Terraforming Mars Could Be Easier Than Scientists Thought

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this report from Science magazine:

One of the classic tropes of science fiction is terraforming Mars: warming up our cold neighbor so it could support human civilization. The idea might not be so far-fetched, research published today in Science Advances suggests…

Samaneh Ansari [a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University and lead author on the new study] and her colleagues wanted to test the heat-trapping abilities of a substance Mars holds in abundance: dust. Martian dust is rich in iron and aluminum, which give it its characteristic red hue. But its microscopic size and roughly spherical shape are not conducive to absorbing radiation or reflecting it back to the surface. So the researchers brainstormed a different particle: using the iron and aluminum in the dust to manufacture 9-micrometer-long rods, about twice as big as a speck of martian dust and smaller than commercially available glitter. Ansari designed a simulation to test how these theoretical particles would interact with light. She found “unexpectedly huge effects” in how they absorbed infrared radiation from the surface and how they scattered that radiation back down to Mars — key factors that determine whether an aerosol particle creates a greenhouse effect.

Collaborators at the University of Chicago and the University of Central Florida then fed the particles into computer models of Mars’s climate. They examined the effect of annually injecting 2 million tons of the rods 10 to 100 meters above the surface, where they would be lofted to higher altitudes by turbulent winds and settle out of the atmosphere 10 times more slowly than natural Mars dust. Mars could warm by about 10 degreesC within a matter of months, the team found, despite requiring 5000 times less material than other proposed greenhouse gas schemes…

Still, “Increasing the temperature of the planet is just one of the things that we would need to do in order to live on Mars without any assistance,” says Juan Alday, a postdoctoral planetary science researcher at the Open University not involved with the work. For one, the amount of oxygen in Mars’s atmosphere is only 0.1%, compared with 21% on Earth. The pressure on Mars is also 150 times lower than on Earth, which would cause human blood to boil. And Mars has no ozone layer, which means there is no protection from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. What’s more, even once warmed, martian soils may still be too salty or toxic to grow crops. In other words, McInnes says, upping the temperature “isn’t some kind of magic switch” that would make Mars habitable.

That isn’t stopping Ansari and her colleagues from investigating the possibilities.

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Russia Blocks Signal Messaging App

Russia has blocked access to the encrypted Signal messaging app to “prevent the messenger’s use of terrorist and extremist purposes.” YouTube is also facing mass outages following repeated slowdowns in recent weeks. The Associated Press reports: Russian authorities expanded their crackdown on dissent and free media after Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. They have blocked multiple independent Russian-language media outlets critical of the Kremlin, and cut access to Twitter, which later became X, as well as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.

In the latest blow to the freedom of information, YouTube faced mass outages on Thursday following repeated slowdowns in recent weeks. Russian authorities have blamed the slowdowns on Google’s failure to upgrade its equipment in Russia, but many experts have challenged the claim, arguing that the likely reason for the slowdowns and the latest outage was the Kremlin’s desire to shut public access to a major platform that carries opposition views.

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FDA Rejects MDMA-Assisted Therapy For PTSD

The FDA has rejected a first-of-its-kind proposal to use the psychedelic drug MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to drugmaker Lykos Therapeutics. NBC News reports: There had been intense political pressure on the FDA to approve the drug. Friday’s decision was the first time the agency had considered a Schedule 1 psychedelic for medical use. If approved, it would have been the first new treatment for PTSD in more than two decades. Lykos Therapeutics had asked the FDA to approve the drug as part of a treatment regimen, given alongside talk therapy. The agency’s decision came after an independent advisory committee in June declined to recommend approval of the drug, saying there was not enough evidence that the therapy was safe and effective.

The committee cited a myriad of concerns, including poorly designed studies, allegations of sexual misconduct during a midstage clinical trial and the potential for serious health risks after taking the drug, including heart problems and abuse. A review by FDA scientists, published ahead of the June meeting, also raised concerns about how the trials were carried out, including that a number of patients and therapists likely were able to guess who was given the medication and who got the placebo. Despite the rejection, experts say they expect that psychedelic therapies are still on their way to FDA approval. There are around four dozen MDMA trials in various stages of clinical development, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. “I think it will be a temporary setback,” said Holly Fernandez Lynch, an associate professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “The advisory committee and FDA gave very clear indications of what they’re looking for in terms of study design and adverse event reporting, so Lykos and other companies should know pretty clearly how to proceed going forward if they want to get psychedelics approved.”

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Japan Issues First Ever ‘Megaquake’ Warning

After a 7.1 tremor struck southwestern Japan on Thursday, the country’s meteorological agency issued its first-ever alert for a possible “megaquake.” It marks the first time the warning has been issued under new rules drawn up after a 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster killed almost 20,000 people. Phys.org reports: The JMA’s “megaquake advisory” warns that “if a major earthquake were to occur in the future, strong shaking and large tsunamis would be generated.” “The likelihood of a new major earthquake is higher than normal, but this is not an indication that a major earthquake will definitely occur during a specific period of time,” it added. The advisory concerns the Nankai Trough “subduction zone” between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean, where massive earthquakes have hit in the past. […]

Japan’s government has previously said the next magnitude 8-9 megaquake along the Nankai Trough has a roughly 70 percent probability of striking within the next 30 years. In the worst-case scenario 300,000 lives could be lost, experts estimate, with some engineers saying the damage could reach $13 trillion with infrastructure wiped out. “The history of great earthquakes at Nankai is convincingly scary,” geologists Kyle Bradley and Judith A Hubbard wrote in their Earthquake Insights newsletter. And “while earthquake prediction is impossible, the occurrence of one earthquake usually does raise the likelihood of another”, they explained. “A future great Nankai earthquake is surely the most long-anticipated earthquake in history — it is the original definition of the ‘Big One’.”

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