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A Massive New Planet Lurking On The Edge Of Our Solar System?

A Massive New Planet Lurking On The Edge Of Our Solar System?

When we think of our solar system, we typically imagine the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, with the possible exclusion of Pluto. There are eight planets, and these facts have been known for hundreds of years.

What if there were a ninth planet? A planet hiding on the very edges of what we consider the solar system? A recent study published on January 20th of this year by two Caltech astronomers has provided evidence of a large planet orbiting the sun far out in the reaches of space.

While we do not have direct visual evidence of the existence of this new mystery planet, researchers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin were able to detect it through the irregular orbital patterns of several objects in the Kuiper Belt, a collection of icy objects just outside the orbit of Neptune. In fact, the evidence for the existence of this planet is so certain that there is only a 0.007% chance that these gravitational anomalies are due to a coincidence.

Image: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC); An artist’s conceptual drawing of “Planet Nine”

This “Planet Nine” is supposedly massive and contains about 10 times the mass of the Earth. According to the researchers who discovered it, our mystery planet is said to have a composition similar to Neptune, which means it is mostly composed of hydrogen and helium. In other words, if we ever travelled to this planet, we wouldn’t have anything to stand on! As a gas giant, the atmosphere would simply become denser and denser as we travel deeper into the planet.

The reason we haven’t yet spotted this planet through conventional telescopes is that it is extremely far away, and thus extremely dim. Whether or not we can spot this planet from telescopes is still doubtful, but with the knowledge of the orbital path of the planet, researchers might be able to visually detect it.

Image: (DATA) JPL; BATYGIN AND BROWN/CALTECH; (DIAGRAM) A. CUADRA/SCIENCE

In this image, the orange ellipse shows the orbit of “Planet Nine”, which is far outside the bounds of what we would normally consider our solar system. At an estimated distance of 600 AU (Astronomical Units, or the distance from the Earth to the Sun) to 1200 AU from the Sun, our mystery planet only orbits the sun once every 20,000 years. For comparison, Pluto, one of the furthest objects in our solar system, is only 40 AU from the Sun. Our furthest probe, Voyager 1, which was launched nearly 40 years ago, is only about 130 AU away from the Sun.

While “Planet Nine” is certainly very fascinating, it is doubtful that we will ever be able to physically reach it. Even if Voyager 1 were pointed directly at the orbital path of the planet, it would not arrive within our lifetime. Hopefully, future advances in propulsion will enable us to investigate planets like these and solve the many mysteries of our solar system.

Trent You

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Posted on February 1, 2016 by trent you in Public Engagement, Science Communication

Tagged exploration, New Planet, Planet Nine, Solar System, Space

In class presentations: What can we do better next time?

Posted on January 25, 2016 by jan jenko | Leave a comment

Last week, we all delivered our short presentations. Some were really good, others needed some work. But the topic and the content had very little to do with it; what mattered was the presentation itself, the way in which the content was delivered. This is a hard truth for a scientist, to whom what matters are numbers and facts, the truth. To have to wrap it up in color paper and perfume seems to diminish it to marketing. But we saw how decisive it is, testifying to the importance of this course. Here are the two noticeable mistakes I think we (myself included) often made:

No Obvious Structure:
Having a clear, organized structure is essential for good understanding. If information is thrown at us without an obvious structure, we won’t connect the dots (interesting article about that), which is what understanding is. Understanding, in turn, is necessary for the internalization of information, for memorization.
The reason, I think, why so many presentations don’t have a clear structure is that when the speaker is the author of the speech, they know exactly what they’re talking about (or at least let’s hope they do) and therefore don’t feel the need to make extra clear where in their speech they are or why they are even talking about something.
To make sure that the audience is onboard and that they don’t have to guess where the presentation is going, it is perhaps useful to break it up into parts and give a quick outline in the beginning. When the speech actually comes to the break, pause for a second and introduce the next part. A good way to do this is with a question, which immediately communicates the relevance of the following section (to answer the question). Exampel of this is in the video below (go to 2:52):

Memorizing the speech word by word:
We talked about this in class. On one side of the spectrum is rigid memorization, on the other not being prepared at all. The aim, I suppose, is to be somewhere in the middle, where you have some bullet points in your mind and then talk more or less freely, making progress from one to the other. This is how we talk in real life conversations, and that’s exactly the point: to make the talk seem like… well, a talk. In our class though, many presentations were very rigid, with no room for error and improvisation. That offers some sort of comfort I suppose, but it doesn’t feel authentic. Moreover, memorizing a sequence of words makes it very hard to recover after being distracted and losing the thread.

Bill Clinton, pretty casual during a speech. Photo by Kate Wellington (source: Flickr)

I’m no authority here, I know my presentation was average at best. But still, the success of a presentation is measured by the impression it leaves on the audience and so every member of the audience is a competent judge.

Jan Jenko

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Posted in Public Engagement, Science Communication

Tagged Memorization, Organization, Presentation, Speech, Structure, Understanding

Is it possible to have sex in space?

Posted on January 25, 2016 by ganna12 | Leave a comment

https://www.harwin.com/markets/space/space-craft/

Whenever we watch the movies like ‘Martian’ or ‘Interstellar,’ we want to know having sex in space will be possible or not. This is one of the most famous questions from the astronauts. Before understanding the scientific knowledge of gravity, we might think that we can have sex in space. However the answer for this question is no it is impossible to have sex in space. The reason is that the micro-gravity environment in space causes many problems. In this blog, I want to introduce the four main problems.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/shuttlestation/station/microgex.html [Micro-gravity in Space]

The first problem is with the regulation of blood flow. Low gravity affects the blood flow throughout the body unlike the way as on the Earth. Gravity normally helps our blood flow to reach the lower parts of our body on the Earth. However in space, blood rises to your head and chest first. Therefore it will be much more difficult for males to achieve an erection. As we learned from CAPS 390, erection is related primarily to blood flow and regulated by the relaxation and contraction. However, the blood flow is so slow to reach the lower part of our body. It is impossible to contract.

The second problem is sweat. This will be disgusting example if we have sex in space. Sweat tends to make many layers around the astronauts and making them sticky and wet. The reason is that the low gravity causes the sweat droplet do not fall to the ground and stick to the body. There is no pushing force like gravity; the droplets are only influenced by the adhesion force.

The third problem is that male testosterone levels decrease in space. This will diminish the sex hormones in space. NASA still could not discover why the testosterone levels decrease. However, when the astronauts return to the Earth, the testosterone levels reach to the normal state.

The last problem is with our heart and muscle. In space, our heart does not need to pump blood faster to the rest of our body. The reason is that the gravity does not push any blood flow to the lower part of body harder. Therefore, our hearts shrink when we are in space. Also our muscles become weaker because we do not use muscles to overcome the gravity. This is a huge problem when you have sex. The reason is that your heart rate suddenly increases and you breathe harder. Therefore, your body will become tired and muscles will decrease.

In the conclusion, through the micro-gravity issue, it is impossible to have a sex in space.

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Posted in Biological Sciences, Science Communication

Tagged micro-gravity, NASA, sex in space

My low memory computer is too slow to process this graphics intensive video

Posted on January 18, 2016 by ivan fong | Leave a comment

The 6th Gen Intel Core i7-6500U processor gives the Razer Blade Stealth 2.5GHz of processing power and Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.1GHz.

Above is a picture with a quote taken from Razer – introducing it’s latest laptop. After reading that, you’ll probably fall into one of the two categories: “What on earth does this mean,” or “Razer is obviously ripping people off.”

It intrigues me that most people still know so little about what they’re using at the palm of their hands on a daily basis. Yet it is understandable as to why this is, the jargons that are supposed to help customers make better choices have become the barriers themselves.

Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 by Microsoft

Does it matter if you laptop can split in half?

And some of the biggest companies (Apple, Microsoft, etc.) intentionally leave out the specifications of their products. Imagine buying a furnished house without knowing the capacity of the washing machine.

Fret not! Hopefully, this “guide” will help you up your game so you won’t need to waste hours of your life deciding on a new computer. Some fun stuff will be lying around so to not bore you.

CPU: Central Processing Unit, the brain of the computer, responsible for processing things in your computer, the speed is measured in Gigahertz (GHz). Below is a video of Steve Jobs holding a CPU.

You might also have heard of cores. I will leave that to one of my favourite tech YouTuber to explain, take it away MKBHD:

Fun fact: The evolution of CPU (sounds weird I know), was governed by the Moore’s Law until recently, this means that we will only see a significantly faster CPU every two years.

GPU: Graphic Processing Unit, the visual cortex of the computer, responsible for processing visual information. Things that are graphic intensive include videos, games and 3D modelling.

Fun watch: embedded is a video of the legendary Mythbusters explaining the difference between CPU and GPU, though it is old, it is still very relevant now.

HDD/SSD: Hard Disk Drive/Solid State Drive, governing the long term memories of the computer. Measured in Gigabytes (GB) or Terabyes (TB). Trust me on this when I say you don’t want to have a small capacity (<250GB), don’t say I didn’t warn you when you have to start deleting adorable cat pics just because you didn’t listen to me.

Fun read: Scientists have found another use for helium, which is to fill them in HDD to give HDD a higher capacity!

RAM: Random Access Memory, the short term memory of the computer. They will help store tidbits used for short time like booting up a computer or the amount of tabs you have on your browser (seriously, don’t blame the computer for being slow when you have 30 tabs opened all at the same time). <– Funny Joke

To sum up: Everything is better with higher numbers.

And that’s it for today! Maybe I’ll expand on each aspect in the future blog posts, but until then!

Ivan

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Posted in Science Communication, Science Communicators, Science in the News

Tagged computer, cpu, gpu, graphics, hdd, intel, memory, mythbusters, processor, ram, razer, ssd

Mathematics – The magic behind animated movies

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Ryan Tran | Leave a comment

Nowadays, most animated movies are made by using computer animation techniques instead of hand-drawn animation. When we watch these computer animation movies, we usually think the producers are artists with a creative mind and great drawing skills. However, not many of us have noticed that some of them are also great mathematicians. So the question is how maths is used in computer animation?

Creating an animated movie is like creating a new virtual world, where new planes need to be defined in a coordinate system. A plane is described by a set of three points or a point and 2 vectors. But imagine a world where everything is on a flat infinite plane, well, this must be a boring world. Therefore, hills, mountains, rivers, valleys are added. It sounds like an easy task, but in fact it isn’t easy at all. First, the objects are sketched by using wire skeletons which are composed by simple polygons. A mathematical methods called Non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) is then used to smoothen surfaces of the objects. In a TED-ed talk, Tony DeRose, a Senior Scientist and Research Group Lead at Pixar, gave a presentation about how Non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) was used in Pixar’s animated movies. In a paper called Subdivision Surfaces in Character Animation, which was published in 1998 by Tony DeRose, Michael Kass and Tien Truong, the application of NURBS in creating subdivision surfaces was described in detail.

Now it’s when coordinate systems get involved. As the objects are put together, coordinates are required to make sure the objects locate at where they’re supposed to be. Vectors are used to define the location of every point with respect to the origin of the chosen coordinate system. To describe the motion of an object in space, transformation matrices are used. Depending on the elements of the matrices, the transformation can be rotation, translation, enlargement, reflection or a combination of these.

Some examples of simple transformation matrices

The following video shows how maths is use to create more realistic animations

The above mathematical methods are only a few main methods that are used in computer animation. There are many other mathematical methods that are useful for computer animation, such as Fourier Transformation, Complex Analysis, and so on. Mathematics plays an important role in computer animation. It makes a significant contribution to the success of computer animated movies.

Ryan Tran.
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Posted in Science Communication, Uncategorized

Tagged complex analysis, computer animation, computer science, Mathematics, NURBS, PIXAR

Know the Causes, Symptoms, and Remedies of Abdominal Pain?

Posted on January 16, 2016 by shayini | Leave a comment

I just recovered from a pretty sharp pain in my abdomen! I usually have these pains frequently and they last from 2 to 12 days. I decided to do some research on this topic to figure out the origin of this pain. After looking through some news websites and peer-reviewed journal articles, I found a great deal of information regarding abdominal pains.

Anatomy of the abdomen: Wikimedia Commons by Tvanbr

Abdominal Pain, is a very common pain that occurs between the chest and pelvic regions of the human body. As you can see from the image to the right, the pain comes from organs within the abdomen such as the small intestine, stomach, liver, spleen, pancreas, colon and gallbladder. It can be mild or severe, ranging from crampy to sharp.Some of the symptoms of the abdominal pain are chest pain, heartburn and indigestion. Infection, inflammation, and intestinal disorders can cause these symptoms.

One of the main root causes that I want to focus on is the bacterial infection. The infection in the stomach originates from bacterial gastroenteritis, which causes inflammation in the stomach and intestines. The term gastroenteritis is also known as stomach flu with symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhea. Bacterial infection results from coming in contact with contaminated water, food, and animals, as well as having poor hygiene.

Person having abdominal pain: Wikimedia Commons by CDC

Abdominal main affects mainly children, elderly persons, and pregnancy women. However, it also affects the general human population, even students like myself! Abdominal pain in children eases faster than in pregnant women and other adults.

The pain is a serious problem in elderly people. A study states that abdominal pain is a growing concern since the population of elderly persons is increasing, and people are living to an older age. Among the elderly persons who consult the doctor for abdominal pain, at least 50% are hospitalized and 40% have surgery because of the severe pain. Similarly, many diseases can causes abdominal pain during pregnancy, which can be threatening to both the mother and the baby.

What’s the solution to this problem? You can prevent or reduce abdominal pain by reducing your per meal intake (eat more meals but less amount of food in each meal), exercising frequently, avoiding excess amount of alcohol consumption, and avoiding smoking. Good hygiene also reduces the chances of abdominal pain due to bacterial infection.

As you can see, abdominal pain is a very serious concern that affects a range of individuals.It is important to consult a doctor to avoid long term complications, and to avoid turning an acute condition into a chronic one. It is unfortunate that the public dismiss abdominal pain as they do not view it as a serious health concern. When the pain is long-term and severe, it is important to diagnose the cause as soon as possible to avoid further complications.

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Posted in Biological Sciences, Public Engagement, Science Communication, Science in the News

Tagged abdomen, bacteria, biology, human body, infection, pain, scientific

Celebrity Advocacy: The “Experts” Weigh-In on the Vaccine Controversy

Posted on January 16, 2016 by Brigette Wee | 2 comments

Have you ever purchased a product because you saw your favorite celebrity on television use it? The idea behind this marketing strategy is called celebrity endorsement. Celebrity endorsement involves a well-known person using their fame to advertise and promote a product, service or idea. To a certain extent, this is not bad at all. However, it takes a toll in society when a celebrity advocates for their belief on a controversial topic that is beyond their field of expertise.

Jenny McCarthy is an American model, actress, television host and as some may say, an anti-vaccine activist. She claimed, “Time magazine’s article on the autism debate reports that the experts are certain ‘vaccines don’t cause autism; they don’t injure children; they are the pillar of modern public health.’ I say, ‘that’s a lie and we’re sick of it.’ ”

Jenny McCarthy via buzzfeed

Since Jenny McCarthy is under great public attention in the media, she brought attention and awareness to the vaccine controversy but in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons. She failed to realize that, if we stop vaccination, many diseases would come back. This bad publicity could result in reduced vaccine uptake and the return of many diseases.

Picture from Toronto Public Health Data from the Public Health Agency of Canada

Instead, social media coverage and the public should focus their attention on reliable sources regarding the vaccine controversy and any future scientific topics.

Dr. Gregory A. Poland, a health care professional who holds a MD from Southern Illinois University, claimed that no credible scientific evidence supports the idea that Measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccines cause autism; More than 20 carefully-performed scientific studies supported this claim. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also concluded that there is no relationship between MMR vaccine and autism. The American Academy of Pediatrics made similar conclusions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Af9rgAL-0

In this video, Dr. Gregory A. Poland talked about the importance of vaccines and the diseases that have been eradicated and controlled by the use of vaccination. He also addressed the dangers of opposing vaccination.

False beliefs and biases have lead to parents deciding not to immunize their children with vaccines because of the fear that autism is associated with Measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccines. This puts children in the likelihood for acquiring measles and other diseases. The health of numerous children is at great risk because of continued misinformation and unscientific beliefs.

The way forward is that public health concerns should be addressed more carefully by the media. Claims that have no credible data must be ignored no matter how passionate an individual is about their belief. Social media should stop giving celebrities who comment on scientific controversies more attention than scientists who are experts in this field.

The public should not misunderstand celebrity status and fame for authority. We shall always seek for scientific claims that have been supported by experts in the field, peer-reviewed and supported with raw data before believing anything. Thus, we should not be quick to believe Jenny McCarthy’s campaign.

Brigette Wee

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Posted in Issues in Science, Science Communication, Science in the News

Tagged Autism, Celebrity Endorsement, Communicating Science, Jenny McCarthy, Pseudoscience, Vaccine

Category Archives: Science Communication

A Massive New Planet Lurking On The Edge Of Our Solar System?

In class presentations: What can we do better next time?

Is it possible to have sex in space?

My low memory computer is too slow to process this graphics intensive video

Mathematics – The magic behind animated movies

Know the Causes, Symptoms, and Remedies of Abdominal Pain?

Celebrity Advocacy: The “Experts” Weigh-In on the Vaccine Controversy

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Category Archives: Science Communication

A Massive New Planet Lurking On The Edge Of Our Solar System?

In class presentations: What can we do better next time?

Is it possible to have sex in space?

My low memory computer is too slow to process this graphics intensive video

Mathematics – The magic behind animated movies

Know the Causes, Symptoms, and Remedies of Abdominal Pain?

Celebrity Advocacy: The “Experts” Weigh-In on the Vaccine Controversy

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