Massive objects in your area are dragging spacetime

It’s the last day of August, which means tomorrow in the Northern Hemisphere it will be 50 degrees and cloudy; conditions are expected to be hot and humid south of the equator. In this week’s science news, we’ve covered nanoplastic contamination, spacetime shifting, corn sweat, and an AI technique that can non-destructively read ancient papyrus scrolls. Take your pick:

Worrying contaminant

How much nanoplastic are you consuming? Probably a lot: Nanoplastics are suspended in drinking water, food, and air, and none of us can stop eating, drinking, and breathing them, except for the famous superhuman Simone Biles. The ratio of plastic to human cells will continue to increase until we are all walking plastic golems that can only be deanimated by a wizard.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia were morbidly curious about the (probably) countless deposits of microplastics in human cells and developed a portable tool to measure nanoplastics released from sources like disposable cups and water bottles. Comprised of a wireless digital microscope, a green LED light, and an excitation filter, it uses fluorescent labeling to detect plastic particles from 50 nanometers to 10 microns. It connects wirelessly to a smartphone app to reveal the number of nanoplastic particles in a water sample.

In one test, they poured boiling water into a Styrofoam cup, let it cool for 30 minutes, and detected hundreds of millions of nanoscale plastic particles. The health effects of nanoplastics are still poorly understood, but scientists say they are likely to be profound.

Deformable space-time

Frame dragging is a phenomenon in which a rapidly rotating black hole causes spacetime to spin around itself in the direction of the rotation, like the skirt of a beautiful dancer. Scientists at the Beijing Research Center for Computer Science recently demonstrated a technique for determining the rate at which frame dragging occurs around a massive rotating gravitational object such as a black hole or a neutron star. To be clear, all rotating gravitational objects, including Earth, drag spacetime around them, but the effect is too small to measure. In the case of massive objects, the effect is more apparent.

The Beijing researchers were studying the phenomenon of atoms moving from a lower energy level to a higher energy level in weak gravity, caused by phenomena such as an electron absorbing a photon or a nucleus absorbing a gamma ray, and came up with the idea that the amount of excitation depends on the rotation speed of local spacetime; therefore, measuring the changes in a set of excitations could be used to determine the speed of the frame’s movement.

After determining that an atom near a rotating black hole would be excited, they mathematically established that the excitation energies of atoms rotating at different speeds and at different distances from the massive object all lie between zero and an upper limit for all values ​​of the frame drive rotation frequency. The upper limit is measurable and can be used to measure the frame drive rate.

Moist corn

In the United States, we are a monoculture corn farmer. We use corn to make everything from sweeteners to beer to biofuels. Demand for corn continues to grow, particularly in the energy sector. People in corn-growing regions are familiar with the phenomenon of “corn sweat,” the summertime humidity spike caused by corn plants cooling in a process called evapotranspiration: when the corn plants are hot, they draw water from the soil, use it for the corn’s normal biological processes, and then release it into the air as vapor, cooling the plant.

This phenomenon used to occur during the scorching days of August, but according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Nebraskans who already have holes in their shirts by noon, corn is getting wetter much earlier in the summer. Experts say the phenomenon is likely due to climate change, and researchers are studying it to determine how climate change will affect evapotranspiration and its downstream effects in the future.

Book read

In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the city of Herculaneum in a massive ash heap. In the 18th century, researchers unearthed a luxurious Roman villa containing preserved paintings, busts, and statues, as well as the only surviving library from antiquity, housing 1,000 papyrus scrolls. Over the years, attempts to mechanically unroll the scrolls had the predictable effect of destroying them.

Recently, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur teamed up with computer scientist Brent Seales to launch a research challenge to read the text of the scrolls non-destructively using imaging and artificial intelligence techniques; more than 1,000 teams have participated in the competition since 2023. In February 2024, the challenge awarded the prize to the first winners, who developed an AI model that revealed parts of 15 columns of the innermost part of one of the scrolls—a text on ethics, probably by Philodemus.

The team scanned the charred parchment in a high-resolution particle accelerator. The physical structure of the parchment was analyzed and virtually flattened. The team then trained their AI ink detection model on patterns in the papyrus itself and visualized the writing on the parchments. The Vesuvius Challenge organizers believe that once they overcome a number of technical challenges, the remaining parchments can be analyzed using a refined version of this approach.

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