New Delhi: The James Webb telescope just got repaired by two Ph.D students and a little bit of coding—all the way from Earth. A new paper by the University of Sydney researchers was released on arXiv (an open-access platform for journal papers) describing how they used artificial intelligence and coded a solution to the JSWT’s blurry images, all the while sitting in their university on Earth. The paper is currently awaiting peer review.
The James Webb Space Telescope—the world’s largest telescope currently in the L2 Lagrange Point in space—had a technical problem in its Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI), because of which its images were becoming blurry. Since the entire point of the JWST was to capture high-resolution images of planets and stars, this meant a significant obstacle.
When these problems happened earlier, like with the Hubble telescope, astronauts had to be sent to space to repair it. However, this time, two Ph.D students of the Professor who created the AMI for JWST decided to fix the problem using AI. They created a tool called AMIGO, which used simulations and neural networks to model how light and electronics behave inside the telescope. This tool then found a tiny distortion in this process, and then digitally removed it—restoring Webb’s full clarity.
This incident shows the real-life application of AI in space technology. To commemorate their role in fixing the JWST, the two PhD students decided to get tattoos of the telescope on their arms.
Africa’s wildlife declining rapidly
Why does a species declining or going extinct matter? A new study by Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute answers the question by explaining how the decline of any animal species directly impacts an ecosystem through an ‘energy analysis’ in Africa. The study was published in the Nature Journal on 29 October.
The researchers looked at the African ecosystem and found that it has lost one-third of its ‘natural power’ since pre-colonial times, i.e. 1700s because of species extinction and decline. What does this mean? Every natural landscape has actors playing different roles—there are predatory animals, pollinator bees, scavenging vultures, even small mushrooms and spores. They contribute to the power source of the habitat because they provide the energy, keeping the ecosystem running.
The energy that comes from the Sun is taken in by plants through photosynthesis and then transferred through each of these living beings in a complex food web. The article argued that when an entire species dies off, a whole chunk of this web is broken, which leads to a chain effect on the rest of the species, and eventually the ecosystem.
The Oxford study found that the decline of animals like the elephans, rhino and buffalo has completely changed the African landscape and reduced energy flow by more than 30%. This means when the numbers of these species decreased, their ability to support environmental processes also decreased, resulting in the entire ecosystem losing out. This framework also helps make better policies on extinction, going to the heart of why every species matters in the world.
Meerkats live in mobs—& have health insurance!
Timon from The Lion King was part of a mob which gave him health insurance! Not really, but the character of Timon was a meerkat—a furry mongoose usually found in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. And a new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology on 30 October had some startling revelations about meerkats’ social dynamics and their gut health.
A meerkat’s social group, which is called a mob, plays the biggest role in shaping its gut microbiome, which is what provides immunity from diseases. In these mobs, the meerkats don’t just share food and grooming habits—they also swap gut bacteria that help them survive the desert.
Researchers studied over 500 samples of faeces from 146 wild meerkats and found that mob members share a distinctive “social microbiome” in their bodies. In fact, meerkats in the same mob shared more gut bacteria than they share with meerkats in their own family. When meerkats join a new mob, their gut bacteria quickly adapt to be similar to that of their new companions’. This bacterial exchange likely happens through close contact and grooming, and the study revealed how different species have different socialisation patterns.
What 6-mn-year-old ice in Antarctica tells us
Ice from 6 million years ago is our clue to a warmer world. A new study in PNAS journal published on 28 October describes how scientists have discovered Antarctic ice up to 6 million years old, the oldest direct glimpse yet into Earth’s ancient atmosphere. It isn’t just ice that’s been preserved for a while; air bubbles, and every other bacterial or microbial life dating back to 6 million years has also been preserved in it.
This discovery, made in the Allan Hills blue ice area, extends the timeline of how old the world’s ice-core climate records are. Originally, scientists expected we only had 8,00,000-years ice to study the Earth’s historical heating and cooling processes. By preserving traces of ancient air and temperature, these ice cores provide a new window into periods when Earth was warmer and sea levels were higher—helping scientists understand how Antarctic ice and global climate evolved during past warm eras, and what that means for our future.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
Also read: The universe’s missing mass may not be entirely invisible. Dark matter may have ‘fingerprints’