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Another TRAPPIST-1 Habitability Study

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 03 2018, @03:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the earth-2.0 dept.

takyon writes:

A study has found that the two outermost TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets are the most likely to be able to retain their atmospheres:

The last thing the planets around the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 need is abundant sunshine. Active eruptions and flares from the star would wreak havoc on the rocky planets in orbit. But fortunately, the outer planets might be safe from this barrage of high-energy space weather.

According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences [DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1708010115] [DX], the outer planets of the system could cling on to their atmospheres. This finding is despite previous studies showing that TRAPPIST-1 might be so active that it blows away planetary atmospheres.

[...] The new results show that while all seven planets could retain their atmosphere, the more likely scenario is that the outermost two, -1g and -1h, have the best odds (and -1e and -1f have a weaker chance.)

This could be resolved by JWST observations.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 03 2018, @09:17PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Wednesday January 03 2018, @09:17PM (#617351) Journal

    The thing that gives primates an edge is a mutation that prevents neuron size from scaling up with body size (as is normal for all cells), so that primates with bigger brains have more neurons and are thus more intelligent, rather than just having bigger neurons, as its the case with basically all other animals. (Also the reason that brain/body size ratios make a decent approximation of intelligence between species, but only among non-primates).

    There are more neurons in elephant brains [wikipedia.org] than human [wikipedia.org] (though they are far from dumb).

    I think the bigger factors are brain structures devoted to complex cognition as opposed to say, movement. Also differences in neuron types, where bigger can in fact be better. For example, a study in which larger human astrocytes were grown in mice brains [newscientist.com]:

    Goldman’s team extracted immature glial cells from donated human fetuses. They injected them into mouse pups where they developed into astrocytes, a star-shaped type of glial cell.

    Within a year, the mouse glial cells had been completely usurped by the human interlopers. The 300,000 human cells each mouse received multiplied until they numbered 12 million, displacing the native cells.

    “We could see the human cells taking over the whole space,” says Goldman. “It seemed like the mouse counterparts were fleeing to the margins.”

    Astrocytes are vital for conscious thought, because they help to strengthen the connections between neurons, called synapses. Their tendrils (see image) are involved in coordinating the transmission of electrical signals across synapses.

    Human astrocytes are 10 to 20 times the size of mouse astrocytes and carry 100 times as many tendrils. This means they can coordinate all the neural signals in an area far more adeptly than mouse astrocytes can. “It’s like ramping up the power of your computer,” says Goldman.

    A battery of standard tests for mouse memory and cognition showed that the mice with human astrocytes are much smarter than their mousy peers.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 03 2018, @09:50PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday January 03 2018, @09:50PM (#617370)

    Hmm, I didn't realize that. Interesting - certainly they are extremely intelligent creatures whose intelligence we are only beginning to seriously research.

    And certainly brain structure and neuron types play an important role as well in determining how that processing power gets put to work. I suppose what non-scaling neurons really allowed was for a creature as intelligent as a human, at a scale considerably smaller than an elephant.