A planet hotter than most stars

Astronomers at The Ohio State University and Vanderbilt University have discovered a planet that is so hot, its temperature rivals most stars.

A newly discovered Jupiter-like world is so hot that it's stretching the definition of the word "planet."

With a day-side temperature of 4,600 Kelvin (more than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit), planet KELT-9b is hotter than most stars, and only 1,200 Kelvin (about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than our own sun.

In this week's issue of the journal Nature and at a presentation at the American Astronomical Society spring meeting, an international research team led by astronomers at The Ohio State University and Vanderbilt University describes a planet with some very unusual features.

For instance, it's a gas giant 2.8 times more massive than Jupiter but only half as dense, because the extreme radiation from its host star has caused its atmosphere to puff up like a balloon. And because it is tidally locked to its star -- as the Moon is to Earth -- the day side of the planet is perpetually bombarded by stellar radiation, and as a result is so hot that molecules such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane can't form there. The properties of the night side are still mysterious -- molecules may be able to form there, but probably only temporarily.

"It's a planet by any of the typical definitions based on mass, but its atmosphere is almost certainly unlike any other planet we've ever seen just because of the temperature of its day side," said Scott Gaudi, professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University and a leader of the study.

KELT-9b orbits a star, dubbed KELT-9, which is more than twice as large and nearly twice as hot as our sun. Keivan Stassun, a professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt who directed the study with Gaudi said, "KELT-9 radiates so much ultraviolet radiation that it may completely evaporate the planet. Or, if gas giant planets like KELT-9b possess solid rocky cores as some theories suggest, the planet may be boiled down to a barren rock, like Mercury."

That is, if the star doesn't grow to engulf it first. "KELT-9 will swell to become a red giant star in about a billion years," said Stassun. "The long-term prospects for life, or real estate for that matter, on KELT-9b are not looking good."

Given that its atmosphere is constantly blasted with high levels of ultraviolet radiation, the planet may even be shedding a tail of evaporated planetary material like a comet, Gaudi added.

While Gaudi and Stassun spend a lot of time developing missions designed to find habitable planets in other solar systems, the scientists said there's a good reason to study worlds that are unlivable in the extreme.

"As has been highlighted by the recent discoveries from the MEarth collaboration, the planet around Proxima Centauri, and the astonishing system discovered around TRAPPIST-1, the astronomical community is clearly focused on finding Earthlike planets around small, cooler stars like our sun. They are easy targets and there's a lot that can be learned about potentially habitable planets orbiting very low-mass stars in general. On the other hand, because KELT-9b's host star is bigger and hotter than the sun, it complements those efforts and provides a kind of touchstone for understanding how planetary systems form around hot, massive stars," Gaudi said.

Stassun added, "As we seek to develop a complete picture of the variety of other worlds out there, it's important to know not only how planets form and evolve, but also when and under what conditions they are destroyed."

How was this new planet found?

In 2014, astronomers using the KELT-North telescope at Winer Observatory in Arizona noticed a tiny drop in the star's brightness -- only about half of one percent -- that indicated that a planet may have passed in front of the star. The brightness dipped once every 1.5 days, which means the planet completes a "yearly" circuit around its star every 1.5 days.

Subsequent observations confirmed the signal to be due to a planet, and revealed it to be what astronomers call a "hot Jupiter" -- the ideal kind of planet for the KELT telescopes to spot.

KELT is short for "Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope." Astronomers at Ohio State, Vanderbilt University, and Lehigh University jointly operate two KELTs (one each in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres) in order to fill a large gap in the available technologies for finding extrasolar planets.

Other telescopes are designed to look at very faint stars in much small sections of the sky, and at very high resolution. The KELTs, in contrast, look at millions of very bright stars at once, over broad sections of sky, and at low resolution.

It's a low-cost means of planet hunting, using mostly off-the-shelf technology: whereas a traditional astronomical telescope costs millions of dollars to build, the hardware for a KELT telescope runs less than $75,000.

"This discovery is a testament to the discovery power of small telescopes, and the ability of citizen scientists to directly contribute to cutting-edge scientific research," said Joshua Pepper, astronomer and assistant professor of physics at Lehigh University, who built the two KELT telescopes.

The astronomers hope to take a closer look at KELT-9b with other telescopes -- including Spitzer, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and eventually the James Webb Space Telescope. Observations with HST would enable them to see if the planet really does have a cometary tail, and allow them to determine how much longer that planet will survive its current hellish condition.

Study co-authors from Ohio State include Daniel J. Stevens, Marshall C. Johnson, Matthew Penney, Andrew Gould and Richard Pogge, all of the Department of Astronomy.

American partner institutions include Vanderbilt University, Fisk University, Pennsylvania State University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, University of Notre Dame, Lehigh University, NASA Ames Research Center, Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, Swarthmore College, IPAC, Brigham Young University, University of California-Santa Cruz, University of Wyoming, Louisiana State University, University of Louisville, Spot Observatory in Nashville, Westminster College, Kutztown University, University of Hawaii, University of Washington, Texas A&M University, Wellesley College, and Winer Observatory in Sonoita, AZ. International team members are from Denmark, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Switzerland, Australia, Germany and South Africa.

Read more at Science Daily

Hubble's tale of two exoplanets: Nature vs. nurture

This diagram compares Hubble Space Telescope observations of two "hot Jupiter"-class planets orbiting very closely to different sunlike stars. Astronomers measured how light from each parent star is filtered through each planet's atmosphere. HAT-P-38 b did have a water signature indicated by the absorption-feature peak in the spectrum. This is interpreted as indicating the upper atmosphere is free of clouds or hazes. WASP-67 b, has a flat spectrum that lacks any water-absorption feature, suggesting most of the planet's atmosphere is masked by high-altitude clouds.

Is it a case of nature versus nurture when it comes to two "cousin" exoplanets? In a unique experiment, scientists used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study two "hot Jupiter" exoplanets. Because these planets are virtually the same size and temperature, and orbit around nearly identical stars at the same distance, the team hypothesized that their atmospheres should be alike. What they found surprised them.

Lead researcher Giovanni Bruno of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, explained, "What we're seeing in looking at the two atmospheres is that they're not the same. One planet -- WASP-67 b -- is cloudier than the other -- HAT-P-38 b. We don't see what we're expecting, and we need to understand why we find this difference."

The team used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 to look at the planets' spectral fingerprints, which measure chemical composition. "The effect that clouds have on the spectral signature of water allows us to measure the amount of clouds in the atmosphere," Bruno said. "More clouds mean that the water feature is reduced." The teams found that for WASP-67 b there are more clouds at the altitudes probed by these measurements.

"This tells us that there had to be something in their past that is changing the way these planets look," said Bruno.

Today the planets whirl around their yellow dwarf stars once every 4.5 Earth days, tightly orbiting their stars closer than Mercury orbits our sun. But in the past, the planets probably migrated inward toward the star from the locations where they formed.

Perhaps one planet formed differently than the other, under a different set of circumstances. "You can say it's nature versus nurture," explains co-investigator Kevin Stevenson. "Right now, they appear to have the same physical properties. So, if their measured composition is defined by their current state, then it should be the same for both planets. But that's not the case. Instead, it looks like their formation histories could be playing an important role."

The clouds on these hot, Jupiter-like gas giants are nothing like those on Earth. Instead, they are probably alkali clouds, composed of molecules such as sodium sulfide and potassium chloride. The average temperature on each planet is more than 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

The exoplanets are tidally locked, with the same side always facing the parent star. This means they have a very hot day-side and a cooler night-side. Instead of sporting multiple cloud bands like Jupiter does, each probably has just one broad equatorial band that slowly moves the heat around from the day-side to the night-side.

Read more at Science Daily

Genetic study shakes up the elephant family tree

A new study reconfigures the elephant family tree, placing the giant extinct elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus closer to the African forest elephant, Loxodonta cyclotis, than to the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus, which was once thought to be its closest living relative.

New research reveals that a species of giant elephant that lived 1.5 million to 100,000 years ago -- ranging across Eurasia before it went extinct -- is more closely related to today's African forest elephant than the forest elephant is to its nearest living relative, the African savanna elephant.

The study challenges a long-held assumption among paleontologists that the extinct giant, Palaeoloxodon antiquus, was most closely related to the Asian elephant. The findings, reported in the journal eLife, also add to the evidence that today's African elephants belong to two distinct species, not one, as was once assumed.

Understanding their genetic heritage is key to keeping today's elephants from going extinct, said University of Illinois animal sciences professor Alfred Roca, a co-author of the new study. Roca led research in the early 2000s that provided the first genetic evidence that African elephants belonged to two distinct species. Subsequent studies have confirmed this, as does the new research.

"We've had really good genetic evidence since the year 2001 that forest and savanna elephants in Africa are two different species, but it's been very difficult to convince conservation agencies that that's the case," Roca said. "With the new genetic evidence from Palaeoloxodon, it becomes almost impossible to argue that the elephants now living in Africa belong to a single species."

For the new analysis, scientists looked at two lines of evidence from African and Asian elephants, woolly mammoths and P. antiquus. They analyzed mitochondrial DNA, which is passed only from mothers to their offspring, and nuclear DNA, which is a blend of paternal and maternal genes.

The researchers relied on the most sensitive laboratory techniques to extract and amplify the DNA in P. antiquus bones from two sites in Germany -- among the first DNA successfully collected from such ancient bones from a temperate climate.

"Up until now, genetic research on bones that are hundreds of thousands of years old has almost exclusively relied on fossils collected in permafrost," said Matthias Meyer, a researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and first author of the paper. "It is encouraging to see that recent advances in laboratory methods are now enabling us to recover very old DNA sequences also from warmer places, where DNA degrades at a much faster rate."

The mitochondrial analysis revealed that a shared ancestor of P. antiquus and the African forest elephant lived sometime between 1.5 million and 3.5 million years ago. Their closest shared ancestor with the African savanna elephant lived between 3.9 and 7 million years ago.

The nuclear DNA told the same story, the researchers report.

"From the study of bone morphology, people thought Palaeoloxodon was closer to the Asian elephant. But from the molecular data, we found they are much closer to the African forest elephant," said research scientist Yasuko Ishida, who led the mitochondrial sequencing of modern elephants with Roca.

"Palaeoloxodon antiquus is a sister to the African forest elephant; it is not a sister to the Asian elephant or the African savanna elephant," Roca said.

"Paleogenomics has already revolutionized our view of human evolution, and now the same is happening for other mammalian groups," said study co-author Michael Hofreiter from the University of Potsdam, an expert on evolutionary genomics. "I am sure elephants are only the first step and in the future, we will see surprises with regard to the evolution of other species as well."Michael

Understanding the genetic heritage of elephants is vital to protecting the living remnant populations in Africa and beyond, Roca said.

Read more at Science Daily

Ancient Sloth and Bison Fossils Found During LA Metro Dig

Sloth and bison fossils.

It's been around 11,000 years since giant ground sloths roamed North America, but evidence of one of them recently surfaced in Los Angeles, during excavation for a transit project managed by the LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Fossils from a giant sloth and a bison were unearthed on May 16 in a layer of sandy clay about 16 feet (5 meters) below Crenshaw Boulevard between 63rd Street and Hyde Park Boulevard, according to a post published online May 31 by The Source, a blog about the LA Metro.

The rocky fragments were identified on May 24 by Gary Takeuchi, collections manager at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, as pieces of leg bones — one belonging to a sloth and the other to a bison, LA Metro representatives said in a statement.

Fossils of other ancient massive beasts, which roamed North America during the last ice age, have unexpectedly appeared during other LA construction projects in recent years. In April, work on a subway line extension near the La Brea Tar Pits was temporarily halted while paleontologists recovered first a camel bone and then a bone from an elephant relative, a mammoth or mastodon. And in December 2016, workers discovered a skull and partial tusks, as well as a section of mammoth tusk, also close by the tar pits.

In fact, fossils such as these turn up more frequently in LA than you might think, Takeuchi told Live Science in an email.

"Fossils periodically are found during excavation due to construction in the LA area. These fossils would probably not have been found if it were not for this construction unearthing them," he said.

The fossil belonging to the bison is part of a front leg, while the sloth fossil is a femur-head fragment, The Source reported. In photos that show the new finds positioned next to complete bones from the same animals, the rough and fragmented fossils don't look like much. But the trained eye of a paleontologist can quickly puzzle out the animal — and body part — that they represent, Takeuchi explained.

"The shape and size of the end of long bones can tell you what element in the body and what animal it belongs to," he said in an email. "You do not need the complete bone or animal for identification."

Read more at Discovery News

Study of Ancient Ocean Temperatures Shows Sudden Cooling That Let Life Evolve

Artist's impression of haze on Earth during the Archean Eon.

We know little about Earth's surface temperatures for the first 4 billion years or so of its history. This presents a limitation into research of life's origins on Earth and how it might arise on distant worlds.

Now researchers suggest that by resurrecting ancient enzymes they could estimate the temperatures in which these organisms likely evolved billions of years ago. The scientists recently published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We need a better understanding of not only how life first evolved on Earth, but how life and the Earth's environment co-evolved over billions of years of geological history," said lead author Amanda Garcia, a paleogeobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "A similar co-evolution seems certain to be the case for any life elsewhere in the Universe."

 Garcia and her colleagues focused on the history of Earth's surface temperatures. Rocks offer many clues to deduce temperatures over the last 550 million years in the Phanerozoic Era, when complex, multicellular life took off, including that of humans. However, few such "paleo-thermometers" exist for the earlier Precambrian Era, spanning the Earth's formation 4.6 billion years ago and the rise of life.

Earlier geological evidence has suggested that 3.5 billion years ago, during the Archean Eon, the oceans were 131 degrees to 185 degrees F (55 degrees to 85 degrees C). They cooled dramatically to current average temperatures of 59 degrees F (15 degrees C). Scientists made these estimates by examining oxygen and silicon isotopes in marine rocks. Quartz-rich rocks in the seabed, known as cherts, have higher levels of the heavier oxygen-18 and silicon-30 isotopes as the seawater gets colder. In principle, the ratio of heavier to lighter oxygen and silicon isotopes can shed light on ancient temperatures.

But such paleo-thermometers do not adequately take into account how these rocks or the ocean might have changed over the course of billions of years. Perhaps the isotopic ratios in seawater varied over time in response to physical or chemical alterations, such as water flows off the land or from hydrothermal vents.

The image on the left depicts what Earth might have looked like more than 3 billion years ago in the early Archean. The orange shapes represent the magnesium-rich proto-continents before plate tectonics started, although it is impossible to determine their precise shapes and locations. The ocean appears green due to a high amount of iron ions in the water at that time. The timeline traces the transition from a magnesium-rich upper continental crust to a magnesium-poor upper continental crust.

Given the uncertainties, Garcia and her colleagues sought an independent measurement of seawater temperatures in the Precambrian that centers on the behavior of biological molecules. The scientists examined an enzyme known as nucleoside diphosphate kinase (NDK), which helps manipulate the building blocks of DNA and RNA, as well as many other roles. Versions of this protein are found in virtually all living organisms, and were likely vital to many extinct organisms as well. Previous research found a correlation between the optimal temperatures of protein stability and an organism's growth.

By comparing the molecular sequences of versions of NDK in a variety of contemporary species, researchers can reconstruct the versions of NDK that might have been present in their common ancestors. By synthesizing these reconstructions, scientists can experimentally test these "resurrected" ancient proteins to find the temperature that stabilizes the protein and deduce from that the likely temperature that supported the ancient organism.

Scientists estimate when ancient enzymes might have existed by looking at their closest living relatives of their host organism. The greater the number of differences in the genetic sequences of these relatives, the longer ago their last common relative likely lived. Scientists use these differences to gauge the age of biomolecules such as the reconstructions of NDK.

Previous research had reconstructed ancient enzymes to deduce past temperatures, but some of these enzymes may have come from organisms that lived in unusually hot environments, such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents, which would not be representative of the wider ocean. Instead, Garcia and her colleagues sought to reconstruct NDK from land plants and photosynthetic bacteria living in the upper sunlit depths of oceans, presumably far away from boiling hot springs.

Microbial reefs called stromatolites are examples of biological structures found as far back as 3.7 billion years ago.

Their research suggests that Earth's surface cooled from roughly 167 degrees F (75 degrees C) about 3 billion years ago to roughly 95 degrees (35 degrees F) about 420 million years ago. These findings are consistent with previous geological and enzyme-based results.

Garcia said such a dramatic cooling is hard to fathom, emphasizing how scientists need to remember how different conditions were in the past when figuring out how life evolved over time.

"It requires a lot of effort to envision a world that does not seem to fit with the common sense of our current Earth conditions."

Read more at Discovery News

Marine Reserves Renew Hope in the Fight Against Climate Change

A humpback whale breaching off the coast of Gabon.

As the United Nations Oceans Conference gets underway this week in New York City, there is a double dose of renewed hope concerning global efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

First, an international team of researchers has determined that marine reserves help to lessen the gravity of five major environmental problems tied to climate change: ocean acidification, sea-level rise, increased intensity of storms, shifts in species distribution, and decreased productivity and oxygen availability. The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Second, President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon announced today at the UN conference his country’s creation of a massive new network of marine protected areas consisting of 9 new marine parks and 11 new aquatic reserves. The network will be the largest of its kind in Africa and will expand Gabon’s protected waters to be over 20,463 square miles. The area includes both shallow coastal regions and abyssal 2.5-mile ocean depths.

Despite the impressive size of the protected areas, less than 5 percent of the planet’s oceans has been set aside for protection. Governments now have a new tool, however, for making sizable improvements to the environment.

Underwater surveys led by the Wildlife Conservation Society, National Geographic, and Gabon’s Agence Nationale de Parcs Nationaux (ANPN) uncovered a wealth of marine biodiversity (such as this eel peering out from a enclosure of sea anemones), providing valuable information for the formulation and creation of the new marine protected area network.

Callum Roberts, a professor at the University of York’s environment department and lead author of the PNAS study, said governments can use marine preserves as a tool for meeting their commitments under the Paris Agreement on climate change, which recognized ocean ecosystems as a way to fight climate change.

“Government leaders can consider large, highly protected marine reserves as a feasible means to help their nations, and the world as a whole, to adapt and mitigate the impacts of climate change,” he said.

Roberts and his team evaluated existing peer-reviewed studies on the beneficial effects that existing marine reserves have had around the world. They determined that protecting key coastal systems — mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrasses — offers localized reductions in carbon dioxide concentrations and water acidity, as do protections of deep water fish. Such teleost, or bony, fish were found to excrete high magnesium calcite crystals that dissolve at shallow depths and raise ocean alkalinity, thereby likely helping to reduce ocean acidification.

Gabon’s marine protected area network will help protect pelagic fish populations such as these rainbow runners.

Co-author Bethan O’Leary, a research fellow at the University of York, added that she and her colleagues found that marine reserves create areas of great biological productivity, which may allow exploited fish and other marine life animal stocks, as well as degraded habitats, to recover.

“This occurs, in part, because the protection of coastal wetland nurseries facilitates completion of life cycles that require multiple habitats and enhance fisheries,” O’Leary said. “This even has an effect on stimulating primary productivity, and therefore CO2 removal, by boosting nutrient cycling.”

Matt Rand, who is the director of the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy Project that supported part of the research, noted that a study published in March in the journal Nature found that the most effective marine reserves were those possessing the capacity for monitoring and enforcement.

“If there is strong local and community engagement, as well as engagement at the higher levels of government, there is a greater chance that a given reserve will be managed more effectivity,” Rand said.

Large, remote reserves pose the greatest challenges to monitoring. Satellites, drones, and other technologies, however, continue to make possible near-real time surveillance.

Rock Island, Palau.

The researchers mentioned three marine reserves that they say are highly-protected: the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument (also known as the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument), the Pitcairn Islands Marine Reserve, and the Palau Marine National Sanctuary.

The Hawaiian monument, designated under former President George W. Bush in 2006, was expanded by former President Barack Obama in 2016 to over 579,153 square miles. “It is home to more than 7000 species, a quarter of which are endemic, or found nowhere else on Earth,” Rand said. “The area provides habitat for rare species, such as threatened green turtles, endangered Hawaiian monk seals, and false killer whales, as well as 14 million seabirds representing 22 species.”

The Pitcairn reserve protects nearly 320,465 square miles in the remote waters surrounding the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. This marine region is home to over 1,200 species — including rare ones, such as the many-spined butterfly fish — which are found nowhere else on the planet.

The Palau Marine National Sanctuary, designated in 2015, was highlighted by the researchers as being a highly-protected marine reserve. It covers 193,051 square miles, or more than 80 percent of the nation’s maritime territory.

“It is an area larger than California that is off limits to extractive activities, such as fishing, drilling, or mining,” Rand said. “The reserve was created to safeguard the future of the Palauan people, particularly as global change tightens its hold. It is exactly the kind of climate reserve that our study focuses on.”

A pair of bottlenose dolphins frolic in the waters of Mayumba National Park, previously the country’s only national park dedicated to the protection of marine species and one of the locations of a recent coastal survey by WCS, National Geographic, and Gabon’s Agence Nationale de Parcs Nationaux.

The just-announced network of marine protected areas in Gabon adds to this worldwide collection of water-based sanctuaries. In addition to the dedication of President Ali Bongo Ondimba, the project has involved the efforts of the Waitt Foundation, National Geographic Pristine Seas, Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Gabon Program and the Gabonese National Parks Agency. The Tiffany & Co. Foundation provided a $1 million grant towards the WCS Marine Protected Area (MPA) Fund, which has a mission of establishing and strengthening MPAs around the world.

Cristián Samper, president and CEO of the WCS, said creating marine protected areas will help advance the health of the world’s oceans.

“Gabon is showing great leadership with this massive expansion of efforts to protect its surrounding waters,” he said. “MPAs are an important conservation tool protecting habitat, improving fisheries, supporting livelihoods, and securing the long-term health of marine biodiversity and the oceans.”

Roberts, whose team was not involved in the Gabon work, is hopeful that the ambitious marine conservation plan for this African country will be properly enforced.

“Africa is an area that has taken the brunt of much of the planet’s hunger for seafood,” he said. “(The new marine protected areas network) is an interesting approach, and you want to believe that by implementing a network of protected areas, that Gabon will be able to enforce it effectively and the ecosystems will be able to recover. To make these areas properly effective, they will need high levels of protection from fishing and other sources of damage, as well as effective management, monitoring, and enforcement.”

Read more at Discovery News

Graphene: Everything You Need to Know About the ‘Miracle Material’

A sheet of graphene is shown with an image of its structure in the background.

Graphene, the thinnest and strongest material on Earth, is just one atom thick yet 150 times stronger than the same weight of steel. A square meter of graphene is 1,000 times lighter than a piece of paper and more flexible than rubber. Graphene conducts electricity more than 200 times more efficiently than silicon and is made entirely of carbon, the fourth most-abundant element in the universe.

Since 2004, when researchers first isolated a single-atom-thick sheet of graphene from normal graphite — a feat that won them the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 — some of the loftiest hopes of the technological world have been heaped on the shoulders of this “miracle material.”

Viewed at atomic scale, graphene is a two-dimensional matrix of carbon atoms arranged in hexagonal bonds like chicken wire. If you held a piece of graphene in your hand, it would be perfectly flat, 97-percent transparent and gossamer. But its unique physical properties make it one of the most hyped materials on the market.

Graphene, some predict, will usurp silicon as the backbone of our electronic circuits, enabling leaps in processing speeds well beyond Moore’s Law inside devices that are lighter, thinner, and more flexible. Others dream about graphene-boosted batteries that pack many times the energy density of today’s lithium-ion technology, greatly extending the range of electric vehicles and charging our phones and laptops in seconds.

In the near future, lightweight circuits printed with graphene ink might be embedded into product packaging, clothing, and even temporary tattoos right on your skin. These cheap and efficient wireless circuits will drive the Internet of Things, some acting as sensors (think of biosensors embedded into clothing to track your health) and others as “smart tags” that transmit useful product information to your phone.

Graphene’s lightweight strength will be used to create next-generation composites that will help us engineer lighter, faster, and safer vehicles and aircraft. The same composite materials and coatings will benefit from graphene’s exceptional electrical conductivity, turning a simple coat of paint into a heat sensor or wireless transmitter.

In fact, it’s hard to think of an industry or technology that wouldn’t potentially be transformed — or at least significantly impacted — if graphene lives up to the hype.

Andrea Ferrari is a nanotechnology professor at the University of Cambridge and director of the Cambridge Graphene Center, one of the leading academic research centers into the properties of and commercial applications for graphene. In an interview with Seeker, he said that “you can go on and on naming the possible applications for graphene.”

But it’s also hard to believe that any single material will really be as disruptive and game-changing as the graphene evangelists dream it will be. If the history of material science is any indication, graphene may very well trigger leaps in technological innovation — including entirely new products and unimagined applications — but we might have to wait a few years (or many years, in some cases) to see it happen.

So the question is: When will we actually see the miracles promised by the world’s most novel material?

Batch samples of graphene nano material in graphene processing factory.

If you’re looking to buy real-world products made with graphene, the list is still very short. You can buy graphene-reinforced tennis rackets, bicycle tires, and motorcycle helmets. But the small quantity of graphene in these products is designed to deliver more marketing buzz than a real technical advantage, said Jesus de la Fuente, founder and CEO of Graphenea, a company that manufactures and sells graphene to academic researchers and R&D departments.

De la Fuente told Seeker that the first widespread commercial applications for graphene will probably be in the field of biosensing. While not as sexy as flexible flat-screen TVs and smart tattoos, biosensors are critical components of medical diagnostics and the drug discovery process. Modern biosensors are built into chips that can detect the smallest presence of targeted molecules.

Graphene boasts several key properties that make it an ideal biosensor. The first is surface area. With a single-layer sheet of graphene — even on a tiny, micrometer-scale chip — every last carbon atom is exposed to the environment. And because graphene is highly conductive, you can run a current through it and measure the slightest changes in conductivity across the electric field.

The first wave of commercial graphene biosensing devices is already hitting the market. A company called Nanomedical Diagnostics sells a handheld device called the Agile R100 that’s based on “field effect biosensing” technology. Pharmaceutical companies in the early testing stages can quickly see whether a new drug is reaching its target, bypassing the slower and more expensive assay process.

Ferrari at the Cambridge Graphene Center is excited about the next wave of graphene-enabled biosensors. Since graphene is flexible, durable, and made entirely of carbon, it’s highly biocompatible, meaning it can be introduced into the body without deteriorating or triggering adverse reactions. Researchers are working on tiny graphene sensors that can be mounted on a tooth to monitor respiration or in the brain to predict seizures. Others are trying to make artificial graphene retinas for the vision-impaired.

“Since graphene is so thin, you can create very thin circuitry that can be implanted in the back of the eye to transmit information to the brain,” said Ferrari.

After biosensors, batteries are next in line for harnessing the unique properties of graphene. Both large global companies and small startups are racing to bring a graphene-boosted battery to market, said De la Fuente. That’s because lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries — the rechargeable batteries found in cell phones, laptops and electric cars — have reached a limit as to how much energy they can store and how quickly they can charge.

Since graphene is the world’s best electrical conductor, it holds the promise of doubling or even tripling the life of today’s li-ion batteries while shrinking charging times from hours to minutes. To achieve such a quantum leap in battery power, researchers are experimenting with battery electrodes made from pure graphene and graphene composites.

But biosensors and batteries are just the beginning when it comes to graphene’s transformative potential. De la Fuente says that 60,000 scientific papers are now published every year related to graphene.

“Graphene is just the tip of a massively huge iceberg that we just started to scratch from the top. We’re at the very beginning of a very long field of research and technology that will last for decades to come.”

 MIT researchers made headlines recently when they showed off a futuristic construction material made from 3D-printed graphene that’s incredibly light — only 5 percent density — but 10 times stronger than steel. And researchers at the University of Manchester, where graphene was first produced in 2004, are testing a graphene oxide sieve that may provide a cheap and energy-efficient way of producing fresh drinking water from seawater.

So what’s standing in the way of our graphene-powered future? Price used to be a major obstacle. Back in 2006, when graphene production was in its infancy, the price for even a tiny piece of graphene was absurdly high. “We’re talking about trillions of dollars per gram,” Ferrari said.

Not anymore. De la Fuente told Seeker that the sales price of his graphene has dropped 27 percent per year since Graphenea opened in 2010. The price of single-layer sheet of graphene is now as low as 50 cents per square centimeter, the same as silicon, said De la Fuente.

And new, even cheaper methods of making graphene are showing up every day. The original technique was to exfoliate single layers from graphite. Next, researchers figured out how to “grow” layers of graphene in the lab using a method called chemical vapor deposition. Recently a team at Kansas State University stumbled on a new method that creates bucket loads of powdered graphene from igniting oxygen and hydrocarbon gas. Boom.

As graphene gets cheaper and more abundant, it’s worth asking, given all of its miraculous properties, will graphene eventually replace silicon as the foundation of our computers and electronic devices, ushering in a new era of crazy thin and fast machines? Not quite.

Graphene alone will never replace silicon for the simple fact that graphene isn’t a semiconductor. A sheet of pure graphene conducts electricity brilliantly, but it can’t shut off the flow of electrons. That’s the difference between a conductor and a semiconductor. For graphene to be used in processors, it will almost certainly need to be combined with other materials. This will diminish some of graphene’s superpowers, but perhaps still outperform the competition.

Ferrari at Cambridge said that there are around 2,000 other materials with the same, layered structure as graphite, the source of graphene. Now that researchers know how to separate graphite into single layers, they can employ the same technique to create all sorts of new monolayer materials, some of which are excellent semiconductors.

Read more at Discovery News

Here's What Emergency Medicine Will Look Like for Astronauts in Space

Expedition 50 flight engineer Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency) corrals medical packs aboard the International Space Station.

If an emergency medical situation arises during a crewed trip to Mars, odds are that the astronauts helping out will have little medical training. Making things even more challenging, the astronauts will be far from home working only with the limited supplies on board — a task that would be difficult for even experienced doctors.

Astronauts could potentially break bones, develop blood clots, or find themselves dealing with other unexpected medical situations. Such scenarios have occurred in isolated environments, as when physician Jerri Nielsen found herself treating her own breast cancer after identifying a lump in her breast during winter at the South Pole’s scientific station in 1999. Before she could be airlifted to other medical care, she worked with a welder to perform a biopsy at the station and managed her own hormone and chemotherapy injections by conferencing with doctors in the US.

Astronauts dealing with a medical emergency in space would have to display similar resourcefulness.

“During these long duration flights, the estimated risk of severe medical and surgical events, as well as the risk of loss of crew life are significant.” said Matthieu Komorowski, a consultant in intensive care and anesthesia at London’s Charing Cross Hospital, in a statement. “The exposure to the space environment itself disturbs most physiological systems and can precipitate the onset of space-specific illnesses, such as cardiovascular deconditioning, acute radiation syndrome, hypobaric decompression sickness and osteoporotic fractures.”

For example, the microgravity environment of space tends to weaken bones over time, leading to osteoporotic fractures. Astronauts are also exposed to radiation and at risk for decompression sickness, given that they depend on a pressurized environment.

Komorowski has direct experience working in isolated environments. In 2014, he served as the on-site doctor for a two-week mission to the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), a Mars Society facility in Utah where mock astronaut teams simulate procedures and experiments for the Red Planet. (Komorowski and I were crewmates on the project.)

Komorowski did a medical study on site where untrained crew members were taught to insert tubes in a mannequin, simulating a common medical procedure. A study based in part on this work was published in 2014 in Extreme Physiology & Medicine.

It’s possible that on such a long voyage to Mars, even the doctor could get ill on the trip. Komorowski advocates for a few ways to deal with such a situation.

The first is to have duplicated skills among the crew, which means requiring that everyone have at least basic medical training. The second — although less accessible on a trip to Mars — would be telemedicine. Given the minutes-long time lag between Earth and Mars communications, there would be little opportunity for a conference call in an emergency.

There also are preventative steps that can be taken, such as having on-demand 3D printing of medical equipment, or matching crew members by blood type — an easier solution for transfusions, since the right blood type would be available for everyone.

Komorowski also cautioned that in some cases it may be best not to make an attempted medical intervention, especially if a lot of consumables would be used on a medical procedure where the person is not likely to survive.

“During future space exploration missions, the crew must prepare for non-survivable illnesses or injuries that will exceed their limited treatment capability,” he said.

Even common procedures, such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), may require a rethink in space. After all, you can’t use your body weight in microgravity, and there are restrictions on how much medical equipment you can take on board.

After testing CPR techniques aboard aircraft and underwater space simulators, a team led by Jochen Hinkelbein suggests that the “hand-stand technique” is the most effective method for CPR in space. Alternatively, especially in a microgravity environment, wrapping the legs around the patient (called the Evetts-Russomano method) while performing compressions will stop them from floating away.

“Since astronauts are selected carefully, are usually young, and are intensively observed before and during their training, relevant medical problems are, fortunately, rare in space,” said Hinkelbein, executive senior physician of anesthesiology and intensive care at the University Hospital of Cologne in Germany, in a statement.

Read more at Discovery News

Physicist builds on Einstein and Galileo's work

In the new quantum test of the Einstein equivalence principle, free fall of atoms in quantum superpositions on different mass-energies, |a> and |b>, was compared to the free fall of atoms with a well-defined, classical mass-energy |a>. In all previous tests of this principle, the objects were in classical mass-energy states.

Sixteenth century scientist Galileo Galilei threw two spheres of different mass from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to establish a scientific principle.

Now nearly four centuries later, a team of Italian physicists has applied the same principle to quantum objects using a novel scientific method proposed by UQ physicist Dr Magdalena Zych, reported in Nature Communications.

Dr Zych, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, said the work could lead to the development of new sensors with applications in the study of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, in searching for mineral deposits, in navigation of Earth and space, and in high-precision measurements of time, frequency and acceleration.

Mathematician and physicist Albert Einstein described the principle last century and it became known as 'Einstein's equivalence principle' for atoms whose mass is in a quantum superposition state.

Dr Zych said the principle played a vital role in physicists' understanding of gravity and space-time.

"The principle contends that the total inertial and gravitational mass of any objects are equivalent, meaning all bodies fall in the same way when subject to gravity," she said.

"Our research team conducted a quantum version of the Leaning Tower test."

The novel approach was first proposed by Dr Zych and University of Vienna and Austrian Academy of Science researcher Professor Časlav Brukner.

"Our test relied on a unique quantum feature: superposition," Dr Zych said.

"In relativistic physics, the total mass of a system depends on its internal energy.

"In quantum theory, a system can occupy two or more different energy states 'at once'. This is called quantum superposition, which means a quantum system may occupy different mass-energies concurrently."

A team led by Professor Guglielmo Tino of the University of Florence and Rome's Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) designed and realised the experiment.

"The spheres in Galileo's Leaning Tower example were replaced by rubidium atoms," Dr Zych said.

"The tower was replaced by a scheme developed by Professor Tino's team that is based on Bragg atom interferometry.

Read more at Science Daily

Cold brown dwarf discovered close to our solar system

This gif shows the 'flipbook' from which citizen scientists identified the new brown dwarf, marked with the red circle.

A new citizen-science tool released earlier this year to help astronomers pinpoint new worlds lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system has already led to a discovery: a brown dwarf a little more than 100 light years away from the Sun. Just six days after the launch of the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 website in February, four different users alerted the science team to the curious object, whose presence has since been confirmed via an infrared telescope. Details were recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"I was so proud of our volunteers as I saw the data on this new cold world coming in," said Jackie Faherty, a senior scientist in the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Astrophysics and one of Backyard World's researchers. "It was a feel-good moment for science."

The Backyard Worlds project lets anyone with a computer and an internet connection flip through images taken by NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. If an object is close enough to Earth, it will appear to "jump" when multiple images taken of the same spot in the sky a few years apart are compared. The goal for Backyard Worlds volunteers -- of which there are more than 37,000 -- is to flag the moving objects they see in these digital flipbooks for further investigation by the science team. So far, volunteers have classified more than 4 million flipbooks.

Days after the Backyard Worlds website debuted on February 15, Bob Fletcher, a science teacher in Tasmania, identified a very faint object moving across the WISE images. It was soon also flagged by three other citizen scientists from Russia, Serbia, and the United States. After some initial investigation by the research team, which originally called the object "Bob's dwarf," Faherty was awarded time on NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, where she confirmed that it was a previously unknown brown dwarf just a few hundred degrees warmer than Jupiter. The authors say that sky surveys had missed this object because it's too faint. All four volunteers are co-authors on the scientific paper announcing the discovery.

Brown dwarfs, sometimes called "failed stars," are spread throughout the Milky Way. They lack enough mass to sustain nuclear fusion but they are hot enough to glow in the infrared range of the light spectrum.

"Brown dwarfs are strikingly similar to Jupiter so we study their atmospheres in order to look at what weather on other worlds might look like," said Jonathan Gagné, a Backyard Worlds team member from the Carnegie Institution for Science.

Although the Backyard Worlds research team hopes to find the infamous Planet 9 hiding in our own solar system, these brown dwarfs are also exciting discoveries.

Read more at Science Daily