From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) via Eos: “At-Home Astronomers Help Discover a New and Unique Exoplanet”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US)

via

AGU

Eos

2 March 2022
J. Besl

An artist’s rendering of gas giant TOI-2180 b, which is roughly the size of Jupiter but 3 times more massive. Credit: R. Hurt/ NASA/JPL-Caltech/

Exoplanets are everywhere. NASA assumes there are 100 billion in the Milky Way alone, but fewer than 5,000 have been found so far. The first exoplanets were confirmed in the 1990s. That makes exoplanet research “one of the most fresh and exciting fields in what’s possibly the oldest science in humanity,” said Paul Dalba, a planetary astronomer at University of California-Riverside. “Exoplanet [research] is kind of in this gold rush phase.”

If exoplanets are a gold rush, then newly discovered TOI-2180 b is like a 24-karat nugget. The gas giant is a rare find because of its long orbit (261 days), its close range (379 light-years from Earth), and the relative improbability of finding it in the first place. If not for a team of planet-hunting hobbyists, the exoplanet might still be undetected.

Hunting for Treasure

The first evidence of the exoplanet came courtesy of TESS, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

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The National Aeronautics Space Agency (US)/The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) TESS

NASA/MIT Tess in the building.

The National Aeronautics Space Agency (US)/The Massachusetts Institute of Technology(US) TESS – Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite replaced the Kepler Space Telescope in search for exoplanets. TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US), and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (US).

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)

The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (US)

Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; The NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the The Center for Astrophysics – Harvard and Smithsonian; The MIT Lincoln Laboratory; and the The NASA Space Telescope Science Institute (US) in Baltimore.

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Launched in 2018, TESS looks for repeated dips in starlight that may indicate planets passing between their stars and Earth. This method—the transit method—is the most popular way to confirm exoplanets’ existence, but it can work only when everything aligns.

Planet transit. NASA/Ames.

In this case, TESS needed to be pointed at the exoplanet at the same time it transited in front of its star. The satellite focuses on a slice of the sky for only a month at a time, though, so a planet that takes more than a month to orbit its star may go undetected.

TESS also relies on repeat dips in brightness to flag a possible planet, as single dips could be triggered by the satellite or the star. By prioritizing repeat observations, the algorithm reduces false positives but mostly catches the short-orbit planets that transit most often. Amateur astronomers who know what to look for can sift through NASA data for long-orbit exoplanets and single-transit gems.

It’s like “another form of treasure hunting,” said planet-finding enthusiast Tom Jacobs in an email. Jacobs, a former U.S. naval officer, is part of a hobby planet-hunting crew called the Visual Survey Group (VSG) that looks for missed opportunities in TESS’s algorithm. The group was the first to notice TOI-2180 b in the data. They alerted Dalba, who plugged the coordinates into the aptly named Automated Planet Finder at California’s Lick Observatory. Sure enough, its star showed a regular cadence of gravitational tugs that indicated the presence of a hidden exoplanet. Dalba determined the planet’s mass, narrowed the potential transit to an 11-day window, and arranged for 14 observatories on three continents to help confirm the planet. When the professionals published their findings in The Astronomical Journal, Jacobs and his VSG team appeared among the international coauthors. It was VSG’s 68th peer-reviewed publication.

Space Stats

The team confirmed that in addition to being relatively close to Earth, the exoplanet has two important features: a long orbit and a large mass. Independently, the planet’s 261-day orbit is nothing noteworthy, but the fact that it’s a long orbit and can be seen passing in front of its star from Earth is unique, said Dalba.

A giant planet with a short orbit is easy to find with the transit method, so most of the exoplanets that have been confirmed so far are close orbiters. But that’s misrepresentative, said Heather Knutson, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research, because astronomers assume that other systems are arranged like ours, with gas giants like Jupiter orbiting farther from their stars.

“We’d ideally like to study gas giant planets [like TOI-2180 b] that are further out because we think that’s preferentially where they form,” said Knutson. Thankfully, TOI-2180 b should be relatively easy to study, because at 379 light-years away, the planet’s star shines bright from Earth and “photons are information,” noted Dalba.

TOI-2180 b’s mass has also raised eyebrows. It’s roughly the same size as Jupiter, but 3 times its mass and 105 times the mass of Earth. Its heavy mass is due to its makeup of heavy elements, which is uncommon among gas giants and may help astronomers better understand how these planets develop. The planet’s composition is curious, said Dalba, “because it suggests that maybe there are pretty interesting differences in how this giant planet formed compared to how Jupiter formed.”

The Stars Aligned

TOI-2180 b’s discovery may not have happened without collaboration between crowdsourced science and academics. The VSG team had time to manually sift through data, and Dalba and his colleagues had resources to confirm their finds.

“Personally, I feel very grateful to be able to be part of this discovery effort,” Jacobs said. Veteran astronomers do the heavy lifting, he said, while his team looks for planets that computer algorithms might have missed.

“There is a very thin line between what they do and just being astronomers,” Dalba said of Jacobs and his team of amateur astronomers. “It’s an amazing honor for me to work with them.”

TOI-2180 b’s most recent transit occurred in early February, and once again, luck was on the astronomers’ side. TESS was aimed at TOI-2180 b’s section of the sky and recorded the transit at a greater resolution than any Earth-bound observatory could, providing even more information on the unique gas giant.

See the full article here.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz (US) campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) , opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

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, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch). “Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego (US) who led the development of the new instrument while at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz
NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley (US) researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute (US).

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

“This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” said Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley SETI Project Director. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”

NIROSETI will also gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording levels of light over time so that patterns can be analyzed for potential signs of other civilizations.

“Searching for intelligent life in the universe is both thrilling and somewhat unorthodox,” said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Lick Observatory has already been the site of several previous SETI searches, so this is a very exciting addition to the current research taking place.”

NIROSETI will scan the skies several times a week on the Nickel 1-meter telescope at Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US): “Easy aluminum nanoparticles for rapid and efficient hydrogen generation from water”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US)

February 18, 2022
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

UCSC chemists developed a simple method to make aluminum nanoparticles that split water and generate hydrogen gas rapidly under ambient conditions.

Bubbles of hydrogen gas are generated from the reaction of water with an aluminum-gallium composite. Movies of the reaction are available online. Credit: Amberchan et al., Applied Nano Materials 2022.

Scanning electron microscopy of the composite shows aluminum nanoparticles in a matrix of gallium. (Credit: Amberchan et al., Applied Nano Materials 2022)

Aluminum is a highly reactive metal that can strip oxygen from water molecules to generate hydrogen gas. Its widespread use in products that get wet poses no danger because aluminum instantly reacts with air to acquire a coating of aluminum oxide, which blocks further reactions.

For years, researchers have tried to find efficient and cost-effective ways to use aluminum’s reactivity to generate clean hydrogen fuel. A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows that an easily produced composite of gallium and aluminum creates aluminum nanoparticles that react rapidly with water at room temperature to yield large amounts of hydrogen. The gallium was easily recovered for reuse after the reaction, which yields 90% of the hydrogen that could theoretically be produced from reaction of all the aluminum in the composite.

“We don’t need any energy input, and it bubbles hydrogen like crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said UCSC Chemistry Professor Scott Oliver.

Oliver and Bakthan Singaram, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, are corresponding authors of a paper on the new findings, published February 14 in Applied Nano Materials.

The reaction of aluminum and gallium with water has been known since the 1970s, and videos of it are easy to find online. It works because gallium, a liquid at just above room temperature, removes the passive aluminum oxide coating, allowing direct contact of aluminum with water. The new study, however, includes several innovations and novel findings that could lead to practical applications.

A U.S. patent application is pending on this technology. The international (PCT) filing on which it was based is linked here.

Singaram said the study grew out of a conversation he had with a student, coauthor Isai Lopez, who had seen some videos and started experimenting with aluminum-gallium hydrogen generation in his home kitchen.

“He wasn’t doing it in a scientific way, so I set him up with a graduate student to do a systematic study. I thought it would make a good senior thesis for him to measure the hydrogen output from different ratios of gallium and aluminum,” Singaram said.

Previous studies had mostly used aluminum-rich mixtures of aluminum and gallium, or in some cases more complex alloys. But Singaram’s lab found that hydrogen production increased with a gallium-rich composite. In fact, the rate of hydrogen production was so unexpectedly high the researchers thought there must be something fundamentally different about this gallium-rich alloy.

Oliver suggested that the formation of aluminum nanoparticles could account for the increased hydrogen production, and his lab had the equipment needed for nanoscale characterization of the alloy. Using scanning electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction, the researchers showed the formation of aluminum nanoparticles in a 3:1 gallium-aluminum composite, which they found to be the optimal ratio for hydrogen production.

In this gallium-rich composite, the gallium serves both to dissolve the aluminum oxide coating and to separate the aluminum into nanoparticles. “The gallium separates the nanoparticles and keeps them from aggregating into larger particles,” Singaram said. “People have struggled to make aluminum nanoparticles, and here we are producing them under normal atmospheric pressure and room temperature conditions.”

Making the composite required nothing more than simple manual mixing.

“Our method uses a small amount of aluminum, which ensures it all dissolves into the majority gallium as discrete nanoparticles,” Oliver said. “This generates a much larger amount of hydrogen, almost complete compared to the theoretical value based on the amount of aluminum. It also makes gallium recovery easier for reuse.”

The composite can be made with readily available sources of aluminum, including used foil or cans, and the composite can be stored for long periods by covering it with cyclohexane to protect it from moisture.

Although gallium is not abundant and is relatively expensive, it can be recovered and reused multiple times without losing effectiveness, Singaram said. It remains to be seen, however, if this process can be scaled up to be practical for commercial hydrogen production.

First author Gabriella Amberchan is graduate student in Singaram’s lab. Other coauthors of the paper include Beatriz Ehlke, Jeremy Barnett, Neo Bao, and A’Lester Allen, all at UCSC. This work was partially supported by funds from the Ima Hernandez Foundation.

See the full article here.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz (US) campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) , opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

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, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch). “Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego (US) who led the development of the new instrument while at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz
NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley (US) researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute (US).

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

“This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” said Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley SETI Project Director. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”

NIROSETI will also gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording levels of light over time so that patterns can be analyzed for potential signs of other civilizations.

“Searching for intelligent life in the universe is both thrilling and somewhat unorthodox,” said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Lick Observatory has already been the site of several previous SETI searches, so this is a very exciting addition to the current research taking place.”

NIROSETI will scan the skies several times a week on the Nickel 1-meter telescope at Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US): “Tilting of Earth’s crust governed the flow of ancient megafloods”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US)

February 14, 2022
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Study provides new perspective on Washington state’s Channeled Scablands, carved by the Missoula megafloods at the end of the last ice age

Enormous volumes of floodwater from the Missoula megafloods once poured over Dry Falls, which stretches 3.5 miles wide and drops 400 feet to a plunge pool now fed by groundwater. Photo by Tamara Pico.

Towering cliffs carved by the Missoula megafloods are found throughout the Channeled Scablands in eastern Washington. Photo by Tamara Pico.

The landforms on the Columbia Plateau in eastern Washington reveal a past punctuated by violent floods. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

As ice sheets began melting at the end of the last ice age, a series of cataclysmic floods called the Missoula megafloods scoured the landscape of eastern Washington, carving long, deep channels and towering cliffs through an area now known as the Channeled Scablands. They were among the largest known floods in Earth’s history, and geologists struggling to reconstruct them have now identified a crucial factor governing their flows.

In a study published February 14 in PNAS, researchers showed how the changing weight of the ice sheets would have caused the entire landscape to tilt, changing the course of the megafloods.

“People have been looking at high water marks and trying to reconstruct the size of these floods, but all of the estimates are based on looking at the present-day topography,” said lead author Tamara Pico, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz. “This paper shows that the ice age topography would have been different over broad scales due to the deformation of Earth’s crust by the weight of the ice sheets.”

During the height of the last ice age, vast ice sheets covered much of North America. They began to melt after about 20,000 years ago, and the Missoula megafloods occurred between 18,000 and 15,500 years ago. Pico’s team studied how the changing weight of the ice sheets during this period would have tilted the topography of eastern Washington, changing how much water would flow into different channels during the floods.

Glacial outburst floods

Glacial Lake Missoula formed in western Montana when a lobe of the Cordilleran ice sheet dammed the Clark Fork valley in the Idaho panhandle and melt water built up behind the dam. Eventually the water got so deep that the ice dam began to float, resulting in a glacial outburst flood. After enough water had been released, the ice dam resettled and the lake refilled. This process is thought to have been repeated dozens of times over a period of several thousand years.

Downstream from glacial Lake Missoula, the Columbia River was dammed by another ice lobe, forming glacial Lake Columbia. When Lake Missoula’s outburst floods poured into Lake Columbia, the water spilled over to the south onto the eastern Washington plateau, eroding the landscape and creating the Channeled Scablands.

During this period, the deformation of the Earth’s crust in response to the growing and shrinking of ice sheets would have changed the elevation of the topography by hundreds of meters, Pico said. Her team incorporated these changes into flood models to investigate how the tilting of the landscape would have changed the routing of the megafloods and their erosional power in different channels.

“We used flood models to predict the velocity of the water and the erosional power in each channel, and compared that to what would be needed to erode basalt, the type of rock on that landscape,” Pico said.

They focused on two major channel systems, the Cheney-Palouse and Telford-Crab Creek tracts. Their results showed that earlier floods would have eroded both tracts, but that in later floods the flow would have been concentrated in the Telford-Crab Creek system.

“As the landscape tilted, it affected both where the water overflowed out of Lake Columbia and how water flowed in the channels, but the most important effect was on the spillover into those two tracts,” Pico said. “What’s intriguing is that the topography isn’t static, so we can’t just look at the topography of today to reconstruct the past.”

The findings provide a new perspective on this fascinating landscape, she said. Steep canyons hundreds of feet deep, dry falls, and giant potholes and ripple marks are among the many remarkable features etched into the landscape by the massive floods.

“When you are there in person, it’s crazy to think about the scale of the floods needed to carve those canyons, which are now dry,” Pico said. “There are also huge dry waterfalls—it’s a very striking landscape.”

She also noted that the oral histories of Native American tribes in this region include references to massive floods. “Scientists were not the first people to look at this,” Pico said. “People may even have been there to witness these floods.”

In addition to Pico, the coauthors include Scott David at Utah State University; Isaac Larsen and Karin Lehnigk at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; Alan Mix at Oregon State University; and Michael Lamb at the California Institute of Technology. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

See the full article here.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz (US) campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) , opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

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, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz
NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley (US) researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute (US).

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

“This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” said Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley SETI Project Director. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”

NIROSETI will also gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording levels of light over time so that patterns can be analyzed for potential signs of other civilizations.

“Searching for intelligent life in the universe is both thrilling and somewhat unorthodox,” said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Lick Observatory has already been the site of several previous SETI searches, so this is a very exciting addition to the current research taking place.”

NIROSETI will scan the skies several times a week on the Nickel 1-meter telescope at Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US): “Biochemist Carrie Partch honored by the National Academy of Sciences”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US)

January 24, 2022
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Carrie Partch, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz, will be honored by The National Academy of Sciences (US) with the 2022 NAS Award in Molecular Biology for her contributions to the molecular understanding of circadian rhythms.

Partch’s transformative work has shed light on the protein-based signaling mechanisms and structural assemblies that give rise to daily cycles known as circadian rhythms in most living things. These daily cycles affect virtually every aspect of our physiology and are driven by the interactions of clock proteins in our cells.

Partch’s studies reveal protein dynamics and interactions at the core of molecular circadian timing mechanisms in both mammals and in cyanobacteria. Her unique approach to the field combining biochemistry, molecular biophysics, and structural biology has provided a deeper mechanistic understanding of how these clocks function at the molecular level.

The NAS Award in Molecular Biology is presented with a medal and a $25,000 prize.

Partch is among 18 individuals being honored this year with NAS awards recognizing their extraordinary scientific achievements in a wide range of fields spanning the physical, biological, social, and medical sciences. The winners will be honored in a ceremony during the National Academy of Sciences’ 159th annual meeting in April.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and—with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine—provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

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, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).
UC Santa Cruz (US) campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) , opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US) who led the development of the new instrument while at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley (US) researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute (US).

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

“This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” said Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley SETI Project Director. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”

NIROSETI will also gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording levels of light over time so that patterns can be analyzed for potential signs of other civilizations.

“Searching for intelligent life in the universe is both thrilling and somewhat unorthodox,” said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Lick Observatory has already been the site of several previous SETI searches, so this is a very exciting addition to the current research taking place.”

NIROSETI will scan the skies several times a week on the Nickel 1-meter telescope at Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US): “Two UCSC professors elected 2021 AAAS Fellows”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US)

January 26, 2022
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Suzanne Alonzo. Photo by Carolyn Lagattuta.

James Zachos. Photo by Carolyn Lagattuta.

Two professors at UC Santa Cruz have been awarded the distinction of AAAS Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the association announced this week. They are Suzanne Alonzo, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and James Zachos, distinguished professor of Earth and planetary sciences.

Alonzo was recognized “for distinguished contributions to the field of ecology and evolution, particularly for field and modeling approaches to understanding the evolution of reproductive behavior.”

Alonzo uses a combination of mathematical theory, field research, and lab experiments to understand the evolution and ecology of reproduction and how social interactions among individuals arise and evolve. Her lab mostly studies fish, which are strikingly diverse and exhibit impressive plasticity in their social and reproductive behaviors. Her work provides novel insights into old questions and increases scientists’ ability to explain and predict the diversity of reproductive patterns observed in nature.

Alonzo currently serves as vice president of the American Society of Naturalists and president elect of the International Society of Behavioral Ecology. She is also a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Toulouse School of Economics, and editor of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. She has received continuous funding from the National Science Foundation throughout her career, including the prestigious Early CAREER Award.

Zachos, who holds the Ida Benson Lynn Chair of Ocean Health at UCSC, was recognized for “outstanding contributions in geology, paleontology, and climate science of the Cenozoic and Cretaceous oceans.”

Zachos studies the climates and marine environments of Earth’s distant past by analyzing evidence in the layers of sediments deposited on the seafloor. Much of his research has focused on major climate shifts during the past 65 million years, such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This work is highly relevant to understanding how human activities are driving modern-day global climate change. In a study published in Science in 2020, Zachos and other climate scientists compiled for the first time a continuous, high-fidelity record of variations in Earth’s climate extending 66 million years into the past.

A member of The National Academy of Sciences (US), Zachos is a fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (US), The American Geophysical Union (US), The California Academy of Sciences (US), and The Geological Society of America (US). He received the 2016 Milutin Milankovic Medal from The European Geosciences Union (EU).

Election as a AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. This year, 564 members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.

The new Fellows will be celebrated later this year during an in-person gathering when it is feasible from a public health and safety perspective. The new class will also be featured in the AAAS News & Notes section of Science in January 2022.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

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, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).
UC Santa Cruz (US) campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) , opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US) who led the development of the new instrument while at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley (US) researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute (US).

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

“This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” said Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley SETI Project Director. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”

NIROSETI will also gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording levels of light over time so that patterns can be analyzed for potential signs of other civilizations.

“Searching for intelligent life in the universe is both thrilling and somewhat unorthodox,” said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Lick Observatory has already been the site of several previous SETI searches, so this is a very exciting addition to the current research taking place.”

NIROSETI will scan the skies several times a week on the Nickel 1-meter telescope at Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) : “MaNGA team releases largest-ever collection of 3D maps of nearby galaxies”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US)

January 12, 2022
Jordan Raddick

MaNGA measures spectra at multiple points in the same galaxy using a newly created fiber bundle technology. This image shows the Sloan Foundation Telescope and a close-up of the tip of the fiber bundle on the left, while the bottom right illustrates how each fiber observes a different section of each galaxy. The top right shows data gathered by two fibers observing two different part of the galaxy, showing how the spectrum of the central regions differs dramatically from outer regions. Credit: Dana Berry/SkyWorks Digital, David Law, SDSS Collaboration

Just over a month ago, scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) released the complete dataset of 10,000 galaxies observed by the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) project, making MaNGA the largest galaxy survey of its kind.

SDSS Telescope at Apache Point Observatory, near Sunspot NM, USA, Altitude 2,788 meters (9,147 ft).

Apache Point Observatory near Sunspot, New Mexico Altitude 2,788 meters (9,147 ft).

Kevin Bundy, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, is MaNGA’s principal investigator.

“Observing such a large sample with MaNGA allows us to see how the detailed internal properties of galaxies vary in systematic ways with other factors, like galaxy mass or where galaxies live in the universe,” Bundy said. “These patterns are the key to understanding the physical processes that shape galaxy evolution.”

MaNGA is a special kind of galaxy survey, using an innovative fiber-bundling technology to make detailed spectral maps of thousands of nearby galaxies. Spectra are graphs that show the amount of light given off by a galaxy at different wavelengths, much like a rainbow shows the amount of sunlight in various colors. Most previous galaxy surveys have either taken detailed images in one or a handful of colors, or measured just a single spectrum for an entire galaxy, but MaNGA works differently.

With fiber-optic cables bundled into tightly-packed hexagonal arrays, the team measured spectra at tens to hundreds of separate points in each galaxy, resulting in a “datacube” containing full spectroscopic information at each point. MaNGA was able to observe seventeen galaxies at once, while similar surveys could only observe one galaxy at a time. Six years of observing in this mode created the largest sample size of this kind ever obtained.

Researchers study each data cube to reveal its galaxy’s detailed chemical composition; find the ages, chemical makeup, and motions of the stars inside it; and map ionized interstellar gas. MaNGA has created over 30 different maps for each galaxy. These maps can be used for lots of different applications, for example, to estimate how many baby stars are being formed at every position in the galaxy, or to find the influence of the central supermassive black hole. MaNGA dramatically increases the number of galaxies with this detailed information, and a sister project, the MaNGA Stellar Library (MaStar), helped it along.

Galaxies are made of stars, so understanding them in detail requires a detailed library of spectra of stars. Alongside the complete release of MaNGA, SDSS scientists announced the completion of MaStar, which made use of otherwise unused time on the MaNGA instrument to observe over 24,000 stars, enabling the scientists to more accurately extract information from the MaNGA data.

The leader of the MaStar project, Renbin Yan of The Chinese University of Hong Kong [香港中文大学](HK), explained, “MaStar is a special kind of library that includes spectra for as many types of stars as possible. Using these data, we can figure out how many of each type of star add up to make each of the many spectra from a MaNGA galaxy and reconstruct the most accurate view ever of when and where stars formed in that galaxy’s cosmic history.”

For example, MaNGA data have been used to make movies showing how the location where baby stars form moves around through spiral arms and other features in galaxies. Identifying which spectra came from which internal structure turns out to be tricky for computers, but with the help of citizen scientists, the MaNGA team have been able to do this, providing in this release maps showing where the structures are. And the kinematics of galaxies can reveal previously unknown galaxy interactions.

All of this MaNGA data has been made publicly available, and the SDSS team have also created a specially designed tool dubbed “Marvin” to help with data access. Marvin allows anyone to have a quick look at the data of each galaxy in an easy-to-use web interface, and is also available as a powerful set of python modules which allow anyone familiar with coding to access and visualize this complex data. Brian Cherinka at The Space Telescope Science Institute (US), one of the lead developers of Marvin, explains, “Marvin was designed specifically to access the complex MaNGA data and help researchers to avoid some of the common pitfalls in data visualization and access.”

Using MaNGA data and an early version of Marvin, scientists have already been discovering many new things about galaxies, with over 500 papers already published using the data. For example, MaNGA team members discovered a new class of galaxy, dubbed a red geyser, in which outflows from the supermassive black hole, revealed in MaNGA maps of ionized gas, are preventing new stars from forming. And to scientists’ surprise, this happens even in the smallest galaxies.

Making MaNGA data publicly available and accessible will fuel science analyses for years to come and puts the full power of MaNGA data into the hands of anyone who wants to use it. “It’s important to us that the data is not just available, but also accessible, so that anyone with an interest in galaxies can use MaNGA data for their research, education, or just for fun, can explore the cubes, spectra, and maps to learn more about these galaxies,” said Anne-Marie Weijmans of The University of St. Andrews (SCT), who led the part of the SDSS team in charge of data releases. “You don’t need to be a galaxy expert to work with MaNGA data: we have many tutorials on our website to get you started.”

The instrumentation innovations developed for MaNGA will reverberate into the future. The next generation of SDSS (SDSS-V) is expanding on the novel fiber-packing methods developed for MaNGA to construct even larger fiber bundles for its Local Volume Mapper program. This survey will also study gas and newly-formed stars, but in an environment much closer to home—our own Milky Way and its nearby smaller neighbors. By combining these data with what MaNGA has learned from thousands of more distant galaxies, astronomers will gain a much deeper understanding of how gas and stars coexist and interact throughout a galaxy’s lifetime.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz (US) campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) , opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

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, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch). “Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego (US) who led the development of the new instrument while at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz
NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley (US) researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute (US).

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

“This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” said Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley SETI Project Director. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”

NIROSETI will also gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording levels of light over time so that patterns can be analyzed for potential signs of other civilizations.

“Searching for intelligent life in the universe is both thrilling and somewhat unorthodox,” said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Lick Observatory has already been the site of several previous SETI searches, so this is a very exciting addition to the current research taking place.”

NIROSETI will scan the skies several times a week on the Nickel 1-meter telescope at Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) : “Materials theorist Yuan Ping wins NSF CAREER Award”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US)

January 05, 2022
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Yuan Ping

Yuan Ping, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz, has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from The National Science Foundation (US) to support her work developing computational platforms to investigate the physics of new materials for quantum computers and other applications of quantum information science.

In quantum computers, information is encoded in quantum bits, or qubits, which can be made from any quantum system that has two states. One promising approach is based on the spin states of electrons. Ping’s group has developed a theoretical framework and computational tools for predicting spin dynamics in solid-state materials which they will use to study the properties of spin qubits.

Critical properties of spin qubits include quantum coherence which determines how long the spin state will last (or how long the encoded information will be intact); readout efficiency, which determines the fidelity with which information can be extracted from a qubit; and quantum transduction, which determines if quantum information can be transferred and communicated among qubits over a long range.

“Understanding kinetics of excited states and spin qubit relaxation and decoherence is the core issue of spin-based quantum information science,” Ping said. “In this project, we will develop a computational platform to tackle these issues for spin qubits.”

All of these properties are materials-specific, and previous efforts have relied mostly on simplified models which require inputs from prior experiments. Ping’s first-principles approach will eliminate the need for prior input parameters and will open the path for designing novel quantum materials with the potential to enable unprecedented performance for applications in quantum information science.

“Stable, scalable, and reliable quantum information science has the potential to transform and advance knowledge across a large number of critical fields through next-generation technologies for sensing, computing, modeling, and communicating,” Ping said.

The funding for this project also includes support for a range of education and outreach activities. These include strengthening undergraduate education in physical chemistry through a summer bootcamp; developing computational materials research through new courses and undergraduate research programs; and supporting women and underrepresented groups through UCSC’s Women in Science and Engineering program.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

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, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).
UC Santa Cruz (US) campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) , opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US) who led the development of the new instrument while at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley (US) researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute (US).

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

“This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” said Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley SETI Project Director. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”

NIROSETI will also gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording levels of light over time so that patterns can be analyzed for potential signs of other civilizations.

“Searching for intelligent life in the universe is both thrilling and somewhat unorthodox,” said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Lick Observatory has already been the site of several previous SETI searches, so this is a very exciting addition to the current research taking place.”

NIROSETI will scan the skies several times a week on the Nickel 1-meter telescope at Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) : “A new way to find genetic variations removes bias from human genotyping”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US)

December 16, 2021
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Using a pangenomic approach instead of a single reference genome allows a more comprehensive characterization of genetic variations and can improve the genomic analyses used by a wide range of researchers and clinicians. Photo by Elena Zhukova.

Overview of the experiments: Variant calls from long-read–based and large-scale sequencing studies were used to construct pangenome reference graphs (top). Giraffe (and competing mappers) mapped reads to the graph or to linear references, and mapping accuracy, allele coverage balance, and speed were evaluated (middle). Then, mapped reads were used for variant calling, and variant call accuracy was evaluated (bottom). Structural variant calls were analyzed alongside expression data to identify population frequency estimates. Credit: Sirén et al., Science 2021.

Since the first sequencing of a human genome more than 20 years ago, the study of human genomes has relied almost exclusively on a single reference genome to which others are compared to identify genetic variations. Scientists have long recognized that a single reference genome cannot represent human diversity and that using it introduces a pervasive bias into these studies. Now, they finally have a practical alternative.

In a paper published December 16 in Science, researchers at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute have introduced a new tool called Giraffe that can efficiently map new genome sequences to a “pangenome” representing many diverse human genome sequences. They show that this approach allows a more comprehensive characterization of genetic variations and can improve the genomic analyses used by a wide range of researchers and clinicians.

“We’ve been working toward this for years, and now for the first time we have something practical that works fast and works better than the single reference genome,” said corresponding author Benedict Paten, associate professor of biomolecular engineering at UC Santa Cruz and associate director of the Genomics Institute. “It’s important for the future of biomedicine that genomics helps everyone equally, so we need tools that account for the diversity of human populations and are not biased.”

All humans have the same genes but there are many variations in the exact sequences of the genes—meaning the sequence of DNA subunits (abbreviated A, C, T, G) that spell out the genetic code—as well as in the vast stretches of the genome outside of the protein-coding genes. A difference in a single letter of code is called a single nucleotide variant (SNV), and insertions or deletions of short sequences are known collectively as “indels”.

Structural variations

The most complex variants are structural variations involving rearrangements of large segments of code (50 or more letters). These are especially hard to find using a single reference genome, yet they can have significant effects and are known to play an important role in some diseases. The average person has millions of SNVs and indels and tens of thousands of larger structural variants, and collectively the structural variants actually involve more letters of code than the other types of variants do.

“The workhorses of genomics have been SNVs and short indels, because structural variants have been hidden from view,” Paten said. “Pangenomics is making structural variants visible so we can study them the same way we do SNVs and short indels. There are a lot of structural variants and they can have a big impact, so this is critical for the future of genetic studies of disease.”

A pangenome reference can be created from multiple genome sequences using a mathematical graph structure to represent the relationships between different sequences. In the new paper, the researchers built two human genome reference graphs using publicly available data. These were used to evaluate the new tool, Giraffe, which is a set of algorithms for mapping new sequence data to a pangenome reference.

First author Jouni Sirén, a research scientist at the Genomics Institute, pioneered many of Giraffe’s key algorithmic innovations. Giraffe can accurately map new sequence data to thousands of genomes embedded in a pangenome reference as quickly as existing tools map to a single reference genome. The study also showed that using Giraffe reduces mapping bias, the tendency to incorrectly map sequences that differ from the reference genome.

“Not only is the analysis better, it is also as fast as current methods that use a linear reference genome,” said co-first author Jean Monlong, a postdoctoral researcher at the Genomics Institute.

Genotyping

Inexpensive short-read sequencing is a mainstay of modern genomics, yielding snippets of sequence that must be mapped to a reference genome to make sense of them. Mapping shows where each snippet belongs on one of the 23 human chromosomes and identifies the variants present at each location in an individual’s genome, a process known as genotyping.

The researchers found that Google Health’s deep-learning variant caller, DeepVariant, could more accurately identify SNVs and indels using Giraffe’s alignments against a pangenome than it could using alignments against a single reference genome.

Monlong said he was most excited about using pangenomics to study structural variants.

“A lot of structural variants have been discovered recently using long-read sequencing,” he said. “With pangenomes, we can look for these structural variants in large datasets of short-read sequencing. It’s exciting because this will allow us to study those new structural variants across many people and ask questions about their functional impact, association with disease, or role in evolution.”

The researchers used Giraffe to map sequence reads from a diverse group of 5202 people and determine their genotypes for 167000 recently discovered structural variations. This enabled them to estimate the frequency of different versions of these structural variants in the human population as a whole and within individual subpopulations. They showed that the frequency of some variants differs considerably between subpopulations and could be misinterpreted if analyzed only in, for example, European-ancestry populations where the frequency of a particular variant is low.

A single reference genome must choose one version of any variation to represent, leaving the other versions unrepresented. By making more broadly representative pangenome references practical, Giraffe can make genomics more inclusive.

Paten and others at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute are involved in a major effort funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute to build a comprehensive human pangenome reference, which they expect to release next year as a resource for the scientific community.

In addition to Sirén and Monlong, the new paper has three other co-first authors who contributed equally: Xian Chang, Adam Novak, and Jordan Eizenga, all at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. In addition to other coauthors at the Genomics Institute, including Director David Haussler, the coauthors also include researchers at Google Health, Broad Institute of MIT (US) and Harvard (US), The University of Michigan (US), The University of Virginia (US), Harbor-University of California at Los Angeles(US) Medical Center, and The University of Tennessee-Knoxville (US) Health Science Center. This research was funded by The National Institutes of Health (US).

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

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, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).
UC Santa Cruz (US) campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) , opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US) who led the development of the new instrument while at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley (US) researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute (US).

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

“This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” said Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley SETI Project Director. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”

NIROSETI will also gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording levels of light over time so that patterns can be analyzed for potential signs of other civilizations.

“Searching for intelligent life in the universe is both thrilling and somewhat unorthodox,” said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Lick Observatory has already been the site of several previous SETI searches, so this is a very exciting addition to the current research taking place.”

NIROSETI will scan the skies several times a week on the Nickel 1-meter telescope at Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) : “Mirror-image peptides form ‘rippled sheet’ structure predicted in 1953”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US)

December 17, 2021
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

A UCSC team obtained an x-ray ‘snapshot’ of a novel protein structure with potential applications in biomedicine and materials science.

This illustration shows the “left-handed” and “right-handed” triphenylalanine peptides which bond together to form a rippled beta sheet. Illustration by Jevgenij Raskatov.

The dimeric rippled sheets assembled into a layered crystal structure with a herringbone pattern. Image credit: Kuhn et al., Chemical Science 2021.

By mixing a small peptide with equal amounts of its mirror image, a team of scientists at UC Santa Cruz has created an unusual protein structure known as a “rippled beta sheet” and obtained images of it using x-ray crystallography. They reported their findings in a paper published December 8 in Chemical Science.

The rippled sheet is a distinctive variation on the pleated beta sheet, which is a well-known structural motif found in thousands of proteins, including important disease-related proteins. Linus Pauling and Robert Corey described the rippled beta sheet in 1953, two years after introducing the concept of the pleated beta sheet.

While the pleated beta sheet (often called simply the beta sheet) quickly became a textbook example of a common protein structure, the rippled sheet has languished in obscurity as a rarely studied and largely theoretical structure. Previous studies have found experimental evidence of rippled sheet formation, but none using x-ray crystallography, which is the gold standard for determining protein structures.

“Now, for the first time, we have the crystal structure of a rippled sheet, which is like a snapshot of it, and the structure closely matches the predictions of Pauling and Corey,” said Jevgenij Raskatov, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz and corresponding author of the paper.

“The rippled sheet paradigm may have significance for both materials research and biomedical applications, and having the crystal structure is important for the rational design of rippled sheet materials,” Raskatov noted.

Proteins consist of long chains of amino acids folded into complex three-dimensional shapes that enable them to carry out a huge variety of functions in all living things. A pleated beta sheet is composed of linear strands (called beta strands) bonded together side by side to form a 2-dimensional sheet-like structure. A rippled beta sheet is similar except that alternate strands are mirror images of each other.

The amino acids that make up proteins can have either a “left-handed” (L) or “right-handed” (D) orientation in the arrangement of their atoms—the same in all respects but mirror images, like left and right hands. All natural proteins are made with left-handed amino acids, but synthetic proteins can be made with either L or D amino acids.

In the new study, the researchers used mirror-image forms of triphenylalanine, a short peptide consisting of three phenylalanine amino acids. When mixed in equal amounts, the mirror-image peptides joined in pairs, which then packed together into herringbone layer structures.

“They pack together to form a crystal, so we could use x-ray crystallography to see that rippled sheet structure,” said coauthor Timothy Johnstone, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry. “It’s a highly enabling discovery that opens up new avenues for exploration, because it gives us a new building block, or a new way to put building blocks together, for creating novel polypeptide structures with desirable properties.”

Having determined the crystal structure, the researchers then searched the Protein Data Bank, an online archive of structural data, for other proteins involving mirror-image peptides. They found three additional crystal structures containing rippled sheets that had not been recognized when the structures were originally analyzed.

The co-first authors of the paper are Ariel Kuhn, a Ph.D. student in Raskatov’s lab, and Beatriz Ehlke, a Ph.D. student in the lab of coauthor Scott Oliver, professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

“It was a great collaborative effort between the three labs, as well as demonstrating the incredible capabilities of our new single crystal XRD instrument for x-ray crystallography,” Kuhn said.

This work was supported by The National Institutes of Health (US) and The National Science Foundation (US).

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

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, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).
UC Santa Cruz (US) campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) , opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US) who led the development of the new instrument while at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley (US) researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute (US).

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

“This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” said Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley SETI Project Director. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”

NIROSETI will also gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording levels of light over time so that patterns can be analyzed for potential signs of other civilizations.

“Searching for intelligent life in the universe is both thrilling and somewhat unorthodox,” said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Lick Observatory has already been the site of several previous SETI searches, so this is a very exciting addition to the current research taking place.”

NIROSETI will scan the skies several times a week on the Nickel 1-meter telescope at Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) : “List of most highly cited researchers features 20 UCSC scientists and engineers”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz (US)

November 16, 2021
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

A new list of the world’s most highly cited researchers includes 20 scientists and engineers at UC Santa Cruz.

The 2021 Highly Cited Researchers list, released November 16 by Clarivate’s Web of Science Group, identifies researchers from across the globe who have demonstrated exceptional influence in their field or fields through the publication of multiple papers frequently cited by their peers during the last decade.

The UCSC researchers on the list include materials science researchers Shaowei Chen and Yat Li, both professors of chemistry and biochemistry, and Yichuan Ling, a former graduate student in Li’s lab. Also on the list are three members of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics—Jonathan Fortney, Garth Illingworth, and Rychard Bouwens (now at Leiden University [Universiteit Leiden](NL))—and a number of researchers affiliated with the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, including Director David Haussler, professor of biomolecular engineering, and Associate Director Benedict Paten, an associate professor of biomolecular engineering.

Other genomics researchers on the list include Mark Diekhans, technical director of the Genomics Institute’s Computational Genomics Laboratory, and James Kent, creator and director of the UCSC Genome Browser, along with 10 other members of the Genome Browser Team: Galt Barber, Hiram Clawson, Max Haeussler, Angie Hinrichs, Donna Karolchik, Robert Kuhn, Brian Raney, Kate Rosenbloom, Brian Lee, and Ann Zweig.

The Highly Cited Researchers list recognizes pioneers in their fields over the last decade, demonstrated by the production of multiple highly-cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index. Researchers are selected for their exceptional performance in one or more of 21 fields or across several fields.

See the full article here.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz (US) campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz (US) , opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

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, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch). “Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego (US) who led the development of the new instrument while at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz
NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley (US) researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute (US).

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

“This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” said Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley SETI Project Director. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”

NIROSETI will also gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording levels of light over time so that patterns can be analyzed for potential signs of other civilizations.

“Searching for intelligent life in the universe is both thrilling and somewhat unorthodox,” said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Lick Observatory has already been the site of several previous SETI searches, so this is a very exciting addition to the current research taking place.”

NIROSETI will scan the skies several times a week on the Nickel 1-meter telescope at Lick Observatory, located on Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose.