Could Fast Radio Bursts Be Aliens? It's Not Impossible

In 2007, a team of astronomers at the Parkes radio telescope in Australia discovered the first "fast radio burst," a millisecond-long flash of radio waves that has so far defied a natural explanation. To date, fewer than two dozen fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been discovered and many seem to originate from galaxies that are billions of light years away. And when you can't pin something on a natural explanation in science, you might as well pin it on aliens.

"Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven't identified a possible natural source with any confidence," said Avi Loeb, a theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "An artificial origin is worth contemplating."

As detailed in a paper recently accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Loeb and his colleague Manasvi Lingam wanted to figure out whether or not it would even be physically possible to create a radio transmitter that was able to send such strong signals that were detectable over such huge distances.

Based on their calculations, they found that if such a transmitter were solar powered, it would require the amount of energy roughly equal to that of all the sunlight falling on a planet twice the size of Earth. The next question was if an artificial structure would even be able to withstand that much concentrated energy, or whether it would simply melt. According to Loeb and Lingam, it's possible if the massive device is water-cooled. While such a construction project is way beyond the capabilities of Earthlings, it is at least physically possible.

So what interest would an extraterrestrial civilization have in building such a massive, powerful device? Loeb and Lingam theorize that it might be used as a way to propel gigantic light sails across interstellar distances. Indeed, according to their calculations, the amount of power generated by this device would be strong enough to push a craft weighing about 1 million tons, or about 20 times heavier than the largest cruise ship on Earth.

This ship would require a radio beam to be focused on it continuously in order to move, but here on Earth we'd only see short, bright flashes of this radio signal. Since both the ship and the source of the radio beam would be moving relative to us, the beam would only be visible as it momentarily sweeps across our field of view.

The idea is pretty far out, but not inconceivable. In fact, we're working on our own light sails here on Earth, albeit on a far smaller scale.

NASA launched the first of these light sails, weighing only 8 pounds, into low Earth orbit in 2011 as a proof of concept. The Planetary Society has plans to send a second light sail into orbit later this year to test the viability of using photon pressure from solar radiation as a means of propulsion. At the same time, the Breakthrough Initiative is flirting with the idea of sending a nanocraft just a few centimeters in size through interstellar space to our nearest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri star system.  To make this four-light-year journey feasible on human timescales, researchers want to accelerate the craft to about one-fifth the speed of light, using giant arrays of lasers for propulsion.

As to whether or not any of this—be it a giant extraterrestrial spacecraft, or our own nanocraft bound for Alpha Centauri—is likely, Loeb said it best.

"Science isn't a matter of belief, it's a matter of evidence," Loeb said in a statement. "Deciding what's likely ahead of time limits the possibilities. It's worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge."

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from Could Fast Radio Bursts Be Aliens? It's Not Impossible

Fake News About a Secret Nazi UFO Base In Antarctica Refuses to Die

Two Research Teams Have Independently Made a Real-Life Time Crystal

Two research teams from Harvard and the University of Maryland have published research papers today in Nature which detail how they have independently managed to create real time crystals for the first time in a laboratory setting.

Time crystals are a new phase of matter that was first described as a mathematical oddity by the Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek in 2012, in which the periodicity of a three-dimensional spatial crystal is extended into the fourth dimension: time. If this sounds mind blowing and nearly impossible to understand, that's because it is. To fully appreciate the magnitude of the Harvard and Maryland teams' work, I'd highly recommend checking out Motherboard's time crystal primer.

In any case, Wilczek's original idea for a time crystal, which he described as the "spontaneous emergence of a clock," looked suspiciously like a perpetual motion machine and despite the novelty of the idea, the underlying physics just didn't work out. It wasn't until 2015 that a group of researchers at Princeton University led by Shivaji Sondhi published research on how time crystals could be brought from the realm of theory into the lab.

Using this initial blueprint for a time crystal, and subsequent research done at Microsoft's Station Q laboratory at UC Santa Barbara, physicists at Harvard and the University of Maryland were both able to independently create a time crystal in their laboratories. Each team relied upon a different method based on the same underlying theory.

Read More: Okay, WTF is a Time Crystal

According to the paper published today by the Maryland team, they created a time crystal using ten trapped ytterbium ions lined up in a row, which they then hit with laser pulses to flip the spins of the ions at half the speed of the laser pulse—a periodicity that is the telltale mark of a bona fide time crystal. The Harvard group, on the other hand, created their time crystal using imperfections in a diamond, called nitrogen vacancies, and flipping the spins of these nitrogen atoms using a microwave field.

Just where this discovery will lead remains an open question. For now, researchers are still trying to wrap their heads around possible applications for this new phase of matter, but they suspect that, because it is a periodically driven system, it may be a good candidate for a nearly perfect memory system for quantum computers in the future.

from Two Research Teams Have Independently Made a Real-Life Time Crystal

Anti-Social 'Shybot' Rolls Around the Sonoran Desert, Running Away From Humans

Over the course of the last week, California's Coachella Valley hosted a strange, anti-social visitor. Its name was Shybot, a six-wheeled rover whose only purpose in life is to roam the Sonoran desert avoiding humans at all costs.

Designed by the Italian artist Norma Jeane and a team of engineers for the DesertX biennial,  Shybot was equipped with a camera that would transmit its perspective live to spectators at The Lab, a San Francisco art gallery. For just under a week, the algorithm allowed the little bot to roam the desert freely, avoiding obstacles, and most importantly, any signs of human life.

To get around the bot's programmed shyness, the artist employed drones to follow the robot from the air (although Shybot would still get spooked if they got too close) and equipped it with GPS so that Shybot could be tracked in real time (you can watch its entire weeklong journey here).

According to Norma Jeane's artist's statement, Shybot's weeklong sojourn in the American southwest was their "fantasy of the desert sublime: the machine is let loose in the landscape, free of the human determinism that thus far framed its existence, and we, in turn, are free to imagine a world liberated from the indeterminacy of us."

For many roboticists, the most pressing design task is to create social robots to ease the human awkwardness of interfacing with a machine. But the for the introverts among us, Norma Jeane's Shybot might be the most humanoid bot yet.

from Anti-Social 'Shybot' Rolls Around the Sonoran Desert, Running Away From Humans

Scientists Are Trying to Detect Enriched Uranium From Miles Away With Friggin' Lasers

According to new research published today in Scientific Reports, a team of nuclear engineers have used lasers to identify enriched uranium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons, at a distance. This device could eventually be deployed in trucks or on drones to snoop out illegal nuclear activity and aid in non-proliferation efforts aimed at reducing the global nuclear arsenal.

Techniques for measuring chemicals at a distance are by no means new—it is one of the main techniques used by the Curiosity Mars Rover to sample the composition of the Red Planet's surface. Things get a little trickier when the technique is leveraged to measure isotopes (which describes to instances of the same element, only with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei), but when it comes to measuring uranium at a distance, being able to parse isotopes makes all the difference.

Uranium is one of the more common elements in nature, with the World Nuclear Association reporting that it is "found in most rocks" in small quantities. The overwhelming majority (about 99.3 percent) of this naturally occurring uranium is uranium-238, an isotope that is incapable of sustaining the nuclear fission reactions needed for its use in nuclear weapons. But if you knock three neutrons out of the isotope's nucleus, you end up with uranium-235, the main ingredient in the world's most dangerous warheads.

When lasers are used to detect chemicals, the laser strikes the surface of the atom of the chemical and forms a plasma in the process. During this process, light is emitted at different colors that will then act as a fingerprint for that particular chemical.

As University of Michigan nuclear engineer Igor Jovanovic and his colleagues discovered, this also works to determine the difference between uranium isotopes, even when they're free-floating in the air. By firing very short and intense laser pulses at uranium isotopes, the researchers were able to turn both the uranium particles and the air around them into plasma. This allowed the uranium and the oxygen in the air to bond, and the energy levels stored in bonds between oxygen and uranium-235 or oxygen and uranium-238 are just different enough to be measured.  

Read More: What is Uranium?

"These molecules radiate just slightly different colors, depending on whether we are looking at uranium-235 or uranium-238," Jovanovic said in a statement. "Not only is it possible to make measurements in air, but some constituents of air in fact make this detection more readily achievable."

Although the team was only able to test their device at a few meters distance in a laboratory at Penn State, they were testing it on weapons-grade nuclear material at the university's reactor. The results were reliable enough that the system could eventually be applied at distances upwards of a mile, so long as the uranium is exposed, as might be the case with the dust particles around a secret uranium enrichment facility, for instance.

Yet not all instances of this device's use need be applied to covert nuke facilities. The researchers also envision its use for things like nuclear forensics, which is used to determine the origin of nuclear material in the aftermath of an nuclear explosion, as well as monitoring the production of nuclear fuel at legit reactors to ensure the right levels of enrichment. According to Jovanovic's colleague Kyle Hartig, a nuclear engineer at the University of Florida, the technique may also find uses from further afield.

"This technique is not limited to uranium," Hartig said in a statement. "It is capable of simultaneous detection of molecules and atoms for the vast majority of elements in the periodic table."

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We Talked to the Pathetic Meatbag Enslaved by a Band of Metal-Playing Robots

Last Friday, I found myself over-indulging in some virgin pina coladas at a small punk venue in Phoenix, Arizona when a friend of mine texted me to suggest I check out the band that had just gone on stage in the room adjacent to the bar. "The band playing is almost entirely robots," his text message read. Incredulous, I opened the door to the stage area and sure enough, my eardrums were assaulted by the growls of JBOT and his two robot overlords, GTRBOT666 and DRUMBOT 0110, which were shredding on a double-necked guitar/bass hybrid and liberally doling out blast beats on the drums.

As I would later learn, this was Captured! By Robots, a metal outfit formed 20 years ago when JBOT had designed some robots to play in his band, only to have those robots rebel against their maker, tear out his eyes and force him to be the frontman of their band. Wanting to know more about what may very well be the most metal band to have ever graced this godforsaken planet, I gave JBOT a call as he and his robo-bandmates were slogging through Louisiana on their "20 Years of Suffering" tour in support of the band's latest album, 'Endless Circle of Bullshit.'

Motherboard: Hey JBOT, how'd you end up with robots for bandmates?

JBOT: I used to play in a bunch of bands for years and it got real old real fast. The lineup changes, too many people on meth, egos, alcohol, all the bullshit you have to deal with with band members. After getting super frustrated with it for a while, I wanted to start my own band, but I couldn't find any players that didn't make me fucking crazy. Then I was watching this band one night and they had some sort of tape player they'd play during their set to make some crazy sounds. At the time, I was having a hard time finding a guitar player, so I thought well, I want to do some similar crazy sounds with my band, but I don't want to copy them so what else can I do? I'll just make a robot guitar player. It wasn't very good, but it did what I wanted. Then I got sick of my drummer so I was like fuck it, I'm just going to build a drummer too. Necessity is the mother, you know?

So you designed and built these robots yourself. Did you have any background in robotics?

No I have no training at all in robotics. In the beginning the robots sucked, but I learned by doing and didn't give up.

Are the robots actually playing the music, or are they just miming over a recording?

They play every fucking note! There's no backing track, they're actually playing the shit.

So what's your writing process like? How do you program robots to play metal?

When I write, I actually play the robotic instruments through a keyboard. It's all about sequencing, there's a lot of tricks to make it sound more alive, to make it not sound, well, robotic. One of the things that was a real challenge was overcoming lag times. In a sequence that tells something to play, you have to drive a relay and then after you have to open up a valve to let the air flow through valve, then go through a cylinder to pull the stick down, the stick has to come down and then you have to hear the sound that comes out of the drum. That's tricky to get around, but I've been doing it so long now I've learned the tricks.

So when I was trying to track you down, I came across a German cover band called Compressorhead which is also a metal band featuring robots. Have you heard of them at all?

Yeah, they came out like two years ago or something like that and we talked for a while because I wanted to find out what they were all about. They were individual robot makers who made all these various instruments and then they came together to make the band. Good guys, but their robots don't play very well, no offense. They're impressive looking, but that's the thing about having a robotic band, it really sums up what you want out of your band since you can make it however you want. They were kind of going for a Terminator look, big and bulky robots. I'm more of a junk guy, I make things out of garbage. I write a lot of political stuff and they do covers. I fell into doing that a few years ago and it's the quickest path to hell, I think.

Considering you're in a band with robots, what do you think about our relationship to technology as humans?

I think technology is our surest way to destruction. I don't want to be a luddite, but I think back to the days before internet and I think people were a lot happier. It's killed magic in the world and it's killed live music. Why do you need to go see a band if you can just pop 'em up on YouTube and there they are. The human condition is a weird thing and when you add technology in there, we haven't learned how to balance it yet. All you gotta do is go to a restaurant and look at all the motherfuckers on phones. We cannot separate it right now and it's disgusting. It kills relationships, friendships. It's like a big hole that you just fall down and you can't get out.

Who would you say your inspiration is, musically speaking?

I have a degree in Jazz, but I don't really listen to music to relax anymore. I listen to really awful music. Bands like Wormrot and Killdozer, stoner metal, power violence. I like stuff that's got a lot of passion and anger and stuff that just makes you want to put your fist in the air and just rage. There's so much to rage against these days.

Your robo-bandmates seem like they'd require a lot of upkeep. Do they ever break down during a show?

That's just something that goes along with the territory. I carry a lot of extra parts with me just in case. I've had to shut down a show a few times, but you gotta be able to roll with it. I've done some interesting mods over the years when something breaks in the middle of a set, like with a kick drum I've had a linkage break and had to have someone go find a coat hanger.

What is your response normally like from people who haven't seen you play before?

When they hear it's a robot band, people tend to think it's going to be like beep boop beep boop, some fucking stupid electronica. Most robot bands and instruments I've seen are very wimpy and don't play that well. My robots kick ass. If you want to see some robots going full bore, and you like metal or grindcore, we're your people. That's where I live and my robots live there too. We're the real deal.

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from We Talked to the Pathetic Meatbag Enslaved by a Band of Metal-Playing Robots

We Talked to the Guy Who's LARPing 'The Martian' in His Backyard

Jeff Raymond, a 38-year old former Air Force engineer in Washington, really wants to be an astronaut. He wants to be one so badly, in fact, that instead of waiting for NASA or SpaceX to begin shuttling people to the Red Planet, he's constructed his own self-sustaining Martian habitat in his backyard.

Raymond and his wife began constructing the massive habitat (it measures 80 feet long by 40 feet wide by 22 feet tall) last May and began initial operations in September. Late in December, he began hosting a YouTube series in which he takes his 20,000 subscribers along with him on his quest to engineer a self-sustaining Mars Habitat while borrowing his thematic elements from The Martian.

I caught up with Raymond to find out how his project is going, how he deals with the trolls, and whether or not he still wants to go to Mars after trying to be a Martian on Earth.

Motherboard: Hey Jeff! How'd you get started with your Martian Homestead project?

Jeff Raymond: Over the course of the last five years, I was doing a lot of research on living off the grid and that led to a bunch of big discoveries for me. What I came to find out is that there is this really big population problem on the horizon, and some reports say that by the year 2050 there's going to be 9.5 billion people on the planet. In order to feed all those people, we're going to have to increase agricultural production by over 75 percent from today. The best we can do, based on current projections, is 33 percent. Then I read another report that found that half the world's natural, freshwater aquifers are emptying faster than they can be filled. This is related of course to the agricultural problem and when I found this out, I was like man, we're going to have to do something.

So you decided to create a Martian habitat?

Well, first I did a little experiment in our home and built an aquaponics system. That little test led me to do a whole bunch of engineering design and some simulation scripts to figure out how to produce sustainable food. When people think sustainable agriculture, they usually think cattle, but if you do the math on animals, cattle are very costly when it comes natural resources, especially water. That led us to aquaponics because fish are fairly easily sustained, and one female fish can lay 750 eggs in one laying, and aquaponics uses about 90 percent less water than traditional agriculture. So we picked a fish that we enjoy eating that we're now raising for consumption and sale: rainbow trout. The problem with raising fish, of course, is you have all this waste. That's where aquaponics comes in. If you add the plants on top of the fish, then the plants and bacteria will eat the waste, you'll clean the water, and you have this really nice, almost closed loop system.

Okay, but what about power?

Solar power was key. The Mars Habitat isn't a greenhouse, it's a fabric building. It lets sunlight through but during the winter months we had to find a way to incorporate artificial light to handle the darkness. Our requirements for this structure is that it should be able to be employed anywhere on the planet, including Antarctica, so it had to be able to withstand extreme winds, snow loading, and the months of darkness that are found in extreme northern and southern latitudes. In the darkness, solar power won't really work though, so we started looking at how we could produce energy locally and integrate it into this system. We tried looking at growing algae and extracting biodiesel, but the numbers didn't really work out to where it was viable. We ended up still having to utilize fossil fuel in order to run the power generator when the solar panels weren't working. That led us to a digester, which takes organic matter and breaks it down, turning it into methane as well as a substance called digestate, which is a liquid fertilizer that can be cycled back into our aquaponics system.

This is a pretty impressive system. How much did it cost to get it off the ground and running?

To date we've invested $97,000 of our own money. By the time the first habitat is finished, the total cost is going to be just south of $150,000.

Is there any way this system could be used to generate revenue to help sustain the costs of running it?

That's where microgreens come in. One of the three grow lanes in the habitat is only growing microgreens and we've got three customers now who we deliver to weekly. Microgreens go for about $24 per pound, and we've finally made enough money from selling them to cover the cost of electricity and heating. If we grow all year around, we should produce about $125,000 in revenue.

What's next?

We want to make a second hab and make it really small, so that you could potentially put these in urban environments, like in a highrise. We really want to get it so we can take all these systems so we can shove it into a shipping container so we can send them to whoever wants them, but particularly those areas that don't have food or energy. At that point, we're also kind of entering Mars territory as well.

Based on your videos, it looks like you've had to go through a lot of trial and error at this point. Has sharing your experience on YouTube helped or hindered this process?

It's a double-edged sword, to be honest. I've gotten an overwhelming amount of awesome feedback. People are spending time doing CAD drawings, sending me information, or offering advice based on their own personal experience for everything from grant writing to writing software. And there are students who are actually watching what I'm doing and learning from it. That makes me feel really good to know that both my successes and failures are being transitioned to the next generation.

On the other hand, the overwhelming response required me to rewire my brain. With 20,000 people watching and all these comments coming in, how can I respond to all of them? I want to, but I can't. I'm already booked: I work a full-time job, I do all the design work, all the build work, my wife does operations—so how do I make time for YouTube? It's taken a big toll to keep it going, but it's been worth it for all the feedback. But then you have the trolls. There are all these comments offering great constructive feedback, but then you get the ones that are like you're a complete idiot, this is all going to fail, you suck. No matter how hard you try to push those things out, it still hurts.

So after trying to create a sustainable Martian Habitat here on Earth and seeing how hard it is, do you still want to go to Mars?

I've actually thought about that a lot. My initial view of Mars was very romantic and I'd argue that a lot of them are. One of the things I think is missing [from many Mars projects] is the realism that actually comes from running a farm. If you're going to grow your own vegetables and do all this, you don't need biologists, you need farmers. Farmers are biologists, chemists, machinists, carpenters, farmers and ranchers all in one. They know how to deal with all these problems and we really need to be talking to them. The best financing, planning and best engineering pale in comparison to someone who can think on their feet and deal with problems directly in front of them. That's where The Martian did a very good job of saying this is what it looks like when everything goes horribly wrong.

Our conversation was lightly edited for length and clarity. You can follow Jeff Raymond's Real Martian Homestead project on YouTube .

from We Talked to the Guy Who's LARPing 'The Martian' in His Backyard

Watch This Woke Documentary Shell Made About Climate Change in 1991

These days it's hard not to be at least a little pessimistic about the future of the planet, especially when it comes to climate change. Not only has the President of the United States surrounded himself with a cabinet of climate deniers, his right hand man, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, is the former CEO of Exxon Mobil, one of the largest petroleum companies in the world.

Yet based on a 1991 mini-documentary produced by another petroleum giant, Royal Dutch Shell, it seems that at least some of those with their fingers deepest in the petrol-pie weren't nearly as blasé about the dangers of climate change a quarter century ago.

Shell's 28-minute video, called Climate of Concern, resurfaced yesterday thanks to online Dutch newspaper The Correspondent . As noted by The Guardian, which also obtained a confidential internal Shell report on climate change from 1986, the film was remarkably accurate in its predictions about the future of climate change, and its warning was "endorsed by a uniquely broad consensus of scientists in their report to the United Nations at the end of 1990."

Read More: Tillerson and Putin Want to Drill for Oil in the Arctic

Yet in spite of the video's dire message, it ends on a hopeful note, asking, "whether or not the threat of global warming proves as grave as the scientists predict, is it too much to hope that it might act as the stimulus, the catalyst, of technical and economic cooperation?"  

Unfortunately, the answer would seem to be no. Despite Shell's prescient take on rising sea levels, global temperatures, and resource scarcity in the developing world, it appears the company didn't heed its own warnings. As noted by The Guardian, in the last 25 years, Shell has invested in developing ecologically devastating tar sand operations, explored the Arctic, spent over $20 million on anti-climate lobbying, and looks hopefully to the future of fracking, despite its own report from 1998 suggesting that fracking wouldn't be enough to meet necessary climate goal.

While such actions might be expected of an oil company, its awareness that "the problems and dilemmas of climatic change concern us all" over a quarter century ago makes these actions feel particularly callous in retrospect.

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from Watch This Woke Documentary Shell Made About Climate Change in 1991

This Guy Is Building a Sustainable Martian Habitat in His Backyard

Early last year, Jeff Raymond was hit with an epiphany. Despite enjoying the benefits of agricultural developments, he and his wife came to realize they weren't doing anything to contribute to sustainable agriculture themselves. And so, after a year of digging and building in the backyard of his Washington home, the Real Martian Homestead was born.

"We're here to help bring sustainable food and energy to our community," Raymond said in an introductory video to the project. "This facility is a result of us trying to accomplish that mission."

Over the course of the last year, Raymond and his partner used their free time to build their first Mars Habitat, which is essentially a giant solar-powered greenhouse. Their goal is to eventually incorporate automation into the greenhouse to make it a self-sustaining system. But if the goal is to bring sustainable agriculture to their local community, however, what does Mars have to do with it?

"This system will replicate exactly what people need on Mars," Raymond said. "So while Musk is working on getting us there, we're working on staying alive once we get there."

Unlike Musk, however, Raymond and his wife are taking whoever wants to come along with them on their adventure. The entire project was self-funded and is partially sustained through Patreon donations, but even if you don't have the cash to contribute to the project, you can follow along as they live blog their (mis)-adventures in creating a Martian habitat, which they're framing as a recreation of The Martian.

This includes in-depth looks at everything from farming sustainable trout in aquaponics systems to whether a leaf blower can be used to clear snow from solar panels, some of which is knowledge that Raymond gleaned during his time as an Air Force engineer and some that he has taught himself along the way. In this sense, the project is truly community oriented, insofar as viewers often provide advice or tips for Raymond's Martian habitat.

"Our story at the Real Martian will not only teach us what we need to accomplish our goal on Earth, but it will also help teach all of those of you out there who are trying to go to Mars some valuable lessons," Raymond said.

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from This Guy Is Building a Sustainable Martian Habitat in His Backyard

I Went to the International UFO Congress to Learn the Truth About the Phoenix Lights

OK, WTF Is a Time Crystal?

NASA's Historic Kennedy Space Center Is Reborn As a Commercial Spaceport

Inside NASA’s Space Farming Labs

SpaceX Is Finally on Its Way Back to the ISS After Historic Launch

This Neuroscientist Wants to Know Why People Who See UFOs Feel So Good

Twitter Has Made Our Alien Contact Protocols Obsolete

In 1990, the International Academy of Astronautics published a special issue of their journal , Acta Astronautica, dedicated to the problem of what to do in the event that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) detected an alien signal. These "post-detection protocols" as outlined in the IAA's Declaration of Principles in 1989 were inspired by increasingly rapid technological advances in the SETI field that made the likelihood of detecting a signal more likely than at any other point in the search's 30 year history.

But the one technological development that its collaborators couldn't have anticipated was the rise of social media, which could seriously complicate the ability of government and private research institutions to control the social consequences resulting from the detection of an extraterrestrial message.

"The IAA declaration of principles was based on using traditional forms of media, print, radio, TV, " Les Tennen, a space lawyer from Phoenix and member of the IAA's SETI Committee, told me. "Now we've got instantaneous communication where your phone will notify you of something important is happening, you don't even have to go looking for it. Millions, if not billions of people could be informed [of a potential ET signal] almost instantaneously."

As detailed in the text of the original 1990 post-detection protocol, in the aftermath of the detection of a possible alien signal, the institution or individual responsible for the discovery should seek to verify that the signal is indeed artificial and extraterrestrial in origin before making any sort of public announcement. Moreover, before informing the public about the signal, the institution that discovered the signal should first inform other relevant institutions and government actors about the signal so that its veracity can be independently verified.

If it turns out that the signal is indeed from aliens, the discovery can be made public via the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (a news service run by the International Astronomical Union) and the discoverer should inform the Secretary General of the United Nations. Indeed, the legal strength of the post-detection protocol rests on the authority of Article XI of the UN Treaty on governing the exploration and use of outer space, which requires that countries "inform the secretary general of the United Nations as well as the public and the international scientific community…of the nature, conduct, locations and results" of the results of space science.

Read More: An Astrolinguist Explains How to Talk to Aliens

Ultimately, these protocols were designed as a sort of damage control, both to limit the spread of false positives as well as public hysteria. As detailed in the report from a workshop conducted by NASA following the launch of the High Resolution Microwave Survey in 1993 (the most powerful SETI search ever conducted at that point), "reactions to a detection can range from indifference…through millennial enthusiasm or catastrophist anxiety, to full scale paranoia…a few reactions would probably be irrationally extreme or even violent."

NASA identified education as the most prominent factor in limiting the negative impacts of detecting an alien signal. In the days before the World Wide Web had risen to prominence, and long before the advent of social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, limiting false information (which could trigger public panic) was far simpler. All news would be channeled through a handful of official agencies, and only after rigorous peer review and analysis.

Yet in the age of social media, rampant fake news, and Wikileaks, it's hard to imagine that news as big as the detection of the first message from an extraterrestrial civilization would be kept under wraps for long.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. Not only could it spark public hysteria, but it could also lead toward government infighting like seen in Arrival or attempts to send a reply to aliens without a global consensus on what to say, or whether a message should be sent at all. The IAA post-detection protocol prohibits sending a response to ET without global consensus on the content of the message, and for that matter, SETI scientists are fiercely divided on whether sending a message to aliens is a smart move.

For now, Tennen is focused on developing ideas that would update the IAA post-detection protocol for our connected world. Some of his suggestions include updating the declaration so that it enables a strict confidentiality among researchers involved in verifying that a received signal is extraterrestrial in origin, as well as establishing a central organization that would be responsible for managing all communications to the public related to the detection of a signal.

Interestingly, some form of these protocols were included in the original 1989 Declaration of Principles, but were omitted from the 2010 revision. For example, the 1989 declaration said that the world should be informed of the signal through the International Astronaomical Union's Central Bureau of Astronomical Telegrams. On the other hand, the 2010 revision also established a Post-Detection Task Group under the IAA SETI committee, which would be responsible for dealing with "matters that may arise in the event of a confirmed signal."

At last year's International Astronautical Congress in Mexico, Tennnen gave a presentation on the problems social media poses to the post-detection protocol and some of his proposed solutions. Tennen said he got a positive response from the members of the IAA SETI committee in the audience, who agreed that it was time to start seriously considering how to update the post-detection protocols.  

"The danger if this isn't updated is [in the event of a signal detection] the declaration will be disregarded because it will be obsolete," said Tennen. "There is not going to be time to have the kind of discussions and deliberations that the original protocols were envisioning."

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What Is Uranium?

There might come a time in a person's life when they're standing in front of a room full of reporters and they get asked about their responsibility as the leader of a world nuclear power. This can be a tough and awkward question, particularly if you don't know much about one of the critical components of many nuclear weapons: enriched uranium. To help you navigate this pivotal moment in your life, we've compiled this helpful beginner's guide to the world's favorite heavy metal.

What is uranium?

Uranium is a radioactive element discovered by the German chemist Martin Klaproth in 1789, which he decided to name after Uranus for some reason. Uranium has an atomic number of 92, which means that it has 92 protons in its nucleus. It is surprisingly common in nature, with the World Nuclear Association reporting that it is "found in most rocks" in small quantities (about 2 to 4 parts per million). This makes it about as common as tin in the Earth's crust, and about 40 times more common than silver. It also occurs in seawater and can be extracted for use. Originally, uranium was formed by supernovas and its slow radioactive decay (Uranium-238, the most common uranium isotope, has a half-life of 4.5 billion years) is the main source of heat in Earth's core.

What's so special about uranium?

In 1938, physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman discovered something unique about uranium: when uranium was bombarded with neutrons, it would split into two nearly equal parts—a process called nuclear fission. Soon after, it was discovered that nuclear fission can produce a cascading effect: firing a neutron into the nucleus of a uranium isotope splits the nucleus of the uranium isotope in two, which releases heat but also knocks a couple of neutrons loose. If those neutrons go on to split other uranium atoms, this creates a "fission chain reaction" and when this happens millions of times, it can create a lot of heat from relatively small amounts of uranium.

How is Uranium used?

When most people hear uranium, they think nuclear weapons. Indeed, uranium was the critical component the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan during World War II, but the type of uranium used for these bombs was highly enriched. In nature, uranium ore consists of about 99.3 percent uranium-238 isotopes and .7 percent uranium-235 isotopes, and the difference between the two uranium isotopes consists of the number of neutrons in the nucleus: 146 neutrons and 143 neutrons, respectively. While this might sound inconsequential, it means that U-238 cannot sustain nuclear fission reactions, but U-235 can. Yet because U-235 is found in such small amounts in naturally occurring Uranium ore, its percentage needs to be increased so that it can be used to power nuclear reactors and create nuclear weapons.

To power a nuclear reactor for energy, U-235 needs to be enriched to about 3 to 5 percent. When this uranium undergoes a fission chain reaction, it boils water to generate steam, which spins a turbine to power a generator and produce electricity. The uranium-235 used for bombs, on the other hand, needs to be enriched to about 90 percent—when uranium is this enriched, it only takes a very small amount to produce a huge result. The bomb that leveled Hiroshima contained about 140 pounds of enriched uranium, but only two percent of it underwent fission (just under three pounds)–still, it produced a blast equivalent to 150 kilotons of TNT.  

Uranium and Politics

Even though uranium is abundant on Earth, who gets to enrich the stuff is the subject of intense political debate. This is currently at the center of the United States beef with Iran, which was enriching uranium to about 20 percent, not enough for a bomb, but more than enough for a nuclear reactor. The 2015 nuclear deal with Iran calls for the country to decrease its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98 percent, not produce uranium-235 enriched above 3.7 percent, and repurpose the facility it was building to create weapons grade Plutonium from naturally occurring uranium.

The production of uranium was also at the center of an agreement struck between the Russian atomic energy agency and a Canadian company called Uranium One in 2013. The agreement gave the Russian agency a majority stake in the company, whose mining operations in Utah and Wyoming accounted for 20 percent of the uranium production capacity in the United States (which is not the same thing as owning 20 percent of the existing uranium in the United States). There was concern that Hillary Clinton had conflicts of interest when signing off on the deal as Secretary of State.

Uranium also has significant environmental implications. According to the Argonne National Laboratory, nuclear energy plants powered by uranium reactions accounted for "90 percent of all carbon emissions averted between 1981 and 1994." On the other hand, this energy supply also produces small amounts of highly-radioactive nuclear waste, which needs to be totally isolated in storage to avoid severe health and environmental problems.

This information probably isn't crucial to 99 percent of the population's day-to-day existence. But for those select few who should be thinking about responsible uses of nuclear power on the reg, there's no more excuses for not knowing about one of the world's most abundant elements.

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Intelligent Machines are Teaching Themselves Quantum Physics

New LHC Experiments May Help Explain What Happened to All the Antimatter

For every particle in the universe, physicists believe that there should exist an antiparticle with the same mass, but the opposite charge. When a particle and an antiparticle meet, they annihilate one another and are transformed into pure energy. Looking around, though, it's obvious that most of the antimatter has disappeared and the universe has not been annihilated into pure energy. Although antimatter has been observed in nature, it occurs in far smaller quantities than its twin, which begs one of the most perplexing questions in physics: where did all the antiparticles go? Or to put it another way: why do we exist?

Physicists have been puzzling over this matter-antimatter asymmetry for decades, but new data coming from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment may help shed some light on the problem. As reported last week in Nature, physicists at the LHC have observed CP violation in the decay of particles known as baryons and antibaryons for the first time. Although a little more data is needed before it can officially be declared a discovery, these observations may blow open the door for new experiments that will ultimately explain what happened to all the antimatter, and beyond that, why there is something in the universe rather than nothing.

In 1967, Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov proposed a solution to the puzzle of matter-antimatter asymmetry, but it required violating one of the fundamental properties of nature known as Charge-Parity (CP) symmetry. According to an MIT explainer, CP symmetry describes the correspondence between matter and antimatter through two operations known as charge conjugation and parity. Charge conjugation describes the process of turning a particle, such as an electron, into its antiparticle, such as a positron, whereas parity describes the inversion of a particle in space, such that if an electron was moving left to right, parity would make it move right to left.

Taken together, this means that when CP is applied to matter, it should result in a mirror image of antimatter that is equal, but opposite. Yet in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a handful of physicists began producing irrefutable evidence of CP symmetry violation, which would imply that the laws of physics were different for matter and antimatter. This resulted in a Nobel prize for the physicists behind it, and kickstarted a decades-long hunt in particle physics for miniscule differences between matter and antimatter in an effort to explain the universe's preference for the former.

In the last 50 years, CP violation has only been observed in a class of subatomic particles known as mesons, which are composed of two quarks. When two protons are fired at one another in a particle accelerator such as the LHC, they produce mesons and antimesons. It's the idiosyncratic ways these particles and antiparticles decay that reveal whether CP violation has occurred.

"The problem is that "the amount of Charge-Parity violation that exists in the Standard Model is not enough to explain the the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe," Makoto Fujiwara, a senior scientist at the ALPHA antimatter project, told me. "Charge-Parity violation exists, we know it exists and its been measured, but there's just not enough. It's too small."

In other words, Sakharov's theory of matter-antimatter asymmetry requires particles other than mesons to exhibit CP violation in order to make up the difference—and the LHCb observed the CP violation in a non-meson particle for the first time.

Using data compiled over the first three years of the LHC's life, researchers at the LHC beauty experiment compared the decay of baryon and antibaryon particles (baryons are in the same family of particles as mesons, but are composed of three quarks instead of two), which resulted from proton-proton collisions. It was the first time that CP violation in the process of baryon decay had ever been observed, partly due to the difficulty in producing the specific type of baryons in large enough quantities. After three years, the LHCb researchers had collected 6,000 examples of this type of decay.

When baryons and antibaryons decay, they leave behind a proton or antiproton and three charged particles called pions. When they observed the way the baryons and antibaryons would decay into these particles, the researchers found a significant level of asymmetry in how the baryons decayed into matter or antimatter. Put another way, this is strong evidence of CP violation in baryons, an observation which could eventually shed light on the problem of matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe.

"This is the first time asymmetry in baryon decays have been measured," Nicola Neri, an Italian physicist working on the LHC beauty experiment, told me. "This study will not answer the question of why we ended up with a matter-dominated universe, but this is one piece of that puzzle."

Although the LHCb researchers had 6000 examples of this type of decay, more precise data is needed before these observations can be classed as a discovery of CP violation in baryons. The researchers at the LHCb are confident that, after a series of upgrades on the LHC that will allow them to collect up to ten times the amount of data being collected during the first three years of the experiment, they will have enough evidence to claim the discovery.   

"This is very exciting time for the whole community," said Neri. "With these measurements and more data, we can do a systematic study to investigate the underlying physics that regulates baryon decays and the differences between matter and antimatter."

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