An asteroid estimated to be 1.2 miles wide will fly by Earth next week, but it’s not expected to collide with our planet. And if an asteroid could be aware of such things, it appears to be wearing a face mask in deference to the pandemic, according to new images from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The asteroid is called 52768 (1998 OR2), and it was first spotted in 1998. On April 29, it will pass within 3,908,791 miles of Earth, moving at 19,461 miles per hour. That’s still 16 times farther than the distance between Earth and the moon.

If it did impact Earth, the asteroid is “large enough to cause global effects,” according to NASA, back when the asteroid was first discovered. “The small-scale topographic features such as hills and ridges on one end of asteroid 1998 OR2 are fascinating scientifically,” said Anne Virkki, head of planetary radar at Arecibo Observatory, in a statement. “But since we are all thinking about Covid-19, these features make it look like 1998 OR2 remembered to wear a mask.”

The flyby is expected to occur on Wednesday, April 29, at 5:56 a.m. ET, according to NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. The center tracks Near-Earth Objects, or NEOs, that could collide with Earth. Arecibo Observatory is a National Science Foundation facility managed by the University of Central Florida. A team of experts has been monitoring this near-Earth asteroid, among others. The observatory is supported by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program and has been analyzing asteroids since the mid-’90s. During the pandemic, scientists at Arecibo are continuing to make their observations on behalf of planetary defense. In line with social distancing, they have limited the number of scientists and radar operators at the facility, and they’re wearing masks during observations.

The asteroid was classified as a potentially hazardous object because it’s bigger than 500 feet and comes within 5 million miles of Earth’s orbit. The experts at Arecibo can monitor the asteroids and use observations to determine their path in the future to see if they pose a risk to Earth. “The radar measurements allow us to know more precisely where the asteroid will be in the future, including its future close approaches to Earth,” said Flaviane Venditti, a research scientist at the observatory, in a statement. “In 2079, asteroid 1998 OR2 will pass Earth about 3.5 times closer than it will this year, so it is important to know its orbit precisely.” –CNN

Electric Universe: Tiny, vibrating hairs may explain how bumblebees sense and interpret the signals transmitted by flowers, according to a study by researchers at the University of Bristol. Although it’s known that flowers communicate with pollinators by sending out electric signals, just how bees detect these fields has been a mystery — until now. Using a laser to measure vibrations, researchers found that both the bees’ antenna and hairs deflect in response to an electric field, but the hairs move more rapidly and with overall greater displacements. Researchers then looked at the bees’ nervous system, finding that only the hairs alerted the bee’s nervous system to this signal.

The findings, published in the international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) today, suggest that electroreception in insects may be widespread. Electroreception may arise from the bees’ hairs being lightweight and stiff, properties that confer a rigid, lever-like motion similar to acoustically sensitive spider hairs and mosquito antennae. Dr Gregory Sutton, a Research Fellow in the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, led the research. He said: “We were excited to discover that bees’ tiny hairs dance in response to electric fields, like when humans hold a balloon to their hair. A lot of insects have similar body hairs, which leads to the possibility that many members the insect world may be equally sensitive to small electric fields.”

Scientists are particularly interested in understanding how floral signals are perceived, received and acted upon by bees as they are critical pollinators of our crops. Research into these relationships has revealed the co-evolution of flowers and their pollinators, and has led to the unraveling of this important network which keeps our planet green. Electroreception is common in aquatic mammals. For example, sharks are equipped with sensitive, jelly-filled receptors that detect fluctuations in electric fields in seawater which helps them to home in on their prey. The research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and The Royal Society.  –Science Daily

Billions of years from now, after the Sun has expanded into a red giant and obliterated Earth, new life could spring up in our Solar System. The hunt for habitable worlds has often focused on systems like our own, with middle-aged stars supporting warm inner planets surrounded by frozen outer planets. But as a star ages, it grows, boiling away the atmospheres and water of inner worlds and warming up the outer ones.

“When a star ages and brightens, the habitable zone moves outward and you’re basically giving a second wind to a planetary system,” said Ramses M. Ramirez, research associate at Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute and lead author of the study, in a statement. “Currently objects in these outer regions are frozen in our own solar system, like Europa and Enceladus – moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn.”

“Long after our own plain yellow sun expands to become a red giant star and turns Earth into a sizzling hot wasteland, there are still regions in our solar system – and other solar systems as well – where life might thrive,” added co-author Lisa Kaltenegger, an associate professor of astronomy and director of the Sagan Institute.

Ramirez and Kaltenegger have modeled the locations of habitable zones for older stars and how long planets can stay in that zone as the star continues to age. Depending on the mass of a star, planets and moons tend to stay in the habitable zone of a middle-aged star for around nine billion years. Earth has been in this zone of our Solar System for around 4.5 billion years so far. –Forbes

 

If you’ve ever been on a crowded bus and found yourself stuck between a loud conversation on one side and obnoxiously loud music on the other, the idea of being able to cancel out that background noise probably sounds like bliss. Now, new earbuds can not only help boost your hearing and cancel out pesky noise, but also serve as wireless earphones for making phone calls and listening to music hands-free. Wearable devices such as fitness trackers and smart-watches have become popular accessories, and recently, companies have started developing “hearable” — earbuds that electronically control how a person hears the world.

The IQbuds from Nuheara in San Francisco can use Bluetooth to wirelessly connect to a smart-phone. As such, these earbuds can act like wireless earpieces, so you can listen to music, podcasts or audiobooks in stereo; make hands-free phone calls; and engage with Siri and other voice-enabled apps. Users can also answer phone calls and start or stop audio with a simple tap of the earbuds.

Furthermore, IQbuds are equipped with noise-cancellation technology, which generates sounds that can neutralize background noise, such as distracting chatter in crowded places. In addition, microphones in each IQbud capture incoming audio, letting in sounds that you may want to hear, such as someone next to you talking to you. As such, people can “genuinely and in real time experience the ability to augment their hearing in noisy social environments,” said Nuheara co-founder David Cannington.

A smart-phone app accompanying the IQbuds can help users control exactly what they hear in the world around them. Moreover, the app can save hearing settings personalized for specific environments; for instance, you may want to hear as much of your surroundings as you can while riding a bicycle, but suppress background noise while in a cafe. The founders of Nuheara came up with the idea for the IQbuds in late 2014. Cannington said that no other wireless earbud combines a Bluetooth earpiece with the abilities to boost hearing and cancel noise. IQbuds can operate over 4 hours of continuous use with the help of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and low-power electronics that optimize battery power. And the carrying case that holds the earbuds houses three additional charges, granting an extra 12 hours of battery life, the company said.

Nuheara representatives said hearables will grow to become a large segment of the wearables market. “Voice-recognition technologies will drive how consumers interact with their devices, and hearing-technology platforms will play a major role in this development,” Cannington said. “Fifty million people in the USA alone have some degree of hearing loss. They will be our early adopters,” Cannington said. Moreover, younger audiences “like the idea of bionic hearing,” Cannington said. In 2015, Nuheara raised $750,000 in seed money for the project, and in 2016, the company raised $3.5 million when it went public. The business also has $480,000 in pre-orders from more than 2,200 backers in an ongoing Indiegogo campaign. So far, more than 300 people have tested IQbuds prototypes, in Australia, the United States and Canada, Cannington said. Nuheara plans to ship IQbuds to backers in December, and the devices should reach the market in early 2017, he added. They will be compatible with Android and iOS devices, the company said. –Live Science

FS: I must say I enjoyed reading your new book, Sapientia: The 40 Principles of Wisdom. I was actually pleasantly surprised how much I actually learned from the book. A lot of the wisdom you shared in Sapientia will stay with me as life-long lessons. What inspired you to write this book?

AC: I wanted to explore human potential. Not in a humanistic sense or in a scientific way or even as something remotely esoteric, but I wanted to challenge the traditional notions about the nature of reality and the self-imposed psychological restrictions we place on our minds from societal conditioning, which actually inhibits us from accomplishing truly great things.

FS: Sapientia shares tenets of wisdom that have some familiar roots in both Eastern and Western cultures. Do you think this book will be a bridge for cultures or even different religions that may find their followers gravitating towards its common themes and philosophical axioms?

AC: Well, truth is universal – like music. Anyone can comprehend music, but the understanding sometimes breaks down between cultures when we add elements of language to music to create songs. That’s why classical music is so beautiful and sacrosanct because it’s unadulterated by being wordless. Maybe another way of looking at it is, music is the soundtrack of life and we are the story or the words to the song. We don’t always have to talk to communicate – sometimes we can just “be.” I hope this book with be an intellectual and philosophical bridge across the oceans and something that resonates beyond the periphery of cultures.

FS: Your book challenges us in the most basic primal way to be more introspective, to reach for something higher, and to evolve into something more meaningful. Was this your intent?

AC: There is no evolution by revolution – going around in circles. The only evolution by revolution I know is by moving forward and tearing down the old order – a sort of demolition by innovation, so to speak. That’s how we make permanent changes in our lives. It’s like checkers. The objective of the game is to move across the board and become twice the person you were before you started by a series of well-coordinated moves. The goal and hope is to reach your crowning achievement on the far end of the game board. What everyone should want for themselves is progressive change; not retrospective wandering. The day we stop growing is the day we die.

FS: You also take exception with the traditional ways that we achieve greatness and think of success in society. Why is that?

AC: Because someone winning should not always be about someone else losing. It takes a thousand hairs to make one paint brush. In nature, success is inclusive not a competitive struggle for existence. There are symbiotic relationships which build networks of cooperation for the whole, not pyramids of competition that benefit only the privileged few at the top. Bees work together as a collective for a holistic purpose. Life is not about stealing opportunities. It should be about creating them. We can’t be truly successful until we’ve shared ourselves, our time, and resources. Love always goes searching for equilibrium. Selfishness, on the other hand, is always looking for leverage so it can be advantaged over someone else.

FS: You talk about personal growth a lot. Is that a part of the whole enlightenment process in your opinion?

AC: It’s certainly a part of it. Every journey doesn’t start the same, from the same starting point, and it won’t end at the same destination. Life will continue to challenge us from the cradle to the grave. When we were babies, there was always something we wanted that was just out of the reach of our cribs. Sometimes, it was for our own good and sometimes it was just because we were no good at reaching it. However, that’s what living is all about – meeting up at random connection points and sharing life experiences: its ups, downs, and all arounds. He came. She overcame. He saw. She conquered. He stepped in. She stepped up. She thought she was above it. He rose above it. She gave up. He never gave in. She pushed back. He pushed on. We go, so we can grow. We outgrow, so we can grow up. Life is a never-ending story because it’s one perpetual learning process. That’s what Sapientia is all about. Life begins now.

Fringe Science’s Mark Chaffin interviewing Sapientia author Alvin Conway

Where to buy the book: Lulu       Alvin Conway on Twitter – Facebook

© 2016 Copyright Fringe Science

White holes are the opposite of black holes, objects into which nothing can enter but are constantly spewing out matter. They were thought to be completely hypothetical, more a mathematical oddity than a real thing…but we may have seen one. We’ve talked about white holes before in some detail here and here, but the basic idea behind them is that the laws of physics aren’t comfortable with things that happen in only one direction. In other words, if black holes exist, then it should be possible to reverse the equations governing them so that you get something that’s reversed but otherwise identical. That’s what a white hole is.

Of course, just because something can happen going both forwards and backwards in time doesn’t mean that, in practice, we’ll actually observe both of those phenomena. (The fact that entropy only increases when the laws of physics say it could just as easily decrease is a famous example of this, but we’ll leave a discussion of that for another day.) At its most basic, white holes simply wouldn’t be as stable as black holes are, and it seems that they would collapse almost immediately under the weight of its own gravity.

Here’s where things get interesting. A gamma ray burst back in 2006 didn’t fit with our understanding of where they come from – its long duration (102 seconds) meant that it had to be created in a supernova explosion, and yet there were no supernovas there for it to have come from. Its discoverers actually said that “this is brand new territory; we have no theories to guide us.”

Now, five years later, it’s being suggested that we might actually have caught sight of a white hole. The fierceness and duration of the explosion could well fit with a white hole briefly popping into existence, spewing out some matter, and then quickly collapsing into itself, resulting in this massive explosion. Although it’s not the most likely explanation – after all, it invokes something that many astronomers have concluded is exceedingly unlikely, verging on impossible – it can’t be immediately discounted.

The trouble is that we’ve found out all we’re going to from this particular burst, so all we can do now is wait for another of these strange hybrid bursts and see how it behaves. If these hybrid bursts really are white holes, then the universe is about to get a lot stranger. –Io9

The question of why space is three-dimensional (3D) and not some other number of dimensions has puzzled philosophers and scientists since ancient Greece. Space-time overall is four-dimensional, or (3 + 1)-dimensional, where time is the fourth dimension. It’s well-known that the time dimension is related to the second law of thermodynamics: time has one direction (forward) because entropy (a measure of disorder) never decreases in a closed system such as the universe.

In a new paper published in EPL, researchers have proposed that the second law of thermodynamics may also explain why space is 3D. “A number of researchers in the fields of science and philosophy have addressed the problem of the (3+1)-dimensional nature of space-time by justifying the suitable choice of its dimensionality in order to maintain life, stability and complexity,” coauthor Julian Gonzalez-Ayala, at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico and the University of Salamanca in Spain, told Phys.org.

“The greatest significance of our work is that we present a deduction based on a physical model of the universe dimensionality with a suitable and reasonable scenario of space-time. This is the first time that the number ‘three’ of the space dimensions arises as the optimization of a physical quantity.” The scientists propose that space is 3D because of a thermodynamic quantity called the Helmholtz free energy density. In a universe filled with radiation, this density can be thought of as a kind of pressure on all of space, which depends on the universe’s temperature and its number of spatial dimensions.

Here the researchers showed that, as the universe began cooling from the moment after the big bang, the Helmholtz density reached its first maximum value at a very high temperature corresponding to when the universe was just a fraction of a second old, and when the number of spatial dimensions was approximately three. The key idea is that 3D space was “frozen in” at this point when the Helmholtz density reached its first maximum value, prohibiting 3D space from transitioning to other dimensions.

This is because the second law allows transitions to higher dimensions only when the temperature is above this critical value, not below it. Since the universe is continuously cooling down, the current temperature is far below the critical temperature needed to transition from 3D space to a higher-dimensional space. In this way, the researchers explain, spatial dimensions are loosely analogous to phases of matter, where transitioning to a different dimension resembles a phase transition such as melting ice—something that is possible only at high enough temperatures. “In the cooling process of the early universe and after the first critical temperature, the entropy increment principle for closed systems could have forbidden certain changes of dimensionality,” the researchers explained.

The proposal still leaves room for higher dimensions to have occurred in the first fraction of a second after the big bang when the universe was even hotter than it was at the critical temperature. Extra dimensions are present in many cosmological models, most notably string theory. The new study could help explain why, in some of these models, the extra dimensions seem to have collapsed (or stayed the same size, which is very tiny), while the 3D space continued to grow into the entire observable universe. –Physics