New Delhi: This might sound like science fiction, but it’s very true. A new study on asteroid ‘deflection’ says we need to be careful about which region of an asteroid we hit to deflect it away from the Earth. This comes under an entire branch of space technology that researches how to protect the Earth from asteroids.
The new study was presented by NASA Fellow Rahil Makadia at the Europlanet Science Congress annual meeting held in Helsinki, Finland, earlier this week. While the paper isn’t peer-reviewed yet, its findings have sparked some conversations around upcoming space technologies.
The most logical way would be to use a spacecraft to hit an oncoming asteroid so it moves away from the Earth. But a lot of research goes into the physics and gravity, and calculations about the asteroid’s potential pathway when it comes to deciding when and where to strike an asteroid. For example, in 2022, NASA sent a Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission to hit the asteroid Dimorphos to put it off its natural course.
Makadia’s research however says that we can’t just hit an asteroid anywhere we want in order to deflect it from its way to Earth. Because one of the possibilities is that we knock the asteroid into another orbit, due to which it will circle around and find its way back to Earth maybe years or decades later. This is called a gravitational keyhole effect, where the Earth’s gravity will also play a role in determining the asteroid’s path. To avoid this, the paper created a probability map which explains the different consequences of hitting the asteroid on any point on its surface.
This research could help future astronomers and scientists avoid catastrophe.
Potlucks happened in Late Bronze Age in Britain
There is evidence of potlucks and food festivals happening even in the Bronze Age in Britain more than 3,000 years ago. A paper by Cardiff University published in iScience journal on 10 September explored remains of bones at different sites in the British landscape in what are known as middens. These middens are like massive piles of prehistoric rubbish, made of everything from animal bones to broken pottery to other leftovers that are all indicative of feasts and festivals back in the day.
What the archaeologists from Cardiff did is perform isotope analysis on the bones found in these middens to find their origins. While it was mostly pork in some sites like Potterne, this pork wasn’t just from around that area. Some of the bones were traced back to pigs from Northern England, indicating that the area was sort of a gathering point for traders and people from different regions.
Similarly, middens like Runneymede in Surrey had cattle from various different regions in and around England. According to the researchers, the isotope analysis revealed how each of these middens or rubbish heaps revealed something about the location being significant in the region’s economy, and showed how prehistoric people lived, traded, ate and had relationships with each other.
Robots could help kids overcome public speaking anxiety
To add to everything else that robots could potentially do for humankind is this new research from the University of Chicago which says they could help some children overcome anxiety. According to the study, published in Science Robotics on 10 September, researchers wanted to understand how some children feel scared or anxious when asked to read in front of a class and what could fix that.
What they did was take a group of children and make them read books out loud alone, in front of an adult, and in front of a robot called Misty. They tried to notice common signs of anxiety in kids—trembling voices, high heart rates, and facial temperature. This is because these signs are more accurate than simply asking the children if they were nervous.
They saw that most children had steadier voices and less rigid heart rates in front of robots when compared to reading in front of an adult. The children also said Misty the robot was cute, and because she couldn’t react when they spelled something wrong, they had more time to focus on their reading.
This could lead to robots possibly serving as reading tools or classroom allies in some situations, said the scientists in the paper.
How humans led to native ant apocalypse in Fiji islands
An 11 September study in the journal Science lays out how native ant populations in the Fiji islands have been declining for 3,000 years, ever since humans arrived. In an attempt to reconstruct the natural history of ants in one particular region, researchers from Japan used genome sequencing on 4,000 different ant species on the islands.
They found that the native species, which have been declining steadily since 3,000 years, declined faster in the past 300 years, ever since Europeans arrived on the islands and increased plantation agriculture, deforestation and invasive species.
Meanwhile, an ant species introduced from outside of Fiji thrived and expanded over the past 3,000 years. This is because they live on farms, roadsides and towns which are all sites of human activity.
One of the most important takeaways from this study, which the scientists highlighted in the paper, is that they could study the genomics using museum specimens. That is, most of these ant specimens were collected decades ago when people didn’t even know genome sequencing. But this points to the importance of biological specimens and natural history museums which can reveal so much more about the world.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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