Saturday Citations: ‘Thar she pokes!’ Scientists capture drone footage of narwhals

Look, all somewhat positive climate news has to be placed in the context of the ongoing global climate crisis, but this week, researchers did report a new simulation suggesting that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is unlikely to shut down within this century. Engineers developed a new flat telescope lens that captures color while detecting light from distant stars, minimizing some of the tradeoffs inherent to traditional lenses. And as a person who lives in a hurricane-prone region of the U.S., I was personally alarmed by the mass firings at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, but this is ultimately going to impact everyone.

Additionally, this week we reported on a cool way to deduce traits of a quantum system without destroying the underlying quantum information; Earth may have geologic evidence of its passage through a star-forming region 14 million years ago; and scientists shot cool footage of narwhal behavior in the Arctic.

So you want to violate the second law of thermodynamics

In 1867, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell proposed a thought experiment, now called Maxwell’s demon, that seemingly disproves the second law of thermodynamics. To be fair, he didn’t initially call it a “demon,” but physics is the one field of science unafraid to invoke demonology in its thought experiments.

Anyway, Maxwell’s little guy controls a door between two chambers containing gas. When a gas molecule approaches the door, he opens it only for fast-moving molecules traveling in one direction and slow-moving molecules traveling in the other direction, thereby causing one chamber to heat up while the other chamber cools, thus decreasing the total entropy of the system and violating the second law.

In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, a group of researchers discovered an approach to detecting the quantum properties of a system that draws inspiration from Maxwell’s demon. Traditional methods of observing the quantum properties of a system rely on collapsing the system’s quantum state, which also destroys the system’s information.

While studying the replacement of classical memory with quantum memory, they found that quantum systems reveal their traits by exchanging heat with their surroundings. The researchers explored the idea that quantum coherence influences energy transfer in ways that classical systems can’t, allowing for the indirect detection of traits like spin or entanglement. Rather than relying on measurements that destroy the information, the technique uses heat as a witness.

Professor Jonatan Bohr Brask from the Technical University of Denmark told Phys.org, “What makes our approach exciting is that it doesn’t rely on any specific model or system. Instead, we can explore fundamental constraints on heat exchange in a quantum process simply by measuring a thermal ancilla, or heat bath, acting as the environment.”

Earth still a tiny, insignificant mote in the vast sea of the cosmos

So way out there in the vast interstellar reaches, there’s a structure called the Radcliffe Wave, a thin strip comprising interconnected star-forming regions, including one called the Orion complex. An international research team now reports that about 14 million years ago, the solar system traveled through the Orion complex, and the resulting cascade of effects may have left its mark on the evolution of the Earth’s climate.

The researchers describe the solar system as a ship at sea, passing through “varying galactic environments.” As it traveled through the Orion complex, it encountered an interstellar region with higher gas density. This could have compressed the heliosphere, the vast bubble surrounding the solar system inflated by the solar wind. The heliosphere shields the solar system from cosmic radiation.

The solar system would also have encountered high levels of dust that may have penetrated the atmosphere, leaving traces of radioactive elements from supernovae in the geological record; these traces would be too faint for current technology to detect. The timeframe of the solar system’s passage through the Orion complex lines up pretty well with the Middle Miocene Climate Transition, when the Earth shifted from a warm to a cool climate.

Narwhals observed being cute

Researchers from Florida Atlantic University recently conducted a study on narwhal behavior, relying on drones to capture footage of behaviors never before observed. Narwhals are great because they’re like a unicorn that actually exists. These Arctic whales have a long, spiral tusk that scientists say is actually a tooth, but which any grade school child will readily identify as a horn signifying a being of magical origin. Significantly, owing to their remote territory, biologists are not entirely sure about the functions of these spiral tusks, further inviting mythological speculation. But they are notably gregarious, congregating in groups and collectively raising their young.

From the drone footage, the researchers found the first evidence of narwhals using their tusks to manipulate Arctic char fish, and to strike them with their tusks to stun and capture them. They also documented the first known play behaviors of narwhals, reporting that aspects of their exploratory-object play may include examples of social learning, social instruction and personality differences between narwhals.

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