After thirty years as a professional stuntman, Eddie Braun is ready for his most daring feat yet: completing Evel Knievel's failed 1974…

Continue reading on Kickstarter »

On May 23, 1967, the Air Force prepared aircraft for war, thinking the nation's surveillance radars in polar regions were being jammed by the Soviet Union. Just in time, military space weather forecasters conveyed information about the solar storm's potential to disrupt radar and radio communications. The planes remained on the ground and the U.S. avoided a potential nuclear weapon exchange with the Soviet Union, according to the new research.

Retired U.S. Air Force officers involved in forecasting and analyzing the storm collectively describe the event publicly for the first time in a new paper accepted for publication in Space Weather, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The storm's potential impact on society was largely unknown until these individuals came together to share their stories, said Delores Knipp, a space physicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder and lead author of the new study. Knipp will give a presentation about the event on August 10, 2016 at the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

The storm is a classic example of how geoscience and space research are essential to U.S. national security, she said.

"Had it not been for the fact that we had invested very early on in solar and geomagnetic storm observations and forecasting, the impact [of the storm] likely would have been much greater," Knipp said. "This was a lesson learned in how important it is to be prepared."

The U.S. military began monitoring solar activity and space weather - disturbances in Earth's magnetic field and upper atmosphere - in the late 1950s. In the 1960s, a new branch of the Air Force's Air Weather Service (AWS) monitored the sun routinely for solar flares - brief intense eruptions of radiation from the sun's atmosphere. Solar flares often lead to electromagnetic disturbances on Earth, known as geomagnetic storms, that can disrupt radio communications and power line transmissions.

The AWS employed a network of observers at various locations in the U.S. and abroad who provided regular input to solar forecasters at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a U.S. and Canadian organization that defends and controls airspace above North America. By 1967, several observatories were sending daily information directly to NORAD solar forecasters.

On May 18, 1967, an unusually large group of sunspots with intense magnetic fields appeared in one region of the sun. By May 23, observers and forecasters saw the sun was active and likely to produce a major flare. Observatories in New Mexico and Colorado saw a flare visible to the naked eye while a solar radio observatory in Massachusetts reported the sun was emitting unprecedented levels of radio waves.

A significant worldwide geomagnetic storm was forecast to occur within 36-48 hours, according to a bulletin from NORAD's Solar Forecast Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado on May 23.

As the solar flare event unfolded on May 23, radars at all three Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) sites in the far Northern Hemisphere were disrupted. These radars, designed to detect incoming Soviet missiles, appeared to be jammed. Any attack on these stations - including jamming their radar capabilities - was considered an act of war.

Retired Colonel Arnold L. Snyder, a solar forecaster at NORAD's Solar Forecast Center, was on duty that day. The tropospheric weather forecaster told him the NORAD Command Post had asked about any solar activity that might be occurring.

"I specifically recall responding with excitement, 'Yes, half the sun has blown away,' and then related the event details in a calmer, more quantitative way," Snyder said.

Along with the information from the Solar Forecast Center, NORAD learned the three BMEWS sites were in sunlight and could receive radio emissions coming from the sun. These facts suggested the radars were being 'jammed' by the sun, not the Soviet Union, Snyder said. As solar radio emissions waned, the 'jamming' also waned, further suggesting the sun was to blame, he said.

During most of the 1960s, the Air Force flew continuous alert aircraft laden with nuclear-weapons. But commanders, thinking the BMEWS radars were being jammed by the Russians and unaware of the solar storm underway, put additional forces in a "ready to launch" status, according to the study.

"This is a grave situation," Knipp said. "But here's where the story turns: things were going horribly wrong, and then something goes commendably right."

The Air Force did not launch additional aircraft, and the study authors believe information from the Solar Forecasting Center made it to commanders in time to stop the military action, including a potential deployment of nuclear weapons. Knipp, quoting public documents, noted that information about the solar storm was most likely relayed to the highest levels of government - possibly even President Johnson.

The geomagnetic storm, which began about 40 hours after the solar flare and radio bursts, went on to disrupt U.S. radio communications in almost every conceivable way for almost a week, according to the new study. It was so strong that the Northern Lights, usually only seen in or near the Arctic Circle, were visible as far south as New Mexico.

According to Snyder and the study authors, it was the military's correct diagnosis of the solar storm that prevented the event from becoming a disaster. Ultimately, the storm led the military to recognize space weather as an operational concern and build a stronger space weather forecasting system, he said.

The public is likely unaware that natural disasters could potentially trick contemporary military forces into thinking they are under attack, said Morris Cohen, an electrical engineer and radio scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who was not involved in the new study.

"I thought it was fascinating from a historical perspective," he said of the new study.

The May 1967 storm brought about change as a near miss rather than a full-blown catastrophe, according to Cohen. "Oftentimes, the way things work is something catastrophic happens and then we say, 'We should do something so it doesn't happen again,'" he said. "But in this case there was just enough preparation done just in time to avert a disastrous result."

The Daily Galaxy via American Geophysical Union

Image credit: NASA/SDO

Whether or not they aced it in high school, human beings are physics masters when it comes to understanding and predicting how objects in the world will behave. Cognitive scientist Jason Fischer at Johns Hopkins University has found the source of that intuition, the brain's “physics engine.”

“We run physics simulations all the time to prepare us for when we need to act in the world,” said lead author Fischer, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences. “It is among the most important aspects of cognition for survival. But there has been almost no work done to identify and study the brain regions involved in this capability.”

This engine, which comes alive when people watch physical events unfold, is not in the brain's vision center, but in a set of regions devoted to planning actions, suggesting the brain performs constant, real-time physics calculations so people are ready to catch, dodge, hoist — any necessary actions on the fly. The findings, which could help design more nimble robots, are set to be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Brain_side_view_wireframeFischer, along with researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducted a series of experiments to find the parts of the brain involved in physical inference. First they had 12 subjects look at videos of Jenga-style block towers. While monitoring their brain activity, the team asked the subjects to either guess where the blocks would land should the tower topple, or if the tower had more blue or yellow blocks. Predicting the direction of falling blocks involved physics intuition, while the color question was merely visual.

Next the team had other subjects watch a video of two dots bouncing around a screen. They asked subjects to predict the next direction the dots would head, based either on physics or social reasoning.

The team found that with both the blocks and dots, when subjects attempted to predict physical outcomes, the most responsive brain regions included the premotor cortex and the supplementary motor area the brain's action planning areas.

“Our findings suggest that physical intuition and action planning are intimately linked in the brain,” Fischer said. “We believe this might be because infants learn physics models of the world as they hone their motor skills, handling objects to learn how they behave. Also, to reach out and grab something in the right place with the right amount of force, we need real-time physical understanding.”

In the last part of the experiment, the team asked subjects to look at short movie clips — just look, no other instructions — while having their brain activity monitored. Some of the clips had a lot of physics content, others very little. The team found that the more physical content in a clip, the more the key brain regions activated.

“The brain activity reflected the amount of physical content in a movie, even if people weren't consciously paying attention to it,” Fischer said. This suggests that we are making physical inferences all the time, even when we're not even thinking about it.”

The findings offer insight into movement disorders such as apraxia, as it's very possible that people with damage to the motor areas of the brain also have what Fischer calls “a hidden impairment” — trouble making physical judgments.
A better understanding of how the brain runs physics calculations could also enrich robot design. A robot built with a physics model, constantly running almost like a video game, could navigate the world more fluidly.

The Daily Galaxy via Johns Hopkins University

Related articles

Holocene Epoch 12,000 Years Ago --Modern Human Skeleton Evolved

Iconic Supergiant Star's Hidden Companion

"Your Inner Jellyfish" --Origin of Electrical Communication in Human Brain Traced Back 600 Million Years

New experimental results show a difference in the way neutrinos and antineutrinos behave, which could explain why matter persists over antimatter. The results, from the T2K experiment in Japan, show that the degree to which neutrinos change their type differs from their antineutrino counterparts. This is important because if all types of matter and antimatter behave the same way, they should have obliterated each other shortly after the Big Bang.

This is an important first step towards potentially solving one of the biggest mysteries in science. So far, when scientists have looked at matter-antimatter pairs of particles, no differences have been large enough to explain why the universe is made up of matter and exists rather than being annihilated by antimatter.

Neutrinos and antineutrinos are one of the last matter-antimatter pairs to be investigated since they are difficult to produce and measure, but their strange behaviour hints that they could be the key to the mystery. Neutrinos (and antineutrinos) come in three ‘flavors' of tau, muon and electron, each of which can spontaneously change into the other as the neutrinos travel over long distances.

The latest results, announced today by a team of researchers including physicists from Imperial College London, show more muon neutrinos changing into electron neutrinos than muon antineutrinos changing into electron antineutrinos. This difference in muon-to-electron changing behavior between neutrinos and antineutrinos means they would have different properties, which could have prevented them from destroying each other and allow the universe to exist.

To explore the (anti)neutrino flavor changes, known as osciallations, the T2K experiment fires a beam of (anti)neutrinos from the J-PARC laboratory at Tokai Village on the eastern coast of Japan.

It then detects them at the Super-Kamiokande detector, 295 km away in the mountains of the north-western part of the country. Here, the scientists look to see if the (anti)neutrinos at the end of the beam matched those emitted at the start.

The latest results were concluded from relatively few data points, meaning there is still a one in 20 chance that the results are due to random chance, rather than a true difference in behaviour. However, the result is still exciting for the scientists involved.

“This is an important first step towards potentially solving one of the biggest mysteries in science," said Dr Morgan Wascko, international co-spokesperson for the T2K experiment from the Department of Physics at Imperial. “T2K is the first experiment that is able to study neutrino and antineutrino oscillation under the same conditions, and the disparity we have observed is, while not yet statistically significant, very intriguing.”

“More data is needed to prove conclusively that neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently, but this result is an indication that neutrinos will continue to provide breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe," added
Dr Yoshi Uchida, also from the Department of Physics at Imperial and a principal investigator at T2K.

Upgrades to the equipment that produces (anti)neutrinos, as well as to the detector that measures them, are expected to add more data within the next decade, and determine whether the difference is in fact real.

The Daily Galaxy via Imperial College London

Related articles

Clustering of Matter 400,000 Years After Big Bang --"Yields New Measurement of the Universe"

"Gravity May Answer Last Great Unknown in Standard Model of Physics"

Antarctica Ice-Cube Observatory Comes Up "Zip" --Search for Mystery Particle That Would Solve the Origin of Dark Matter

Massive New NOvA Accelerator --"Unravel Mystery of Why Matter in Universe Wasn't Annihilated After Big Bang"

"We believe that in addition to a Planet Nine, there could also be a Planet Ten, and even more," say two Spanish astronomers, the brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, who together with Sverre J. Aarseth from the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), developed statistical and numerical evidence leads them to suggest that there is not just one planet, but rather several more beyond Pluto.

In the race towards the discovery of a ninth planet in our solar system, scientists from around the world have strived to calculate its orbit using the tracks left by the small bodies that move well beyond Neptune. Now, the astronomers from Spain and Cambridge University have confirmed, with new calculations, that the orbits of the six extreme trans-Neptunian objects that served as a reference to announce the existence of Planet Nine are not as stable as it was thought.

At the beginning of this year, the astronomers K. Batygin and M. Brown from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, USA) announced that they had found evidence of the existence of a giant planet with a mass ten times larger than Earth's in the confines of the Solar System. Moving in an unusually elongated orbit, the mysterious planet will take between 10,000 and 20,000 years to complete one revolution around the Sun.

In order to arrive at this conclusion, Batygin and Brown run computer simulations with input data based on the orbits of six extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs). Specifically, these ETNOs are: Sedna, 2012 VP113, 2004 VN112, 2007 TG422, 2013 RF98 and 2010 GB174.

Now, however, the brothers de la Fuente Marcos, and Sverre J. Aarseth have considered the question the other way around: How would the orbits of these six ETNOs evolve if a Planet Nine such as the one proposed by K. Batygin and M. Brown really did exist? The answer to this important question has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

"With the orbit indicated by the Caltech astronomers for Planet Nine, our calculations show that the six ETNOs, which they consider to be the Rosetta Stone in the solution to this mystery, would move in lengthy, unstable orbits," warns Carlos de la Fuente Marcos.

"These objects would escape from the Solar System in less than 1.5 billion years, -he adds-, and in the case of 2004 VN112, 2007 TG422 and 2013 RF98 they could abandon it in less than 300 million years; what is more important, their orbits would become really unstable in just 10 million years, a really short amount of time in astronomical terms."

According to this new study, also based on numerical (N-body) simulations, the orbit of the new planet proposed by Batygin and Brown would have to be modified slightly so that the orbits of the six ETNOs analysed would be really stable for a long time.

These results also lead to a new question: Are the ETNOs a transient and unstable population or, on the contrary, are they permanent and stable? The fact that these objects behave in one way or another affects the evolution of their orbits and also the numerical modelling.

"If the ETNOs are transient, they are being continuously ejected and must have a stable source located beyond 1,000 astronomical units (in the Oort cloud) where they come from", notes Carlos de la Fuente Marcos. "But if they are stable in the long term, then there could be many in similar orbits although we have not observed them yet".

In any case, the statistical and numerical evidence obtained by the authors, both through this and previous work, leads them to suggest that the most stable scenario is one in which there is not just one planet, but rather several more beyond Pluto, in mutual resonance, which best explains the results. "That is to say we believe that in addition to a Planet Nine, there could also be a Planet Ten and even more," the Spanish astronomer points out.

These studies are only a few of the countless international peer-reviewed articles published or in preparation about the search for Planet Nine with the help of N-body simulations and other techniques. Batygin and Brown are going to present soon new models of the orbit of the mysterious Planet Nine with up-to-date data. On the other side of the Atlantic, in France, Professor Jacques Laskar's team from the Paris Observatory is also attempting to be the first to compute the position of the hypothetical Planet Nine in order to then observe it.

This situation is reminiscent of the discovery of Neptune, in which the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier was the first to "discover" a new planet using laborious hand calculations based on the positions of Uranus; later, the German astronomer J. G Galle directly observed it.

"If Neptune was the first planet discovered using pen and paper, Planet Nine could be the first to be discovered using entirely computerized numerical calculations." notes de la Fuente Marcos, although he points out that the results of the French team are based on residuals in the tracking data from the Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn, caused by the presence of the hypothetical planet, but NASA has denied it, suggesting that it could simply be statistical noise in the signal.

One of the most revolutionary studies from recent months, also with computational simulations and participation of French institutions, was led by the researcher Alexander Mustill from Lund University (Sweden), who raised the idea that Planet Nine may have come from outside the Solar System, that is to say, that it could be an exoplanet.

His hypothesis is that around 4.5 billion years ago, our then young Sun "stole" this planet from a neighbouring star with the help of a series of favourable conditions (proximity of stars within a star cluster, a planet in a wide and elongated orbit,...). Other scientists, however, believe that this scenario is improbable.

The debate is on. What all astronomers do agree on is the importance of closely tracking the motions of the extreme trans-Neptunian objects to be able to adjust the calculations that should lead the way to the location of Planet Nine, without forgetting that the best evidence will be its direct observation, a race which several research teams are fighting to win.

The NASA New Horizons near-sunset image at the top of the page shows Pluto's Norgay Montes (left-foreground), Hillary Montes (left-skyline), and Sputnik Planum (right).

Today's Most Popular

The Daily Galaxy via Spanish Foundation for Sciene & Technology