Digest of science news for the week that we didn’t write anything about

Study: Some People Can Perceive More Images Per Second Than Others

People perceive visual information at different speeds, and some people see more images per second than others, according to new research from Trinity College Dublin. IN research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists found that if a light source flickers above the limit of the number of images per second that a person can perceive, then the person will not perceive the light source as flickering at all. To determine the maximum number of images per second that each study participant could perceive, the scientists measured the “critical flicker fusion threshold” for each person. Some people perceived the light as solid even if it flickered about 35 times per second, but other participants could see the light flickering even if it flickered more than 60 times per second.

“We don't yet know how these differences in visual temporal resolution might affect our daily lives, but we believe that individual differences in perceptual speed may emerge in high-speed situations where it is necessary to determine location or track fast-moving objects, such as in sports with ball, or in situations where visual scenes change rapidly, such as in competitive games,” said study lead author Clinton Haarlem, a PhD candidate in Trinity's School of Natural Sciences, in Monday's release.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe makes the first observation of its kind inside a coronal mass ejection

From time to time, the Sun's turbulent magnetic field throws colossal clouds of plasma into outer space. These are the so-called coronal mass ejections (KVM). If a single CME hits Earth, for example, the result could be spectacular auroras—and equally spectacular disruptions to power grids and satellites.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe is now available for the first time in history looked in inside a CME erupting from the Sun. And what's inside looks like it will be a treasure for solar physicists. The Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR), which detects visible light, detected clear turbulent eddies inside the CME.

Physicists call these vortices Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. Physicists believe that this effect occurs whenever one section of fast-moving fluid interacts with another. On Earth, it occurs in clouds when the wind speed at one end of the cloud is different from the wind speed at the other end.

Solar physicists have proposed that these instabilities exist in CMEs because the plasma in a CME moves at odds with the background solar wind. But they never had the right equipment in the right place to observe this phenomenon.

Expedition discovers 100-year-old shipwreck using small underwater drone

Small underwater drone Hydrus discovered The wreck of a 100-year-old coal ship in deep waters off the coast of Western Australia. Using data collected from the drone, scientists were able to use photogrammetry to virtually “reconstruct” the 210-foot vessel into a 3D model. An interactive 3D rendering of the wreckage can be viewed Here.

The use of robotic underwater vehicles to locate and explore historical shipwrecks has long been known. For example, researchers used remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to examine the wreck of HMS Terror, the doomed Arctic expedition of Captain Sir John S. Franklin to cross the Northwest Passage in 1846. In 2007, brothers from Norfolk discovered the wreck of the ship Gloucester, which ran aground off the Norfolk coast in 1682 and sank within an hour. Among the passengers was James Stewart, Duke of York and future King James II of England, who escaped in a small boat shortly before the ship sank.

Ross Anderson, curator of the Western Australian Museum, was able to identify the wreck as an iron coal carrier once used in the port of Fremantle to service steamships, probably built between the 1860s and 1890s and sank sometime in the 1920s. Geolocation data provided by Curtin University HIVE scientists allowed them to use photogrammetry to transform the data into a 3D digital model. “It cannot be overstated how much this data structure helps reduce feature matching and processing time, especially in large data sets,” he said in his statement Andrew Woods, University Professor.

“Webb” saw hints of the formation of satellites around an exoplanet in the nascent planetary system

Astronomers have already discovered two planets forming in a disk of gas and dust, or protoplanetary disk, around the tiny star PDS 70. Now, using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers from the MIRI mid-infrared Disk Survey (MINDS) have seen hints of a third world , forming around a nascent star located approximately 400 light years from Earth.

Additionally, using the Webb Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the MINDS team saw a large spiral flow of material fueling the growth of one of the previously discovered planets, PDS 70C. This giant planet is already surrounded by its own disk of material, which is also fed by this flow and is expected to give birth to satellites.

“We found new evidence for the presence of a third planet in the system, which was proposed based on VLT observations,” said Space.com Valentin Christiaens is a member of the MINDS team and a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics at KU Leuven and the University of Liège. (VLT is the Very Large Telescope operated by the European Southern Observatory in Chile).

Researchers have developed an efficient way to extract energy from waves

We're one step closer to capturing the energy behind the ocean's constant ebb and flow with an advanced “blue energy” harvesting device. Researchers report in the journal ACS Energy Letters that simply changing the position of the electrode—from the center of the fluid-filled oscillating tube to the end where the water hits with the most force—significantly increases the amount of wave energy that can be collected.

The tube-shaped wave energy harvesting device the researchers have perfected is called a liquid-solid triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). TENG converts mechanical energy into electrical energy as water beats back and forth against the inside of the tube. One of the reasons why these devices have not yet found practical use on a large scale is their low energy efficiency. Guozhang Dai, Kai Yin, Junliang Yang and their colleagues aimed to increase the energy-harvesting ability of liquid-solid TENG by optimizing the location of the energy-harvesting electrode.

Researchers used 16″ clear plastic tubes to create two TENGs. In the first device, they placed a copper foil electrode in the center of the tube—a common location in conventional liquid-solid TENGs. In the new design, a copper foil electrode was placed at one end of the tube. The researchers then filled the tubes a quarter full with water and sealed the ends. A wire connected the electrodes to the external circuit.

By placing both devices on a rocking mechanism, they moved water back and forth inside the tubes and generated an electrical current, converting mechanical energy—the friction from the water hitting the electrodes—into electrical energy. The researchers found that the optimized design increased the conversion of mechanical energy to electrical current by 2.4 times compared to the traditional design.