We must meet for a chat on the subject. I know just the place My eldest texted via Whatsapp yesterday. There's a pub in Stockton Heath called the Red Lion where we used to meet for a drink. She drove past the Red Lion in Dubai yesterday. She's now scouring the place for The Cheshire Cheese
Isn't this the ****wit Sisu used to hold up as some sort of oracle? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5133897/Climate-skeptics-fire-new-paper.html
**** me, some of them are really scared of losing their grants aren't they. ‘The relatively large spread of modelling predictions has zero impact on the conclusion (ok) They Results of the findings in the study they are decrying just happen to be almost exactly what was predicted 23 years ago but that prediction was based on bad data (errm again ok) We will get much better at the modelling in the future (when we have had enough time to tweak them enough to make them fit our prediction that we need more research money) Ahh, right.
Collision illuminates the mysterious makeup of neutron stars Recently detected crash provides hints to size, innards of these stellar cores BY EMILY CONOVER 7:00AM, DECEMBER 1, 2017 please log in to view this image SMASH HIT The recently detected violent collision of two neutron stars (illustrated) is helping scientists understand the strange stuff that makes up the incredibly dense objects. MARK GARLICK/UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK Email Twitter Facebook Reddit Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE On astrophysicists’ charts of star stuff, there’s a substance that still merits the label “here be dragons.” That poorly understood material is found inside neutron stars — the collapsed remnants of once-mighty stars — and is now being mapped out, as scientists better characterize the weird matter. The detection of two colliding neutron stars, announced in October (SN: 11/11/17, p. 6), has accelerated the pace of discovery. Since the event, which scientists spied with gravitational waves and various wavelengths of light, several studies have placed new limits on the sizes and masses possible for such stellar husks and on how squishy or stiff they are. “The properties of neutron star matter are not very well known,” says physicist Andreas Bauswein of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in Germany. Part of the problem is that the matter inside a neutron star is so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh a billion tons, so the substance can’t be reproduced in any laboratory on Earth. In the collision, the two neutron stars merged into a single behemoth. This remnant may have immediately collapsed into a black hole. Or it may have formed a bigger, spinning neutron star that, propped up by its own rapid rotation, existed for a few milliseconds — or potentially much longer — before collapsing. The speed of the object’s demise is helping scientists figure out whether neutron stars are made of material that is relatively soft, compressing when squeezed like a pillow, or whether the neutron star stuff is stiff, standing up to pressure. This property, known as the equation of state, determines the radius of a neutron star of a particular mass. An immediate collapse seems unlikely, two teams of researchers say. Telescopes spotted a bright glow of light after the collision. That glow could only appear if there were a delay before the merged neutron star collapsed into a black hole, says physicist David Radice of Princeton University because when the remnant collapses, “all the material around falls inside of the black hole immediately.” Instead, the neutron star stuck around for at least several milliseconds, the scientists propose. Simulations indicate that if neutron stars are soft, they will collapse more quickly because they will be smaller than stiff neutron stars of the same mass. So the inferred delay allows Radice and colleagues to rule out theories that predict neutron stars are extremely squishy, the researchers report in a paper published November 13 at arXiv.org. Using similar logic, Bauswein and colleagues rule out some of the smallest sizes that neutron stars of a particular mass might be. For example, a neutron star 60 percent more massive than the sun can’t have a radius smaller than 10.7 kilometers, they determine. These results appear in a paper published November 29 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Other researchers set a limit on the maximum mass a neutron star can have. Above a certain heft, neutron stars can no longer support their own weight and collapse into a black hole. If this maximum possible mass were particularly large, theories predict that the newly formed behemoth neutron star would have lasted hours or days before collapsing. But, in a third study, two physicists determined that the collapse came much more quickly than that, on the scale of milliseconds rather than hours. A long-lasting, spinning neutron star would dissipate its rotational energy into the material ejected from the collision, making the stream of glowing matter more energetic than what was seen, physicists Ben Margalit and Brian Metzger of Columbia University report. In a paper published November 21 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the pair concludes that the maximum possible mass is smaller than about 2.2 times that of the sun. “We didn’t have many constraints on that prior to this discovery,” Metzger says. The result also rules out some of the stiffer equations of state because stiffer matter tends to support larger masses without collapsing. Some theories predict that bizarre forms of matter are created deep inside neutron stars. Neutron stars might contain a sea of free-floating quarks — particles that are normally confined within larger particles like protons or neutrons. Other physicists suggest that neutron stars may contain hyperons, particles made with heavier quarks known as strange quarks, not found in normal matter. Such unusual matter would tend to make neutron stars softer, so pinning down the equation of state with additional neutron star crashes could eventually resolve whether these exotic beasts of physics indeed lurk in this unexplored territory.
THEY'D BETTER ****ING WELL MAKE THIS HAPPEN, AND NOT JUST SPOUT OFF ABOUT IT! Government and life sciences sector agree transformative sector deal From: Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, The Rt Hon Greg Clark MP, and The Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP Part of: Industry Sector Deals, Industrial strategy, and The UK's Industrial Strategy Published: 6 December 2017 Business Secretary Greg Clark and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announce a Sector Deal with the life sciences sector. please log in to view this image Business Secretary Greg Clark and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt have today (Wednesday 6 December) announced a Sector Deal with the life sciences sector significant investment by 25 organisations from across the sector and supported by government will ensure the UK is at the forefront of developing new innovative treatments and medical technologies that improve patient lives the transformative Sector Deal gives the life sciences sector and government an agreed set of strategic goals that will ensure the UK builds on its exceptional reputation for science and research, genomics and clinical trials A transformative Sector Deal between the UK life sciences sector and the government has today (Wednesday 6 December) been announced. This draws substantial investment into the sector from across the world, ensuring that the next wave of breakthrough treatments, innovative medical research and technologies, and high skilled jobs are created in Britain. A key part of the Industrial Strategy White Paper, the Life Sciences Sector Deal sets out an agreed strategic vision, built on co-investment, for the government and UK life sciences that will modernise the industry, boost businesses large and small within it, and ensure the sector is perfectly positioned to respond to the challenges and opportunities of demographic change and pioneering research and development. The deal brings together a number of significant commitments and investments into the UK by 25 global organisations from across the sector, including a major investment by global healthcare firm MSD, known as Merck and Co. Inc. in the US. The investment by MSD will include a new world-leading life sciences discovery research facility and headquarters in the UK, supporting 950 jobs including 150 new high-skilled and high-value research roles. Business Secretary Greg Clark said: Across the world, advances in science and technology are transforming the way we live our lives. Nowhere is innovation more life-changing than in medicine, healthcare and its associated fields. New discoveries and the applications of new technologies are making diagnoses earlier and more accurate, making new treatments available and existing ones more effective; and making care more beneficial and comforting. The United Kingdom is extraordinarily well-placed to play a leading role in this revolution in the life sciences. Our universities and research institutes rank among the best in the world. They nurture and attract some of the most inventive people on earth. We are home to many of the most successful global life sciences businesses and we are also a hotbed of new businesses – springing up to bring new discoveries and techniques to a wider market. Our National Health Service is a prized national asset – the nation’s biggest employer and a deep source of learning and of translating discoveries into care. That is what our Industrial Strategy sets out to support and achieve. So it is appropriate that the first Sector Deal of our Industrial Strategy should be with the life sciences sector. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: The UK has a huge amount to offer the life sciences sector, combining globally renowned scientific research bases with our world leading NHS which allows innovators to test and refine products at scale. Today proves that life science organisations of all sizes will continue to grow and thrive in the coming years, which means NHS patients will continue to be at the front of the queue for new treatments. The government and industry have worked extensively since the launch of the Industrial Strategy green paper to secure the deal, with Professor Sir John Bell convening industry involvement in the deal. Yesterday evening, representatives from the companies involved in the deal attended an event at 10 Downing Street to celebrate the success of the sector, attended by Business Secretary Greg Clark and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt. Secretary of State for International Trade, Dr Liam Fox said: Today’s deal is a clear signal to life science investors around the world that the UK is open for business and a world leader in scientific innovation. The Department for International Trade has provided dedicated support to make this investment possible, and that offer is available to all investors through our global network. As an international economic department our role is to promote the UK as a premier destination to invest, and we are ready to work with potential investors to secure our capital requirements for infrastructure, regeneration and innovative projects in every part of the country. Regius Professor of Medicine, University of Oxford, Professor Sir John Bell said: This Life Sciences Sector Deal demonstrates how powerful it can be to have industry, the NHS, the research community and charities all working together to provide important new insights that can lead to the discovery and implementation of novel innovations for healthcare. It represents a significant change in both pace and culture that I hope will lead to a flow of such investments into the future. Key themes of the deal The deal sets out a plan for key priorities for the sector going forward, with a vision and strategy that are aligned to the pillars of the Industrial Strategy and the themes of Sir John Bell’s Life Sciences Industrial Strategy. It includes action on the technologies of the future and the evolution of clinical trials, alongside government support for direct and indirect investment to support growth. Each theme sets out a programme of action: Research Building on the UK’s position as a world leader in biomedical discovery with major inward investments, including MSD announcing a new state-of-the-art R&D hub in London. Technologies of the future The deal outlines plans to grow the UK’s international reputation for pioneering early diagnostics and genomics programmes, with a government investment from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund of up to £210 million, subject to business case. This will contribute to the genomics programme in partnership with organisations including GSK and AstraZeneca and launch a trail-blazing AI programme to develop digital pathology and radiology programmes in partnership with industry, embedded in the NHS. The evolution of UK clinical trials capabilities Ensuring that the UK continues to lead the world with its clinical trials, through innovative new trials platforms and investments in the UK’s digital evidence collection abilities, combined with a progressive regulatory system. The Medicines Company is today announcing new trials that will use novel methodologies. Business environment The government has committed £162 million, through the first wave of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, to develop innovative medicines manufacturing infrastructure and enable SMEs to manufacture advanced therapies. This includes 2 new national centres – Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre and a Vaccines centre – adding to the existing national centres and 3 advanced therapy treatment centres co-located in hospitals across the UK as well as funding for viral vectors. Investment across the UK The UK has a number of world-class life sciences clusters across the country and today’s deal delivers on the Industrial Strategy’s aim to distribute growth and opportunity across the country, with pioneering investments in Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Glasgow, South Wales and the South East. The Sector Deal, published on GOV.UK at 9am, sets out full details of the agreed strategy with details of each investment coming into the UK. It includes: MSD: a commitment by MSD to establish a state-of-the-art life sciences discovery research facility in London, focussed on early bioscience discovery and entrepreneurial innovation; MSD believes that locating a research facility in London will expand its opportunity to engage with leading researchers in the UK and Europe Johnson & Johnson: one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, and the University of Oxford intend to collaborate on novel clinical trial methodologies in the UK; these would include platform trials, focused on mental health disorders such as depression Medicines Company: The Medicines Company has initiated 2 projects – one with the University of Oxford to perform a large multinational cardiovascular disease clinical trial and another with The Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership to improve the understanding, management and economics of cardiovascular disease GSK and AstraZeneca: significant investments by GSK and AstraZeneca in initiatives to harness advances in genetic research in the development of medicines Government announced in August £162 million of funding focused on medicines manufacturing from the first wave of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) and an additional £86 million as part of the response to the Accelerated Access Review. Building on this, as part of the Industrial Strategy white paper, government committed through ISCF’s Wave 2 up to £210 million, dependent on businesses cases, for early diagnostics programmes including funding for genomics research and using AI with digital pathology and radiology. Dr Roger M. Perlmutter, President of MSD Research Laboratories said: For more than a century, MSD has been inventing for life, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world’s most challenging diseases. The announcement of our plans to bring a new Discovery Centre to London, as part of the Life Sciences Sector Deal, will enable us to collaborate with scientists conducting promising emerging science in the UK. Our new site will combine MSD’s powerful and proven R&D engine with the cutting edge technologies and deep discovery capabilities afforded by the biomedical research community in the golden triangle of London-Oxford-Cambridge as well as access to the continental European life science ecosystem. Dr Richard Mason, Head of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, EMEA said: At Johnson & Johnson we collaborate with the brightest minds in every field to drive innovation, change and transformation in healthcare. We are proud to be part of today’s sector deal, demonstrating our commitment to UK life sciences and to ensuring that the UK remains at the forefront of new innovations. Our partnership with Oxford University will focus on mental health disorders, which is a priority area of focus for the NHS. Phil Thomson, President, Global Affairs, GSK, said: The UK has a world class life sciences sector, but that will only continue to thrive through a strong partnership of government, industry and academia. This Sector Deal contains a number of very practical commitments to strengthen the UK’s life science base and make it more attractive to international investment in areas such as clinical trials and high-tech research. Ultimately, this should provide benefits to the economy and create jobs. We look forward to seeing further initiatives result from this strategy for the sector. Mene Pangalos, Executive Vice-President, Innovative Medicines and Early Development (IMED) Biotech Unit and Business Development, at AstraZeneca, said: Establishing the UK as a global leader in genomics and precision medicine closely aligns with AstraZeneca’s ongoing research programmes and ambitions for the future of medicine. The UK is one of the best places in the world for cutting-edge science, as is reflected in AstraZeneca’s investment of £500 million in our new strategic R&D centre and global headquarters in Cambridge. The Life Sciences Sector Deal will complement the work of our existing partnerships with Genomics England and others to analyse two million genomes by 2026, helping us to unlock the full benefits that targeted medicines present for patients and the NHS. Clive Meanwell, Chief Executive Officer, The Medicines Company, said Our exciting and productive partnerships with the University of Oxford and with The Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership demonstrate the significant potential for The Life Sciences Industrial Strategy to drive growth through new forms of collaboration. We also believe that our work with these two groups demonstrates the UK’s unique capabilities in clinical trials and in digital healthcare data systems which are rapidly emerging as critical capabilities in the life-science sector worldwide. Peter Ellingworth, Chief Executive Officer, ABHI, said I welcome today’s announcement and with continued government backing, the UK will be a world leader in developing new medical treatments and technologies in the life sciences. This deal will not only benefit the MedTech sector, but the healthcare system and the economy as a whole. If we are to ensure the value our industry provides is realised, high levels of sustained NHS collaboration will be crucial to its success. Mike Thompson, Chief Executive Officer, ABPI, said: Today’s announcements are a great start towards industry and government working together to deliver the long-term strategic roadmap set out in the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy. These are smart investments for the future that acknowledge the government’s willingness to build upon the UK’s global strength in R&D, our leadership in new technologies such as genomic medicine and the potential that exists in making the best use of health data. If we get this right - if the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy is implemented in full - the UK can open itself up to be at the forefront of cutting-edge clinical research. NHS hospitals will reap the benefits of global clinical trials and the financial rewards they bring; doctors can prescribe the latest treatments and patients will get the best standard of care. This ecosystem will deliver for everyone. Next year could be a transformative year for the NHS as we work together to deliver this innovation to underpin a more productive health service.
In a first, Galileo’s gravity experiment is re-created in space Equivalence principle holds up inside an orbiting satellite BY EMILY CONOVER 6:00AM, DECEMBER 4, 2017 please log in to view this image FREE-FALLIN’ Scientists compared the acceleration of two objects in free fall in a satellite orbiting 710 kilometers above Earth (illustrated). (C) CNES/VIRTUAL-IT 2017 Email Twitter Facebook Reddit Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE Galileo’s most famous experiment has taken a trip to outer space. The result? Einstein was right yet again. The experiment confirms a tenet of Einstein’s theory of gravity with greater precision than ever before. According to science lore, Galileo dropped two balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to show that they fell at the same rate no matter their composition. Although it seems unlikely that Galileo actually carried out this experiment, scientists have performed a similar, but much more sensitive experiment in a satellite orbiting Earth. Two hollow cylinders within the satellite fell at the same rate over 120 orbits, or about eight days’ worth of free-fall time, researchers with the MICROSCOPE experiment report December 4 in Physical Review Letters. The cylinders’ accelerations match within two-trillionths of a percent. The result confirms a foundation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity known as the equivalence principle. That principle states that an object’s inertial mass, which sets the amount of force needed to accelerate it, is equal to its gravitational mass, which determines how the object responds to a gravitational field. As a result, items fall at the same rate — at least in a vacuum, where air resistance is eliminated — even if they have different masses or are made of different materials. The result is “fantastic,” says physicist Stephan Schlamminger of OTH Regensburg in Germany who was not involved with the research. “It’s just great to have a more precise measurement of the equivalence principle because it’s one of the most fundamental tenets of gravity.” In the satellite, which is still collecting additional data, a hollow cylinder, made of platinum alloy, is centered inside a hollow, titanium-alloy cylinder. According to standard physics, gravity should cause the cylinders to fall at the same rate, despite their different masses and materials. A violation of the equivalence principle, however, might make one fall slightly faster than the other. As the two objects fall in their orbit around Earth, the satellite uses electrical forces to keep the pair aligned. If the equivalence principle didn’t hold, adjustments needed to keep the cylinders in line would vary with a regular frequency, tied to the rate at which the satellite orbits and rotates. “If we see any difference in the acceleration it would be a signature of violation” of the equivalence principle, says MICROSCOPE researcher Manuel Rodrigues of the French aerospace lab ONERA in Palaiseau. But no hint of such a signal was found. With about 10 times the precision of previous tests, the result is “very impressive,” says physicist Jens Gundlach of the University of Washington in Seattle. But, he notes, “the results are still not as precise as what I think they can get out of a satellite measurement.” Performing the experiment in space eliminates certain pitfalls of modern-day land-based equivalence principle tests, such as groundwater flow altering the mass of surrounding terrain. But temperature changes in the satellite limited how well the scientists could confirm the equivalence principle, as these variations can cause parts of the apparatus to expand or contract. MICROSCOPE’s ultimate goal is to beat other measurements by a factor of 100, comparing the cylinders’ accelerations to see whether they match within a tenth of a trillionth of a percent. With additional data yet to be analyzed, the scientists may still reach that mark. Confirmation of the equivalence principle doesn’t mean that all is hunky-dory in gravitational physics. Scientists still don’t know how to combine general relativity with quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small. “The two theories seems to be very different, and people would like to merge these two theories,” Rodrigues says. But some attempts to do that predict violations of the equivalence principle on a level that’s not yet detectable. That’s why scientists think the equivalence principle is worth testing to ever more precision — even if it means shipping their experiments off to space.
Huntington’s breakthrough may stop disease By James GallagherHealth and science correspondent, BBC News please log in to view this image Image copyrightJAMES GALLAGHER Image captionPeter has Huntington's disease and his siblings Sandy and Frank also have the gene The defect that causes the neurodegenerative disease Huntington's has been corrected in patients for the first time, the BBC has learned. An experimental drug, injected into spinal fluid, safely lowered levels of toxic proteins in the brain. The research team, at University College London, say there is now hope the deadly disease can be stopped. Experts say it could be the biggest breakthrough in neurodegenerative diseases for 50 years. Huntington's is one of the most devastating diseases. Some patients described it as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and motor neurone disease rolled into one. Peter Allen, 51, is in the early stages of Huntington's and took part in the trial: "You end up in almost a vegetative state, it's a horrible end." Huntington's blights families. Peter has seen his mum Stephanie, uncle Keith and grandmother Olive die from it. Tests show his sister Sandy and brother Frank will develop the disease. The three siblings have eight children - all young adults, each of whom has a 50-50 chance of developing the disease. Worse-and-worse The unstoppable death of brain cells in Huntington's leaves patients in permanent decline, affecting their movement, behaviour, memory and ability to think clearly. Peter, from Essex, told me: "It's so difficult to have that degenerative thing in you. "You know the last day was better than the next one's going to be." Huntington's generally affects people in their prime - in their 30s and 40s Patients die around 10 to 20 years after symptoms start About 8,500 people in the UK have Huntington's and a further 25,000 will develop it when they are older Huntington's is caused by an error in a section of DNA called the huntingtin gene. Normally this contains the instructions for making a protein, called huntingtin, which is vital for brain development. But a genetic error corrupts the protein and turns it into a killer of brain cells. The treatment is designed to silence the gene. This is how it works: The instructions for making huntingtin are locked away inside the DNA in a cell's nucleus. Those blueprints have to be carried to a cell's protein-making factories and that job is done by a short strand of genetic code, called messenger RNA. The drug kills the messenger. It is an engineered piece of genetic code that is the precise mirror image of the messenger, known as an antisense oligonucleotide. It binds to the RNA and neutralises it. please log in to view this image On the trial, 46 patients had the drug injected into the fluid that bathes the brain and spinal cord. The procedure was carried out at the Leonard Wolfson Experimental Neurology Centre at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London. Doctors did not know what would happen. One fear was the injections could have caused fatal meningitis. But the first in-human trial showed the drug was safe, well tolerated by patients and crucially reduced the levels of huntingtin in the brain. please log in to view this image Image captionProf Sarah Tabrizi , from the UCL Institute of Neurology, led the trials. Prof Sarah Tabrizi, the lead researcher and director of the Huntington's Disease Centre at UCL, told the BBC: "I've been seeing patients in clinic for nearly 20 years, I've seen many of my patients over that time die. "For the first time we have the potential, we have the hope, of a therapy that one day may slow or prevent Huntington's disease. "This is of groundbreaking importance for patients and families." Doctors are not calling this a cure. They still need vital long-term data to show whether lowering levels of huntingtin will change the course of the disease. The animal research suggests it would. Some motor function even recovered in those experiments. please log in to view this image Image copyrightJAMES GALLAGHER Image captionSandy Sterne, Peter Allen, Hayley Allen, Frank Allen, Annie Allen and Dermot Sterne Peter, Sandy and Frank - as well as their partners Annie, Dermot and Hayley - have always promised their children they will not need to worry about Huntington's as there will be a treatment in time for them. Peter told the BBC: "I'm the luckiest person in the world to be sitting here on the verge of having that. "Hopefully that will be made available to everybody, to my brothers and sisters and fundamentally my children." He, along with the other trial participants, can continue taking the drug as part of the next wave of trials. They will set out to show whether the disease can be slowed, and ultimately prevented, by treating Huntington's disease carriers before they develop any symptoms. Landmark Huntington's trial starts Huntington's disease trial test is 'major advance' Stem cell transplant to tackle Huntington's disease Prof John Hardy, who was awarded the Breakthrough Prize for his work on Alzheimer's, told the BBC: "I really think this is, potentially, the biggest breakthrough in neurodegenerative disease in the past 50 years. "That sounds like hyperbole - in a year I might be embarrassed by saying that - but that's how I feel at the moment." The UCL scientist, who was not involved in the research, says the same approach might be possible in other neurodegenerative diseases that feature the build-up of toxic proteins in the brain. The protein synuclein is implicated in Parkinson's while amyloid and tau seem to have a role in dementias. Off the back of this research, trials are planned using gene-silencing to lower the levels of tau. Prof Giovanna Mallucci, who discovered the first chemical to prevent the death of brain tissue in any neurodegenerative disease, said the trial was a "tremendous step forward" for patients and there was now "real room for optimism". But Prof Mallucci, who is the associate director of UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, cautioned it was still a big leap to expect gene-silencing to work in other neurodegenerative diseases. She told the BBC: "The case for these is not as clear-cut as for Huntington's disease, they are more complex and less well understood. "But the principle that a gene, any gene affecting disease progression and susceptibility, can be safely modified in this way in humans is very exciting and builds momentum and confidence in pursuing these avenues for potential treatments." The full details of the trial will be presented to scientists and published next year. The therapy was developed by Ionis Pharmaceuticals, which said the drug had "substantially exceeded" expectations, and the licence has now been sold to Roche.
please log in to view this image Some things may be bigger than they seem. The implications are immense. No, they're immenser than that. Clever cosmologists calculated that Einsten's theory of relativity might be flawed and the universe could be bigger than we thought. I don't know about you but I doubt they know how big I thought it was. How big did you think it was? Big, right? Well, add between 5% and 9% to what you thought. Have you done it yet? Come on, hurry up. It's simple mathematics. Measurements taken with the Hubble telescope don't match some predictions based on radiation leftovers from the Big Bang days of 13.8bn years ago. How long did you think 13.8bn years was? Are you picturing it? Maybe in birthday cakes? That's a good way to do it. When I read that our Milky Way has the mass of 700bn suns, I pictured that in sausages. It was a lot of sausages. More than 700bn, which is already too many to picture, so you might as well try for sausages as suns. Physicist and lead trombonist in the band raining on Einstein's parade, Adam Reiss, related, "You start at two ends and you expect to meet in the middle if all of your drawings are right and your measurements are right. But now the ends are not quite meeting in the middle and we want to know why.” Like sausages. They have two ends, which meet in the middle, unless you're having Lorne sausage, which is my preference and has four ends. Lorne must be the Einstein of sausages. The mismatch in size could have something to do with something or other to do with 95% of stuff out there we can't see. The scientists stamping on Einstein's sausage don't really know. Not so ****ing clever, eh? NASA noted that a speedier universe expanding faster than it should be means Einstein's theory of relativity could possibly be slightly wrong. Could? Possibly? Slightly? How small is "slightly"? Nobody knows. They haven't invented a telescope small enough yet. So it seems like some people have been making some pretty big talk. Huge talk. Immense talk. Bigger than you first imagined when you started reading this post. It was over 100 years ago - not as hard as 13.8bn years for your brain to grasp - in 1905 that Einstein looked at a clock from a bus. He didn't have a computer linked to a telescope with a price tag measured precisely in billions, which was sent into space specifically so somebody could nitpick. It took him ten years just to work out the maths to be able to explain it to all the other scientists. And they've been pissed off at him ever since. It's like Einstein won a grand prix in a horse and cart, then some scientist comes along in a modern F1 motor and does a burn dance because he cut a tiny fraction of a nanosecond off of Einstein's record time. Are you picturing a tiny fraction of a nanosecond? Or are you thinking that you could really go for some sausages right now? The size of the sausages isn't that important, right? Size generally isn't, unless you're trying to blow somebody's mind. Big chipolata/tiny frankfurter - it's all relative. please log in to view this image Since both my folks died in 2015, I've been quite taken with the quantum theorists' speculation that our consciousness may actually live on after we die. It doesn't mean there really are ectoplasmic entities rattling about upstairs at Acora's house but Dr. Christian Hellwig of the Max Planck Institute put it thusly: "Our thoughts, our will, our consciousness and our feelings show properties that could be referred to as spiritual properties. No direct interaction with the known fundamental forces of natural science, such as gravitation, electromagnetic forces, etc. can be detected in the spiritual. On the other hand, however, these spiritual properties correspond exactly to the characteristics that distinguish the extremely puzzling and wondrous phenomena in the quantum world.” The duality doc's colleague, Hans-Peter Dürr, explained the non-computational in a computational analogy. A particle "writes" its information on its wave function and we write our consciouness, our data, onto the brain, our hard drive, which is uploaded to the quantum field, the universe, like we upload data to the Internet. When your hard drive dies, your data is still there and out there on the Internet. I had a lecturer at college who developed a blood-spinning machine. Roche wouldn't invest in it because they said they'd only make around 60% profit, whereas they make over 90% from pills.
Colliding neutron stars, gene editing, human origins and more top stories of 2017 A gravitational wave discovery is the year’s biggest science story — again BY SCIENCE NEWS STAFF 8:32AM, DECEMBER 13, 2017 please log in to view this image CI LAB/NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER Magazine issue: Vol. 192, No. 11, December 23, 2017, p. 18 Email Twitter Facebook Reddit Google+ In science, progress rarely comes in one big shebang. Well, it has now, two years running. The first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves, our top story in 2016, launched a long-dreamed-of kind of astronomy capable of “unlocking otherwise unknowable secrets of the cosmos,” as physics writer Emily Conover puts it. 2017’s key event: a never-before-seen neutron star collision that immediately validated some theories in physics and killed others. And so a new way to probe cosmic mysteries wins our top spot again this year. Another turning point is coming, and maybe soon, via CRISPR/Cas9, a biotechnology that holds the promise of curing genetic diseases (and the peril of making permanent, heritable tweaks). Nearly five years after the gene-editing tool debuted, researchers for the first time have used it to alter genes in viable human embryos. That’s a big advance, and worthy of the No. 2 spot. Don’t be fooled, though. Even eureka moments like these are the fruits of the slow build of progress: Fossil by fossil, paleoanthropologists draw a picture of Homo sapiens’ earliest days. Brain by brain, the extent of damage caused by chronic traumatic encephalopathy — a disease linked to hard head knocks — becomes clear. And crack by crack, one of the biggest icebergs ever recorded calves. That story, No. 3 on our list, is not exactly progress, but it’s surely an opportunity to make scientific headway. Teams racing to Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf will have an unprecedented chance to collect real-time data on how the remaining ice reacts and to reveal secrets of a long-hidden ecosystem. Building on those advances, as well as others described in our Top 10 picks, will fuel “aha!” moments — both revolutionary and incremental — well into the future. — Macon Morehouse, News Director The Top 10 Stories of 2017 please log in to view this image 1 Neutron star collision A rare and long-awaited astronomical event united thousands of astronomers in a frenzy of observations. please log in to view this image 2 Gene editing in human embryos Scientists edited viable human embryos with CRISPR/Cas9 this year. please log in to view this image 3 Larsen C ice shelf break The hubbub over the iceberg that broke off Larsen C may have died down, but scientists are just getting warmed up to study the aftermath. please log in to view this image 4 Human origins take shape Human evolution may have involved the gradual assembly of scattered skeletal traits, fossils of Homo naledi and other species show. please log in to view this image 5 Seven new neighbor planets The possibly life-friendly family of worlds orbiting TRAPPIST-1 fuels a debate about what makes a habitable planet. please log in to view this image 6 Quantum communication Quantum communication through space is now possible, putting the quantum internet within closer reach. please log in to view this image 7 Nutrition and climate change Studies show that rice, wheat and other staple crops could lose protein and minerals, putting more people at risk of hunger worldwide. please log in to view this image 8 CAR-T cell therapy The first gene therapies approved in the United States are treating patients with certain types of leukemia and lymphoma. please log in to view this image 9 Football players’ brains Examinations of NFL players’ postmortem brains turned up signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in 99 percent of samples in large dataset. please log in to view this image Zika virus subsides The number of Zika cases in the Western Hemisphere has dropped this year, but the need for basic scientific and public health research on the virus remains strong.
An inspirational figure from my youth: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42378765 A life that enriched many.
My television over the festive period sorted: http://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures/2017-the-language-of-life
RIP and Godspeed John Young. Ninth man to walk on the moon, a career that straddled Gemini, Apollo and the STS, and generally regarded as the best astronaut of all time (especially by his peers). The human race owes you a debt of gratitude. https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/01/06/legendary-astronaut-john-w-young-dies/
2018’s Top 10 science anniversaries Year ahead offers noteworthy birthdays and anniversaries from math, science and medicine BY TOM SIEGFRIED 9:00AM, JANUARY 5, 2018 please log in to view this image Among the anniversaries worth celebrating in 2018 are the publication of Noether’s theorem (Emmy Noether at left) and the birthdays of Richard Feynman (middle) and James Joule (right). FROM LEFT: TRIGGERHIPPIE4/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; MATERIALSCIENTIST/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; SCEWING/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Email Twitter Facebook Reddit Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE With each new year, science offers a fresh list of historical occasions ideally suited for a Top 10 list. Science’s rich history guarantees a never-ending supply of noteworthy anniversaries. Centennials of births, deaths or discoveries by prominent scientists (or popular centennial fractions or multiples) offer reminders of past achievements and context for appreciating science of the present day. To keep the holiday spirit pleasant, we’ll omit the plagues and natural disasters (so no mention of the centennial of the Spanish flu pandemic or the tricentennial of the Gansu earthquake in the Qing Empire). But that leaves plenty of math, medicine, astronomy and quantum stuff. Such as: 10. Quantum teleportation (25th anniversary) At a physics meeting in Seattle in March 1993, Charles Bennett of IBM thrilled science fiction fans everywhere by revealing the theory of quantum teleportation. (A few days later, a paper by Bennett and his teleportation collaborators appeared in Physical Review Letters.) Bennett described how quantum experimentalists Alice and Bob could use quantum entanglement to erase the identity of a quantum particle at one location and restore it at a remote location — just like Captain Kirk disappearing in the Enterprise transporter and reappearing on some dangerous alien planet. It’s not magic, though. Alice and Bob must each possess one of a pair of entangled quantum particles. If Alice wants to teleport a quantum particle to Bob, she must let it interact with her entangled particle and send the result to Bob by e-mail (or text, or phone call, or snail mail). That interaction destroys Alice’s copy of the particle to be teleported, but Bob can reconstruct it using his entangled particle after Alice e-mails him. In 1993, it was just an idea, but a few years later it was successfully demonstrated in the lab. 9. Arnold Sommerfeld (150th birthday) Born in Königsberg, Prussia, (now part of Russia) on December 5, 1868, Arnold Sommerfeld played a major role in advancing early quantum theory in the years after Niels Bohr introduced the quantum version of the hydrogen atom. Sommerfeld showed how to extend quantum ideas from circular to elliptical electron orbits, making him kind of like a Kepler to Bohr’s Copernicus. Earlier Sommerfeld had been one of the first strong supporters of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Sommerfeld also mentored an all-star cast of 20th century physicists, his students including Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Hans Bethe. 8. Jean Fourier (250th birthday) Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, born March 21, 1768, survived multiple arrests during the French Revolution and ended up working for Napoleon, who made him a baron. With Napoleon’s demise, Fourier struggled to regain political favor and acceptance in the academic world, and eventually succeeded, but his political and diplomatic embroilments consumed much of his time when he should have been doing math. Nevertheless he did important work on the mathematics of heat diffusion and developed useful techniques for solving equations. His most famous achievement, Fourier’s theorem, allows complex periodic processes to be broken down into a series of simpler wave motions. It has wide application in many realms of physics and engineering. 7. James Joule (200th birthday) James Joule was born into a family of brewers on December 24, 1818. The brewery provided a laboratory where he developed exceptional experimental skills. Despite no formal scientific training and no academic job, he still became one of England’s leading scientists. His experimental skill led him to precisely establish the amount of work needed to produce a quantity of heat and the relationship between heat and electricity. Most famously, he demonstrated the law of conservation of energy. Whether mechanical, electrical or chemical, energy’s quantitative relationship to heat remained the same, regardless of the substances used in conducting the measurements, Joule showed. In other words, energy is conserved — a truth now known as the First Law of Thermodynamics. There were no Nobel Prizes in those days, so Joule’s main reward was the designation of the standard unit of energy as the joule. 6. Henrietta Swan Leavitt (150th birthday) Born in Massachusetts on July 4, 1868, Henrietta Swan Leavitt attended Oberlin College in Ohio and then Radcliffe College, where she studied astronomy. Her excellent academic record impressed Edward Pickering, the director of the Harvard Observatory, where she volunteered to be a research assistant and soon earned a permanent job. She worked on mapping stars with the latest photographic and spectroscopic methods, eventually measuring the brightnesses of thousands of stars. Some of those stars varied in brightness over time (one of them, Delta Cephei, gave such stars the name Cepheid variables). Leavitt analyzed these Cepheids more thoroughly than her predecessors and noticed that the stars’ brightness varied on a regular schedule that depended on their intrinsic brightness. Leavitt worked out the “period-luminosity relationship” in 1908, giving astronomers a powerful tool for measuring the distance to stars and other astronomical objects. Distance to a Cepheid nearby could be determined by parallax, enabling the determination of its intrinsic brightness based on its brightening-dimming schedule. Then, using nearby Cepheids’ intrinsic brightness, the bright-dim period for a more distant Cepheid could be used to infer its intrinsic brightness. That made it possible to calculate the star’s distance. Leavitt’s work made much of the 20th century’s dramatic revision of humankind’s conception of the cosmos possible. “Her discovery of the period-luminosity relationship in Cepheid variable stars is absolutely fundamental in transforming people’s ideas about first, our own galactic system and second, providing the means to demonstrate that galaxies do in fact exist,” historian Robert Smith said in a talk last January. 5. Spontaneous Generation, Not (350th anniversary) Casual observations of nature had led the ancients to believe that life sometimes spontaneously generated itself from decaying organic matter — think maggots appearing in rotten meat. Francesco Redi, an expert on the effects of snake venom, thought otherwise. Born in Italy, educated at the University of Pisa and then medical school in Florence, Redi conducted various experiments on the effects of snakebites, realizing that the danger stemmed from venom entering the bloodstream. In his masterwork Experiments on the Generation of Insects, published in 1668, he described clever experiments that showed maggots could appear only if flies had access to the meat to lay their eggs. He didn’t close the case on all claims of spontaneous generation, but his work was a major first step toward eliminating received dogma in biology and replacing it with experiment and reason. 4. Discovery of helium (150th anniversary) On August 18, 1868, French astronomer Jules Janssen witnessed a total eclipse of the sun in Guntur, India, and recorded the colors in the spectrum of solar prominences. He realized that he could record the colors even without an eclipse, and in the following days he observed a curious bright yellow line. He wrote a paper and sent it off to the French Academy of Sciences. Later that year, English astronomer Joseph Lockyer observed the same spectral line, wrote a paper and also sent it to the French Academy of Sciences. Legend (apparently true) has it that the papers arrived within minutes of each other, so Janssen and Lockyer shared in the discovery of the yellow line, whatever it was. Lockyer soon argued that it was the signature of a new chemical element, unknown on Earth. He called it helium, for Helios, the Greek god of the sun. Some experts doubted that the line signified a new element or insisted that such an element must exist only on the sun and would never have any usefulness on Earth. But their balloon burst in 1895 when William Ramsay in London found helium gas within a uranium-containing mineral. (Others working in Sweden found the gas at about the same time.) Uranium emits alpha particles, the nuclei of helium atoms, so all those alpha particles need to do is find some stray electrons buzzing around to become helium atoms. But nobody understood that at the time because radioactivity hadn’t been discovered yet. 3. Ignaz Semmelweis (200th birthday) Born on July 1, 1818, in Hungary, Ignaz Semmelweis almost single-handedly (or maybe dual-handedly) showed how to bring public health out of the dark ages and into modernity by identifying the importance of washing your hands. After attending medical school in Vienna, he practiced midwifery for a while and then studied surgery and statistics. He then joined the staff at a teaching hospital, where he noticed a large (statistically suspicious) difference between two clinics in deaths of mothers or their babies from puerperal fever. He eventually realized that in one of the clinics doctors conducted autopsies and apparently carried cadaver contamination to the birthing room. Semmelweis concocted a solution for cleansing hands after autopsies; the puerperal fever death rate then dropped dramatically. But his insight was widely resisted by the medical establishment. It was only much later, after Louis Pasteur established the importance of germs in transmitting disease, that Semmelweis’ method could be successfully explained and then adopted. 2. Richard Feynman (100th birthday) One of the most nonconformist of theoretical physicists, Richard Feynman (born May 11, 1918) gained public notoriety late in life as a member of the Presidential Commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger explosion. He was also skilled at playing bongo drums. Among physicists, he was most highly regarded for his original approach to quantum mechanics and formulation of quantum field theory (work earning a share of the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics). Later he was an early leading advocate of research into quantum computing. Hans Bethe, another physics Nobel laureate, considered Feynman to be a most unusual kind of genius. “He was a magician,” Bethe once said. “Feynman certainly was the most original physicist I have seen in my life.” 1. Noether’s theorem (centennial) On any list of history’s great mathematicians who were ignored or underappreciated simply because they were women, you’ll find the name of Emmy Noether. Despite the barricades erected by 19th century antediluvian attitudes, she managed to establish herself as one of Germany’s premier mathematicians. She made significant contributions to various math specialties, including advanced forms of algebra. And in 1918, she published a theorem that provided the foundation for 20th century physicists’ understanding of reality. She showed that symmetries in nature implied the conservation laws that physicists had discovered without really understanding. Joule’s conservation of energy, it turns out, is a requirement of time symmetry — the fact that no point in time differs from any other. Similarly, conservation of momentum is required if space is symmetric, that is, moving to a different point in space changes nothing about anything else. And if all directions in space are similarly equivalent — rotational symmetry — then the law of conservation of angular momentum is assured and figure skating remains a legitimate Olympic sport. Decades after she died in 1935, physicists are still attempting to exploit Noether’s insight to gain a deeper understanding of the symmetries underlying the laws of the cosmos. On any decent list of history’s great mathematicians, regardless of sex or anything else, you’ll find the name of Emmy Noether.
Fast radio bursts may be from a neutron star orbiting a black hole Twistiness of the radio waves suggests they traveled through a strong magnetic field BY LISA GROSSMAN 1:42PM, JANUARY 10, 2018 please log in to view this image TWISTS AND TURNS The twisted waves from a distant fast radio burst suggest the burst originates from a neighborhood with a strong magnetic field. This artist’s impression represents the burst in different radio wavelengths: blue is a shorter wavelength, red is longer. . — Fast radio bursts could come from a turbulent home. At least one source of these bright, brief blasts of radio energy may be a young neutron star assisted by a nearby massive black hole, new research suggests. “The biggest mystery around fast radio bursts is how such powerful and short-duration bursts are emitted,” says astronomer Daniele Michilli of the University of Amsterdam. The latest observations, reported online January 10 in Nature and at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, suggest the bursts are coming from an environment with an unusually strong magnetic field. That field leaves a signature mark on the radio waves, twisting them into spirals, Michilli and his colleagues report. Only a few fast radio bursts have ever been detected, and most appear as one-off events. Few known processes in the universe can explain them. But one burst, FRB 121102, has been seen repeating over the past decade or so (SN Online: 12/21/16). That repetition let astronomers follow up on the burst, and track it to a dwarf galaxy some 2.5 billion light-years away (SN: 2/4/17, p. 10). Now, Michilli and his colleagues have used the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to show that the burst’s source is embedded in an extremely strong magnetic field, 200 times stronger than the average magnetic field in the Milky Way. The team measured the radio waves from 16 distinct bursts over three two-hour observational runs spanning several months. The bursts were exceptionally brief, the shortest lasting just 30 microseconds. That means that whatever emitted it must be just 10 kilometers wide, Michilli says. “To emit a short burst you need a small region,” he says. “Therefore compact objects such as neutron stars are strongly favored by this result.” The team also analyzed the radio waves in a new way, revealing that what looked like individual bursts were actually composed of many smaller sub-bursts, says astronomer Andrew Seymour of the Universities Space Research Association at Arecibo. That complicates the picture even further. The sub-bursts might be intrinsic to the object that creates them, or they might be the result of the waves passing through blobs of plasma, he says. Finally, the observations showed that the waves were polarized, all oriented in the same direction. But something had twisted the waves, forcing them to rotate in corkscrews on their way from the dwarf galaxy to Earth. Follow-up observations with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia confirmed the twists were really there. Story continues below image please log in to view this image NEW AND IMPROVED New hardware on the Arecibo radio telescope (shown) helped astronomers detect signatures of twisted light from a fast radio burst. NAIC The only phenomenon that is known to create such a rotation is a strong magnetic field, Michilli says. There are two main hypotheses for the bursts’ behavior. One is that they are from a young, energetic neutron star called a magnetar that’s sitting inside a shell of magnetized gas, which the magnetar itself expelled in a supernova explosion. The magnetar emits radio waves, and the shell makes them rotate. “If you have young magnetars that have just been born in supernova explosions, only a few decades old, they could be very bursty objects, have very violent youths, and that could give rise to repeating fast radio bursts,” says astronomer Brian Metzger of Columbia University, who was not involved in the new study. But Michilli points out that in order to drive such strong magnetic fields, the supernova remnant would have to be a million times brighter than even the brightest remnant in the Milky Way, the Crab nebula (SN: 1/1/11, p. 11). Instead, the bursts could come from a young neutron star orbiting the dwarf galaxy’s dominant black hole, which probably has between 10,000 and 1 million times the mass of the sun, he says. Such large black holes are already known to have strong magnetic fields and to make polarized light rotate. And a neutron star nestling up next to a black hole is a plausible setup: There’s one orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Although this neutron star’s radio waves don’t come in brief bright bursts, they are also twisted, the researchers say. If not for that neutron star, “this would seem very contrived to me,” Metzger says. “That combines two unlikely things.” More exotic explanations remain possible, too, Michilli’s team says. “The joke is there are far more theories than there are observed bursts,” said coauthor Jason Hessels of the University of Amsterdam in a news conference January 10. “In the coming weeks we expect that very creative theorists will come up with explanations for our observations we haven’t thought of yet.” Questions remain about whether all fast radio bursts, including the ones that don’t repeat, come from such exciting neighborhoods. “We cannot say yet if there are two classes with different properties, or if it’s one class of fast radio bursts and they just happen to be seen in different configurations,” Michilli says. It’s also still unknown whether any other bursts have twisted waves at high frequencies — the smoking gun for strong magnetic fields. Measuring the rotation of the waves in FRB 121102 required hacking Arecibo with new hardware that let it detect higher frequencies than before. “We weren’t able to do that until recently,” Seymour says. “I stayed up on Christmas evening [2016] and made these observations, and luckily it paid off.” Maybe other fast radio bursts that Arecibo observed didn’t show the same rotation signature because the telescope wasn’t ready to measure it yet. Hessels thinks “the prospects are quite good” for figuring out what fast radio bursts are in the near future. Several new radio observatories around the world are due to come online in the next few years. “These are going to be FRB factories,” Hessels said. He expects to find other repeating bursts, if they exist. “Then we can see if this repeating source is really a complete oddball, or part of a distribution of sources.”
Great topic, though if I may point out, Neutron stars defy the laws of physics. I would say "something" is orbiting a black hole. Neutron stars, the entire Neutron star theory rests on something called "strange matter", where neutrons defy the laws of known physics to stay clumped together when Neutrons repel each other through the nuclear strong force forcing them away from the others in the mass, if you had some protons in there, they would attract the Neutrons. The star should fly apart instantly, yet it does not, so a concept called strange matter has been hypothesised, there is no evidence to make Strange matter a theory, as it is untestable.
Trio of dead stars upholds a key part of Einstein’s theory of gravity Celestial orbital dance conforms with physicists’ expectations for ultradense objects BY EMILY CONOVER 4:19PM, JANUARY 12, 2018 please log in to view this image TRIPLE THREAT A threesome of dead stars has allowed a new test of a tenet of Einstein’s theory of gravity. The trio includes a pulsar (illustrated, with bands of electromagnetic radiation in blue) in orbit with a nearby white dwarf. A second white dwarf orbits farther afield (red, upper right). Observations of a trio of dead stars have confirmed that a foundation of Einstein’s gravitational theory holds even for ultradense objects with strong gravitational fields. The complex orbital dance of the three former stars conforms to a rule known as the strong equivalence principle, researchers reported January 10 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. That agreement limits theories that predict Einstein’s theory, general relativity, should fail at some level. According to general relativity, an object’s composition has no impact on how gravity pulls on it: Earth’s gravity accelerates a sphere of iron at the same rate as a sphere of lead. That’s what’s known as the weak equivalence principle. A slew of experiments have confirmed that principle — beginning with Galileo’s purported test of dropping balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa (SN: 1/20/18, p. 9). But the strong equivalence principle is more stringent and difficult to test than the weak version. According to the strong equivalence principle, not only do different materials fall at the same rate, but so does the energy bound up in gravitational fields. That means that an incredibly dense, massive object with a correspondingly strong gravitational field, should fall with the same acceleration as other objects. “We’re asking, ‘How does gravity fall?’” says astronomer Anne Archibald of the University of Amsterdam, who presented the preliminary result at the meeting. “That sounds weird, but Einstein says energy and mass are the same.” That means that the energy bound up in a gravitational field can fall just as mass can. If the strong equivalence principle were violated, an object with an intense gravitational field would fall with a different acceleration than one with a weaker field. To test this theory, scientists measured the timing of signals from a pulsar — a spinning, ultradense collapsed star that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation that sweep past Earth at regular intervals. The pulsar in question, PSR J0337+1715, isn’t just any pulsar: It has two companions (SN: 2/22/14, p.8). The pulsar orbits with a type of burnt-out star called a white dwarf. That pair is accompanied by another white dwarf, farther away. If the strong equivalence principle holds, the paired-up pulsar and white dwarf should both fall at the same rate in the gravitational field of the second white dwarf. But if the pulsar, with its intense gravitational field, fell faster toward the outermost white dwarf than its nearby companion, the pulsar’s orbit would be pulled toward the outermost white dwarf, tracing a path in the shape of a rotating ellipse. Scientists can use the timing of a pulsar’s signals to deduce its orbit. As a pulsar moves away from Earth, for example, its pulses fall a little bit behind its regular beat. So if J0337+1715’s orbit were rotating, signals received on Earth would undergo regular changes in their timing as a result. Archibald and colleagues saw no such variation. That means the pulsar and the white dwarf must have had matching accelerations, to within 0.16 thousandths of a percent. Many physicists expect the strong equivalence principle to be violated on some level. General relativity doesn’t mesh well with quantum mechanics, the theory that reigns on very small scales. Adjustments to general relativity that attempt to combine these theories tend to result in a violation of the strong equivalence principle, says physicist Clifford Will of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved with the research. The strong equivalence principle might still fail at levels too tiny for this test to catch. So the door remains open for adjustments to general relativity. But the new measurement constrains many such theories better than any previous test. The result is “really tremendous,” says Will. It’s “a great improvement in this class of theories … which is why this triple system is so beautiful.” The man proved right again. He truly was a bone fide genius
