Jeff Wise – Page 6 – science journalism

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 7: Frequency

On March 24, 2014, the Malaysian Prime minister made a shocking announcement: using a new kind of mathematical analysis, scientists at the British satellite communications company Inmarsat had determined conclusively that MH370 had flown into a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean. Because there are no islands in the area, there was no possibility that anyone on the plane could have survived. Therefore, all 239 passengers and crew must be dead. It was a stunningly sweeping conclusion to reach based entirely on a kind of mathematics that no one in the outside world knew the details of. But was it correct?

Up until that time it had seemed to me that the plane more likely went north. It seemed implausible that someone sophisticated and motivated enough to steal a plane so aggressively would do it just to die a protracted death. In fact I’d written two articles for Slate making that case. At the time, most people already thought the plane probably went south, so my editor had only let me write the articles after I’d promised that I would write an apology article if I turned out to be wrong. I thought it was worth it, so I said yes.

New York: How Long Can Gaza Survive Without Water?

On Wednesday, President Biden announced Israel would not block some humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip via Egypt, partially reversing a two-week-old ban put into place after the Hamas attack on October 7. Human-rights experts said the food, medicine, and water will do little to mitigate the looming humanitarian disaster. The most acute form of deprivation is safe drinking water, which threatens the lives of over 2 million people.

That’s because the infrastructure to distribute water was in a critical state even before the current crisis. The decades-long conflict between Israel and Hamas has denied the Gaza Strip of the resources to invest in a robust water system. “The baseline was already quite limited,” says Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “So that even a step that might have been significant in the pre-October 7 context is going to be even more limited in terms of how much it helps the population.”

New York: Why NASA Wants Your UFO Videos

Last year, as the topic of UFOs was exploding back into the mainstream, NASA convened a panel of outside experts, the UAP Independent Study Team, to assess the unclassified evidence the government had collected. (UAP, for “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” is the government-approved euphemism for UFO.) The group was a science-nerd murderers’ row whose purpose was to help the space agency handle a subject that had long attracted conspiracy theories — but which was also grounds for legitimate questions, considering the unexplained objects people had been observing and recording with increasing frequency. Heading the 17-member panel was Dr. David Spergel, a longtime Princeton professor of astrophysics who in 2021 took over as president of the Simons Foundation, a $5 billion nonprofit that supports basic science research. The group held a public meeting to discuss its work in May and released its final report last month. Among its top-line findings was that it had found no evidence of extraterrestrial UFOs, but that more data would be needed to settle the matter conclusively — including data from civilians who capture unidentified phenomena. It was a circumspect conclusion that, predictably, did little to satisfy true believers on either side of the UAP divide.

Intelligencer spoke with Spergel at his office at the Simons Foundation’s building near Madison Square, where he discussed why NASA got involved in the hunt for UFOs, what the odds of finding aliens are, and whether David Duchovny really believes that the truth is out there.

Why did NASA want to get involved in UFOs?
This starts with the Navy starting to declassify a bunch of images. The most famous one is the “Tic Tac” [filmed by a U.S. Navy fighter off the coast of San Diego], which is about 20 years old now. You look at those incidents and you say, “There’s something weird going on we don’t understand.” Then, having delved into the incident a bit, you realize that you wish they collected better data. What we’re left with is hard to interpret. NASA is a scientific agency. It’s charged with investigating the unknown. And the head of NASA announced, “We’re going to weigh in on this.”

After looking at evidence declassified by the Pentagon’s UAP organization, AARO (“All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office”), the panel concluded that most reported UAPs were either balloons, drones, or airplanes. What does that tell you?
The number of drones that are up at any given moment is enormous — they’re just monitoring fires and gas pipelines and helping farmers monitor crops. There’s also a ton of balloons. It turns out that small amateur balloons below a certain size didn’t have to be reported to the FAA. There’s probably some regulatory cleanup needed to make sure that balloons at low altitudes are not a threat to pilots.

Behind the Scenes on “Deep Dive: MH370”

It’s been a lot of fun working with the multi-talented Andy Tarnoff putting together our new podcast “Deep Dive: MH370,” which breaks down step by step the technical clues behind aviation’s greatest mystery. Here’s a peek behind the scenes:

Deep Dive: MH370

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve launched a podcast to delve into the evidence underpinning the greatest (and, I’d argue, most important) aviation mystery of all time. Andy Tarnoff and I are steadily working through the disappearance, deciphering what happened step-by-step. We’re currently on our third episode, which is the first to be both a video and an audio podcast. You can find all the episodes on our show page.

New York: F35 Fighters Are Supposed to Disappear — Just Not Like This

The U.S. Marine Corps suffered a major embarrassment yesterday when one of the $75 million top-of-the-line fighters, designed to be virtually undetectable to enemy radar, kept flying after its pilot punched out during a “mishap” Sunday afternoon. Evidently whatever had gone wrong wasn’t as bad as the pilot had feared, because the plane kept on flying on autopilot for several more hours — but to where, exactly, the Marines didn’t know, the F-35’s stealth capabilities in this context being a positive hindrance. Search planes flew grid patterns over South Carolina Monday as Joint Base Charleston put out an appeal to the public asking for “any information that may help our recovery teams.” Eventually, the wreckage was located Monday evening in a wooded area about 80 miles north of the base.

This was not the first time an F35 has been lost, in either sense of the word. In 2019, a Japanese F-35 vanished off the coast of Honshu during a training flight; pieces of debris and the pilot’s body were located, but the plane itself was never found. Last January, a U.S. Navy F-35 slid off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson after a botched landing and sank to the bottom. A month later it was successfully recovered from a depth of 12,400 feet. In 2018, the U.S. grounded the entire fleet after an earlier crash in South Carolina. All told, at least half a dozen F-35s have been destroyed in various mishaps, with others severely damaged but repairable.

[Here’s video of a pilot ejecting from an F35 at low altitude shortly before it crashed in Forth Worth, Texas last December]

New York: In Russia, No One Is Safe in the Air

The apparent downing of the business jet carrying Wagner chief Evgeniy Prigozhin delivered a suitably brutal end to one of Putin’s most ruthless and effective deputies. It also underlined the extent to which Russia has been willing to set aside the niceties of aviation safety in the raw exercise of power.

Throughout the rest of the world, civil aviation is sacrosanct, a highly protected and regulated industry bound by international treaties enforced by powerful agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency in the EU. Passenger safety is paramount. As a result, fatal accidents are exceedingly rare: The United State hasn’t had a fatal crash since 2009.

In 1978, the Soviet Union shot down an off-course Korean Air Lines 707, forcing it to crash-land on a frozen lake with the loss of two of the passengers and crew. Five years later, it shot down another off-course Korean Air Lines airliner over the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 aboard. In both cases, Soviet officials claimed that they were acting in self-defense, yet in both fighter jets had approached close enough to their targets to see that they were civilian airliners.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, its successor state, the Russian Federation, modernized its civilian aircraft fleet, and for a time safety improved. But after former KGB agent Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, the Kremlin gradually returned to its old ways. In 2014, as a Russia-backed insurgency raged in the eastern part of Ukraine, a regular Russian army anti-aircraft unit shot down a Malaysian Airlines 777 en route from the Netherlands to Malaysia as it neared the border between Ukraine and Russia. All 298 passengers and crew were killed. To this day, it remains unclear why the plane was shot down, but in the aftermath Ukraine halted its air-force attacks on Russian ground units and its counteroffensive against the invaders stalled.

New York: The Floating Speck That Promised to Change the World

The video is subtle. A small, regular chip of stonelike material as wide as the end of a ballpoint pen rests on a flat metal surface. But it’s not resting, exactly: While one end touches the metal, the other end floats above the surface, and when pushed it bobs like a cork. It’s levitating.

If the physical scale of the phenomenon was small, the response by science enthusiasts was anything but. “Today might have seen the biggest physics discovery of my lifetime. I don’t think people fully grasp the implications,” a former Princeton physics undergraduate named Alex Kaplan tweeted. The tweet has since been viewed 30 million times.

The video was attached to one of a pair of papers published by a team of researchers from South Korea on July 22 on the Arxiv preprint server, a site where scientists can post papers that haven’t yet been through the peer-review vetting process. They described the results of experiments conducted with LK-99, a lab-made substance containing lead, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. (The name derives from the initials of its inventors and the year they created it.) The levitation could be explained by the Meissner effect, a characteristic of materials that are superconducting, meaning they carry electrical current without any resistance. The authors made no bones about what they thought they’d found, titling one of their reports “The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor.” This was no modest claim; scientists have spent decades searching for a substance that is superconducting under normal, day-to-day conditions, and finding one would have a revolutionary impact on a wide range of industries. “Our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind,” the authors concluded.

The story spread far and wide, from Twitter, Tik Tok, and Twitch to every mainstream publication. One of the science influencers touting LK-99’s incredible potential was San Francisco–based applied physicist Andrew Cote, who tweeted, “if successful LK-99 would be a watershed moment for humanity easily on-par with invention of the transistor.” His tweets, too, received millions of views.

As the news spread, so did optimism. For a time, one online betting market was posting better-than-even odds that the superconductor claims would pan out.

But would the findings prove replicable?

New York: Could Trump Get Tossed Off 2024’s Ballots?

Donald Trump’s indictment on charges relating to his attempt to overturn the election, which led to the January 6 insurrection, represents not just a major legal hazard for the former president but also a potential political risk. The Constitution states officeholders who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States are unable to hold office. Already, anti-Trump advocates plan to use the charges tying Trump to the coup attempt to get him removed from the 2024 ballot.

The two main groups behind the effort to bar Trump’s candidacy are Free Speech for the People, a nonprofit aimed at fighting corruption and political inequality, and the watchdog organization Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Both are likely to start filing multiple challenges in dozens of states this November after states have set their primary rules. “We are focused on bringing the strongest case possible against Donald Trump,” says Donald Sherman, CREW’s senior vice-president and chief counsel. “This is not a messaging exercise. We are bringing a case to win.”

New York: The Airstocracy: Six things to know about flying with the superrich

It was all quite serene, at first. Out on a gated-off section of taxiway at Geneva Airport in May, a row of private jets (PJs, to fans) gleamed under the warm spring sun: Bombardier Challengers, Dassault Falcons, and Gulfstreams stood in a line beneath the distant verdure of the Alps. The display was part of the European Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition, a yearly confab that brings together manufacturers and service providers with their ultrarich customers in a politically neutral safe space. Velvet ropes and red carpets separated the curious onlookers from the VIPs being escorted aboard to tour the cabins and cockpits with swiveling leather club chairs, walnut veneer, and, in at least one case, a stateroom with an extra-long seat belt stretching across a full-size bed. The vibe was discreet, calm, befitting an environment designed to cosset the fortunate as they wafted through the upper reaches of the stratosphere.

Then, a hubbub of shouting and a rumble of footsteps. A hundred young climate protesters wearing orange vests like airport workers had broken through the fences and were racing toward the aircraft, juking past the employees who were trying to fend them off. Not all the manufacturers’ employees fought with equal vigor. “You really found out where people’s loyalties lay,” one told me later. “Some ran forward, and some cowered.” Amid the confusion, a few protesters managed to handcuff themselves to some of the planes’ landing gear, where they chanted and held signs reading “Private Jets Burn Our Future” and “Fuel Inequality.” In the end, police hauled off the protesters, and the trade show went on, albeit with a slightly shaky, post-traumatic skittishness.

The skirmish encapsulated the tensions that have begun to grip private aviation. At a time when income inequality has reached dizzying extremes, there has never been so much money pouring into an industry that’s become a byword for extreme luxury, nor has flying private enjoyed so much cultural resonance: stealing scenes in Succession and BlackBerry, infiltrating news headlines about Supreme Court justices, inspiring rap lyrics, and obsessing thirsty TikTokers. At the same time, it’s come under withering attack as a proxy for the self-destructive obliviousness of the megarich and become a symbol of how unfair and unsustainable their privilege is. With regulations tightening in several European countries and pressure building for more, it’s entirely possible that private flying’s sudden cultural ascendancy could help pave the way for its ultimate demise.