Wanted: Lunar detectives to unravel the mysteries of the Moon! Crime to be solved: Mass extinctions on the Moon by meteorite impact!

The criteria and clues for identifying meteorite contamination are outlined to aid in the quest for more knowledge regarding the evolution of the Moon and the early Earth. The Warren and Wasson seven criteria for establishing the pristine nature of highland rocks are presented. Other topics covered include iron/nickel metals, monomict nature, and lunar glasses. The major conclusion is that pristinity should not be the primary consideration in the study of lunar rocks. The most important criterion to establish is whether or not the lunar sample contains more than one lunar rock type. Even if a sample is non-pristine, as long as only one lunar rock type is present, petrogenetic interpretation can still be carried out

The Apollo 17 mare basalts: Serenely sampling Taurus-Littrow

As we are all aware, the Apollo 17 mission marked the final manned lunar landing of the Apollo program. The lunar module (LM) landed approximately 0.7 km due east of Camelot Crater in the Taurus-Littrow region on the southwestern edge of Mare Serenitatis. Three extravehicular activities (EVA's) were performed, the first concentrating around the LM and including station 1 approximately 1.1 km south-southeast of the LM at the northwestern edge of Steno Crater. The second traversed approximately 8 km west of the LM to include stations 2, 3, 4, and 5, and the third EVA traversed approximately 4.5 km to the northwest of the LM to include stations 6, 7, 8, and 9. This final manned mission returned the largest quantity of lunar rock samples, 110.5 kg/243.7 lb, and included soils, breccias, highland samples, and mare basalts. This abstract concentrates upon the Apollo 17 mare basalt samples

Using Apollo 17 high-Ti mare basalts as windows to the lunar mantle

The Apollo 17 high-Ti mare basalts are derived from source regions containing plagioclase that was not retained in the residue. Ilmenite appears to remain as a residual phase, but plagioclase is exhausted. The open-system behavior of the type B2 basalts results in slightly higher Yb/Hf and La/Sm ratios. The nature of the added component is not clear, but may be a KREEP derivative or residue. The recognition of plagioclase in the source(s) of these basalts suggests that the location of the source region(s) would be more likely to be less than 150 km (i.e., closer to the plagioclase-rich crust), which would allow incorporation of plagioclase into the source through incomplete separation of crustal feldspar

Developing a Habitat Suitability Model for Welsh Lesser Horseshoe Bats

Lesser horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus hipposideros) are protected in the UK under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, having a threatened status. Habitat Suitability Models (HSM) offer a practical way to determine species-specific predictions on potential roost sites for bats, aiding in the protection and conservation of threatened species. Fuller, Shewring & Caryl (2018) present a novel HSM method for identifying roost sites for R. hipposideros in Wales, UK. This study aims to test the hypothesis that national-scale models are not appropriate for use in making accurate predictions at local levels, by recreating their HSM within Gower AONB, a region of Wales ~1% the size of the whole of Wales. The difference in environmental variables for two pseudo-absence methods (random and building) across Wales and Gower AONB were assessed, and the accuracy of both was investigated using known bat roost presences, provided by the Bat Conservation Trust. Additionally, a third ensemble model was assembled from both pseudo-absence methods and assessed. Sites within Gower AONB with high bat roost presence probability were then identified. This studies’ assessments generally supported the stated hypothesis, with Gower AONB having significantly different environmental structure to the whole of Wales, and despite predictive performance being ‘fair’ for both pseudo-absence methods (0.782 for building pseudo-absences and 0.787 for random pseudo-absences) and the ensemble model (0.700), accuracy was low throughout (known bat presences that should have probabilities of 1.00 instead had probabilities of 0.548 [building pseudo-absences, 0.57 [random pseudo-absences], and 0.571 [ensemble model]). Although Fuller, Shewring & Caryl’s HSM have practical use in determining likely roost sites of R. hipposideros across Wales, their use across Gower AONB is diminished by the variable environment of the regions being investigated. These findings suggest that applying large-scale HSM’s to smaller-scale regions is not effective for identifying potential roost sites for R. hipposideros and may potentially serve as a cautionary case study for other species-specific HSM’s. However, given that the random pseudo-absence model had ‘fair’ predictive performance, and was able to correctly predict bat roost presences more than half the time, it was used to provide three sites within Gower AONB of highest probability. These three sites would be used to feed into R. hipposideros conservation by providing them to the Bat Conservation Trust for observation. Should these sites prove to include roost sites for R. hipposideros, it would suggest the uses of such HSM’s across smaller-scale regions still have some merit for other species with large-scale HSM’s available

A Supersymmetric Twin Higgs

We present a supersymmetric realization of the twin Higgs mechanism, which cancels off all contributions to the Higgs mass generated above a scale f. Radiative corrections induced by the top quark sector lead to a breaking of the twin sector electroweak symmetry at a scale f ~ TeV. In our sector, below the scale f, these radiative corrections from the top quark are present but greatly weakened, naturally allowing a Z boson mass an order of magnitude below f, even with a top squark mass of order 1 TeV and a messenger scale near the Planck mass. A sufficient quartic interaction for our Higgs boson arises from the usual gauge contribution together with a radiative contribution from a heavy top squark. The mechanism requires the presence of an SU(2)-adjoint superfield, and can be simply unified. Naturalness in these theories is usually associated with light winos and sleptons, and is largely independent of the scale of the colored particles. The assumption of unification naturally predicts the existence of many exotic fields. The theory often has particles which may be stable on collider timescales, including an additional color octet superfield. In the limit that m_SUSY >> f, the mechanism yields a UV completion of the non-supersymmetric twin Higgs, but with the notable improvement of a tree-level quartic for the standard model Higgs. In this framework, a successful UV completion requires the existence of new charged fields well below the scale f.Comment: 20 page

Why the Supreme Court Cares About Elites, Not the American People

Supreme Court Justices care more about the views of academics, journalists, and other elites than they do about public opinion. This is true of nearly all Justices and is especially true of swing Justices, who often cast the critical votes in the Court’s most visible decisions. In this Article, we will explain why we think this is so and, in so doing, challenge both the dominant political science models of judicial behavior and the significant work of Barry Friedman, Jeffrey Rosen, and others who link Supreme Court decision making to public opinion

Split Definitive

For the first time in a century, the Supreme Court is divided solely by political party