According to co-author Dr Bjorn Sturmberg, the results show the use of electric vehicles in remote communities is more feasible than might be expected.

“We analysed the distances between people’s homes and the nearest “service hub” towns — where they might go to the do the shopping, for example,” Dr Sturmberg, said.

“The vast majority of residents, or 93 per cent, could do those trips with even the lower-range of electric vehicles currently available on the Australian market. That’s without needing to recharge en route.”

Dr Sturmberg said given this, there’s no excuse for leaving our remote communities out of the discussion.

“We need to do better — electric vehicles shouldn’t be left in the too hard basket. It’s an unequitable and unfair path forward if remote and regional communities are the last ones left driving diesel vehicles, especially as they will be some of the most impacted by catastrophic climate change,” Dr Sturmberg said.

“Yes the barriers are obvious — large distances, unsealed roads. But the benefits are equally obvious. It’s difficult and expensive to get diesel out to these communities, and electric engines are simpler and more robust than fuel engines.”

Co-author Dr Francis Markham added there are some limits to what we know, and aspects that need further investigation.

“For example, we still don’t have clear data on the impact of unsealed roads or different conditions on the effective range of electric vehicles,” Dr Markham said.

“And information on the performance of electric vehicles in very hot conditions is still lacking. However, we are confident that electric vehicles do have a place in regional and remote Australia.”

According to the researchers, transport is one of the key issues we need to tackle to limit the worst effects of climate change.

“The transport sector is responsible for 25 per cent of global emissions and more than 18 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gas pollution,” Dr Sturmberg said.

“It must rapidly decarbonise — and electric vehicles are going to be a crucial part of that decarbonisation.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by Australian National University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Water is certainly the best-known liquid in the world. Water plays a crucial role in all biological and many chemical processes. The water molecules themselves hardly hold any secrets. In school already we learn that water consists of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. We even know the typical obtuse angle that the two O-H legs form with each other. In addition, we know when water boils or freezes and how these phase transitions are related to pressure. But between facts on individual molecules and a deeper understanding of the macroscopic phenomena, there is a wide area of uncertainty: Only statistical information is known about the behaviour of the individual molecules in normal liquid water: the water molecules in the liquid phase form a fluctuating network of hydrogen bonds, disordered and dense, and their interactions are not at all as well understood as in the gaseous state.

Pure liquid water examined

Now, a team led by HZB physicist Dr. Annette Pietzsch has taken a closer look at pure liquid water at room temperature and normal pressure. Using X-ray analysis at the Swiss Light Source of the Paul Scherrer Institute and statistical modelling, the scientists have succeeded in mapping the so-called potential energy surfaces of the individual water molecules in the ground state, which come in a large variety of shapes depending on their environment.

Oscillations and vibrations measured

“The special thing here is the method: we studied the water molecules on the ADRESS beamline using resonant inelastic X-ray scattering. Simply put, we nudged individual molecules very carefully and then measured how they fell back into the ground state,” says Pietzsch. The low-energy excitations led to stretching oscillations and other vibrations, which — combined with model calculations — produced a detailed picture of the potential surfaces.

“This gives us a method to experimentally determine the energy of a molecule as a function of its structure,” explains Pietzsch. “The results help to enlighten the chemistry in water, for example to understand better how water behaves as a solvent.”

Outlook: METRIXS at BESSY II

The next experiments are already planned at the BESSY II X-ray source at HZB. There, Annette Pietzsch and her team have set up the METRIXS measuring station, which is designed precisely for investigating liquid samples with RIXS experiments. “After the summer shutdown due to maintenance work on BESSY II, we will start with the first tests of our instruments. And then we can move on.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A citizen scientist has searched NSF’s NOIRLab’s catalog of 4 billion celestial objects, known as NOIRLab Source Catalog DR2, to reveal brown dwarfs with companions. His intensive investigation led to the discovery of 34 ultracool dwarf binary systems, nearly doubling previously known samples [1].

Brown dwarfs lie somewhere between the most massive planets and the smallest stars. Lacking the mass needed to sustain nuclear reactions in their core, brown dwarfs loosely resemble cooling embers on a huge scale. Their faintness and relatively small sizes make them difficult to identify. Data from sensitive telescopes have enabled the discovery of several thousand objects but just a small subset have been identified as binaries. The difficulty in observing these faint embers also means that astronomers are still unsure how often brown dwarfs have companions.

To help find brown dwarfs, the astronomers of the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project have previously turned to a worldwide network of more than 100,000 volunteer citizen scientists who scrutinized telescope images to identify the subtle motion of brown dwarfs against background stars. Despite the abilities of machine learning and supercomputers, the human eye is still a unique resource when it comes to scouring telescope images for moving objects.

“The Backyard Worlds project has fostered a diverse community of talented volunteers,” commented Aaron Meisner, an astronomer at NSF’s NOIRLab and co-founder of Backyard Worlds. “150,000 volunteers across the globe have participated in Backyard Worlds, among which a few hundred ‘super users’ perform ambitious self-directed research projects.”

One such ‘super sleuth — citizen scientist Frank Kiwy — embarked on a research project involving the NOIRLab Source Catalog DR2, a catalog of nearly 4 billion unique celestial objects that contains all of the public imaging data in NOIRLab’s Astro Data Archive. By searching the data for objects with the color of brown dwarfs, Kiwy was able to find more than 2500 potential ultracool dwarfs lurking in the archive. These were then scrutinized for hints of comoving companions, yielding a total of 34 systems comprising a white dwarf or low-mass star with an ultracool dwarf companion [2]. Kiwy then led a team of professional astrophysicists in publishing these discoveries in a scientific paper.

“I love the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project! Once you master the regular workflow you can dive much deeper into the subject,” commented Kiwy. “If you’re a person who is curious and not afraid to learn something new, this might be the right thing for you.”

“This amazing result clearly demonstrates that NOIRLab’s data archive has a reach far beyond that of professional astronomers,” notes Chris Davis, NSF’s Program Director for NOIRLab. “Keen members of the public can also participate in cutting-edge research and directly share in the joy of cosmic discovery!”

As well as being an inspiring story of citizen science, these discoveries could help astronomers determine if brown dwarfs are more akin to oversized planets or undersized stars, as well as providing insights into how star systems evolve over time. It also demonstrates the continued exceptional contribution to astronomy made by scientists using astronomical archives and science platforms such as NOIRLab’s Astro Data Archive and Astro Data Lab at the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC).

“These discoveries were made by an amateur astronomer who conquered astronomical big data,” concluded Aaron Meisner. “Modern astronomy archives contain an immense treasure trove of data and often harbor major discoveries just waiting to be noticed.”

Notes

[1] Previous samples include white dwarf plus ultracool dwarf (L dwarf) pairs separated by more than 150 astronomical units (au), and red dwarf plus L dwarf pairs with separations between 700 and 1800 au. An astronomical unit (au) is a unit used by astronomers that was originally chosen to represent the average distance between the Earth and the Sun: roughly 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles.

[2] The closest-together pair of dwarfs had a physical separation of only ~170 au, and the furthest apart were about 8500 au from one another.

“We need more effective methods of managing acute and chronic pain, and that starts with gaining a better understanding of the basic neural processes that regulate pain,” said NIDCR Director Rena D’Souza, D.D.S., Ph.D. “By uncovering the circuitry that mediates the pain-reducing effects of sound in mice, this study adds critical knowledge that could ultimately inform new approaches for pain therapy.”

Dating back to 1960, studies in humans have shown that music and other kinds of sound can help alleviate acute and chronic pain, including pain from dental and medical surgery, labor and delivery, and cancer. However, how the brain produces this pain reduction, or analgesia, was less clear.

“Human brain imaging studies have implicated certain areas of the brain in music-induced analgesia, but these are only associations,” said co-senior author Yuanyuan (Kevin) Liu, Ph.D., a Stadtman tenure-track investigator at NIDCR. “In animals, we can more fully explore and manipulate the circuitry to identify the neural substrates involved.”

The researchers first exposed mice with inflamed paws to three types of sound: a pleasant piece of classical music, an unpleasant rearrangement of the same piece, and white noise. Surprisingly, all three types of sound, when played at a low intensity relative to background noise (about the level of a whisper) reduced pain sensitivity in the mice. Higher intensities of the same sounds had no effect on animals’ pain responses.

“We were really surprised that the intensity of sound, and not the category or perceived pleasantness of sound would matter,” Liu said.

To explore the brain circuitry underlying this effect, the researchers used non-infectious viruses coupled with fluorescent proteins to trace connections between brain regions. They identified a route from the auditory cortex, which receives and processes information about sound, to the thalamus, which acts as a relay station for sensory signals, including pain, from the body. In freely moving mice, low-intensity white noise reduced the activity of neurons at the receiving end of the pathway in the thalamus.

In the absence of sound, suppressing the pathway with light- and small molecule-based techniques mimicked the pain-blunting effects of low-intensity noise, while turning on the pathway restored animals’ sensitivity to pain.

Liu said it is unclear if similar brain processes are involved in humans, or whether other aspects of sound, such as its perceived harmony or pleasantness, are important for human pain relief.

“We don’t know if human music means anything to rodents, but it has many different meanings to humans — you have a lot of emotional components,” he said.

The results could give scientists a starting point for studies to determine whether the animal findings apply to humans, and ultimately could inform development of safer alternatives to opioids for treating pain.

This research was supported by the NIDCR Division of Intramural Research. Support also came from the National Key Research and Development Program of China Brain Science and Brain-Like Intelligence Technology, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Science Fund for Creative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research, Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province, and the University of Science and Technology of China Research Funds of the Double First-Class Initiative.

“The low gravity of rubble-pile asteroids such as Bennu weakens its near-subsurface by not compressing the upper layers, minimizing the influence of particle cohesion,” said SwRI’s Dr. Kevin Walsh, lead author of a paper about this research published in the journal Science Advances. “We conclude that a low density, weakly bound subsurface layer should be a global property of Bennu, not just localized to the contact point.”

Fitting its designation as a “rubble-pile asteroid,” Bennu is a spheroidal collection of rock fragments and debris 1,700 feet in diameter and held together by gravity. It is thought to have been formed after a collision involving a larger main-asteroid-belt object. Rocks are scattered across its heavily cratered surface, indicating that it has had a rough-and-tumble existence since being liberated from its much larger parent asteroid some millions or billions of years ago.

The goal of OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) mission is to collect and return at least 60 grams of surface material from Bennu and deliver it to Earth in 2023. Sample collection activities provided additional insights.

According to Walsh, researchers involved in the OSIRIS-REx mission have so far measured Bennu’s thermal properties and craters to estimate the strength and porosity of discrete particles of rubble-pile asteroids. The ensemble of particles, or regolith, at an asteroid’s surface controlling and influencing long-term evolution have not yet been probed directly until now.

Before, during, and after the sampling event, the Sample Acquisition Verification Camera (SamCam) of the OSIRIS-REx Camera Suite captured images looking at the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) robotic arm.

“The SamCam images bracketing the moment of contact show the contact caused considerable disturbance at the sample site,” said Dr. Ron Ballouz, a co-author from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “Nearly every visible particle is moved or re-oriented at all points along the circumference of TAGSAM up to a 15-inch radius.”

These SamCam images showed the downward force of TAGSAM lifted a nearly 16-inch rock. Though strong enough to withstand breaking, the rock was re-oriented and small debris lofted off its surface. The mobility of these millimeter-scale particles under relatively weak forces suggests minimal cohesive bonding with the surface of the larger rock.

Scientists have theorized that the average regolith particle size increases as asteroid size decreases, because larger bodies retain smaller materials due to a higher surface gravity. The team then compared Bennu to similar rubble-pile asteroids.

“We discovered a dichotomy between the rough, boulder-covered surfaces of Bennu and Ryugu versus Itokawa, which includes ponds of smaller particles across 20% of its surface,” Walsh said. “This could have several explanations, including that the latter’s near-surface has compressed enough to frustrate these microparticles percolating into the interior or perhaps the granular deposits are subsurface layers revealed by a recent disruptive reorganization of the body.”

A companion paper in the journal Science and co-authored by Walsh characterized the 30-foot-long elliptical crater excavated by the TAGSAM arm when it collected the sample. The event mobilized rocks and dust into a debris plume, exposing material that is darker, redder and more abundant in fine particulates than the original surface. The displaced subsurface material’s bulk density is about half that of the asteroid as a whole.

Video: https://youtu.be/wCO1y_GNo98

Story Source:

Materials provided by Southwest Research Institute. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.