To the Moon

The most dangerous place in the world for scientists to go is right in between fact and fiction, where the superstition meets the science, where the conspiracies become consensus. 

Granted, being that the purpose of science is to advance the perimeter of ignorance, all cutting edge science, all "new" science, exists in this liminal zone. Maybe this should be revised - it's not a scary place to be for the scientist, actually I'll bet it's pretty exciting. But it's a scary place for the person who has to explain said science to the general public, because it is confusing as hell. The truth is hard. Simple explanations for the fundamental rules of the universe are like military strategy - no plan survives first contact with the enemy. There are so many contingencies, that only the most deeply-steeped genius can tease them apart. And there's also the 'paradox of knowledge' to contend with, something about how the more you know about a thing the less able you are to talk about it in plain language, yet the less you know and the more you can talk about it easily, the lower the quality of your information. (I think nowadays we call that "low credibility information".)

And speaking of which, you've never had so much fun at a science lecture:

Sasquatch Distribution Modelling: Investigating patterns of Bigfoot sightings in North America

Annual Halloween lecture by Prof Joss Wright at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oct 31 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_upySOOzcI

So here we are - the origin of the word "lunatic" comes from "lunar" - suggesting to us, from generations long before we were even calling "science" "philosophy", that the moon makes us crazy. Yet behavioral scientists, neurologists, biologists, etc., all say that's ridiculous. The truth is between the two, and as usual it's complicated.  

Gravitational action of sun and moon influences behavior of animals and plants

Jan 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-01-gravitational-action-sun-moon-behavior.html

Gravitational cycles do not only affect the simplest organisms. Scientific studies have found that humans kept in the dark tend to establish a cyclical fluctuation lasting 24.4 - 24.8 hours, in harmony with the lunar cycle. This tendency has also been noted in people who spend long periods in caves. It conditions the alternation of sleep and wakefulness, meal times, and other metabolic functions.

via University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil: Cristiano de Mello Gallep et al, Are cyclic plant and animal behaviours driven by gravimetric mechanical forces?, Journal of Experimental Botany (2021). DOI: 10.1093/jxb/erab462

http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jxb/erab462

Image credit: Who am I kidding, this has become futile.

As for the rest of this post, just moon things in general:

Moon cave discovered that could one day house humans

Jul 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce784r9njz0o

Scientists have for the first time discovered a cave on the Moon.

At least 100m deep, it could be an ideal place for humans to build a permanent base, they say. Countries are racing to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, but they will need to protect astronauts from radiation, extreme temperatures, and space weather.

Humans could potentially be living in lunar pits in 20-30 years.

They found the cave by using radar to penetrate the opening of a pit on a rocky plain called the Mare Tranquillitatis. It is visible to the naked eye from Earth, and is also where Apollo 11 landed in 1969.

Moon landing live: US spacecraft Odysseus begins Moon landing descent

Feb 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/science-environment-68349490?src_origin=BBCS_BBC

Odysseus successfully landed on the surface of the Moon, officially making Intuitive Machines the first commercial company to successfully land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.

Odysseus is also carrying 125 tiny sculptures made by US artist Jeff Koons, making them the first artworks land on the lunar surface.

Researchers figure out how to keep clocks on the Earth, Moon in sync

Aug 2024, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/researchers-figure-out-how-to-keep-clocks-on-the-earth-moon-in-sync/

So, the International Astronomical Union has a resolution that calls for a "Lunar Celestial Reference System" and "Lunar Coordinate Time" to handle things there. On Monday, two researchers at the National institute of Standards and Technology, Neil Ashby and Bijunath Patla, did the math to show how this might work.

The Astronomical Journal, 2024. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ad643a

http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ad643a

Post Script:

1. We put reflectors on the moon, which you can still see from Earth.

2. The lunar calendar has 354 days, and the Egyptian calendar has 365. This averages to 360, which is coincidentally the number of degrees in a circle. (Is it really a coincidence?)

--via University of Glasgow: An Improved Calendar Ring Hole-Count for the Antikythera Mechanism. Graham Woan, Joseph Bayley. The Horological Journal, July 2024. bhi.co.uk; https://phys.org/news/2024-06-gravitational-antikythera-mechanism-mystery.html

Measuring Things for Old Time's Sake

Starting with a stretch, this first one requires some concentration. We're talking about macro time vs micro time, and one where the time is measured by genetic changes. It's a new way to measure evolutionary time. Also it's scalar, which means fractals:

New research shows microevolution can be used to predict how evolution works on much longer timescales

May 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-05-microevolution-evolution-longer-timescales.html

By compiling and analyzing datasets from existing species and from fossils, researchers showed the evolvability responsible for microevolution (the evolution of a species over a few generations) of many different traits predicts the amount of change observed between populations and species separated by up to one million years (macroevolution).

"Darwin suggested that species gradually evolve, but what we found is that even though populations rapidly evolve over the short term, this (short-term) evolution doesn't accumulate over time. However, how divergent populations and species are, on average, over long periods of time still depends on their ability to evolve on the short term." 

via Norwegian University of Science and Technology Department of Biology: Agnes Holstad et al, Evolvability predicts macroevolution under fluctuating selection, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adi8722

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.adi8722

Further reading, from above: Traits with higher evolvability change rapidly because they are able to respond to environmental changes more quickly.

Highly evolvable traits can rapidly respond to these fluctuations in selection and will fluctuate over time with high amplitude. Traits with little evolvability will also fluctuate but more slowly and thus with lower amplitude.

"Populations or species that are geographically distant from each other are exposed to environments whose fluctuations are not synchronized. Consequently, these populations will have different trait values, and the size of this difference will depend on the amplitude of the trait's fluctuation, and therefore on the evolvability of the trait."

Note: "Evolvability" depends on the amount of heritable (genetic) variation in a species (which sounds like heterozygosity?).

Image credit: AI Art - An Old Man Servicing a Rolex - Dec 2024

Researchers more precisely calculate how much faster time passes on the moon

Jul 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-precisely-faster-moon.html

The team found that time on the moon ticks by at 0.0000575 seconds faster per day (57.50 µs/d) than it does on Earth. Based on that number, other calculations can be made - if a person were to live on the moon for 274 years, for example, they would be 5.76 seconds older than they would be had they lived on Earth all that time.

It doesn't seem like a big deal until you try to do something like dock with a space station.

via NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology: Slava G. Turyshev et al, Time transformation between the solar system barycenter and the surfaces of the Earth and Moon, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2406.16147

https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2406.16147

Why timekeeping is now on the verge of a giant leap forward in accuracy

Nov 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-timekeeping-verge-giant-accuracy.html

Atomic clocks are about to be replaced by nuclear clocks that can use the Thorium atom instead of the Cesium or Strontium atom, because it has a faster electron transition, so with it we can measure time to the nineteenth decimal place, possibly redefining the second by 2030.

Some background:

• Water clocks appeared around 2,000BC and measure time by regulating the flow of water into or out of a vessel.
• The mechanical clock was established in the late 13th century.
• Until 1967, a second was defined as 1/86,400 of a day.
• The International System of Units then changed things: "The second… is defined by taking the… transition frequency of the cesium-133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s⁻¹."

Bonus: 

Scientists successfully create a time crystal made of giant atoms

Jul 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-scientists-successfully-crystal-giant-atoms.html

via Vienna University of Technology Institute of Theoretical Physics and Tsinghua University: Xiaoling Wu et al, Dissipative time crystal in a strongly interacting Rydberg gas, Nature Physics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-024-02542-9.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02542-9