We might be wrong about how children understand the minds of others at a young age

There's a chance we're overestimating how much children understand about the minds of others – in fact, we might be expecting too much of kids at too young an age.

For decades now, psychologists have largely agreed that a human child acquires a 'theory of mind' during preschool. Experiments indicate that by age five, most children will generally understand other people are psychological beings with their own desires, intentions, perceptions, and beliefs, both true and false.

Experiments on kids' comprehension of false beliefs in others have been conducted since the 1980s with what's widely known as the Sally-Anne test.

In a typical example, one character (let's name him Maxi) puts a chocolate in a blue box; then, he leaves the room and his mother enters. The observing child watches as the mother takes Maxi's chocolate out of the blue box and puts it in a green box nearby. Then, the mother leaves the room and Maxi re-enters. The observing child is then asked to predict which box Maxi is going to open to look for his chocolate.

For decades, this type of experiment has been repeated over and over, and the findings suggest 90 percent of preschoolers think Maxi is going to open the blue box. Preschoolers seem to know that Maxi is holding a false belief based on what he has seen, as Maxi never witnessed his mother move the chocolate.

But what if we have been misinterpreting these results all along? New data from a decade's worth of false- and true-belief studies in Phoenix, Arizona, conducted among 580 children aged 4 to 7 years, have now challenged the long-held view of many developmental psychologists.

When a third red box is added to the experiment, the results change quite a lot. Researchers have found preschoolers are ultimately torn over which box Maxi will choose, splitting their choice 50/50 between red and blue.

"When there are only two locations, 4- and 5-year-old children can answer correctly without truly understanding that Maxi has a false belief about the location of the chocolate bar," explains psychologist William Fabricius from Arizona State University.

"Adding a third location results in them guessing at chance between the two empty locations."

Preschoolers appear to understand that Maxi does not know the chocolate is in the green box, because he did not see his mother put it there. As far as they are concerned, that leaves the red box or the blue box as Maxi's inevitable 'wrong choice'.

The authors call this thinking perceptual access reasoning, or PAR. While a child understands that seeing leads to knowing, they do not incorporate the memory of Maxi putting the chocolate in the blue box into their answer.

"When there is only one empty location (the blue box), children answer correctly by default," the psychologists explain.

"When there are two empty locations (blue and red boxes), they guess."

And guessing is not equivalent to a deeper understanding of Maxi's motives. No matter whether Maxi holds a false or true belief, new experiments have shown 4- or 5-year-olds struggle to understand his thought process.

For instance, when Maxi leaves the room and his mother doesn't move the chocolate bar, children of preschool age tend to think Maxi will look in the green box, not the blue box where he left the chocolate.

"Perceptual access reasoning users have an immature concept of knowing as tied to the present situation, and do not yet understand that people have memories that persist across situation," explains Fabricius.

"They do not understand that Maxi might remember putting the chocolate bar into the blue box. The evidence from this series of experiments is consistent that children do not understand mental representation until they are 6 or 7 years old."

False-belief studies are considered a gold standard test for theory of mind, but these new experiments suggest these studies might only measure PAR.

If the authors are right and PAR is a precursor to a properly developed theory of mind, then we need to readjust our expectations of preschoolers – and even infants and toddlers – who are said to demonstrate abilities associated with a theory of mind. 

Sharing a toy, for instance, requires a child to understand another kid's desires and their current state of mind. So, when a preschooler takes another child's toy, they might not actually understand why the other kid starts to cry.

If an educator knows this, they can rely on a child's capacity for PAR to help each kid understand where the other is coming from.

"We say to the child who is crying, 'I can see you are upset and saw that Johnny took the toy away from you. Is that why you are upset?'" explains Anne Kupfer, director of ASU's Child Study Lab (CSL).

"We then role model and ask the crying child to tell Johnny why they are upset, because he took their toy. Then we direct Johnny to look at the sad child's face and say, 'She just told you she is upset. Why is she upset?' Johnny can then answer, 'Because I took her toy'."

The authors behind the new experiments acknowledge their results will need to be replicated, and further studies will need to explore alternative explanations to PAR.

That said, the pattern of findings has raised important questions about how we have been interpreting one of the most famous experiments in developmental psychology.

The study was published in Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

#Humans | https://sciencespies.com/humans/we-might-be-wrong-about-how-children-understand-the-minds-of-others-at-a-young-age/

This Molecule Could Be the Key to Understanding Why Concussions Have Such Long-Term Effects

Denver Bronco player David Bruton grabs his head on the field after a reported concussion. Many patients with such head injuries suffer symptoms months after their diagnosis, even though their brains look healthy on CT scans.
Doug Pensinger / Getty Images

Imagine you fall down the stairs in your house and bang your head. Or perhaps you hit your noggin during a car accident. Or maybe you are football player who has just taken yet another blow to the head. You are diagnosed with a mild or a severe concussion, and you end up in a hospital and even an ICU.

Eventually your injury heals weeks later, or so it seems, because your CT scans look clear, and you go on with your life. But in a few years, strange things start to happen. Bright lights and loud noises begin to bother you. You have trouble sleeping. You can’t concentrate, can’t keep up with your daily routine and your work performance plummets. That’s because deep within your brain, in the areas where the imaging technology can’t see, that old injury never healed. Instead, it became a chronic inflammatory process that will eventually damage your brain tissues, explains a study published this month in Science.

According to a 2018 study in the Journal of Neurosurgery, about 69 million individuals around the world suffer from traumatic brain injury every year. Geoffrey T. Manley, a trauma neurosurgeon at San Francisco General Hospital and professor of neurosurgery at the University of California San Francisco who wasn’t involved in the study, sees patients every week who seem to recover, only to suffer from debilitating symptoms later that develop as a consequence of the initial injury. Over time, this slow-brewing process can trigger cognitive impairments, sleep disturbances from abnormal neuron firing and even epileptic spikes—short “electrical explosions" that don’t happen in healthy people. Manley says this process is very prominent in brain injury patients and is severely disabling. The inability to have a normal, healthy sleep is particularly detrimental. “Sleep disorders affect all aspects of your life,” he says.

Neuroscientists had known for years that brain injuries can linger, but the underlying molecular mechanisms weren’t fully clear. They don’t have any therapies to stop these secondary injuries from occurring. “I have no treatment for traumatic brain injury other than symptomatic relief, or medication for seizures once patients develop them,” Manley says. However, epilepsy drugs often have such profound side effects that people don’t want to take them. “So we are really, really desperate for anything,” he says.

Now, the new study sheds some light into the brain areas where CT scans can’t see and where the inflammatory process takes hold. Led by Jeanne Paz, who studies neurological diseases at Gladstone Institutes, the study identifies that a specific molecule, named C1q, is present in certain brain areas at unusually high levels for months after the initial trauma. The study also describes the team’s efforts—so far only done in mice—to show that a drug prevents the inflammation from setting in.

Most brain traumas affect the cerebral cortex, which sits right underneath the skull, absorbing the impact. But Paz’s team found that the ill effects can propagate to the thalamus—a small area located near the brain’s center responsible for processing sensory input. The constant communication between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex is what enables us to make intelligent decisions—the thalamus processes the input and the cortex decides what to do. For example, if you’re talking on the phone and your toddler suddenly lets out a loud scream, you know you must stop the conversation and attend to the child. The thalamus processes the sounds from the conversation and the toddler, the cortex decides what’s important.

As part of the study, scientists examined human brain tissues obtained from autopsies of patients who ultimately died from their head trauma. The team found that the C1q molecules were present in the diseased patients’ thalamus for over a week after they were originally hurt. “We were surprised to see such high levels of this molecule in the brain region that wasn’t even affected by the initial injury,” says Paz. “Our hypothesis is—it’s because the thalamus is very closely connected to the cortex and the two constantly talk to each other.” This constant talk and coordination generates a certain rhythmic activity in the brain that is important for attention, consciousness and sleep. So when the cerebral cortex is hurt, the communication between the two is disrupted, and some neurons within the thalamus die. As a result, the brain’s cellular cleanup crew shows up.

Called microglia, these cleanup cells remove damaged neurons and fight infections. To do this, they release the C1q molecules, which, overall, play a very important role in brain health. C1q trims synapses—the points of junction between neurons—to avoid having too many of the connectors. C1q promotes brain development and helps humans forget memories, which is necessary for storing new memories. When things go as normal, C1q trims synapses as it should. When injuries happen and neurons die, C1q helps clean them, but instead of stopping, it continues to trim what it shouldn’t trim anymore. “So C1q can be both good and bad,” Paz says.

Normally, in the adult person’s thalamus, no C1q is present, she says. Researchers believe that in some cases, the microglia cells just keep releasing the molecule within the thalamus, making the process chronic. “We wanted to know what makes the process chronic and how we can interrupt it,” Paz says. So her team tried treating brain-injured mice with a potential therapeutic, shortly after the trauma and before long-term symptoms appear.

Paz worked with collaborators at Annexon Biosciences, a pharmaceutical company that is developing and testing an antibody therapeutic that can block the activity of the C1q molecule. The antibody was initially designed to treat Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which is also linked to the aberrant activity of overzealous C1q. Paz wanted to see if the drug would have beneficial effects in brain injury cases in mice.

The team treated brain-injured mice with antibody cocktails within 24 hours after injury and then did twice-weekly treatments for three weeks. That brought down the amount of the C1q molecule and prevented chronic inflammation and the loss of neurons in the critters’ thalamus. It also prevented the development of the epileptic spikes and restored their sleep. But when the researchers studied how mice genetically engineered to not have the C1q molecule dealt with trauma, their initial brain injury was much worse—they suffered much greater neuronal death in the cerebral cortex, where the blow struck. So ultimately, the C1q indeed lived up to its “good and bad” reputation.

The C1q molecule shouldn’t be blocked at the time of injury, because it seems to protect the brain and prevent cell death, Paz explains. But blocking the C1q shortly after the initial injury may reduce inflammation.

Manley describes the study as an important milestone in the brain trauma treatment paradigm. “It demonstrated that after the initial injury to the cortex, there is the secondary injury to the thalamus—you can see pathology evolving,” says Manley. But what’s really promising, he adds, is that an antibody drug can help remediate that secondary injury. Antibodies are drugs that do exactly what their name suggests—they work against the body’s proteins or molecules that have somehow gone rogue and are now causing harm rather than performing normal functions. Designed to bind to rogue molecules and disable them, antibodies have revolutionized how medics treat many diseases—neurological, autoimmune, cancer and most recently, Covid-19.

So far the C1q antibody has been tried only in mice, which means it is still at least a few years away from arriving to the brain trauma wards. The therapeutic would have to be tested in human trials and approved by the FDA first. But this is an important step in right direction, Manley says, because the currently available meds can’t prevent the injury from progressing. “So when I see a paper that not only explains the mechanism that generates the pathology I see in my patients every day, but says that here is a monoclonal antibody that apparently suppresses this pathology, I find it very exciting,” Manley says. “We need better ways to treat people.”

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#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/this-molecule-could-be-the-key-to-understanding-why-concussions-have-such-long-term-effects/

Space Force says upcoming meeting with industry won’t be business as usual

The SWAC briefing Oct. 27 not be about contract opportunities but rather a strategic-level discussion about what capabilities the Space Force will need in the coming decades

WASHINGTON — When Space Force officials meet with defense contractors later this month they will share intelligence about threats to U.S. satellites at an unusual level of detail. 

“The people that are going to participate are going to probably get the largest trove of threat models that have ever been released, ever,” Andrew Cox, the director of the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, said Oct. 1 on a webcast hosted by National Security Space Association.

Cox leads the SWAC, a new Space Force organization focused on wargaming and analysis. It will host its first “business fair” Oct. 27 with representatives from the space and defense industry. 

The classified discussion will focus on early-warning satellites and how to make future systems more resistant to anti-satellite weapons. The Space Force also has to start planning the next generation of space sensors to defend the United States and allies against Chinese hypersonic weapons.

This will not be a traditional briefing about contract opportunities, Cox said. It’s an attempt to bring the private sector into early deliberations on what capabilities the Space Force will need in the coming years. 

“I have never seen an instance where we’ve put this level of work into detailed threat models that industry will now have in their hands to help them understand what kind of threats and targets we need to worry about for the foreseeable future,” he said. 

The models the Space Force will share with contractors are based on “validated threat data” from DoD and intelligence agencies, said Cox. These models however don’t provide all the answers the Space Force needs, he said. “Some of those models often stop where the intelligence record ends. And we have to fill in the holes with good engineering judgment. So we’ll have a robust conversation about this.”

“We’ll talk about where these models depart the record, and where we’re having to fill in the puzzle pieces with sound engineering judgment,” Cox said. 

Military briefings to industry typically are attended by business development executives but for this one the Space Force is encouraging companies to send strategists and technical experts. 

The chief of space operations of the Space Force Gen. John “Jay” Raymond will kick off the briefing with his “strategic perspective,” Cox said. “I think he would like to see similarly strategic minded folks from these companies.”

Why? “Because we’re going to be talking about what this industry actually needs to look like, how we engage with industry long before we have a requirement, long before we have a program put in place,” Cox said.

Strategies that will inform industry investment portfolios “I think is the kind of conversation we hope to have,” he said. 

“We would also like to have people there that are technically sound in this particular mission area: system engineers, senior technical leads from your corporations, because we are going to geek out a little bit, and show you some of these detailed models that we’ve been working on,” Cox added. “I think it would be good to have folks there that can appreciate the level of information we plan to exchange.”

Cox said at least 110 companies have registered to attend, a mix of traditional defense contractors and new space companies. The deadline to sign up is Oct. 12.

“We wanted to reach out to a large segment of industry,” he said. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, some attendees wil meet at a classified facility in Chantilly, Virginia, and others in Colorado Springs. Both will be connected via secure video-teleconferencing.

#Space | https://sciencespies.com/space/space-force-says-upcoming-meeting-with-industry-wont-be-business-as-usual/

Two decades of data show that Earth is 'dimming' as the planet warms up

Earth is getting dimmer, researchers have found, and climate change is likely to blame. As the oceans get hotter, they appear to be generating fewer bright clouds, which means less sunlight is reflected back into space – and that warms up the planet even more.

Researchers measured the reflectance or albedo of Earth by observing the earthshine that illuminates the Moon. Nearly 20 years of data, from 1998 to 2017, was collected to inform the results of the study.

The measurements showed that Earth is now reflecting about half a watt less light per square meter compared to 1998, the equivalent of a 0.5 percent decrease in Earth's reflectance. In total, our planet reflects about 30 percent of the sunlight that reaches it.

"The albedo drop was such a surprise to us when we analyzed the last three years of data after 17 years of nearly flat albedo," says theoretical physicist Philip Goode from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The brightness of Earth depends on both the amount of sunlight reaching it and the reflectiveness of the planet. This study showed the two factors were not in tandem, so something on Earth is causing the dimming, especially in recent years.

Satellite measurements looked at by the research team suggest that a reduction in bright, reflective, low-lying clouds over the eastern Pacific Ocean has been a major contributor to the reduction in Earth's brightness shown in the data.

And it's all likely to be connected to climate change. In the same areas where bright clouds are thinning, ocean surface temperatures are rising, possibly caused by the reversal of a climatic condition called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

"[Earth's albedo] is an essential determinant of the earth's climate, since, in the broadest sense, changes in climate arise from the simultaneous evolution of the solar intensity, the Earth's albedo, and greenhouse insulation," write the researchers in their published paper.

Earthshine readings were taken from the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California, with about 1,500 nights of usable data gathered in total. Earthshine has been recorded on and off for almost 100 years and was first described by Leonardo da Vinci in the 16th century.

Clouds, water, ice, forests, deserts, and all the other types of land reflect sunlight differently, which is why researchers need large pools of data to draw conclusions from as Earth spins around. Human pollution can also affect the readings.

Now the researchers are calling for more comprehensive measurements to be taken over the coming years. It had been hoped that a warming planet might create a greater albedo, thus mitigating some of the warming – but it seems the opposite is happening.

"Stringent data quality standards were applied to generate monthly and annual means," conclude the researchers. "These vary significantly on monthly, annual, and decadal scales with the net being a gradual decline over the two decades, which accelerated in the most recent years."

The research has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

#Environment | https://sciencespies.com/environment/two-decades-of-data-show-that-earth-is-dimming-as-the-planet-warms-up/

Bigleaf maple decline tied to hotter, drier summers in Washington state, U.S.

As its name suggests, the bigleaf maple tree's massive leaves are perhaps its most distinctive quality. A native to the Pacific Northwest's wet westside forests, these towering trees can grow leaves up to 1.5 feet across -- the largest of any maple.

But since 2011, scientists, concerned hikers and residents have observed more stressed and dying bigleaf maple across urban and suburban neighborhoods as well as in forested areas. Often the leaves are the first to shrivel and die, eventually leaving some trees completely bare. While forest pathologists have ruled out several specific diseases, the overall cause of the tree's decline has stumped experts for years.

A new study led by the University of Washington, in collaboration with Washington Department of Natural Resources, has found that bigleaf maple die-off in Washington is linked to hotter, drier summers that predispose this species to decline. These conditions essentially weaken the tree's immune system, making it easier to succumb to other stressors and diseases. The findings were published Sept. 16 in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.

"These trees can tolerate a lot, but once you start throwing in other factors, particularly severe summer drought as in recent years, it stresses the trees and can lead to their death," said co-author Patrick Tobin, associate professor in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

In addition to warmer, drier weather, the researchers found that bigleaf maple are more likely to decline near roads and other development -- especially in hotter urban areas. Across multiple years and sites in Western Washington, they weren't able to find any single pest or pathogen responsible for the mass decline; rather, all signs point to climate change and human development as the drivers behind the regional die-off.

"Managing, protecting and utilizing our urban and wild ecosystems in the face of climate change and human population growth is and will continue to be one of the major challenges facing us," said lead author Jacob Betzen, a biological technician with the U.S. Forest Service who completed this work as a UW graduate student. "This research investigating bigleaf maple is one small piece of that larger puzzle."

From field sampling and lab work, the researchers found that bigleaf maple grew less in summers that were hot and dry, both in their overall mass as well as leaf size. One of the signature signs of distress, they found, was significantly smaller leaves. In drought conditions, trees use more energy trying to survive and defend themselves from diseases and other threats.

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"These results show that summer heat and drought impact the health of iconic tree species of Washington, like bigleaf maple, even in Western Washington, a region known for abundant precipitation. Health impacts to our forests and tree species are likely to continue as we have increased periods of drought each year," said co-author Amy Ramsey, an environmental planner and forest pathologist with Washington DNR.

For this study, the research team revisited a selection of sites around Western Washington where DNR in 2014 and 2015 had taken samples and performed testing on trees in decline. They also chose 36 roadside sites where maples were present. Finally, they randomly selected an additional 59 sites on public land across the region where bigleaf maple are known to exist. Across these randomly chosen sites, they found that nearly a quarter of the bigleaf maple trees showed signs of decline.

From each study site, they collected soil, leaves, stems and tree cores, which they analyzed in the lab. Tree cores allow scientists to learn about the age and growth rate of a tree -- as well as weather history at that location -- without having to cut it down.

From the analysis of the tree cores, the team found that the growth of bigleaf maple has varied significantly since 2011, and was especially lower in years with hotter, drier summers. They compared this growth to that of Douglas fir trees, which they also cored, and found their annual growth was consistent -- meaning that bigleaf maple are especially sensitive to dry, hot weather.

"For us, these analyses were a big piece of the puzzle," Tobin said. "This helped us determine that their decline is a recent phenomenon that is linked to weather conditions."

These findings will likely change the way foresters manage bigleaf maple in both urban and wild settings. This might mean planting the trees in different locations, watering more in urban areas or using seed stock better adapted to the projected future conditions of a site, Betzen said. In forests, it might mean a focus on keeping intact landscapes free from more urbanization.

Other co-authors are Gregory Ettl of the UW and Daniel Omdal of Washington DNR. This research was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture NIFA McIntire-Stennis Cooperative Forestry Program, Washington DNR and the David R.M. Scott Endowed Professorship in Forest Resources.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/bigleaf-maple-decline-tied-to-hotter-drier-summers-in-washington-state-u-s/

X-Ray Technology Reveals Marie Antoinette's Censored Secret Correspondence

An X-ray fluorescence scanner analyzes correspondence of Marie Antoinette and Fersen at France’s National Archives.
Centre de Recherche sur la Conservation, French National Museum of Natural History

“I will finish not without telling you my dear and loving friend that I love you madly and that I can never be a moment without adoring you.”

During the dangerous days of the French Revolution, in January 1792, Marie Antoinette, queen of France, closed a letter with these tender words. But that letter was not meant for her husband Louis XVI. Instead, her intimate friend and rumored lover Swedish count Axel von Fersen was the recipient. 

The pair’s relationship demanded discretion. So did political aspects of their correspondence. The letters were exchanged while the royal family was being held under house arrest by the revolutionaries controlling France. Both Marie Antoinette and Fersen were pulling political strings in the hopes of salvaging the Bourbon dynasty, or at least saving the royals' lives. For one or both of these reasons the few surviving letters between them are sprinkled with passages, like the one above, that have been blotted out by some unknown censor. By blacking over words and entire lines with dark ink someone meant to hide them forever from history and they succeeded for two centuries—until now.

Modern technology has foiled some of the censor’s efforts. Anne Michelin, a physical chemist at the French National Museum of Natural History and colleagues have used old fashioned hard work and new techniques that plumb the varied composition of different inks to uncover many redacted parts of this famed correspondence. In doing so they believe they’ve also revealed who wielded the heavy-handed pen. The mystery censor appears to have been Fersen himself. Michelin’s study, published today in Science Advances, also demonstrates a methodology that may recover countless historical correspondences, official papers and drawings—and it might even help to analyze fossils.

A side-by-side comparison shows an original letter with redactions (left) and the same letter examined using a combination of X-ray fluorescence imaging and data processing (right).


Centre de Recherche sur la Conservation, French National Museum of Natural History

Between June 1791 and August 1792 the French royal family lived under a form of house arrest at the Tuileries Palace in Paris while Fersen was abroad. Their confinement followed a disastrous failed attempt to escape Paris orchestrated in large part by Fersen. The royals hoped to rally supporters in rural France and seize power from the revolutionaries. Instead, the family’s flight and arrest at Varennes turned popular opinion decidedly against them and opened them to charges of treason. During this period, while under heavy guard, Marie-Antoinette conducted a complicated correspondence with Fersen. Letters were delivered by intermediaries but also hidden by extravagant precautionary methods including invisible ink and codes that required complicated deciphering.

Marie-Antoinette even complained about the process to Fersen on November 2, 1791, writing “Farewell, I am getting tired of ciphering; this is not my usual occupation and I am always afraid of making mistakes.”

Secrecy was critical for several reasons and historians have long wondered who crossed out various parts of the text. The influential Fersen had fled France after his role in the failed escape was discovered. In Brussels, Vienna and elsewhere he desperately lobbied to influence foreign powers, including relatives of the royals, who might help to restore them to the throne or otherwise aid their plight. Such political intriguing, mentioned in the letters, would have been considered a deadly serious crime by the revolutionaries.

A portrait of Marie Antoinette painted by Vigée-Le Brun.


Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Other sections had a different reason for being hidden. They are evidence of a very personal correspondence between the queen of France and a man who was not her husband.

Many of the letters written by Marie Antoinette during this period were destroyed. But Fersen kept some letters received from the queen, as well as copies of those he wrote to her. They were held by several generations of his family before finally being purchased by the French Historical Archives in 1982. During all that time the redactions puzzled those who read these letters.

Although they look the same to the eye, inks from the late 18th century weren’t uniform. Michelin’s team used X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a nondestructive analysis, to delve into their chemical composition. When excited by X-rays, elements produce unique fluorescent ‘fingerprints.’ Using the technique, the researchers mapped the distribution and ratios of different elements in the inks of the original letter writers and of the unknown censor.

In 8 of the 15 redacted letters the scientists uncovered consistent differences between the inks of the original text and the redactions, with copper-to-iron and zinc-to-iron ratios being the most revealing. Mapping these elemental differences allowed researchers to distinguish between the two inks and made the redacted words more readable.

But that wasn’t always enough to reconstruct words. In harder to decipher sections the team employed data processing applications, using statistics to further sort out their findings. Once they’d identified the slightly different elemental compositions of the different inks, they trained algorithms to produce images that maximized those differences and thus made the text more legible.

All of the letters penned by Fersen also shared very similar ratios of ink elements, meaning they were written with the same ink. This revealed that some of the letters from Marie-Antoinette were actually copies of the originals, which were written by Fersen in that same ink. The same ink was also used by the mysterious censor, strongly suggesting that it was Fersen who chose to blot out sections of the correspondence forever. “The coincidence was too big!” Michelin explains. “In addition, on one letter, Fersen added a few words above a redacted passage (his handwriting was confirmed by a specialist) but with an ink of the same composition as the redaction ink used on this same letter.”

“It’s a remarkable work,” says physicist Uwe Bergmann at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wasn’t affiliated with the research and is an expert on X-ray imaging of ancient materials. "I think they were tenacious, and I think it will have an impact on people who use all kinds of imaging techniques and can learn from the application of these approaches to get exceptional results.”

Bergmann was part of a team that famously used X-ray technology to uncover once-lost and unreadable works of the legendary mathematician Archimedes.

The nature of Marie-Antionette and Fersen’s special relationship has been debated for more than two centuries and was a topic of conversation at the court. In historian Evelyn Farr’s book on their correspondence, I Love You Madly, she uncovered a letter written from Fersen friend Quintin Craufurd to British Prime Minister William Pitt. “This gentleman was Colonel of the Royal Suédois; was Her Most Christian Majesty's prime favourite; and is generally supposed to be the father of the present Dauphin,” Craufurd wrote.

Some have construed such comments as proof that the pair had a physical relationship, while others dismiss it as court gossip or even political slander. No smoking gun exists in the redacted comments; but there is definitely further evidence illustrating just how close the two star-crossed aristocrats really were. Their endearment was so strong that Fersen himself felt it prudent to blot out some of the more private terms of endearment including ‘beloved,’ ‘tender friend,’ and ‘adore.’

“The redacted passages are the most intimate passages of the correspondence,” Michelin explains. “Fersen probably wanted to keep this correspondence, important to him perhaps for sentimental reasons or political strategies, while protecting the queen's honor and perhaps his own.”

The team hypothesizes that Ferson removed what he felt were the most compromising passages, though he may not have completed the process through the entire folio of letters.

The process used to recover the redacted and once-lost texts could be in high demand. Archives around the world are stacked with diplomatic and political documents, notable letters and other pieces of history in which carefully redacted items might be revealed. Michelin notes that studies have already used the technique to delve beneath paintings and uncover the underlying drawings, or first versions, that would otherwise remain lost. And Bergmann’s group even teamed up with paleontologist Peter Lars Larson to study feather and bone chemistry in the Archaeopteryx, a key fossil on the lineage of dinosaurs and birds.

As for Marie-Antoinette and Fersen, we may never be absolutely certain how far their relationship went.

“Ultimately, in my opinion, I think it doesn’t really matter if their love was consummated,” says College of William & Mary historian Ronald Schechter, who is studying Marie Antoinette’s library and reading habits. “Even if it was consummated, they still lived with this level of frustration in not being able to see each other, and anxiety in worrying that they were both in danger. It’s not the kind of love story with a happy ending.”

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#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/x-ray-technology-reveals-marie-antoinettes-censored-secret-correspondence/

A new paper claims photosynthesis could be possible in the clouds of Venus

The putative detection of phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus raised the fascinating question of whether it could be of biological origin.

Given how inhospitable Venus appears to be to life as we know it, the question raised a furor. But scientists have now determined that the hellacious planet could indeed be habitable after all – aloft in the clouds, high above the scorching surface.

Specifically, the level of solar irradiation at specific altitudes is comparable to solar irradiation on Earth, meaning that airborne photosynthesizing microbes could conceivably survive at those altitudes. Moreover, the thick cloud layer would provide some protection against harmful ultraviolet radiation, and it's possible that the acidity in those clouds is less than predicted and within acceptable parameters for life.

"Together," the researchers wrote in their paper, "these photophysical and chemical considerations support a potential for phototrophy in Venus' clouds."

When it comes to habitability, Venus looks pretty unlikely. Conditions on the surface really are hellish. The planet is completely shrouded in a thick atmosphere made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide that rotates 60 times faster than the planet itself, producing insane winds.

The sky is filled with thick clouds of sulfuric acid, and its atmospheric pressure at 0 altitude is almost 100 times greater than Earth's. If that weren't bad enough, it's lander-meltingly hot, with an average surface temperature of 471 degrees Celsius (880 degrees Fahrenheit).

So when astronomers announced that they had detected phosphine gas in the planet's atmosphere last year, controversy ensued. That's because one of the explanations for its presence could be microorganisms.

Phosphine can be found here on Earth in very limited contexts, one of which is anaerobic, or low oxygen, ecosystems. It's found in swamps and sludges, where anaerobic microbes thrive; it's found in intestines and intestinal gas. Somehow, anaerobic microorganisms produce phosphine, and the clouds of Venus are anaerobic.

A biological origin is not the only explanation – a volcanic origin is also possible – but in order to assess the feasibility of a biological origin in the first place, a proper analysis of the habitability of Venus definitely wouldn't go astray.

So, led by biochemist Rakesh Mogul of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, a team of scientists set about conducting one. First, they examined the level of sunlight that can penetrate Venus's clouds. We have data from Russia's Venus expedition between 1967 and 1983; none of their probes survived long on the surface, but they did send back measurements they took of the clouds during their descents.

From these and other historic measurements, the researchers were able to calculate the light levels within the clouds, and determined that irradiances in Venus's middle and lower clouds are similar to those at Earth's surface, where photosynthetic life is abundant.

But light levels alone are insufficient. A study earlier this year found that there is simply not enough water activity in Venus' clouds to support life as we know it. But that might not be the case if the composition of Venus' clouds is not what we think it is. Current estimates place the concentration of sulfuric acid at 75 percent for the middle clouds and 98 percent for the lower clouds.

Mogul and his team revisited Venus data and determined that the signatures indicating sulfuric acid could also be caused by neutralized forms of sulfuric acid, like ammonium bisulfate. If this is the case, then there could be significantly more water activity – and significantly less acidity – in Venus' clouds than previous estimates suggest.

This is not to say that this is the case. The research is intended to establish that this is simply possible – which, in turn, opens pathways avenues for future research, including more detailed analysis of the Venusian atmosphere, to determine habitability.

"Our study provides tangible support for the potential for phototrophy and/or chemotrophy by microorganisms in Venus's clouds," Mogul said.

"The acidity and water activity levels potentially fall within an acceptable range for microbial growth on Earth, while the constant illumination with limited UV suggests that Venus's clouds could be hospitable for life. We believe that Venus's clouds would make a great target for habitability or life detection missions, like those currently planned for Mars and Europa."

The research has been published in Astrobiology.

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