Every day, the world keeps spinning, orbiting our home planet and slowly rotating around the center of the Milky Way according to the laws of motion, SlashGear reports. These laws aren't always known. In fact, in the grand scheme of human experimentation, they are almost breaking news. That's the beauty of science, its incredible ability to illuminate and transform the world around us.
While most of us go about our daily lives, scientists continue the work of discovering new knowledge, making new discoveries, and breaking new ground. Every day, scientists and researchers in laboratories and in the field around the world are working to eliminate the knowledge "vacuum" we came into this world with.
It is impossible to report on every discovery, advance, or invention in a day, let alone a month, but that should not stop us from trying. Science is at its best when it's understood or at least appreciated. To that end, SlashGear has rounded up the 12 coolest scientific discoveries for March 2022.
Is Stonehenge a solar calendar?
Stonehenge has been a source of mystery and awe for centuries, and there have been a variety of explanations for how it was made and what it was used for. Now, according to a recent analysis, researchers may finally have an answer.
Professor Timothy Darvill, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University, believes that Stonehenge operated as a solar calendar, with parts of its structure corresponding to days or weeks.
According to the researchers, the structure of the ancient calendar was slightly different from what we might recognize today. Each stone represented a day of the month and was divided into three weeks, each consisting of ten days. This simple setup worked well for daily tracking, but they had to make a few adjustments to keep up with the movements of the sun.
They added a short extra "month" of only five days, and a stone that tracked one day every four years to account for leap years. The result is that the winter and summer solstices are made up of the same pair of stones every year. This would have provided Neolithic Europeans with a reliable frame of reference to correct any errors in tracking the days of the year.
Underwater Robot Discovery Reveals a Centuries-Old Shipwreck
In 1915, the Endurance disappeared into the dark depths of the Weddell Sea while on an expedition through Antarctica. Fortunately, ***28 crew members survived the sinking. Despite knowing approximately where the ship sank, it has remained undiscovered for over 100 years, until now.
Finding the ship has been an incredible challenge, in part because conditions in Antarctic waters are not ideal. Sea ice covers much of the frigid waters, preventing explorers from using conventional survey methods. It seems that finding the wreck of the sunken Endurance will have to wait for technology to complete the task.
The crew of the salvage expedition, known as Endurance 22, traveled on the S.A. Agulhass II to a location where they thought they might find the ship. Once there, they deployed autonomous underwater robots called Sabertooths, which scoured the seafloor using laser scanners and sonar as well as cameras to document anything they might find. And they did find something.
After discovering the wreck, the Sabertooths used their scanning instruments to build a three-dimensional model of the ship and nearby debris.
Artemis is getting closer to its first launch
The Apollo missions, which first put humans on the surface of the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, marked the most famous era of human spaceflight, and December 2022 will mark 50 years since mankind last walked on another world. NASA has set its sights on a return.
The Artemis mission, named for Apollo's twin sister in Greek mythology, was initially planned to return astronauts to the surface of the moon by 2024, although that timeline has since been extended. Nonetheless, the program is moving forward, and the first mission is close at hand.
Artemis I is an uncrewed test mission that will send the Orion spacecraft into space and launch a flight around the moon via NASA's Space Launch System (SLS). The entire mission will last four to six weeks before the spacecraft returns to Earth.NASA's main goal is to test the launch system and the spacecraft and ensure safe re-entry and splashdown. The launch is scheduled for sometime in mid-2022.
To celebrate the upcoming mission, NASA released a minute-long trailer promising that the Artemis mission would launch soon.On March 17, 2022, NASA made good on that promise. The SLS, mounted on the Crawler-Transporter 2 (CT-2), slowly made its way - at a speed of less than a mile per hour - from the Spacecraft Assembly Building to its launch position at Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center.
Mercury's surface is covered in "diamond" dust
Mercury used to be a much "wilder" place. Its environment is still not ideal, suffering extreme temperature variations between its days and nights. Although it is uninhabitable, it may be worthwhile to go on a treasure hunt.
As Kevin Cannon explained at the 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, recent simulations of Mercury's surface and impact interactions over the past 4 billion years suggest that the planet may have microscopic diamonds on its surface.
Early in Mercury's formation, it was covered in a global magma ocean. Graphite formed in the magma and eventually rose to the surface, creating a floating graphite shell estimated to be hundreds of meters thick. The first billion years after the formation of the solar system were characterized by a high number of asteroid impacts, each of which could have instantly transformed graphite into diamonds.
Unlike diamonds on Earth, these won't be the big, clear stones we're used to seeing in jewelry. Instead, tiny diamond dust would be scattered across the surface. Future missions to the planet may tell us more about the surface composition, but if these estimates turn out to be correct, Mercury could have a diamond hoard 16 times larger than Earth.
Asteroid Discovered Two Hours Before Impact
On March 11, 2022, an asteroid struck Earth. Luckily for all of us, it wasn't the kind of object that destroys our planet like in a movie plot. The asteroid, dubbed 2020 EB5, was only about 6.5 feet in diameter and burned up in the atmosphere off the coast of Greenland.
2020 EB5 marks the fifth time astronomers have detected an impactor before it hit Earth. Objects of this size are not rare in our solar system, and they often "pass by" our planet. Their small size makes them extremely difficult to detect ahead of time because the search region is infinitely long in every direction and they are relatively faint.
Miniature Worms Sniff Out Cancer
Detecting a disease like cancer is often critical to a good prognosis. Cancer, in particular, has a dramatically higher survival rate when detected early, so doctors and scientists are always looking for better screening methods. The latest addition to the diagnostician's best tool is a small piece of plastic filled with worms. Specifically, the nematode C. elegans.
Medical technology, tests, and treatments have improved dramatically over the past few decades. Nematodes are relatively simple creatures, so simple that they are the most popular model organisms for various studies, but they have an advanced sense of smell that they use to navigate the world. This sense of smell is apparently fine-tuned to sniff out certain types of cancer.
Researchers working with the National Research Foundation of Korea used the worms to detect lung cancer cells in culture. Their device, which they call a "worm on a chip," consists of a small rectangular piece of elastomer with a cavity carved out of its interior. The worm is placed in the center and can choose to follow one of two paths. Healthy cells at one end and cancer cells at the other. The researchers found that the worms successfully moved toward the cancerous samples about 70 percent of the time.
More research is needed, but the "worm on a chip" could provide a quick and accurate initial diagnosis in the future.
Exoplanet research reaches a major milestone
The search for planets outside our solar system is a relatively new development in astronomy. In fact, the first confirmed exoplanet was only discovered in 1992. Although exoplanet discovery is still in its infancy, the field has grown rapidly.
Telescopes like Hubble, TRAPPIST, and most recently the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have allowed humanity to peer deeper into our universe and further back in time than ever before. With solid tools and ever-improving detection methods and practices, the number of recognized exoplanets has steadily climbed to the point where planets are no longer added to the registry individually, but in batches.
On March 21, 2022, NASA received the latest batch of confirmed planets. Confirmation usually requires multiple observations to ensure they are not an anomaly or an experimental error. This batch of planets includes a total of ****65 new worlds, enough to bring the overall number of exoplanets to over 5,000.
A significant proportion of the exoplanets discovered by scientists so far are so-called hot Jupiters, gas giants orbiting close to their parent stars. However, this seems to be a result of our observational techniques and does not necessarily represent the most common type of planet. Scientists have also discovered so-called "super-Earths" and "mini-Neptunes", as well as other exotic planet types. At the current rate, humanity is expected to reach the 10,000-planet mark without even realizing it.
Gravitational waves can be detected on the moon
Gravitational waves were first hypothesized by Albert Einstein as part of his theory of general relativity, but were not observed until 2015. Instruments like the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) use lasers to detect gravitational waves from intense cosmic events, like the collision of two black holes.
Interferometers work by running two lasers perpendicular to each other and measuring the interference pattern of light waves as they bounce back and forth across their path. In general, the pattern remains constant, but changes in the distance between the two points of the instrument can cause fluctuations in the ripples, and these can be detected.
One way to disrupt the pattern is to physically interfere with the machine, but this doesn't tell us much about the nature of the universe. Another way to change the distance is to literally stretch or squeeze spacetime, which is what happens when gravitational waves travel through an instrument.
Tools like LIGO, as advanced as they may be, are limited in the frequencies they can detect, and that's where the moon comes in. As explained in a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, scientists propose turning the Moon-Earth system into a giant interferometer by bouncing lasers off mirrors left on the lunar surface by Apollo astronauts.
Even small changes in the moon's orbit over time could reveal the presence of tiny gravitational waves left over from the beginning of the universe.
ALS Patient 'Talks' Using Computer-Brain Interface
Scientists recently used a computer-brain interface to enable an unnamed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patient, who lost all muscle control due to the disease, to regained minimal communication.
Scientists and researchers have been working on devices designed to take a patient's remaining mental or physical abilities and turn them into communication, restoring voice to people who have lost their own. Physicist Stephen Hawking, who himself suffers from ALS, retains the ability to move his cheek muscles slightly and uses that ability to manipulate computers, construct sentences and even write books. However, many people with ALS do not retain any muscle movement, so scientists need to come up with another solution.
According to a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, an array of electrodes is implanted in the patient's brain, and the system is trained to recognize the activity of nearby nerves. The patient manipulated a computer by activating these nerves, supposedly by trying to move his eyes to answer yes-or-no questions and laboriously spell out sentences.
The process was slow, at one character per minute, but he was able to make simple requests and express feelings for his family. There's still a long way to go before these interfaces are widely available, but being able to tell your family that you love them again is a clear victory.
Today's astronaut feces is tomorrow's fuel for Mars
Getting anything into space is both technically challenging and very expensive. Even with recent advances, such as reusable rocket boosters, it costs thousands of dollars per kilogram delivered.
That's why astronauts traveling to the space station don't carry a lot of water. The space station is designed to recover almost all of the water, filter it, and reuse it. That's the mindset that space agencies are adopting for the next phase of human space exploration. A mission to Mars could last about two years, and every kilogram of water or fuel that has to be carried ahead of time makes it harder to accomplish.
To that end, the European Space Agency (ESA) is working with the technology company Tekniker to develop a new type of reactor that will turn astronauts' feces into fuel. The system will collect carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and combine it with astronauts' urine to produce methane and other hydrocarbons.
Most importantly, the system will also purify water and return it to the astronauts, so future astronauts get a double return on their biological investment. Any crew traveling to the Red Planet will need less water, and they'll get some extra fuel.
The danger of catastrophic scrolling
Many of us have a personal feeling that increased time on social media sites leads to an overall decline in our happiness, and now there's science to prove it.
A recent study by the Oxford Internet Institute looked at the emotional health of 80,000 volunteers of all ages and genders to see how social media use affected their happiness levels.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that the more time spent scrolling through social media, the less happy they were. As Oxford explains, the age range at which the highest negative consequences are experienced varies across the population, but the overall impact is clear. Use of social media, especially at higher rates, showed a strong association with negative emotional responses.
So far, it's not clear what the exact mechanisms behind emotional reactions are. In either case, the results are the same. If you don't feel good, then log in.
Hubble has more insight into the past than ever before
The oldest stars visible to the Hubble Space Telescope burned in the night sky about 4 billion years after the birth of the universe. At least, that was the case until March 2020, when that record was broken through Hubble's incredible technology and assistance from the universe.
As NASA explains, Hubble aimed its orbiting "eye" near a huge cluster of galaxies known as WHL0137-08 and got more than it bargained for. The cluster is so massive and carries so much mass that it bends space and time around it, causing light to bend as if through a magnifying glass.
This phenomenon is known to astronomers as gravitational lensing. Essentially, this lensing effect catches a star that is by all accounts outside of Hubble's visible range and pulls it billions of light years closer. The star, nicknamed Earendel by astronomers, hasn't actually been moved and is probably "dead," but its light is still coming toward us, and by a cosmic coincidence, we're able to see it.