Consciousness has the ability to transcend the physical world in moments of heightened awareness. His concept ties into the theory of hyperdimensionality, or the idea that our universe is not just made up of the three dimensions we perceive. Instead, the universe might actually be part of a much larger nexus with hidden dimensions.
If this controversial theory turns out to be true, we would have to accept not only that some beings may be residing outside the physical realm, free from the limitations of space and time, but also that our consciousness might have a similar capacity.
You’re living in a three-dimensional world. We all are. You can go left, right, forward, backward, up, and down. Now, picture a being that can pop in and out of your reality as if pressing a button, like the most brilliant master of illusions. Untethered from the physical limitations of our world, this entity can now travel instantly across vast distances in space. Whether you think of it as a type of “soul” or a “spiritual entity,” this being has unlocked hidden dimensions that some believe lie beyond our perception.
But what if you were similarly connected to these higher dimensions? What if another word for the otherworldly being in question were “consciousness”—including your very own?
...we all might have the potential to interface with higher dimensions when we engage our brain in certain ways, like while creating art, practicing science, pondering big philosophical questions, or traveling to all sorts of far-flung places in our dreams. In those moments, our consciousness breaches the veil of the physical world and syncs with higher dimensions, which in return flood it with currents of creativity, Pravica claims. “The sheer fact that we can conceive of higher dimensions than four within our mind, within our mathematics, is a gift ... it’s something that transcends biology.
Despite centuries of scientific study, the nature of consciousness remains a mystery. Theories to explain the phenomenon abound, ranging from neural networks in the brain to complex algorithms of cognition, but none have definitively captured its essence. Michael Pravica, Ph.D., a professor of physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, believes that we should be looking at hidden dimensions to explain consciousness. In his view, consciousness has the ability to transcend the physical world in moments of heightened awareness. His concept ties into the theory of hyperdimensionality, or the idea that our universe is not just made up of the three dimensions we perceive. Instead, the universe might actually be part of a much larger nexus with hidden dimensions, Pravica suggests.
This idea of consciousness interacting with higher dimensions ties into some of the most advanced theories in physics, like string theory. It says that everything in the universe—from the smallest particles to the forces that bind them—is made of tiny, vibrating strings.
If this controversial theory turns out to be true, we would have to accept not only that some beings may be residing outside the physical realm, free from the limitations of space and time, but also that our consciousness might have a similar capacity, Pravica claims.
An Orthodox Christian with a Ph.D. from Harvard, Pravica has found hyperdimensionality to be a unique way of bridging his scientific background with his religious beliefs. For this, he is on the fringes of traditional scientific thinking, taking more widely accepted ideas to extremes as a way to think about complex topics. Pravica believes hyperdimensionality is a much more familiar concept than we think. For example, he claims Jesus could be a hyperdimensional being—and not the only one. “According to the Bible, Jesus ascended into heaven 40 days after being on Earth. How do you ascend into heaven if you’re a four-dimensional creature?” Pravica asks. But, if you’re hyperdimensional, it’s very easy to travel from our familiar world into heaven, which could be a world of higher or infinite dimensions, he says.
Pravica suggests that we all might have the potential to interface with higher dimensions when we engage our brain in certain ways, like while creating art, practicing science, pondering big philosophical questions, or traveling to all sorts of far-flung places in our dreams. In those moments, our consciousness breaches the veil of the physical world and syncs with higher dimensions, which in return flood it with currents of creativity, Pravica claims. “The sheer fact that we can conceive of higher dimensions than four within our mind, within our mathematics, is a gift ... it’s something that transcends biology,” he says.
This idea of consciousness interacting with higher dimensions ties into some of the most advanced theories in physics, like string theory. It says that everything in the universe—from the smallest particles to the forces that bind them—is made of tiny, vibrating strings. The vibrations of these strings in multiple, unseen dimensions gives rise to all the different particles and forces we observe. “String theory is essentially a theory of hyperdimensionality,” says Pravica. “It’s looking at how the universe is put together on a sub-quantum scale.”
Hyperdimensionality may also help explain the curvature of spacetime, how space and time warp around massive objects like stars or planets and cause gravity. “If spacetime is not flat and it’s curved, then one could possibly argue that this curvature somehow comes from a higher dimension,” Pravica says.
A recent study by researchers in China proposes an intriguing hypothesis: entangled photons could be generated inside the myelin sheaths, the structures that surround nerve fibers. This discovery could provide a new explanation for the surprising speed of neural communication, a key element in understanding consciousness.
Neural communication, which is essential for brain function, relies on electrical signals traveling along axons. These axons are coated with myelin, a lipid substance that insulates and protects nerve fibers while accelerating signal propagation. However, the speed of these signals is still slower than that of sound and is too slow to explain the precise neuronal synchronization observed.
“When it becomes accepted that the mind is a quantum phenomenon, we will have entered a new era in our understanding of what we are.”
To explore this issue, the researchers applied quantum mechanics techniques inside the myelin sheath, treating it as an electromagnetic cavity. They discovered that entangled photons could be produced there, facilitating instantaneous communication along the axons. This entanglement, a phenomenon where two particles are closely linked, could allow for far faster information transmission than through electrical signals alone.
The results show that the production of these entangled photons could be significantly increased within the cavities formed by myelin. This entanglement could even influence the ion channels of neurons, which are essential for opening and closing signaling pathways, potentially across considerable distances within the brain.
Although this research is in its early stages, the discovery opens new perspectives on how neurons might synchronize their activities. It hints at a potential link between consciousness and quantum phenomena, a field still largely unexplored. Researchers hope that this direction will help them better understand the deep mechanisms of neuronal synchronization.
Summary: A new study suggests that consciousness may be rooted in quantum processes, as researchers found that a drug binding to microtubules delayed unconsciousness in rats under anesthesia. This discovery supports the idea that anesthesia acts on microtubules, potentially lending weight to the quantum theory of consciousness.
The research challenges classical models of brain activity, suggesting that consciousness could be a collective quantum vibration within neurons. These findings could reshape our understanding of consciousness, with implications for anesthesia, brain disorders, and consciousness in non-human animals.
Key Facts:
The study found that microtubule-binding drugs delayed unconsciousness under anesthesia in rats.
This supports the quantum model of consciousness, challenging classical theories.
The findings could influence our understanding of anesthesia, brain disorders, and consciousness in non-human animals.
For decades, one of the most fundamental and vexing questions in neuroscience has been: What is the physical basis of consciousness in the brain?
Most researchers favor classical models, based on classical physics, while a minority have argued that consciousness must be quantum in nature, and that its brain basis is a collective quantum vibration of “microtubule” proteins inside neurons.
New research by Wellesley College professor Mike Wiest and a group of Wellesley College undergraduate students has yielded important experimental results relevant to this debate, by examining how anesthesia affects the brain.
More broadly, a quantum understanding of consciousness “gives us a world picture in which we can be connected to the universe in a more natural and holistic way.”
Wiest and his research team found that when they gave rats a drug that binds to microtubules, it took the rats significantly longer to fall unconscious under an anesthetic gas.
The research team’s microtubule-binding drug interfered with the anesthetic action, thus supporting the idea that the anesthetic acts on microtubules to cause unconsciousness.
The findings are published in the journal eNeuro.
“Since we don’t know of another (i.e., classical) way that anesthetic binding to microtubules would generally reduce brain activity and cause unconsciousness,” Wiest says, “this finding supports the quantum model of consciousness.”
It’s hard to overstate the significance of the classical/quantum debate about consciousness, says Wiest, an associate professor of neuroscience at Wellesley.
“When it becomes accepted that the mind is a quantum phenomenon, we will have entered a new era in our understanding of what we are,” he says.
The new approach “would lead to improved understanding of how anesthesia works, and it would shape our thinking about a wide variety of related questions, such as whether coma patients or non-human animals are conscious, how mysterious drugs like lithium modulate conscious experience to stabilize mood, how diseases like Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia affect perception and memory, and so on.”
More broadly, a quantum understanding of consciousness “gives us a world picture in which we can be connected to the universe in a more natural and holistic way,” Wiest says.
Wiest plans to pursue future research in this field and hopes to explain and explore the quantum consciousness theory in a book for a general audience.
There was a Big Bang that created an exquisitely bio-tuned space-time matter-energy universe from a singularity or from nothing, or from "cosmic foam" spontaneity, which was instantaneously, immanently pregnant with reality – much as the moment of conception contains within it a specific LifeForm – and transcendently permeated by a Vital Force, with light acting as the ultimate carrier of information-knowledge, thus constituting a holonic Holy Hologram, thereby inducing consciousness and quantum mechanically enabling the cultivation of Divine Free Will.
A new paper by engineers from the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), the University of Houston's Chemical Engineering Department, and biologists from the UChicago Chemistry Department, have proposed a solution.
In the paper, published in Science Advances, UChicago PME postdoctoral researcher Aman Agrawal and his co-authors—including UChicago PME Dean Emeritus Matthew Tirrell and Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak—show how rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to every bacterium, plant, animal, and human that ever lived.
"This is a distinctive and novel observation," Tirrell said.
The research looks at "coacervate droplets"—naturally occurring compartments of complex molecules like proteins, lipids, and RNA. The droplets, which behave like drops of cooking oil in water, have long been eyed as a candidate for the first protocells. But there was a problem. It wasn't that these droplets couldn't exchange molecules between each other, a key step in evolution, the problem was that they did it too well, and too fast.
Any droplet containing a new, potentially useful pre-life mutation of RNA would exchange this RNA with the other RNA droplets within minutes, meaning they would quickly all be the same. There would be no differentiation and no competition—meaning no evolution.
And that means no life.
"If molecules continually exchange between droplets or between cells, then all the cells after a short while will look alike, and there will be no evolution because you are ending up with identical clones," Agrawal said.
Engineering a solution
Life is by nature interdisciplinary, so Szostak, the director of UChicago's Chicago Center for the Origins of Life, said it was natural to collaborate with both UChicago PME, UChicago's interdisciplinary school of molecular engineering, and the chemical engineering department at the University of Houston.
"Engineers have been studying the physical chemistry of these types of complexes—and polymer chemistry more generally—for a long time. It makes sense that there's expertise in the engineering school," Szostak said. "When we're looking at something like the origin of life, it's so complicated and there are so many parts that we need people to get involved who have any kind of relevant experience."
In the early 2000s, Szostak started looking at RNA as the first biological material to develop. It solved a problem that had long stymied researchers looking at DNA or proteins as the earliest molecules of life.
"It's like a chicken-egg problem. What came first?" Agrawal said. "DNA is the molecule which encodes information, but it cannot do any function. Proteins are the molecules which perform functions, but they don't encode any heritable information."
Researchers like Szostak theorized that RNA came first, "taking care of everything" in Agrawal's words, with proteins and DNA slowly evolving from it.
"RNA is a molecule which, like DNA, can encode information, but it also folds like proteins so that it can perform functions such as catalysis as well," Agrawal said.
RNA was a likely candidate for the first biological material. Coacervate droplets were likely candidates for the first protocells. Coacervate droplets containing early forms of RNA seemed a natural next step.
That is until Szostak poured cold water on this theory, publishing a paper in 2014 showing that RNA in coacervate droplets exchanged too rapidly.
"You can make all kinds of droplets of different types of coacervates, but they don't maintain their separate identity. They tend to exchange their RNA content too rapidly. That's been a long-standing problem," Szostak said.
"What we showed in this new paper is that you can overcome at least part of that problem by transferring these coacervate droplets into distilled water—for example, rainwater or freshwater of any type—and they get a sort of tough skin around the droplets that restricts them from exchanging RNA content."
'A spontaneous combustion of ideas'
Agrawal started transferring coacervate droplets into distilled water during his Ph.D. research at the University of Houston, studying their behavior under an electric field. At this point, the research had nothing to do with the origin of life, just studying the fascinating material from an engineering perspective.
"Engineers, particularly Chemical and Materials, have good knowledge of how to manipulate material properties such as interfacial tension, role of charged polymers, salt, pH control, etc.," said University of Houston Prof. Alamgir Karim, Agrawal's former thesis advisor and a senior co-author of the new paper. "These are all key aspects of the world popularly known as 'complex fluids'—think shampoo and liquid soap."
Agrawal wanted to study other fundamental properties of coacervates during his Ph.D. It wasn't Karim's area of study, but Karim had worked decades earlier at the University of Minnesota under one of the world's top experts—Tirrell, who later became founding dean of the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
During a lunch with Agrawal and Karim, Tirrell brought up how the research into the effects of distilled water on coacervate droplets might relate to the origin of life on Earth. Tirrell asked where distilled water would have existed 3.8 billion years ago.
"I spontaneously said 'rainwater!' His eyes lit up and he was very excited at the suggestion," Karim said. "So, you can say it was a spontaneous combustion of ideas or ideation!"
Tirrell brought Agrawal's distilled water research to Szostak, who had recently joined the University of Chicago to lead what was then called the Origins of Life Initiative. He posed the same question he had asked Karim.
"I said to him, 'Where do you think distilled water could come from in a prebiotic world?'" Tirrell recalled. "And Jack said exactly what I hoped he would say, which was rain."
Working with RNA samples from Szostak, Agrawal found that transferring coacervate droplets into distilled water increased the time scale of RNA exchange—from mere minutes to several days. This was long enough for mutation, competition, and evolution.
"If you have protocell populations that are unstable, they will exchange their genetic material with each other and become clones. There is no possibility of Darwinianteleological evolution," Agrawal said. "But if they stabilize against exchange so that they store their genetic information well enough, at least for several days, so that the mutations can happen in their genetic sequences, then a population can evolve."
Rain, checked
Initially, Agrawal experimented with deionized water, which is purified under lab conditions. "This prompted the reviewers of the journal who then asked what would happen if the prebiotic rainwater was very acidic," he said.
Commercial lab water is free from all contaminants, has no salt, and lives with a neutral pH perfectly balanced between base and acid. In short, it's about as far from real-world conditions as a material can get. They needed to work with a material more like actual rain.
What's more like rain than rain?
"We simply collected water from rain in Houston and tested the stability of our droplets in it, just to make sure what we are reporting is accurate," Agrawal said.
In tests with the actual rainwater and with lab water modified to mimic the acidity of rainwater, they found the same results. The meshy walls formed, creating the conditions that could have led to life.
The chemical composition of the rain falling over Houston in the 2020s is not the rain that would have fallen 750 million years after the Earth formed, and the same can be said for the model protocell system Agrawal tested.
The new paper proves that this approach of building a meshy wall around protocells is possible and can work together to compartmentalize the molecules of life, putting researchers closer than ever to finding the right set of chemical and environmental conditions that allow protocells to evolve.
"The molecules we used to build these protocells are just models until more suitable molecules can be found as substitutes," Agrawal said. "While the chemistry would be a little bit different, the physics will remain the same."
Kamala Harris says she has raised $230,000,000 in campaign funds from rich American liberals. Why are rich American liberals so determined to have Kamala as President of the United States?
One reason could be because she, unlike Trump, is easily controlled, so the explanation is the rich are electing their own self-interests.
But are they? The Democrats’ have two agendas: One is to normalize and legitimize sexual perversity. The other is open borders. To put it in different words, the Democrats are devoted to transforming traditional America into a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel.
Does this serve rich liberals’ interests beyond providing them with a servant class?
The main benefactors are sexual perverts and immigrant-invaders.
Do rich liberals prefer their genes not to be passed on because their transgendered kids are unable to procreate and are made infertile by Covid vaccines and a variety of testosterone-inhibitors that leave even young men unable to have a natural erection?
Their politics suggest that the interests of the rich liberals diverge from their heirs, the future of their country, and their self-respect. Everything with which the rich liberals are involved–Diversity, equity, and inclusion, global warming, globalism, the WEA’s Great Reset–undermines their commitment to their country. Rich liberals see America as a resource to be used in behalf of “larger agendas.”
So where does America’s leadership class come from?
It comes from the Jews. The Secretary of the Treasury is a Jew. The Secretary of State is a Jew. The Secretary of Homeland Security is a Jew. Finance, media, Hollywood and entertainment are in the hands of Jews. As Netanyahu told Congress yesterday, every Jew is a Zionist, a defender of Israel. And every American who is not a defender of Israel is an anti-semite. John V. Whitbeck describes the total humiliation of “Proud America” on its knees kissing Netanyahu’s feet. A totally conquered country whose obeisance is shown with 53 standing ovations.
In America today the remaining patriots are “Trump deplorables.” They are despised by the elite and the left-wing and regarded as white supremacists, threats to democracy, and insurrectionists. The FBI puts their names on watch lists and brings false charges against those who attended the January 6 Trump rally.
The Democrats having moved Biden out of the picture are set to steal the November election. Democrats in the swing states have legalized and institutionalized the theft mechanisms they used to steal the 2020 and 2022 national elections. For example, the Democrat state Supreme Court in Wisconsin overturned the ban on drop boxes, thus making it possible for invalid ballots to become part of the vote count. A large number of such practices that enable electoral fraud are now legal in the swing states.
Democrats could not steal the election with Biden as candidate as no one would believe he won. Biden was moved out of the way. Now polls are being rigged showing Kamala leading Trump by 3 points. The rigged polls create public believability of a Kamala win. If the Democrats did not intend to steal the election, they would not have legalized the theft mechanisms in the swing states.
The public accepted the last two stolen national elections and will accept a third. A people this insouciant have no chance of preserving their liberty and the accountability of government. Considering American insouciance, one wonders if the voting public and the Republican Party realize that if the Democrats take the election with so much going for Trump, the result will be to solidify the Uni-Party. The Republican establishment will conclude that the only way the party can compete with Democrats is to better represent the interests of the ruling elite. Henceforth there would be no more Trumps. “Representative Democracy” would only represent the ruling elite.
If Trump is elected despite the Democrats’ intent to steal the election, what can he do? Can he find people willing to accept the risks of helping him to reconstruct America? Can such people get confirmed in office by the Senate? Can Trump survive another four years of media, FBI, CIA attacks, and can his appointees? Can Trump survive assassination? Most certainly Trump cannot rely on Secret Service protection.
It is clear that America is split more decisively than it was by tariffs that led to the so-called “Civil War.” All relations in American society have been damaged by the liberal-left. Feminism has made women unsupportive and even hostile to men. Consequently, men cannot trust women. Families, the basis of society, are weakened. Men’s testosterone levels have dropped so much that you can’t even get into a fight in a redneck bar.
The Republicans point to Kamala’s war chest provided by rich American liberals and ask their working-class supporters to help fund Trump’s election. The mismatch of resources between Democrat billionaires and Republican working class “deplorables” is extraordinary. But note that for both parties the election is a matter of who has the most money.
This is the sign of a country that is finished, over and done with.
I have just witnessed the most pathetic and humiliating hour which I, as an American, have experienced in my lifetime.
After virtually every sentence uttered by the notorious war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, no matter how inane or blatantly false, virtually all the attending political prostitutes infesting the U.S. Congress rose (53 times!) in a loud standing grovel of homage to their puppet master, most long and loudly when he condemned pro-justice and anti-genocide protestors on American campuses and on the streets of Washington during his speech as “useful idiots” financed by Iran.
Anyone watching this obscene spectacle could only conclude that the United States of America has ceased to be a respectable independent country and is now, as, indeed, it has been for many years already, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the State of Israel, with shared values which are rightfully rejected by the overwhelming majority of mankind.
By their venality, cowardice, moral bankruptcy and near-treason, the American political class is flushing a once great country down history’s toilet, and the Global West, if it does not soon liberate itself from domination by the Israeli-American Empire, risks a similar fate.
John V. Whitbeck is a Paris-based international lawyer.
It’s a little mind-boggling to think about, but there was a time when no stars existed in the universe. The earliest stars, galaxies and black holes came into being in a wondrous period called “cosmic dawn,” some 250 to 350 million years after the Big Bang [i.e., the Big Seed].
All sorts of ingredients of our universe were popping into existence at that time: stars, galaxies, black holes. Given all the components were there, could that short list include life itself? Could aliens have popped up much earlier in the universe’s 13.8-billion-year history?
The question of how life first came into existence has exercised scientists and philosophers for millenia. In a 2016 book on the subject, Sean Carroll describes how Jan Baptist van Helmont, a 17th Century chemist, thought that “the way to create mice from nonliving materials is to place a soiled shirt inside an open vessel, along with some grains of wheat.” After about twenty-one days, the wheat would supposedly have turned into mice.
“If for some reason you wanted to make scorpions rather than mice, he recommended scratching a hole in a brick, filling the hole with basil, covering with another brick, and leaving them out in sunlight.”
As Carroll goes on to say, “if only it were that easy.” One interesting angle on the question might be to go back not to the early years of Earth, but further — to those earliest millions of years after the Big Bang, when gravity essentially turned on the lights, pulling “us” out of the dark ages of a hot, dense and boring early universe into a cooler, more complex reality.
Avi Loeb, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics co-operated by Harvard University and the Smithsonian, and a theoretical physicist focused on cosmology and astronomy, told Salon that with some creative thinking, it might be possible to find evidence that life started far, far earlier than the earliest evidence we have for it on Earth.
“I would say one hundred million years after the Big Bang, there were pockets of enriched material that could have led to planets and life as we know it, potentially,” Loeb said.
After all, that’s when the essential elements that make up life first appeared in our universe. Rooting around just in our solar system, we’re already finding evidence of the building blocks of life in unexpected places. In December, scientists studying findings from the Cassini mission (which sent a space probe to Saturn and its system in 1997, wrapping up in 2017) uncovered evidence of hydrogen cyanide on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. So if we’ve already found water, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen gas on Saturn’s icy moon — which scientists predict are some of the crucial elements necessary for life to spring into being — would it be possible for them to create life much earlier in our universe’s evolution?
The life-giving elements emerged gradually after the Big Bang [i.e., the Big Seed], about 380,000 years after the explosion [i.e., the sprout], when the universe cooled enough for hydrogen atoms to form. For the next fifty to a hundred million years, space was completely dark, with hydrogen atoms spread across the universe, a gas that was eventually cleared – or ionized – by the ultraviolet light of the first generation of stars.
And then came the epoch of reionization, which lasted until about 100 billion years after the Big Bang, with new elements like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and iron released from those first, massive stars,.They quickly exploded, giving way to a second generation formed around those heavy elements and others like cobalt and nickel, sulfur and silicon. Neutron stars merge to produce gold and uranium. The universe is full of stuff.
The region of habitability
But that’s not all you need to spark life. What about an atmosphere? Can’t forget the thing that lets us breathe and stay unbaked from solar radiation. For liquid water to exist — so as to have the chemistry necessary for life in a form we might recognize — you need external pressure. It can’t be done in a vacuum. Given the necessary pressure, you need a certain temperature. So the whole concept of a “habitable zone” for life is a Goldilocks one: in Loeb’s words, “Just the right distance [from a star], not too close so that it’s too hot, and not too far from the furnace so the surface freezes.”
The clever Youtube channel Kurzgesagt produced speculation about whether the life that exists on Earth might not in fact have originated way, way back and far, far away, some time during the cosmic dawn and in some other part of the universe, draws in part on Loeb’s theorizing about the early post-Bang universe. Basically, considering the requirements for a habitable zone conducive to life, Loeb realized that you can get around the requirement of being close enough to a star to be optimally warmed. You’ve just gotta go back in time. Because back then, the universe was not just smaller. It was hotter, too.
“In the early universe, that temperature requirement could have been met when the universe was just fifteen million years old,” Loeb said. “And that would allow liquid water to exist, or [an adequate temperature could be achieved] when it was about seventy-five million years old or so, when liquid methane or ethane would have existed just like in Titan.”
“It’s just the temperature of the entire universe because it’s filled with the radiation background, or the cosmic microwave background [...] so you don’t need the object to be close to a star to attain this temperature. It would have been everywhere.”
Life as we don’t know it
When you think about the building blocks of life, typically you need water. But there are potentially other solvents that could do the job: methane or ethane, for example.
After all, why assume that, if there’s life out there in the vast, unknown reaches of the universe, it follows the same contours as ours? Sure, the laws of physics place certain constraints on the pre-conditions for life – but there’s no reason to be so anthropomorphic, or terramorphic, about it.
Loeb cited the Dragonfly mission, currently scheduled by NASA to launch in 2028 to explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan (as well as Enceladus, which is Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, another candidate for life in our solar system is Jupiter’s moon, Europa).
Loeb describes the Dragonfly mission as a fishing expedition. Literally: looking for alien fish.
“You go there and you look for fish, and if there is something moving and alive, that would be amazing,” Loeb said. “Because not only would we realize that life exists elsewhere, but also that it could take very different forms. Of course, I would not recommend putting these fish in restaurants on Earth and eating them, because it might not be good for our stomachs. But you can imagine — I mean, we just don’t understand how life emerged on Earth with its complexity and definitely not in other liquids.”
If we were to come across life based on solvents other than water, Loeb explained that “would open up a whole new frontier of biology to understand what happens in methane and ethane. And maybe it will lead to some important insights about life.”
It’s actually not just the temperature but a temperature gradient that seems to be needed to kickstart the initial reactions needed, but Loeb argues that under the surface of an object like a planet, you can get higher temperatures where liquids might hide, as we believe they do on Europa and Enceladus, for example, which are frozen on the surface due to their great distance from the sun, but which conceal liquid oceans buried under the ice.
“I mean,” said Loeb, “your life is as boring as you are, if you don’t have imagination.”
To be fair, though, Loeb has been accused of having a little too much imagination before, in particular when he was quick to suggest that ‘Oumuamua’, a mysterious, highly reflective space rock (or chunk of space ice) briefly pulled by the sun’s gravity into our inner solar system in 2017, might in fact be an artifact from an extraterrestrial civilization. But while Dr. Catherine Neish, associate professor in Planetary Surfaces at the University of Western Ontario, and a co-investigator on the Dragonfly mission, might not be looking for fish on Titan, her expedition will, she hopes, turn up at least the building blocks of life: amino acids. What she’s really interested in is prebiotic goo, the stuff from which life first arose – and which she can mimic with lab-created analogues (non-identical copies) of the kind of chemicals found in the haze in Titan’s organic chemical-rich atmosphere. During her PhD work she discovered that when you mix such chemicals with water, “you can make some really interesting products that are of a biological or prebiotic nature.”
“You take methane, nitrogen, you spark it with electricity, you make these haze analogues,” she told Salon in an interview, referring to Titan's thick, gassy atmosphere. “So no oxygen in there. It should be just carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, those three elements. But then if you add them to water, they can react to form more interesting biological molecules. I was especially interested in amino acids and nucleotides which make up proteins and nucleic acids.”
While water is frozen most of the time on the surface of Titan, where it’s around -288.67º F on a balmy day, there are certain environments even there where you can heat up the rock enough that liquid water could exist – and thus the oxygen (part of the H2O molecule) that we need to have a hope of life. One of those environments would be the kind that exists after a comet strikes the moon’s surface, melting it, resulting in transient liquid water at the bottom of the impact crater it creates.
“You know, how far could you get towards life?” That’s the question Neish asked with the highly interdisciplinary research she conducted (working with chemists) for her PhD in Planetary Sciences, concluding that it wasn’t all that difficult to make prebiotic molecules like amino acids in such environments. Back when she graduated in 2008, actually going back to Titan to look for life there — whether Loeb’s hypothetical alien fish or a nice string of amino acids — seemed about as unrealistic as going back in time in search of the perfect cosmic microwave background to incubate life.
But then in 2016, Neish got word that Titan had been added to the NASA New Frontiers Program. And, a proposal and a long selection process later, Neish and her team are working on a plan to look for evidence of prebiotic chemistry in the wild, on an impact crater on Saturn’s moon.
“In the lab we have these experiments running for days, weeks, months at the most. Whereas Titan, these experiments have been happening for billions and billions of years. So you know, just how advanced can you get with prebiotic chemistry in a natural environment?” Neish asked.
It’s not just a hope of finding life on Titan that either scientist is thinking of, but the hope such a find on Titan might represent complex and interesting life one day being discovered elsewhere in the universe. And not just after the Big Bang, but in a galaxy far, far away.
“There’s so many mysteries about the environment in which life arose on Earth,” said Neish. “Because that Earth doesn’t exist anymore. So we can go to other planets like Titan and maybe it’s more representative of what the chemistry was on the early Earth, a billion years ago. And so by learning about what steps do we need to take to originate life, it tells us more about how life came to be here on Earth, but also elsewhere in the universe, on other planets.”
Some of the spiral galaxies studied by the researchers in the study. Credit: Vicki Kuhn
Relevant presentation begins at 33:35
University of Missouri scientists are peering into the past and uncovering new clues about the early universe. Since light takes a long time to travel through space, they are now able to see how galaxies looked billions of years ago.
In a new study, the Mizzou researchers have discovered that spiral galaxies were more common in the early universe than previously thought. The work appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"Scientists formerly believed most spiral galaxies developed around 6 to 7 billion years after the universe formed," said Yicheng Guo, an associate professor in Mizzou's Department of Physics and Astronomy and co-author on the study. "However, our study shows spiral galaxies were already prevalent as early as 2 billion years afterward. This means galaxy formation happened more rapidly than we previously thought."
This insight could help scientists develop a better understanding of how spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way, Earth's home galaxy, formed over time.
"Knowing when spiral galaxies formed in the universe has been a popular question in astronomy because it helps us understand the evolution and history of the cosmos," said Vicki Kuhn, a graduate student in Mizzou's Department of Physics and Astronomy who led the study.
"Many theoretical ideas exist about how spiral arms are formed, but the formation mechanisms can vary among different types of spiral galaxies. This new information helps us better match the physical properties of galaxies with theories—creating a more comprehensive cosmic timeline."
Using recent images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the scientists found that nearly 30% of galaxies have a spiral structure about 2 billion years after the universe formed. The discovery provides a significant update to the universe's origin story as previously told using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
Studying distant galaxies with JWST gives Guo, Kuhn and other scientists an opportunity to solve a cosmic puzzle by determining the meaning of each clue.
"Using advanced instruments such as JWST allows us to study more distant galaxies with greater detail than ever before," Guo said. "A galaxy's spiral arms are a fundamental feature used by astronomers to categorize galaxies and understand how they form over time. Even though we still have many questions about the universe's past, analyzing this data helps us uncover additional clues and deepens our understanding of the physics that shaped the nature of our universe."
The observations, made by the James Webb space telescope, suggest that vast amounts of carbon were released when the first generation of stars exploded in supernovae. Carbon is known to have seeded the first planets and is a building block for life as we know it, but was previously thought to have emerged much later in cosmic history.
“This is the earliest detection of an element heavier than hydrogen ever obtained,” said Prof Roberto Maiolino, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and a co-author of the findings. “It’s a massive discovery.”
“The finding of a large amount of carbon in such a distant galaxy implies that life could have potentially emerged very early in the universe, really close to cosmic dawn.”
The very early universe was almost entirely made up of hydrogen, helium and tiny amounts of lithium. Every other element – including those that formed the Earth and humans – was formed in stars and released during supernovae, when stars explode at the end of their lives. With every new generation of stars, the universe was enriched with progressively heavier elements until rocky planets formed and life became a possibility.
Carbon is a fundamental element in this process, since it can clump into grains of dust in a swirling disc around stars, eventually snowballing into the earliest planets. It was previously thought that carbon enrichment occurred about 1bn years after the big bang.
The latest research dates the earliest carbon fingerprint to just 350m years, suggesting that carbon was released in large quantities in the supernovae of the very first generation of stars in the universe. This doesn’t change estimates for when life began on Earth, about 3.7bn years ago, but suggests some of the criteria for life emerging elsewhere in the universe was present far earlier than expected.
“The very first stars are the holy grail of chemical evolution, since they are made only of primordial elements, and they behave very differently to modern stars,” said Dr Francesco D’Eugenio, an astrophysicist the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at Cambridge and the lead author of the findings. “By studying how and when the first metals formed inside stars, we can set a time frame for the earliest steps on the path that led to the formation of life.”
The galaxy, which is the fifth most distant ever observed, is small and compact – about 100,000 times smaller than the Milky Way. “It’s just an embryo of a galaxy when we observe it, but it could evolve into something quite big, about the size of the Milky Way,” said D’Eugenio. “But for such a young galaxy, it’s fairly massive.”
An analysis of the spectrum of light coming from the galaxy gave a confident detection of carbon and tentative detections of oxygen and neon. “From carbon to DNA is a huge journey, but this shows those key elements are, in principle, already there,” said Maiolino.
An international team of astronomers today announced the discovery of the two earliest and most distant galaxies ever seen, dating back to only 300 million years after the Big Bang. These results, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), mark a major milestone in the study of the early universe.
The discoveries were made by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) team. Daniel Eisenstein from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) is one of the team leaders of JADES and Principal Investigator of the observing program that revealed these galaxies. Ben Johnson and Phillip Cargile, both Research Scientists at CfA, and Zihao Wu, a Harvard Ph.D. student at CfA, also played important roles.
Because of the expansion of the universe, the light from distant galaxies stretches to longer wavelengths as it travels. This effect is so extreme for these two galaxies that their ultraviolet light is shifted to infrared wavelengths where only JWST can see it. Because light takes time to travel, more distant galaxies are also seen as they were earlier in time.
The two record-breaking galaxies are called JADES-GS-z14-0 and JADES-GS-z14-1, the former being the more distant of the two. In addition to being the new distance record holder, JADES-GS-z14-0 is remarkable for how big and bright it is.
"The size of the galaxy clearly proves that most of the light is being produced by large numbers of young stars," said Eisenstein, a Harvard professor and chair of the astronomy department, "rather than material falling onto a supermassive black hole in the galaxy's center, which would appear much smaller."
The combination of the extreme brightness and the fact that young stars are fueling this high luminosity makes JADES-GS-z14-0 the most striking evidence yet found for the rapid formation of large, massive galaxies in the early universe.
"JADES-GS-z14-0 now becomes the archetype of this phenomenon," says Dr. Stefano Carniani of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, lead author on the discovery paper. "It is stunning that the universe can make such a galaxy in only 300 million years."
Evidence for surprisingly vigorous early galaxies appeared even in the first JWST images and has been mounting in the first two years of the mission. This trend runs counter to expectations that most astronomers had before the launch of JWST of theories of galaxy formation.
JADES-GS-z14-0 was a puzzle for the JADES team when they first spotted it over a year ago, as it appears close enough on the sky to a foreground galaxy that the team could not be sure that the two were not neighbors. But in October 2023, the JADES team conducted even deeper imaging—five full days with the JWST Near-Infrared Camera on just one field—and used filters designed to better isolate the earliest galaxies.
"We just couldn't see any plausible way to explain this galaxy as being merely a neighbor of the more nearby galaxy," says Dr. Kevin Hainline, research professor at the University of Arizona.
The galaxy is located in a field where the JWST Mid-Infrared Instrument had conducted an ultra-deep observation. Its brightness at intermediate infrared wavelengths is a sign of emission from hydrogen and even oxygen atoms in the early universe.
"Despite being so young, the galaxy is already hard at work creating the elements familiar to us on Earth," said Zihao Wu, a co-author on a second paper about this finding, led by Jakob Helton, a graduate student at the University of Arizona.
Emboldened, the team then obtained a spectrum of each galaxy, and confirmed their hopes that JADES-GS-z14-0 was indeed a record-breaking galaxy and that the fainter candidate, JADES-GS-z14-1, was nearly as far away.
A third paper led by Brant Robertson, professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz, and Ben Johnson, studies the evolution of this early population of galaxies.
"This amazing object shows that galaxy formation in the early universe is very rapid and intense," said Johnson, "and JWST will allow us to find more of these galaxies, perhaps when the universe was even younger. It is a marvelous opportunity to study how galaxies get started."
Gas that accumulates and accretes onto a mini galaxy in the process of being built. While this is how galaxies are formed according to theories and computer simulations, it had never actually been witnessed. Credit: NASA
For the first time in the history of astronomy, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have witnessed the birth of three of the universe's absolute earliest galaxies, somewhere between 13.3 and 13.4 billion years ago.
The discovery was made using the James Webb Space Telescope, which brought these first "live observations" of formative galaxies down to us here on Earth.
Through the telescope, researchers were able to see signals from large amounts of gas that accumulate and accrete onto a mini galaxy in the process of being built. While this is how galaxies are formed according to theories and computer simulations, it had never actually been witnessed.
"You could say that these are the first 'direct' images of galaxy formation that we've ever seen. Whereas the James Webb has previously shown us early galaxies at later stages of evolution, here we witness their very birth, and thus, the construction of the first star systems in the universe," says Assistant Professor Kasper Elm Heintz from the Niels Bohr Institute, who led the new study.
Galaxies born shortly after the Big Bang
The researchers estimate the birth of the three galaxies to have occurred roughly 400–600 million years after the Big Bang, the explosion that began it all. While that sounds like a long time, it corresponds to galaxies forming during the first 3–4% of the universe's 13.8-billion-year overall lifetime.
Shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was an enormous opaque gas of hydrogen atoms—unlike today, where the night sky is speckled with a blanket of well-defined stars.
"During the few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first stars formed, before stars and gas began to coalesce into galaxies. This is the process that we see the beginning of in our observations," explains Associate Professor Darach Watson.
The birth of galaxies took place at a time in the history of the universe known as the Epoch of Reionization, when the energy and light of some of the first galaxies broke through the mists of hydrogen gas.
It is precisely these large amounts of hydrogen gas that the researchers captured using the James Webb Space Telescope's infrared vision. This is the most distant measurement of the cold, neutral hydrogen gas, which is the building block of the stars and galaxies, discovered by scientific researchers to date.
Adds to the understanding of our origins
The study was conducted by Kasper Elm Heintz, in close collaboration with--among others--research colleagues Darach Watson, Gabriel Brammer and Ph.D. student Simone Vejlgaard from the Cosmic Dawn Center at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute—a center whose stated goal is to investigate and understand the dawn of the universe. This latest result brings them much closer to doing just that.
The research team has already applied for more observation time with the James Webb Space Telescope, with hopes of expanding upon their new result and learning more about the earliest epoch in the formation of galaxies.
"For now, this is about mapping our new observations of galaxies being formed in even greater detail than before. At the same time, we are constantly trying to push the limit of how far out into the universe we can see. So, perhaps we'll reach even further," says Vejlgaard.
According to the researcher, the new knowledge contributes to answering one of humanity's most basic questions.
"One of the most fundamental questions that we humans have always asked is 'Where do we come from?' Here, we piece together a bit more of the answer by shedding light on the moment that some of the universe's first structures were created. It is a process that we'll investigate further, until hopefully, we are able to fit even more pieces of the puzzle together," concludes Associate Professor Brammer.
Dutch political commentator and lawyer Eva Vlaardingerbroek warned that Europeans must take a stand against the huge demographic shift brought by mass migration orchestrated by their leaders or risk becoming a minority in their home countries.
When asked by Remix News at CPAC Hungary 2024 this week how conservatives should deal with accusations of racism while also not wanting to be demographically replaced in their home countries, Vlaardingerbroek responded, “You can’t.”
“That’s the thing, you can’t. So you have to pick a side. Of course, you’re going to be attacked if you say, “Hey, this continent, Europe, has been predominantly White for the entirety of its history, and now suddenly within one generation, a few bureaucrats have decided against the will of the people that we should suddenly be a minority,” she said.
“‘Why do we agree with that, or why do we allow that to happen?’ If you say that, you are going to be attacked.”
“But the only other option then you have is saying nothing and have it happen, so the choice is yours, and I’ve made my choice,” she continued. “I think there are many ways in which you can defend yourself, of course, against this ridiculous attack, so I’m sure that they’re going say about me that I’m a terrible racist again. No, that’s not true. I don’t think that any race is superior to another. I just think that mine is also not inferior to that of others.”
Vlaardingerbroek went on to say that European leaders should be forced to answer why whites don’t have the right to exist in their own countries.
“So, I don’t have to be pointed at as the root of all evil, as the Neo-Marxist critical race theory does,” she said. “I don’t have to become a minority in my own country, as Joe Biden said would be ‘a good thing,’ would be ‘our strength.’ No, why actually? Who was the racist here? Explain to me why we don’t have the right to exist, why we’re not allowed to be a majority in the continent, in the countries that we have been a majority in since forever? Explain it to me. Turn the question around.”
This latest research is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Bars are elongated strips of stars found in disk or spiral galaxies like our Milky Way. As bars develop, they regulate star formation within a galaxy, pushing gas into the galaxy's central region, and their presence tells scientists that galaxies have entered a settled, mature phase.
Previous studies carried out using the Hubble Space Telescope had been able to detect bar forming galaxies up to eight or nine billion years ago. But the increased sensitivity and wavelength range offered by the JWST means researchers have been able to see the phenomenon happening even further back in time. This means that scientists might have to rethink their theories about galaxy evolution in the early stages of the universe's formation.
Lead author Zoe Le Conte, a Ph.D. researcher in the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Department of Physics, Durham University, said, "Galaxies in the early universe are maturing much faster than we thought. This is a real surprise because you would expect the universe at that stage to be very turbulent with lots of collisions between galaxies and a lot of gas that hasn't yet transformed into stars.
"However, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope we are seeing a lot of these bars much earlier in the life of the universe which means that galaxies were at a more settled stage in their evolution than previously thought. This means we will have to adjust our views on early galaxy evolution."
The researchers used the JWST to look for bar formation in galaxies as they would have been seen between eight to 11.5 billion years ago. The universe itself is 13.7 billion years old.
Of 368 disk galaxies observed, the researchers saw that almost 20% had bars—twice as many than observed by Hubble.
Co-author Dr. Dimitri Gadotti, in the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Department of Physics, Durham University, noted, "We find that many more bars were present in the early universe than previously found in Hubble studies, implying that bar-driven galaxy evolution has been happening for much longer than previously thought. The fact that there are a lot more bars is what's very exciting.
"The simulations of the universe now need to be scrutinized to see if we get the same results as the observations we've made with James Webb. We have to think outside of what we thought we knew."
As the researchers looked further back in time, they were able to see fewer and fewer bar-forming galaxies.
They say this might be because galaxies at an even earlier stage of the universe might not be as well formed. There is also currently no way to see shorter bars of stars, which are less easy to spot, even with the increased telescopic power offered by the JWST.
The researchers say they now want to investigate even more galaxies in the early universe to see if they have also formed bars. They hope to eventually look further back in time—12.2 billion years—to look at bar-growth over time and what the mechanisms are behind this growth.
The JWST is the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope and is the largest, most powerful space telescope ever built.
Durham University's Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy was involved in the telescope's scientific development, including the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which is used to probe galaxies and black holes. Durham's Centre for Advanced Instrumentation also made some of the optics for the JWST's Near Infrared Spectrograph's (NIRSpec) Integral Field Unit instrument.
The latest study also included scientists from Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, University of Victoria, Canada; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics—University of Manchester, UK; the European Southern Observatory; the Department of Astronomy and Atmospheric Sciences, Kyungpook National University, Republic of Korea; the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Germany; Aix Marseille University, France.
Bees play by rolling wooden balls — apparently for fun. The cleaner wrasse fish appears to recognize its own visage in an underwater mirror. Octopuses seem to react to anesthetic drugs and will avoid settings where they likely experienced past pain.
All three of these discoveries came in the last five years — indications that the more scientists test animals, the more they find that many species may have inner lives and be sentient. A surprising range of creatures have shown evidence of conscious thought or experience, including insects, fish and some crustaceans.
“This declaration, and other means of getting the public to appreciate that animals are not just biological automatons, can create a groundswell of support for raising protections.”
That has prompted a group of top researchers on animal cognition to publish a new pronouncement that they hope will transform how scientists and society view — and care — for animals.
Nearly 40 researchers signed “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which was first presented at a conference at New York University on Friday morning. It marks a pivotal moment, as a flood of research on animal cognition collides with debates over how various species ought to be treated.
The declaration says there is “strong scientific support” that birds and mammals have conscious experience, and a “realistic possibility” of consciousness for all vertebrates — including reptiles, amphibians and fish. That possibility extends to many creatures without backbones, it adds, such as insects, decapod crustaceans (including crabs and lobsters) and cephalopod mollusks, like squid, octopus and cuttlefish.
“When there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal,” the declaration says. “We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.”
Jonathan Birch, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and a principal investigator on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project, is among the declaration’s signatories. Whereas many scientists in the past assumed that questions about animal consciousness were unanswerable, he said, the declaration shows his field is moving in a new direction.
“This has been a very exciting 10 years for the study of animal minds,” Birch said. “People are daring to go there in a way they didn’t before and to entertain the possibility that animals like bees and octopuses and cuttlefish might have some form of conscious experience.”
From 'automata' to sentient
There is not a standard definition for animal sentience or consciousness, but generally the terms denote an ability to have subjective experiences: to sense and map the outside world, to have capacity for feelings like joy or pain. In some cases, it can mean that animals possess a level of self-awareness.
Descartes believed that animals “can’t feel or can’t suffer,” said Rajesh Reddy, an assistant professor and director of the animal law program at Lewis & Clark College. “To feel compassion for them, or empathy for them, was somewhat silly or anthropomorphizing.”
In the early 20th century, prominent behavioral psychologists promoted the idea that science should only study observable behavior in animals, rather than emotions or subjective experiences. But beginning in the 1960s, scientists started to reconsider. Research began to focus on animal cognition, primarily among other primates.
Birch said the new declaration attempts to “crystallize a new emerging consensus that rejects the view of 100 years ago that we have no way of studying these questions scientifically.”
Indeed, a surge of recent findings underpin the new declaration. Scientists are developing new cognition tests and trying pre-existing tests on a wider range of species, with some surprises.
Take, for example, the mirror-mark test, which scientists sometimes use to see if an animal recognizes itself.
In a series of studies, the cleaner wrasse fish seemed to pass the test.
The fish were placed in a tank with a covered mirror, to which they exhibited no unusual reaction. But after the cover was lifted, seven of 10 fish launched attacks toward the mirror, signaling they likely interpreted the image as a rival fish.
After several days, the fish settled down and tried odd behaviors in front of the mirror, like swimming upside down, which had not been observed in the species before. Later, some appeared to spend an unusual amount of time in front of the mirror, examining their bodies. Researchers then marked the fish with a brown splotch under the skin, intended to resemble a parasite. Some fish tried to rub the mark off.
“The sequence of steps that you would only ever have imagined seeing with an incredibly intelligent animal like a chimpanzee or a dolphin, they see in the cleaner wrasse,” Birch said. “No one in a million years would have expected tiny fish to pass this test.”
In other studies, researchers found that zebrafish showed signs of curiosity when new objects were introduced into their tanks and that cuttlefish could remember things they saw or smelled. One experiment created stress for crayfish by electrically shocking them, then gave them anti-anxiety drugs used in humans. The drugs appeared to restore their usual behavior.
Birch said these experiments are part of an expansion of animal consciousness research over the past 10 to 15 years. “We can have this much broader canvas where we’re studying it in a very wide range of animals and not just mammals and birds, but also invertebrates like octopuses, cuttlefish,” he said. “And even increasingly, people are talking about this idea in relation to insects.”
As more and more species show these types of signs, Reddy said, researchers might soon need to reframe their line of inquiry altogether: “Scientists are being forced to reckon with this larger question — not which animals are sentient, but which animals aren’t?”
New legal horizons
Scientists’ changing understanding of animal sentience could have implications for U.S. law, which does not classify animals as sentient on a federal level, according to Reddy. Instead, laws pertaining to animals focus primarily on conservation, agriculture or their treatment by zoos, research laboratories and pet retailers.
“The law is a very slow-moving vehicle, and it really follows societal views on a lot of these issues,” Reddy said. “This declaration, and other means of getting the public to appreciate that animals are not just biological automatons, can create a groundswell of support for raising protections.”
State laws vary widely. A decade ago, Oregon passed a law recognizing animals as sentient and capable of feeling pain, stress and fear, which Reddy said has formed the bedrock of progressive judicial opinions in the state.
Meanwhile, Washington and California are among several states where lawmakers this year have considered bans on octopus farming, a species for which scientists have found strong evidence of sentience.
British law was recently amended to consider octopuses sentient beings — along with crabs and lobsters.
“Once you recognize animals as sentient, the concept of humane slaughter starts to matter, and you need to make sure that the sort of methods you’re using on them are humane,” Birch said. “In the case of crabs and lobsters, there are pretty inhumane methods, like dropping them into pans of boiling water, that are very commonly used.”
DESI mapped galaxies and quasars with unprecedented detail, creating the largest 3D map of the universe ever made and measuring how fast the universe expanded over 11 billion years.
This is the first time that scientists have measured the expansion history of that distant period (8-11 billion years ago) with a precision of better than 1%, providing a powerful way to study dark energy.
With just its first year of data, DESI has surpassed all previous 3D spectroscopic maps combined and confirmed the basics of our best model of the universe – with some tantalizing areas to explore with more data.
With 5,000 tiny robots in a mountaintop telescope, researchers can look 11 billion years into the past. The light from far-flung objects in space is just now reaching the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), enabling us to map our cosmos as it was in its youth and trace its growth to what we see today. Understanding how our universe has evolved is tied to how it ends, and to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark energy, the unknown ingredient causing our universe to expand faster and faster.
To study dark energy’s effects over the past 11 billion years, DESI has created the largest 3D map of our cosmos ever constructed, with the most precise measurements to date. This is the first time scientists have measured the expansion history of the young universe with a precision better than 1%, giving us our best view yet of how the universe evolved. Researchers shared the analysis of their first year of collected data in multiple papers that will be posted today on the arXiv and in talks at the American Physical Society meeting in the United States and the Rencontres de Moriond in Italy.
Looking at DESI’s map, it’s easy to see the underlying structure of the universe: strands of galaxies clustered together, separated by voids with fewer objects. Our very early universe, well beyond DESI’s view, was quite different: a hot, dense soup of subatomic particles moving too fast to form stable matter like the atoms we know today. Among those particles were hydrogen and helium nuclei, collectively called baryons.
“We’re incredibly proud of the data, which have produced world-leading cosmology results and are the first to come out of the new generation of dark energy experiments,” said Michael Levi, DESI director and a scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which manages the project. “So far, we’re seeing basic agreement with our best model of the universe, but we’re also seeing some potentially interesting differences that could indicate that dark energy is evolving with time. Those may or may not go away with more data, so we’re excited to start analyzing our three-year dataset soon.”
Our leading model of the universe is known as Lambda CDM. It includes both a weakly interacting type of matter (cold dark matter, or CDM) and dark energy (Lambda). Both matter and dark energy shape how the universe expands – but in opposing ways. Matter and dark matter slow the expansion down, while dark energy speeds it up. The amount of each influences how our universe evolves. This model does a good job of describing results from previous experiments and how the universe looks throughout time.
However, when DESI’s first-year results are combined with data from other studies, there are some subtle differences with what Lambda CDM would predict. As DESI gathers more information during its five-year survey, these early results will become more precise, shedding light on whether the data are pointing to different explanations for the results we observe or the need to update our model. More data will also improve DESI’s other early results, which weigh in on the Hubble constant (a measure of how fast the universe is expanding today) and the mass of particles called neutrinos.
“No spectroscopic experiment has had this much data before, and we’re continuing to gather data from more than a million galaxies every month,” said Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, a Berkeley Lab scientist and co-spokesperson for the experiment. “It’s astonishing that with only our first year of data, we can already measure the expansion history of our universe at seven different slices of cosmic time, each with a precision of 1 to 3%. The team put in a tremendous amount of work to account for instrumental and theoretical modeling intricacies, which gives us confidence in the robustness of our first results.”
DESI’s overall precision on the expansion history across all 11 billion years is 0.5%, and the most distant epoch, covering 8-11 billion years in the past, has a record-setting precision of 0.82%. That measurement of our young universe is incredibly difficult to make. Yet within one year, DESI has become twice as powerful at measuring the expansion history at these early times as its predecessor (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s BOSS/eBOSS), which took more than a decade.
“We are delighted to see cosmology results from DESI’s first year of operations,” said Gina Rameika, associate director for High Energy Physics at DOE. “DESI continues to amaze us with its stellar performance and is already shaping our understanding of the universe.”
Traveling back in time
DESI is an international collaboration of more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world. The instrument was constructed and is operated with funding from the DOE Office of Science, and it sits atop the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a program of NSF’s NOIRLab.
Looking at DESI’s map, it’s easy to see the underlying structure of the universe: strands of galaxies clustered together, separated by voids with fewer objects. Our very early universe, well beyond DESI’s view, was quite different: a hot, dense soup of subatomic particles moving too fast to form stable matter like the atoms we know today. Among those particles were hydrogen and helium nuclei, collectively called baryons.
Tiny fluctuations in this early ionized plasma caused pressure waves, moving the baryons into a pattern of ripples that is similar to what you’d see if you tossed a handful of gravel into a pond. As the universe expanded and cooled, neutral atoms formed and the pressure waves stopped, freezing the ripples in three dimensions and increasing clustering of future galaxies in the dense areas. Billions of years later, we can still see this faint pattern of 3D ripples, or bubbles, in the characteristic separation of galaxies – a feature called Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs).
Researchers use the BAO measurements as a cosmic ruler. By measuring the apparent size of these bubbles, they can determine distances to the matter responsible for this extremely faint pattern on the sky. Mapping the BAO bubbles both near and far lets researchers slice the data into chunks, measuring how fast the universe was expanding at each time in its past and modeling how dark energy affects that expansion.
“We’ve measured the expansion history over this huge range of cosmic time with a precision that surpasses all of the previous BAO surveys combined,” said Hee-Jong Seo, a professor at Ohio University and the co-leader of DESI’s BAO analysis. “We’re very excited to learn how these new measurements will improve and alter our understanding of the cosmos. Humans have a timeless fascination with our universe, wanting to know both what it is made of and what will happen to it.”
Using galaxies to measure the expansion history and better understand dark energy is one technique, but it can only reach so far. At a certain point, light from typical galaxies is too faint, so researchers turn to quasars, extremely distant, bright galactic cores with black holes at their centers. Light from quasars is absorbed as it passes through intergalactic clouds of gas, enabling researchers to map the pockets of dense matter and use them the same way they use galaxies – a technique known as using the “Lyman-alpha forest.”
“We use quasars as a backlight to basically see the shadow of the intervening gas between the quasars and us,” said Andreu Font-Ribera, a scientist at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE) in Spain who co-leads DESI’s Lyman-alpha forest analysis. “It lets us look out further to when the universe was very young. It’s a really hard measurement to do, and very cool to see it succeed.”
Researchers used 450,000 quasars, the largest set ever collected for these Lyman-alpha forest measurements, to extend their BAO measurements all the way out to 11 billion years in the past. By the end of the survey, DESI plans to map 3 million quasars and 37 million galaxies.
State-of-the-art science
DESI is the first spectroscopic experiment to perform a fully “blinded analysis,” which conceals the true result from the scientists to avoid any subconscious confirmation bias. Researchers work in the dark with modified data, writing the code to analyze their findings. Once everything is finalized, they apply their analysis to the original data to reveal the actual answer.
“The way we did the analysis gives us confidence in our results, and particularly in showing that the Lyman-alpha forest is a powerful tool for measuring the universe’s expansion,” said Julien Guy, a scientist at Berkeley Lab and the co-lead for processing information from DESI’s spectrographs. “The dataset we are collecting is exceptional, as is the rate at which we are gathering it. This is the most precise measurement I have ever done in my life.”
DESI’s data will be used to complement future sky surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and to prepare for a potential upgrade to DESI (DESI-II) that was recommended in a recent report by the U.S. Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel.
“We are in the golden era of cosmology, with large-scale surveys ongoing and about to be started, and new techniques being developed to make the best use of these datasets,” said Arnaud de Mattia, a researcher with the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and co-leader of DESI’s group interpreting the cosmological data. “We’re all really motivated to see whether new data will confirm the features we saw in our first-year sample and build a better understanding of the dynamics of our universe.”
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