Category: Sciency Words

Sciency Words: VIRA

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we take a closer look at some interesting and new scientific term so we can expand our scientific vocabularies together.  Today’s Sciency Word is:

VIRA

You don’t mind if I do one more post about Venus, do you?  Venus is my favorite planet, after all, and the detection of phosphine (a possible biosignature!) in Venus’s atmosphere has got me really excited.  I’ve been reading lots of papers and articles about Venus lately, and many of those papers and articles mention something called VIRA.

VIRA stands for Venus International Reference Atmosphere.  VIRA is actually a book, originally published in 1985 by an international committee on space research.  The purpose of VIRA was to consolidate everything we knew about Venus’s atmosphere at that time into a single, easy to use reference guide.  As planetary scientist David Grinspoon describes it in his book Venus Revealed:

Although not exactly a best-seller, [VIRA] is a cherished reference among students of Venus’s atmosphere, and many a copy has become dog-eared and worn.  The tables and summaries of atmospheric data found therein are still the standard on Earth for Venus models, and the wide use of this standard allows us to make sure that we are comparing apples with apples, when making models and sharing new results.

One thing I don’t understand: why are Venus researchers still relying so heavily on a reference guide from 1985?  I’ve found several scientific papers (like this one or this one or this one) offering updates and improvements to VIRA.  And yet, unless I’m missing something (I feel like I must be missing something), it sounds like the original 1985 VIRA is still used as the gold standard for modeling Venus’s atmosphere.

Anyway, when people say we can’t explain where Venus’s phosphine comes from, in a sense, what they mean is that there’s nothing in VIRA that helps explain it.  So maybe the discovery of phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere will finally give scientists the push they need to update VIRA for the 21st Century.

P.S.: According to this paper, there’s also a Mars International Reference Atmosphere, or MIRA.  And I’m guessing there are similar reference atmospheres for other planets and moons in our Solar System as well.

Sciency Words: Global Resurfacing

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome back to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we talk about those wild and crazy words scientists like to use.  Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:

GLOBAL RESURFACING

Venus is a mysterious planet.  Ever since the detection of phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere, the mystery du jour has been: does Venus support life?

We’ll circle back to Venus’s phosphine in a moment, but first I’d like to turn our attention to a different mystery concerning Venus: where did all of Venus’s craters go?

Impact craters are a common sight in the Solar System, especially here in the inner Solar System.  You’ll find plenty of craters on the Moon, of course.  You’ll find lots of them on Mercury, Earth, and Mars as well.  Some of those craters look fresh and new.  Others, due to weathering and erosion, look quite old—sometimes extremely old.

But the surface of Venus is relatively crater free, and the few craters we do find appear to be very, very recent.  In his book Venus Revealed, American planetary scientist David Grinspoon describes Venus’s craters thusly:

All the craters on Venus look unnaturally pristine.  Instead of blending into the volcanic plains that cover most of the planet, they seem planted on top as an afterthought, as though a crew had built a cheap movie-set planet and realized at the last minute that they had better throw in some craters.

Grinspoon goes on to explain how this might have happened:

Suppose that half a billion years ago something happened to Venus, wiping out all older craters.  Vast lava flows occurring simultaneously all over the planet would do the trick.  Then, if there has been relatively little surface activity since that time and Venus has been slowly collecting craters all along, things should look as they do.

This sudden event, when the whole surface of Venus got covered in fresh lava, is called “global resurfacing.” That’s a nice euphemism for an apocalyptic event, isn’t it?

Now this is important: Venus should have had little-to-no volcanic activity since her last global resurfacing event.  Otherwise, those younger, fresher, “unnaturally pristine”-looking craters would have gotten resurfaced too.  But in the last few years, circumstantial evidence has emerged suggesting that there are active volcanoes on Venus after all.

And now, finally, we circle back to the detection of phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere.  Some have suggested that that could be evidence of Venusian life.  But according to this preprint paper, that phosphine signature could also be interpreted as further evidence of volcanic activity.  Maybe global resurfacing was not a one-time event half a billion years ago.  Maybe resurfacing is an ongoing process that’s still happening today!

In a previous post, I said that Venus is about to teach us something we did not know: maybe it’ll be a biology lesson, or maybe it’ll be a chemistry lesson.  But now I think there’s a third possibility: maybe it’ll be a geology lesson.

P.S.: Special thanks to Mike Smith from Self Aware Patterns for sending that preprint paper my way.  At this point, it is just a preprint paper waiting to go through the peer review process, so don’t get too excited.  But the more I think about it, the more I feel like the authors of that paper are on the right track.

Sciency Words: The Unknown Absorber

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 5 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome back to Sciency Words, a special species here on Planet Pailly where we talk about those weird and wonderful words scientists like to use.  Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:

THE UNKNOWN ABSORBER

We’ve talked about this one before.  Several times now.  But given the recent news about Venus, I feel like this is a topic worth revisiting right now.

In 1974, NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft discovered that an unknown chemical in Venus’s atmosphere was absorbing copious amounts of ultraviolet light.  No one could figure out what this chemical could be.  And whenever science can’t figure something out, people’s imaginations tend to run wild.

What if this unknown ultraviolet absorber were a complicated chlorophyll-like molecule?  That would imply that some sort of organism, perhaps something like Earth’s cyanobacteria, was soaking up U.V. light and using it for some sort of alien version of photosynthesis!

Now you may be wondering how anything could live on a planet as absurdly hot as Venus.  Venus’s surface temperature is approximately 460°C (870°F).  But the unknown absorber wasn’t found on Venus’s surface; it was drifting around in the upper layers of Venus’s clouds, where the temperature is about 30°C (80°F)—almost Earth-like!  And as we learned in a previous Sciency Words post, microorganisms can (and do) use clouds as a habitat.

Don’t get too excited, though.  The unknown absorber was a mystery for a time, but in 2016 it was identified as a fairly simple sulfur compound.  At this point, there is no reason to think the formerly unknown absorber has anything to do with photosynthesis or any other biological process.  It’s just another weird chemical among the many, many weird chemicals found on Venus.

So when you hear about the discovery of phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere, and when you hear speculation about where that phosphine might be coming from, remember the story of the unknown absorber.

Sciency Words: Aerobiology

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we talk about those weird and wonderful words scientists like to use.  Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:

AEROBIOLOGY

You will find life pretty much anywhere you go on Earth.  Living things are in the water, on the land, and up in the air.

Aerobiology comes from three Greek words meaning “air,” “life,” and “the study of.”  So aerobiology is the study of airborne life, specifically airborne microbial life.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was first introduced in the late 1930’s.

I have to confess I am totally new to aerobiology.  I only found out about this term yesterday, and I don’t want anything I say to misrepresent the field.  But based on what I have read, it sounds like aerobiologists are primarily concerned with protecting public health from the spread of pollen and other allergens, as well as the spread of airborne diseases.

However, aerobiologists also study airborne microbes that are not a direct threat to human health—and this is the part that connects to the outer space stuff I normally write about.  For decades now, aerobiologists have known that algae and other common microorganisms can fly up into Earth’s atmosphere and travel great distances on the wind.  And according to this 2001 paper, microorganisms can (and do) remain active—growing and reproducing—inside the water droplets found in clouds.  As the authors of that 2001 paper explain it, we should start thinking of clouds as microbial habitats.

So what does this have to do with outer space?  Well, if clouds on Earth can serve as a habitat for microorganisms, then maybe microorganisms could exist in the clouds of some other planet.

And by some other planet, I mean Venus.

And by maybe, I mean stay tuned for Monday’s post.

Sciency Words: Outgassing

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we talk about science or science-related terminology.  Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:

OUTGASSING

Okay, I’m tempted to start this blog post with a fart joke.  But I won’t.  I’m too classy for that.  Outgassing is a normal and natural process that occurs on all the rocky and/or icy planets and moons of our Solar System.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest known usage of “outgas” or “outgassing” is this 1919 paper titled “The Relative Adsorption of Mixtures of Oxygen and Nitrogen in Cocoanut Shell Charcoal.”  It’s a thrilling read.

Basically, solid substances (cocoanut shell charcoal, planetary regolith, etc) can get gas particles stuck to their surfaces or trapped inside them.  Gradually, these gas particles will escape.  The process of gas particles gradually escaping from a solid material is called outgassing.

On a planetary scale, outgassing is a major contributing factor in the formation of a planet’s atmosphere.  Or at least that’s true for small, terrestrial planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.  Gas giants tend to form their atmospheres through a different process (so before anyone makes a comment about this, there is no outgassing happening on Uranus).

So the main takeaway of today’s post is this: solid materials often have gas particles trapped inside them.  On a planetary scale, the gradual release of these gas particles helps to form planetary atmospheres.  This is known as outgassing.

Or you could just say terrestrial planets fart, almost constantly, and that’s where their atmospheres come from.

Sciency Words: Oxidation

~ J.S. Pailly ~ Leave a comment

Hello, friends, and welcome back to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we talk about the definitions and etymologies of scientific terms.  Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:

OXIDATION

You may think of oxygen as something good and wholesome.  It’s what we breathe.  It gives us life.  How easily you forget all the other things oxygen can do.  It corrodes metals.  It degrades organic materials.  And under the right conditions, oxygen supports and perpetuates combustion reactions (a.k.a. fire).

French chemist Antoine Lavoisier usually gets credit for coining the words oxygen and oxidation.  He was the first to write about the principe oxygine (French for the acidifying principle).  The words oxygen and oxidation appeared soon afterwards in English translations of Lavoisier’s work, so maybe the English translators should get some of the credit too.

Anyway, oxidation originally referred to chemical reactions involving oxygen, specifically.  But then through a process of semantic generalization, the word oxidation came to refer to any chemical reaction similar to the kind of chemical reaction oxygen could cause.  Oxygen is no longer considered a necessary ingredient for oxidation, and some chemicals (i.e.: chlorine and fluorine) have turned out to be better oxidizers than oxygen.

So what actually happens when one chemical substance oxidizes another?  Well, oxygen and other strong oxidizing agents are greedy for electrons.  Oxidation is the act of stealing electrons from another chemical substance.  Or, if outright stealing doesn’t work, then oxidizing agents will try to form chemical bonds that allow them to “share” electrons—but it will be a highly unequal kind of sharing, one that does not favor the atoms that originally owned those electrons.

A whole lot of energy can be released in oxidation reactions.  That’s what makes them so destructive.  However, life on Earth has found ways to control the energy released by oxygen oxidation and put that energy to good use.  That’s why oxygen is generally thought of as something good and wholesome, even though it’s really one of the most dangerous and destructive chemicals in the world.

P.S.: It’s important to remember that whenever an oxidation reaction occurs, a reduction reaction also occurs.  And reduction is another Sciency Word with an interesting history.

Sciency Words: Oxygen

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 9 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we take a closer look at the definitions and etymologies of scientific terms.  Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:

OXYGEN

Earth.  Fire.  Air.  Water.  Only the Avatar can master all four elements.  Only the Avatar… or Antione-Laurent Lavoisier, the 18th Century French chemist.  As described in this article, Lavoisier originally intended to study each of the four elements in turn, starting with air.  But Lavoisier’s air research quickly “bent” the concept of the four elements so hard that the whole concept broke. And thus…

Lavoisier did not discover oxygen, but he did name it.  You see, when oxygen was first discovered in the early 1770’s, it was called “dephlogisticated air.”  That’s a mouthful of a name, but it made perfect sense to anyone who was familiar with the phlogiston theory of combustion.

Now I’m not going to waste your time explaining what phlogiston theory was, except to tell you that it was an updated-for-the-18th-Century version of the theory that fire is an element.  The important thing to know is that Lavoisier’s experiments on dephlogisticated air poked some pretty big holes in phlogiston theory, and so that theory had to be abandoned in favor of “oxygen theory.”

So where did the word oxygen come from?  Let me try to reconstruct Lavoisier’s thought process.  Among other things, Lavoisier found that burning stuff in “dephlogisticated air” tended to produce substances that were more acidic than the original reactants.  “Oxy” is Greek for acid.  So some sort of acid-generating process was occurring… an “oxy-genesis,” if you will.  Or “oxy-gen” for short!

The term Lavoisier actually used was principe oxygéne, meaning “the acidifying principle.”  The words oxygen and oxidation start appearing in English shortly thereafter, thanks mainly to translations of Lavoisier’s work.  But by that point, it was clear that oxygen was more than merely an acid-generating gas.  It had other properties too. Lavoisier demonstrated that oxygen played an important role in both combustion and animal respiration, as well as other natural processes like the rusting of iron.

But we’ll talk more about oxygen’s many abilities in next week’s episode of Sciency Words.

P.S.: Lavoisier also named hydrogen.  Burning “inflammable air” and “dephlogisticated air” together produced water.  “Hydro” is Greek for water.  So some sort of water-generating process was occurring… a “hydro-genesis,” if you will.  Or “hydro-gen” for short!

P.P.S.: And since you can make water by mixing two different kinds of air, water must not be an element.  Also, how can air truly be an element if there are different kinds of air? This whole four elements thing fell apart pretty quickly as Lavoisier continued his research.

Sciency Words: Orthofabric

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 9 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we explore the definitions and etymologies of scientific terms.  Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:

ORTHOFABRIC

If you’re planning to spend any amount of time floating around in outer space, you need to dress appropriately.  You’ll need protection against solar and cosmic radiation.  You’ll need protection against extreme temperatures, both extreme cold and extreme heat (direct sunlight in the vacuum of space can make things super hot super quick).  Oh, and there are lots of tiny micrometeoroids whizzing about up there.  You’ll need protection against those too.

Around the same time that the space shuttle program got going, NASA started using a new fabric for the outermost layer of their spacesuits.  That fabric is still used today for spacesuits aboard the International Space Station.  It’s called Orthofabric (sometimes spelled with a hyphen: Ortho-fabric).

Orthofabric is made by a company called Fabric Development Inc., based in Quakertown, PA.  Orthofabric is made using three different synthetic fibers: Gore-Tex, Nomex, and Kevlar.  As reported in several research papers (like this one or this one), Orthofabric consistently holds up well against the harsh conditions found in space.  That’s why NASA keeps using it.

For these Sciency Words posts, I think it’s important to say something about the etymology of the word we’re talking about, but I had an extremely hard time finding any sort of etymology for this one.

The prefix “ortho-” comes from a Greek word meaning righteous, virtuous, or pure (hence the word orthodox).  “Ortho-” can also mean upright or straight (hence the word orthopedic).  But what do either of those meanings have to do with Orthofabric?  The prefix “ortho-” also has a specialized meaning in chemistry, but based on my research, the chemistry sense of “ortho-” didn’t seem relevant to Orthofabric either.

So finally, I picked up the phone, called Fabric Development Inc., and asked.  I was told the name Orthofabric was chosen after some back and forth consultation with NASA.  The name doesn’t mean anything in particular.  It’s just a name.  I guess somebody thought it sounded good.  End of story.

P.S.: NASA’s new Perseverance rover will be searching for life on Mars, but as a little side experiment Perseverance is also carrying a small sample of Orthofabric, along with samples of other commonly used spacesuit materials.  NASA wants to see how well these spacesuit materials hold up in the windy and dusty Martian environment.

Sciency Words: How Words Change

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 9 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we talk about those highly specialized words scientists use.  Words like:

I thought we’d do something a little different today and talk about some linguistic terms.  Linguistics is a science too, right?  Right.  So let’s go!

  • Semantic Generalization: a process of linguistic change where a word with some specific meaning ends up having a more general meaning.  My favorite example is the word “escape,” which originally meant “to get out of your clothes” (ex-cape) but has since generalized to mean getting out of all sorts of things.
  • Semantic Narrowing: a process of linguistic change where a word with a general meaning comes to mean something more specific.  A good example is the word “meat,” which used to refer to food in general but now refers specifically to food that comes from animal flesh.
  • Amelioration: a process of linguistic change where a word with a negative meaning or connotation comes to have a more positive meaning or connotation.  An example of amelioration that I’ve witnessed in my own lifetime is the word “geek.”  Geeks are cool now.  We didn’t used to be.
  • Pejoration: a process of linguistic change where a word with a positive meaning or connotation becomes more negative.  A great example is the word “awful.”  Originally, awful meant “worthy of awe.”  But if something’s worthy of awe, it could also be worthy of fear, and that no doubt contributed to the negative meaning we know today.

When I’m researching the etymologies of scientific terms, these four linguistic processes—generalization, narrowing, amelioration, and pejoration—come up a lot.  So much so that I thought I should do a post about them.  Don’t be surprised if I link back to this post in future Sciency Words posts!

Sciency Words: Perseverance

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome back to Sciency Words, an ongoing series here on Planet Pailly where we talk about science or science-related terms.  Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:

PERSEVERANCE

Mars rovers are among the most advanced pieces of technology we humans have ever produced.  And by a longstanding tradition dating back to the Sojourner rover in 1997, the official names for NASA’s Mars rovers are chosen by school children.

The Perseverance rover, currently on route to Mars, was named by 7th grader Alex Mather.  He won an essay contest.  Here’s a video of Mather reading his essay, followed by a quick Q and A session with some NASA officials.

You know, after listening to Mather’s essay, I have to agree.  Perseverance is the right name for our newest Mars rover.  It’s even more right of a name now than it was back in March, when the name was announced.

Things are scary here on Earth.  So many people are suffering.  So many people are struggling.  So many lives are being needlessly lost.  But I do believe, as Mather says in his essay, that perseverance is our most important quality as a species.  In the end, humanity will persevere.