From The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München] (DE) And From The MPG Institute for Astronomy [MPG Institut für Astronomie] (DE) Via “COSMOS (AU)” : “Scientists narrow down the theory about the origins of life – volcanoes or meteors”

From The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München] (DE)

And

MPG Institut für Astronomie (DE)

From The MPG Institute for Astronomy [MPG Institut für Astronomie] (DE)

Via

“COSMOS (AU)”

5.26.23
Evrim Yazgin

Artist impression of the Hadean Eon. Credit: Tim Bertelink via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

How did the building blocks of life on earth – amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates and nucleic acids – begin to form? They are the fundamental molecules making up all life and had to have come from somewhere.

New research shows how iron-rich particles from meteors OR volcanoes about 4.4 billion years ago, could have provided the right conditions for the formation of these molecules, essential in the origins of life on our planet.

It has long been a subject of debate as to where the precursors of organic molecules – the chemical compounds that make up every living cell on Earth – came from.

Previous studies have suggested that these precursors – hydrocarbons, aldehydes and alcohols – may have come to Earth from space through asteroid and comet collisions, billions of years ago.

But others suggest an alternative route – that these precursors emerged in the oceans and atmosphere of the early Earth through chemical reactions promoted by high energy during lightning, volcanic activity, or impacts.

Little observable evidence remains of conditions on Earth more than four billion years ago.

This period of Earth’s history is dubbed the “Hadean,” a period when the planet was still extremely hot, had intense volcanic activity, and suffered frequent collisions with other objects in the solar system.

The geological eon begins with the planet’s formation about 4.54 billion years ago and ends about 4.0 billion years ago.

Researchers from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE) and MPG Institute for Astronomy (DE) investigated how life-forming molecules may have formed in the Hadean. They simulated a large range of conditions, that previous research suggests may have existed on early Earth, to assess the likelihood of different chemical reactions taking place.

Both meteorite (space-born) or ash (Earth-born) particles that might have been deposited on volcanic islands were tested to see if, in these conditions, they could have promoted the conversion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the precursor molecules for organic life.

Carbon dioxide gas placed in a heated and pressurized autoclave system was subjected to pressures between nine and 45 bar. For comparison, atmospheric pressure at sea level today is 1.013 bar while on Venus (which probably resembles Hadean Earth in many ways) it is 93 bar.

Temperatures were also varied from 150°C to 300°C. Wet conditions were compared to dry conditions by adding hydrogen gas or water respectively.

Crushed samples of iron meteorites, stony meteorites and volcanic ash were added to the system, as well as minerals that may have been present on early Earth.

Iron-rich particles from meteorites and volcanic ash were found to promote the conversion of carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons, aldehydes and alcohols.

The results suggest that hydrocarbons formed at 300°C and alcohols and aldehydes formed at lower temperatures when the atmosphere would have cooled over time. These compounds may then have undergone further reactions to form sugars, carbohydrates, fat molecules, amino acids, DNA and RNA.

The scientists estimate that their proposed mechanism could have synthesized up to 600,000 tonnes of organic precursor molecules per year on early Earth.

But which was it? Did volcanoes on Earth, or meteors from space spark the beginnings of life on our planet?

In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports [below], the authors of the research say, “it is difficult to deduce with certainty which scenario was the most dominant (if any) due to missing key data.” This new study shows that it could have been a little bit of both.

Scientific Reports

Figure 1.

Formation of prebiotic key organic matter from CO2 by catalysis with meteoritic and volcanic particles. (A) Early Earth scenario with sources of catalytically active iron, and iron-rich particles. The exogenous sources include iron and iron-containing stony meteorites and asteroids producing nanoparticles by their thermal ablation in the atmosphere or after giant impacts. In situ sources are active volcanic chains similar to Hawaii, which produce iron-rich volcanic ash particles. These nano- and microscopic particles of elemental iron show catalytic activity and drive a robust synthesis of the feedstock atmospheric CO2 and H2 or H2O into key prebiotic organic compounds, at temperatures and pressures representative on the early Earth. Alternatively, H2 can be formed during the oxidation of elemental iron with water. These prebiotic organic compounds can act as reactants in further organic syntheses leading to the formation of carbohydrates, lipids, sugars [23*], amino acids [55], and RNA and DNA molecules [35]. (B) Catalyst particles were prepared by acidic dissolution of iron meteorites Campo del Cielo and Muonionalusta, stone meteorite Gao-Guenie and volcanic ash from Etna (Sicily, Italy) (I), followed by the impregnation of support material, calcination at 450 °C (II), and reduction (III). To simulate a giant impact or volcanic eruption these materials were also ground in a ball mill. These catalytic particles were investigated in high-pressure autoclave experiments applying a broad range of conditions (9–45 bar and 150–300 °C) with a mixture of CO2 and H2 (IV). The reaction products were identified and quantified by GC–MS measurements (V).
*This and similar references found in the full science paper.
More instructive images are available in the science paper.

See the full article here.

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The MPG Institute for Astronomy campus, Heidelberg (DE)
The MPG Institute for Astronomy [MPG Institut für Astronomie] (DE) is a research institute of The MPG Society for the Advancement of Science [MPG Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.] (DE). It is located in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany near the top of the Königstuhl, adjacent to the historic Landessternwarte Heidelberg-Königstuhl astronomical observatory. The institute primarily conducts basic research in the natural sciences in the field of astronomy.

In addition to its own astronomical observations and astronomical research, the Institute is also actively involved in the development of observation instruments. The instruments or parts of them are manufactured in the institute’s own workshops.

The founding of the institute in 1967 resulted from the insight that a supra-regional institute equipped with powerful telescopes was necessary in order to conduct internationally competitive astronomical research. Hans Elsässer, an astronomer, became the founding director in 1968. In February 1969, a first group of 5 employees started work in the buildings of the neighbouring Königstuhl State Observatory. The institute, which was completed in 1975, was initially dedicated to the preparation and evaluation of astronomical observations and the development of new measurement methods.

From 1973 to 1984, it operated the Calar Alto Observatory on Calar Alto near Almería together with Spanish authorities.

The Calar Alto Astronomical Observatory 3.5 meter Telescope, located in Almería province in Spain on Calar Alto, a 2,168-meter-high (7,113 ft) mountain in Sierra de Los Filabres(ES)

This largest observatory on the European mainland was used equally by astronomers from both countries until 2019. On 23 May 2019, the regional government of Andalusia and the MPG signed a transfer agreement for the 50% share in the observatory. Since then, it has been owned exclusively by Spain.

Since 2005, The MPG Institute for Astronomy has been operating the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) together with partners from Germany, Italy and the USA and equipping it with measuring instruments.

LBT-University of Arizona Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer, or LBTI, is a ground-based instrument connecting two 8-meter class telescopes on Mount Graham, Arizona, Altitude 3,221 m (10,568 ft.) to form the largest single-mount telescope in the world. The interferometer is designed to detect and study stars and planets outside our solar system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Two scientific questions are given priority at The MPG Institute for Astronomy. One is the formation and development of stars and planets in our cosmic neighborhood. The resonating question is: Is the Sun with its inhabited planet Earth unique, or are there also conditions in the vicinity of other stars, at least the numerous sun-like ones among them, that are conducive to life? On the other hand, the area of galaxies and cosmology is about understanding the development of today’s richly structured Universe with its galaxies and stars and its emergence from the simple initial state after the Big Bang.

The research topics at a glance:
• Star formation and young objects, planet formation, astrobiology, interstellar matter, astrochemistry
• Structure and evolution of the Milky Way, quasars and active galaxies, evolution of galaxies, galaxy clusters, cosmology

Together with the Center for Astronomy at The Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg [Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg](DE), the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and the Department of Astro- and Particle Physics of the MPI for Nuclear Physics (MPIK), the MPIA in Heidelberg is a globally renowned centre of astronomical research.

Since 2015, the MPIA has been running the “Heidelberg Initiative for the Origins of Life” (HIFOL) together with the MPIK, the HITS, the Institute of Geosciences at Heidelberg University and the Department of Chemistry at The Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München](DE). HIFOL brings together top researchers from astrophysics, geosciences, chemistry and the life sciences to promote, strengthen and combine scientific research towards the prerequisites for the emergence of life.

Structure
• Galaxies and Cosmology Department

• Gaia Galactic Survey Mission
• Supermassive black holes and galaxies in the epoch of reionization
• Stellar spectroscopy and populations
• AGN Jet Physics
• High angular resolution astronomy
• Coevolution of Galaxies and Black Holes
• Euclid Mission Group
• Stellar Physics and the Evolution of Chemical Elements
• Structure of Active Galactic Nuclei
• Galactic Nuclei
• Galaxies and Cosmology Theory
• Black Hole and Accretion Research/Instrumentation
• Galaxy Evolution and Milky Way groups
• Extragalactic Star Formation
• Interstellar Matter and High-z QSOs

• Planet and Star Formation Department

• Star Formation
• Planet Formation in Accretion Discs
• Adaptive Optics
• Unveiling Planet Formation by Simulations and ObservationS
• Center “Frontiers of Interferometry in Germany”
• Disks and Exoplanets
• Laboratory Astrophysics
• Theory of Planet and Star Formation
• Infrared Space
• The Genesis of Planets

• Atmospheric Physics of Exoplanets
• Technical Departments

Instrumentation
The MPIA also builds instruments or parts of them for ground-based telescopes and satellites, including the following:
• Calar Alto Observatory (Spain)[above]
• La Silla Observatory of the European Southern Observatory (The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral] [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte](EU)(CL))
European Southern Observatory(EU) La Silla Observatory 600 km north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2400 metres.
• Paranal Observatory and E-ELT (ESO)

The Paranal Observatory pictured with Cerro Paranal in the background. The mountain is home to one of the most advanced ground-based telescopes in the world, the VLT. The VLT telescope consists of four unit telescopes with mirrors measuring 8.2 meters in diameter and work together with four smaller auxiliary telescopes to make interferometric observations. Each of the 8.2m diameter Unit Telescopes can also be used individually. With one such telescope, images of celestial objects as faint as magnitude 30 can be obtained in a one-hour exposure. This corresponds to seeing objects that are four billion (four thousand million) times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye.

The European Southern Observatory(EU) ELT 39 meter telescope to be on top of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile at an altitude of 3,060 metres (10,040 ft).

• Large Binocular Telescope [above]
• Infrared Space Observatory (The European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU))

ESA Infrared Space Observatory.

• Herschel Space Observatory (ESA, The National Aeronautics and Space Agency)

European Space Agency Herschel spacecraft active from 2009 to 2013.
• James Webb Space Telescope (NASA, ESA.CSA)

National Aeronautics Space Agency/European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU)/ Canadian Space Agency [Agence Spatiale Canadienne](CA) James Webb Infrared Space Telescope(US) annotated, finally launched December 25, 2021, ten years late.

The MPIA is also participating in the Gaia mission.

European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea][Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU) GAIA satellite.

Gaia is a space mission of The European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU), in which the exact positions, distances and velocities of around one billion Milky Way stars are determined.

The MPG Society for the Advancement of Science [MPG Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.](DE) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and renamed the Max Planck Society in 1948 in honor of its former president, theoretical physicist Max Planck. The society is funded by the federal and state governments of Germany as well as other sources.

According to its primary goal, the MPG Society supports fundamental research in the natural, life and social sciences, the arts and humanities in its 83 (as of January 2014) MPG Institutes. The society has a total staff of approximately 17,000 permanent employees, including 5,470 scientists, plus around 4,600 non-tenured scientists and guests. Society budget for 2015 was about €1.7 billion.

The MPG Institutes focus on excellence in research. The MPG Society has a world-leading reputation as a science and technology research organization, with 33 Nobel Prizes awarded to their scientists, and is generally regarded as the foremost basic research organization in Europe and the world. In 2013, the Nature Publishing Index placed the MPG institutes fifth worldwide in terms of research published in Nature journals (after Harvard University, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and The National Institutes of Health). In terms of total research volume (unweighted by citations or impact), the Max Planck Society is only outranked by The Chinese Academy of Sciences [中国科学院](CN), The Russian Academy of Sciences [Росси́йская акаде́мия нау́к](RU) and Harvard University. The Thomson Reuters-Science Watch website placed the MPG Society as the second leading research organization worldwide following Harvard University, in terms of the impact of the produced research over science fields.

The MPG Society and its predecessor Kaiser Wilhelm Society hosted several renowned scientists in their fields, including Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein.

History

The organization was established in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, or Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG), a non-governmental research organization named for the then German emperor. The KWG was one of the world’s leading research organizations; its board of directors included scientists like Walther Bothe, Peter Debye, Albert Einstein, and Fritz Haber. In 1946, Otto Hahn assumed the position of President of KWG, and in 1948, the society was renamed the Max Planck Society (MPG) after its former President (1930–37) Max Planck, who died in 1947.

The MPG Society has a world-leading reputation as a science and technology research organization. In 2006, the Times Higher Education Supplement rankings of non-university research institutions (based on international peer review by academics) placed the MPG Society as No.1 in the world for science research, and No.3 in technology research (behind AT&T Corporation and The DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.

The domain mpg.de attracted at least 1.7 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study.

MPG Institutes and research groups

The MPG Society consists of over 80 research institutes. In addition, the society funds a number of Max Planck Research Groups (MPRG) and International Max Planck Research Schools (IMPRS). The purpose of establishing independent research groups at various universities is to strengthen the required networking between universities and institutes of the Max Planck Society.
The research units are primarily located across Europe with a few in South Korea and the U.S. In 2007, the Society established its first non-European centre, with an institute on the Jupiter campus of Florida Atlantic University (US) focusing on neuroscience.
The MPG Institutes operate independently from, though in close cooperation with, the universities, and focus on innovative research which does not fit into the university structure due to their interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary nature or which require resources that cannot be met by the state universities.

Internally, MPG Institutes are organized into research departments headed by directors such that each MPI has several directors, a position roughly comparable to anything from full professor to department head at a university. Other core members include Junior and Senior Research Fellows.

In addition, there are several associated institutes:

International Max Planck Research Schools

International Max Planck Research Schools

Together with the Association of Universities and other Education Institutions in Germany, the Max Planck Society established numerous International Max Planck Research Schools (IMPRS) to promote junior scientists:

• Cologne Graduate School of Ageing Research, Cologne
• International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems, at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems located in Tübingen and Stuttgart
• International Max Planck Research School on Adapting Behavior in a Fundamentally Uncertain World (Uncertainty School), at the Max Planck Institutes for Economics, for Human Development, and/or Research on Collective Goods
• International Max Planck Research School for Analysis, Design and Optimization in Chemical and Biochemical Process Engineering, Magdeburg
• International Max Planck Research School for Astronomy and Cosmic Physics, Heidelberg at the MPI for Astronomy
• International Max Planck Research School for Astrophysics, Garching at the MPI for Astrophysics
• International Max Planck Research School for Complex Surfaces in Material Sciences, Berlin
• International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science, Saarbrücken
• International Max Planck Research School for Earth System Modeling, Hamburg
• International Max Planck Research School for Elementary Particle Physics, Munich, at the MPI for Physics
• International Max Planck Research School for Environmental, Cellular and Molecular Microbiology, Marburg at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology
• International Max Planck Research School for Evolutionary Biology, Plön at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology
• International Max Planck Research School “From Molecules to Organisms”, Tübingen at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology
• International Max Planck Research School for Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Jena at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
• International Max Planck Research School on Gravitational Wave Astronomy, Hannover and Potsdam MPI for Gravitational Physics
• International Max Planck Research School for Heart and Lung Research, Bad Nauheim at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research
• International Max Planck Research School for Infectious Diseases and Immunity, Berlin at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology
• International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, Nijmegen
• International Max Planck Research School for Neurosciences, Göttingen
• International Max Planck Research School for Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience, Tübingen
• International Max Planck Research School for Marine Microbiology (MarMic), joint program of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, the University of Bremen, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, and the Jacobs University Bremen
• International Max Planck Research School for Maritime Affairs, Hamburg
• International Max Planck Research School for Molecular and Cellular Biology, Freiburg
• International Max Planck Research School for Molecular and Cellular Life Sciences, Munich
• International Max Planck Research School for Molecular Biology, Göttingen
• International Max Planck Research School for Molecular Cell Biology and Bioengineering, Dresden
• International Max Planck Research School Molecular Biomedicine, program combined with the ‘Graduate Programm Cell Dynamics And Disease’ at the University of Münster and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine
• International Max Planck Research School on Multiscale Bio-Systems, Potsdam
• International Max Planck Research School for Organismal Biology, at the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology
• International Max Planck Research School on Reactive Structure Analysis for Chemical Reactions (IMPRS RECHARGE), Mülheim an der Ruhr, at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion
• International Max Planck Research School for Science and Technology of Nano-Systems, Halle at Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics
• International Max Planck Research School for Solar System Science at the University of Göttingen hosted by MPI for Solar System Research
• International Max Planck Research School for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Bonn, at the MPI for Radio Astronomy (formerly the International Max Planck Research School for Radio and Infrared Astronomy)
• International Max Planck Research School for the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy, Cologne
• International Max Planck Research School for Surface and Interface Engineering in Advanced Materials, Düsseldorf at Max Planck Institute for Iron Research GmbH
• International Max Planck Research School for Ultrafast Imaging and Structural Dynamics, Hamburg

Max Planck Schools

• Max Planck School of Cognition
• Max Planck School Matter to Life
• Max Planck School of Photonics

Max Planck Center

• The Max Planck Centre for Attosecond Science (MPC-AS), POSTECH Pohang
• The Max Planck POSTECH Center for Complex Phase Materials, POSTECH Pohang

Max Planck Institutes

Among others:
• Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior – caesar, Bonn
• Max Planck Institute for Aeronomics in Katlenburg-Lindau was renamed to Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in 2004;
• Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen was closed in 2005;
• Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology in Ladenburg b. Heidelberg was closed in 2003;
• Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena was renamed to the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in 2014;
• Max Planck Institute for Ionospheric Research in Katlenburg-Lindau was renamed to Max Planck Institute for Aeronomics in 1958;
• Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Stuttgart
• Max Planck Institute of Oceanic Biology in Wilhelmshaven was renamed to Max Planck Institute of Cell Biology in 1968 and moved to Ladenburg 1977;
• Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich merged into the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in 2004;
• Max Planck Institute for Protein and Leather Research in Regensburg moved to Munich 1957 and was united with the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in 1977;
• Max Planck Institute for Virus Research in Tübingen was renamed as Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in 1985;
• Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg (from 1970 until 1981 (closed)) directed by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Jürgen Habermas.
• Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology
• Max Planck Institute of Experimental Endocrinology
• Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Social Law
• Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics
• Max Planck Research Unit for Enzymology of Protein Folding
• Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing

Welcome to The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München] (DE) – the University in the heart of Munich. LMU is recognized as one of Europe’s premier academic and research institutions. Since our founding in 1472, LMU has attracted inspired scholars and talented students from all over the world, keeping the University at the nexus of ideas that challenge and change our complex world.

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München] (DE) is a public research university located in Munich, Germany.

The University of Munich is Germany’s sixth-oldest university in continuous operation. Originally established in Ingolstadt in 1472 by Duke Ludwig IX of Bavaria-Landshut, the university was moved in 1800 to Landshut by King Maximilian I of Bavaria when Ingolstadt was threatened by the French, before being relocated to its present-day location in Munich in 1826 by King Ludwig I of Bavaria. In 1802, the university was officially named Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität by King Maximilian I of Bavaria in his as well as the university’s original founder’s honour.

The University of Munich is associated with 43 Nobel laureates (as of October 2020). Among these were Wilhelm Röntgen, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn and Thomas Mann. Pope Benedict XVI was also a student and professor at the university. Among its notable alumni, faculty and researchers are inter alia Rudolf Peierls, Josef Mengele, Richard Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Campbell, Muhammad Iqbal, Marie Stopes, Wolfgang Pauli, Bertolt Brecht, Max Horkheimer, Karl Loewenstein, Carl Schmitt, Gustav Radbruch, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Bloch, Konrad Adenauer. The LMU has recently been conferred the title of “University of Excellence” under the German Universities Excellence Initiative.

LMU is currently the second-largest university in Germany in terms of student population; in the winter semester of 2018/2019, the university had a total of 51,606 matriculated students. Of these, 9,424 were freshmen while international students totalled 8,875 or approximately 17% of the student population. As for operating budget, the university records in 2018 a total of 734,9 million euros in funding without the university hospital; with the university hospital, the university has a total funding amounting to approximately 1.94 billion euros.

Faculties

LMU’s Institute of Systematic Botany is located at Botanischer Garten München-Nymphenburg

The university consists of 18 faculties which oversee various departments and institutes. The official numbering of the faculties and the missing numbers 06 and 14 are the result of breakups and mergers of faculties in the past. The Faculty of Forestry Operations with number 06 has been integrated into the Technical University of Munich [Technische Universität München] (DE) in 1999 and faculty number 14 has been merged with faculty number 13.

01 Faculty of Catholic Theology
02 Faculty of Protestant Theology
03 Faculty of Law
04 Faculty of Business Administration
05 Faculty of Economics
07 Faculty of Medicine
08 Faculty of Veterinary Medicine
09 Faculty for History and the Arts
10 Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Study of Religion
11 Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
12 Faculty for the Study of Culture
13 Faculty for Languages and Literatures
15 Faculty of Social Sciences
16 Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics
17 Faculty of Physics
18 Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy
19 Faculty of Biology
20 Faculty of Geosciences and Environmental Sciences

Research centres

In addition to its 18 faculties, the University of Munich also maintains numerous research centres involved in numerous cross-faculty and transdisciplinary projects to complement its various academic programmes. Some of these research centres were a result of cooperation between the university and renowned external partners from academia and industry; the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, for example, was established through a joint initiative between LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum, while the Parmenides Center for the Study of Thinking resulted from the collaboration between the Parmenides Foundation and LMU Munich’s Human Science Center.

Some of the research centres which have been established include:

Center for Integrated Protein Science Munich (CIPSM)
Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences (GSN)
Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health
Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM)
Parmenides Center for the Study of Thinking
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society

From The University of Colorado-Boulder Via “COSMOS (AU)” : “Water levels plunge in half of Earth’s largest lakes”

From The University of Colorado-Boulder

Via

“COSMOS (AU)”

5.19.23
Petra Stock

Looking northeast, the Imperial Valley and Salton Sea in southern California is photographed from the Earth-orbiting Gemini-5 spacecraft / Credit: NASA

Gemini-5. NASA.

Water levels are declining in more than half of the world’s largest lakes, according to analysis of nearly three decades of satellite data.

Climate change and unsustainable human consumption are to blame, say climate researchers from the universities of Virginia and Colorado Boulder in the US.

The assessment published in Science [below] is the first comprehensive review of global trends and drivers of lake water storage, its authors say.

“We have pretty good information on iconic lakes like [the] Caspian Sea, Aral Sea and Salton Sea, but if you want to say something on a global scale, you need reliable estimates of lake levels and volume,” says co-author Balaji Rajagopalan, professor of engineering at The University of Colorado-Boulder.

The analysis draws on satellite data for 1,972 of the world’s largest lakes between 1992 and 2020, available data on long-term water levels, as well as water use and climate modelling.

The lakes in the study represent 95% of total lake water storage on Earth and the authors estimate around 2 billion people live in areas affected by drying lakes.

The assessment found 53% of lakes globally experienced a decline in water storage, and that lakes located in both wet and dry areas of the world are losing volume.

Nearly two-thirds of large water reservoirs experienced significant water losses, with sedimentation the main driver.

In around a quarter of the lakes assessed, water levels increased. These were mainly located in underpopulated areas in the inner Tibetan Plateau, the northern Great Plains of North America and areas with new reservoirs such as the Yangtze, Mekong and Nile River basins.

The authors say their findings can assist water managers and communities in better managing and protecting local water resources.

Science

Fig. 1. Widespread storage decline in large global lakes from October 1992 to September 2020.
Lake water storage (LWS) trends for 1058 natural lakes (dark red and dark blue dots) and 922 reservoirs (light red and light blue dots). Recently filled reservoirs after 1992 are denoted as light purple dots. All colored dots denote statistically significant trends (p < 0.1), whereas no significant trends are shown as gray dots. Classification of climate regimes between arid and humid regions was done using the aridity index [ratio of mean annual precipitation to mean annual potential evapotranspiration (materials and methods)].

Fig. 2. Time series and drivers of global lake water storage change, October 1992 to September 2020. (A to F) Time series and trends of aggregate storage anomalies for each type of water body for global, humid, and arid regions, respectively. (G to L) Attribution of storage trends in natural lakes and reservoirs. Temp, Precip, and PET stand for temperature, precipitation, and potential evapotranspiration, respectively. The shading denotes the LWS uncertainties in all water bodies (gray shading), natural lakes (blue shading), and reservoirs (green shading) at a 95% confidence interval. The error bars show the aggregate uncertainty in LWS trends at a 95% confidence interval. For natural lakes, 57% of the net global decline is attributable to human activities and increasing temperature and potential evapotranspiration. Recent dam construction, largely in humid basins, supported the net increase in global reservoir storage, although more than 80% of the increased storage in recently filled reservoirs is offset by sedimentation-induced storage loss in existing reservoirs.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

As the flagship university of the state of Colorado The University of Colorado-Boulder , founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state. It is a dynamic community of scholars and learners situated on one of the most spectacular college campuses in the country, and is classified as an R1 University, meaning that it engages in a very high level of research activity. As one of 34 U.S. public institutions belonging to the prestigious Association of American Universities ), a selective group of major research universities in North America, – and the only member in the Rocky Mountain region – we have a proud tradition of academic excellence, with five Nobel laureates and more than 50 members of prestigious academic academies.

University of Colorado-Boulder has blossomed in size and quality since we opened our doors in 1877 – attracting superb faculty, staff, and students and building strong programs in the sciences, engineering, business, law, arts, humanities, education, music, and many other disciplines.

Today, with our sights set on becoming the standard for the great comprehensive public research universities of the new century, we strive to serve the people of Colorado and to engage with the world through excellence in our teaching, research, creative work, and service.

In 2015, the university comprised nine colleges and schools and offered over 150 academic programs and enrolled almost 17,000 students. Five Nobel Laureates, nine MacArthur Fellows, and 20 astronauts have been affiliated with CU Boulder as students; researchers; or faculty members in its history. In 2010, the university received nearly $454 million in sponsored research to fund programs like the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and JILA. CU Boulder has been called a Public Ivy, a group of publicly funded universities considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

The Colorado Buffaloes compete in 17 varsity sports and are members of the NCAA Division I Pac-12 Conference. The Buffaloes have won 28 national championships: 20 in skiing, seven total in men’s and women’s cross country, and one in football. The university has produced a total of ten Olympic medalists. Approximately 900 students participate in 34 intercollegiate club sports annually as well.

On March 14, 1876, the Colorado territorial legislature passed an amendment to the state constitution that provided money for the establishment of the University of Colorado in Boulder, the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, and the Colorado State University – College of Agricultural Sciences in Fort Collins.

Two cities competed for the site of the University of Colorado: Boulder and Cañon City. The consolation prize for the losing city was to be home of the new Colorado State Prison. Cañon City was at a disadvantage as it was already the home of the Colorado Territorial Prison. (There are now six prisons in the Cañon City area.)

The cornerstone of the building that became Old Main was laid on September 20, 1875. The doors of the university opened on September 5, 1877. At the time, there were few high schools in the state that could adequately prepare students for university work, so in addition to the University, a preparatory school was formed on campus. In the fall of 1877, the student body consisted of 15 students in the college proper and 50 students in the preparatory school. There were 38 men and 27 women, and their ages ranged from 12–23 years.

During World War II, Colorado was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a navy commission.

University of Colorado-Boulder hired its first female professor, Mary Rippon, in 1878. It hired its first African-American professor, Charles H. Nilon, in 1956, and its first African-American librarian, Mildred Nilon, in 1962. Its first African American female graduate, Lucile Berkeley Buchanan, received her degree in 1918.

Research institutes

University of Colorado-Boulder’s research mission is supported by eleven research institutes within the university. Each research institute supports faculty from multiple academic departments, allowing institutes to conduct truly multidisciplinary research.

The Institute for Behavioral Genetics (IBG) is a research institute within the Graduate School dedicated to conducting and facilitating research on the genetic and environmental bases of individual differences in behavior. After its founding in 1967 IBG led the resurging interest in genetic influences on behavior. IBG was the first post-World War II research institute dedicated to research in behavioral genetics. IBG remains one of the top research facilities for research in behavioral genetics, including human behavioral genetics, psychiatric genetics, quantitative genetics, statistical genetics, and animal behavioral genetics.

The Institute of Cognitive Science (ICS) at CU Boulder promotes interdisciplinary research and training in cognitive science. ICS is highly interdisciplinary; its research focuses on education, language processing, emotion, and higher level cognition using experimental methods. It is home to a state-of-the-art fMRI system used to collect neuroimaging data.

ATLAS Institute is a center for interdisciplinary research and academic study, where engineering, computer science and robotics are blended with design-oriented topics. Part of CU Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, the institute offers academic programs at the undergraduate, master’s and doctoral levels, and administers research labs, hacker and makerspaces, and a black box experimental performance studio. At the beginning of the 2018–2019 academic year, approximately 1,200 students were enrolled in ATLAS academic programs and the institute sponsored six research labs.[64]

In addition to IBG, ICS and ATLAS, the university’s other institutes include Biofrontiers Institute, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Institute of Arctic & Alpine Research (INSTAAR), Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS), JILA, Laboratory for Atmospheric & Space Physics (LASP), Renewable & Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI), and the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

From The University of Sydney (AU) Via “COSMOS (AU)” : “Scientists find fungi that can eat plastic”

From The University of Sydney (AU)

Via

“COSMOS (AU)”

5.12.23
Matthew Ward Agius

Amira Farzana Samat and Ali Abbas inspect a petri dish of Engyodontium album attacking polypropylene. Credit: Matthew Ward Agius/Cosmos.

Researchers have found fungi that eat up widely used plastics and are now trying to scale up the process.

The fungi studied in the research are common in nature – Aspergillus terreus, a soil mould and Engyodontium album – and have special enzymes that aid the breakdown of plastic.

Both can break down polypropylene, a cheap and flexible plastic used to make packaging, car parts and batteries, and is widely used in other industrial manufacturing.

The use of plastics, especially industrially, is unlikely to conclude any time soon. But with increased public awareness of the role of plastics in ecosystem pollution and as an end-product of fossil oil use, demand for less environmentally impactful materials is increasing.

To test whether their fungi would chew through plastic, the researchers pre-treated polypropylene samples with heat, ultraviolet light or Fenton’s reagent (a solution of hydrogen peroxide and iron).

Samples were then added to a petri dish with a single culture of either of the two fungi and incubated for 30 and 90-day periods.

Within a month, a fifth of the plastic had been reduced. In three months, more than a quarter had disappeared.

Fungi don’t have mouths though, so what enables them to ‘eat’ their way through plastics? The process observed in the Sydney lab boils down to the unique enzymes produced by each fungi, which enables them to decompose the polypropylene into simpler molecules that can be taken up by the fungi.

It’s these enzymes that are being closely studied as part of the experiment.

“We want to see how effective these enzymes that actually help to degrade this plastic [are],” says Amira Farzana Samat, who conducted the experiments at the University of Sydney’s School of Chemical and Molecular Engineering under the supervision of Professor Ali Abbas.

“Basically, there are many types of enzyme that can be produced by the fungi, but we focus on this particular lactase enzyme, that are known to be produced by many other types of fungi.”

Initial indications suggest hydrogen, carbon dioxide and methane result from the fungal feasting, as well as microsized pieces of plastic.

The scale challenge

Samat and Abbas’s research is currently at lab scale, but their initial results have them hopeful of future upscaling of the process.

Working with the university’s mycology expert to identify natural-state, safe-to-use fungi for plastic degradation, there are likely to be other potential candidates that can work faster or more efficiently at chewing up undesirable materials.

“We are a few steps away from getting this into a commercial implementation,” Abbas says.

“That will require some chemical process engineering and we are doing that at the moment to ensure we can scale this process up to a pilot facility.”

One question that might also be answered through their experiments – and inform commercial outcomes – is whether the fungi are needed at all. If the specific enzymes produced by the fungi are responsible for deterioration, it might be possible to isolate these molecules.

But Samat cautions that such a move might have unindented drawbacks if other fungal properties aid the degradation process. It’s for this reason that her focus is on using the entire biological system.

“We’ve seen that the use of whole microbes are actually more effective, because we know that it is not that only particular enzyme that can help. Other types of enzyme can too,” Samat says.

“We haven’t had a whole experimental lineup to extract out whatever enzymes or secondary metabolites are able to be produced by these fungi.

“If, let’s say one day, we are able to determine everything – all of the metabolites or enzymes – and select one that particularly can degrade higher compared to the others, we might be able to do that.

“But for now, Ali and I are concerned with using the whole microorganism to scale up the process.”

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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The University of Sydney (AU)
Our founding principle as Australia’s first university, U Sydney was that we would be a modern and progressive institution. It’s an ideal we still hold dear today.

When Charles William Wentworth proposed the idea of Australia’s first university in 1850, he imagined “the opportunity for the child of every class to become great and useful in the destinies of this country”.

We’ve stayed true to that original value and purpose by promoting inclusion and diversity for the past 160 years.

It’s the reason that, as early as 1881, we admitted women on an equal footing to male students. The University of Oxford (UK) didn’t follow suit until 30 years later, and Jesus College at The University of Cambridge (UK) did not begin admitting female students until 1974.
It’s also why, from the very start, talented students of all backgrounds were given the chance to access further education through bursaries and scholarships.

Today we offer hundreds of scholarships to support and encourage talented students, and a range of grants and bursaries to those who need a financial helping hand.

The University of Sydney (AU) is an Australian public research university in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is Australia’s first university and is regarded as one of the world’s leading universities. The university is known as one of Australia’s six sandstone universities. Its campus, spreading across the inner-city suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington, is ranked in the top 10 of the world’s most beautiful universities by the British Daily Telegraph and the American Huffington Post.The university comprises eight academic faculties and university schools, through which it offers bachelor, master and doctoral degrees.

The QS World University Rankings ranked the university as one of the world’s top 25 universities for academic reputation, and top 5 in the world and first in Australia for graduate employability. It is one of the first universities in the world to admit students solely on academic merit, and opened their doors to women on the same basis as men.

Five Nobel and two Crafoord laureates have been affiliated with the university as graduates and faculty. The university has educated seven Australian prime ministers, two governors-general of Australia, nine state governors and territory administrators, and 24 justices of the High Court of Australia, including four chief justices. The university has produced 110 Rhodes Scholars and 19 Gates Scholars.

The University of Sydney (AU) is a member of The Group of Eight (AU), CEMS, The Association of Pacific Rim Universities and The Association of Commonwealth Universities.

From The Queensland University of Technology (AU) Via “COSMOS (AU)” : “Panning for genes – how scientists are creating a more ‘diverse’ human genome”

From The Queensland University of Technology (AU)

Via

“COSMOS (AU)”

5.11.23
Jacinta Bowler

According to geneticists, this pangenome set of studies is a step forward in mapping the diversity of the human genetic code.

“There is no such thing as ‘normal’ genes,” says QUT clinical geneticist, Associate Professor Michael Gabbett.

“Humans are wonderfully diverse creatures, with each individual having their own unique collection of genetic variants.

“A single reference sequence cannot and does not capture the extraordinary genetic diversity of people around the globe.”

The first human genome was mapped – as part of the Human Genome Project – in the early 2000s.

The first genome, painstakingly put together at a cost of over $3 billion dollars – was not actually one individual’s genome, but a mix of a handful of genomes, all smooshed into one. This single genome was an absolute triumph at the time, but it didn’t reveal everything. One of the biologists who helped lead the effort suggested that the genome could be summed up with “bought the book; hard to read.”

Genetics has moved on since 2003, and a much wider variety of humans were required to allow the genome to continue to be useful.

A series of papers in Nature [below] have now released the ‘pangenome’ – mapping the genomes of 47 ancestrally diverse individuals, which adds 119 million base pairs and 1,115 gene duplication mutations to the original reference human genome.

Nature

Fig. 1: Presenting 47 accurate and near-complete diverse diploid human genome assemblies.

a) Selecting the HPRC samples. Left, the first two principal components of 1KG samples showing HPRC (triangles) samples, excluding HG002, HG005 and NA21309. Right, summary of the HPRC sample subpopulations (three letter abbreviations) on a map of Earth as defined by the 1KG. ACB, African Caribbean in Barbados; ASW, African Ancestry in Southwest US; CHS, Han Chinese South; CLM, Colombian in Medellin, Colombia; ESN, Esan in Nigeria; GWD, Gambian in Western Division; KHV, Kinh in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; MKK, Maasai in Kinyawa, Kenya; MSL, Mende in Sierra Leone; PEL, Peruvian in Lima, Peru; PJL, Punjabi in Lahore, Pakistan; PUR, Puerto Rican in Puerto Rico; YRI, Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria. b) Interchromosomal joins between acrocentric chromosome short arms. Red, the join is on the same strand; blue, otherwise. c) Total assembled sequence per haploid phased assembly. d) Assembly contiguity shown as a NGx plot. T2T-CHM13 and GRCh38 contigs are included for comparison. e) Assembly QVs showing the base-level accuracy of the maternal and paternal assembly for each sample. f) Yak-reported phasing accuracy showing the switch error percentage versus Hamming error percentage. g) Flagger read-based assembly evaluation pipeline. Coverage is calculated across the genome and a mixture model is fit to account for reliably assembled haploid sequence and various classes of unreliably assembled sequence. For each coverage block, a label is assigned according to the most probable mixture component to which it belongs: erroneous, falsely duplicated, (reliable) haploid, collapsed, and unknown. h) Reliability of the 47 HPRC assemblies using read mapping. For each sample, the left bar is the paternal and the right bar is the maternal haplotype. Regions flagged as haploid are reliable (green), constituting more than 99% on average of each assembly. The y axis is broken to show the dominance of the reliable haploid component and the stratification of the unreliable blocks. i) Assembly reliability of six types of repeats. AlphaSat, alpha satellites; HSat2/3, human satellites 2 and 3. j) Completeness of the HPRC assemblies relative to T2T-CHM13. The number of reference bases covered by none, by one, by two or by more than two alignments are included.

See the full article here.

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) (AU) is a public research university located in the urban coastal city of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The Queensland University of Technology is located on two campuses in the Brisbane area viz. Gardens Point and Kelvin Grove. The university in its current form was founded in 1989, when the Queensland Institute of Technology (QIT) was made a university through the Queensland University of Technology Act 1988, with the resulting Queensland University of Technology beginning its operations from January 1989. In 1990, the Brisbane College of Advanced Education merged with QUT.

In 2020, The Queensland University of Technology has 52,672 students enrolled (composed of 39,156 undergraduate students, 10,390 postgraduate students, and 661 non-award students), employs 5,049 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff members, a total revenue of $1.054 billion, and a total expenditure of $1.028 billion.

The Queensland University of Technology was a member of the Australian Technology Network of universities, but withdrew participation on 28 September 2018.

History

The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has a history that dates to 1849 when the Brisbane School of Arts was established. Queensland Institute of Technology (QIT) succeeded the Central Technical College and was formed in 1965. The current Queensland University of Technology was established as a university in 1989 from the merger of several predecessor institutions listed below:

Brisbane School of Arts (1849)
Brisbane Technical College (1882)
Central Technical College (1908)
Queensland Institute of Technology (1965)

Brisbane College of Advanced Education was formed in 1982, which itself is a combination of multiple predecessor institutions shown in the list below:

Brisbane Kindergarten Training College (1911)
Brisbane Kindergarten Teachers College (1965)
Queensland Teachers’ Training College (1914)
Kelvin Grove Teachers College (1961)
Kelvin Grove College of Advanced Education (1976)
Kedron Park Teachers College (1961)
North Brisbane College of Advanced Education (1974)

In 1988, The Queensland University of Technology Act was passed for the grant of university status to Queensland Institute of Technology (QIT). As a result, QIT was granted university status and was operational as The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) beginning in January 1989. The Brisbane College of Advanced Education joined with QUT in 1990.

The Gardens Point campus was once entirely housed in the 19th-century, former Government House of Queensland. In 1909, during the relocation of the governor’s residence, the Old Government House and the surrounding five hectares were set aside for both a university and a technical college. The first university on the site was the University of Queensland which was moved to St Lucia in 1945, where it remains today.

Research

The Queensland University of Technology establishes collaborative research partnerships between academia, industry, government and community actors. The university is a key member of the Brisbane Diamantina Health Partners, Queensland’s first academic health science system. The Queensland University of Technology attracts national grants and industry funding and has a number of research centres, including:

Research institutes

Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child
Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy
Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Centre for Data Science
Centre for Future Enterprise
Centre for Genomics and Personalized Health
Centre for Healthcare Transformation
Centre for Justice
Centre for Materials Science
Centre for Robotics
Digital Media Research Centre
Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research
Australian Centre for Health Law Research
Australian Centre for Health Services Innovation
Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies
Australia-China Centre for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine
Cancer and Palliative Care Outcomes Centre
Centre for a Waste-Free World
Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety
Centre for Behavioral Economics, Society and Technology
Centre for Clean Energy Technologies and Practices
Centre for Decent Work and Industry

Indigenous Research Centres

Curumba Institute
National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network

Research infrastructure

Biorefining Research Facility
Central Analytical Research Facility
Design and Fabrication Facility
Digital Observatory
eResearch
Medical Engineering Research Facility
Samford Ecological Research Facility
Research Engineering Facility
Visualization and Interactive Solutions for Engagement and Research

Former research institutes

Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation
Institute for Future Environments
Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation (now defunct)
Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI)
Institute for Future Environments (IFE)

Research Centres

Australian Centre for Health Law Research (ACHLR)
Australian Centre for Robotic Vision (ACRV)
Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety – Queensland (CARRS-Q)
Centre for Social Change Research (now defunct) [63]
Commercial and Property Law Research Centre (CPLRC)
Dementia Collaborative Research Centre (DCRC)
QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC)

From The Australian National University (AU) Via “COSMOS (AU)” : “Looking for very small things researchers see the light”

From The Australian National University (AU)

Via

“COSMOS (AU)”

4.30.23
Ellen Phiddian

The researchers have made a single nanoparticle that can convert low-frequency red light into extreme-ultraviolet light, which has a very high frequency. Credit: Dr Anastasiia Zalogina/ANU.

Extremely powerful, cheap, microscopes could be the result of new research that’s figured out a simple way to intensify light.

At the moment, to see small things like proteins or transistors in computer chips, you need an electron microscope, or even more expensive and inconvenient technology.

This hampers a lot of nanoscale science, particularly in medical research and computer chip manufacturing. Failures to see nanoscale faults in computer chips can cost billions of dollars.

But research published in Science Advances [below], by an international team of researchers, has landed on a method that could lead the way to much more simple magnification.

Fig. 1. Subwavelength resonator for a HHG.
(A) Schematics: The light of a frequency ω is incident on a resonator that is placed on a substrate, which excites high harmonics. (B) Scanning electron microscope images of the fabricated resonator. (C) Dependence of the resonator’s modes on geometrical parameters and wavelength. Avoided crossing of two modes leads to the enhancement of the quality (Q) factor (indicated with the color scheme). (D) Extinction of the incident light at around the resonant wavelength and resonator’s diameter.

“If we look under a microscope, we can see pretty small objects, but not infinitely small,” says senior author Dr Sergey Kruk, a researcher at the Australian National University (ANU)’s Nonlinear Physics Centre.

“The limit is wavelengths of light. There is an equation which can work out exactly the smallest size you can see in any particular microscope, but loosely speaking, you can see objects as small as half of the wavelength of light.”

Violet light waves have the shortest length for visible light, with a wavelength of around 400 nanometres (nm). This is also called high frequency visible light: the higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength.

This means that it’s difficult to see anything smaller than 200nm: most molecules, and all atoms, are much smaller than that.

One avenue to work around this is to use non-visible light, with smaller wavelengths.

“If you use extreme ultraviolet light, 100 nanometres in wavelength, you might be able to see something that is about 50 nanometres large,” says Kruk.

But getting light with wavelengths this short isn’t easy.

“There are no natural sources of extreme ultraviolet light, and artificial sources are rare and extremely bulky and extremely expensive,” says Kruk.

“For example, synchrotrons can generate extreme ultraviolet light. But these machines can be anywhere from the size of a room to the size of a building or the size of a small town. Free electron lasers can generate extreme ultraviolet light, but again, these are very large and very expensive setups.

“So the only pathway that, in my understanding, we know today to get sources of extreme ultraviolet light at the tabletop or shoebox size, is a process called high harmonic generation. And that’s what we tried to pursue.”

The researchers are not yet at extreme ultraviolet light, but they have shown that they can turn lower frequency sources of light into higher frequencies.

“We started with a conventional light source, a laser – in our case infrared [light],” says Kruk.

“We shine short bursts of light pulses from the laser onto a single nanoparticle. And the nanoparticle generates multiples of a frequency of that laser. It generates twice the frequency, three times the frequency, four times the frequency, et cetera. In our case up to seven times the frequency was detected.”

What this looked like in reality was invisible, low-frequency infrared light becoming visible blue light.

One of the nanoparticles the researchers have developed, seen through an electron microscope. Credit: Dr Sergey Kruk/ANU

“We think that if we apply the same principles to a setup where we start from a red light, and we multiply the frequency by a factor of seven, that should bring us to extreme ultraviolet,” says Kruk.

“It’s a commercial laser, which can be fairly compact and fairly affordable. And then it is engineered from a nanoparticle which is a novelty of our research. Our team designed and fabricated those particles ourselves.”

There’s no physical reason they have to stop at seven multiplications either – that was just the highest number they could detect with the equipment they were using.

Next, the team is going to have a run at getting to extreme ultraviolet light, as well as seeing if they can demonstrate its use practically.

“We in particular interact with the School of Medical Research at ANU. So we will try to engage with biology and medical researchers to see something useful using those light sources,” says Kruk.

This would take around three years to achieve, Kruk believes, or about the size of a research grant or PhD project.

Science Advances

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Australian National University (AU) is a world-leading university in Australia’s capital city, Canberra. Our location points to our unique history, ties to the Australian Government and special standing as a resource for the Australian people.

Our focus on research as an asset, and an approach to education, ensures our graduates are in demand the world-over for their abilities to understand, and apply vision and creativity to addressing complex contemporary challenges.

Australian National University (AU) is regarded as one of the world’s leading research universities, and is ranked as the number one university in Australia and the Southern Hemisphere by the 2021 QS World University Rankings. It is ranked 31st in the world by the 2021 QS World University Rankings, and 59th in the world (third in Australia) by the 2021 Times Higher Education.

In the 2020 Times Higher Education Global Employability University Ranking, an annual ranking of university graduates’ employability, Australian National University (AU) was ranked 15th in the world (first in Australia). According to the 2020 QS World University by Subject, the university was also ranked among the top 10 in the world for Anthropology, Earth and Marine Sciences, Geography, Geology, Philosophy, Politics, and Sociology.

Established in 1946, ANU is the only university to have been created by the Parliament of Australia. It traces its origins to Canberra University College, which was established in 1929 and was integrated into Australian National University (AU) in 1960. Australian National University (AU) enrolls 10,052 undergraduate and 10,840 postgraduate students and employs 3,753 staff. The university’s endowment stood at A$1.8 billion as of 2018.

Australian National University (AU) counts six Nobel laureates and 49 Rhodes scholars among its faculty and alumni. The university has educated two prime ministers, 30 current Australian ambassadors and more than a dozen current heads of government departments of Australia. The latest releases of ANU’s scholarly publications are held through ANU Press online.

From “COSMOS (AU)” : “Why the Twelve Apostles are eroding by two centimetres every year”

From “COSMOS (AU)”

3.31.23

The Twelve Apostles are just one of the spectacular features situated along the Great Ocean Road.

The collection of offshore rock pillars rise abruptly from the water like a line of giant soldiers protecting the coastline from the extreme force of the Southern Ocean. Some are lightly vegetated, while others are bare of any greenery. Measuring up to 45 metres in height, they are pounded constantly by the relentless wind and waves that crash into them in explosions of whitewater. As the sun sets, it paints them in rich orange and purple light; when it dips below the horizon, they transform into foreboding silhouettes against the bruised dusk sky.

Located on Kirrae Whurrong Country, off the shore of Port Campbell National Park by the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, the Twelve Apostles – as these rock pillars are most commonly known – are an iconic natural landmark in Australia and around the world. Their name, however, hasn’t always been the same: early European charts, for example, refer to them as the Sow and Piglets – the ‘sow’ being Mutton Bird Island and ‘piglets’ being the surrounding rock pillars to the east.

This name persisted until 1922, when the pillars were renamed to “The Apostles” in a bid to attract more tourists to the region. Eventually, they were renamed to the Twelve Apostles, despite there only being nine pillars visible from the Twelve Apostles viewpoint at the time. Since then, two rock pillars have collapsed, leaving only seven visible from the viewpoint.

Although these pillars now stand in the sea, all of them were once connected to the heath-carpeted cliff line of the mainland. Their separation from it speaks to the landscape-shaping power of the harsh and extreme conditions of the Southern Ocean. But to understand how it happened first requires understanding the basics of the geology of the coastline.

This stretch of coast – which is also known as Shipwreck Coast due to the number of seafaring vessels that have met their demise there – is comprised primarily of Port Campbell Limestone that was deposited under the sea roughly 15 to 20 million years ago during the Mid-Late Miocene period. This limestone isn’t consistent in durability: some parts that contain silt depositions are much softer than others that have a higher concentration of calcium carbonate, provided by the skeletons and shells of millions and millions of ancient marine creatures.

The limestone is also interspersed with layers of softer mudstone and calcareous clays. Generally speaking, these layers are located towards the bottom of the strata and are the first to be eroded by the extreme forces of waves, wind and rain. The different rate of erosion undermines the stability of the land; it leads to overhangs, sea caves, and arches, which in turn collapse to create the majestic pillars of rocks like the Twelve Apostles.

This process is still occurring now; evidence indicates that the Port Campbell Coast is eroding at a rate of roughly two centimetres per year. Geologists like Dr Eric Bird, who have extensively studied the limestone plain in the region, surmise the evolution of a rock stack from headland to arch to stack and eventual collapse can happen can take place in just 800 to 1800 years in this region.

In geological terms, this is a very short amount of time, but it is – for the most part –difficult to visually detect the changes in the landscape during a human lifespan. Every now and then, however, the impermanence of this landscape is visible for all to see in a sudden moment of drama – like, for instance, in July 2005, when one of the Twelve Apostles – a 50-metre-tall pillar – collapsed into the sea.

There are between 20 and 30 other similar limestone pillars scattered up and down this stretch of coastline, and new ones will continue to be formed as the wind and ocean continues to carve away at the cliff. But in March 2016, University of Melbourne PhD Student Rhiannon Bezore also discovered five “drowned” apostles in front of a submerged ancient coastal cliff six kilometres offshore while analyzing new sonar data collected as part of a project to survey potential reef habitats.

This was the first time such stacks have been found preserved below the sea. Like their terrestrial counterparts, they consist of limestone that had been carved out by erosion from softer surrounding rock.

20,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, these underwater pillars would have resembled their terrestrial counterparts. But as the ice rapidly melted, sea levels rose so quickly that the pillars were simply swamped in place. Instead of knocking them over, the ocean shaved off their tops, leaving them flattened; they now stand up to seven metres tall and are, on average, sixty metres below sea level.

These drowned apostles now support a thriving reef system. They also allow us to imagine what the coastline would have been like over 20,000 years ago – and what the future may hold for natural landmarks like the Twelve Apostles as sea levels continues to rapidly rise as a result of Anthropogenic climate change.

One of the most spectacular coastal drives in the world, the Great Ocean Road is the perfect road trip: with no shortage of natural wonders, rugged coastline, stunning national parks and friendly towns to explore. Whatever the season, the Great Ocean Road welcomes you.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

From The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral] [Observatoire européen austral] [Europäische Südsternwarte](EU)(CL) And The NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer (Galex) Via “COSMOS (AU)” : “Largest galaxy in the universe brought into sharp relief in stunning new composite image”

From The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral] [Observatoire européen austral] [Europäische Südsternwarte](EU)(CL)

And

The NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer (Galex)

Via

“COSMOS (AU)”

2.15.23
Evrim Yazgin

The galaxy is roughly 522000 light years across.

This comes from ESO. Specifically, from Paranal’s FORS1 on the VLT, with far-ultraviolet data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer [above] and infrared data acquired by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESO/JPL-Caltech/DSS.

The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral][Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte](EU)(CL)FORS1 on the Very Large Telescope, Cerro Paranal (CL) (decommissioned in 2009)

The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral][Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte](EU)(CL), Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert •ANTU (UT1; The Sun ) •KUEYEN (UT2; The Moon ) •MELIPAL (UT3; The Southern Cross ), and •YEPUN (UT4; Venus – as evening star). Elevation 2,635 m (8,645 ft) from above Credit J.L. Dauvergne & G. Hüdepohl atacama photo.

National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationSpitzer Infrared Space Telescope no longer in service. Launched in 2003 and retired on 30 January 2020.

NGC 6872, also known as the Condor Galaxy, stretches 522,000 light years from tip to tip. The Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light years across.

The galaxy is visible in the southern skies as part of the Pavo constellation, and is 212 million light-years from Earth.

It was always thought to be among the largest stellar systems in the universe, but NGC 6872 was officially designated the largest galaxy known to science by NASA in 2013.

Not only is NGC 6872 massive, it also has a very different structure to our home galaxy. The galactic goliath is known as a barred spiral galaxy with two smooth bars of stars emanating from either side of the object, tipped with smooth and continuous arms. This galaxy type is known as a SBb galaxy.

Hubble-de Vaucouleurs diagram for galaxy morphology. Credit: Antonio Ciccolella / M. De Leo / CC BY 3.0.
20 July 2016

It is thought that the elongated appearance of NGC 6872 is due to its proximity to nearby galaxy IC 4970. The dwarf galaxy is about one-fifth the size of its monstrous neighbour, but is believed to impart enough gravitational tidal forces on the Condor Galaxy to give it its distinctive shape.

Interactions between galaxies like these usually lead to mergers. However, data, including the information gleaned from the new composite image, suggests that NGC 6872 and IC 4970 are actually doing the opposite – giving birth to a new galaxy.

See the full article here .

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The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral] [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU)(CL) is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organization in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. today ESO is supported by 16 Member States (Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), along with the host state of Chile and with Australia as a Strategic Partner. ESO carries out an ambitious program focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organizing cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: Cerro La Silla, Cerro Paranaland Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world’s largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) enables scientists worldwide to discover the secrets of the Universe for the benefit of all. We design, build and operate world-class observatories on the ground — which astronomers use to tackle exciting questions and spread the fascination of astronomy — and promote international collaboration in astronomy. Established as an intergovernmental organization in 1962, ESO’s headquarters and its visitor centre and planetarium, the ESO Supernova, are located close to Munich in Germany, while the Chilean Atacama Desert, a marvellous place with unique conditions to observe the sky, hosts our telescopes. At Paranal ESO will host and operate the Čerenkov Telescope Array South, the world’s largest and most sensitive gamma-ray observatory.


Cerro La Silla HELIOS (HARPS Experiment for Light Integrated Over the Sun).

3.6m telescope & HARPS at Cerro LaSilla, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2400 metres.

MPG Institute for Astronomy [MPG-Institut für Astronomie](DE) European Southern Observatory(EU)(CL) 2.2 meter telescope at Cerro La Silla, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2400 metres.

The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral] [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte](EU)(CL) Danish 1.54 meter telescope at La Silla, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2400 metres.

European Southern Observatory (EU)(CL)Cerro La Silla Observatory 600 km north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2400 metres.

Paranal Observatory pictured with Cerro Paranal in the background. The mountain is home to one of the most advanced ground-based telescopes in the world, the VLT. The VLT telescope consists of four unit telescopes with mirrors measuring 8.2 meters in diameter and work together with four smaller auxiliary telescopes to make interferometric observations. Each of the 8.2m diameter Unit Telescopes can also be used individually. With one such telescope, images of celestial objects as faint as magnitude 30 can be obtained in a one-hour exposure. This corresponds to seeing objects that are four billion (four thousand million) times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye.

European Southern Observatory(EU)(CL) , Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert •ANTU (UT1; The Sun ) •KUEYEN (UT2; The Moon ) •MELIPAL (UT3; The Southern Cross ), and •YEPUN (UT4; Venus – as evening star). Elevation 2,635 m (8,645 ft) from above Credit J.L. Dauvergne & G. Hüdepohl atacama photo.

ESO Paranal Residencia

ESO Paranal Residencia inside near the swimming pool

ESO Paranal Residencia dining room

European Southern Observatory(EU) (CL) VLTI Interferometer image, Cerro Paranal, with an elevation of 2,635 metres (8,645 ft) above sea level, •ANTU (UT1; The Sun ), •KUEYEN (UT2; The Moon ), •MELIPAL (UT3; The Southern Cross ), and •YEPUN (UT4; Venus – as evening star).

ESO VLT Survey telescope.

ESO Very Large Telescope 4 lasers on Yepun (CL).

Glistening against the awesome backdrop of the night sky above ESO’s Paranal Observatory, four laser beams project out into the darkness from Unit Telescope 4 UT4 of the VLT, a major asset of the Adaptive Optics system.

ESO New Technology Telescope at Cerro La Silla, at an altitude of 2400 metres.

Part of ESO’s Paranal Observatory the VLT Survey Telescope (VISTA) observes the brilliantly clear skies above the Atacama Desert of Chile. It is the largest survey telescope in the world in visible light, with an elevation of 2,635 metres (8,645 ft) above sea level.

European Southern Observatory (EU)(CL)National Radio Astronomy ObservatoryNational Astronomical Observatory of Japan(JP) ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 metres.

European Southern Observatory(EU) (CL) ELT 39 meter telescope to be on top of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. located at the summit of the mountain at an altitude of 3,060 metres (10,040 ft).

European Southern Observatory(EU)(CL)/MPG Institute for Radio Astronomy [MPG Institut für Radioastronomie](DE) ESO’s Atacama Pathfinder Experiment(CL) high on the Chajnantor plateau in Chile’s Atacama region, at an altitude of over 4,800 m (15,700 ft).

The Leiden Observatory [Sterrewacht Leiden](NL) MASCARA instrument cabinet at Cerro La Silla, located in the southern Atacama Desert 600 kilometres (370 mi) north of Santiago de Chile at an altitude of 2,400 metres (7,900 ft).

ESO Next Generation Transit Survey telescopes, an array of twelve robotic 20-centimetre telescopes at Cerro Paranal, 2,635 metres (8,645 ft) above sea level.

ESO Speculoos telescopes four 1 meter robotic telescopes at ESO Paranal Observatory 2635 metres 8645 ft above sea level.

TAROT telescope at Cerro LaSilla, 2,635 metres (8,645 ft) above sea level.

European Southern Observatory (EU)(CL) ExTrA telescopes at Cerro LaSilla at an altitude of 2400 metres.

A novel gamma ray telescope under construction on Mount Hopkins, Arizona. A large project known as the Čerenkov Telescope Array composed of hundreds of similar telescopes to be situated in the Canary Islands and Chile at, ESO Cerro Paranal site The telescope on Mount Hopkins will be fitted with a prototype high-speed camera, assembled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and capable of taking pictures at a billion frames per second. Credit: Vladimir Vassiliev.

European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU)(CL), The new Test-Bed Telescope 2 is housed inside the shiny white dome shown in this picture, at ESO’s Cerro LaSilla Facility in Chile. The telescope has now started operations and will assist its northern-hemisphere twin in protecting us from potentially hazardous, near-Earth objects. The domes of ESO’s 0.5 m and the Danish 0.5 m telescopes are visible in the background of this image.Part of the world-wide effort to scan and identify near-Earth objects, the European Space Agency’s Test-Bed Telescope 2 (TBT2), a technology demonstrator hosted at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, has now started operating. Working alongside its northern-hemisphere partner telescope, TBT2 will keep a close eye on the sky for asteroids that could pose a risk to Earth, testing hardware and software for a future telescope network.

European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea][Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU)(CL) ‘s The open dome of The black telescope structure of the European Space Agency Test-Bed Telescope 2 peers out of its open dome in front of the rolling desert landscape. The telescope is located at ESO’s Cerro La Silla Observatory, which sits at a 2400 metre altitude in the Chilean Atacama Desert.

The Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) is an orbiting ultraviolet space telescope launched on April 28, 2003. NASA cut off financial support for operations of GALEX in early February 2011 as it was ranked lower than other projects which were seeking a limited supply of funding. The California Institute of Technology negotiated to transfer control of GALEX and its associated ground control equipment to the California Institute of Technology in keeping with the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act. Under this Act, excess research equipment owned by the US government can be transferred to educational institutions and non-profit organizations.[3] In May 2012, GALEX operations were transferred to The California Institute of Technology .

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation’s civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

Since that time, most U.S. space exploration efforts have been led by NASA, including the Apollo moon-landing missions, the Skylab space station, and later the Space Shuttle. Currently, NASA is supporting the International Space Station and is overseeing the development of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and Commercial Crew vehicles. The agency is also responsible for the Launch Services Program (LSP) which provides oversight of launch operations and countdown management for unmanned NASA launches. Most recently, NASA announced a new Space Launch System that it said would take the agency’s astronauts farther into space than ever before and lay the cornerstone for future human space exploration efforts by the U.S.

NASA science is focused on better understanding Earth through the Earth Observing System, advancing heliophysics through the efforts of the Science Mission Directorate’s Heliophysics Research Program, exploring bodies throughout the Solar System with advanced robotic missions such as New Horizons, and researching astrophysics topics, such as the Big Bang, through the Great Observatories [NASA/ESA Hubble, NASA Chandra, NASA Spitzer, and now The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Infrared Space Telescope and all associated programs.] NASA shares data with various national and international organizations such as The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency [国立研究開発法人宇宙航空研究開発機構](JP) and The European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU).

From The University of Adelaide (AU) Via “COSMOS (AU)” : “Green hydrogen produced with near 100% efficiency using seawater”

From The University of Adelaide (AU)

Via

“COSMOS (AU)”

1.31.23
Evrim Yazgin

Credit: Abstract Aerial Art / DigitalVision / Getty.

It’s not quite splitting the Red Sea, but new research into splitting seawater to produce hydrogen may be a scientific miracle that puts us on a path to replacing fossil fuels with the environmentally-friendly alternative.

“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 percent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyzer,” says project leader Professor Shi-Zhang Qiao from the University of Adelaide’s School of Chemical Engineering.

Electrolysis is the process of splitting water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. So, the process itself requires energy.

The process also requires catalysts. But not all catalysts are created equal. Catalysts used in electrolysis tend to be rare precious metals like iridium, ruthenium and platinum.

Typical non-precious catalysts are transition metal oxide catalysts, for example cobalt oxide coated with chromium oxide.

The new breakthrough in splitting seawater to produce green energy was achieved by adding a layer of Lewis acid (a specific type of acid, for example chromium(III) oxide, Cr2O3) on top of the transition metal oxide catalyst.

While using cheaper materials, the process is shown to be very effective.

“The performance of a commercial electrolyzer with our catalysts running in seawater is close to the performance of platinum/iridium catalysts running in a feedstock of highly purified deionized water,” explains the University of Adelaide’s Associate Professor Yao Zheng.

Another typical part of the electrolysis process is some form of treatment of the water. For that reason, freshwater is the main source of green hydrogen. But freshwater is increasingly scarce.

So, scientists are looking to seawater, particularly in regions with long coastlines and abundant sunlight.

“We used seawater as a feedstock without the need for any pre-treatment processes like reverse osmosis desolation, purification, or alkalisation,” Zheng adds. “Current electrolyzers are operated with highly purified water electrolyte. Increased demand for hydrogen to partially or totally replace energy generated by fossil fuels will significantly increase scarcity of increasingly limited freshwater resources.”

Seawater electrolysis is relatively new compared to pure water electrolysis. Complications include side reactions on the electrodes, as well as corrosion.

“It is always necessary to treat impure water to a level of water purity for conventional electrolyzers including desalination and deionization, which increases the operation and maintenance cost of the processes,” Zheng says. “Our work provides a solution to directly utilize seawater without pre-treatment systems and alkali addition, which shows similar performance as that of existing metal-based mature pure water electrolyzer.”

The team hopes to scale their experiment up for commercial production in generating hydrogen fuel cells and ammonia synthesis.

Their research is published in Nature Energy.

See the full article here.

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Adelaide is a public research university located in Adelaide, South Australia. Established in 1874, it is the third-oldest university in Australia. The university’s main campus is located on North Terrace in the Adelaide city centre, adjacent to the Art Gallery of South Australia, the South Australian Museum and the State Library of South Australia.

The university has four campuses, three in South Australia: North Terrace campus in the city, Roseworthy campus at Roseworthy and Waite campus at Urrbrae, and one in Melbourne, Victoria. The university also operates out of other areas such as Thebarton, the National Wine Centre in the Adelaide Park Lands, and in Singapore through the Ngee Ann-Adelaide Education Centre.

The University of Adelaide is composed of five faculties, with each containing constituent schools. These include the Faculty of Engineering, Computer, and Mathematical Sciences (ECMS), the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of the Professions, and the Faculty of Sciences. It is a member of The Group of Eight and The Association of Commonwealth Universities. The university is also a member of the Sandstone universities, which mostly consist of colonial-era universities within Australia.

The university is associated with five Nobel laureates, constituting one-third of Australia’s total Nobel Laureates, and 110 Rhodes scholars. The university has had a considerable impact on the public life of South Australia, having educated many of the state’s leading business people, lawyers, medical professionals and politicians. The university has been associated with many notable achievements and discoveries, such as the discovery and development of penicillin, the development of space exploration, sunscreen, the military tank, Wi-Fi, polymer banknotes and X-ray crystallography, and the study of viticulture and oenology.

Research

The University of Adelaide is one of the most research-intensive universities in Australia, securing over $180 million in research funding annually. Its researchers are active in both basic and commercially oriented research across a broad range of fields including agriculture, psychology, health sciences, and engineering.

Research strengths include engineering, mathematics, science, medical and health sciences, agricultural sciences, artificial intelligence, and the arts.

The university is a member of Academic Consortium 21, an association of 20 research intensive universities, mainly in Oceania, though with members from the US and Europe. The university held the Presidency of AC 21 for the period 2011–2013 as host the biennial AC21 International Forum in June 2012.

The Centre for Automotive Safety Research (CASR), based at the University of Adelaide, was founded in 1973 as the Road Accident Research Unit and focuses on road safety and injury control.

From The Square Kilometer Array (SA)(AU)(UK) Via “COSMOS (AU)” : “Construction begins on Australia’s Square Kilometre Array Telescope”

SKA-Square Kilometer Array

SKA South Africa.

From The Square Kilometer Array (SA)(AU)(UK)

Via

“COSMOS (AU)”

12.5.22 [Just found this.]
Jacinta Bowler

SKA Square Kilometre Array low frequency at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

After 31 years of planning, radio telescopes called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) have finally begun construction. Ceremonies will occur today on both Australian and South African sites to ‘break ground’.

The Australian site in the Murchison region of WA – known as SKA-Low – will eventually comprise of over 130,000 Christmas tree-like antennas.

“The Square Kilometre Array is a game-changer, not just for radio astronomy but for our collective understanding of the Universe,” says Professor Tara Murphy, Head of the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.

“After many years of planning and designing it is incredibly exciting that construction has begun.”

SKA-Low will be housed at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory.

This is already home to the ASKAP telescope, as well as other smaller radio telescope projects. The site is on Wajarri Country in Western Australia, four hours drive away from Geraldton. ASKAP is the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, the precursor to SKA-mid in South Africa.

When SKA-Low is complete it will comprise of 131,072 antennas spread between 512 stations. The furthest antennas will be 65 kilometres away from each other throughout the desert. However, because of the way the telescope works, research will be able to be done after the first few stations are built.

“Unlike an optical telescope, where you can’t do anything until you have the mirror and the dome and all of the pieces, with a radio interferometer we can start doing science when we only have a subset of the full array,” Professor Cathryn Trott, astronomer and Chief Operations Scientist at SKA-Low told Cosmos.

“We expect to be doing commissioning and some science verification within the next couple of years … By the end of the decade, we’ll have a full array ready, scientifically verified, and ready to go.”

The venture is international. Along with both Australia and South Africa hosting one of the telescopes, the headquarters is based in the UK. The cost to construct the two telescopes will be about AU$3 billion to build and AU$1.1 billion for operations over the coming decade. Australia will contribute AU$400 million.

Once completed, the SKA-Low will be significantly more powerful than any other radio telescopes of this type – potentially up to eight times as sensitive and 135 times faster than comparable current telescopes.

SKA-Low will focus on the very early universe, where it can peer into primordial hydrogen, which was present when the first stars were forming. This will hopefully answer questions about this ‘Cosmic Dawn’.

Dark Energy Camera Enables Astronomers a Glimpse at the Cosmic Dawn. Credit: The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (国立天文台](JP).

Epoch of Reionization and first stars. Credit: California Institute of Technology.

Potentially more excitingly for alien enthusiasts, it will also be sensitive enough to be able to discover any stray alien communication signals – called technosignatures – that could be out there.

“If there are intelligent societies on nearby stars with technology similar to ours, the SKA could detect the aggregate ‘leakage’ radiation from their radio and telecommunication networks – the first telescope sensitive enough to achieve this feat,” says Dr Danny Price, Australian Project Scientist for Breakthrough Listen and Curtin University astronomer.

___________________________________________________________________
Breakthrough Listen Project

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California

Green Bank Radio Telescope, West Virginia, now the center piece of the Green Bank Observatory, being cut loose by the National Science Foundation, supported by Breakthrough Listen Project, West Virginia University, and operated by the nonprofit Associated Universities, Inc.

CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (AU) Parkes Observatory [ Murriyang, the traditional Indigenous name] , located 20 kilometres north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, 414.80m above sea level.

SKA SARAO Meerkat telescope(SA) [SKA-Mid] 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA.

Newly added

University of Arizona Veritas Four Čerenkov telescopes A novel gamma ray telescope under construction at the CfA Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Mount Hopkins, Arizona, altitude 2,606 m 8,550 ft. A large project known as the Čerenkov Telescope Array, composed of hundreds of similar telescopes to be situated at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory [Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias ](ES) in the Canary Islands and Chile at European Southern Observatory Cerro Paranal(EU) site. The telescope on Mount Hopkins will be fitted with a prototype high-speed camera, assembled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and capable of taking pictures at a billion frames per second. Credit: Vladimir Vassiliev. ___________________________________________________________________

“To put the sensitivity of the SKA into perspective, the SKA could detect a mobile phone in the pocket of an astronaut on Mars, 225 million kilometres away.”

The SKA-Mid, which is the South African section of the project, is also a radio telescope, but looks more like a series of ‘normal’ dish telescopes.

SKA SARAO Meerkat [SKA-Mid] Telescope (SA), 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA.

SKA-Mid will observe a higher frequency of the radio spectrum, but being relatively close together in the same hemisphere, they will regularly see the same sky and can be used together in certain situations.

“There will be some science cases where there’ll be joint observations between the two telescopes and they’ll be quite coordinated,” Trott told Cosmos.

“It will be interesting to see how much the use of the two telescopes together evolves as people become a bit more creative about how to use both.”

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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About SKA

The Square Kilometre Array (AU) will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. The total collecting area will be approximately one square kilometre giving 50 times the sensitivity, and 10 000 times the survey speed, of the best current-day telescopes. The SKA will be built in Southern Africa and in Australia. Thousands of receptors will extend to distances of 3 000 km from the central regions. The SKA will address fundamental unanswered questions about our Universe including how the first stars and galaxies formed after the Big Bang, how dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the Universe, the role of magnetism in the cosmos, the nature of gravity, and the search for life beyond Earth. Construction of phase one of the SKA is scheduled to start in 2016. The SKA Organization, with its headquarters at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Manchester, UK, was established in December 2011 as a not-for-profit company in order to formalize relationships between the international partners and centralize the leadership of the project.
SKA SARAO Meerkat Telescope [SKA-Mid] (SA), 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA.

SKA Hera at SKA South Africa.

SKA Murchison Widefield Array (AU), Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA ASKAP Pathfinder Radio Telescope at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA Square Kilometre Array low frequency at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Widefield Array, Boolardy station in outback Western Australia on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

Testing EDGES at MIT Haystack Observatory

EDGES telescope in a radio quiet zone at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia, on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA Pathfinder – LOFAR location at Potsdam via Google Images.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, led by SKA Organization. The SKA will conduct transformational science to improve our understanding of the Universe and the laws of fundamental physics, monitoring the sky in unprecedented detail and mapping it hundreds of times faster than any current facility.
Organizations from sixteen countries are currently taking part in the SKA project at government or national-coordination level or are represented as observers – Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Eight African partner countries are involved in coordinated action to support the future expansion of the SKA project in Africa.

Furthermore, around 100 organizations across about 20 countries have been participating in the design and development of the SKA project in the last decades and more specifically over the last 10 years during the detailed design of the telescopes. Many of these organizations and their experts are now involved in construction activities.

From CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (AU) via “COSMOS (AU)” : “Australian telescopes images provide a glut of rare supernova remnants”

From CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (AU)

Via

“COSMOS (AU)”

1.16.23
Jacinta Bowler

Why do we see so few remnants when so many stars have lived and died?

Combined images from the ASKAP and Parkes radio telescopes. Credit: R. Kothes (NRC) and the PEGASUS team.

A combined image from the Parkes radio telescope [below] and the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) [below] has given scientists the most detailed radio image yet of our galaxy.

The image highlights hydrogen gas– likely from supernova remnants (SNRs) or new stellar nurseries – in the galactic plane, and the team is hoping it will shed much more information on why SNRs seem to be so rare.

The researchers believe this new image shows twenty possible SNRs, a huge boost to the number already known.

SNRs are giant clouds of dust and gas created from a star going supernova. The resulting nebula are beautiful, and relatively short lived – lasting only a few tens of thousands of years.

ASKAP telescope image of the Galactic SNRs. Credit: R. Kothes (NRC) and the EMU and POSSUM teams.

But models predict that, due to the age and density of the Milky Way, we should see the remnants of many, many stars that have lived and died. Instead, we only know of thirty or so in the Milky Way, the Large and Small Megallanic Clouds and Andromeda Galaxy.

“It’s not totally clear why SNRs are hard to find,” Professor Andrew Hopkins, Macquarie University astronomer told Cosmos.

“Some of it is just a sensitivity issue and needing more sensitive observations to pick up the faintest things. But another part is that they not only become fainter but also larger as they age, which makes them very dim and diffuse.”

Hopkins is the lead scientist on ASKAP’s Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, which published details on a pilot survey in 2021 [Cambridge Core (below)]. A paper on this new image and any SNR candidates has not yet been finalized.

Parkes Radio Telescope image of Galactic SNRs. Credit: E. Carretti (INAF) and the PEGASUS team

The researchers used the Parkes and ASKAP telescopes because of their differing resolutions. Parkes, which is a 64-metre dish, is one of the largest single dish radio telescopes in the world. However, ASKAP is an interferometer telescope, which uses multiple telescopes placed very far apart to mimic a single telescope with a 6-kilometre-wide dish.

“However, since even with 36 dishes we can’t sample all the light falling on that 6km aperture, the ASKAP image is not sensitive to the large-scale radio emission that Parkes does detect,” Hopkins says.

“Hence, combining the information from both images gives us the best of both worlds – ASKAP’s fine resolution together with the large-scale emission from Parkes, each filling in the gaps of the other, to give us the best fidelity image of our Milky Way Galaxy.”

“The eventual results will be an unprecedented view of almost the entire Milky Way, about a hundred times larger than this initial image, but achieving the same level of detail and sensitivity,” he adds.

“It is estimated that there may be about 1500 more supernova remnants in the galaxy that astronomers haven’t discovered yet. Finding the missing remnants will help us unlock more of an understanding of our galaxy and its history.”

Science paper:
Cambridge Core 2021

See the full article here.

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (AU ), is Australia’s national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world.

CSIRO works with leading organizations around the world. From its headquarters in Canberra, CSIRO maintains more than 50 sites across Australia and in France, Chile and the United States, employing about 5,500 people.

Federally funded scientific research began in Australia 104 years ago. The Advisory Council of Science and Industry was established in 1916 but was hampered by insufficient available finance. In 1926 the research effort was reinvigorated by establishment of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), which strengthened national science leadership and increased research funding. CSIR grew rapidly and achieved significant early successes. In 1949 further legislated changes included renaming the organization as CSIRO.

Notable developments by CSIRO have included the invention of atomic absorption spectroscopy; essential components of Wi-Fi technology; development of the first commercially successful polymer banknote; the invention of the insect repellent in Aerogard and the introduction of a series of biological controls into Australia, such as the introduction of myxomatosis and rabbit calicivirus for the control of rabbit populations.

Research and focus areas

Research Business Units

As at 2019, CSIRO’s research areas are identified as “Impact science” and organized into the following Business Units:

Agriculture and Food
Health and Biosecurity
Data 61
Energy
Land and Water
Manufacturing
Mineral Resources
Oceans and Atmosphere

National Facilities
CSIRO manages national research facilities and scientific infrastructure on behalf of the nation to assist with the delivery of research. The national facilities and specialized laboratories are available to both international and Australian users from industry and research. As at 2019, the following National Facilities are listed:

Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL)
Australia Telescope National Facility – radio telescopes included in the Facility include the Australia Telescope Compact Array, the Parkes Observatory, Mopra Radio Telescope Observatory and the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder.

CSIRO Australia Compact Array (AU), six radio telescopes at the Paul Wild Observatory, is an array of six 22-m antennas located about twenty five kilometres (16 mi) west of the town of Narrabri in Australia.

CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (AU) Parkes Observatory [Murriyang, the traditional Indigenous name], located 20 kilometres north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, 414.80m above sea level.

CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (AU) Mopra Radio Telescope

NASA Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (AU), Deep Space Network. Credit: NASA.

CSIRO Canberra campus (AU).

ESA DSA 1, hosts a 35-metre deep-space antenna with transmission and reception in both S- and X-band and is located 140 kilometres north of Perth, Western Australia, near the town of New Norcia.

CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (AU) CSIRO R/V Investigator.

UK Space NovaSAR-1 satellite (UK) synthetic aperture radar satellite.

CSIRO Pawsey Supercomputing Centre AU)

Magnus Cray XC40 supercomputer at Pawsey Supercomputer Centre Perth Australia.

Galaxy Cray XC30 Series Supercomputer at at Pawsey Supercomputer Centre Perth Australia.

Pausey Supercomputer CSIRO Zeus SGI Linux cluster.

Pawsey Cray EX Supercomputer – Setonix

Others not shown

SKA

SKA- Square Kilometer Array.

SKA Murchison Widefield Array (AU), Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA ASKAP Pathfinder Radio Telescope at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA Square Kilometre Array low frequency at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Widefield Array, Boolardy station in outback Western Australia on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

Testing EDGES at MIT Haystack Observatory

EDGES telescope in a radio quiet zone at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia, on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.