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The distant planet GJ 1132b intrigued astronomers when it was discovered last year. Located just 39 light-years from Earth, it might have an atmosphere despite being baked to a temperature of around 450 degrees Fahrenheit. But would that atmosphere be thick and soupy or thin and wispy? New research suggests the latter is much more likely.

Orbiting so close to its star, at a distance of just 1.4 million miles, the planet is flooded with ultraviolet or UV light. UV light breaks apart water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, both of which then can be lost into space. However, since hydrogen is lighter it escapes more readily, while oxygen lingers behind.

"On cooler planets, oxygen could be a sign of alien life and habitability. But on a hot planet like GJ 1132b, it's a sign of the exact opposite - a planet that's being baked and sterilized," said Schaefer.

Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, the planet would have a strong greenhouse effect, amplifying the star's already intense heat. As a result, its surface could stay molten for millions of years.

A "magma ocean" would interact with the atmosphere, absorbing some of the oxygen, but how much? Only about one-tenth, according to the model created by Schaefer and her colleagues. Most of the remaining 90 percent of leftover oxygen streams off into space, however some might linger.

"This planet might be the first time we detect oxygen on a rocky planet outside the solar system," said co-author Robin Wordsworth (Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences).

If any oxygen does still cling to GJ 1132b, next-generation telescopes like the Giant Magellan Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope may be able to detect and analyze it.

The magma ocean-atmosphere model could help scientists solve the puzzle of how Venus evolved over time. Venus probably began with Earthlike amounts of water, which would have been broken apart by sunlight. Yet it shows few signs of lingering oxygen. The missing oxygen problem continues to baffle astronomers.

Schaefer predicts that their model also will provide insights into other, similar exoplanets. For example, the system TRAPPIST-1 contains three planets that may lie in the habitable zone. Since they are cooler than GJ 1132b, they have a better chance of retaining an atmosphere.

The Daily Galaxy via Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

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Chinese scientists have proposed a new theory that explains why humans are so much more intelligent than animals even though our brains are often much smaller than those of other species. Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Neuroscience and Neuro-engineering have previously carried out studies backing the theory that the brain not only processes and passes on information not only through electrical and chemical signals, but also with photons of light.

The hypothesis that our brain also operates using other mechanisms --a quantum consciousness--rather than just electrical and chemical signals has been around for decades. Its supporters have included the physicist Eugene Wigner, Nobel Prize laureate in 1963 and more recently the eminent physicist Sir Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford, who has suggested that the human brain is more complex than a galaxy.

"If you look at the entire physical cosmos, our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it," said Penrose. "But they're the most perfectly organized part. Compared to the complexity of a brain, a galaxy is just an inert lump."

These theories include the idea that the brain transmits non-electrical particles, a form of physics which also underpins the idea of the quantum computer. But other scientists have remained sceptical, with one of their biggest concerns the absence of a physical medium in the brain through which information is transmitted.

It is still not clear, for example, how the brain carries out the transfer of information, coding and storage via photons.
Critics of the “quantum brain” theory have also questioned whether the brain is physically able to relay information through photons.

“The critical questions we are concerned with is whether any components of the nervous system ... wet and warm tissue strongly coupled to its environment - display any macroscopic quantum behaviors, such as quantum entanglement,” wrote Christof Koch and Professor Klaus Hepp at the University of Zürich in an earlier study.

According to the South China Morning Post, in their latest study, Dai and his colleagues sliced tissue samples from the brains of a bullfrog, mouse, chicken, pig, monkey and human. The neurons, still alive in the culture dish, were then stimulated with glutamate and the photons recorded with specially-built sensors. They observed the spectral redshift, or the change of light waves from higher to lower energy levels. Human brain tissue showed the lowest energy photons, followed by the monkey, pig, chicken and mouse, with the frog at the highest level.

“Interestingly, we found that the chicken exhibits more redshift than the mouse, raising the question of whether chickens hold higher cognitive abilities than those of mice,” the researchers wrote in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.

“It has been suggested that birds might have evolved from a certain type of dinosaur and that dinosaurs, which dominated on Earth for a long time, should hold certain advanced cognitive abilities over other animals. Based on this theory, it may be true that poultry have higher cognitive abilities than rodents, at least in language abilities, because certain birds, such as parrots, are able to imitate human words,” the Wuhan team observed.

The authors said they hoped the findings would suggest a new viewpoint in understanding the mechanisms of the brain and also explain why human brains were better than those of other animals in some advanced cognitive functions, such as language, planning and problem solving.

The Daily Galaxy via South China Morning Post and The Allen Institute

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