Centuries-old physics problem that baffled Newton finally solved!

"while preparing his breakfast" ----- Moments worthy of Newton's "a falling apple" - serendipity strikes when it likes to.

Centuries-old physics problem that baffled Newton finally solved
RT : 4 Jul, 2019

The optical phenomenon was discovered approximately 2,000 years ago by Greek mathematician Diocles. Since then, scientists like Newton and Leibniz tried, and failed, to resolve the problem of maintaining the sharpness of images when passed through spherical lenses.

Newton managed to solve the chromatic aberration (the issue of focusing all the colors from a light source) but not the spherical aberration. The issue was formalized in 1949 in what became known in the scientific community as the Wasserman-Wolf problem, but no one could solve it, until now.

Industrial engineer Gonzalez, who is currently working on a PhD in nanotechnology, teamed up with his friend and colleague Alejandro to solve what they dubbed the “a mythical problem.” Their work was published in the journal Applied Optics (https://www.osapublishing.org/ao/abstract.cfm?uri=ao-57-31-9341).

A previous quick-fix solution was the use of two aspheric lenses (only rounded on one side) but the calibration of such lenses depended on an imprecise calculation. However, thanks to Gonzalez and his solution, a precise result can now be derived regardless of changes to the variables with a 99.99 percent success rate.

The resolution of spherical aberration problem could revolutionize the field of optics and greatly improve the technology used in telescopes and cameras the world over.

Origin of OK

What’s the Real Origin of “OK”?
Arika Okrent
Mental Floss, April 11, 2014

For starters, it’s not even 200 years old.

 "OK" is the all-purpose American expression that became an all-purpose English expression that became an all-purpose expression in dozens of other languages. It can be an enthusiastic cheer (A parking spot! OK!), an unenthusiastic "meh" (How was the movie? It was … OK.), a way to draw attention to a topic shift (OK. Here's the next thing we need to do), or a number of other really useful things. It's amazing that we ever got along without it at all. But we did. Until 1839.

There may be more stories about the origin of "OK" than there are uses for it: it comes from the Haitian port "Aux Cayes," from Louisiana French au quai, from a Puerto Rican rum labeled "Aux Quais," from German alles korrekt or Ober-Kommando, from Chocktaw okeh, from Scots och aye, from Wolof waw kay, from Greek olla kalla, from Latin omnes korrecta. Other stories attribute it to bakers stamping their initials on biscuits, or shipbuilders marking wood for "outer keel," or Civil War soldiers carrying signs for "zero killed."

The truth about OK, as Allan Metcalf, the author of OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word, puts it, is that it was "born as a lame joke perpetrated by a newspaper editor in 1839." This is not just Metcalf's opinion or a half remembered story he once heard, as most OK stories are. His book is based in the thorough scholarship of Allen Walker Read, a Columbia professor who for years scoured historical sources for evidence about OK, and published his findings in a series of journal articles in 1963 to 1964.

It Started With a Joke

OK, here's the story. On Saturday, March 23, 1839, the editor of the Boston Morning Post published a humorous article about a satirical organization called the "Anti-Bell Ringing Society " in which he wrote:

The "Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Bells," is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train-band, would have his "contribution box," et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.

It wasn't as strange as it might seem for the author to coin OK as an abbreviation for "all correct." There was a fashion then for playful abbreviations like i.s.b.d (it shall be done), r.t.b.s (remains to be seen), and s.p. (small potatoes). They were the early ancestors of OMG, LOL, and tl;dr. A twist on the trend was to base the abbreviations on alternate spellings or misspellings, so "no go" was k.g. (know go) and "all right" was o.w. (oll write). So it wasn't so surprising for someone come up with o.k. for oll korrect. What is surprising is that it ended up sticking around for so long while the other abbreviations faded away.

Then it Got Lucky

OK got lucky by hitting the contentious presidential election jackpot. During the 1840 election the "oll korrect" OK merged with Martin van Buren's nickname, Old Kinderhook, when some van Buren supporters formed the O.K. Club. After the club got into a few tussles with Harrison supporters, OK got mixed up with slandering and sloganeering. It meant out of kash, out of karacter, orful katastrophe, orfully confused, all kwarrelling or any other apt phrase a pundit could come up with. It also got mixed up with the popular pastime of making fun of van Buren's predecessor, Andrew Jackson, for his poor spelling. One paper published a half-serious claim that OK originated with Jackson using it as a mark for "all correct" (ole kurrek) on papers he had inspected.

OK was the "misunderestimated," "refudiated," and "binders full of women" of its day, and it may have ended up with the same transitory fate if not for the fact that at the very same time, the telegraph was coming into use, and OK was there, a handy abbreviation, ready to be of service. By the 1870s it had become the standard way for telegraph operators to acknowledge receiving a transmission, and it was well on its way to becoming the greatest American word.

But, as Metcalf says, its ultimate success may have depended on "the almost universal amnesia about the true origins of OK that took place early in the twentieth century. With the source of OK forgotten, each ethnic group and tribe could claim the honor of having ushered it into being from an expression in their native language." By forgetting where OK came from, we made it belong to us all.

This Big Question came from Emerson Whitney, who inquired about the history of OK via Twitter.

Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'!

Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
By Helen Briggs
BBC News, 7 December 2016


The regular use of Caesarean sections is having an impact on human evolution, say scientists.

More mothers now need surgery to deliver a baby due to their narrow pelvis size, according to a study.

Researchers estimate cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal have increased from 30 in 1,000 in the 1960s to 36 in 1,000 births today.

Historically, these genes would not have been passed from mother to child as both would have died in labour.

Researchers in Austria say the trend is likely to continue, but not to the extent that non-surgical births will become obsolete.

Dr Philipp Mitteroecker, of the department of theoretical biology at the University of Vienna, said there was a long standing question in the understanding of human evolution.

"Why is the rate of birth problems, in particular what we call fetopelvic disproportion - basically that the baby doesn't fit through the maternal birth canal - why is this rate so high?" he said.

"Without modern medical intervention such problems often were lethal and this is, from an evolutionary perspective, selection.

"Women with a very narrow pelvis would not have survived birth 100 years ago. They do now and pass on their genes encoding for a narrow pelvis to their daughters."

Opposing forces

It has been a long standing evolutionary question why the human pelvis has not grown wider over the years.

The head of a human baby is large compared with other primates, meaning animals such as chimps can give birth relatively easily.

The researchers devised a mathematical model using data from the World Health Organization and other large birth studies.

They found opposing evolutionary forces in their theoretical study.

One is a trend towards larger newborns, which are more healthy.

However, if they grow too large, they get stuck during labour, which historically would have proved disastrous for mother and baby, and their genes would not be passed on.

"One side of this selective force - namely the trend towards smaller babies - has vanished due to Caesarean sections," said Dr Mitteroecker.

"Our intent is not to criticise medical intervention," he said. "But it's had an evolutionary effect."

Future trends

The researchers estimated that the global rate of cases where the baby could not fit through the maternal birth canal was 3%, or 30 in 1,000 births.

Over the past 50 or 60 years, this rate has increased to about 3.3-3.6%, so up to 36 in 1,000 births.

That is about a 10-20% increase of the original rate, due to the evolutionary effect.

"The pressing question is what's going to happen in the future?" Dr Mitteroecker said.

"I expect that this evolutionary trend will continue but perhaps only slightly and slowly.

"There are limits to that. So I don't expect that one day the majority of children will have to be born by [Caesarean] sections."

The research is published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Commenting on the study, Smithsonian paleoanthropologist Dr Briana Pobiner said there are "probably many other biological and cultural issues that factor into the Caesarean sections rate, which varies widely across the developed and developing world".

And Daghni Rajasingam, a consultant obstetrician and a spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians, said factors such as diabetes and obesity, are having an impact on the number of Caesarean sections.

"I think what is important to take into the [question of] evolution is that things like diabetes are much more common at a younger age so we see many more women of reproductive age who have diabetes," she said.

"That has consequences as to whether or not they may need a caesarean section.

"In addition, the rates of obesity are increasing so more and more women of reproductive age have a higher body mass index and this again has an impact on caesarean section rates."

India's Malabar region is where pepper growing started

Little known historical facts about the growing of pepper...

Where the Pepper Grows
by Sebastian R. Prange
Aramco magazine, 2008 issue

Pepper corns of Malabar

Before Europeans found their way to the Indian Ocean, Arab mariners and merchants dominated the all-important pepper trade on India’s spice coast. There they established communities characterized by a unique blend of Islamic traditions and South Indian customs.

Today pepper is our single most commonly used spice, routinely offered in fine restaurants and fast food joints alike and universally available in stores and supermarkets. It is therefore hard to imagine just how highly prized pepper was in ancient and medieval times and how it spurred a complex trade that saw peppercorns travel distances so enormous that their origins remained obscure even to their purveyors. Along the way, fortunes were made, lives were lost, and the spice became enriched with its connotations of mystery and exoticism.

Since at least the first millennium BC, pepper was regarded as an ultimate luxury, inessential to survival yet highly desired for ritual, medicinal and culinary purposes. The origins of this desire stretch back to ancient Egypt, with the great pharaoh Ramses II being the first known consumer, albeit posthumously: peppercorns were found in the nostrils of his mummified corpse. In ancient Greece, pepper was used medicinally and the Chinese have used it in their cooking since at least the fourth century. The Romans’ conquest of Egypt gave them regular access to pepper, and it became a symbol of luxurious cookery. It was traded ounce for ounce with precious metals: When Rome was besieged in the fifth century, the city allegedly paid its ransom in peppercorns, and the spice remained an accepted form of “currency” throughout the Middle Ages.

The period from roughly the first century BC to the first century of our era witnessed a surge in the pepper trade as navigators began to understand the pattern of the Indian Ocean monsoon, and the surge resulted in more detailed knowledge about the lands where the pepper grows.

In 70 AD, the Periplus Maris Erythraei, an anonymous merchant’s guide to the Red Sea, recorded information on the spice trade and the now lost Indian port of Muziris. Large ships are sent there, the author reports, “on account of the great quantity and bulk of pepper” that is only grown in that region. Even though archeologists still debate its exact location, it is clear from the Periplus and other references that Muziris was located near the modern city of Kodungallor (formerly known as Cranganore, its colonial name) on India’s Malabar Coast, where black pepper is native.

The Malabar Coast comprises a narrow sliver of land on the southwestern tip of peninsular India, hemmed in by the Arabian Sea to the west and the mountain range of the Western Ghats in the east. This region, now largely contained in the northern part of the Indian state of Kerala, is located in the humid equatorial tropics: the annual monsoon rains nourish the fertile soil, feed the extensive network of backwater canals, and support the region’s rich biodiversity. In addition to being the source of pepper, Malabar’s position at the center of the Indian Ocean made it a natural location for commerce and transshipping. For these reasons, foreign merchants hailing from the different corners of the Indian Ocean trading world established settlements in Malabar’s ports and brought with them not only their commercial expertise but also their cultures and creeds.

As the original suppliers of pepper to the Mediterranean world, the Persians had sailed along the coast to Malabar since the earliest days of maritime navigation. Jews are believed to have arrived and established synagogues as early as the sixth century BC. The Christians of modern Kerala trace their ancestry to Thomas the Apostle, who they believe came to Muziris in the year 52; they are known to this day as St. Thomas Christians. 

Pippali by Alexander

In the same century, ships from China reached South India and created the long-lasting connection between the Chinese empire and Malabar: This was as evident to medieval visitors, who spoke of Malabari communities known as “sons of the Chinese,” as it is to modern tourists who marvel at the peculiar shore-based fishing contraptions known as “Chinese nets.” Traders from other parts of India, especially Gujarat to the north and Coromandel on the east coast, also established permanent trading communities on the Malabar Coast, often specializing in particular goods. But what would prove to be the most profound foreign influence on Malabar did not arrive for another five centuries, when a new religion spread across the lands around the Indian Ocean, galvanized their commerce and created immense wealth through the trade in pepper.

Despite their reputation as a desert people, Arabs had long been involved in maritime trade. Yet it was only with the unifying, expansionist and proselytizing energy of early Islam that Arabs were able to develop their traditional dominance over the caravan and Red Sea trade into a network of Muslim settlements that rapidly spread along the Indian Ocean littoral. Under the early caliphates, this Islamic network matured to encompass most of the Indian Ocean world from East Africa to the southern coast of China. It carried with it not only the beliefs of Islam but also the Arabic language, shari’a courts able to enforce common legal standards and shared commercial practices that favored the interaction of these settlements. Merchants residing in foreign ports were able to learn the local language, establish and maintain business contacts, and act as cross-cultural brokers. Muslim trade settlements developed into particularly effective organizations because of the political unity initially created by a burgeoning Islam, the great emphasis on literacy within its culture and the practice of pilgrimage, which kept its heartlands in communication with even the most far-flung settlements. Even though the bulk of Indian Ocean commerce was carried on Indian and Chinese ships, and despite the continued significance of Jewish merchants, Arab Muslims increasingly dominated trade in its most profitable commodity: pepper.

The momentous commercial expansion during the early centuries of Islam was driven by the demand for spices in Europe and in the grand capitals of the new Islamic states. Within the lucrative spice trade, pepper was the most important commodity in bulk and value, and so the Malabar Coast remained of central importance to the Indian Ocean trading world. In his description of Malabar, the 14-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta recorded his astonishment at seeing pepper, elsewhere valued by the grain, “being poured out for measuring by the bushel, like millet in our country.” It is therefore not surprising that Malabar was the first region of India to attract Muslim traders in significant numbers. The Malabar Coast was originally inhabited by the Dravidian people, who were distinct in their languages and culture from the Indo-Aryans of northern India. Organized religions came to Kerala in the form of Jainism, Buddhism and later Hinduism, and expressed themselves in the construction of temples—their profusion in the region has led Kerala to be called “the land of temples.” A revived Hinduism developed into the region’s predominant religion from about the ninth century onward, when Kerala’s royal houses patronized Brahmins from North India.

The origins of Islam on the Malabar Coast began, according to legend, with the last king of the South Indian Chera dynasty, which had ruled Malabar since the beginning of its recorded history. Cheraman Perumal, the tale goes, converted to Islam after having dreamt of a splitting moon and then meeting Arab pilgrims who reported that the Qur’an mentions just such a miracle (54:1–2). The king resolved to join the pilgrims in their journey to Makkah, but not before dividing his kingdom among his princes, a fragmentation that would characterize the region for many centuries.

Having fallen ill on the return journey and unable to make it to his homeland, the king entrusted the same pilgrims with the mission of founding mosques and propagating his new faith in Kerala. Many of the oldest mosques in the region are said to have been founded by these pilgrims, who were dispatched all along the coast to serve as qadis to its fledgling Muslim communities.

The legend of Cheraman Perumal is similar to conversion myths in other parts of Asia and appears to be a confusion of two distinct traditions, one relating the end of unified Chera rule over Kerala and the other the conversion of a king. Its appeal and longevity, however, are testament to the exceptional circumstances that surrounded the introduction of Islam to Kerala and to the unique history of the communities it created. Furthermore, many aspects of this tale can be linked to historical truths. To begin to understand this blend of fact and fiction, therefore, we must look at the intriguing history of the Muslims of Malabar and their unique blend of Islamic traditions and South Indian customs.

Islam was introduced to the Malabar Coast peacefully by Arab traders in search of pepper and by Sufis who traveled within the commercial networks. To this day, most Muslims of Malabar adhere to the Shafi’i school of Islamic law, which was dominant among Muslim merchants across the Indian Ocean world. They are also more closely linked to Arab culture than to the Persian influence that was brought to the rest of India by invaders from the north. Muslim merchants settling in Malabar ports married (often multiple) local women. Their offspring were the first generation of Indian-born Muslims, and their upbringing in both Arabic and the local language, Malayalam (not related to the Malay language of Southeast Asia), was an excellent preparation for future work as brokers. In this manner, the ports of the Malabar Coast became ever more closely woven into the network of Islamic trade spanning the Indian Ocean, and the wealth of the expatriate merchants and their associates increased.

As the legend of Cheraman Perumal already suggests, another significant factor in the introduction of Islam to Malabar was conversion. Aside from rare exceptions, these did not, however, occur in the ruling class but in the lower strata of society. Hinduism in this part of South India had developed a particularly rigid system of caste division, with social intercourse between castes severely restricted to avoid ritual pollution. Conversion to Islam was therefore a chance for low-caste Hindus to break free of such limitations, and also opened new opportunities for economic interaction with the prosperous Arab merchants. This group of new Muslims native to Malabar developed into a distinct community known as Mappilas (or Moplahs). These new converts preserved many of their traditional practices and integrated them into their new Islamic identity. Some Mappilas, for instance, continued the practice of matrilineality in which descent is understood to be of the mother’s bloodline. The particular cultural heritage of this community is preserved in the Mappila songs, an indigenous form of devotional folklore in the Malayalam language.

From about the thirteenth century onwards, Kozhikode (anglicized “Calicut”) emerged as the coast’s dominant port. It was the center of a princely state ruled by hereditary sovereigns known as Zamorins. These were particularly renowned for their tolerance on the one hand—they for instance granted merchant communities independent jurisdiction over their members—and their scrupulousness in upholding property rights on the other, and they built a reputation for honesty that helped to turn Kozhikode into the region’s principal port. Ibn Battuta explicitly states that, because of this reputation, Kozhikode had become “a flourishing and much frequented city” and one of the most important ports in the world. Foremost among its cosmopolitan assemblage of foreign merchants were the Muslim traders. These became over time not only the Zamorins’ main source of tax revenue but also allies in their ambitions to subjugate other princely states, often through the provision of ships and sailors for naval warfare. Historians such as K. M. Panikkar are of the opinion that the Zamorins were on course towards subjecting and unifying Malabar under their rule, but that “this very process gave rise to jealousies and feuds” that were easily exploited by the Portuguese after their arrival on the coast.

When Vasco da Gama’s fleet reached Kozhikode in May 1498, he came “in search of Christians and spices.” He was initially content to imagine having found the former: He believed the Hindus to be an aberrant Christian sect and even offered prayers at a Hindu temple, albeit somewhat puzzled by the depiction of “Our Lady” with multiple arms. The desire for a monopoly of the pepper trade, however, was more difficult to quench: The Portuguese soon realized the prominence of Arab traders in the town and their control over the pepper trade. Laden with a profound antagonism toward Muslims born of the Reconquista, the Portuguese were not content to trade alongside other merchant communities. When the second fleet reached Malabar in 1500, its commander, Cabral, demanded that the Zamorin expel all Muslim merchants from the port. This stood in marked contrast to the long tradition of free trade that had been the source of Kozhikode’s prosperity, and the ruler responded (in the words of the Portuguese chronicler) that he could not comply “for it was unthinkable that he expel 4000 households of them, who lived in Calicut as natives, not foreigners, and who had contributed great profits to his Kingdom.”

Already during the second European expedition to India, confrontation became inevitable: While the Europeans were no match for the economic strength of Muslim merchants, their ship-mounted artillery and military expertise proved to be the force majeure. The Portuguese seized and destroyed Muslim merchant vessels, regularly bombarded Kozhikode and other ports, and exploited rivalries among the coast’s princely states to establish fortified factories.

They used their advantage in maritime violence to enforce a royal monopoly on the spice trade and to sell permits to other ships that wished to trade on the coast, and the Portuguese “pepper empire” was born.

The initial returns on the expeditions were staggering, and Lisbon soon replaced Venice as the main importer of pepper to Europe. But the Portuguese violence in India also galvanized resistance. The Zamorins together with the Muslim merchants repeatedly assembled fleets, but despite some small victories they could not break the Portuguese domination of the sea. The ruler of Kochi (formerly Cochin) to the south of Kozhikode, who had long been a resentful subject of the Zamorins, allowed the Portuguese to build a factory as their base on the Malabar Coast. A long period of warfare at sea and on land ensued, and repeated attempts were made to incite other Islamic states to assist the Mappilas’ struggle. Egyptian merchants were able to rouse the Mamluk sultan to send a fleet, but after inconclusive engagements his ships retreated. As Portugal’s power in the Indian Ocean expanded over the following decades, Malabar developed into a major test case of their imperial ambitions. Foreign Muslims were able to move to safer ports and conduct their business from there. That they did so successfully is evident by the great quantities of pepper that again became available in the markets of Alexandria and Venice by the mid-16th century, often undercutting the prices at which the Portuguese could sell it at Lisbon. The local Mappila Muslims, on the other hand, had no choice but to stay and to resist or evade the Portuguese monopoly system.

Excluded from the opportunities of regular commerce, the Mappila communities became increasingly militarized. While some resorted to smuggling and indiscriminate piracy, others turned to forms of guerrilla warfare to harass Portuguese shipping. The Portuguese, claiming ownership of all of the sea, soon described all Mappilas as pirates and treated them as such. The Mappilas used small ports in northern Malabar as bases, and by the mid-16th century a Muslim called Kunjali Marakkar was granted the hereditary admiralty of the Zamorin’s fleet. He and his successors inflicted several defeats on Portuguese armadas, but when, toward the end of the century, Kunjali iv asserted his independence of the Zamorin, the ruler allied with the Portuguese and together they eventually defeated the Mappila strongholds.

Around the same time, the Muslim historian Zain al-Din, whose family had come to Malabar from Yemen in the 15th century, wrote his famous Tuhfat al-Mujahidin (Gift to the Holy Warriors) describing the cruelty of the “Franks” in an attempt to persuade the Muslim states of northern India to assist the Mappilas in their struggle. The historian Stephen Dale argues that the Mappila Muslims developed a particular idiom of holy warfare that, instead of reflecting the conquest of new territories by Muslim powers, expressed a religious struggle born of individual desperation. This found expression in popular festivals (the nerccas), at which folk ballads celebrating the Mappila victims of the anti-colonial struggle are recited.

The profits of the pepper trade eventually motivated other European powers to join the fray, and in time the Portuguese were eclipsed first by the Dutch and later by the British. Throughout the centuries, economic and political circumstances continued to conspire against the Mappilas and led to recurrent riots and attacks. However, the Mappilas also preserved their link to the sea, mostly as fishermen in Kerala’s rich waters, and strengthened their involvement in riverine trade and agriculture. Today, Muslims constitute about a quarter of Kerala’s population and remain concentrated in the north of the state on the historic Malabar Coast; in contrast to other regions of India, Kerala experiences very little of the problems of sectarianism. In recent years, many Mappilas have found work in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and so continue the long-standing ties that bind the regions and societies. While historically pepper may have been as much of a blight as a blessing for the Malabar Coast, there can be no doubt that, because of it, the region served as a nexus where the dynamics of world history were played out —a point for reflection on the next turn of the pepper mill.

Moon astronauts snacked on sweet Slim Jims!

Pillsbury developed high-protein Space Food Sticks at the request of NASA, then tried to get people on Earth to eat them.

On the Moon, the astronauts snacked on sweet Slim Jims right inside their helmets
By David Lidsky
July 3, 2019



Once the Apollo astronauts got out to walk and drive around on the Moon, they were, of course, sealed in their spacesuits. The first ones—Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin—were only outside for two-and-a-half hours. But the later moonwalks lasted for seven hours or more, and were physically demanding, and so the astronauts had a snack, mounted ingeniously inside their space helmets, where they could lean over and take a bite.

The delivery system, it would turn out, was more appealing than the snack itself—which dates back to before Apollo started.

In 1959, two years before President Kennedy’s speech setting out the goal of going to the Moon by the end of the 1960s—as well as two years before any human, either Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin or American astronaut Alan Shepard, had been to space—people on the ground were thinking about how we might feed astronauts during space travel.

That year, people from the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute of the United States Armed Forces contacted Pillsbury, then perhaps best known for selling premixed biscuit and cookie dough in tubes, to enlist its help in developing space food. Although popular culture had fetishized (and satirized) the notion of a meal in pill form since the late 19th century, Pillsbury food scientists initially focused on making cube-sized foods for astronauts.

Early on, NASA engineers emphasized that any space food needed to be both contaminant-free and could not produce crumbs. Food safety was paramount to protect the astronauts’ health in what were then completely unknown conditions, and crumbs, it was feared, could interfere with the performance of a spaceship’s electronics and equipment.

The specifics of the types of food that could be developed took a backseat to concerns about food safety. As NASA got more serious about space food development during the Mercury program of the early 1960s, the people determining how to feed astronauts in space realized that there was no way to ensure that any food would be free of toxins or bacteria that could affect the astronauts’ health during spaceflight. Paul Lachance, the flight food and nutrition coordinator at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, feared a call from NASA’s chief medical officer Charles Berry telling him that an astronaut was sick or having any kind of gastrointestinal distress. “We quickly found by using standard methods of quality control there was absolutely no way we could be assured there wouldn’t be a problem,” recalled Howard Bauman, the Pillsbury food scientist tasked with this challenge.

Bauman, in response, developed what came to be known as the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) system, which flipped product-safety testing from a reactive process of identifying problems after they had been created to a preventative one. A microbiologist by training, Bauman realized that nothing could be taken for granted to preserve the health of the astronauts who’d eat their food, and as the project matured to feed the Apollo astronauts, food was produced in clean-room environments. “We found certain critical control points like telephones in the room,” he wrote in an internal company report in 1973. “They are a good source of bacteria, unless you sterilize the receiver. That’s something that you really don’t always think of.”

HACCP is considered one of the more notable and long-lasting innovations from the space program. It became the standard for food-safety testing and was expanded by the Food and Drug Administration decades later to test seafood and juice, among other foods.

As for the space food itself, in 1966, Pillsbury won a government contract to create a “rod-shaped contingency food designed to sustain a flight crew when they must remain sealed within their pressure suits.” Bauman and Pillsbury developed a compressed food bar that was nutrient dense and could deliver the astronauts a burst of energy when they needed it.

Pillsbury developed a commercial version, released in 1969 amid peak Moon fervor and called: Space Food Sticks. The packaging shamelessly promoted Pillsbury’s connection with the space program. “The energy food developed by Pillsbury in support of the U.S. aerospace program” read the large-type copy on the box under the name. Each stick came in a shiny foil wrapper, which gave it a little extra space-age sheen.

Although the space program pioneered the protein bar industry as we know it today, Space Food Sticks in the Apollo era were marketed mostly for dieters or children. The product touted that it had just 44 calories, and the back of the box featured a young blond woman wearing a headband and enjoying one. The TV ads opened and closed with images of a hovering lunar module and are explicitly tailored to space-obsessed kids.

Pillsbury was wise to lean on its connection to the space program, because the bars themselves were unappetizing in appearance (resembling an 8-inch dowel) and were, in effect, a kind of processed candy dressed up as something more. The first two ingredients were sucrose and corn syrup.

The Space Food Sticks were available to the astronauts starting with Apollo 11, and were designed to do exactly what the government asked from Pillsbury: provide contingency food when the astronauts were confined to their pressurized spacesuits. Here’s how Gene Cernan, mission commander of Apollo 17, described the snacking experience:

“We were going to be locked in the suit for maybe nine hours and we had a little water bag that we suspended from the inside rim of the suit . . . . And then we also had one of these high protein or high calorie sticks shaped like a ruler. It was a soft stick and you could chew it. We had it inside a little bag, and it was probably about eight inches long. It, too, was Velcroed just inside the helmet ring and we could put our chin down and pull a little bit out with our teeth, take a bite, chew it for some energy. It was typical candy-tasting stuff. It was nice to be able to suck up a few ounces of water now and then and have something to chew on. That was it; I mean, we had no way of eating or drinking anything other than that. But having some water and a little candy was a real help; it really was.”

There were many other snack options on Earth, though, and Space Food Sticks did not last long on supermarket shelves. The recollections of what Space Food Sticks tasted like vary widely. The most charitable one is that it resembled a Tootsie Roll. The least? “Cat crap in foil pouches” and “gummy hamster food pellets.”

In the early 1970s, Pillsbury changed the product’s name to the oddly generic Food Sticks, and they were gone by the 1980s, unlike, say, Tang, the powdered orange drink that remains on sale to this day. If you want an authentic Pillsbury Space Food Stick, there’s one box available on eBay, guaranteed unopened. Price? $9,500.

Chinese scientists invent new material to clean up oil spills

The material is essentially foam with a rough surface and a tubular structure modeled on honeycombs.

Scientists in China invent new material to clean up oil spills
Oilprice.com, 3 Jul, 2019

Chinese scientists have invented a honeycomb-style polypropylene material that can soak up oil from water more cheaply and efficiently than some popular established methods.

The material according to a press release, is essentially foam with a rough surface and a tubular structure modeled on honeycombs. This structure allows water to flow freely through the tubes while oil gets caught and absorbed in seconds, the researchers from Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology said.

While we don’t see many oil spills of Deepwater Horizon proportions on a regular basis, luckily, the problem of oil-contaminated water is a serious one simply because, as the Chinese scientists note in their research, oil and oil derivatives are used in so many industrial activities that also involve water at some point. The result is oily water that cannot be cleaned by setting it on fire (a common method for waterborne oil cleanup if not very environmentally friendly) or filtering it in another way.

The news from the Chinese institute come soon after another invention in this field: a sorbent material that can absorb oil without also absorbing a lot of water. Called a plasma-polymerized carbonaceous nanosponge and developed by Argentine scientists, the material is a powder that “can be used to selectively and efficiently adsorb hydrocarbons from water, with negligible water uptake.” The material can work on its own or be used as coating for textiles or metal meshes as a barrier between oil and water.

Oil water separation research certainly looks like an exciting field. Some more news in it came from Texas earlier this month. Two young entrepreneurs there developed what they’ve called Towelie: a cheap fabric that can hold up to 15 times its weight in oil. The towel-like unwoven material is cheap and it floats without leaving any microplastic residue in the water. What’s more, it’s made from natural cotton fibers. Things don’t get any eco-friendlier than this.

Of course, for all their benefits, these different materials certainly have drawbacks since they were made in an imperfect world.

The Chinese invention, for example, is made from polypropylene, which is an oil—or gas—derivative. This probably contributes significantly to its affordability but does not, strictly speaking, make it completely environmentally friendly in terms of production. Also, plastic-based sorbents leave microplastic residue in the water.

The nanosponge invented by the Argentine scientists can absorb oil for half an hour under UV radiation but then it begins to soak up water as well, which compromises its effectiveness.

The cotton-based Towelie is already used in the Permian for minor leaks at wellheads and as a replacement for synthetic towels widely used in the oil production industry. Yet it doesn’t seem like the best idea for a major offshore spill: a major spill would require thousands of Towelies that would then have to be collected and the oil disposed of.

All in all, however, it’s good to know there is an ongoing effort to make potential oil spills and leaks less devastating and clean them up more quickly with less water getting wasted in the process.

An excellent summary of what we do and don't know about the "Big Bang," and why there currently is no other model for the origin of our universe that offers a serious alternative. The premise that many of the objections to this model are based on misunderstanding it is well proven by quite a few of the initial posts. This is why I would suggest fully reading an article before responding to it, rather than posting a response which clearly is a reaction to the headline.

"At the same time, it is important to be open about how much we don’t know. It is not only possible, it is absolutely certain that our understanding of the Big Bang is incomplete."

Could the Big Bang Be Wrong?

By Corey S. Powell | June 15, 2019

The Big Bang is the defining narrative of modern cosmology: a bold declaration that our universe had a beginning and has a finite age, just like the humans who live within it. That finite age, in turn, is defined by the evidence that universe is expanding (again, and unfortunately, many of us are familiar with that feeling as well). Those two ideas–a singular cosmic beginning, followed by billions of years of cosmic growth–are so strange that some people have never made peace with them. As a result, skeptics have been questioning the validity of the Big Bang model for as long as there has been a Big Bang model.

Among mainstream cosmologists, doubts about the Big Bang largely melted away in the 1960s with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background–an omnidirectional buzz of radiation that makes sense only as a relic from the hot, early era of the universe. But around the fringe, the doubts have persisted. Lately they have intensified, inspired by a puzzling discrepancy in different measurements of how the universe is expanding. Even scientific centrists acknowledge that our understanding of the early universe is glaringly incomplete. So now is a prime time, it seems to me, to dig into the big question: Could the Big Bang be wrong?

This question comes up all the time in public forums and on social media. In most cases, it seems rooted not so much in misgivings about the science as in misunderstanding of what the science is. Any meaningful answer therefore has to begin with a crucial piece of clarification: The Big Bang means two quite different things depending on who you are talking to.

In popular conversation, the Big Bang is often used broadly to mean the mysterious primal event that created the universe, and it is commonly envisioned as a tremendous explosion emanating from a single point. (To be fair, popular articles and illustrations often reinforce those ideas with oversimplification and confusing language.) But that is not what cosmologists mean by the Big Bang.

One key point is that the Big Bang was not an explosion of the kind any person has ever witnessed. “This is a hard concept for people to get their heads around,” says Wendy Freedman, a veteran cosmologist at the University of Chicago. “The first thing to get rid of is an image analogous to a bomb — which is our first tendency to imagine, and which is wrong — where you have an explosion with matter that flies outward from a center. This is not what happens in space. The Big Bang is an explosion of space, and not into space. There is no center or edge to the explosion.”

There was no place outside of the Big Bang, so it was not expanding into anything. Rather, all of space began expanding, everywhere. That is why galaxies appear to be moving away from us in every direction. Any observer, anywhere, would see the same thing. I sometimes think of the Big Bang as a metaphor for human psychology. In a sense, you can think of yourself as the center of the universe, since that’s how it looks to all observers. But in a deeper sense, nobody is at the center, since the expansion is everywhere and all of us are in the same situation.

For anyone wondering how the universe could have formed from an explosion at one point in space, the answer is that it couldn’t. That idea truly is wrong — but it is also not at all what the Big Bang describes.

Which brings me to the other key point: The Big Bang is a description of how the universe began, not an explanation of why it began. It does not assume anything about what (or who) made the universe, and it does not assume anything about what (if anything) came before.

To modern cosmologists, the Big Bang is a model describing how the universe expanded from an extremely hot, dense early state into the reality that we see today. The evidence for this interpretation overwhelming. Certainly, nothing else has come anywhere close in the last 50 years, even as our knowledge about the universe has grown tremendously.

The most famous evidence for the Big Bang comes from “redshifts,” the observed stretching of light from distant galaxies, but that’s hardly the only source of support. The spectrum and distribution of the cosmic microwave background exactly matches expectations of the hot Big Bang. The evolution of galaxies testifies to the finite age of the universe, and the observed ages of stars exactly match up with the age of the universe deduced from the cosmic expansion. The large-scale distribution of galaxies displays a subtle rippling pattern that corresponds to the inferred rippling of acoustic waves in Big Bang’s primordial soup of particles and radiation. The observed abundances of hydrogen, helium, deuterium and lithium in the universe exactly align with models of the nuclear reactions that occurred in that soup.

Could that entire Big Bang framework of interpretation be wrong? I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but I will call it … inconceivable.

One of the last serious holdouts against the Big Bang was late cosmologist Geoffrey Burbidge, who had championed the Steady State cosmology early in his career and refused to abandon his pet theory even long after the evidence falsified it. Later in life he came up with a complicated oscillating-universe model, which effectively incorporates many small big bangs. So really, he accepted the Big Bang, just without saying so. Discover ran a detailed profile of Burbidge and his ideas in 2005.

I’ve come across many proposed alternatives to the Big Bang, but I’ve never seen one that deals honestly and comprehensively with the vast observational evidence that our universe had a hot, dense beginning about 13.8 billion years ago. The closest to a true outsider alternative that I know of is the plasma-cosmology model of Eric Lerner, a plasma physicist who developed a cult following for his view that the Big Bang never happened. His model is thoroughly inconsistent with the data, however.

At the same time, it is important to be open about how much we don’t know. It is not only possible, it is absolutely certain that our understanding of the Big Bang is incomplete.

Cosmic inflation is a widely accepted theory about what happened during the first fraction of a second during the Big Bang, but it is not proven. The current dispute over the cosmic expansion rate may be a reflection of our ignorance about that early era. Why and how the Big Bang occurred are complete mysteries. You may have heard cosmologists speculate about the “multiverse,” or about the idea of an oscillating universe with many beginnings, or about a collision between two membranes of reality that created our universe. Nobody knows which of these ideas, if any, is correct. But what they all have in common is that they all accept the evidence that our current universe emerged from an intensely hot, dense early state — which is to say, they all take the Big Bang as their starting point.

Was there a time before the Big Bang? Will the universe expand forever? Will there be another Big Bang? Is the universe finite or infinite? Do other universes exist? These are all exciting, wide open questions. We have a lot to learn about our place in nature’s grand scheme. But we can be quite confident that, wherever future theories and discoveries take us, the Big Bang will be a part of the picture.