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Scientists observe 'negative' time
and ants began farming 66 million years ago.
Coffee Table Science
October 06, 2024
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In this newsletter
Ants started farming fungi 66 million years ago
If you were impressed by the human skill of agriculture that developed around 12,000 years ago, ants have been doing so for about 66 million years now. It began in the face of adversity but has a lot to offer to humans even today.
If the 66 million-year mark sounds familiar, it is because that was when an unsuspecting massive asteroid raced toward Earth and crashed into modern-day Mexico. The cloud of dust that rose blocked out sunlight and led to the death of many animals and plants (also dinosaurs).
But ants found an opportunity in this devastation and began working with fungi that were feasting on dead plants. After the dust settled, ants began providing fungi leaves that they could decay and consume. Ants consume the tips of threadlike structures that fungi make to spread themselves. The other way to spread is to make fruiting bodies, what we popularly call mushrooms.
This happened for a few million years in the wild. But later, ants domesticated fungi varieties and brought them back to their nests. This continues to this day, where leaf-cutter ants carry leaves to their nest to feed the fungi.
When a daughter queen is ready to leave the nest, she also takes a bit of fungus in her mouth to continue farming in her new colony.
We now also know that ants deploy certain bacteria in the process as well to keep their fungi healthy and free from disease. Humans have a lot to learn from tiny ants when it comes to farming.
A study tracing back the origins of fungi farming in ants was published in Science.
In a first, scientists observe negative time
In a strange experiment, researchers at the University of Toronto observed a rare phenomenon of ‘negative’ time.
The researchers were looking to study the phenomenon of atomic excitation where photons absorbed by a material experience a time delay when they pass through a material.
In their experimental setup, the researchers shot photons through a cloud of ultracold rubidium atoms and expected to measure the transit time for the photons. To their surprise, they found that some photons passed through the cloud of atoms before they had even entered it.
The reason for such an observation was that the photons left the atoms even before the excitation was completed, giving the perception that the photons were leaving the cloud of atoms even before entering it. This suggested a concept of negative time.
This is unlikely to impact our understanding or perception of time but suggests that if we were to build a quantum clock that measures how much time atoms spend it an excited state, its measurements could be forward and backward as well.
The research findings were published in the preprint journal arXiv.
If you want to know what else is being published on arXiv, subscribe to Arxiv Weekly Insights.
COVID-19 had an impact on the Moon
Humanity has always been interested in how the Moon affects the Earth. From tides to human behavior, we have theories about different phases of the moon and their impact. But how does the Earth impact the Moon? Researchers at the Physical Research Laboratory in India asked this question and found a strange answer.
Since the Moon has a thin atmosphere, temperature fluctuations are significant between lunar days and nights. At the equator on the Moon, the temperature during the day can be as high as 250 Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius). When the Sun does not shine, the temperature drops to minus 208 Fahrenheit (-133 degrees Celsius).
In this darkness of the night, the only source of light and heat on the Moon is radiation from the Earth. But something drastically changed in 2020. As the world locked down and human activity ceased, the radiation released from the Earth also reduced.
Nighttime temperatures dropped by 13-16 Fahrenheit (8-10 degrees Celsius) while daytime temperatures showed no deviation during the COVID-19 lockdown period.
With countries racing to set up bases on the Moon, the impact of Earth on the Moon also needs to be studied in greater detail.
The research findings were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Armageddon 2.0 would not use a nuclear bomb
If Michael Bay were to reprise his 1998 movie Armageddon, it is unlikely that Michael Stamper (Bruce Willis’ character) would be detonating a nuclear bomb. Instead, it would be a nuclear X-ray pulse that would change the direction of the asteroid.
While Bay’s movie was meant to entertain in the theatres, using a nuclear bomb to split the asteroid into several pieces makes no sense. Now, there would be multiple meteors, which would result in multiple impact points instead of just one.
A smarter move would be to completely push the asteroid off its trajectory toward Earth, something NASA scientists did with the DART mission a few years ago. Now, researchers at Sandia National Laboratory have simulated a powerful X-ray pulse that could achieve this.
To generate the pulse, researchers need to direct an intense burst of electricity at pocket or argon gas, which would result in an implosion and turn it into plasma. This plasma would emit powerful X-rays creating a vapor plume that will shoot off to one side and push the asteroid in the other direction.
You read more about the method used in this press release.
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Thanks for reading.
Until next time,
Ameya
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