March 06, 2019

Good Morning,

Scientists, after research, have come to the conclusion that deflecting a larger asteroid from hit the Earth's surface will be much harder than they anticipated. Better get on it science!

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Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Deflecting an asteroid will be harder than scientists thought --*

According to new asteroid collision models designed by scientists at Johns Hopkins University, deflecting a large rock headed for Earth will be harder than previously thought.

Using the most up-to-date findings on rock fracturing, researchers developed computer models to more accurately simulate asteroid collisions.

"Our question was, how much energy does it take to actually destroy an asteroid and break it into pieces?" Charles El Mir, a mechanical engineer at Johns Hopkins, said in a news release.

The results, detailed this week in the journal Icarus, suggest the task is quite difficult.

"We used to believe that the larger the object, the more easily it would break, because bigger objects are more likely to have flaws," El Mir said. "Our findings, however, show that asteroids are stronger than we used to think and require more energy to be completely shattered."

Scientists used small rocks in lab experiments to study asteroid collisions, but accurately scaling the dynamics of violent space rock collisions has proven difficult. Nearly two decades ago, researchers developed collision models to measure the effects of a rock's mass, temperature, and material brittleness on its potential to fracture.

The first high-speed rock collision simulations suggested an asteroid 15 miles across could be easily destroyed by an asteroid measuring just a half-mile in diameter traveling at 180 miles per hour.

Over the last decade, scientists have slowly made improvements to asteroid collision models by accounting for more detailed rock fracturing processes ignored by the earliest simulations.

For example, the first asteroid collision models failed to accurately account for the slow speeds at which cracks in asteroids develop.

For the newest study, scientists decided to divide the model into two phases. Phase one modeled the immediate fracturing that happens in the wake of a collision -- the processes that play in a matter of seconds. The second phase simulated the gravitational re-accumulation process that happens over the course of several hours or days.

The first phase of the updated model showed a large asteroid is not destroyed by a much smaller asteroid. Instead, millions of cracks form throughout, the core fractures and a crater is left behind. During phase two, the fractured core exerts a strong gravitational pull on the smaller pieces of debris and shrapnel broken during the impact.

Because the asteroid did not crack completely during phase one, the space rock retained significant strength.

If scientists are going to develop an asteroid deflection strategy that can actually work, they need to know how much force it really takes to destroy or deflect one. The latest study -- published in the newest issue of the journal Icarus -- showed it's more force than was originally thought.

"We are impacted fairly often by small asteroids, such as in the Chelyabinsk event a few years ago," said K.T. Ramesh, director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute. "It is only a matter of time before these questions go from being academic to defining our response to a major threat. We need to have a good idea of what we should do when that time comes -- and scientific efforts like this one are critical to help us make those decisions."

*-- Electronic nose better at sniffing out disease-carrying dogs in Brazil --*

Scientists have developed a new, more accurate electronic nose designed to sniff out dogs carrying Leishmaniasis, a deadly disease that kills some 3,500 people in Brazil every year.

Dogs carry the parasite that causes the disease in humans. Sand flies can spread the disease from dogs to humans. Any dog found to carry the parasite must be put down to prevent the spread of the deadly illness.

Because the new electronic nose, or volatile organic chemical analyzer, is 95 percent accurate, researchers hope fewer dogs will be unnecessarily euthanized.

"We collect some hair from the dog and test it in our kit which we call an electronic nose. This can sniff the odor of the hair and, it can tell if the dog is infected or not," Gordon Hamilton, professor of medical entomology and vector control at Lancaster University in England, said in a news release.

The electronic nose uses spectroscopic imaging to identify the chemical patterns produced by a sample's volatile compounds. The device's computer processing analyzes the spectral signatures for patterns linked to an infection.

In addition to preventing false positives, the more accurate electronic nose can help Brazilian officials detect infected dogs earlier.

"It's important that our approach can detect the parasite even if the dog looks healthy. It's easy to spot a sick dog, the problem are the dogs which look well but aren't," Hamilton said.

There is currently no vaccine for Leishmaniasis, but infections can be treated with drugs. Infected humans typically present with skin lesions and ulcers, fever, low red blood cells and an enlarged spleen and liver.

Researchers described their electronic nose in a new paper published this week in the journal BioRxiv. Hamilton and his colleagues hope to eventually train the electronic nose to detect other tropical disease, including malaria, trypanosomiasis and Chaga's disease.

Scientists in the United States and elsewhere are working to improve the sensitivity, accuracy and cost-effectiveness of electronic nose technology, with the hope that it could be more widely adopted by the healthcare field and used to remotely diagnose a range of diseases, from the flu to diabetes.