Month: May 2020

Enlarge (credit: Jose Luis Stephens | Getty Images)

Something weird happened on the oil market last week. For a few minutes on April 20, the price of a barrel went negative for the first time ever. The unprecedented collapse of prices is linked to the pandemic, which has caused people to stop doing oil-guzzling things like flying and driving. There’s now so much extra petroleum on the market that the world is running out of places to put it. If you’re an oil producer, it seems like the sensible thing to do in this situation would be to … stop producing so much oil.

On Friday, members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia, the US, and others will begin scaling back their production by nearly 10 million barrels per day. They hope that this will help stabilize prices and take some pressure off of producers and refineries that are scrambling to find a place to store the excess. But the rollback isn’t likely to be enough. Oil producers would have to reduce production by almost three times that amount to match the downturn in demand. So why don’t they?

H.P. Lovecraft is having a moment. January brought us Richard Stanley's surreal film, Color Out of Space, an adaptation of the short story of the same name, in which a family on a farm encounters a glowing purple meteorite with typically horrific Lovecraftian consequences. Stanley's film adaptation of The Dunwich Horror is rumored to be in development, the second in a planned trilogy. And now HBO has dropped the first trailer for a new series partly inspired by the works of the Cthulhu-loving horror master, called Lovecraft Country.

The series is based on the 2016 dark fantasy/horror novel, Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff, who also found inspiration in a 2006 essay by Pam Noles describing what it was like growing up being both black and, well, a hardcore nerd. The protagonist is Atticus Finch, a black veteran of the Korean War and science fiction fan who embarks on a perilous road trip from his home on Chicago's South Side to a small town in rural Massachusetts. He's looking for his estranged father, who purportedly vanished after encountering a well-dressed man driving a silver Cadillac.

Atticus's Uncle George and childhood friend/fellow sci-fi buff, Leti, come along for the ride. This being inspired by Lovecraft, naturally they encounter all kinds of arcane rituals, magic, shape-shifters, monsters, and an alternate reality or two along the way.

In the first fractions of a second of our universe's existence, the energy density was so incredibly high that there were no protons and neutrons, just a hot "quark soup" known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Physicists have successfully recreated this unique state of matter in high-energy laboratories, but those conditions are exceedingly rare in the current cosmos. According to a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, German physicists have performed computer simulations indicating that a QGP could form in the immediate aftermath of a binary neutron star merger, and that it should produce a telltale, detectable signature in the gravitational waves emanating from that event.

"Compared to previous simulations, we have discovered a new signature in the gravitational waves that is significantly clearer to detect," said co-author Luciano Rezzolla of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. "If this signature occurs in the gravitational waves that we will receive from future neutron-star mergers, we would have a clear evidence for the creation of quark-gluon plasma in the present universe."

A hot, dense soup

Quarks, the fundamental components of subatomic particles, are bound together by force-carrying gluons to form protons and neutrons. But under the extreme high-energy conditions of the early universe in its first microseconds of existence, that couldn't happen. Instead, quarks and gluons mingled freely in a dense soup, until things cooled down sufficiently for protons to condense out of the QGP. Before the first second was up, the Universe had gone through its entire inflationary period, sowing the seeds for the large-scale structures we see today.

Enlarge / SLS Liquid Hydrogen Tank test article is moved onto the Pegasus barge. (credit: NASA)

Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered. So how come no one has taken the Space Launch System rocket behind the woodshed yet?

We'll answer that question in a moment. First, some news: On Friday, the space agency announced that it had awarded a contract to Aerojet Rocketdyne to build 18 additional space shuttle main engines for the Space Launch System rocket. The contract is valued at $1.79 billion—so $100 million per engine.

However, this is not the true price of these engines. NASA has previously given more than $1 billion to Aerojet to "restart" production of the space shuttle era engines and a contract for six new ones. So, according to the space agency, NASA has spent $3.5 billion for a total of 24 rocket engines. That comes to $146 million per engine. (Or 780,000 bars of Gold-Pressed Latinum, as this is a deal only the Ferengi could love.)

Enlarge / The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on April 17, 2020. (credit: Getty | Hector Retamal)

Researchers expressed alarm this week after the National Institutes of Health abruptly cancelled funding for a long-standing research project by US and Chinese scientists to examine how coronaviruses leap from bats to humans, potentially causing devastating pandemics—such as the one we are currently experiencing by a coronavirus genetically linked to those found in bats.

The funding cut could set back critical research into preventing such disease spread, scientists say. They also expressed dismay that the decision was prompted by unfounded conspiracy theories and what some see as a wider attempt by the Trump administration to deflect criticism of its handling of the pandemic by blaming China for unleashing the disease.

The NIH has not provided a clear explanation for its move to cancel the funds, which occurred April 24 and was first reported by Politico Monday, April 27. However, in emails exchanges published April 30 by Science magazine, it is clear that the NIH was motivated by conspiracy theories that allege—without evidence—that the virus was somehow released by Chinese researchers in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the pandemic began.