Youpaper Science Alert – ISSUE 1 – 19. November 2015

Welcome! Thank you for opening this copy of Youpaper Science Alert. Our mission at Youpaper is to bring you the newest discoveries in science and technology. We believe in ‘open science open minds’. In the last couple of months we started translating several scientific articles and papers of young scientists and hopefully future Nobel Price winners. The newest scientific discoveries should be open to everyone and be made understandable. In the next couple of months we will regularly post new issues of Youpaper Science Alert on all of our social media channels. Stay tuned on Facebook “Youpaper.org” and Twitter @youpaper.org as well. The articles will be individually posted on youpaper.org as well and posted on Facebook and Twitter, so that you will always be updated about the newest discoveries in science and technology. Check out our blog on Medium too! Our goal in the future is to translate all of our articles to several other languages in order to make science more accessible and fun to all ages. Our special emphasis depends on young scientists and their discoveries. We want to give them a voice and offer them a platform to publish and inform about their newest discoveries. In this issue, we will feature Maximilian Stegemeyer, a young scientist from Germany who invented a software in order to test whether sky jumping is fair or not. We interviewed him earlier this year and talked with him about his software invention which won him the “Jugend Forscht

Landeswettbewerb”, a prestigious German science competition. I hope you will enjoy reading his interview as

much as reading all the other scientific articles. In the next couple of issues, we will feature more interviews and articles

written by young scientists. If you invented something or made a great discovery, text us on our social network accounts. But, for now, I hope you will have fun reading this issue!

 

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Pluto Like You Have

Never Seen It Before

NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft recently

collected photos of Pluto that give us insights on

how geologically divers its surface is. Ice mountains,

volcanoes, and streams of icy dust, currently astonish the scientific

community all over the globe. Most recent data suggests that Pluto is much

more divers than we though until now.

Until today, Pluto has been a huge mystery. Only few data provided us with

little information. Fortunately, in July 2015, when the NASA New Horizon

spacecraft passed Pluto, it gave us a closer look on Pluto and its surface. A

few days ago, NASA created a false color photo of the ninth planet of our

solar system and marked different geological

conditions. Will Grundy, a New Horizon scientist,

later used a technique called “principal

component analysis” in order to visualize how

Pluto’s surface is shaped. His astonishing

discovery: Pluto’s surface is far more complex

then we thought. The psychedelic image shown

left, displays the remarkable complexity that even

most researcher cannot explain yet.

In the next couple of months the NASA New Horizon spacecraft will deliver

more data to earth and will give us even deeper insights on how the planet

was shaped billions of years ago. Further discoveries will be presented at

the Division of Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting in Maryland, USA.  

Pluto  [Natural  Color]:    NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI  Pluto:  NASA  

Why Do We Exist? Harvard researcher and leading theoretical physicist Lisa Randall developed a

revolutionary theory on why we human exist. Oddly, it’s connected to dark

matter and the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago. In her new book

“Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs”, she gives insights into her theory and why dark

matter gave our ancestor primates a chance to thrive.

About 66 million years ago, a colossal object hit earth.

Most researchers believe this object could have been

a comet of immense size. The impact of the object

killed around 75% of all species across the planet

instantly and later killed 24% more because of climate

change and poor living conditions. Only 1% of all the

animals alive today existed before that time. Randall

states in her theory that the colossal object hitting earth

could have been caused by dark matter around our

galaxy, the Milky Way. Until now, dark matter has not

been detected but measurements suggest that dark matter has a strong

gravitational force on the objects in our universe. Randall believes that dark

matter could be concentrated in giant bubbles (or halos) around galaxies.

Randall nevertheless thinks that dark matter could also be concentrated in so-

called ‘dark discs’. These dark discs could be the reason why such an object

struck the earth in the first place.

DID YOU KNOW?

Around 85% of all matter in the universe supposedly is dark matter.

 Dark  Matter  And  The  Dinosaurs  :  Business  Insider  

Here’s how Randall explains it. She believes the dark

matter disc has a strong gravitational influence on the

outer region of our solar system, the so-called ‘Oort

Cloud’ which contains billions of objects similar to the

object that struck earth 66 million years ago. Randall

figures that the gravitational force could have forced

one of these objects out of the Oort Cloud and brought

it close to earth.

Interestingly, she calculates that the earth should pass the dark disc every 25-35

million years, which is also the approximate time frame mass extinctions

happened in earth’s history.

Is This The End To Climate Change? Researchers from the University of Belfast just developed a liquid that could

capture gases like carbonat dihydroxid (CO2) or methane that cause the

current global climate change.

In comparison, methane is 25-times more harmful for our earth then

carbonat dihydroxid. Recent studies suggest that we are now entering a

state which is described by the milankovitch theory. The theory states the

when the earth’s temperature increases, our best natural reflector, the ice

caps on north and south pole, melt. Thus, the sea level will rise with water

being the worst natural reflector. Because of it being the worst natural

reflector, less sun beams will be reflected away from earth but will heat up

the oceans which will then melt the ice caps even quicker – a double mill!

But, Professor Stuart James from Queen’s University Belfast School of

Chemistry and Chemical Engineering has a revolutionary idea. He explains

that the liquid he and his research team developed, is full of holes which

surprisingly is a good thing. He states: „Materials which contain permanent,

or pores, are technologically important [...] They are used for

manufacturing a range of products from plastic bottles to petrol“.

Here’s how the liquid works: James and his research team took cage-like

molecules which have hollow space inside. These hollow spaces inside the

molecule allow it to form potential „cages“, as James describes them.

These cages can fit methane or carbonat dihydroxid molecules in it and

thus hopefully some day reduce the amount of carbonat dihydroxid in the

air and help weakening the current milankovitch cycles.

Liquid  [Background]  Queen’s  University  Belfast  

Slid into Science! Translated by Daniel Eliasson An interview with Maximilian Stegemeyer in regards to his project “Analysis and Evaluation of the Wind- and Gate-Compensation in ski jumping”, which led him up to the federal level of the young scientist competition, “Jugend Forscht” (English: “Youth researches”). In his work, Maximilian developed software that enabled him to verify if ski jumping was fair. Youpaper: Maximilian, thank you for taking the time to speak to us. Surely, your schedule must be tight. When did

you discover your passion for sciences and technology? Maximilian: That’s a funny story. This paper is actually a term paper, one that everyone in Bavaria has to write in sixth form. Before that I surely wasn’t the typical “Jugend Forscht” participant. I play the piano quite well and even participated in the federal competition of “Jugend Musiziert (English: Youth makes music)” this year. In my free time I mostly concentrated on music. Only with the term paper did I come to the topic of winter sports. Somehow that interested me and my project advisor motivated me to participate in “Jugend Forscht”. I had success in the regional and then in the state-wide competition, which came as a complete surprise to me, so I kind of just slid into it. That was something that truly fascinated me. I find it amazing to get to know all the people there. And then I just worked myself into a frenzy. Youpaper: How long did it take to make your project ripe for “Jugend Forscht”? Maximilian: I conceived the original idea of the paper in 2012 and the submission deadline for “Jugend Forscht” was in January 2014, so it took me 14 months. Between the different levels of the competition it really took a lot of effort into putting the perfect finishing touches onto the paper. I’ve always been interested in maths and physics in general, but I never put much thought into it outside of lessons. That’s why I found it really difficult to create all the simulations, which made up the basis of the term paper. This work ended up taking the most time.

13

Abb. 3: Schanzenprofil der Granåsen-Schanze in Trondheim

4. Ergebnisse

4.1 Ergebnisse der Simulation des Anlaufs Die Simulation wurde für 11 verschiedene Startluken (Startorte) durchgeführt, wobei die mittlere Start-

luke S0 als Ausgangspunkt gewählt wurde. Jede weitere Startluke Si(xS,i ǀ s(xS,i)) befindet sich ein Viel-

faches von 1m von S0 entfernt ( ). Die Koordinaten der Startluken finden sich in Tabelle 1,

bzw. Tabelle 2. Für jede Startluke wurde nun der Anlauf mit den in 3.2.2 angegebenen Ausgangswer-

ten simuliert. Die sich im Schanzentisch T(0 ǀ 0) ergebenden Gesamtgeschwindigkeiten vA, die den

Anlaufgeschwindigkeiten für die Simulation der Flugphase entsprechen, finden sich ebenfalls in Tabel-

le1. Mit diesen Geschwindigkeiten wurde dann die Simulation der Flugphase durchgeführt (siehe

3.3.2). Die aus dieser Simulation resultierenden Sprungweiten wA können ebenfalls Tabelle 1 ent-

nommen werden29.

Mit S0 als Ausgangspunkt wurden für alle anderen Startluken die Werte für die Sprungweite wG be-

rechnet, wie sie der Gate-Compensation (siehe 2.2, Gleichung (2)) zufolge erzielt werden müssten.

Der Faktor f an der Granåsen-Schanze in Trondheim beträgt 30. Für einen um 1m verlänger-

ten Anlauf, müsste der Springer also 4,2m weiter springen.

29 Die Sprungweite wird zentimetergenau angegeben. In einem Skisprungwettkampf wird die Sprung-weite hingegen auf halbe Meter gerundet, dies würde hier jedoch nicht für eine ausreichende Genau-igkeit sorgen. 30 Vgl. Internationaler Skiverband 2012b und Internationaler Skiverband 2013a

Maximilian’s simulation of a ski jumping platform

Maximilian and his project

  Youpaper: Did you have a specific target for your work? Maximilian: Well, the paper had a precise question to provide an answer to. That question was answered at an early point into my research – it only took a couple simulations to do so. To give the paper a sense of depth I then conducted some more. The idea was to substantiate the results with more data. The main objective of the paper was simply solving the problem. Youpaper: What are the capabilities of the software that you developed? Maximilian: Based on the model I can generate an entire ski jump. In general, a jump like that consists of three phases: run-up, jump and flight. I have developed a simulation for the run-up, as we were working with a particular ski-jumping hill, measurements for which are provided by the International Ski Federation. For example I received data on how steep the run-up track and how large the radius of the curve can be. You can then put a jump location and the weight of the athlete into the program, and it will calculate the take-off velocity, taking the steepness of the hill into account. The other part of the program is the flight phase. Run-up and take-off velocity have to be considered for that. Through the take-off motion the athlete generates a particular velocity. That is how I generate the ski jump. Youpaper: Wind- and gate-compensation – what is that actually? Maximilian: At different wind velocities there is a bonus score given to the athlete and I can modify the wind and the wind velocity in the flight phase simulation. In my situation I can calculate how many meters short the athlete jumped, for example in the event of strong winds. That way I can verify whether the bonus scores given by the International Ski Federation are correct. The same applies to the run-up. There I can modify the run-up distance and then compare that with the gate-compensation. Youpaper: Have you heard of any organizations that might be interested in your software? Maximilian: Quite frankly, I think this software is too tailor-made for my term paper to actually distribute it. It isn’t an actually completed piece of software.