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The Economy and the 2024 Election: Trump’s and Harris’ Proposed Tax Plans and Economic Vision

In the first two installments of this series of posts I have discussed our nation’s economy over the last 7½ years in an effort to determine whether President Trump or President Biden have done a better job of handling our nation’s economic growth. What I think we have discovered is that neither President’s policies were as important as the impact caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

At its height the Covid pandemic overwhelmed hospitals and caused major disruptions in the lives of every American. The effects of Covid on the economy will last for years! (Credit: Sky News)

In this post I will take a look at the proposed policies of both Trump and Kamala Harris who has succeeded Biden as the Democratic nominee. As can be expected during an election cycle both candidates are promising tax cuts but in almost every other aspect their economic visions for America are very different.

At their only debate Harris and Trump talked a great deal about the economy. The one thing that was obvious was how different their ideas and policies were. (Credit: Investopedia)

Trump’s proposals are centered around the concept of lowering taxes for everyone, but mostly for corporations and the rich while making the rest of the world pay for it through tariffs on goods imported into the US from abroad. As far as taxes are concerned Trump intends to make permanent the tax cuts on corporations he succeeded in getting past congress in (2018).

This is the tax cut that Trump succeeded in getting passed by congress in 2017. The richest 1% of Americans got nearly 2/3rds of the money. These cuts are due to expire in 2025, but Trump intends to make them permanent. (Credit: itep.org)

Those cuts lowered the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%, an estimated savings for corporations of $4 trillion dollars that have mainly been spent in stock buybacks that have done nothing more than make stock prices rise. In addition to making his first term tax cuts permanent Trump has also floated ideas about eliminating taxes on tips and overtime although many economists are convinced that the bookkeeping required by such ideas would be complicated and difficult to police properly. In general however, Trump’s tax plans are just ideas with few details about implementation.

When he made this comment at the debate Trump was specifically talking about replacing the Affordable Care Act but really it pretty much sums up all of his plans if he gets re-elected. (Credit: Tenor)

If Trump’s plans for taxes are blurry at least they’re not as crazy as his plan to make the rest of the world pay for them through tariffs, a notion that every economist knows is just flat out wrong. Somewhere back in his days as a student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business he got the idea that the taxes we impose on foreign goods are paid by the manufacturer in that foreign country. In other words he simply doesn’t understand how tariffs work or why countries use them.

The intention of a Tariff is to make foreign goods more expensive so people will buy domestic goods instead. Anyone who still buys the foreign product pays a tax. The domestic consumer pays the tax, not the foreign manufacturer. (Credit: LinkedIn)

Let me describe a classic example of how a tariff works and why they are used, my example is whiskey! Back in the 19th century the US had a large whiskey producing industry that didn’t want to have to compete against whiskeys from other countries, particularly Scottish and Irish whiskeys from the UK. (By the way there is no such a thing as Scotch, it’s Scottish Whiskey!!!)

So let us toast John Barleycorn, each man a glass in hand. And may his great posterity Ne’er fail in old Scotland. (Credit: Robert Burns)

In order to get an advantage over foreign whiskey makers the whiskey industry here in the US got the Federal Government to impose tariffs, that is taxes as high as 50% on whiskey imported into this country. Now the whiskey manufacturers in Scotland didn’t pay that tax, they didn’t care whether their product got bought in the UK or the US, and certainly the US has no way of making a company in the UK pay any kind of tax. It is the importer, the person or company who brings the whiskey into the US that actually pays the tariff.

It’s the American consumer who will pay the actual tax on imported goods, raising inflation. That’s just one of the consequences of tariffs. if they start a trade war they can really damage both nation’s economies. (Credit: SlidePlayer)

However that importer isn’t going to just eat the cost of the tariff, he’s going to raise the price of the whiskey so he can still make a profit. So the price of the tariff finally gets passed along to the consumer here in America. The idea of the tariff is just that, to make foreign products more expensive so as to give manufacturers here in the US an unfair advantage. Because of that tariffs cause a decrease in foreign goods coming into our country by raising their prices, which is what the whiskey producers here in the US wanted. Nevertheless it is still the American consumer who actually pays the tariff.

Depending on just how far Trump is willing to go on tariffs this is quite possible! (Credit: Cagle.com)

 And by raising the prices of foreign goods tariffs actually increase inflation, worst still they can lead to trade wars between countries that hurt everybody’s economy. Nevertheless Trump thinks that tariffs are a way of getting other countries to pay us for the right to do business here and he’s gonna do them no matter how bad everybody else thinks they are.

Trump promises a lot but remember the wall, remember how Mexico was going to pay for it! (Credit: YouTube)

One other policy that Trump is advocating may not seem to be directly connected to the economy but will definitely do so and that is his determination to deport millions of the illegal aliens, Democrats prefer the term undocumented, currently living here in the US. Illegal or not those people are contributing to our economy, they are working, many in jobs Americans don’t want, and they are buying things. Depending on exactly how many aliens Trump succeeds in deporting our country’s GDP could decline by anywhere between 2% to 8%.

Mass deportations is a foundation of Trump campaign but remember those people are now a part of our economy, they have jobs and spend money. If we simply throw 20 million people legal or illegal out of our country we will instantly be in a recession! (Credit: AP News)

Additionally Trump intends for the government to jump start the economy by what he refers to as “Drill baby Drill”, that is to open up federal lands for exploitation by the petroleum and mining industries. In this way Trump hopes that cheaper gas prices will induce economic growth. However the US is already the world’s largest oil producer and it’s questionable as to whether the oil companies will actually want to work harder to pump out more oil in order to lower prices and therefore reduce their profits.

A huge amount of oil and gas produced by the petroleum industry already comes from Federal land. Trump intends to greatly increase that amount. (Credit: Reuters)

All in all the U of P Wharton School, that Trump attended remember, has estimated that Trump’s tax plans could add $4.1 Trillion, yes Trillion to our national debt while economists at Goldman Sachs estimate that his plan to remove all illegal / undocumented aliens would reduce GDP by about a half a percent in 2025 alone. Finally the Tax Policy Foundation calculates that Trump’s tariff plan could result in a tax on American consumers of $300 Billion a year. And those are all pretty conservative institutions. Again however, it’s hard to figure out exactly what Trump’s policies will do because he hasn’t really announced any concrete plans for economists to analyze.

Trump is a graduate of the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His former professors however don’t think he learned much there. (Credit: Business Insider)

Kamala Harris’ economic plans could hardly be much more different, although like Trump’s they are also lacking in detail. The one tax initiative that Harris agrees with Trump on is his idea of eliminating taxes on tips. In general the Vice President intends to raise taxes on Billionaires and multi-Millionaires. Specifically her plan is to increase the corporate taxes from their current rate of 21% to 28% in order to fund tax cuts for the middle class. Those middle class tax cuts will come in the form of higher income tax deductions for children, childcare and small businesses.

For the last 40 years we’ve been concentrating on ‘Supply Side Economics’ where the rich get tax cuts and the money ‘trickles down’ to everybody else. Could that be why the middle class is in such trouble now? Just asking! (Credit: CBS News)

Another way in which Harris’ plans differ from Trump’s is that she fully intends to continue Biden’s policies of both rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure while also providing incentives to both companies and individuals to help promote a ‘Green’ economy, more solar and wind energy production along with more charging stations for electric vehicles. In addition Harris intends to provide the middle class with incentives for first time home purchases. In many ways however Harris’ economic ideas are adjustments to Biden’s policies.

President Biden picked Harris to be his running mate because they shared a vision of how to government this country. It’s only reasonable therefore that Harris’ policies will resemble Biden’s. (Credit: Slate.com)

Well, that’s about all I have to say. I hope these past three posts have given you some clear views about the current state of our economy as well as how much credit, or blame the last two administrations deserve for it. At the same time I have tried to give some idea about the economic plans that the two major party candidates have for how they will handle our economy if they are elected President. Throughout these posts I have tried to be fair to both candidates, whether I have succeeded or not I leave for you to decide.

We’d all like to think that we’re fair and balanced. Sometimes that’s not easy to do! (Credit: Faculty Focus)

The most important thing is for you to get out and vote this November, for you to make your choice based upon all of the information you can gather. After all that’s the way democracy is supposed to work!

The Economy and the 2024 Election: Part 2: Job Growth, GDP and Wage Growth. 

In the first installment of my review of the Trump versus Biden economy going into this election I began by discussing just how difficult it is to try to understand all of the claims made about the economy by the various candidates seeking office, especially the two candidates for President. It isn’t just the fact that each party only tells you the facts they want you to hear, and try to hide the facts they don’t want you to know.

Need I say more? (Credit: Imgflip)

There’s also the fact that economics is a pretty difficult subject to study even if economists didn’t measure some factors on a weekly basis, some on a monthly basis, some quarterly and some yearly. So I’m going to try to put it all together in some sort of sensible format for you to make up your own mind. I hope I’m going to be fair, at any rate I’m going to try; you’ll have to judge.

They say in sports if you don’t notice the umpires or referees during a game, then they did a good job! I hope that’s how you’re look at me after this post! (Credit: Baseball wiki)

Last time I described how inflation under Joe Biden hit a level higher than it had since the 1980s; this is the economic problem that the Republicans want you to remember. That high level of inflation however was really caused by the US coming out of the covid-19 pandemic, it lasted less than one year and inflation is now pretty much under control.

And it did! At the time democrats pushed through their Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) inflation was running at about 9% it’s now 2.5% so whatever the democrats did worked! (Credit: Senate Majority PAC)

At the same time I also described how Covid was responsible for Trump’s biggest economic failure, an unemployment rate that topped out at 15%, the highest unemployment since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  So it is that with respect to both inflation and unemployment the economic record of Trump and Biden are pretty equal, and that both of their records have been overshadowed by the effect of Covid, a disease that came out of nowhere to kill almost one and a quarter million Americans. The lesson to be learned here is that even the President of the United States has only so much influence over our economy, and that forces beyond the control of any President or party, like a pandemic, can wreck even the best laid plans of mice and men.

The Covid pandemic in the US between March of 2020 and February of 2021. This is all of the people who got sick not those who died. Of course this disaster had a major effect on our economy! (Credit: Johns Hopkins)

In this post I’ll continue to describe how both Trump and Biden performed on other economic factors such as job growth, wage growth, and GDP. Once again all of the economic numbers I’ll be using have been adjusted for inflation where appropriate.

Consumer Price Index (CPI), the most commonly used measure of inflation over the last 50 years. Although inflation did spike in 2022 it was nowhere near as bad as during the 1970s and 80s. (Credit: US Treasury Department)

The Democrats love to remind everyone of how President Biden has created more jobs than any President ever in our nation’s history while under Trump the US saw a net job loss. That’s literally true but again those facts are more due to the Covid pandemic than by any actions taken by either Trump or Biden. If you look at the Chart below it’s obvious that job growth was puttering along at about 200,000 per month under Trump until April of 2020, just as the pandemic began to rage. In that month 20 million jobs were lost, which is why the line for job growth drops out of the bottom of the chart.

Number of jobs created each month in thousands for both Trumps and Biden. Notice how the dip and spike caused by COVID pretty much dominates the more normal time periods. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

Then, during Biden’s first year in office the pandemic waned and companies started hiring back all of the people they’d laid off. That’s a big reason why job growth under Biden was about twice what it was even during Trump’s good years. So again with respect to job growth we have a strong economy no matter who is President and while it did take a big whack from Covid it has come back quite nicely.

Because of Covid many businesses were forced to close at least temporarily, laying off millions of workers. When the pandemic eased those businesses reopened and people got their jobs back. (Credit: New York Times)

Taking a quick look at the growth in our nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) we see much the same story. For the first three years of Trump’s term GDP growth was a stable and reasonable 5%, as measured on a quarterly basis. Then came Covid and the economy took a sharp drop, in fact the country was technically in a recession, which is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

Or as we now know a pandemic. Technically a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. (Credit: Worksheets Planet)

When Biden took office things got dramatically better with the second quarter of 2021 actually having a growth of 17%! Thereafter things settled down again but GDP growth for Biden has remained above 5%. Still however we have to ask, were Biden’s good GDP figures due to our recovery from Covid. Taking away the effect of the pandemic both Presidents can claim to have had reasonable economic growth.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for both Trump and Biden. Again the effect of the Pandemic on the Economy dwarfs everything else. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)
In standard Economic Theory Inflation almost always leads to a Recession. That hasn’t happened after the Inflation caused by Covid which means somebody is learning how to handle the Economy! (Credit: LinkedIn)

Finally I’d like to take a look at how wages rose, or fell during the Trump and Biden administrations. This is important because, as I said in my last post, if wages rise faster than inflation then people are actually better off but when wages don’t rise at least as fast as inflation that’s when everybody starts to feel the economic pinch.

Wage growth during both the Trump and Biden administrations. It looks like wages grew much faster during Biden’s term but remember inflation was higher as well. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

Just looking at the chart by itself it certainly looks like wages increased a lot more under Biden than they did under Trump. Again however it must be remembered that inflation was also higher under Biden so was there really any great difference?

Wage growth versus inflation (CPI) over the last 15 years. Again, the disruption caused by Covid is obvious so that it’s difficult to say that any president’s policy had any effect. (Credit: Axios)

Really the one thing that can be said about the state of the economy under either Trump or Biden is that the performance or policies of any President have only a minor effect while things outside of their control, like a pandemic, can have a much greater effect. Now you may have noticed that I’ve been comparing Trump’s economy to Biden’s, but it’s actually Vice-President Harris who is the democratic nominee in 2024. Of course Trump has been tying Harris to every one of Biden’s problems in his efforts to make her look bad and certainly as Biden’s Vice-President Harris went along with Biden’s policies.

President Biden (r) and his Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s always a fair question to ask how responsible is the vice-president for the decisions of the president? (Credit: Pittsburg Post Gazette)

Still Kamala Harris is her own candidate. For that reason in my next, and last post of this series I’ll be taking a look at the proposed policies of the two candidates Trump and Harris so that you can make up your own mind whose economic vision is more in line with yours.

However you decide, VOTE! (Credit Harvard Gazette)

Before I go however let me just give a brief overview of our economy at just this moment a little more than a month before the election. Inflation in August was 2.5%, a little bit more than we’d like. Unemployment is at 4.2%, again we’d like that to be lower, but it’s really pretty good. GDP in the second quarter, April to June, was a sold 3% indicating strong growth in our economy. At present then the US economy is strong, true it could be better, but it could also be a lot worse!

So, if we want to get ahead as a nation, if we want our children to achieve the ‘American Dream’, then we need to provide a better education for them! (Credit: Pinterest)

Perhaps the best way to gage our economy however is to take a look at how the stocks markets have been performing so far this year. Since the end of September of 2023 the DOW Jones Industrials have climbed 26%, the Standard and Poor’s 500 has climbed 33% while the tech heavy NASDAQ has beaten them both with a 37% gain in just one year. Obviously our economy isn’t too bad!

Postscript: The latest job figures have come out for September. This will be the last data point for jobs before the November election. In September the US added 254,000 jobs, many more than economists had estimated. That’s a quarter of a million people who are now working! Because of that high job growth unemployment dropped to 4.1%, a very low value. All in all, it points to a very strong economy that has fully recovered from the pandemic!

The Economy and the 2024 Election: You’ve heard a lot of Claims by both Parties. What do the figures actually say and what do they actually mean! 

Once again the US is in a critical election year and once again it’s the economy that is the number one issue that voters care about. That means that once again both parties are filling the TV airwaves with ads claiming that they are the ones who can best handle the economy. I know that you’ve seen the Republican ads claiming that under Biden inflation was the worst in 40 years, it was but only for one month.

Economists actually like a bit of inflation because that spurs us to go out and spend our money before it decreases in value. The Federal Reserve’s target value is 2%. (Credit: Stanford Report Stanford University)

The Democrats meanwhile claim that unemployment under Biden has been at its lowest level in 60 years, it was but over the last few months it’s been creeping up. Meanwhile, under the Democrats wages have been steadily rising, but have they been rising enough to offset inflation? It’s all so confusing and with both sides only talking about the statistics that makes them look good it’s hard to know what to think.

In a sense unemployment hurts a small fraction of our population a lot while inflation hurts everyone a little. Finding a reasonable medium is one of the big questions facing economists. (Credit: Live Science)

Well I’m going to try to give it a shot. I have to tell you this is the most difficult post I’ve ever attempted. Economists not only have a large number of different quantities, Inflation, Unemployment, GDP and the like that they keep track of but they have several different ways of reporting those measurements. For example the Consumer Price Index, considered the best gage of inflation, is reported every month but announced as being ‘on an Annual Basis’. How can something that’s measured every month be on an annual basis? And most of the other quantities that economists talk about, like GDP and wages, but not unemployment, have to be adjusted for inflation. It’s no wonder that few people can make heads or tails about the claims being made by the Republicans and Democrats. However at least I will try to bring all the stats together, not just the ones that favour one side, and hopefully I’ll be able to explain it all enough for you to make the decision that’s right to you!

Harris or Trump, that’s the choice we have to make in November. Let’s all try to make an informed one! (Credit: Spotlight Pa)

I have to start with inflation because, as I just said several other quantities have to be adjusted for inflation in order to make a fair comparison between what happened during the Trump administration from 2017-2020 and the Biden administration from 2021-2024. We all have a basic idea of what inflation is, prices keep going up, as time passes the cost of just about everything from food to gas to cars and even homes keeps rising year after year. That means that a dollar in 2024 buys a little bit less than a dollar would back in 2023 and a lot less than a dollar would have back in say the year 2000.

Back in the 1970s and early 80s inflation was much higher than anything we’ve seen in decades. That’s a big reason why the American people switched our economy to a Supply Side, Market Based one. (Credit: EconoFact)

As I said inflation also affects several other economic measures as well, such as wages. Let’s say that last year your boss gave you a raise of 4%, sounds pretty good. Unfortunately inflation over the last year came in at 4.1% so you actually lost 0.1% of your pay. In economic terms your wage increase did not keep pace with inflation. On the other hand if you received a raise of 4% and inflation stayed below the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%, then you did indeed get an actual 2% increase in your income, your raise minus inflation.

Two years ago, inflation was at the highest rate since the 1980s, notice the steep climb of the red line between Jan21 and Jan22. However, wages were also high so they kind of canceled each other out! (Credit: Statista)

Inflation also affects our whole nation’s growth in the same way. We’ve all heard of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is the sum total of all goods and services bought and paid for in a year, everything and every time money changes hands it contributes to the GDP. The growth of our country’s economy is measured in the percentage growth of GDP and if GDP actually goes down we are basically in a recession. But even an increase in GDP has to be higher than the rate of inflation or else, as with wages above, the country’s income actually got smaller. On the other hand two quantities that are not effected by inflation are unemployment and job growth. The percentage of people who are unemployed is the same no matter what happens to the value of the dollar. The same is true for the number of jobs created, or lost.

Throughout this post I have taken the various economic quantities effected by inflation and adjusted their values so that everything is given in terms of 2024 dollars. So now let’s take a look at how inflation has increased during the four years of the Trump administration and the first three and a half years of the Biden administration, remember Biden’s term is not yet over. Chart 1 shows how inflation increased for each president.

Inflation during Biden’s first two years in office was much higher than at any point in Trump’s term. We were just coming out of a pandemic however and the economy of the whole world was recovering from Covid. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

On the surface it looks as if inflation has been much higher during Biden’s term as President. Indeed the Republicans have been using this fact as their main attack against Democrats in general claiming that inflation under Biden reached its highest level in 40 years. It is worth noting however that the one bad year that Biden had with inflation also was the year that the US and the rest of the world came out of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Between March of 2020 and February of 2021 millions of American got sick from Covid, and over 100,000 died from the disease. How could that not affect our economy? (Credit: NPR)

You will remember that during the pandemic a considerable portion of the economy shut down and once the threat of Covid had lessened there were a number of issues getting people back to work, fixing supply chain problems and etc. For example, during Covid people cut back a lot on travel, even such ordinary trips as going to a restaurant for dinner. Further evidence that it was Covid that triggered the inflation comes from the fact that the rest of the world saw as high or higher inflation. The European Union, the UK, China and Japan all suffered from a spike in inflation.

Over the last three years inflation in the European Union was even higher than here in the US. Ya can’t blame the democrats for that. (Credit: The New York Times)

Because of this oil companies cut back on their production of gasoline and then, when the pandemic ended people immediately wanted gas again. Unfortunately it took the oil companies some time to bring production back to pre-covid levels. That time lag led to a big increase in gas prices that contributed to inflation. That supply issue was eventually solved however and for the past two years gas prices have dropped slowly but surely helping to stabilize inflation.

Notice the big dip in oil production that occurred in March of 2020, just as the pandemic began. It took more than a year to recover from the pandemic’s drop and that delay added to inflation. (Credit: CNBC)

So now that we’ve considered the Democrat’s biggest economic liability going into this election let’s a look the Republicans’ biggest liability. That’s unemployment and if you’re going to blame Biden for the worst inflation in 40 years then you have to blame Trump for the worst unemployment since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, 80 years ago.

The huge spike in unemployment caused by Covid is obvious, the highest level of unemployment since the 1930s!!! Still, Trump was no more to blame for unemployment than Biden was for inflation. That’s just what happens to economies when a pandemic hits! (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

Actually unemployment for Trump’s first three years in office was quite good. The unemployment level his first year was a bit over 4% but dropped below 4% for Trump’s second and third year. Then in 2020, Trump’s fourth and final year in office unemployment skyrocketed to nearly 15%, literally the worst unemployment figure since the Great Depression back in the 1930s. So what happened to cause such a tremendous number of people to lose their jobs, well of course it was Covid.

We all remember seeing signs like this during Covid. So unemployment spiked during the pandemic just as inflation spiked immediately after it. (Credit: Liberty Street Economics)

With the pandemic spreading, with deaths and hospitalizations increasing the hospitality industry, restaurants, hotels, movie theaters etc, virtually closed because people could not gather together for fear of getting infected. Baseball games were played without fans in the seats so there were no concession stands that needed any workers; symphony orchestras stopped performing so there was no need for musicians. The fact that unemployment didn’t go higher than 15% during Covid was remarkable and shows the strength of the American economy. Once Covid became less of a threat unemployment quickly dropped. Indeed for almost two years during Biden’s term of office unemployment dropped to its lowest level since the 1960s. A statistic the Democrats are happy to remind us all about.

Here’s the statistic Biden wants everyone to know about, more jobs created per month than any President ever! But once again that’s also due to people getting their old jobs back once the pandemic eased. (Credit: X)

So, if you’re going to blame Biden and the Democrats for the worst inflation in 40 years then you have to blame Trump for the worst unemployment in 80 years. The plain fact is that no one is to blame, that both unemployment and the inflation that followed were caused by Covid. The lesson to be learned here is that there are factors outside the control of anyone, even the President that shape our economy.

If President’s do have power over the economy then Democrats seem to be better at it than Republicans! (Credit: The New York Times)

In my next post I’ll continue to discuss some other economic factors such as wages, GDP and the Deficit and how both Trump and Biden handled them.

Geology News for September 2024: 

Geology is usually a quiet science, we generally only hear about it when there’s been a big earthquake or volcano eruption and even then all that the news media talks about is the destruction that’s happened to both people and property. There’s very little discussion of what an earthquake or volcano is and how they relate to our planet as a whole. Today I’d like to discuss two stories about our Earth that aren’t directly tied to either quakes or volcanoes and which don’t threaten destruction but which do tell us a great deal about the planet we live on.

Collecting and studying rocks is a large part of the science of Geology and is something that even a child can do as a way to get started in a career in science. (Credit: ThoughtCo)

We all remember from our High School science classes how our planet is built. We learned that at Earth’s very center there is a solid metal inner core composed mostly of iron about the size of the planet Mars. Above this solid core is a liquid outer core of molten metal, again mostly iron, this liquid outer core being about a thousand kilometers thick. On top of the outer core rides the 2,900 kilometer thick Mantel which is composed of a mixture of metals and silicates and which is often described as being plastic because it’s too warm to be solid but not hot enough to be completely liquid. Finally at the top is the 10-20 kilometer thick crust of solid rock that all life exists upon. That’s the basic model we all learned in school.

Just like we remember from High School our earth is like a Russian doll with layers of material one upon the other. (Credit: Handy Geography)

The way that scientists know that’s what the inside of Earth is like is by studying the different kinds of waves that are generated by large earthquakes or volcanic eruptions and which propagate around the entire planet. For example what geologists call a secondary or s wave is what physicists like me call a transverse wave, the kind of wave you can make with a piece of rope. Now transverse waves, s waves cannot go through either a liquid or a gas, they need a solid media to transmit them. So, if a large earthquake occurs in let’s say the island of Java in Indonesia then geologists at the exact opposite spot on Earth in Ecuador would not observe any s waves from that event because the s waves cannot pass through the liquid inner core.

Earthquakes generate both ‘S’ and ‘P’ waves which propagate around the world but only the ‘P’ waves can go through the Earth’s liquid core! (Geology Science)

On the other hand earthquakes also generate primary or p waves that are like sound waves and which can go through a liquid so the scientists in Ecuador will see p waves from the quake on Java. It’s by studying the various ways that the waves generated by Earthquakes propagate that geologists have learned so much about the interior of our planet.

A typical seismic wave as recorded by a seismograph. The ‘S’ and ‘P’ waves are notes along with surface waves. (Credit: Michigan Technological University)

Now a new study is linking a mysterious kind of seismic wave called a PKP precursors with another mystery, volcanic ‘hot spots’ which are volcanoes that seem to last for hundreds of millions of years at the same spot on Earth even as the continental plates move across the top of them. The Hawaiian Island chain is the best know example of this, a fixed volcano ‘hot spot’ that has created a series of islands as the Pacific plate moved across it. The supervolcano beneath Yellowstone Park is another such long lasting ‘Hot Spot’.

‘PKP’ waves are generated when ‘P’ waves are reflected off of the boundaries between the Earth’s layers. As you can see in the image PKP waves can be pretty complicated. (Credit: USGS.gov)

Geologists studying the PKP precursor waves at the University of Utah recognized that they were not being directly generated by earthquakes, instead PKP waves appeared to be echoes, that is waves that were bouncing off of something deep underground and are then scattered in many different direction. Now the Utah geologists have succeeded in zeroing in on the locations where PKP waves originate and have discovered that they are clustered around the volcanic hot spots in the Pacific, North America and Iceland.

The Earth’s known volcanic ‘Hot Spots’. These areas of intense volcanic activity do not seem to move with the Earth’s tectonic plates but rather pierce through those plates. (Credit: www.geo.cornell.edu)

Based upon what the researchers can learn about these deep regions in the Earth’s mantel they have been christened ‘Ultra Low Velocity Zones’ (ULVZs) and appear to lay at the boundary between Earth’s mantel and liquid core. Exactly what connection these ULVZs have with the volcanic hot spots is unknown at present, do they cause the hot spots or do the hot spots attract the ULVZs? You can be certain however that geologists will concentrate their efforts to further understand the origins of PKP waves at the ULVZs.

Ultra Low Velocity Zones or ULVZs lay the boundary between the outer core and the mantel. They appear to have some relation to the Volcanic Hot Spots but exactly what is presently unclear. (Credit: Research Gate)

As I was writing about the paper describing the discovery of the Ultra Low Velocity Zones (ULVZs) by the geologists at the University of Utah a second paper was being prepared by a second group of geologists at the Australian National University that provides further details about the ULVZs. According to the Australians the ULVZs form a doughnut shaped structure roughly beneath the equator at the boundary between the inner core and the mantel. Now the precise details about the ULVZs differ slightly between the two papers but it’s exciting to watch as a new part of our planet is being discovered and explored.

Do the ULVZs form a doughnut shaped structure around our planet’s equator? That’s what the team in Australia assert. We’ll find out in time! (Credit: Daily Mail)

Even while they study our planet’s interior geologists also continue to learn more and more about Earth’s past. Throughout it’s history Earth has seen periods of large temperature swings that resulted in geological periods where the planet became so hot that it completely lost its polar ice caps as well as periods where the planet was so cold that they have been christened ‘ice ages’.

Our planet has had many ice ages over the past 4 billion years but one that occurred about 700 million years ago covered nearly the Earth’s entire surface. Geologists call that period ‘Snowball Earth’. (Credit: wikipedia)

One of the most extreme cold periods occurred between 720 and 660 million years ago and is known as ‘Snowball Earth’ because virtually the entire planet’s surface was covered in ice. This particular ice age is of considerable importance not only because it was so extreme but because the first evidence for multi-cellular life occurs in the fossil record immediately after Snowball Earth. In fact evolutionary biologists have developed the theory that multi-cellular life evolved in order to survive the extremely harsh conditions of Snowball Earth and then exploded around the world as the glaciers retreated.

It was shortly after Snowball Earth that the very first multi-cellular creatures appear in the fossil record. Nobody thinks that’s just a coincidence. (Credit: Everything Dinosaur Blog)

The problem for both geologists and biologists is that ice ages have a tendency to destroy the geologic evidence of their own existence by the grinding and scouring of glaciers across the planet’s surface. For over a hundred years geologists have been searching for an unbroken stretch of sedimentary rock that records the entire history of Snowball Earth.

Did these rocks in Scotland escape Snowball Earth? That’s what geologists at the University College of London are claiming. If so they can tell us a lot about that period in Earth’s history. (Credit: The Independent)

They may now have finally found it. A new study in the Journal of the Geological Society of London by geologists at the University College of London has found that the Port Askaig formation on the Hebrides Islands of Scotland along with portions of Northern Ireland is just that rock sequence. The Port Askaig formation is a 1.1 kilometer thick series of strata that were laid down as sedimentary rock during the Sturtian glaciation period, to give Snowball Earth is technical name and which are underlain by 70 meters of carbonate rock that formed in tropical waters. Which shows that the period right before the snowball was considerably warmer. Those carbonate rocks are teeming with cyanobacteria, the most common form of life on the early Earth.

Spread out over portions of Scotland and Northern Ireland parts of the Askaig Formation lie in areas with little human habitation making the geologists work that much easier. (Credit: Stockholm University www.su.se)

The islands of the Inner Hebrides are generally uninhabited, making the Port Askaig formation a perfect labouratory for geologists to study this critical period in Earth’s history. Perhaps somewhere in these Scottish rocks lies the secret to the environmental conditions that caused the single celled life of Earth to unite into the communities of cells that today we call plants and animals.

Paleontology News for September 2024: Three creatures from the Cambrian period, the time when the kinds of animals we’re familiar with today were first developing. 

The Cambrian period, dating to some 560 to 500 million years ago, is well known as being that time when all of the basic types of animals that inhabit our world today first appear in the fossil record. From the jointed-legged arthropods or the crawling molluscs to the many different kinds of worms they all appear to have become identifiable groups during the Cambrian.

The creatures of the Cambrian Period may look very strange to us but paleontologists can identify many of them as the ancestors of our modern animals. (Credit: Natural History Museum)

The reasons for this sudden explosion of life are still a matter of intense study, the best scenario at present is that it was during the Cambrian that the first ‘hard parts’ of animals evolved, shells and spines for defense, claws and teeth for offense. These new structures initiated an ‘arms race’ amongst early life forms, which led to a great diversification in the kinds of animals there were. 

A complete shell of a Trilobite, perhaps the best known of the creatures of the Cambrian. One of the first groups of animals to possess a hard shell they raise the question as to whether it was the evolution of hard parts that led to the Cambrian explosion of life. (Credit: Live Science)

So if the Cambrian period is the time when the major types of animals evolved it is also the time to look for the earliest development of the characteristic features of those animals, the jointed legs of arthropods, the shells of mollusks and etc. In today’s post I will be discussing three newly discovered fossils highlighting the way paleontologists are studying the Cambrian Period but I will not be following my usual technique of discussing the earliest animal first and then moving forward in time because these three creatures may have all lived at the same time.

The world famous Walcott Quarry that exposes the Burgess Shale. This outcrop of rocks has revealed so much of the history of early life that it has been given ‘World Heritage’ status. (Credit: University of California Museum of Paleontology)

The first creature I’ll discuss is a member of the ‘weird wonders’ from the famous Burgess Shale in British Columbia; see my post of 29 September 2021. The animal is called Odaraia alata although it’s also known as the taco animal because of the distinctive taco-shaped shell that covers the front half of its body. Odaraia was first described over 100 years ago as an arthropod, and at 20cm in length one of the largest. However because only a few specimens were found and because that taco shaped shell covered some of the animal’s most important anatomy, where exactly within the arthropods it belonged remained controversial.

An artist’s illustration of Odaraia alata. The taco like shell contains over 30 pairs of legs that are not used for walking but rather for grabbing particles of food that pass through the shell. (Credit: CBC)

Most paleontologists thought that Odaraia swam through the upper water column capturing food particles in the opening of its shell as it swam but how it caught that food and whether it had mandibles like modern insects and crustaceans or lacked them like the trilobites did was unknown. (By the way did you know that arthropod mandibles, their jaws that is, are actually modified legs? That’s right, insects, crabs, spiders and shrimp all chew with their feet, or rather feet that have evolved in shape to crush and tear rather than walk.)

The jaws or mandibles of insects are actually modified legs! How far back in the history of arthropods this evolved has been a question for a long time. (Credit: Adobe Stock)

Now a new study from researchers at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) has succeeded in answering those questions. Using some new specimens and the latest technology the paleontologists have found that Odaraia did have a small set of mandibles near its mouth, making it one of the earliest arthropods to possess them. Also the team discovered that inside of its shell Odaraia possessed 30 pairs of legs that had been modified with numerous spines to capture food passing through the shell. With 30 legs covered in spines Odaraia had a very effective net inside its shell for capturing food.

One of the specimens of Odaraia alata that enabled paleontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum to confirm that O alata did possess mandibles. (Credit: Phys.Org)

One interesting fact about arthropods in general is the way that they often change their shape as they grow and mature, I’m talking about the process of metamorphosis where for example a caterpillar changes into a butterfly. The butterfly is the mature, sexual stage while the caterpillar is the immature or larval stage, very different in shape even though they are the same species. As you might guess paleontologists often have enormous difficulty in connecting fossils of larva to the adult species they mature into. Despite this however paleontologists are always on the lookout for fossils of larva because those immature specimens can tell them a great deal about how the species grows and matures.

You only live twice, at least you do if you’re a Butterfly who begins life as a caterpillar then metamorphizes into a butterfly. (Credit: BBC Wildlife Magazine)

A good example of this comes from a recent paper by Doctor Martin Smith of the Oxford University based upon a larva fossil no bigger than a poppy seed that was discovered in half billion year old rocks from Northern China by colleagues at Yunnan University. The study of microfossils, complete fossils so small you need a microscope to examine them at all, is a science to itself where specimens of fossil bearing rock such as limestone are dissolved in acidic solutions. The tiny bits left over then have to be examined to see if any are interesting fossils, a job that requires a great deal of work and patience.

No bigger than a poppy seed this fossil larva from 520 million years ago is teaching us a great deal about the life cycle of ancient arthropods. (Credit: Live Science)

As soon as they saw the specimen the researchers at Yunnan knew they had found something special. First of all they could see that it was an arthropod larva of some type, and in addition the specimen was so well preserved that, even though it was only the size of a poppy seed, it might still have evidence of the internal structure of the animal. The problem was that Yunnan University did not possess the necessary equipment to examine the inside of the fossil.

A colourized X-Ray image of the larva reveals a lot of the details of the animal’s internal structure. (Credit: BBC)

Enter Dr. Smith, who was well acquainted with Oxford’s Diamond Light X-ray Source. The paleontologists at Yunnan allowed Dr. Smith to take the larva specimen back to England where much of its internal structure were revealed in Smith’s lab. Despite its small size the fossil’s X-rays revealed a developing brain cavity, traces of the digestive system along with the circulatory system and even nerve endings to the legs and eyes. The 500 million year old larva has given paleontologists new insights into how the ancestors of today’s insects, crustaceans and other arthropods grew and matured.

An X-Ray machine so large and complex it needs a building this big to hold it. That’s Oxford University’s Diamond Light X-Ray Source. (Diamond Light Source)

Finally today I’ll discuss a recent paper about a 510 million year old fossil animal from a completely different group of animals, the mollusks, but by a coincidence from the same two Universities, Yunnan in China and Oxford in the UK.

We’re all familiar with mollusks, particularly the shelled variety of bivalved clams and oysters along with single shelled snails. Just how the earliest mollusks first developed their shells is a subject of considerable study.

Just a few of the many different kind of bi-valve Mollusks that we love to eat. (Credit: Clovegarden)

That’s what makes the specimens discovered at a road building site outside of Kunming China by Yunnan University Paleontologist Guangxu Zhang so interesting. Looking like a slug covered by hollow spines the animal, which has been given the name Shishania aculeata, gives paleontologists clues about how the earliest molluscs evolved their shells.

514 million year old Mollusk shell Shishania aculeata (l) and a closeup of its spines (r) (Credit: SciTechDaily)

“The spines, which might also have been sense organs, probably helped Shishania and other molluscs to avoid predators as they crept along the Cambrian sea floor,” according to Luke Parry, a paleontologist at Oxford University who also contributed to the paper. “The fact that we have any of these fossils is pretty amazing.”

Artists impression of Shishania aculeata, something like a snail with a very simple shell or a clam with only one shell it reveals some of the details of how Mollusk’s evolved their shells. (Credit: BBC)

If you think about it, it’s pretty amazing that we have any of these wonderful fossils of animals that lived, and died a half a billion years ago.

Physics News for September 2024: Physics in the Shower and new measurements confirm that Earth’s Magnetic Field is undergoing rapid change. 

One of the best known tales in the history of science relates how the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes discovered his principal of buoyancy when he stepped into his bath. Noticing the water that had overflowed onto the floor Archimedes realized that the volume of water that was displaced was equal to the volume of his body that had been submerged and the scientist had the solution to his problem. Overjoyed Archimedes got out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse crying “Eureka” which is Greek for “I found it!”

As he stepped into his bath Archimedes realized that he could measure the volume of any solid object by the volume of water it displaced! (Credit: Dreamstime)

Recently a physicist with the California Institute of Technology named Amnon Yariv had an experience somewhat like that of Archimedes while taking his shower at his home in Pasadena, California. Having one of those shower heads that are at the end of a long flexible hose Yariv noticed that when he let the head hang free the force of the flowing water caused it to not only swing back and forth like a pendulum but also twist clockwise and anti-clockwise. Doctor Yariv, who is an expert in Oscillations and periodic motions quickly recognized this behaviour as bimodal, that is two distinct oscillations were moving in synch with each other. Doing a little experimenting Yariv soon discovered a few other interesting characteristics of his phenomenon, one was that the two oscillations were also coupled, any dampening of one would cause a dampening of the other. Also, if he increased the water flow of the shower beyond a certain point the two oscillations began to grow wildly, uncontrollably. Doctor Yariv likens his discovery to two tango dancers, who have to coordinate their dancing with their partner in order to avoid tripping over each other.

Physicist Amon Yariv of Caltech. (Credit: Caltech)
Dr. Yariv in his shower experimenting just like Archimedes did! (Credit: Caltech)

Having discovered his new phenomenon Doctor Yariv spent the next several years modeling it mathematically while also performing some experiments to confirm his model. According to Yariv his oscillation is an bimodal extension of a class of oscillations that were studied by Lord Rayleigh and Michael Faraday a century and a half ago in which a system is excited by a modulation at twice the resonate frequency of the system.

Lord Rayleigh is also the physicist who first worked out the reason why the sky is Blue. Today we call that Rayleigh scattering. (Credit: Science Facts)

Doctor Yariv was also able to obtain useful work from his oscillations by coupling it to a rotary gear. He hopes that his research may lead to more efficient energy conversion from wind turbines and other green energy systems. Not bad for something discovered in the shower!

The rotation of the blades on a wind turbine are a form of oscillation. Dr. Yariv hopes that by better understanding his double oscillation it may be possible to improve the efficiency of wind turbines! (Credit: Just Energy)

Most of the discoveries made by physicists today however require a bit more equipment than a showerhead, often very expensive equipment, even equipment on satellites in outer space. The mystery of Earth’s magnetic field for example has been studied by hundreds of physicists over the last several hundred years with some of the most precise instruments available yet we still known only a little about it. We do know that the core of our planet is composed mainly of liquid iron and nickel, both magnetic materials, and that as our planet spins on its axis currents in that molten core can generate a magnetic field.

A simplified view of Earth’s magnetic field. Once again, since the north pole of your compass points north that means that there is a south magnetic pole up there!!! (Credit: BC Open Textbooks)

Another thing that we’ve discovered is that every couple of hundred thousand years or so our planet’s magnetic poles swap their positions, the one up north going south and the one down south going north. (By the way, since opposite poles of a magnetic attract each other while similar poles repel, and since the north pole of a compass points north that means that currently there is a south magnetic pole up north and a north magnetic pole down south.)

For reasons unknown every couple of hundred thousand years or so the Earth’s magnetic poles reverse their positions. Right now our planet’s magnetic field is starting to look like the figure on the right. (Credit: NASA Science)

Over the past several decades measurements of the Earth’s magnetic field have shown a steady decline in the strength of that field leading many researchers to think that Earth may be in the initial stages of one of those magnetic pole swaps. In order to get a more precise idea of just how rapidly the Earth’s magnetic field is changing in 2014 the European Space Agency (ESA) launched three satellites that they called the Swarm Constellation that were designed to make the most accurate measurements of our planet’s magnetic field. Over the next six years the satellites made detailed and comprehensive maps of the Earth’s magnetic field from Low Earth Orbit (LOE) and just as importantly monitored how the magnetic field was changing!

The three satellites of the European Space Agency’s ‘Swarm Constellation’. Together these satellites are monitoring the changes in Earth’s magnetic field. (Credit: European Space Agency)

That data has now been analyzed by researchers at the University of Michigan’s department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering and compared to the latest model for how we think the Earth’s magnetic field works. That model is known as the International Geomagnetic Reference Field or IGRF-13, the 13 meaning that this is the 13th model in a series. A report on that analysis has recently been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

Image depicting the data collected by the Swarm Constellation satellites. It obvious that Earth’s field is no longer a nice simple one pole up the other down! (Credit: eoPortal)

Through their examination of the data from the Swarm Constellation satellites the researchers discovered a number of discrepancies between the data and the model many of which were caused by a surprising error in the model. You see, although the physical North and South Poles, as defined by the Earth’s axis of rotation, are exactly on opposite sides of our globe, the same is not quite true of the North and South magnetic poles. Currently the north magnetic pole is situated at 84º of latitude and 169º of longitude, for the south magnetic pole to be exactly opposite it on our globe it would have to be at -84º and 11º of longitude but it is in fact at -74º latitude and 19º longitude. At least some of the reason for this asymmetry in Earth’s magnetic field comes from the observed fact the both magnetic poles move, currently the north magnetic pole is moving at a speed of about 45km per year.

We’ve known for over a century that the North Magnetic Pole was moving but for decades it moved very slowly. Recently that motion has accelerated and the pole is racing across the polar region. (Credit: Newsweek)

The discovery of this error in the model will certainly help with further improvements in the model but another find by the scientists may be even more important and that is the speed with which the Earth’s magnetic field is changed. As outlined in the report noticeable shifts in both the strength and polarity of the magnetic field can be observed even over as short a period as six months. In fact the rapid changes in the magnetic field are already causing problems in navigation for both ships and aircraft, especially for those whose paths take them close to the Polar Regions.

Compass, Sextant and Telescope, the instruments seafarers used for centuries to navigate their way around the world. What happens when the Compass is no longer so accurate? (Credit: Adobe Stock)

Earth’s magnetic field is a dynamic phenomenon whose pace of change is increasing. In the years to come those changes could impact our daily lives in other ways than just making navigation more difficult. Only by learning more about our planet’s magnetic field physicists can we prepare ourselves for the changes to come.

Space News Special Edition: Starliner’s Continuing Problems. Can Boeing’s Manned Capsule be saved or will Space X have to Rescue the two Starliner Astronauts from The International Space Station (ISS)? 

NASA has made their decision, the Boeing Starliner capsule will return unmanned from the International Space Station (ISS) sometime in early September, the scheduled date is currently 6 September. The two Boeing astronauts who traveled to the ISS aboard Starliner Back in June, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will remain on the ISS and return to Earth with the astronauts of the Space X Crew 9 mission in February of 2025. That mission had been originally scheduled to go to the ISS in late August but the mission’s launch date has been pushed back to late September because of the problems with Starliner.

On the 24th of August the Big Brass at NASA announced that the Boeing Starliner Astronauts would be brought back to Earth aboard a Space X Dragon Capsule. This makes Starliner’s Orbital Flight Test a definite failure! (Credit: NASA)

Additionally, the Crew 9 mission was originally supposed to carry four astronauts to the ISS, NASA’s preferred compliment for the Space X Dragon capsule, but will now only carry two astronauts when it launches in September. That change to the Crew 9’s mission is so that it can return in February with Wilmore and Williams. This means that the original eight-day stay of Williams and Wilmore at the ISS will now last about eight months.

In order to bring back the Starliner crew the Space X Crew 9 Mission will only carry two astronauts to the ISS instead of the planned four shown here. Mission commander Zena Cardman on the right and Pilot Nick Hague next to Cardman will probably still go while Russian Cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov and Mission specialist Stephanie Wilson will remain on Earth pending another mission. (Credit: NASA)

As the NASA administrator in charge of the Commercial Crew Program Steve Stich explained it. There was simply too much uncertainty in the way that the thrusters aboard Starliner worked to allow them to risk the capsule’s returning with its crew aboard. This is a painful setback for Boeing and its efforts to get into the business of commercial manned space travel.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the decision but it was a unanimous choice by the NASA Team. (Credit: Internet Archive)

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When NASA initiated its Commercial Crew Program in 2011 to replace the Space Shuttle the space agency expected Boeing, with all of its aerospace experience to be the prime contractor for manned missions to and from the International Space Station (ISS). It was thought that the newer space startups like Space X, Sierra Nevada and Blue Origin would act as back ups to Boeing.

This is the way everyone thought NASA’s Commercial Crew Program would go, Boeing’s Starliner riding into orbit aboard an Atlas V rocket. Boeing was expected to take the lead in sending astronauts to the ISS. (Credit: SciTechDaily)

Boeing’s design for their Starliner capsule was also the most conservative of the four competitors; it even somewhat resembled the old Apollo Command Module from NASA’s glory days. The designs proposed by the other potential contractors were thought to be more innovative.

The Apollo Command Module from NASA’s glory days. NASA had a lot of experience with capsules so when the decision was made on which designs would fulfill the CCP requirement they went with the two capsules. (Credit: SketchFab)

Sierra Nevada proposed their Dreamchaser space plane while Blue Origin’s unusual design was christened the ‘Biconic Nose Cone’. In the end it was the two traditional designs that received NASA’s full funding. Boeing’s Starliner got $4.2 billion while Space X’s Dragon capsule; an upgrade of their unmanned cargo carrying Dragon got $2.6 billion.

Looking like a miniature Space Shuttle Sierra Nevada’s Dreamchaser will undergo its first, unmanned test flight hopefully this year! (Credit: Wikipedia)
Blue Origin’s Capsule may look like an ordinary space capsule but it returns to Earth sideways like a shuttle, its heat shield is on its side! (Credit: Spaceref)

The original schedule of the program called for the first test flights of the two capsules to begin in 2017 with regular transfer missions to begin the following year but a series of problems caused both Boeing and Space X to announce delays. These delays required NASA to purchase an additional five seats aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft in order to maintain an American presence aboard the ISS.

Russia’s Soyuz capsule has been flying now since 1967. (Credit: NASA)

Finally in May of 2020 Space X’s Dragon capsule carried out its manned Orbital Test Flight (OTF) taking two astronauts to the ISS in the first manned mission to launch from American soil since 2011. Just a few months later Space X conducted the program’s first regular crew transfer mission to the ISS, the Crew 1 mission. Since that time Space X has carried out another seven successful crew transfer missions along with five purely commercial space missions, the Inspiration 4 mission, see my post of 2 Oct 2021 and the Axios-1 through 4 missions to the ISS, see my post of 17 June 2023. Going forward Space X appears ready to take however many astronauts NASA needs in Low Earth Orbit while at the same time grow the emerging market of private manned space missions.

In the First manned launch of a commercial space mission Space X Dragon capsule delivered two NASA Astronauts to the ISS. (Credit: NASA)

The same cannot be said of Boeing, which has had to deal with a long, and still growing list of technical issues. Those problems include some of the capsule’s most vital systems including the vehicle’s thrusters and parachutes along with numerous software glitches. Boeing’s difficulties became public in December of 2019 as Starliner failed to pass both its Pad Abort Test and its unmanned OFT. The results of these tests required further redesign of the capsule, and further delays including NASA’s insistence on a second unmanned OFT.

As every Engineer knows it’s Redesign, Redesign, Redesign… (Credit: My Code Club Journal)

That second OFT was finally conducted in May 0f 2022 as the Starliner capsule did manage to dock with the ISS, despite further problems with three of its thrusters. The manned OFT was then scheduled for early 2023 but yet again more problems led to more delays. It wasn’t until June 5th of this year that NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams sailed into orbit and docked at the ISS aboard a Starliner capsule. But again there were problems with helium leaks and thruster issues so that Wilmore and Williams were forced to manually dock with the station rather than allowing Starliner’s computer to control the docking process.

While I’m certain that Butch and Suni are happy to remain on the ISS having an eight day mission turn into an eight month one really screws up any personal plans you might have! (Credit: CNN)

According to the mission plan Starliner was only supposed to remain docked at the ISS for eight days before returning to Earth but NASA wanted to conduct further tests on the thrusters while the capsule was in orbit so, little by little, the eight days grew to more than eight weeks and rumours began that Williams and Wilmore were stranded in space. What made the whole situation worse was that, with Starliner still docked at the ISS there was no docking port available for the next Space X routine crew transfer mission. This is what caused the Crew-9 mission to be delayed from its original August 25th launch date to sometime in late September.

So long as Starliner is docked at the ISS there isn’t room for the Space X Crew 9 Mission to dock. So Crew 9 had to be delayed until late September while NASA figured out what to do with Starliner. (Credit: CBS News)

So NASA had a dilemma, did the space agency have enough confidence in Starliner to try to bring Wilmore and Williams back home aboard it, or have Starliner come home unmanned and have the astronauts remain on the ISS and come home with the Crew-9 mission in February of next year!

So the Starliner crew will have to wait until February to return to Earth aboard the Crew 9 Dragon capsule, splashing down off the coast of Florida like the Crew 4 mission shown here. (Credit: NASA)

In the end the space agency decided to take the safer course and bring the astronauts home in February aboard a Space X Dragon capsule. The question now becomes, will Starliner ever fly again let alone begin regular transfers of astronauts to Low Earth Orbit (LOE). Assuming the unmanned capsule returns intact from the ISS Boeing will have an enormous amount of investigative work to do determining the causes of the thruster issues. That effort will then have to be followed by a considerable resign of the capsule.

If Starliner makes a successful landing, like the unmanned OFT capsule did here, then Boeing will have to do a complete examination to determine what went wrong with the thrusters. (Credit: Geekwire)

Those efforts could take years and only after further ground testing is completed will NASA even consider launching Starliner again. At that point NASA will have to decide if Boeing will have to perform another unmanned OFT before another manned OFT before finally certifying Starliner. With all of the delays and problems Starliner has had so far the question becomes, will the ISS still be in orbit by the time Starliner is finally ready to begin service to it?

Three News Items from the Natural World around Us. 

Communing with Nature is a passion for many people. Just getting out of doors and observing the plants and animals that inhabit the wild areas of our world can be an endlessly fascinating pastime. Those people who are lucky enough to study nature as their profession are obviously called naturalists and they have many interesting stories to tell, here are three of them. I’ll start with the biggest, creature that is, and work my way down in size.

Ah, enjoying nature. What could be better than having a career that allows us to observe and understand the world around us! (Credit: Westend61)

Everyone has heard the old saying that “an elephant never forgets”. For thousands of years or longer we humans have recognized that elephants are among the smartest of animals and over the last few decades evidence that elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror or the ability of elephants to remember the directions to waterholes they haven’t been to for years has proven their mental abilities.

Good advice from one intelligent species to another. (Credit: Flickr)

Now a new study has been published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution that suggests that elephants might have individual names for each other in the deep rumblings that they use to communicate. There are already a few other species that are recognized as having and using personal names for each other, Bottlenosed Dolphins and Orange Fronted Parakeets are two examples. Unlike humans however, who are given our names at birth, individual Dolphins and Parakeets create their own signature call that their friends and family then use to identify them. These animals pick their own name in other words.

Yes, it appears that Elephants have individual calls that they associate with certain individuals and use those calls when they want to get the attention of those individuals. They each have their own name! (Credit: Bored Panda)

In order to determine whether or not elephants also have personal names researchers from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York recorded 469 calls from wild female African savanna elephants and their offspring. The team then used an AI to analyze the contents of the calls. After processing the calls the AI was able to identify which elephant was being spoken to in each call more than 25% of the time.

Some of the audio data accumulated by the researchers as they studied the calls of African Elephants. (Credit: Nature)

In order to demonstrate that their analysis was correct the researchers then replayed some of the recorded calls to a group of 17 elephants. When the ‘name’ of a particular animal was played that elephant was observed to become more vocal itself and moved toward the speaker that had sounded its name.

African Elephants now join a growing list of different species of animals that are known to have personal names from individuals. (Credit: The Atlantic)

The fact that elephants actually call each other by individual, personal names shouldn’t really surprise anyone. We’ve always known that elephants have complex social lives and of course good memories. The Cornell study is really just another example of how intelligent other species of animals can be.

The evolutionary linage of elephants. Right now some scientists are trying to bring the extinct Mammoths back to life. If they succeed it will be interesting to see if they are as intelligent as their African kin? (Credit: Britannica)

Another way that animals can demonstrate their intelligence is through tool use. Certainly one of the biggest moments in science during the 20th Century was when Jane Goodall saw a chimpanzee take a twig, licked it and then stuck it into a termite mound. When the chimp pulled the twig back out it was covered with termites that the animal then consumed. The chimpanzee was using a tool to obtain protein rich food to eat.

When Jane Goodall first observed Chimpanzees using twigs to ‘fish’ for termites it was proof that our closest relative used tools. (Credit: Britannica)

Since that time many other species have been observed to use tools. For example sea otters along the Pacific coast will bring up a clam or oyster from the sea floor to eat. Swimming on their backs with the shellfish on their stomach the otter will then bang a sharp rock on the clam in order to break the shell open so they can eat the mollusk inside.

A sea otter banging a mussel shell against a rock in order to open it! Another species of animal that uses tools. (Credit: Phys.org)

The advantages of using the rock as a tool are pretty obvious but a new study by Naturalists at the University of Texas at Austin and the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California examined tool use among sea otters more closely to determine if there were any other benefits as well. What the researchers did was to observe the feeding techniques of 196 radio tagged sea otters off of the California coast. In an effort to gather as much data as possible the scientists also enlisted the aid of volunteer ‘otter spotters’ who were able to keep track of individual otters thanks to the radio tags.

Here’s someone who’s really into observing sea otters. Naturalists often make good use of volunteers like this to gather data about how animals in the wild live. (Credit: USGS.gov)

What the researchers found was that female otters tended to make use of rocks as tools more often than males did, perhaps to compensate for their smaller size and reduced biting strength. The tendency of females to make greater use of tools is also known from other tool using species such as dolphins and chimpanzees, and perhaps for the same reason. The naturalists also suggest that, since it is the females that raise the young in all those species, it may be that tool use is passed down though the generations by females.

Like humans, much of what a baby sea otters learns comes from its mother! (Credit: YouTube)

One other unexpected but not surprising outcome discovered by the study was a considerable reduction in tooth damage to those otters that used the rocks as tools. As you can imagine major tooth damage can be a death sentence to any animal so the fact that tool use reduces the chances of tooth damage is another great advantage to any species.

Trying to open clam shells with your teeth not only requires a lot more effort but also can result in damage to the otter’s teeth. That’s the advantage of tool use! (Credit: Futurity)

My last story from nature does not concern a single species of animal but rather a huge group of animals spread across several phyla. I’m talking about animals that fly, along with many that swim and how fast they all beat their wings / fins in order to fly / swim. A large scale analysis of hundreds of such species by researchers at the Department of Science and Environment at the University of Roskilde in Roskilde in Denmark has led to a simple equation that predicts the frequency that a flying animal has to beat its wings based only upon the animals mass and the area of its wings. This single equation was found to be accurate for hundreds of species of insect, birds and bats and also for the fins of penguins along with several species of whale.

We all know that bird’s flap their wings in order to fly but how often they flap depends on several factors. (Credit: Wired)

According to the study the frequency of wing beat is proportional to the square root of the animal’s mass divided by the area of the animal’s wings.

The basic equation for the frequency that birds, insects, bats and even whales have to flap their wings or flippers in order to fly or swim. (Credit: Jensen, Dyer et al)

After checking the accuracy of their equation against the wing beat frequency of several species that had not been used in deriving it the researchers then used it to predict the frequency of wing beats for the extinct pterosaur species Quetzalcoatlus northropi, the largest known flying animal ever. According to the equation Q northropi would have had to beat its ten square-meter wings seven times every ten seconds in order to be able to fly.

Some of the data collected to verify their equation for wing beat frequency. (Credit: Jensen, Dyer et al)

Whether they are studying a single species or discovering a general rule that helps to understand hundreds of different species naturalists are lucky in that they get to study the endlessly fascinating world of life on Planet Earth.

The Happiest Countries and the most Livable Cities are all in Europe. What lessons can We here in the US learn from that or don’t We really want to be Happy Anyway?

The annual surveys listing of which are the happiest countries and the most livable cities in the world are out and together they show a definite trend, Europe is definitely the best Continent to live on. The happiest country survey comes from the Gallup polling organization along with the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network while the most Livable Cities survey is an assessment made by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

We all know this is true but here in America the drive for money is overpowering even as our country declines in happiness. (Credit: Quora)

As a part of the happiest country survey a poll of about a thousand people is taken in each country asking them to rate how happy they are on a scale of one to ten, ten being the happiest. The average value for the people surveyed in each country allows a happiness value to be calculated for that country. As you might guess some countries, like Russia and North Korea do not permit the survey to be taken so they are not included in the list, but can you imagine anyone being happy in either of those countries.

The North Korean government doesn’t allow the Happiness Survey to be conducted in their country but I don’t think it’s a very happy place anyway! (Credit: Al Jazeera)

In addition the people surveyed evaluate their own country with regards to six distinct qualities, GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and perceptions of corruption. Social support generally deals with governmental programs like education and healthcare.

The two best ways for any government to improve the lives, and hence the happiness of their people is to make certain that they have the best education and healthcare systems possible. (Credit: Colorado Consumer Health Initiative)

For the seventh year in a row Finland has topped the list at number 1 with several other Nordic countries also appearing in the top ten, Denmark at number 2, Iceland at 3, Sweden at 4 and Norway at 7. Israel came in at 5, a bit of a surprise since they are currently at war, while the Netherlands finished at 6. Rounding out the top ten were Luxemburg at 8, Switzerland at 9 and Australia at 10. The countries with the lowest rankings are also pretty easy to understand, Afghanistan comes in at the very bottom while Lebanon, Lesotho, Sierra Leone and Congo are also places you wouldn’t want to live in.

Maybe one of the reasons that Finland is such a happy place is because the people there take care of the environment in which they live! (Credit: Fishing Booker)
On the other hand it’s also easy to see why Afghanistan is such an unhappy place. (Credit: NBC News)

This year saw the United States take a considerable drop from 15th place to number 24 after being in the top 20 ever since the survey was first taken. It’s thought that there were two main reasons for the US dropping out of the top 20. Firstly several other countries got a lot happier. Czechia for example moved up to 18 while Lithuania rose to number 19.

Czechia moved up in this year’s happiness survey and I can understand why, Prague is one of the places I’d really like to visit! (Credit: Wikipedia)

The biggest reason for the US drop however was because of the low value given to it by people under thirty years of age. Indeed, the US ranked at number 10 for people over 60 years old but for young people the US ranked at a dismal 62. Such a disparity between the feelings of the old and young in this country is more than just unsettling it could threaten the very stability of our society. Lack of educational opportunity, college debt, the high cost of homeownership along with a feeling that their government simply doesn’t notice them all contribute to the unhappiness growing amongst America’s young. Low taxes for the rich along with Social Security and Medicare for the elderly, I’m one of them, means there’s nothing left to solve the problems facing young people.

Just some of the problems young people feel they have to contend with. I took particular note of how getting into college is a bit easier but paying for college is much, much harder. (Credit: Pew Research Center)

A similar trend can be seen in the rankings of the most livable city. What constitutes a livable city is a bit more complicated with thirty different factors being evaluated for each of the 173 cities reviewed. Those factors are grouped into five categories including stability, education, infrastructure, healthcare, culture along with a healthy environment. Each city is rated for each factor on a scale of 1 to 100.

So much of our view of the world in which we live is due to our environment. It’s no wonder that people who live in harsh, violent conditions become harsh and violent themselves. If you want better people, however you define that, you have to provide them a better environment to live in. (Credit: Telegraph India)

As with the survey for happiest country Europe dominates the list taking the top three spots, Vienna was number one followed by Copenhagen and Zurich. Altogether Europe placed eight in the top twenty. Seven cities in Australia and New Zealand also made it into the top twenty, as did three Canadian cities and two cities in Japan. Not a single US city managed to make in into the top twenty, the closest being Honolulu at 23, followed by Atlanta at 29 and Pittsburgh at 30.

Honolulu, Hawaii maybe the best city to live in here in the US but it’s so expensive that it has dropped out of the top twenty cities worldwide. (Credit: TheTravel)

So what’s going on here? We Americans are used to being on top, not back in the middle of the pack, and loosing ground! And you can’t insist that America’s decline is all because the surveys have some kind of liberal, leftist bias. In the Happiness survey they just asked a thousand people how happy they were and we didn’t do very well.

Here in the US what our government considers important is to blame the other side for our problems rather than try to fix them! Ya think that could be why we’re losing ground. (Credit:

Back when I was born in the 1950s the US probably was the happiest country on Earth. Back then most other industrial countries were still in ruins because of World War 2 but the US had a booming and fair, emphasis on fair, economy. So what happened, how did we fall so far?

This may be how we imagine life in the US was back in the 50s but even then there were problems but at least back then some of us tried to solve those problems. (Credit: History Facts)

I think it all comes down to the difference between being happy and being rich. Now don’t get me wrong, I know the US has always had a large segment of its population whose chief concern was increasing their own personal wealth. In the last 40 years however the grasping for every penny has gone from a chief concern to an unhealthy obsession. At the same time our competitive nature has also grown and coarsened to the point where opponents have become enemies and cheating has become accepted, so long as you get away with it.

It’s been almost 40 years since the movie ‘Wall Street’ encapsulated ‘Supply Side Economics’ in a single sentence. And far too many people still think it’s true! (Credit: Etsy)

  So what we have succeeded in building is a society in which we have a small number of big winners and a large number of losers, and losers are rarely happy people. But are the winners happy either? It is really worth owing a fifty-room mansion if you have to drive through a slum to get to that mansion?

Marie Antoinette’s wealth and power didn’t save her when the mob finally rebelled! (Credit: YouTube)

A hundred and fifty years ago it was Europe that was obsessed with ostentatious wealth. It appears that they have finally learned the lesson that living in a happy country, a fair country where everyone is happy, not just you, is better than living in a big mansion and having everyone else being jealous of you. Maybe America will learn that lesson as well one day. 

Astronomy News for July 2024: A New Study of the Radial Velocities of Cepheid Variable Stars Allows Astronomers to more Precisely use these Stars in Their Measurements and What Makes Cepheids so Important Anyway? 

The ancient astronomers of Babylon, Greece and Mesoamerica all believed that the heavens above were perfect, changeless, eternal, and that’s despite the changing phases of the Moon and the motion of the planets against the background of ‘Fixed Stars’. That’s why they thought comets and meteoroids were weather phenomenon, not part of the heavens, because they weren’t permanent. As astronomers began to examine stars with telescopes and other instruments however, they quickly realized that are the stars not ‘Fixed’ in their positions but they do move slowly across our sky.

The Geocentric model of the Universe. Here the Earth is motionless in the center with the planets orbiting around it and the ‘fixed stars’ of heaven beyond them. Modern instruments like the telescope quickly showed this idea to be grossly incorrect! (Credit: Simple Wikipedia)

Another way that astronomers discovered stars change is in their brightness. In fact even before the telescope there were some observations of ‘nova’ or new stars that appeared where no star had been and then disappeared after several weeks to a month. There was also the strange star Algol whose brightness noticeable dropped every 2.87 days. The Arab astronomers who first noticed this named the star ‘El Ghoul’ which over the centuries got shortened to Algol.

Algol is known to be an eclipsing binary where a large but cool star occasionally passes in front of a brighter star causing the system as a whole to become dimmer for a short period of time. (Credit: Cosmic Pursuits)

It wasn’t until the 19th century however that an entire class of stars were discovered whose brightness varied up and down in a rhythmic fashion, that is the length of time it took a particular star to go from being bright to being dim and back to bright was the same over and over again. Different stars of this type each had their own period but each star’s period stayed the same. The brightest star of this type in our sky was δ Cepheid so the entire class acquired the name Cepheids. By the way, while δ Cepheid might be the brightest Cepheid in the sky the best known Cepheid is the Pole Star Polaris.

Something I learned in my days as a Boy Scout. To find the North Star Polaris just use the two front star of the cup of the Big Dipper and follow the line they make to Polaris! (Credit: YouTube)

It wasn’t long before astronomers began to wonder if there was some connection between a Cepheid’s period and its absolute brightness, the actual amount of energy it emits every second. You have to remember that the brightness of a star in our sky, its apparent brightness, depends not only on how bright it really is, its absolute brightness, but on how far away from Earth it is as well. The star Betelgeuse for example is actually a lot brighter than the star Sirius, but Betelgeuse is about 70 times farther away than Sirius, that’s why it’s Sirius that appears to be the brighter of the two stars in the sky.

The star Sirius appears to be the brightest star in the sky here on Earth but if all of the stars around Sirius were at the same distance as Sirius it wouldn’t look very bright at all! Sirius is so bright mainly because it’s close to our Solar System. (Credit: Physics Feed)

On the other hand, if astronomers know the absolute brightness of a star then they can measure its apparent brightness and from those values calculate the distance to that star, and it’s measuring distances to objects in space that is the hardest thing to do in astronomy. That’s why astronomers were so interested in seeing if there was a relationship between the period of a Cepheid and its absolute brightness. By 1890 more than 30 Cepheid variables were known to astronomers but they were all over the sky, at various distances and brightnesses, the problem of finding a simple relationship seemed impossible to solve.

Cepheid variables are easily recognized by astronomers because of the rhythmic pattern in the change in their brightness. (Credit: Hyper Physics Concepts)

It was the Lady Computer Miss Henrietta Swan Leavitt of Harvard Observatory who cracked the puzzle. Oh, you didn’t know that before computers were built out of transistors and other electronics people were called computers. Computers were usually graduate students or women with degrees who did the actual calculations, the arithmetic so that the male scientists could get on with doing the real science! And if that sounds sexist, well it was!

It was Harvard researcher Henrietta Leavitt who worked out the relationship between the period of a Cepheid Star and its absolute brightness. (Credit: Ogle.astrouw.edu.pl)

In fact at the Harvard Observatory it was the male astronomers who made the observations, took the measurements and then handed their data over to the female computers to categorize the results. So it turned out that it was the women, paid less and never allowed to do actual astronomy, who took all that data and made the big discoveries.

It was another Harvard ‘Computer’ who developed the stellar classification system that astronomers still use today. (Credit: Space.com)

What Henrietta Leavitt did was take observations of the Small Magellanic Cloud where she managed to find sixteen Cepheids. Since the sixteen stars were all in the same cloud, and therefore at approximately the same distance, Miss Leavitt reasoned that any Cepheid that looked brighter really was brighter. With the data from those sixteen variables Henrietta was able to work out the equation that connected a Cepheid’s period to its absolute brightness. For example it was found that a Cepheid with a period of one day was about 200 times brighter than our Sun but a Cepheid with a period of fifty days was more than 10,000 times brighter than our Sun.

The small Magellanic cloud is a satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way. It was among these millions of stars that Heneretta Leavitt found several dozen Cepheids and by assuming they were all at approximately the same distance, discovered her law of period to absolute brightness. (Credit: Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.)

By using Cepheids astronomers could not only find the distances to objects inside our Milky Way galaxy but distances to other galaxies as well. It was by finding a Cepheid in Andromeda that Carl Hubble was able to show that the ‘nebula’ as it was then called, was a galaxy in its own right, far outside of our Milky Way.

The photograph that exploded our view of the Universe. On the sixth of October in 1923 Carl Hubble took this image of Andromeda, then thought to be a nebula within the Milky Way, and found a Cepheid variable, see ‘VAR!’ at the top right. Thanks to Miss Leavitt he could calculate the distance to that star and it was way outside the Milky Way. Andromeda, and many other nebula were in fact galaxies in their own right! (Credit: Nick Nielsen)

With Cepheid variables being such important tools for astronomers you can imagine that astronomers are working even now to refine Miss Leavitt’s period-Luminosity law and make it more accurate. For example variations in the stars brightness can also be caused by other factors, such as if the Cepheid has a companion star, many do, and the two stars are dancing around each other so that the Cepheid is sometimes closer, sometimes further away!

In trying to make Henrietta Leavitt’s law more precise and accurate astronomers ran into the problem that many Cepheid’s are part of binary star system complicating measurements of their brightness. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

In order to study such complications a recent study has been carried out at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The astronomers used their instruments to not only measure the brightness of the Cepheids they studied but also the velocity of the star either towards or away from the Earth. Because of this the program has been christened the VELOcities of CEphieds or VELOCE program. The results of the VELOCE study have been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Some of the data collected by the VELOCE Program in their efforts to better understand the behavior of Cepheid variables. (Credit: ArXiv)

In order to obtain the most precise measurements the VELOCE researchers employed two high resolution spectrographs that separated the wavelengths of the light from each star they studied. By using the Doppler effect, see my post of 5 August 2023, the astronomers were able to precisely measure the stars motion relative to Earth and thereby make adjustments to the star’s actual brightness.

The most difficult thing to do in astronomy is to measure the distance to celestial objects. Astronomers use several different techniques that they have christened ‘The Distance Ladder’. Cepheid variables are an important rung on that ladder. (Credit: UNC Physics)

By improving our measurements of the Cepheid variables the work of the VELOCE group will allow astronomers to make better measurements of the distances to objects throughout the Universe giving us a better, more accurate picture of the Universe in which we live.