This is Spacetime Series twenty seven, Episode eleven, for broadcast on the twenty fourth of January twenty twenty four. Coming up on Spacetime, claims Mars could have had flowing water for hundreds of millions of years. New web space telescope data shows that early galaxies looked a lot more like pool noodles and surfboards. And NASA's new mission to capture Star staff. All that and more coming up on Spacetime Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary. A new study based on Martian Impact crater erosion rates suggest water may have flowed across the surface of the Red planet for hundreds of millions of years. The findings, reported in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, looked at the maximum time scales for the formation of Martian river valley networks shaped by flowing water. The studies le ad author Alexander Morgan from the Planetary Science Institute, says that while the Red planet is a global freeze dried desert today, its surface preserves extensive evidence of past flowing water, including what appears to be river valleys, and the time scales over which these river valleys formed could have big implications for early Mars habitability. That's because long periods would stable liquid water would be more conducive for the formation of life. The red planet's river valley networks for more than three billion years ago and have long been considered among the strongest pieces of evidence for liquid water on early Mars. Previous researchers already showed they would have taken a minimum of tens of thousands of years to erode these river valleys, but the frequency of flow events and consequently the total matter time over which the river valleys formed, has never been constrained, and that's where this new work comes in. Morgan and colleagues use craters that both predate and post state the river valley system in order to place the maximum bounds of hundreds of millions of years on the era over which these systems formed. Now, given what scientists already know about erosion rates on early Mars, longer time scales implies that the conditions permitting rivers to flow would have been highly intermittent, with long arid periods interspersed with brief periods of fluval activity. Morgan says scientists studying early Mars have historically tended to fall in one of two camps. Early Mars was either a warm, wet world with oceans, or it was a cold, frozen place with massive ice sheets. Over the past decade or so, scientists have come to realize that these descriptions are far too general, and it doesn't really make any sense to try and condense hundreds of millions of years of planetary climate history into just a two or three word description. You see, like the early Earth, early Mars was a more complex place, and the conditions permitting surface water on Mars would have also varied considerably. Morgan points out that Earth has undergone massive climatic changes throughout its history. For example, twenty thousand years ago, the area what is now Chicago was beneath half a mile of ice, and in the same way, climatic surface conditions permitting rivers to flow on early Mars likewise, would have probably waxed and waned. So looking at the overall results, it suggests that Martian rivers were eroding at very slow rates, similar to parts of the Attakami High Desert in Chile today. One explanation for this is that erosion might have been inhibited by the accumulation of large boulders on the river bed, which could not be further broken down. Another possibility, however, is that rivers were simply flowing very infrequently, maybe as little as once in one hundred years, and that would imply that rivers on Mars were generally dry, could become active when something like say volcanic activity or variations in the planet's axial tilt and it's orbit around the Sun, warmed the Martian's surface more than normal. These long term climatic changes are not unusual because they also happen here on Earth. Earth's axial tilt often changes, as does its orbit around the Sun. We call these Melancovitch cycles, and they're responsible for many of Earth's glacial periods. Morgan says that over short time scales, river flows are controlled by rainfall or upstream snow melt, but when looking over longer time scales, it's clear that Earth's rivers are affected by climatic changes. For example, twenty thousand years ago, there were large lakes and rivers flowing across Wood is now Nevada, and Martian rivers could have operated in much the same way, with short term viability due to storms and snow melt, long term viability due to changes in the planet's spin or it's orbit around the Sun. This space time still to come. New web telescope data shows that early galaxies looked a lot more like pearl noodles and surfboards than the frisbees and volleyballs they commonly look like today, And we take a close look at NASA's new mission to capture Star Staff. All that and more still to come on space time. New images from NASA's web Space Telescope shows that early galaxies at the dawn of time are often flat and elongated, looking a lot more like surfboards and pearl noodles than the frisbees and volleyball shaped galaxies we see around us today. The findings reported in the Astrophysical Journal suggest that today's more common spherical shaped elliptical galaxies disc shaped spiral galaxies were very uncommon in the early universe. The studies, based on observations using Webb's Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey. Astronomers focused on galaxies estimated to have existed when the universe was between six hundred million and six billion years old. The studies lead Auto Varaj Pandea from Columbia University says roughly fifty to eighty percent of galaxies studied appear to be flattened in two dimensions. Galaxies that look like pearl noodles or surfboards seem to be very common in the early universe, which is surprising considering they're very uncommon today. But while most of the distant galaxies looked like surfboards and pearl noodles, there were some which were shaped like frisbees and volleyballs. The volleyball or elliptical shaped galaxies appear the most compact type and the cosmic ocean early times, but were also the least frequently identified. On the other hand, the frisbee or spiral shaped galaxies, while still rare, were found to be at least as large as the surfboard and pull noodle shaped galaxies, but became more common as the universe aged and the observations raised an interesting question. See our milky Way is about twelve billion years old, so when it started to form, it would have formed right at the time when there were lots of pill noodles and surfboards. So what would our spiral milky Way galaxy have looked like back then? Well, according to the authors, their best guess is that it probably would have looked something like a surfboard. This hypothesis is based partly on new evidence from web theorists have wound back the clock to estimate the Milky Ways mass billions of years ago, which would correlate to the shape it hat at that time. See, these distant galaxies are all far less massive than nearby spirals and elliptical galaxies which we see today. That's because in the early universe, galaxies had far less time to grow. The authors say, the question now is to determine how galaxies reached their shape through their process of merger and evolution. This is space time still to come new mission to capture star stuff, and later in the science report, paleontologists discover a new species of tyrannosaur that's the closest relative yet of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex. All that and more still to come on space time. Okay, let's take a break from our show for a word from our sponsor, NordVPN. If you're a sports fan, you know this struggle of missing out on that big game, especially when they're simply not available in your country through gear blocking. Well that's where NordVPN comes in. It's quite literally a game changer for sports fans worldwide. 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If you're ready to join nordvpn's winning team, head over to NordVPN dot com slash Stewart Gary and click on the get the Deal button. That's NordVPN dot com slash Stewart Gary and click on they get the Deal button. And remember it's all totally risk free with Nord's thirty day money back guarantee. Now you can find all the details in our show notes and on our website, so don't miss out. That's NordVPN dot com. Slash Stewart Garry. Secure your spot in the global sports arena with NordVPN and now it's back to our show. You're listening to Space Time and Space Time with Stewart Gary. Scientists are working on a new instrument to capture stardust from interstellar space. The instrument, called the Interstellar Dust Experiment or IDEX, will be a key component of NASA's new Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe IMAP, which will launch in just over a year from now. The IMAP spacecraft will travel to a gravitational will between the Earth and the Sun known as the Lagrangian L one position. It's located about one hundred and sixty million kilometers from Earth and is a point in space where the gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth tend to cancel each other, thereby allowing a spacecraft to remain in orbit at this position with very little expenditure of fuel. From its perch at L one, IMAPP will spend two years collecting and analyzing the composition of literally hundreds of thousands of microscopic dust particles floating past now. A lot of these will be particles in the solar wind streaming out from the Sun, as well as from passing comets and asteroids, and the zodiacolte, which a particle was blurn into space by massive dust storms on the red planet Mars. But also included in the catch will be grains from interstellar space particles flowing into our Solar System from the vast expanses between the stars and the Milky Way galaxy. These will include dust particles from other star systems and the remains of exploded stars called supernovae. Supernovae are important because it's thought one supernova explosion not too far from where we are now probably triggered the collapse of a molecular gas and dust cloud which wound up forming our son in Solar System four point six billion years ago. But interstellar dust grains are spread so thin the instrument will probably only collect a few hundred of them during its lifetime, and so each and every small speck of interstellar dust will be a treasure trave of information. Of course, most of them will have been altered as they travel through interstellar space, but they'll still be the closest material we have for understanding the original building blocks of our solar system. So far, astronomers have only ever captured just a few dozen grains of interstellar dust, and that will make each new find by IDEX precious. Detecting and analyzing them in space will open up new windows into the universe. Built over the past six years by a team at the University of Colorado, Boulder, IDEX will be one of ten scientific packages aboard the IMAP spacecraft IMAPS being assembled at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. The IDEX instrument looks a lot like a large drum. It features a fifty centimeter white aperture at one end designed to capture dust zooming buy It's sort of like a baileing whale feeding. IDEX will record how fast these particles are moving, what they're made of, and the direction from which they're coming. And this isn't the team's first project. They previously designed and build a similar instrument called the Surface Dust Analyzer a SCOOTER, which is part of NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which is slated to launch to the Jovian Moon later this year, and they built an earlier version which was mounted aboard NASA's New Horizons mission spacecraft to Pluto. It's now exploring the dark outer reaches of the Solar System. IIDEX project manager Scott Tucker says trapping dust in space is no easy feet that's because interstellar dust particles are very rare. His team's made the instrument roughly two and a half times bigger than scooter because the bigger the mouth, the more particles you can catch. Each grain of dust will likely be rich in elements like silicon and carbon, and may I only measure a few millions of a centimeter across, making things more difficult. Some will be traveling at speeds of will over one hundred thousand kilometers per hour, and as these grains crashed into the back of IDEX, they'll instantly vaporize in a cloud of ions, which the instrument will then collect and analyze. Tucker says the main challenge with IDx is being what engineers referred to as dynamic range. See the instrument needs to capture both really fast and large particles as well as smaller, slower moving ones and then measure them all using the same instrument. This report from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Interstellar dust from outside our solar system enter our solar system and we don't know a lot about its composition, mass, and speed, and so IDEX throughout its orbit will be able to answer some questions that kind of remain unanswered from past missions. IDEX, first of all, is an instrument. One of the instruments on the IMAP mission. IMAPP is going to fly to a location called one, which is Lagarage point one, which is about one percent of the way from the Earth to the Sun, and it's gonna sit there HIGHDEX is gonna look off into space, and it's gonna measure interstellar dust particles that arrive at that point in space. This is a way for us to learn more, not just about our solar system, but a way for us to learn about extrasolar systems, and instead of just looking at the light that those systems produce, we can actually get the material that is coming into our solar system. And so we have this chance an opportunity to learn more, not just from our traditional light model, but from a chemical standpoint, what some of those building blocks of other planets and systems might be. Like the interstellar dust, it's not quite as affected by the Sun and it doesn't collide with other dust quite as often, so it's the same way that it was millions of years ago. So by looking at these dust particles, we can get some information about what our solar system was like many years ago. And in that report from the University of Colorado, Boulder, we heard from IDEX Project Manager Scott Tucker, IDEX instrument in Jeanie Christina Davis, and IDEX Research assistant Ethan I Yari this space time and time that to take another brief look at some of the other stories making us in science this week. With a science report, the World Meteorological Organization has confirmed that twenty twenty three was the hottest gee globally since records began. Following their original declaration back in November last year, the organization has consolidated data from six leading global weather monitoring data sets, concluding the average annual global temperature for twenty twenty three was one point four five five degrees plus or minus zero point one two degrees celsius above pre industrial levels. Considering the shift from l Ninia to El Nino conditions in late twenty twenty three and the continuing presence of El Ninia today, the Ward Meteorological Organization says it's now possible that twenty twenty three record could be broken. In twenty twenty four, researchers have taken the first critical step in creating a successful HIV vaccine. A report in the journal's Cell claims researchers activated specific immune cells that induce broadly neutralizing antibodies. The study confirms that these antibodies are at the structural and genetic levels similar to human antibodies needed as the foundation for a protective HIV vaccine. The authors had previously isolated naturally occurring broadly neutralizing antibodies from an individual and then backtrack them through all the changes the antibody and the virus underwent to reach a point of origin for the native antibody and its binding site on the HIV envelope. This allowed the authors to engineer a molecule that elicits antibodies that mimic the native antibody and its binding site on the HIV envelope. The human immune deficiency virus HIV is an infection that attacks the body's immune system, causing acquired immuno deficiency syndrome or AIDS. It's thought of originated from infected primates in western Central Africa and was first identified in humans in May nineteen eighty one. HIV targets the body's white blood cells, specifically helper T cells. It also attacks macrophasas and dendritic cells, weakening them and causing a progressive featherure of the immune system. This allows a wide range of so called opportunistic diseases, such as tuberculosis and several types of cancer to become critical, eventually killing the patient. The World Health Organization estimates at least fifty two million people have been killed by AIDS, with another forty million currently living with HIV. Palaeontologists of uncovered a new species of a tyrannosaur that may be the closest known relative to Tyrannosaurus rex. The new therapere dinosaur, named Tyrannosaurus macronesis, was found at the Whole Lake Formation in New Mexico. The findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, are based on a fossilized durw and partial skull originally thought to belong to a t Rex. However, numerous subtle differences in the shape of enjoins between the skull bones eventually led the authors that determine it belonged to a new and different species. The dur of Macaranesis is far more slender than the more robust, lowered you're seen on t Rex. The other main difference lies in the prominent ridge or post orbital bone, that's the bone around the eye that might have something to do with how the species attracted a mate. The new tyrannosaur is thought to have lived between seventy one and seventy three million years ago, that's between five and seven million years before t Rex. Samsung have just released their new Galaxy S twenty four lineup, and it's full of new features which will force Apple and Google to up their game. The new Galaxy smartphone includes a range of AI capabilities, including photo editing using the new Snap drag and eight generation three chip set for improved graphics and AI features. With all the details, we're joined by technology editor alex'harov Freud from Tech Advice, Start Life This is Samsung's attempt to make AI effortless. You know, the creativity that it can offer for in users via text messages, a thing called Circle to search cameras, a new five times optical zoom camera with a thing called nitography WHI which it takes excellent low light photos and videos with a sixty percent larger pixel size for the camera center and the new stronger optical image stabilizer so that when you are taking these long shots with the zoom they are as sharp and as clear as possible. And you also don't have a thing called a flat screen, so it's much easier to apply it spreen protectors and also better for writing on. The S twenty four Ultra has a titanium frame, so matching the iPhone. The S twenty four and S twenty four plus have aluminium frames, and they also have the Qualcom snap Dragon eight Gen three chip, the one that supercharged with AI smarts. But of course there's a special Galaxy addition and that allows you to do things like translate live in one of thirteen different languages whilst you're having a phone call. So when you're talking to somebody and you're in English, there in Spanish for example. You can choose the languages. I think it can detective, but certainly you can choose the languages you want. You speak, it translates, they speak, it translates and you can have a conversation. And I tried it at CES. There was an embarigoed session where I gave it a go and it actually it works very cool. Then you got this circle to search, so you can tap the little white line which is the home button effectively. Now you know normally you'd swipe up, but you hold your finger on that. Then in any video, any web page, anywhere that you are, you can then circle around something with your finger or the stylust and Google search and that this is nothing can induction with Google. It will search just for that, so you can do a visual search of anything, which is extremely cool. You can now type messages in one language and have them appear in another via the same live translation capability. You can now have HDR photos, not just in the main camera app, but things like Instagram. You can also write something in the note taking app or just anywhere, and then the keyboard allows you to change the tone of what you've written, so an informal tone to your friends, or a formal tone for your boss. If you're typing things out or even handwriting them, the note app can take your wonky handwriting and make it nice and straight. You can take your notes and put it into bullet point format and give it proper headings. If you are recording your voice and you've got multiple people recording a session, it can break the voices up into speaker one, speaker two, speaker three. It can transcribe it all for you can even translate that to a different voice. And that's just for free part of the system. Normally you'd have to pay twenty dollars a month to a service like otter dot Ai. And you know, there's just so many cool little features inside. But this is sad Sung throwing down the gauntlet to Apple, to Google, everybody to say this is the new standard. And Samsung is backing it up with seven years not just of security updates but operating system updates. That's to match what Google has promised for his Pixel phones, and also to outclass Apple where it can, who normally does at least five years. I think the one thing that Samsung still doesn't have nailed down is the ability to get the updates out on the same day simultaneously for all of its phones globally, and that's something that Google can do because it has a much smaller series of phones. Samsung has a very wide clutch of phones. Samsung just lost the crown for selling the most smartphones to Apple in twenty twenty three, and I'm sure they want to get it back. They've got more competition than ever, very impressive phone. Google is going to have to do some big work to match the features with their Google Pixel eight and eight Pro with their feature drops, and of course Apple is We're expecting great things from Apple at the Worldwide Developer Conference in the middle of this year with the iowsad team and all of the AI updates, and also with the iPhone sixteen Pro. So great news forward smartphone edits. That's Alex Saharov Rout from Tech Advice Start Live and that's the show for now. Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Google podcast pocker Casts, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, bites dot Com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from space Time with Stuart Gary dot com. Space Time's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation, on Science Zone Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune In Radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the space Time Store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies, or by becoming a Spacetime Patron, which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of bonnus audio content which doesn't go to wear, access to our exclusive Facebook group, and other rewards. Just go to space Time with Steward Gary dot com for full details. 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