The Moon is 40 million years older than previously thought

Led by researchers at the Field Museum and the University of Glasgow, the study was made possible by Northwestern University's atom-probe tomography facility, which "nailed down" the age of the oldest crystal in the sample. By revealing the age of these telltale zircon crystals -- found hidden within dust collected from the Moon -- researchers were able to piece together the timeline of the Moon's formation.

The study was published today (Oct. 23) in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters.

"This study is a testament to immense technological progress we have made since 1972 when the last manned Moon mission returned to Earth," said Northwestern's Dieter Isheim, who co-authored the study. "These samples were brought to Earth half-a-century ago, but only today do we have the necessary tools to perform microanalysis at the requisite level, including atom-probe tomography."

The atom-by-atom analysis enabled researchers to count how many atoms in the zircon crystals have undergone radioactive decay. When an atom undergoes decay, it sheds protons and neutrons to transform into different elements. Uranium, for example, decays into lead. Because scientists have established how long it takes for this process to unfold, they can assess the age of a sample by looking at the proportion of uranium and lead atoms.

"Radiometric dating works a little bit like an hourglass," said the Field Museum's Philipp Heck, the study's senior author. "In an hourglass, sand flows from one glass bulb to another, with the passage of time indicated by the accumulation of sand in the lower bulb. Radiometric dating works similarly by counting the number of parent atoms and the number of daughter atoms they have transformed to. The passage of time can then be calculated because the transformation rate is known."

Isheim is a research associate professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and manager of Northwestern's Center for Atom-Probe Tomography (NUCAPT). David Seidman, the Walter P. Murphy Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering at McCormick and founding director of NUCAPT, also co-authored the study. Heck is the Field Museum's Robert A. Pritzker Curator for Meteorites and Polar Studies, senior director of the Negaunee Interactive Research Center and professor at the University of Chicago. Jennika Greer, a research associate professor at the University of Glasgow, is the study's lead author. When the research began, she was a Ph.D. candidate in Heck's laboratory.

More than 4 billion years ago, when the solar system was still young and the Earth was still growing, a giant Mars-sized object crashed into the Earth. A colossal hunk broke off Earth to form the Moon, and the energy of the impact melted the rock that eventually became the Moon's surface.

"When the surface was molten like that, zircon crystals couldn't form and survive," Heck said. "So, any crystals on the Moon's surface must have formed after this lunar magma ocean cooled. Otherwise, they would have been melted and their chemical signatures would be erased."

Because the crystals must have formed after the magma ocean cooled, determining the age of the zircon crystals would reveal the minimum possible age of the Moon. But, to pinpoint the maximum possible age of the Moon, researchers turned to Northwestern's atom-probe tomography instruments.

"In atom-probe tomography, we start by sharpening a piece of the lunar sample into a very sharp tip, using a focused ion beam microscope, almost like a very fancy pencil sharpener," Greer said. "Then, we use UV lasers to evaporate atoms from the surface of that tip. The atoms travel through a mass spectrometer, and how fast they move tells us how heavy they are, which in turn tells us what they're made of."

After determining the materials in the sample and performing radiometric dating, the researchers concluded that the oldest crystals are about 4.46 billion years old. That means the Moon must be at least that old.

It's important to know when the Moon formed, Heck said, because "the Moon is an important partner in our planetary system. It stabilizes the Earth's rotational axis. It's the reason there are 24 hours in a day. It's the reason we have tides. Without the Moon, life on Earth would look different. It's a part of our natural system that we want to better understand, and our study provides a tiny puzzle piece in that whole picture."

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Superdeep diamonds provide a window on supercontinent growth

Diamonds contain evidence of the mantle rocks that helped buoy and grow the ancient supercontinent Gondwana from below, according to new research from a team of scientists led by Suzette Timmerman -- formerly of the University of Alberta and now at the University of Bern -- and including Carnegie's Steven Shirey, Michael Walter, and Andrew Steele. Their findings, published in Nature, demonstrate that superdeep diamonds can provide a window through space and time into the supercontinent growth and formation process.

For billions of years, Earth's landmasses have been ripped apart and smashed back together by plate tectonics, periodically forming giant supercontinents. This formation process results from large-scale convection of the planet's mantle. But the records of these events are poorly preserved, because the oceanic crust is young and continually sinks beneath the planet's surface by a process called subduction, while the continental crust only provides a limited view of Earth's deep workings.

Surprisingly, the research team was able to show that superdeep diamonds that formed between 300 and 700 kilometers below Earth's surface can reveal how material was added to the base of a once-mighty supercontinent.

"These diamonds allow us to see how deep plate tectonic processes relate to the supercontinent cycle," Shirey said.

The supercontinent Gondwana is thought to have formed between 800 and 550 million years ago in Neoproterozoic times. Starting over the present-day location of the South Pole, it incorporated the landmasses that make up present day South America, Africa, the Middle East, India, and Australia.

"By revealing the geological processes that contributed to Gondwana's growth, scientists can better understand the forces that shaped Earth's history and phenomenon of continental stability, which is -- of course -- fundamental to the eventual success of life on our planet," added Walter.

About 40 to 250 kilometers beneath the surface, geologic formations called mantle keels act as the foundation of the continental crust. The material that forms these keels thickened, stabilized, and cooled under the continental blocks to form strong, buoyant structures that can resist the relentless destructive forces of Earth's tectonic activity.

Remnants of the mantle rocks that helped form the keel can be found in tiny silicate and sulfide inclusions hidden inside these superdeep diamonds. Typically flaws in normal gem diamonds, these inclusions are the best friends of a geoscientist. They were identified, isolated, studied crystallographically, and then radiometrically dated to determine their geologic ages.

This work was carried out by researchers at the University of Alberta and the Carnegie Institution for Science, as well as by other teams of diamond specialists at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, University of Bristol, and the University of Padua. It required many steps, including shipping the diamonds around the world several times, and deployed some of the most precise mass spectrometers and X-ray diffractometers available.

"The study of such rare samples with a variety of measurement techniques required major teamwork. But even more remarkable is how careful analyses of such minute amounts of material can shed light on the evolution of Earth's largest continental landmasses," Timmerman explained.

"The age of these inclusions provides a record of when buoyant mantle was added to Gondwana from below, thereby scaffolding, underpinning, and growing the supercontinent" added Shirey.

Then, about 120 million years ago, the supercontinent once buoyed by the rocks that housed these diamonds started to break up and, eventually, 30 million years later -- around 90 million years ago -- the diamonds -- and the inclusions trapped inside them -- were brought to the Earth's surface in violent volcanic eruptions of diamond-bearing kimberlite magma.

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Mummified mice discovered atop sky-high Andean volcanoes

They were the summits of 20,000-foot volcanoes. Amid the driest desert on Earth. Where temperatures never breached freezing, where less than half of sea-level oxygen quenched lungs, where gale-force winds scoured the hardscrabble rocks littering the peaks.

So when archaeologists first reported stumbling across a few mouse cadavers during expeditions to several Andean peaks in the 1970s and '80s, they figured, naturally, that the rodents must have hitched a ride with the Incas who once pilgrimaged a thousand-plus miles to what they considered sacred sites.

Those apexes served as altars for Capacocha, the ritual sacrifice of children to several Incan gods. Maybe, the thinking went, the mice had scurried into firewood or other supplies hauled up the slopes by the Incas. Or they were among the animal sacrifices that sometimes accompanied the human.

"You can't fault the archaeologists for thinking this way, because what other explanation is there?" said Jay Storz, a Willa Cather Professor of biological sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "Nothing could be living up there, so they had to have been brought there."

But Storz would inadvertently cast doubt on the hypothesis in early 2020. Alongside friend and fellow mountaineer Mario Pérez Mamani, he captured a live specimen of leaf-eared mouse atop the 22,000-foot peak of Llullaillaco (zhoo-zhuh-ZHEYE'-koh), a volcano straddling the Chile-Argentina border. No mammal had ever been found living at such extreme altitude.

Alongside the capture of more live specimens, Storz and his colleagues have now reported the discovery of 13 leaf-eared mouse cadavers across the summits of three neighboring volcanoes -- Salín, Púlar and Copiapó -- that each stretch nearly 4 miles above sea level.

"These are basically freeze-dried, mummified mice," Storz said.

Analyzing the baker's dozen of mummies has only reinforced the team's conviction that the seemingly modest mice ascended the volcanoes without Incan assistance. By measuring concentrations of carbon-14, an atom that decays at a known rate, the team determined that the eight mummies atop Salín and one on Copiapó died no more than a few decades ago, likely after 1955. The four mummies on Púlar perished, at most, 350 years ago -- a full century after the last of the Incan empire fell to Spanish invaders.

"It now seems more and more clear," Storz said, "that the mice got there of their own accord."

The mummified state of the mice also helped preserve their DNA, allowing Storz's collaborators from the University of Montana to compare genetic variation among leaf-eared mice collected in the lowlands, midlands and highlands of Atacama Desert. Analyzing that variation across members of a species can help trace the evolutionary history of populations separated by distance, barriers or, in this case, altitude.

Storz and his colleagues wondered whether the genomes of the skyscraping, mummified mice might represent a distinct subpopulation of the leaf-eared rodent -- one with a colonization history different from that of their lower-dwelling peers.

"Our genomic data indicate no: that the mice from the summits, and those from the flanks or the base of the volcanoes in the surrounding desert terrain, are all one big happy family," Storz said, citing it as more evidence that the mummies were not hitchhikers but mountaineers.

In fact, the team found that two pairs of the leaf-eared mummies on Salín were closely related, possibly siblings or parents and offspring. And it noted another telltale: the equal ratio of males to females among the mummies. Combined with the recent discovery of other live specimens and mouse burrows in the heights of the Puna de Atacama, or Atacama Plateau, Storz said it seems that the leaf-eared mouse is not just touring the volcanic summits, but somehow living on them.

"It's exactly what you'd expect," he said, "if you were to capture a set of mice from some localized area in an environment that's habitable."

Which is bewildering, Storz said, given that the Puna de Atacama ranks among the most inhospitable locales on the planet -- one so arid, cold and oxygen-poor that NASA has visited the Atacama to practice searching for life on Mars.

"Even at the base of the volcanoes, the mice are living in an extreme, Martian environment," he said. "And then, on the summits of the volcanoes, it's even more so. It feels like outer space.

"It just boggles the mind that any kind of animal, let alone a warm-blooded mammal, could be surviving and functioning in that environment. When you experience it all firsthand, it even further impresses upon you: How in God's name is anything living up there?"

It's one of a few questions that the researchers are continuing to pursue. Members of Storz's lab and colleagues in Santiago, Chile, have since established colonies of leaf-eared mice collected from various altitudes. By acclimating each group to conditions that simulate the Puna de Atacama at 20,000 feet, the researchers hope to pinpoint whatever physiological adaptations are helping the rodents cope.

Even more fundamental is the question of what would drive the mice to such heights in the first place. Like most small rodents, the leaf-eared mouse -- which grows to about 2 ounces -- spends a fair amount of its time, energy and attention avoiding predators. And even in the Puna de Atacama, those predators are numerous: foxes, mountain lions, smaller cats, birds of prey.

Could the dangers imposed by the Atacama summits -- the near-absence of water, the seeming lack of food, the threat of freezing to death -- really be worth the promise of escaping predation all together?

"Certainly, if you're hunkering down on top of a 6,000-meter volcano, you're at least safe from that," Storz said. "You just have other things to worry about.

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NASA's Webb discovers new feature in Jupiter's atmosphere

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a new, never-before-seen feature in Jupiter's atmosphere. The high-speed jet stream, which spans more than 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide, sits over Jupiter's equator above the main cloud decks. The discovery of this jet is giving insights into how the layers of Jupiter's famously turbulent atmosphere interact with each other, and how Webb is uniquely capable of tracking those features.

"This is something that totally surprised us," said Ricardo Hueso of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, lead author on the paper describing the findings. "What we have always seen as blurred hazes in Jupiter's atmosphere now appear as crisp features that we can track along with the planet's fast rotation."

The research team analyzed data from Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured in July 2022. The Early Release Science program -- jointly led by Imke de Pater from the University of California, Berkeley and Thierry Fouchet from the Observatory of Paris -- was designed to take images of Jupiter 10 hours apart, or one Jupiter day, in four different filters, each uniquely able to detect changes in small features at different altitudes of Jupiter's atmosphere.

"Even though various ground-based telescopes, spacecraft like NASA's Juno and Cassini, and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have observed the Jovian system's changing weather patterns, Webb has already provided new findings on Jupiter's rings, satellites, and its atmosphere," de Pater noted.

While Jupiter is different from Earth in many ways -- Jupiter is a gas giant, Earth is a rocky, temperate world -- both planets have layered atmospheres. Infrared, visible, radio, and ultraviolet light wavelengths observed by these other missions detect the lower, deeper layers of the planet's atmosphere -- where gigantic storms and ammonia ice clouds reside.

On the other hand, Webb's look farther into the near-infrared than before is sensitive to the higher-altitude layers of the atmosphere, around 15-30 miles (25-50 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops. In near-infrared imaging, high-altitude hazes typically appear blurry, with enhanced brightness over the equatorial region. With Webb, finer details are resolved within the bright hazy band.

The newly discovered jet stream travels at about 320 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour), twice the sustained winds of a Category 5 hurricane here on Earth. It is located around 25 miles (40 kilometers) above the clouds, in Jupiter's lower stratosphere.

By comparing the winds observed by Webb at high altitudes, to the winds observed at deeper layers from Hubble, the team could measure how fast the winds change with altitude and generate wind shears.

While Webb's exquisite resolution and wavelength coverage allowed for the detection of small cloud features used to track the jet, the complementary observations from Hubble taken one day after the Webb observations were also crucial to determine the base state of Jupiter's equatorial atmosphere and observe the development of convective storms in Jupiter's equator not connected to the jet.

"We knew the different wavelengths of Webb and Hubble would reveal the three-dimensional structure of storm clouds, but we were also able to use the timing of the data to see how rapidly storms develop," added team member Michael Wong of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the associated Hubble observations.

The researchers are looking forward to additional observations of Jupiter with Webb to determine if the jet's speed and altitude change over time.

"Jupiter has a complicated but repeatable pattern of winds and temperatures in its equatorial stratosphere, high above the winds in the clouds and hazes measured at these wavelengths," explained team member Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. "If the strength of this new jet is connected to this oscillating stratospheric pattern, we might expect the jet to vary considerably over the next 2 to 4 years -- it'll be really exciting to test this theory in the years to come."

"It's amazing to me that, after years of tracking Jupiter's clouds and winds from numerous observatories, we still have more to learn about Jupiter, and features like this jet can remain hidden from view until these new NIRCam images were taken in 2022," continued Fletcher.

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Increased West Antarctic Ice Sheet melting 'unavoidable'

Scientists ran simulations on the UK's national supercomputer to investigate ocean-driven melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet: how much is unavoidable and must be adapted to, and how much melting the international community still has control over through reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Taking into account climate variability like El Niño, they found no significant difference between mid-range emissions scenarios and the most ambitious targets of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Even under a best-case scenario of 1.5°C global temperature rise, melting will increase three times faster than during the 20th century.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing ice and is Antarctica's largest contributor to sea-level rise. Previous modelling finds this loss could be driven by warming of the Southern Ocean, particularly the Amundsen Sea region. Collectively the West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough ice to raise global mean sea-level by up to five metres.

Around the world millions of people live near the coast and these communities will be greatly impacted by sea level rise. A better understanding of the future changes will allow policymakers to plan ahead and adapt more readily.

Lead author Dr Kaitlin Naughten, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey says:

"It looks like we've lost control of melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. If we wanted to preserve it in its historical state, we would have needed action on climate change decades ago. The bright side is that by recognising this situation in advance, the world will have more time to adapt to the sea level rise that's coming. If you need to abandon or substantially re-engineer a coastal region, having 50 years lead time is going to make all the difference."

The team simulated four future scenarios of the 21st century, plus one historical scenario of the 20th century. The future scenarios either stabilised global temperature rise at the targets set out by the Paris Agreement, 1.5°C and 2°C, or followed standard scenarios for medium and high carbon emissions.

All scenarios resulted in significant and widespread future warming of the Amundsen Sea and increased melting of its ice-shelves. The three lower-range scenarios followed nearly identical pathways over the 21st century. Even under the best-case scenario, warming of the Amundsen Sea sped up by about a factor of three, and melting of the floating ice shelves which stabilise the inland glaciers followed, though it did begin to flatten by the end of the century.

The worst-case scenario had more ice shelf melting than the others, but only after 2045. The authors heed that this high fossil fuel scenario, where emissions increase rapidly, is considered unlikely to occur.

This study presents sobering future projections of Amundsen Sea ice-shelf melting but does not undermine the importance of mitigation in limiting the impacts of climate change.

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Researchers identify the oldest pieces of Baltic amber found on the Iberian Peninsula: imports began over 5,000 years ago

A team of scientists from the Universities of Granada and Cambridge, as well as the Government of Catalonia, have identified the oldest pieces of Baltic amber ever found on the Iberian Peninsula, revealing that this luxury material used in jewellery and handicrafts around the world was already being imported more than 5,000 years ago.

The research was led by UGR lecturer Mercedes Murillo-Barroso and involved the collaboration of Marcos Martinón-Torres of the University of Cambridge and Araceli Martín Cólliga of the Government of Catalonia. According to Murillo-Barroso, the work "allows us to say with confidence that the arrival of Baltic amber on the Iberian Peninsula occurred at least in the 4th millennium BC, more than a millennium earlier than we thought, and that it was probably part of wider trade networks linked to the south of France."

Trade is one of the many mechanisms through which we establish social relations, and often the objects that are exchanged are not necessarily consumer goods needed to live, but rather decorative, luxury or symbolic objects. Sometimes, especially in adverse conditions, having trade networks means having a network of mutual support, but these trade networks can also generate social inequalities and relations of dependency, especially if not all the community enjoys equal access to the networks or if the objects exchanged are unequal.

In prehistoric times, amber, a fossil resin, was certainly not a raw material necessary for the development of daily life, but it was highly valued and was exchanged via the extensive trade networks that were established. The use of the multiple amber deposits on the Iberian Peninsula since the Upper Palaeolithic has been documented and, thanks to research carried out by archaeologists over the years, we know that from the 4th millennium BC onwards Sicilian amber began to reach the Iberian Peninsula through Mediterranean trade networks. However, until now it was believed that Baltic amber did not reach the Peninsula until the 2nd millennium BC, at which point it would become the primary raw material, replacing other types of amber such as Peninsular or Sicilian amber.

Regarding their research article, published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, Mercedes Murillo-Barroso affirms: "we present the standard infrared spectroscopy analysis of an amber bead of Baltic origin found at the Cova del Frare site in a context dated between 3634-3363 cal BC."

"The site, which is truly exceptional, illustrates the transition between the Middle Neolithic of the 'Sepulcrand the Late Neolithic of Véraza," explains Araceli Martín Cólliga, director of the excavations at the site.

"As there are no written documents from prehistoric times, the only way to study human activity is through archaeological remains. To study the transport and exchange of materials, we use very precise analytical techniques, such as infrared spectroscopy, which give us a kind of fingerprint of the amber deposits and objects," says Mercedes Murillo-Barroso.

Based on a large amount of data and this type of analysis, combined with other bodies of archaeological information, the study confirms that Baltic amber arrived in the northeastern Iberian Peninsula as early as the Neolithic, which is "something that must be understood in the context of trade during this period of transition and change, either by agents of a declining 'Sepulcres de Fossa' culture, or by those who would set new cultural trends at the end of the Neolithic, led by the Véraza groups of Catalonia and southern France, and not necessarily as direct contact with northern Europe." In fact, there is currently no evidence of Baltic amber crossing the Ebro at such an early date into the southern Iberian Peninsula, where the use of Sicilian amber was predominant as a result of the Mediterranean networks.

The Baltic region is home to what is perhaps the best amber in the world for use in jewellery. Indeed, it was highly sought after in classical Rome and now sustains a whole industry, for example in Poland. We now know that it began to arrive in Iberia as early as the 4th millennium BC, and that it gradually replaced Peninsular and Sicilian amber.

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Challenging prehistoric gender roles: Research finds that women were hunters, too

It's a familiar story to many of us: In prehistoric times, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Women were not physically capable of hunting because their anatomy was different from men. And because men were hunters, they drove human evolution.

But that story's not true, according to research by University of Delaware anthropology professor Sarah Lacy, which was recently published in Scientific American and in two papers in the journal American Anthropologist.

Lacy and her colleague Cara Ocobock from the University of Notre Dame examined the division of labor according to sex during the Paleolithic era, approximately 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago. Through a review of current archaeological evidence and literature, they found little evidence to support the idea that roles were assigned specifically to each sex. The team also looked at female physiology and found that women were not only physically capable of being hunters, but that there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting.

Lacy is a biological anthropologist who studies the health of early humans, and Ocobock is a physiologist who makes analogies between modern day and the fossil record. Friends in graduate school, they collaborated after "complaining about a number of papers that had come out that used this default null hypothesis that cavemen had strong gendered division of labor, the males hunt, females gather things. We were like, 'Why is that the default? We have so much evidence that that's not the case,'" Lacy said.

The researchers found examples of equality for both sexes in ancient tools, diet, art, burials and anatomy.

"People found things in the past and they just automatically gendered them male and didn't acknowledge the fact that everyone we found in the past has these markers, whether in their bones or in stone tools that are being placed in their burials. We can't really tell who made what, right? We can't say, 'Oh, only males flintknap,' because there's no signature left on the stone tool that tells us who made it," Lacy said, referring to the method by which stone tools were made. "But from what evidence we do have, there appears to be almost no sex differences in roles."

The team also examined the question of whether anatomical and physiological differences between men and women prevented women from hunting. They found that men have an advantage over women in activities requiring speed and power, such as sprinting and throwing, but that women have an advantage over men in activities requiring endurance, such as running. Both sets of activities were essential to hunting in ancient times.

The team highlighted the role of the hormone estrogen, which is more prominent in women than men, as a key component in conferring that advantage. Estrogen can increase fat metabolism, which gives muscles a longer-lasting energy source and can regulate muscle breakdown, preventing muscles from wearing down. Scientists have traced estrogen receptors, proteins that direct the hormone to the right place in the body, back to 600 million years ago.

"When we take a deeper look at the anatomy and the modern physiology and then actually look at the skeletal remains of ancient people, there's no difference in trauma patterns between males and females, because they're doing the same activities," Lacy said.

During the Paleolithic era, most people lived in small groups. To Lacy, the idea that only part of the group would hunt didn't make sense.

"You live in such a small society. You have to be really, really flexible," she said. "Everyone has to be able to pick up any role at any time. It just seems like the obvious thing, but people weren't taking it that way."

Man the Hunter

The theory of men as hunters and women as gatherers first gained notoriety in 1968, when anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore published Man the Hunter, a collection of scholarly papers presented at a symposium in 1966. The authors made the case that hunting advanced human evolution by adding meat to prehistoric diets, contributing to the growth of bigger brains, compared to our primate cousins. The authors assumed all hunters were male.

Lacy points to that gender bias by previous scholars as a reason why the concept became widely accepted in academia, eventually spreading to popular culture. Television cartoons, feature films, museum exhibits and textbooks reinforced the idea. When female scholars published research to the contrary, their work was largely ignored or devalued.

"There were women who were publishing about this in the '70s, '80s and '90s, but their work kept getting relegated to, 'Oh, that's a feminist critique or a feminist approach,'" Lacy said. "This was before any of the work on genetics and a lot of the work on physiology and the role of estrogen had come out. We wanted to both lift back up the arguments that they had already made and add to it all the new stuff."

Lacy said the "man the hunter" theory continues to influence the discipline. While she acknowledges that much more research needs to be done about the lives of prehistoric people -- especially women -- she hopes her view that labor was divided among both sexes will become the default approach for research in the future.

For 3 million years, males and females both participated in subsistence gathering for their communities, and dependence on meat and hunting was driven by both sexes, Lacy said.

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Black holes could come in 'perfect pairs' in an ever expanding Universe

Researchers from the University of Southampton, together with colleagues from the universities of Cambridge and Barcelona, have shown it's theoretically possible for black holes to exist in perfectly balanced pairs -- held in equilibrium by a cosmological force -- mimicking a single black hole.

Black holes are massive astronomical objects that have such a strong gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape. They are incredibly dense. A black hole could pack the mass of the Earth into a space the size of a pea.

Conventional theories about black holes, based on Einstein's theory of General Relativity, typically explain how static or spinning black holes can exist on their own, isolated in space. Black holes in pairs would eventually be thwarted by gravity attracting and colliding them together.

However, this is true if one assumes the Universe is standing still. But what about one which is constantly moving? Could pairs of black holes exist in harmony in an ever expanding Universe, perhaps masquerading as one?

"The standard model of cosmology assumes that the Big Bang brought the Universe into existence and that, approximately 9.8 billion years ago, it became dominated by a mysterious force, coined 'dark energy', which accelerates the Universe at a constant rate," says Professor Oscar Dias of the University of Southampton.

Scientists refer to this mysterious force as a 'cosmological constant'. In a Universe explained by Einstein's theory with a cosmological constant, black holes are immersed in a cosmological accelerated background. This moves the theoretical goal posts over how black holes can interact and exist together.

Through complex numerical methods, the team behind this latest study show that two static (non-spinning) black holes can exist in equilibrium -- their gravitational attraction offset by the expansion associated with a cosmological constant. Even in the acceleration of an ever expanding Universe, the black holes remain locked at a fixed distance from one another. As hard as expansion may try to pull them apart, the gravitational attraction compensates.

"Viewed from a distance, a pair of black holes whose attraction is offset by cosmic expansion would look like a single black hole. It might be hard to detect whether it is a single black hole or a pair of them," comments Professor Dias.

Professor Jorge Santos of the University of Cambridge adds: "Our theory is proven for a pair of static black holes, but we believe it could be applied to spinning ones too. Also, it seems plausible that our solution could hold true for three or even four black holes, opening up a whole range of possibilities."

Read more at Science Daily

Cobalt-free battery for cleaner, greener power

High-capacity and reliable rechargeable batteries are a critical component of many devices and even modes of transport. They play a key role in the shift to a greener world. A wide variety of elements are used in their production, including cobalt, the production of which contributes to some environmental, economic, and social issues. For the first time, a team including researchers from the University of Tokyo presents a viable alternative to cobalt which in some ways can outperform state-of-the-art battery chemistry. It also survives a large number of recharge cycles, and the underlying theory can be applied to other problems.

The chances are, you are reading this article on a laptop or smartphone, and if not, you probably own at least one of those. Inside either device, and many others, you will find a lithium-ion battery (LIB). For decades now, LIBs have been the standard way of powering portable or mobile electronic devices and machines. As the world transitions from fossil fuels, they are seen as an important step for use in electric cars and home batteries for those with solar panels. But just as batteries have a positive end and a negative end, LIBs have negative points set against their positive ones.

For one thing, although they are some of the most power-dense portable power sources available, many people wish that LIBs could yield a larger energy density to make them either last longer or power even more demanding machines. Also, they can survive a large number of recharge cycles, but they also degrade with time; it would be better for everyone if batteries could survive more recharge cycles and maintain their capacities for longer. But perhaps the most alarming problem with current LIBs lies in one of the elements used for their construction.

Cobalt is widely used for a key part of LIBs, the electrodes. All batteries work in a similar way: Two electrodes, one positive and one negative, promote the flow of lithium ions between them in what's called the electrolyte when connected to an external circuit. Cobalt, however, is a rare element; so rare in fact that there is only one main source of it at present: a series of mines located in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Many issues have been reported over the years about the environmental consequences of these mines, as well as the labor conditions there, including the use of child labor. From a supply perspective also, the source of cobalt is an issue due to political and economic instability in the region.

"There are many reasons we want to transition away from using cobalt in order to improve lithium-ion batteries," said Professor Atsuo Yamada from the Department of Chemical System Engineering. "For us the challenge is a technical one, but its impact could be environmental, economic, social and technological. We are pleased to report a new alternative to cobalt by using a novel combination of elements in the electrodes, including lithium, nickel, manganese, silicon and oxygen -- all far more common and less problematic elements to produce and work with."

The new electrodes and electrolyte Yamada and his team created are not only devoid of cobalt, but they actually improve upon current battery chemistry in some ways. The new LIBs' energy density is about 60% higher, which could equate to longer life, and it can deliver 4.4 volts, as opposed to about 3.2-3.7 volts of typical LIBs. But one of the most surprising technological achievements was to improve upon the recharge characteristics. Test batteries with the new chemistry were able to fully charge and discharge over 1,000 cycles (simulating three years of full use and charging), whilst only losing about 20% of their storage capacity.

"We are delighted with the results so far, but getting here was not without its challenges. It was a struggle trying to suppress various undesirable reactions that were taking place in early versions of our new battery chemistries which could have drastically reduced the longevity of the batteries," said Yamada. "And we still have some way to go, as there are lingering minor reactions to mitigate in order to improve the safety and longevity even further. At present, we are confident that this research will lead to improved batteries for many applications, but some, where extreme durability and lifespan are required, might not be satisfied just yet."

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Ancient sea monster remains reveal oldest mega-predatory pliosaur

The fossils of a 170-million-year-old ancient marine reptile from the Age of Dinosaurs have been identified as the oldest-known mega-predatory pliosaur -- a group of ocean-dwelling reptiles closely related to the famous long-necked plesiosaurs. The findings are rare and add new knowledge to the evolution of plesiosaurs. The study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The fossils were found 40 years ago in north-eastern France. An international team of palaeontologists from the Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld in Germany, the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg and The Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden have now analysed them and identified them as a new pliosaur genus: Lorrainosaurus.

Pliosaurs were a type of plesiosaur with short necks and massive skulls. They appeared over 200 million years ago, but remained minor components of marine ecosystems until suddenly developing into enormous apex predators. The new study shows that this adaptive shift followed feeding niche differentiation and the global decline of other predatory marine reptiles over 170 million years ago.

Lorrainosaurus is the oldest large-bodied pliosaur represented by an associated skeleton. It had jaws over 1.3 m long with large conical teeth and a bulky 'torpedo-shaped' body propelled by four flipper-like limbs.

"Lorrainosaurus was one of the first truly huge pliosaurs. It gave rise to a dynasty of marine reptile mega-predators that ruled the oceans for around 80 million years," explains Sven Sachs, a researcher at the Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld, who led the study.

This giant reptile probably reached over 6 m from snout to tail, and lived during the early Middle Jurassic period. Intriguingly, very little is known about plesiosaurs from that time.

"Our identification of Lorrainosaurus as one of the earliest mega-predatory pliosaurs demonstrates that these creatures emerged immediately after a landmark restructuring of marine predator ecosystems across the Early-to-Middle Jurassic boundary, some 175 to 171 million years ago. This event profoundly affected many marine reptile groups and brought mega-predatory pliosaurids to dominance over 'fish-like' ichthyosaurs, ancient marine crocodile relatives, and other large-bodied predatory plesiosaurs," adds Daniel Madzia from the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who co-led the study.

Pliosaurs were some of the most successful marine predators of their time.

"Famous examples, such as Pliosaurus and Kronosaurus -- some of the world's largest pliosaurs -- were absolutely enormous with body-lengths exceeding 10 m. They were ecological equivalents of today's Killer whales and would have eaten a range of prey including squid-like cephalopods, large fish and other marine reptiles. These have all been found as preserved gut contents," said senior co-author Benjamin Kear, Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Researcher in Palaeontology at The Museum of Evolution, Uppsala University.

The recovered bones and teeth of Lorrainosaurus represent remnants of what was once a complete skeleton that decomposed and was dispersed across the ancient sea floor by currents and scavengers.

"The remains were unearthed in 1983 from a road cutting near Metz in Lorraine, north-eastern France. Palaeontology enthusiasts from the Association minéralogique et paléontologique d'Hayange et des environs recognised the significance of their discovery and donated the fossils to the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg," said co-author Ben Thuy, Curator at the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg.

Other than a brief report published in 1994, the fossils of Lorrainosaurus remained obscure until this new study re-evaluated the finds. Lorrainosaurus indicates that the reign of gigantic mega-predatory pliosaurs must have commenced earlier than previously thought, and was locally responsive to major ecological changes affecting marine environments covering what is now western Europe during the early Middle Jurassic.

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