This appeared last week:
Consumers Health Forum calls on Australian government to address ‘significant safety concerns’ about prescribing without any conversation with patient
Melissa Davey Medical editorAustralia’s health regulator is fielding complaints about the use of artificial intelligence during telehealth prescribing, and patients being issued with prescriptions without speaking with a doctor.
A spokesperson for the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency told Guardian Australia the agency had received 550 notifications about telehealth consults and prescribing across health professions since July 2020. Of those, 30% related to complaints about a practitioner not adequately assessing a patient, they said.
In 45 cases Ahpra identified poor telehealth prescribing practices, prompting the regulator to take action against practitioners.
“In some cases this has led to restrictions preventing practitioners from prescribing or conducting appointments via telehealth,” the spokesperson said.
Concerns raised with health regulators about telehealth included not having to consult or see a prescriber before a prescription was given; prescribing processes that felt managed by an algorithm, or artificial intelligence process; and medications costing more when dispensed on a prescription provided online or via telehealth.
Dr Elizabeth Deveny, the head of the Consumers Health Forum of Australia, called on the government to address “significant safety concerns” she had about such practices, saying a conversation between a doctor and a patient should occur, “particularly when they’re a new patient”.
“This loophole needs to be closed through better regulation … because there are significant safety concerns,” she said. “Particularly what happens if a person has a bad reaction to this new medication or product, or perhaps the health practitioner who’s doing the prescribing doesn’t have their full history and understand the other medications they’re taking.”
Deveny said she had heard of telehealth platforms prescribing products such as weight-loss drugs without live consults.
“This model of online, no-consumer-contact prescribing doesn’t meet a lot of the safety features we would normally see,” she said.
“Telehealth is a great model that helps consumers access a health practitioner using a phone or computer, allowing them to have important conversations in a way that better suits them. What we’re seeing [when live consultations do not occur] is not telehealth, and we think it has potential for significant harm.”
‘I do not provide tick-box prescribing’
Guardian Australia has reported being able to access a prescription for vapes from an online telehealth platform, despite having never been a patient of that GP and never having previously been prescribed vapes.
The prescription was sent via email almost immediately after a $40 fee was paid and an online questionnaire filled in, with no live phone or video consult required.
The doctor, Dr Carolyn Beaumont, states that her website, medicalnicotine.com.au, “utilises innovative proprietary AI to effectively achieve its aims”.
But Beaumont told Guardian Australia that AI was not used by the platform in prescription generation. She did not clarify how the platform used AI.
“Scripts are individually reviewed and actioned as appropriate,” she said.
She said her online questionnaire “covers all the requirements of taking a medical history and there is plenty of scope for ongoing follow-up as needed”.
Guidelines from Ahpra and the Medical Board of Australia, which came into effect in September 2023, state that “asynchronous, online tick-box prescribing without a real-time patient-doctor consultation is not good medical practice”.
But the guidelines do not explicitly ban the practice. “Real-time doctor-patient consultations remain key to safe prescribing,” the guidelines state.
“I do not provide tick-box prescribing,” Beaumont said. “There is scope for individualised responses and follow-up is available, including in the form of longer-term telehealth that offers preventive care for smokers.”
Ahpra does not disclose the names of doctors who are the subject of complaints and there is no suggestion that Beaumont is among them.
Beaumont has also commented about her method of prescribing without a live consult on an article about vaping on the Medical Republic website.
“It is worth addressing why I choose mostly written communication with my patients, rather than conventional phone or video consults,” she wrote.
“Firstly, timezones. I’m in Victoria, and many patients are from WA. There’s a 3 hour gap, so realistically I can’t make calls until midday. Consider also that as a whole, heavy smokers are more likely to work jobs such as construction, mining or hospitality. These jobs don’t lend themselves to taking time out for a phone consult.”
Deveny told Guardian Australia that in her view time zone differences did not justify a lack of a live consult via phone or video call.
“What happens if something goes wrong with the medication?” she said. “Is the timezone going to mean that they can’t be helped by that doctor? Who’s responsible for that person’s aftercare if the timing doesn’t work?” She said a live consultation also allowed for a more comprehensive medical history than a questionnaire.
Beaumont told Guardian Australia that ideally patients would have a regular GP, but that was rarely a reality for remote workers.
“I manage their aftercare in relation to my prescribing,” she said. “To circumvent timezone difficulties, written communication has proven the most effective modality.”
A spokesperson for the Medical Board of Australia said any practitioner who prescribed in a way not consistent with the board’s guidelines “must be able to explain how the prescribing and the management of the patient was appropriate and necessary in the circumstances”.
More here:
It is rather a shame our medical regulator is just so stuporous at the wheel. Harm will be done and only then will they seriously wake up and enforce the regulations which are designed to keep us all safe!
I think they
should worry about the basics before getting het up about AI etc. The bottom line is that the present regulatory system is not for for purpose in this century!
David.
This appeared last week:
This appeared a few days ago:
Opinion
02 Apr 2024 5 mins
Michael Fagan, former chief transformation officer at Village Roadshow, examines the proposed changes to the Privacy Act and how CIOs in Australia can prepare for them.
Australian privacy legislation is about to undergo a major overhaul with more than 100 proposals under consideration, you can see the detail here. While the exact details of changes to the law remain unknown, there is much that organisations can do to prepare.
Do you know what information you currently hold? Where it is held? Why it was collected and what the future usage of that data will be? Have you clearly identified owners of that data? Hint, it’s not someone in your IT department (or shouldn’t be – this is usually a red flag for CEOs). What are some use cases that might need that data? If you don’t know where your data is then you will struggle to be compliant.
Australian Privacy Principle #1 (APP 1) requires organisations to have a clearly defined and contemporary policy describing how they manage personal information. Is yours readable? Have you run it through ChatGPT and determined the Flesch-Kincaid readability score? It should be readable by a 14-year-old, Year 8 student. The good news is that you can ask any of the large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to rewrite paragraphs or sections for improved comprehension or make it more concise.
I lived in Hong Kong 2008-2013 and one of my most pleasurable weekends was a trip to see an incredible band at the MGM hotel in Macau. Twelve years later, in September 2023, some of my details were compromised in the MGM Resorts hack in the USA. Luckily it was just my name and a now-defunct email address – but it had been expired for at least 10 of those years. I cannot remember ever receiving a single piece of marketing from MGM, but they kept my old data on file – and may have been getting “return to sender” messages for years.
How much old data are you keeping? Deleting obsolete information provides several benefits. Firstly, it tests your ability to destroy data. This is not a trivial matter – backups, archives, deeply linked data present challenges. It also gives executives a clear picture of how much customer data you really have. I helped an organisation clean up their Customer Data Platform (CDP) last year and removed more than a million records, about 15% less than they thought they had.
Another benefit is that it saves money. Not on disk space which can nearly be considered free at this stage, but many CDPs and other SaaS applications have a charging model based on the amount of data (customer records) that you hold. That company I helped had a significant reduction in their CDP licensing cost post clean-up.
Rely more on first-party data that you collect yourself. Inform customers when you collect that data, and what you will use it for. Inform them of this collection, prior to gathering it. If you have new uses for the data, seek further consent or de-identify the data.
For the latter, one such technique involves encryption of identifiers which allows different datasets to be linked together for analysis, but still obscure the original data. Another technique is homomorphic encryption, where a data owner encrypts a dataset, sends to the cloud (or another server) for processing, the server processes the data without decrypting, and sends the encrypted results back to the owner – who is the only party able to decrypt the results.
Who are you sharing data with, and what do they do with it? Are they always using your customers data in a way that is consistent with the promises you made? Review your contracts and agreements in your partner ecosystem and hold them accountable. “It is a condition of doing business with us that you have a mutually acceptable attitude to privacy (and modern slavery, and ethical sourcing, and ….).
Have you conducted a boardroom wargame, simulating a data breach? Have you repeated it in the last 12 months?
More here:
As mentioned above you can follow up here:
Opinion
27 Mar 2024 4 mins
Michael Fagan, former chief transformation officer at Village Roadshow, examines the proposed changes to the Privacy Act and what CIOs in Australia need to be aware of.
I received 7 unsolicited CVs and resumes in the last 12 months, from well-educated and qualified people, seeking to join the organisation where I was working. Unbeknownst to the senders, they put me at risk of breaching one of the 13 Australian Privacy Principles (APP), despite me not really knowing these people, and never asking them for information. The jobseekers included a varying amount of personal information, including email address, phone numbers, home address, work and education history, and more. One applicant even included a photograph and, no lie, their weight. (Although I suppose if I only weighed 47kg I’d put it on my CV too). By giving me this personal information, they placed an obligation on me and my organisation to use it wisely, or risk penalties up to $1.8m.
In 2024, the government has committed to strengthening privacy law, including equipping the regulator with more powers and more options to enforce – meaning that those penalties could be even harsher. The Attorney General’s department spent three years reviewing the 1988 Privacy Act, and released a report in February 2023 outlining 116 proposals for change. The Australian Government published its response in September 2023 agreeing to 38 proposals, “agrees in principle” to 68 proposals (i.e. further consultation required to understand impact and alignment with other reviews like Digital ID, and the Australian Cyber Security Strategy before implementation), and notes the remaining 10. The report is available here, and the response here, and the government’s current round of consultation ends 28 March 2024.
Much more here:
It looks like the time to get ready is now – as these things always sneak up on you!
David.
This appeared a little while ago.
Publisher
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
Resources
Description
In 2023 artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have started to move into mainstream use. Tools such as ChatGPT have provided a way that almost everyone can start to interact with AI technologies – and many people are finding new and novel ways of using the technology. In many ways this stage of the use of AI in society mirrors the arrival of Google in the late 1990s, which really marked the beginning of widespread use of the internet.
A key difference between the use of AI in healthcare and the use of AI in other industries is where AI provides decision-making for diagnosis, prevention, prediction, prognosis, monitoring or treatment. In these cases, the AI is considered a medical device and is currently regulated as such – ‘software as a medical device (SaMD)’. This feeds into a bigger discussion of the use of AI across healthcare, for clinical and non-clinical purposes, and ensuring Australia is ready for its use. The healthcare consequences of the rise of generative models are rapidly unfolding and the national discussion about how to regulate AI is gaining pace.
Publication Details Copyright: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation 2024
License type: All Rights Reserved
Access Rights Type: Open
Post date: 9 Apr 2024
Here is the link:
https://apo.org.au/node/326297
This 48 page document provides insight into what the CSIRO is up to in the “AI and Healthcare” field and is well worth a browse. I am sure any of the authors would be happy to respond to any queries people have! It is good to know there is practically aimed research happening.
Worth a browse and follow up where desired.
David.
This appeared last week
11 April 2024
By Holly Payne
The UK and Canada are valuable case studies for allied health scope of practice – but not for the reason that the scope of practice review commissioners seem to think, the RACGP says.
Commissioned by the Department of Health and Aged Care last year, the Unleashing the Potential of our Health Workforce scope of practice review is set to release its second issues paper in the coming weeks.
The first issues paper was released in January. It was ostensibly a literature review of sorts and only intended to be “a starting point for further discussions”.
Still, it made two key findings: that health professionals working top of scope make for a stronger primary healthcare system and that Australia has a range of barriers to achieving that.
The reviewers specifically noted that “policy and practice examples from the UK and Canada [in particular] were … found to be highly relevant to the Australian context”.
Responding to the issues paper this week, the RACGP said that “Australia should learn from the UK … on what not to do”.
The number of UK doctors working in Australia has doubled over the past decade, and the government’s commitment to expanding the non-doctor physician associate workforce has created a fallout so large it has threatened one of the oldest medical colleges in the world.
“Australia is in the top three health systems in the world, and the NHS is a basket case,” RACGP president Dr Nicole Higgins told The Medical Republic.
“We’ve got NHS doctor refugees and patients who are leaving in droves because it’s a broken system, and Australia can’t afford to go down that pathway.”
The college submission also pointed out that the Canadian province of Alberta, where pharmacists are allowed to prescribe for a variety of conditions, is experiencing an acute doctor shortage.
One board member of the Alberta College of Family Physicians has publicly blamed the workforce issues on a lack of governmental support for primary care.
The RACGP also homed in on something it felt was missing from the first issues paper: recognition of general practice.
“Issues Paper 1 is deafeningly silent on the large body of high-quality evidence for general practice,” it said.
“The review is overlooking the existing broad scope of general practice and the benefits for patients when GPs and their teams are enabled to work at their top of scope.
“Focusing only on increasing the number of access points will not have the same impact.”
Instead of responding to the individual consultation questions put out by the review, the RACGP chose to present lists of recommendations and risks.
High up on its list of recommendations were facilitating general practice-based dispensing, recognising GP advanced skills and increasing funding to support multidisciplinary team care.
This last includes opening MBS rebates for services delivered by practice nurses without direct GP supervision.
The lists of potential risks were equally voluminous. Chief among the college’s concerns were waitlist blowouts should allied health professionals be allowed to refer to specialists, patient confusion about who was a doctor and the increased administrative burden when relying on tools like My Health Record.
“My Health Record is not a clinical record; it is a summary of patient encounters,” the RACGP said.
“It is not sufficient to provide good patient care … [and] is also reliant on patients choosing not to opt out, which many did when the tool was first launched.”
The GP college also took issue with several of the definitions used by the review team, including one reference to the “acute health system”.
“Does ‘acute health system’ translate only to hospitals?” the RACGP wrote.
“GPs provide care of acute problems, such as lacerations or pneumonia, and should therefore be considered part of the acute care system.”
Although the AMA has not publicly released its submission yet, it told TMR that it would not be supporting “shortcuts” to tackling GP shortages.
“Our members have raised a number of concerns and it’s critical the scope of practice review provides a process to genuinely address the AMA’s concerns,” a spokesman said.
“The AMA also rejects suggestions that all identified ‘barriers’ are obstacles that should be removed, because some of the so-called barriers provided safeguards.”
ACRRM’s submission to the consultation, while acknowledging the opportunity it presented for rural generalists, was similarly scathing.
“We are disappointed that the initial analysis and evidence review appears to have concluded that broadening of scope of practice would have virtually universal positive outcomes without any reference to potential risks or unintended costs,” the rural college said.
More here:
https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/are-we-heading-for-a-physician-associate-moment/106634
There is some nonsense being sprouted by Government here!
First it is important to see clearly, as identified above, that the myHealth Record is basically an administrative tool that has little intention or capability to actually support clinical care delivery.
The second is the ongoing bureaucratic attempt from the Department of Health to blur the distinction between medical practitioners and ancillary care providers, and to claim some equivalence between these roles – where there is none. Carers are either doctors or they are not!
We have a very good health system and part of its quality is due to the GP-led nature of the way it is organized. Mess with that at your peril is my view!
David.
Here are the results of the poll.
Yes 21 (81%)
No 4 (15%)
I Have No Idea 1 (4%)
Total No. Of Votes: 26
People seem to think that Private Health Insurance has really gone over the top!
Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!
A fair number of votes. But also a very clear outcome!
1 of 26 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!
Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted!
David.
2 related articles appeared last week:
First we had this:
Astronomers may have got dark energy all wrong. It’s great news for the universe
By Dennis Overbye
April 5, 2024 — 3.30pm
New York: On Thursday, astronomers who are conducting what they describe as the biggest and most precise survey yet of the history of the universe announced that they might have discovered a major flaw in their understanding of dark energy, the mysterious force that is accelerating the expansion of the cosmos.
Dark energy was assumed to be a constant force in the universe, both currently and throughout cosmic history. But the new data suggest that it may be more changeable, growing stronger or weaker over time, reversing or even fading away.
“As [Joe] Biden would say, it’s a BFD,” said Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, referring to the US president’s “big f-—ng deal” expression. Riess shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics with two other astronomers for the discovery of dark energy, but was not involved in this new study. “It may be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” he said.
That conclusion, if confirmed, could liberate astronomers – and the rest of us – from a long-standing, grim prediction about the fate of the universe. If the work of dark energy were constant over time, it would eventually push all the stars and galaxies so far apart that even atoms would be torn asunder, sapping the universe of all life, light, energy and thought, and condemning it to an everlasting case of the cosmic blahs. Instead, it seems, dark energy is capable of changing course and pointing the cosmos towards a richer future.
The keywords are “might” and “could”. The new finding has about a 1-in-400 chance of being a statistical fluke, a degree of uncertainty called three sigma, which is far short of the gold standard for a discovery, called five sigma: 1 chance in 1.7 million. In the history of physics, even five-sigma events have evaporated when more data or better interpretations of the data emerged.
This news comes in the first progress report, published as a series of papers, by a large international collaboration called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI. The group has just begun a five-year effort to create a 3D map of the positions and velocities of 40 million galaxies across 11 billion years of cosmic time. Its initial map, based on the first year of observations, includes just 6 million galaxies. The results were released on Thursday at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Sacramento, California, and at the Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.
“So far we’re seeing basic agreement with our best model of the universe, but we’re also seeing some potentially interesting differences that could indicate that dark energy is evolving with time,” Michael Levi, the director of DESI, said in a statement issued by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which manages the project.
The DESI team had not expected to hit pay dirt so soon, Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley lab and a spokesperson for the project, said in an interview. The first year of results were designed to simply confirm what was already known, she said: “We thought that we would basically validate the standard model.”
But the unknown leaped out at them.
When the scientists combined their map with other cosmological data, they were surprised to find that it did not quite agree with the otherwise reliable standard model of the universe, which assumes that dark energy is constant and unchanging. A varying dark energy fit the data points better.
“It’s certainly more than a curiosity,” Palanque-Delabrouille said. “I would call it a hint. Yeah, it’s not yet evidence, but it’s interesting.”
But cosmologists are taking this hint very seriously.
Wendy Freedman, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago who has led efforts to measure the expansion of the universe, praised the new survey as “superb data”. The results, she said, “open the potential for a new window into understanding dark energy, the dominant component of the universe, which remains the biggest mystery in cosmology. Pretty exciting.”
Michael Turner, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago who coined the term “dark energy,” said in an email: “While combining data sets is tricky, and these are early results from DESI, the possible evidence that dark energy is not constant is the best news I have heard since cosmic acceleration was firmly established 20-plus years ago.”
Dark energy entered the conversation in 1998, when two competing groups of astronomers, including Riess, discovered that the expansion of the universe was speeding up rather than slowing, as most astronomers had expected. The initial observations seemed to suggest that this dark energy was acting just like a famous fudge factor – denoted by the Greek letter Lambda – that Albert Einstein had inserted into his equations to explain why the universe didn’t collapse from its own gravity. He later called it his worst blunder.
But perhaps he spoke too soon. As formulated by Einstein, Lambda was a property of space itself: The more space there was as the universe expanded, the more dark energy there was, pushing ever harder and eventually leading to a runaway, lightless future.
Dark energy took its place in the standard model of the universe known as LCDM, composed of 70 per cent dark energy (Lambda), 25 per cent cold dark matter (an assortment of slow-moving exotic particles) and 5 per cent atomic matter. So far that model has been bruised but not broken by the new James Webb Space Telescope. But what if dark energy were not constant as the cosmological model assumed?
At issue is a parameter called w, which is a measure of the density, or vehemence, of the dark energy. In Einstein’s version of dark energy, this number remains constant, with a value of -1, throughout the life of the universe. Cosmologists have been using this value in their models for the past 25 years.
But this version of dark energy is merely the simplest one. “With DESI we now have achieved a precision that allows us to go beyond that simple model,” Palanque-Delabrouille said, “to see if the density of dark energy is constant over time, or if it has some fluctuations and evolution with time”.
The DESI project, 14 years in the making, was designed to test the constancy of dark energy by measuring how fast the universe was expanding at various times in the past. To do that, scientists outfitted a telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory with 5000 fibre-optic detectors that could conduct spectroscopy on that many galaxies simultaneously and find out how fast they were moving away from Earth.
As a measure of distance, the researchers used bumps in the cosmic distribution of galaxies, known as baryon acoustic oscillations. These bumps were imprinted on the cosmos by sound waves in the hot plasma that filled the universe when it was just 380,000 years old. Back then, the bumps were 500,000-light-years across. Now, 13.5 billion years later, the universe has expanded a thousandfold, and the bumps – which are now 500-million-light-years across – serve as convenient cosmic measuring sticks.
The DESI scientists divided the past 11 billion years of cosmic history into seven spans of time. (The universe is 13.8 billion years old.) For each, they measured the size of these bumps and how fast the galaxies in them were speeding away from us and from each other.
When the researchers put it all together, they found that the usual assumption – a constant dark energy – didn’t work to describe the expansion of the universe. Galaxies in the three most recent epochs appeared closer than they should have been, suggesting that dark energy could be evolving with time.
“And we do see, indeed, a hint that the properties of dark energy would not correspond to a simple cosmological constant” but instead may “have some deviations,” Palanque-Delabrouille said. “And this is the first time we have that.” But, she emphasised again, “I wouldn’t call it evidence yet. It’s too, too weak.”
Time and more data will tell the fate of dark energy, and of cosmologists’ battle-tested model of the universe.
“LCDM is being put through its paces by precision tests coming at it from every direction,” Turner said. “And it is doing well. But, when everything is taken together, it is beginning to appear that something isn’t right or something is missing. Things don’t fit together perfectly. And DESI is the latest indication.”
Riess of Johns Hopkins, who had an early look at the DESI results, noted that the “hint,” if validated, could pull the rug out from other cosmological measurements, such as the age or size of the universe. “This result is very interesting and we should take it seriously,” he wrote in his email. “Otherwise why else do we do these experiments?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Here is the link:
and second we have this:
New 3D cosmic map raises questions over future of universe, scientists say
Researchers say findings from map with three times more galaxies than previous efforts could challenge standard idea of dark energy
Nicola Davis Science correspondent
Fri 5 Apr 2024 02.00 AEDTLast modified on Fri 5 Apr 2024 07.07 AEDT
The biggest ever 3D map of the universe, featuring more than 6m galaxies, has been revealed by scientists who said it raised questions about the nature of dark energy and the future of the universe.
The map is based on data collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (Desi) in Arizona and contains three times as many galaxies as previous efforts, with many having their distances measured for the first time.
Researchers said that by using this map, they have been able measure how fast the universe has been expanding at different times in the past with unprecedented accuracy.
The results confirm that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, they added. However, the findings have also raised the tantalising possibility that dark energy – a mysterious, repulsive force that drives the process – is not constant throughout time as has previously been suggested.
Dr Seshadri Nadathur, a co-author of the work and senior research fellow at the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: “What we are seeing are some hints that it has actually been changing over time, which is quite exciting because it is not what the standard model of a cosmological constant dark energy would look like.”
Prof Carlos Frenk, from Durham University and a co-author of the research, said that if dark energy was indeed constant in time, the future of the universe was simple: it would expand on and on, for ever. But if the hints found in the map stood up, that would be called into question.
“Now all of that goes out the window and essentially we have to start from scratch, and that means revising our understanding of basic physics, our understanding of the big bang itself, and our understanding of the long-range forecast for the universe,” he said, adding that the new hints left open the possibility that the universe might undergo a “big crunch”.
The research, which has been published in a series of preprints – meaning it has yet to be peer-reviewed – reveals how the team first created the 3D map, then measured patterns in the distribution of galaxies that relate to sound waves that occurred in the early universe, known as baryon acoustic oscillations.
As the size of these patterns is known to be regular, the team was able to calibrate the distances to different galaxies in the map, allowing them to work out how fast the universe has been growing over the last 11bn years, with a precision better than 0.5% over all times, and better than 1% between 8bn and 11bn years ago.
Frenk said the precision itself of the measurements was notable given that galaxies could be billions of light years away, and billions of years old. “It’s mind-boggling that we can measure anything to a precision of 1%, which is precision you get in the laboratory in physics for high-precision measurements,” he said.
Andrew Pontzen, professor of cosmology at University College London and author of the book The Universe in a Box, who was not involved in the work, said Desi was one of a slew of exciting new astronomical surveys cataloguing the night sky, with one of the primary goals being to measure the rate at which our expanding universe has speeded up.
“Like measuring the acceleration of a car, charting the universe’s expansion tells us about the ‘engine’ powering cosmic acceleration. That engine is known as dark energy,” he said.
However, Pontzen noted that our knowledge of how dark energy operates was limited. “The new data, when combined with existing measurements, would seem to contradict the simplest possible explanations for dark energy,” he said.
“At face value, that’s an exciting step forward. But as the team themselves caution, there is a huge amount still to understand about this data and early results should be taken with a healthy grain of salt.”
Here is the link:
I think Joe Biden is right that what we a dealing with here is a Big F…king Deal as it really goes to our understanding (or not) of the history and fabric of the cosmos. Doesn’t matter for tonight’s dinner but for where, over time, our overall understanding of the universe winds up!
All we can do is sit back and watch as the story unfolds, and keep our sense of awe and wonder alive.
David.
