare, but the nanoparticle-antennas can be reused. Still, the team is actively seeking alternatives that will allow industries to scale up production using this method. They are also working toward some groundbreaking chemical reactions.

This represents a new form of catalytic chemistry; an emerging field that my colleagues and I have been working on called plasmonic photocatalysis. It takes advantage of the optical properties of these nano-structured metals and uses them to drive more and more interesting chemical reactions.

One of the ones that I think is most exciting - a holy grail for the catalytic community - is a reaction called the Haber-Bosch process.

A German chemist named Fritz Haber developed a process that converts atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer…

...because there’s not enough nitrogen on Earth to fertilize food for everyone...

...so most people’s food comes as a result of this Haber-Bosch process.

It uses something like 5% of the world’s energy and is quite an expensive process, because it requires high temperatures, and it requires high pressures. Our hope is that we would be able to do the same reaction at room temperature using sunlight. If we could do that it would have transformative societal impact for the ability to feed the planet as we continue to grow in population.

This work shows that funding research is so important because it often leads to huge unintended benefits to society.

Our original experiments were never designed to address fuels, or carbon dioxide remediation. We did this purely for scientific purposes. We chose this reaction because it was convenient and well understood. So, we’re thrilled that it has this practical application toward carbon dioxide remediation, and converting that carbon dioxide into a fuel.

Our work began when we started beginning to study these antennas in the ultraviolet and discovered that every molecule we put near the antenna would be destroyed. We got frustrated, and we finally said you know what? If we’re destroying it, then maybe we should take that to an advantage, and instead of being disappointed when our molecules are being destroyed, let's actually try and do catalysis with it and use the destroyed molecules as the fragments from which we would build the products that we wanted. So we built a team of chemists and physicists, experimentalists and theorists, professors and students, and all of us working together were able to pull this concept together to get this surprising and exciting result.

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.

chemistry #rhodium #nanoparticles #catalysis #plasmonic #photocatalysis #haber-bosch #duke #university #henry everitt #nature communications

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This illustration shows the possible surface of TRAPPIST-1f, one of the newly discovered planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Scientists using the Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes have discovered that there are seven Earth-size planets in the system.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Recently, seven rocky, Earth-like planets were discovered orbiting a nearby star, adding to a catalog of 3,500 known extrasolar or exoplanets. Of the many ways to find planets orbiting stars, the most productive has been what's called the transit method: measuring the change in brightness of a star when a planet passes in front of it.

But not every dip in brightness indicates an exoplanet.

Nathan Kirse, an undergraduate majoring in astronomy at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and a Kaleideum Planetarium volunteer, specializes in exoplanets. His research involves Kepler Objects of Interest, or KOIs. These are stars that may or may not have planets.

Nathan Kirse interviewing for SciWorks Radio at SCFSounds Studio. Credit: Shawn Fitzmaurice

There are 5,000 KOIs out there that need to have follow-up observations to know whether these are planets or not. I’m studying these exoplanets to show that these KOIs should not be included in future research for more experienced astronomers.

The big difference is that planets don’t have any color change when the planet crosses the face of the star, but when a star crosses the face of another star there is some color change that I’m trying to detect.

So, if a star gets by Nathan, we can tell an awful lot from that dip in light output.

If it’s a bigger planet, it’s going to cause a bigger dip in brightness when it goes across the face of its star. And so, the transit method gives you an estimate of the size of these planets, assuming that you know the size of the star.

From there, we can use some basic math to learn the density and other important stuff about the planet.

Recently, astronomers confirmed something very exciting about the nearby star Trappist-1.

Astronomers are very excited about this discovery because it shows that Earth-sized planets, even Earth-sized planets that are in the habitable zone of their star, are not that uncommon. We found seven Earth-sized planets, around the same star, only 40 light years away. Forty light years is like our back deck when it comes to looking at the galaxy as a whole.

It’s not much larger than Jupiter, so if our sun was a basketball, this star would be a golf ball. Since it’s so small, it doesn’t produce that much light.

Trappist 1-E is one of those planets that orbits in the habitable zone of Trappist-1, and it receives about the same amount of light as Earth does. So that means that it could be about the same temperature as Earth.

Which means there could be liquid water, which we think life needs to get started. But here’s something else that's interesting about this planet…

Since Trappist-1 is such an incredibly dim star, it has to orbit really, really close to Trappist-1 to get the same amount of light as Earth.

According to Johannes Kepler’s famous second law, the closer a planet is to its star, the faster it moves.

So, Trappist 1E orbits in just six days.

...which is a very short year.

Also, since they’re so close to each other, that means that, if you were to be on the surface of one these planets, the other planets wouldn’t look like pinpoints of light, like they do on Earth. They are actually so close together that the other worlds would look as big as the moon in that sky, or even bigger.

Trappist-1 and its planets are only 40 light years away. Still, it would take about a million years to get there in a spaceship. So, why bother studying the system?

You know, it’s not that astronomers are wrapped in some kind of delusion that we’re going to be able to travel to these planets any time soon. The reason that we study exoplanets - worlds that we may never set foot on - there are many reasons, but I think the main reason is to answer the question, “Are we the only life in the universe?” And so the reason that Trappist-1 is so important is that these planets are close enough that we can actually make useful observations of them. We can answer that question in the near future with telescopes like the James Webb telescope to try and find oxygen in the atmospheres of these planets. That would be a huge sign that there is life on these planets. It would be huge.

science #astronomy trappist 1 #trappist 1e #unca #university of north carolina #asheville #astronomy #physics #explanet #nathan kirse

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A Rowan County coyote is caught in a camera trap.

Hanna_M_Rowan2, North Carolina's Candid Critters Project. Creative Commons

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and Kaleideum, formerly the Children's Museum of Winston-Salem and SciWorks.

North Carolina has some of the greatest biodiversity in the nation, but the picture of our state's wildlife is incomplete. To help protect wildlife and habitat, a better understanding of how and where animals live is needed.

Led by Dr. Roland Kays, Biologist at North Carolina State University, and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the organization North Carolina Candid Critters is on a mission to fill in those gaps. And get your science on, citizens, because they want your help to map wildlife populations county by county, down to the neighborhood in some cases!

Hear Dr. Kays on these previous episodes of SciWorks Radio:

• Closly Lurks the Hybrid Beast
• Camera Traps & Killer Housecats

Dr. Roland Kays interviews for SciWorks Radio from the studios at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. Credit : Eban Crawford

We have a lot of different research questions. With all these different species, there’s quite a lot we can do. We're particularly interested in coyote-deer interactions. In eastern North Carolina, we have the red wolf population which seems to be on the decline, and so we’re pretty interested to see, are they declining, and if so, does that have impacts on other species that they might be preying on? And in the western part of the state, we have an expanding elk population, so helping to map out where they’re living and if they also are having an impact on other animals in the ecosystem would be super interesting.

There are people in all these counties as well, and how animals are interacting with or sharing space with people is a big part of our question.

And that’s where you come in!

To be able to compare these areas, we need to get some volunteers to go into these wild areas and run camera traps, but we also need them to run them in their back yards or in their private forests to understand how those areas are similar or different in terms of how the wildlife sees them.

A camera trap is a camera that you strap to a tree. It will snap a picture of an animal when the animal walks by. Here’s the thing: for this project, you can check one out, like a book, from a local library.

These camera traps are great because we get pictures of all these different species, from chipmunks all the way up to bear and elk. These cameras take millions and millions of pictures. Some of them are boring, they’re just a squirrel walking by or something like that, but, in the process, you end up getting some pretty awesome ones.

The best ones are posted on the NC Candid Critter’s web site.

We’ve developed the computer tools to manage millions and millions of photographs.

We’ve never tried anything this ambitious, never anything this big in scale or this detailed. We’re hoping to get cameras run in 20 to 30-thousand sites across the state over 3 years, and, if we do that, it will actually be the largest camera-trapping project ever!

Science is awesome, and citizen science is a great way to get yourself, and even your kids, involved in some meaningful research in a very fun way.

Related: SciWorks "Be A Citizen Scientist"

Usually the way it works is... the scientist kind of designs a protocol, and they come up with some research questions, and then they look for ways that non-scientists can help collect the data.

But why citizen science?

We can collect data over larger areas with citizens than without citizens. If we wanted to do this camera-trapping across the state by ourselves, we would never be able to afford all the technicians we would have to pay to go to all these places. And the other side is that it also helps people learn about science, about nature, about whatever the project is. So, we’re doing citizen science with wildlife, but there are all kinds of other projects about the solar system, the weather, ladybugs, and frogs. And so, whatever your interest is, there’s a way to kind of explore that more, learn more about that particular field, and then also learn more about science and about how science works at the same time.

We’re working with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, and so they're very interested in using the data to help manage the state’s wildlife populations. And we’re also starting to work with ways to help the public to explore the data as well. Some of the data is up on our website already, at nccandidcritters.org, and as we get more and more data, we’re going to start adding more tools so you can start to see the maps, see the graphs, and start to explore on your own, and maybe ask some of your own questions.

Some online citizen science resources can be found at sites like emammal.si.edu, ebird.org, zooniverse.org and scistarter.com. Find Citizen Science apps for your android smartphone or IOS device.

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.

science #biology #ecology #wildlife #camera #traps #roland kays #north carolina #university #museum of natural sciences #biodiversity #citizen science #library

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An adult female baboon from the Amboseli basin in Kenya displays her exaggerated estrous swelling--a sign that her time of ovulation is near.

Courtney Fitzpatrick

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and Kaleideum, formerly the Children's Museum of Winston-Salem and SciWorks.

If you’re a male animal, you might be far more gorgeous than your female partner. Think about the flowing mane of a lion, the majestic antlers on an elk, or the artistically intricate patterns on a peacock’s feathers.

But now researchers are zeroing in on what qualifies as female beauty among many animal species.

Dr. Courtney Fitzpatrick interviews for SciWorks Radio from the studios of WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana. Selfie Credit, Courtney Fitzpatrick.

They are far more muted than the signals that we see in males, so we don’t see anything like a peacock's tail in a female animal.

That is Dr. Courtney Fitzpatrick, former postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and a co-author of a recent paper in the journal Evolution investigating the purpose of female animal beauty. And it's not as straightforward as you might expect.

The female’s ornamentation is usually red, and you might think that they would increase the risk of predation to an animal who is displaying it.

While we know that for males of many species, it’s very important to get as many mates as you possibly can...

The point, scientifically, is for the male to pass his DNA to as many offspring as possible. And while that might seem obvious for females, it’s not the case, according to Dr. Fitzpatrick’s mathematical models.

This rule is not as likely to apply as ubiquitously to females.

And so, when you see what looks like reproductive competition using, say, a red spot on your side, or a red swelling on your rear end, or an orange patch under your throat if you’re a lizard, what has been hypothesized is that, when females are using those traits for what looks like competition for number of mates, that they might be competing for mates of superior quality.

But instead, what our models suggest is that, even if, for example, because they have this trait, they’re more likely to mate with a male who is “better,” it still is very weak selection.

The female is not influencing future generations in a meaningful way. So what’s going on?

There shouldn’t be as much pressure on females to compete for mates because they’re not scarce from the perspective of the female, and yet we see these things that look like competition for mates.

A female crab is not likely to go without a mate, while many males will. So then, why does that one special she-crab need such alluring and unforgettable red claws?

We might assume that, if a female walks around with a big red spot on her side, that she is going to be more visible to predators and, therefore, less likely to survive. Might it be the case that, by having a big red spot on her side and attracting males to her, that she, somehow, actually gains a survival advantage? So, that’s one hypothesis.

Maybe they’re a resource in terms of the kind of protection they provide from predators, whether that protection is because males are actively doing anything, or by virtue of being closer to a male, you’re less likely to be eaten by a leopard. Or perhaps, in species where males provide nuptial gifts, maybe those females then get more fish, or, you know, whatever the male is bringing to her to eat?

Maybe through social selection, she gets gifts and/or protection from her special guy. The verdict is still out.

So, why does research like this matter?

Just as you would need to go out and get the cement to build the foundation of your house, applied sciences - like medical cures and space habitation research - rely on the foundation laid by basic research, such as this study. That’s why seemingly non-urgent research gets funded.

So, there’s not an immediate application of this work to, say, human health or anything that would necessarily, in the very immediate, improve or affect the human condition, except for the acquisition of basic knowledge. All of the applied research is based on basic research, but that doesn’t mean that all basic knowledge is going to lead to some application. It’s important because we want to understand what has given rise to the patterns we see in the living world.

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.

science #evolution #natural selection #sexual selection #social selection #duke university #dr. courtney fitzpatrick #evolutionary #biology

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Charles Darwin, photograph by Herbert Rose Barraud, 1881. United States Public Domain, Wikicommons

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.

February 12th is Darwin Day, an international, annual celebration commemorating the birthday of Charles Darwin, the English naturalist and geologist made famous for his theory of evolution by natural selection. We’ve all heard of Darwin, but what do we know about him? ​

I spoke with Dr. Paul Brinkman, head of the History of Science Research Lab and Curator of Special Collections at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, to learn more.

Dr. Paul Brinkman dons his Darwin garb for his interview with SciWorks Radio. (Credit: North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences)

He had a reputation of being a fun shipmate. He was a gentleman of course; he had a great sense of adventure; he loved to travel. One of the funniest idiosyncrasies about Darwin, I think, is that he was a really adventurous eater. He wanted to try just about any animal he could get his hands on. His wife was Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin, who then became Emma Darwin.

Darwin was an incurable naturalist and collector from an early age.

As a child, he loved to collect beetles, he loved to hunt. He was very curious about the outdoors, very curious about animals and plants. He was well-read as a young man, so he read Alexander Von Humboldt’s personal narrative of his trip to South America, and this gave Darwin a fever for traveling in the tropics.

So, when he was offered the opportunity to take a five-year scientific journey aboard the HMS Beagle, circumnavigating the globe and spending a lot of time in Southern South America - long story short - he took it.

Some of the most important things he collected were vertebrate fossils. And some of these vertebrate fossils, curiously enough, seemed to resemble the living fauna of those same areas. And so when Darwin recognized that South America had this fairly unique living mammal fauna and that the fossils that he found, which weren’t very old, also resembled these same animals, he thought that was rather curious. I think as early as about 1832, very early in the voyage, he started thinking that maybe the best explanation for this phenomenon is that animals evolve over time.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is important because it was the first feasible mechanism to explain the evolution of life over time.

Natural selection is the engine of evolution. VERY simply stated, if an individual organism is born with an advantage for survival, it lives longer and produces more offspring. The new trait is passed on. Eventually the descendants out-compete the original species and become the next evolutionary step.

Darwin had done such a masterful job of accumulating all of this extremely suggestive evidence, the best explanation of which was “Well, life must evolve. Otherwise, why would you see ‘this’ kind of distribution of animals or ‘this’ suite of fossils in the fossil record unless life had evolved.”

But, at the time, there were holes in his hypothesis.

So, he wrote two entire chapters addressing this problem - that the fossil record didn’t seem to bear out his theory. What Darwin argued is that one should expect to see thousands and thousands, if not millions, of these transitional forms, changing very gradually, one into another. But mostly, it was a lot of random animals distributed over time.

At the time, there was no good record of transition from one animal to the next, but soon after Darwin published his famous book, On The Origin of Species, Archaeopteryx, a beautifully-preserved dinosaur with well-developed, bird-like feathers, was discovered. This was the first known transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds.

(Scroll down for images of Archaeopteryx and some other known transitional fossils.)

RELATED: Discover the The Dinosaurs In Your Backyard On SciWorks Radio.

So, he’d convinced the vast majority of practicing scientists of the fact of evolution, but people were a lot slower to come around to natural selection. One astronomer once famously called it “the theory of higgledy piggledy,” which I think is pretty funny, but I think what really bothered people is that it sort of immediately removes mankind from his privileged position at the top of the great chain of being and argues that, well, man is just sort of a result of these random variations. And this didn’t sit well with a lot of people; even a lot of scientists.

Some SciWorks Radio Episodes about the topic of evolution and/or evolutionary biology:

• Evolution & The Club Tail
• Understanding Why We Teach Evolution
• What Is Evolution?
• The War Between Bats and Moths
• Boy Meets Girl

Archaeopteryx lithographica - If this beautiful specimen of a dinosaur-to-bird transition had been discovered before Darwin published On The Origin of Species, it may have been the smoking gun for his argument for natural selection. (credit: H. Raab)

Tiktaalik is likely a representation of the evolutionary transition from fish to amphibians. (Credit Eduard Solà)

(Have a listen to this SciWorks Radio episode.)

Pakicetus - This four-legged, land animal that once lived in what is now Pakistan is the earliest known whale ancestor. Paleontologists have traced whale evolution, through the fossil record, from land mammal to sea mammal. (credit : Kevin Guertin

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.

north carolina museum of natural sciences #science #evolution #natural selection #darwin #biology #sciworks #kaleideum #fossils

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Middelgrunden wind farm 2009-07-01. By English: Photo by Kim Hansen. Postprocessing (crop, rotation, color adjustment, dust spot removal and noise reduction) by Richard Bartz and Kim Hansen. (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.

The Paris Agreement on climate change was negotiated by almost 200 countries in 2015 and put into effect in late 2016. It aims to prevent global average temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in order to greatly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change, increase our ability to adapt to inevitable impacts, and financially steer us toward low greenhouse gas technology and climate resistant development.

While this is a phenomenal step in the right direction, there is concern about the speed in which we need to make these giant leaps in order to meet that goal.

Dr.Gabriele Manoli interviews with SciWorks Radio via Skype from ETH University in Zurich, Switzerland

What we’d like to say in our study is that the agreement to achieve a target is not really sufficient to achieve the target. And what we argue is that the spreading of green technologies and renewable energy must quicken significantly in the next years if we want to achieve these targets.

Dr. Gabriele Manoli, a former postdoctoral associate at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, led the study seeking to better understand the pace needed to meet the Paris Agreement goals.

The world is complicated. So, for example, it’s not enough to dabble in the technology, but the technology has to be used and the innovation has to spread into other countries. If you have a technology today, or a political or a technical decision is made today, the effect will not affect the emissions tomorrow, but they will probably affect emissions in a year or 10 years or 50 years because it takes time for the decision to be adopted. It takes time for the technology to spread, for the infrastructures to be be built, and so on.

The principle of Uniformitarianism, which states, “The present is the key to the past,” is a useful concept for a geologist. It also comes in quite handy in this environmental study. Only, in this case, the past is the key to the future.

We like to quantify these delays by looking at what happened in the past. So, basically we look back at the second industrial revolution when the emissions started to increase and population started to increase. This is basically the reason for the increase in the emissions, the increase in atmospheric CO2 and temperature.

Since the second industrial revolution, per capita CO2 emissions increased more or less every 60 years by more than 100 percent. So, basically this means that, every 60 years, CO2 emissions per capita was increasing in jumps. And why jumps? Well, everything started in the UK, and then it spread to Europe, then it spread to the US, and then it took time before carbon-emitting technologies were spreading also to India, China, and so on.

How does understanding these cyclical jumps help us understand our challenges going forward?

What we did is to try to study the coupled system of human global population, which is growing, together with the dynamic of innovation spreading globally. And we have coupled these processes with the climate, in a very simple way, but a way that allowed us to try to put everything together and see how the system is likely to evolve in the future.

Using a mathematical model, Dr. Manoli and his team determined that a global, tenfold increase in the use of green technologies is needed to meet Paris Agreement goals.

So the same process will happen in the future, but now we need to spread things much more quickly. So, if it was every 60 years in the past, we need to do it every 6 or 10 years, if we want to stay below this target that we set at the Paris Agreement.

The more we understand history, the better we are at parsing the future. We know that about world and American history, but it’s also true for climate history.

We are not willing to change our lifestyle. We have heating and cooling in our houses, and we cannot stop it, you know, tomorrow.

We try to give an order of magnitude and say that, you know, we cannot delay by 50 years. We need to take action soon. And probably still we will not be able to meet the target, but that’s at least what we can say at the moment by what we have and what we are showing.

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.

science #climate #paris agreement #duke university #green #technology #gabriele manoli #nicholas school of the environment #mathematics

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"Earthrise" a photograph of the Earth from the moon taken by astronaut William Anders in 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission.

NASA astronaut William Anders, 1968

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.

NASA’s Apollo program successfully landed six spacecraft and twelve astronauts on the moon between 1961 and 1972. We collected amazing data, and engineered fantastic spacecraft, but then we stopped going! Ultimately the driver for our success was Cold War competition; the Space-Race. We wanted to get to the moon before the Russians did.

Mission accomplished!

In the near future, moon missions involving astronauts will take place on-board NASA’s Orion Spacecraft.

To lift a quote from the NASA web site:

“NASA’s Orion spacecraft is built to take humans farther than they’ve ever gone before. Orion will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry the crew to space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during the space travel, and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities.

To borrow a quote not found on NASA’s web site:

"The Orion capsule is what they’ve called Apollo on steroids."

That’s Jonathan Ward, volunteer NASA JPL Solar System Ambassador, and author of two books about the Apollo missions.

(Shawn's Note : I spoke with Ward a bit about the late astronaut, Gene Cernan, who was the last person to walk on the moon. You can find audio from this discussion at the end of this blog.)

The first flight of an Orion space capsule with astronauts aboard is planned some time between 2021 and 2023. That would probably send astronauts into a figure 8; a free return fly-by of the moon. This would be the first time that a crew would go aboard.

It can hold six astronauts. The Orion is planned by NASA to be used for deep-space types of missions, so a flight to the moon’s vicinity and back again would test out a long duration mission. That would be about an eight day mission to do that.

Jonathan Ward interviews with SciWorks Radio, and Ivy the Cat, from Shawn's studio Space. - Photo: Shawn Fitzmaurice

A potential planet-saving moon mission is in the works.

There was another plan that NASA was talking about which would be to capture an asteroid and to put it into lunar orbit, and that would be visited by another crew with an Orion capsule. That’s a possibility still for the 2020s, but no date has been set for that. One of the things that we’re most concerned about is an asteroid that would be big enough to come in and hit a city and and destroy it. So, NASA is looking for technologies to be able to help to capture and deflect those kinds of asteroids.

Aside from inspiring romantic songs and poetry, the moon will also be used as a jumping-off point for space exploration.

One of the things that NASA was looking at was to launch one Orion mission to the moon every year during the 2020s. Each of those missions to the moon could carry a module for a space station that could be assembled in lunar orbit. By the end of the 2020s, we’d have a functional space station in lunar orbit and one of the plans being talked about was potentially launching a propulsion module to that space station and being able to send it to Mars. So it could be potentially a very exciting type of mission.

It’s likely that future missions will be international cooperative efforts.

NASA has said that they would entertain cooperating with Russia or with the European Space Agency, who are both talking about how to do some sort of lunar base program in the next 10 to 20 years. The US’s space launch booster, which is going to be having its first flight next year, is going to be much more powerful than any other country’s rockets. So, the United States could launch landers and habitation modules that are built by other nations. It would be a corporative type of effort. For example, Russia could build a habitation module, and the US could launch it to the moon.

Having this alien world on our own doorstep is a huge benefit as we move into deep space exploration.

The moon is close by, so it’s a good opportunity to test out technology on the moon. If there’s a problem, astronauts can get home from there in a couple of days, as opposed to trying to get something to Mars and then finding out there’s a problem and then having to wait 6 to 8 months to get back home again from there. So, it’s much better to do it closer to home.

After Cernan parked the lunar rover for the last time, and walked back to the lunar module, he knew not only was this his last time on the moon, but he knew this was probably the last time for a long time that anybody was going to be on the moon. And so when he went up the ladder, he paused on the porch of the lunar module before going in the door, and he said he tried soak in the meaning of that experience. And he talked about being on God’s front porch.

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.

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Left: Ravi Bellamkonda, Vinik Dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University

Right:A fluorescent stained image of a tumor marking bacterial nanocarriers in pink, cancer cell nuclei in blue, and human mitochondria (another indicator of tumor cells) in green.

Duke University

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.

Great strides have been made in treating various forms of cancer, thus extending lives. But for people with Glioblastoma, a particular type of aggressive brain cancer, very little has worked. Recently, however, a lot of research has been done at the nanoscale, modifying evolution’s 4 billion year progress to suit our own needs.

Check out some of these related SciWorks Radio episodes.

• SciWorks Radio : A Virus that Kills Cancer
• SciWorks Radio : Clever New Cancer Treatments Being Developed Locally
• SciWorks Radio : The Predictive Power Of The Junk In Your Genome
• SciWorks Radio : Tales Of The Genetically Altered, Superhero Bacteria Swarmbot​
• SciWorks Radio : Microbes

A team of biomedical engineers, including Duke University Pratt School of Engineering’s Dean, Dr. Ravi Bellamkonda, has published their most recent innovation in the journal Molecular Therapy – Oncolytics.

This cancer is very invasive in the brain. It doesn’t stay in one place. When a tumor doesn’t have a boundary or a clear edge, then it becomes very challenging to remove it all. You leave some behind because the tumor is migrating and invading the rest of the brain.

Dr. Ravi Bellamkonda, Vinik Dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University interviews for SciWorks Radio at the Duke AV Studios. - Duke UniversityThe principle we’re testing here is, how do you design a system where you have a therapy that goes everywhere, but is only toxic to the region that the tumor is in and not elsewhere?

Some current treatments involve forcing chemicals through the brain, in an attempt to engage all of the cancer cells. This is dicey because it also leaves healthy brain cells vulnerable to the treatment. Surgery is also of limited benefit.

Taking out one extra millimeter of brain could mean the difference between speech and no speech, between walking and not walking. And so, in an organ like the brain, it is particularly important to figure out a way not to kill the normal cells and kill a distributed tumor.

So how do you do this without harming the brain? The answer, in this case, comes in the form of a bacteria called Salmonella, which has been genetically modified so it won’t make anyone sick.

Shawn's note, *according to the CDC:

"Every year, Salmonella is estimated[PDF - 1 page] to cause one million foodborne illnesses in the United States, with 19,000 hospitalizations and 380 deaths. Most persons infected with Salmonella develop diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps 12 to 72 hours after infection. The illness usually lasts 4 to 7 days, and most persons recover without treatment. However, in some persons, the diarrhea may be so severe that the patient needs to be hospitalized."*

The reason Salmonella was interesting to us is it has this property of being able to move in what we call extracellular space. If I put this bacteria in one corner of the brain on the surface, they have the ability to go everywhere in the brain, but they don’t grow everywhere in the brain because we’ve engineered it such that it’s hungry for certain essential compounds that we call purines.

So, by doing that, only in the tumor regions which are rich in purines, do they actually multiply and grow.

That’s just the first step.

We can engineer it genetically to produce proteins that it does not normally produce. So we made Salmonella that made two proteins that work together really well to kill tumors. But we didn’t want them to make these proteins everywhere in the brain. Tumor regions have low oxygen tension. So we use that feature to our advantage and engineered this bacteria such that it only triggers these proteins being made when there is low oxygen tension.

So, the team used Salmonella because it’s mobile in the brain. They made it dependent on cancer-abundant purines. Then they programmed it to only produce cancer killing proteins in low oxygen areas, found only around brain tumors.

When the tumor is gone, the Salmonella dies off safely because it has essentially consumed all of its own food source.

Genius!

Using a lab rat model, this method has increased the survival rate by 20%.

We are now trying to understand why it is that, in 20% of the cases, we had complete cure, and in 80% of the cases, when we treated the rats in this case, we did not. It could be because in those cases for some reason, the bacteria that we injected were not as effective. Or it could be that there’s variation within tumors, and the really aggressive ones outpace the good that these bacteria can do. We see evidence that, even in the cases of the animals that did not respond, initially they did, and then the tumor overtakes that response. So don’t take me wrong. The 20% cure is amazing for a disease we did not move the needle at all on for so many years. We’re very excited about that. But we’re very interested in understanding how we can make that 40, 60, 80 percent of the cases... or 100% with some luck.

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.

biomedical #engineering #science #biology #salmonella #cancer #glioblastoma #duke university #pratt school of engineering #ravi bellamkonda #journal molecular therapy #oncolytics #shawn fitzmaurice #wfdd #sciworks #winston-salem

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False color image of Berchin's Galaxy, PGC 1000714 (left), false color image of Hoag's Object (right). left: {Mutlu Pakdil, B., Mangedarage, M., Seigar, M. S., & Treuthardt, P. False color composite created by Ryan Beauchemin}, right: {NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgment: Ray A. Lucas (STScI/AURA)}

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.

This is the story of an unusual galaxy. Stick with me...

Light takes time to travel, so in a way, your eyes are a time machine.

This graphic represents a slice of the spider web-like structure of the universe, called the "cosmic web." These great filaments are made largely of dark matter located in the space between galaxies. Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Hallman (University of Colorado, Boulder) The sunlight you see actually left the sun eight minutes ago.

It takes 100,000 years for light to travel across our Milky Way galaxy, an island of several hundred billion stars, including our sun. The light from the farthest star you can actually see using just your eyes began its journey across space when the first humans settled in North America.

But the farthest object your unaided eyes can see is Andromeda; another galaxy like our own. It’s about 2.5 million light years away, across empty space; we see it as it was just before the earliest humans evolved.

Using astronomical data, the map of the visible universe shows these galaxies to be part of an unfathomably large, three-dimensional webbed filigree of hundreds of billions of galaxies, carved out as material was pulled together by gravity, after the Big Bang.

(In this amazing video about the power of 10, we get a glimpse, at around 4:17, of the intricate structure of the universe, where each point of light is not a star, but a galaxy.)

How do we test our understanding of galaxy formation?

We have hypotheses and theories as to how we think galaxies evolve, and we run computer simulations and are able to create a lot of the structure we see in the observable universe.

Dr. Patrick Treuthardt interviewing for SciWorks Radio at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science.

That’s Dr. Patrick Treuthardt, Assistant Head of the Astronomy & Astrophysics Research Laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. He collaborated with a team from the University of Minnesota on the discovery and description of an extremely rare object known as a “Hoag-type galaxy” because it has a central bulge with a ring around it, like a similar galaxy discovered in 1950.

This object, unofficially called Burcin's Galaxy after discoverer and lead author Dr. Burcin Mutlu-Pakdil, is about 360 million light years away. We see it as it looked around the time our ancestors were crawling out of the ocean.

What we ended up doing is subtracting out the bulge, subtracting out the center of that galaxy, the light from the center, and what we were able to find was a diffuse red ring, underneath the bulge light. This is what makes it unique, in that it’s a Hoag-type object, but it actually has two rings instead of one.

Hoag objects make up less than 0.1% of all known galaxies, and this one with two rings might be a one-of-a-kind discovery.

So, what’s so important about the ring colors?

Blue regions in a galaxy are generally regions where stars are being formed. These are new stars. But the thing is, the more massive the star is, the more quickly it burns out. So it’s just like if you have an SUV vs. a motorcycle. The SUV is going to burn through gas faster because it’s a more massive object than, for instance, a motorcycle, which is less massive and it won’t burn through its fuel as fast. The same thing happens with stars. So, these really massive stars are blue, and they’ll burn out quickly, and you’ll just be left with these lower mass red stars. So, for instance, in our galaxy there’s a bright blue ring surrounding this yellow-orange central region, the bright blue ring is all these really massive stars that will burn out quickly. So this is actually a somewhat new feature. And when you look at the yellowish-orange center to it, that’s actually all the old stars, and all of the blue stars have burned out, so you’re left with these older features in there. And so, that red ring is probably a really old feature, where all the blue stars have since burned out, and we’re just left with the red stars leftover.

What we think might have happened is that, sometimes there’s gas between galaxies, and maybe there happened to be a dense region of gas that came by and basically fell on the galaxy forming at least one of these rings. Or it could be a smaller galaxy came by and maybe got shredded in the gravity of this galaxy. But we’re not entirely sure about what’s going on with this galaxy, so we actually need more data to figure that out.

A discovery like this can help us better understand the universe.

When we run across these unusual objects, our theories may break down; so something’s going on where we’re not accounting for some of these unusual objects. So there’s probably some tweaking we need to do in understanding the evolution of galaxies.

Science is a process. Science is always testing its ideas. Nothing is 100% all the time in science. Everything can be tested, and it should be tested. Any time we find something new and we use our current theories to explain it, if it holds, then that’s good. If it doesn’t, then we need to modify our theories. It may be a drastic overhaul or it may just be a small tweak. And so basically that’s all science is, is you take things that explain things very well, and you just build on top of it.

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.

science #astronomy #astrophysics #universe #galaxy #burcin's galaxy #patrick treuthardt #pgc 1000714 #north carolina #museum #natural sciences #ncmns #university of minnesota

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Signal crayfish in Lake Washington in Gene Coulon. This crayfish has several branchiobdellida annelida attached to it.

Roger Tabor

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.

I love Cajun cooking. There’s nothing like a gumbo crawling with crawdads! While this thought may bring you back to the bayou, the Southeast – and North Carolina especially – is where it’s at if you’re a crayfish.

The center of biodiversity for crayfish is in the Southeastern United States, so we have the highest diversity of crayfishes worldwide. North Carolina itself has coming up on 50 known species of crayfishes, but there are still several in the state of North Carolina that have yet to be described, which I think is very exciting.

That’s Dr. Bronwyn Williams, Research Curator of Crustaceans at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

In general, North Carolina is among the most biologically-diverse states, for several reasons that have previously been discussed here on SciWorks Radio.

RELATED: Diversity of Species in North Carolina​

Along with that, there are a couple of thoughts as to why we we live in the the Mudbug Mecca.

You have one hypothesis: that this is the center of origin and then there was dispersal out. The other one is because they haven’t been cyclically wiped out by these huge, massive glaciers coming down and running everything off, and they have to recolonize again.

In a way, crayfish are islands unto themselves, kinda. Most species carry with them Branchiobdellida, a species of worm that live life on the clawed critter. Check them out in this video:

Dr. Williams sees the worms as an opportunity.

Can we use these species of worms to actually track or better understand the relationships among crayfish? Or interactions among crayfish?

To better understand a relatively quick, 125-mile upstream migration of a crayfish population, Dr. Williams hypothesized that the worms’ short life-cycle would give a fine-scale resolution of the migration pattern.

So, with the crayfish, we found a fair bit of variation that fit to the landscape very well, but the worms we found nothing. Everybody from Alberta to Ontario and Minnesota shared that same sequence.

Meaning there was none of the mitochondrial variation you would expect after many generations of worm reproduction.

It was just jaw-dropping. Yeah. No idea.

The crayfish host an integrated society; the worms share the neighborhood with a smaller species called ostracods, or seed shrimp.

The largest ones are about a half-a-millimeter in length, and they just look like little kidney beans with legs and antennae. As one of my interns says, they’re microscopically adorable!

Both of these groups would be what we would call obligate ectosymbionts of these crayfishes so, they are obligated to live on that host in some way, shape, or form.

Interestingly, neither the worms nor the seed shrimp actually feed on the crayfish; rather it’s the best neighborhood to raise a family.

When they lay their eggs, those embryos actually won’t develop unless they’re actually on a live crayfish, which is wacky. But nobody has been able, in a lab situation, to rear these off of a live crayfish host. So it’s some sort of uptake, some need from that live crayfish that they get to sustain those embryos.

So, you have these two completely different groups; these little arthropods, these little crustaceans and these worms, that have adopted this very similar, kind of needy lifestyle, as it were.

The highest species diversity that I’ve seen is six different species of worm on a single crayfish, and two species of these little ostracods, so eight total symbiont species on a single crayfish. And they do seem to have their own little territories for the most part. They seem to partition out. You know, “I’m going to claim between the eyes, and you’re going to go down on the tail,” and so on and so forth. They’ve got these territories worked out.

They perceive the crayfish as a landscape. You go out and log at the various buildings and the hills and so on and so forth. To them, that’s the “I’m going to plant my house here on this crayfish.”

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.

science #biology #crayfish #crawdads #mudbugs #north carolina museum of natural sciences #branchiobdellida #ostracods #dr. bronwyn williams #duke #dna #molecular #genes #chromosome #dr. beth sullivan

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