Various individuals belonging to the species Octopus chierchiae.
Liu et al., 2023, PLoS One, CC-BY 4.0
The distinct striped pattern on pygmy octopuses varies from one individual to another, which may help researchers keep track of the rare animal.
Zebra pygmy octopuses (octopus), also known as the less specific striped octopus, live in shallow waters on the Pacific coast of America and have alternating brown and white stripes running across them.
Feeling that little is known about the animal or how it interacts with the environment, Benjamin Liu and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley have bred two adult males and two adult females in their laboratory.
The team then individually kept 25 baby octopuses, which they photographed and videotaped once a week for about 2 years.
When the octopuses were about two weeks old, their patterns became visible to the naked eye and were fully visible by four weeks. Pygmy zebra octopuses often change their appearance to mimic their surroundings in response to disturbance, so the researchers only focused on specimens that persisted for hours or days.
They found that each of the 25 octopuses had a unique stripe pattern.
Volunteers who were shown photos of octopuses could even tell if the photos were of the same octopus or two different ones, with an average accuracy of 84.2%.
This suggests that individual zebra pygmy octopuses can be repeatedly identified and tracked in the wild over time, which may contribute to their conservation, the researchers write in their paper. These octopuses are rare and gentle, so ideally they should be studied in a way that doesn’t move them away from their natural habitat, they wrote.
While the stripes on zebra pygmy octopuses appear to vary between individuals, it is not clear why they have these stripes at all. “The fact that they can turn bands on and off and even do it unilaterally makes me think they are used in communication or at least to make the signals more obvious,” says Roy Caldwellauthor of the study.
On Thursday (April 13), the European Space Agency (ESA) is launching an exciting new mission to study whether Jupiter’s moons have the potential for alien life: Jupiter’s icy moon explorer, also known as JUICE (will open in a new tab). And you can watch the launch thanks to ESA live stream (will open in a new tab)scheduled to start at 7:45 AM EST (11:45 GMT) and launch at 8:15 AM EST (12:15 GMT).
JUICE is a satellite that will study Jupiter’s three moons. 92 known moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. Each of these worlds has an ocean of water hidden under a shell of ice. These subsurface waters are an important target for astronomers looking for life beyond Earth, as they could potentially host life. In accordance with ESAJUICE investigates this key question: “Is the origin of life unique to our planet, or could it originate somewhere else in our solar system or beyond?”
This mission will be the first to orbit a satellite in the outer solar system, as it will spend time orbiting Ganymede. The four largest moons of Jupiter are known as the Galilean moons because they were discovered by Galileo Galilei; of these, Ganymede is the largest and only moon in the solar system with a magnetic field.
An Ariane 5 VA 260 carrying Juice is ready for launch at the ELA-3 launch pad at the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on April 12, 2023. (Image courtesy of ESA – S.Corvaja)
During its stay near Jupiter, JUICE will also observe the gas giant itself, helping astronomers understand how gas giants form and revealing unprecedented details of what their environment is like. Understanding gas giants like Jupiter is important not only for our solar system, but also for observing exoplanetssince we cannot study them closely.
JUICE will spend about eight years on its journey to Jupiter, and its long journey will begin with this launch. The satellite is currently on an Ariane 5 rocket (the same one that launched James Webb Space Telescope) at the Europa Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Several important milestones will follow shortly after the launch. Separation of the satellite from the rocket is scheduled for 8:42 am EDT (1242 GMT), the first signal from JUICE should arrive around 8:51 am EDT (1251 GMT), and the satellite’s solar array will unfold around 9:55 AM EST (13:55 GMT).
You can watch all of this, as well as the post-launch press conference, at ESA Internet TV (will open in a new tab) or ESA broadcast on YouTube (will open in a new tab).
Once launched, the satellite will continue to turn around, turning its antennas after a few days or weeks. You can follow JUICE in the coming years with ESA tracker for probe (will open in a new tab)as we all expect it to arrive on Jupiter in July 2031.
At the end of 2022, a European satellite unfurled a shimmering silver sail behind it. The purpose of this appendage was simple: to accelerate the self-destruction of the satellite by pushing it into the Earth’s atmosphere.
As strange as it may sound at first glance, this was the latest in a growing wave of efforts to tackle the growing problem of space debris. In recent years, the situation over our sky has changed dramatically. For decades, since the beginning of the space age in the late 1950s, satellite launch rates have remained fairly stable. The growth in the number of satellites is now exponential, fueled by the efforts of corporations like Amazon. Collisions in space, meanwhile, produce clouds of debris that could pose a danger to spacecraft for decades.
Why did we write this
As the amount of man-made debris in space grows, so does the search for solutions. Some experts say the first step is to think of space not as an endless garbage dump, but as a common area requiring agreed-upon norms of behaviour.
Threat mitigation efforts are underway, including so-called active garbage disposal. Concepts include the cosmic equivalent of a net, magnet, or harpoon. Another approach is to minimize the creation of new debris, mainly by promoting international agreement on what the norms of behavior should be.
“People on Earth are benefiting tremendously from space,” says Crystal Azelton, director of space applications programs at the Secure World Foundation, a US organization that promotes collaborative solutions to make space sustainable. “It’s fragile, it’s not infinite, and it needs to be managed in a way that’s sustainable.”
At the end of 2022, a European satellite unfurled a shimmering silver sail behind it. The purpose of this appendage was simple: to accelerate the self-destruction of the satellite by pushing it into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Strange as it may sound at first glance, this was actually just the latest wave of efforts to address a growing problem facing humanity in space – the proliferation of debris and satellites in orbit around our planet.
In fact, we treat space like a garbage dump.
Why did we write this
As the amount of man-made debris in space grows, so does the search for solutions. Some experts say the first step is to think of space not as an endless garbage dump, but as a common area requiring agreed-upon norms of behaviour.
And the task doesn’t get any easier: In early February, the United States gave Amazon permission to launch more than 3,000 satellites, not to mention the Russian rocket that destroyed a defunct Soviet satellite in November 2021, creating a new cloud of debris that would pose a danger. spacecraft for years, maybe decades to come.
There is hope, as the European Space Agency’s silver sail shows, but the situation is difficult. A multitude of countries and companies are currently striving to embrace a space perspective with a number of competing and overlapping priorities. This raises the question of who is responsible for cleaning up this mess, and whether we even need to care about it.
“I think until the last few years people were not irresponsible,” says Nick Ross, founder and CEO of Niparo, a space sustainability consulting company based in Edinburgh, Scotland. “These were people who didn’t even think about space as a finite resource.”
Increasing startup speed
In recent years, the situation over our sky has changed dramatically. For decades, since the beginning of the space age in the late 1950s. satellite launch speed remained fairly stable, but in the last few years it has exploded.
This exponential growth was driven not by government agencies, which had long dominated the arena of space exploration and activity, but by commercial enterprises. Starlink, the satellite broadband service being deployed by SpaceX, has already put about 3,500 satellites into orbit.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Nilesat 301 geostationary communications satellite lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on June 8, 2022. Over the past few years, the number of satellite launches has increased dramatically.
For comparison: there are currently only 7200 of them. functioning satellites hovering above the ground. And Starlink has been cleared to launch 7,500 more — not to mention the Amazon Kuiper program, which has now been given the green light, and OneWeb, another company that already has more than 500 satellites in orbit.
The main problem with the growing number of satellites comes down to one thing: collisions.
The International Space Station had to take evasive action more than 30 times over its 24-year history to protect the astronauts on board. And falling debris can affect people on earth. But so far, the most frequent risks are associated with satellites.
“At ESA, when we have to perform collision avoidance maneuvers, it sometimes results in a service interruption,” says Francesca Letizia, a space debris engineer on contract with the European Space Agency. “At the moment it’s tolerable because it only happens occasionally, but if you move to a long-term scenario where you have 10 times as many objects, then perhaps the interruption becomes more significant.”
This, of course, assumes that the satellites are capable of maneuvering at all. In 2009, for example, the inactive Russian satellite Cosmos 2251 collided with an active satellite owned by the American company Iridium. The impact produced thousands of debris, many of which will still be in orbit decades from now.
Some positive steps
Monitoring and warning systems have improved since then, and many modern satellites have self-propulsion capabilities that allow them to evade if another satellite flies too close. Starlink satellites, for example, have already had to make more than 26,000 such maneuvers. The concern is that as certain orbits get busier, the task of avoiding every conceivable collision will become increasingly difficult.
And it’s not just other satellites that need to be taken into account. It is also hundreds of thousands of debris flying in the same orbits. Some of them result from accidents – perhaps collisions or explosions caused by unused fuel. But some are intentional.
“The biggest problem we’re facing right now is countries testing their own missiles against their own satellites,” says Crystal Azelton, director of space applications programs at the Secure World Foundation, a US organization that promotes collaborative solutions for space sustainability.
“People on Earth benefit greatly from space,” continues Ms. Azelton. “It’s fragile, it’s not infinite, and it needs to be managed in a way that’s sustainable.”
And it gets to the heart of why we should care: the number of industries here on Earth that depend on space is only growing. Many of our daily activities now depend on satellites, not least mapping and navigation on our phones. Nevertheless recent report indicates that the vast majority of us deeply underestimate the role that space plays in maintaining our lifestyle.
Magnets and harpoons
Effort in motion to eliminate threats. On the one hand, for example, there are companies seeking to remove objects from orbit that are no longer functional, a process known as active debris removal. Concepts include the cosmic equivalent of a net, magnet, or harpoon.
One of the latest trials involving small plasma thrusters attached to a CubeSat (a miniature satellite), allowing it to feed in Earth’s atmosphere and burn up after completing its mission. CubeSats, which can be the size of a tissue box, are responsible for a large portion of the ballooning satellite population, so finding ways to ease their deorbiting could bring huge payoffs to efforts to keep space clean.
Another approach is to minimize the creation of new debris, mainly by promoting international agreement on what the norms of behavior should be. The Interagency Space Debris Coordinating Committee, for example, set a directive that all satellites in low Earth orbit must be removed from that orbit within 25 years of the end of a mission, a number that the US recently unilaterally reduced to five years.
Of course, much of this depends on whether nations respect the limits and how much they value responsibility in their national politics. But many analysts agree that despite the gaps and shortcomings, it is in the interest of all parties, public and private, to keep the space usable; in other words, self-interest generally encourages compliance.
However, some space experts argue that the solutions lie deeper than just eliminating physical congestion in certain orbits.
“I think we can work it out”
“When I look at the definition of space sustainability, I wonder if our recommendations really fit in with the idea that space is for everyone,” says Hugh Lewis, professor of astronautics at the University of Southampton in England. “For me, it has evolved from a typical engineering problem to something focused on ethics, morality and responsibility.”
Dr. Lewis, who represents the UK Space Agency on the Inter-Agency Committee, notes that all mankind is interested in space, but a relatively small number of states dominate there. Rookie nations, by definition, have to adapt to the boxes set by established heavyweights and fit in where they can.
This is true, although, as Star Trek’s Spock put it, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
Another issue, flagged as Dr. Lewis and Dr. Niparo’s Ross is how satellites are deorbited so often, simply by blasting them into Earth’s atmosphere and allowing the colossal pressures and temperatures to essentially vaporize the spacecraft. This throws off the idea of a circular economy that reuses materials and raises concerns about the impact on the atmosphere when these materials are deposited in its upper layers.
“I think I was quite pessimistic, but… collectively, as humanity, I think we can solve this problem, as I hope, with things like climate change,” says the doctor. Lewis.
“I think we’re very good at digging out the worst case, and that’s where we’ll certainly end up with space junk as well, but I hope we can dig ourselves out and find solutions.”
It stated that strong winds, low temperatures and heavy rain or showers were caused by an Atlantic low-pressure system slowly moving east across the UK.
Strong wind blows away tents in Cornwall
Some vacationers were evacuated from campsites, as the tents were blown away by the wind.
Steve Ackland of Monkey Tree Recreation Park near Newquay said: “We had fantastic weather last weekend and that’s the other side of that.
“This is what you expect in Cornwall in April and the fact that there are still so many people around is a sign that this is a great place.”
Others, like vacationing Katrina Kay, stayed away.
“If you’re going camping you know what you’re on, it actually wasn’t bad,” she said.
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