"Solid Refrigerant" Offers An Air-Con Revolution

When you look at the soft, waxy "solid refrigerant" being investigated in a UK laboratory, it doesn't look very exciting, but its unusual properties promise an air-conditioning revolution that could eliminate the need for greenhouse gases.

The substance's temperature can vary by more than 50 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit) under pressure, and unlike the gases currently used in appliances, it does not leak.

"They don't contribute to global warming, but also they are potentially more energy efficient," Xavier Moya, a professor of materials physics at the University of Cambridge, told AFP.

Approximately two billion air-conditioner units are in use worldwide, and their number is increasing as the planet warms.

Between leaks and energy consumption, the emissions associated with them are also increasing each year, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Moya has been studying the properties of these plastic crystals in his laboratory at the prestigious UK university for 15 years.

On his work surface, a large red and grey machine, topped with a cylinder, tests how the temperature of a substance changes under pressure.

The aim is to identify the best refrigerants among this class of materials, which are already used by the chemical industry and are relatively easy to obtain, even if the exact composition of the crystals eventually selected remains secret.

The phenomenon is invisible to the naked eye, but these crystals are composed of molecules that spin on their own axis.

When the substance is squeezed, that movement stops and the energy is dissipated in the form of heat.

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Eryops' Skull Looks Like From "Toy Story" Character

Paleontologist Andre LuJan had an assist from nature with his latest exciting fossil find. Heavy rains helped expose a nearly complete skull of an enormous ancient salamander-like creature in a quarry in northern central Texas. And while it looks a bit like an anxious T. rex from a beloved children’s film, this creature wasn’t a dinosaur.

LuJan found the Eryops megacephalus, a large, semi-aquatic predator amphibian with a large noggin that lived 280 million years ago. The climate at this time was a bit variable, but there were some long periods when desert-like conditions in present day New Mexico and Texas became a more humid and swamp-like environment.

"Eryops is an apex predator (amphibian) from the Permian period," LuJan, who is also the director of the Texas Through Time Fossil Museum, tells Popular Science. "They could grow up to six feet long (maybe more but this is based on known fossils)."

These enormous salamander-like creatures weighed in at upwards of 200 to 400 pounds and likely would have eaten anything it could fit in its large mouth. Its head was designed for aquatic or semi-aquatic ambush predators, similar to living alligators and crocodiles.

"We can tell by the design of their skull that they were ambush predators, eyes on top of the head along with nostrils to conceal the body while they lay in wait."

Eryops likely didn’t have the ability to chew, so would have eaten its prey whole or torn it into pieces.

Paleontologists have uncovered their remains along estuaries, streams, or other bodies of water that could support hunting and breeding. Fossils of animals like it have been found in rocks dating back to the Permian in what was once the supercontinent Pangea. Eryops is also a member of a larger group of amphibians which includes present day frogs, toads, and salamanders. Finding a complete skull like this one is exciting and rare, since they will often collapse under pressure over the millions of years it takes for the bones to fossilize. Having a more complete skull offers up a more full picture of the animal’s life. More skulls also helps because "in paleontology, sample size is everything." A wider pool of fossils to choose from enables more careful and accurate comparisons, which can tell us more about their evolution. "In some cases finding pathological growths can teach us about ancient diseases and possible predation and interaction with other predators," says LuJan.

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Webb Telescope Discovered An Exoplanet

Aside from providing a trove of information about the early universe, the James Webb Space Telescope, since its 2021 launch, has obtained valuable data on various already-known planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets. Now, for the first time, Webb has discovered an exoplanet not previously known.

Webb has directly imaged a young gas giant planet roughly the size of Saturn, our solar system's second-largest planet, orbiting a star smaller than the sun located about 110 light-years from Earth in the constellation Antlia, researchers said. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

Most of the roughly 5,900 exoplanets discovered since the 1990s have been detected using indirect methods, such as through observation of the slight dimming of a star's light when a planet passes in front of it, called the transit method. Less than 2% of them have been directly imaged, as Webb did with the newly identified planet.

While this planet is large when considered in the context of our solar system, it is actually the least massive one ever discovered through direct imaging - 10 times less massive than the previous record holder. This speaks to the sensitivity of Webb's instruments.

This discovery was achieved using a French-produced coronagraph, a device that blocks out the bright light from a star, installed on Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI.

"Webb opens a new window - in terms of mass and the distance of a planet to the star - of exoplanets that had not been accessible to observations so far. This is important to explore the diversity of exoplanetary systems and understand how they form and evolve," said astronomer Anne-Marie Lagrange of the French research agency CNRS and LIRA/Observatoire de Paris, lead author of the study published last 25 June in the journal Nature.

The planet orbits its host star, called TWA 7, at a distance about 52 times greater than Earth's orbital distance from the sun. To put that in perspective, our solar system's outermost planet Neptune orbits about 30 times further from the sun than Earth. The transit method of discovering exoplanets is particularly useful for spotting those orbiting close to their host star rather than much further out like the newly identified one.

"Indirect methods provide incredible information for planets close to their stars. Imaging is needed to robustly detect and characterize planets further away, typically 10 times the Earth- to-sun distance," Lagrange said.

The birth of a planetary system begins with a large cloud of gas and dust - called a molecular cloud - that collapses under its own gravity to form a central star. Leftover material spinning around the star in what is called a protoplanetary disk forms planets.

The star and the planet in this research are practically newborns - about 6 million years old, compared to the age of the sun and our solar system of roughly 4.5 billion years.

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"God-Kings" May Have Ruled Stone Age Ireland

In 2020, archaeologists in Ireland first announced a startling find at Newgrange, a giant Neolithic burial chamber 30 miles north of Dublin. Genetic analysis of the 5,000-year-old human skull fragments indicated that the man was the product of an incestuous relationship, either between siblings or a parent and their own child.

Experts offered a headline-grabbing theory: Neolithic Ireland was ruled by incestuous royal dynasties, or potentially even "god-kings" similar to those documented in ancient Egyptian and Incan empires. Dating back roughly 500 years before both Stonehenge and the Giza pyramids), the UNESCO World Heritage Site contains the remains of numerous Stone Age individuals.

Combined with evidence of genetic relations in other passage tombs on the island, according to another team led by researchers at the University College Dublin, the Newgrange god-king hypothesis doesn’t hold up to closer scrutiny. Their argument is laid out in a study published on 22 June in the journal Antiquity.

Constructed around 3100 BCE, Newgrange includes a massive burial mound built from an estimated 196,000 tons of layered earth and stone. The site has featured prominently in Irish culture for millennia, with folklore eventually ascribing the chambers as home to the region’s chief god Dagda and his son Aengus.

Antiquarians first rediscovered Newgrange in 1699 CE, but the most thorough excavation work at the site began in 1962. Experts have continued exploring the Stone Age trove—including the controversial skull fragment known as NG10.

Dating between 3340 and 3020 BCE, NG10 potentially offered, "far-reaching consequences for our understanding of prehistoric population movement and the structure of that ancient society," according to the 2020 study’s accompanying report in Nature.

"Socially sanctioned matings of this nature are very rare, and are documented almost exclusively among politico-religious elites—specifically within polygynous and patrilineal royal families that are headed by god-kings," the authors noted at the time.

Archeologist Jessica Smyth disagrees. As one of the latest study’s co-authors and an associate professor at University College Dublin, Smyth has serious doubts about NG10’s royal pedigree.

"People were definitely being selected for burial in passage tombs—the whole community does not end up in these monuments," Smyth explained in a statement. "However, we don’t know the reasons behind this selection, and why they were thought to be special."

Smyth and her colleagues argue that many of the site’s other skeletal remains simply don’t support the idea of pervasive incest among those buried at Newgrange. Instead, they say the genetic clustering found amid bones in specific passage tombs more typically reflects distant biological relations such as second cousins and even great-great-great-grand parents. With this knowledge, Smyth and co-authors believe the burials weren’t solely determined by lineage or royal dynasty, but potentially along more communal, egalitarian lines.

"We now have some really great examples of monuments elsewhere in Europe that contain people with very close biological ties—parents, children, grandparents, etc.," said Smyth. "This sort of [ancient DNA] evidence is much closer to the idea of a lineage or dynasty. [But] we do not see this evidence in Irish passage tombs."

What’s more, a deceased person’s remains were treated differently during Neolithic Ireland than they are today.

"Unlike today, bodies don’t tend to be buried 'whole' or 'intact' in this time period. Before they end up in megalithic monuments, bodies are broken down, sometimes cremated and even circulated around their communities," added Smyth.

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INFINITY Science Hopes To Tickle Your Curiosity

Whenever you are visiting Mississippi this summer, one place you can check out is the INFINITY Science Center on the coast.

"INFINITY is a place where you can come and sort of unleash your curiosity. It’s a place where you can explore this planet and how it works and all the processes that enable life on it. And it’s also a place where you can think about going beyond this planet and going out into space," said John Wilson, the director of the center in Hancock County.

The INFINITY Science Center is the officials NASA Visitor’s Center for the Stennis Space Center. One of the most impressive things there is the first stage of an actual Saturn V rocket, which was the launch vehicle that lifted the Apollo missions off the Earth. There is also a full-scale model of the Lunar Lander.

There’s a lot of space devoted to Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise, who is from Biloxi.

"We have his actual flight suit on display. My brother and I were actually outside doing chores my dad had us do. And I’ll never forget my brother looked up and said, ‘Just think. There’s a guy from Biloxi up there right now,'" said Wilson.

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50-Year Old Moon Samples Still Reveal New Discoveries

Amazingly, the samples of material from the moon retrieved by the Apollo missions are still providing new insights more than 50 years later, in this case how tiny glass beads that litter the lunar surface are telling us about the explosive volcanic plumes that formed them 3.3 to 3.6 billion years ago.

"We've had these samples for 50 years, but we now have the technology to fully understand them," said Ryan Ogliore, a physics professor at Washington University in St Louis, in a statement. "Many of these instruments would have been unimaginable when the beads were first collected."

The tiny beads, less than a millimeter in size, are embedded in lunar rocks and mixed into the lunar regolith. They come in two varieties, orange and black, and were produced when drops of lava in plumes that violently erupted out of volcanoes cooled quickly in the cold vacuum on the lunar surface. Around 3.5 billion years ago, the moon was drastically volcanically active, forming the dark patches of the lunar maria that today form the "face" of the "Man in the Moon."

"The beads are tiny, pristine capsules of the lunar interior," said Ogliore. "They're some of the most amazing extraterrestrial samples we have."

Ogliore was part of a team led by Thomas Williams, Stephen Parman and Alberto Saal of Brown University in Rhode Island, who deployed a variety of modern microscopic analysis techniques on the beads to learn more about the volcanic conditions in which the beads formed.

The main instrument used was a NanoSIMS 50 ion microprobe at Washington University, which can perform spectrometry at the atomic scale, identifying elements and isotopes, and probing nano-scale structure.

To avoid the subject material being exposed to Earth's atmosphere and reacting with its oxygen, the ion beam cored into the samples, extracting the beads from within them, and then taking care that the material was protected from our atmosphere. The samples were then subjected to a number of analysis techniques, including atom probe tomography, scanning-electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy.

"Even with the advanced techniques we used, these were very difficult measurements to make," said Ogliore.

The measurements told the team about the pressure, temperature and chemistry of the environment that the beads formed in. Indeed, their very existence is proof that the moon had explosive eruptions, "something like the fire fountains that you can see in Hawaii today," said Ogliore.

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Why Are Humpback Whales Making Bubbles?

Reseachers arre baffled on why humpback whales produce bubbles that create a spectacle that often draws tourists from around the world.

Now, a new study published in Marine Mammal Science explores rare instances when humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) create dramatic, doughnut-shaped vortex bubbles that look like a rolling underwater smoke ring.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, and their colleagues at other institutions—including the SETI Institute, which is known for focusing on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) but is also interested in nonhuman intelligences on Earth —were looking for examples of whales’ general bubble behavior when they uncovered a striking video taken by videographer Dan Knaub in 1988. In the footage, a humpback called "Thorn" blows 19 bubble structures—including 11 rings—over a 10-minute period.

"We were just gobsmacked—like, 'What the hell is going on?'" says Fred Sharpe, a whale biologist at U.C. Davis. "For a team that’s interested in assisting astrobiologists parse unusual signals coming from deep space, it just fell real neatly into our paradigm.... It’s so bizarre."

Sharpe and his colleagues soon found more examples on social media and from other researchers. Study co-author Jodi Frediani, a wildlife photographer who is also at U.C. Davis, even noticed a telltale circle in a photograph a friend showed during a presentation about humpback whales. With this phenomenon on her mind, she says, "I went, 'Gee, there's a bubble ring!'"

For the study, the team recorded 12 events across the North and South Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans in which 11 individual humpbacks were seen blowing bubble rings. The researchers described 39 rings in total. "It’s not a lot in the world of whales but enough—and in multiple oceans," Frediani says.

"It’s a really fun paper," says Syracuse University biologist Susan E. Parks, who studies bubble-net feeding in humpbacks and wasn’t involved in the new study.

"It reads like a detective story that’s trying to piece together information about something that’s not widely studied and happens rarely." Parks hasn’t observed any bubble rings herself—as far as she knows, she says, "I may have seen them before and never really thought anything of them."

Despite compiling so many examples of the rings, Sharpe still doesn’t know what to think about their purpose. "My guess is that this is what it’s going to feel like when we first make contact with aliens," he says.

The researchers speculate that the behavior could be playful. One whale would blow a bubble ring and then swim through it or "do a spy hop right through the middle of it," Frediani says—when performing such a spy hop, the whale would peep its head vertically above the surface, right through the bubble ring. Or perhaps the animals’ behavior could respresent curiosity toward humans: of the 12 recorded events, nine involved whales that approached the human observers more closely before they blew rings.

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