Author: admin

Space News for July 2023: The European Space Agency’s Euclid Space Telescope is launched

On July 1st the American space corporation Space X successfully launched the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Euclid space telescope and set it on course for its final destination the Lagrangian L2 point that lies about 1 million kilometers from Earth. The spacecraft spent the about thirty days on that journey, reaching its destination at the end of the month. (For more information on the Lagrangian points see my blog posts of 6 January 2017 and 29 January 2022). This is the same location that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was sent to and for the same reason. Since both telescopes observe the Universe in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum they both have to get as far away as they can from the heat of our planet, which would swamp their infrared detectors. Unlike JWST however Euclid will also operate in the visible spectrum.

Artists impression of the ESA’s Euclid space telescope at its L2 Lagrangian position. (Credit: BBC)

With a main mirror of 1.2 meters in diameter Euclid is a less powerful telescope than JWST but it is designed to survey a larger portion of the sky with each observation. That was dictated by Euclid’s six-year mission to determine the distances and redshifts of millions of galaxies spread across approximately one third of the sky. Redshift in the light coming from a distant galaxy is caused by the general expansion of the Universe after the Big Bang and tells astronomers exactly how fast that galaxy is moving away from our own Milky Way.

First Images from the Euclid Space Telescope. The left image is in the visible spectrum while the right is in the infrared. The results are everything astronomers hoped for and they are very excited! (Credit: SciTechDaily)
We’re all familiar with how the Doppler effect causes sirens coming towards us to have a higher pitch than those going away. The same thing happens to light with a shift to the blue meaning the light source is coming towards you while a red shift means it’s going away. (Credit: StudiousGuy)

By making these observations it is hoped that Euclid will give astrophysicists insight into how the expansion of the Universe has changed over the last 10 billion, which in turn will provide some clues about the nature of Dark Energy. At the same time Euclid will study the effect of gravitational lensing on the light coming from distant galaxies. By studying this effect astrophysicists hope to learn more about Dark Matter.

An Einstein ring is caused by the strong gravity of the bright galaxy in the center of this image bending the light from another galaxy behind it into a ring shape. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Together Dark Matter and Dark Energy are the two greatest mysteries in science today. Think about it, physicists estimate that some 95% of the energy in the Universe comes in forms that we know almost nothing about. Physicists first began thinking about Dark Matter more than 50 years ago and although we’ve tried many ideas as to what Dark Matter could be so far none of them have been confirmed. (For more about Dark Matter see my post of 19 June 2019).

According to our best theories this is the composition of the Universe. We understand the 5%, the rest is all guesswork. (Credit: Wickersham’s Conscience)

Most of what we know about Dark Matter comes from the way its gravity effects shape and motions of galaxies, a study known as galactic dynamics. Recently the way that Dark Matter’s gravity can bend the light coming from galaxies behind it has also been studied. By observing this effect for millions of galaxies it is expected that Euclid will provide a better understanding of how Dark Matter is distributed throughout space.

Galaxies upon galaxies, seemingly without end. That’s our Universe! (Credit: The Atlantic)

Dark Energy on the other hand is simply a name cosmologists have given to whatever force it is that is causing the Universe to not only expand but accelerate in that expansion, we literally know nothing else about it. One thing that cosmologists most what to know about is whether Dark Energy is a constant, like the ‘cosmological constant’ in Einstein’s field equations, or is it dynamic, does it’s strength change with time. The very fate of the Universe is at stake here for if Dark Energy is strictly constant then most of the other galaxies in the Universe will one day move so far away as to become invisible, leaving only the Milky Way and a few of its close neighbors as all of the Universe there is to be seen.

We thought that gravity would cause the expansion of the Universe to slow down but instead it is accelerating. We call whatever it is that is causing the acceleration ‘Dark Energy’ and we really know almost nothing about it. (Credit: The Conversation)

If however Dark Energy gets stronger with time then the force of expansion will grow into a ‘Big Rip’ where every single particle in the Universe is repelled by every other particle and no structure of any kind exists. On the other hand, what if Dark Energy should reverse itself, becoming an attraction rather than a repulsion. In that case the expansion of the Universe could come to a stop and become a contraction eventually leading to a ‘Big Crunch’, the opposite of the Big Bang.

There are a lot of ideas out there about how our Universe could end. None of them pleasant! (Credit: Reddit)

It is questions like that that astronomers hope Euclid will provide some answers to. At the same time it is also expected that during its survey of the sky the Euclid spacecraft will discover many unusual objects that will be studied in detail by more powerful telescopes like JWST. The data sent back by Euclid will be shared amongst more than 1200 astronomers and astrophysicists in 15 countries, basically the European Union plus the UK, Canada and the US.

The data sent back by the Euclid space telescope will compliment that sent back from JWST. Hopefully together they will tell us something about Dark Energy and Dark Matter. (Credit: Science News)
The father of Geometry we all learned about Euclid in High School. (Credit: Biography Online)

Ever since Einstein we’ve known that gravity effects the very geometry of space-time. By providing us with details about the nature of Dark Energy and Dark Matter the Euclid spacecraft will teach us a great deal about the overall geometry of the Universe, following in the footsteps of Euclid of Alexandria, the founder of geometry.

Movie Review: Oppenheimer

Any regular reader of this blog would have to expect that I would be seeing, and reviewing the new film ‘Oppenheimer’ as soon as possible. After all, the development of the atomic bomb, and the man (played by actor Cillian Murphy) who directed that development, are watershed moments in the history of science in general, and physics in particular.

Poster for the Christopher Nolan film ‘Oppenheimer’. (Credit: Goelevent.com)

Now, ‘Oppenheimer’ is not the film industry’s first attempt at telling the story of the Manhattan Project, to use the code word for the building of the first nuclear weapon. Shortly after World War 2 the film ‘The Beginning, or the End’ was the first while two other notable efforts are ‘Fat Man and Little Boy’ along with the TV movie ‘Day One’. There’s even a grand operatic telling of the story, ‘Doctor Atomic’ by the composer John Adams.

In the opera ‘Doctor Atomic’ Oppenheimer is a tenor while General Groves is a bass. Still it’s another version of the story of the bomb! (Credit: IMDb)

Those movies concentrated on the building of the bomb however while ‘Oppenheimer’ deals much more closely with the man. Based upon the book ‘American Prometheus’ by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, Christopher Nolan’s film includes portions of Oppenheimer’s life both before the war, and more tragically after.

Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer in the movie based upon the book ‘American Prometheus’ by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. (Credit: Men’s Health)

As a director Christopher Nolan likes to use the time-skipping, stream of consciousness style, in ‘Oppenheimer’ we are actually present at the Atomic Energy Commission’s review of Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954 and that hearing is then used as a setting for a series of flashbacks into portions of Oppenheimer’s life.

Stream of Consciousness may be the way our brains actually work but it is a very difficult writing, or film making style on both the author and audience. (Credit: ProwritingAid)

Beginning with a tour of Europe by the new doctor of Physics Oppenheimer meets other important physicists like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg while learning about the new physics being developed in the 1920s. It’s also during this time that Oppenheimer becomes acquainted with American Physicist I. I. Rabi (played by David Krumholtz) who became a great friend of Oppenheimer but who rarely gets mentioned in stories about the Manhattan Project for reasons I will discuss in a little while.

A leader in the post WW2 generation of physicists I. I. Rabi received the Nobel Prize for his description of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance making possible the modern MRI. (Credit: Wikipedia)

After learning the secrets of Quantum Mechanics in Europe Oppenheimer returns to the US where he joined the faculty of UC Berkeley and became the theoretical counterpoint to experimentalist Ernst Lawrence (played by Josh Hartnett). The gentle antagonism between these two was actually one of my favourite parts of the movie.

Ernest Lawrence and his cyclotron, the first in a long series of ‘atom smashers’ leading to today’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. (Credit: Facebook)

While at Berkeley Oppenheimer also becomes involved with left-wing politics, his brother, his wife (played by Emily Blunt) and several close friends were all one-time members of the communist party although Oppenheimer himself never joined. These associations would later prove to be Oppenheimer’s downfall.

Fueled by the depression during the 1930s the Communist Party of America attracted many followers including many in academia. (Credit: Marxists Internet Archive)

The central portion of ‘Oppenheimer’ is of course his years as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project and leading scientist at Los Alamos labouratory. Oppenheimer was chosen for the position over several Nobel laureates by General Leslie Groves (Played by Matt Damon) for reasons that are still a bit murky, Groves just seemed to trust Oppenheimer more than the other, more prestigious physicists. Unlike the other versions of this story in ‘Oppenheimer’ Enrico Fermi and the other scientists at the University of Chicago have minor roles simply because they rarely interacted with Oppenheimer.

Constructed beneath the handball courts at the University of Chicago the first nuclear reactor was a critical step in the Manhattan Project but since Oppenheimer had little to do with the reactor it only appears for one brief scene in the movie. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

Although I knew very well many of the details of the development of the A-bomb director Nolan still managed to make this portion of the movie engrossing and at times thrilling. Even though many filmgoers would be unfamiliar with nuclear physics and might be confused by such terms as isotopes, implosion and critical mass Nolan refused to turn his movie into a science lecture. ‘Oppenheimer’ is about the people who believed they were doing the right thing by building the most powerful weapon ever rather than the actual science of building a bomb. All the scientists at that time believed that the Nazi were also working on a bomb and were certain that with such men as Heisenberg the Germans had a 12-18 month head start.

Werner Heisenberg (r) led the German atomic bomb but because Hitler (l) considered modern physics to be ‘Jewish Science’ the German program never got much support and at the end of the war Heisenberg had barely started building a reactor. (Credit: First Curiosity)

After the war, and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many of those who worked on the Manhattan Project hoped to find some way to prevent an arms race, to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to ‘put the nuclear genie back in the bottle’. In particular Oppenheimer’s opposition to the development of the even more powerful Hydrogen Bomb made him a number of enemies among the anti-communist politicians of the early 1950s. One in particular was Lewis Strauss (Played by Robert Downey Jr.) head of the Atomic Energy Commission. It was Strauss who orchestrated the hearings on Oppenheimer’s security clearance, using Oppenheimer’s known associations with communist party members back in the 1930s to question his loyalty. Many people today believe that it was the rescinding of his clearance that broke Oppenheimer, he stayed well out of the public eye for the rest of his life, but perhaps it was simply the final straw.

Security’s twin gods of ‘Clearance’ and ‘Need to Know’ are recurring themes in ‘Oppenheimer’. Who gets clearance and who doesn’t is often a matter of politics as much as loyalty to America. (Credit: Advantis Global)

My one complaint about ‘Oppenheimer’ deals with the portrayal of physicist I. I. Rabi. As I mentioned above Rabi is rarely mentioned in other stories about the first atomic bomb because despite his friendship with Oppenheimer he refused to join the Manhattan Project. In ‘Oppenheimer’ however Rabi plays a large role and the movie actually includes the scene where Rabi turns down Oppenheimer’s request to work on the project. In fact the movie seems to imply that Rabi was a pacifist who did not contribute to America’s war effort.

The Manhattan Project was not the United States’ only top secret program during WW2. The Radiation Lab at MIT produced a large number of radar systems that not only detected enemy aircraft but submarines along with radar trackers for naval guns and anti-aircraft weapons. (Credit: Google Arts and Culture)

Nothing could be further from the truth. Rabi was a central figure at MIT’s Radiation Labouratory developing the radar systems that gave the allies a tremendous advantage over the axis powers. After the war Rabi was known to say, “The Atomic Bomb may have ended the War, but Radar won it!” 

Still the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did end the war and for good or ill started the nuclear age. (Credit: The Conversation)
Prometheus Bound by Peter Rubens. The Greeks understood how we often punish those who try to help us! (Credit: Wikipedia)

As a film ‘Oppenheimer’ is a great achievement, a thought provoking view on one of the most important moments in history and the man at the center of it. The acting is simply superb, the effects outstanding, the direction taught and engrossing. ‘Oppenheimer’ is just one of the best movies to come along in a long time so go see it. In Greek mythology Prometheus stole fire from heaven and brought it to men. For that the Gods chained him to a rock and tortured him for eternity. Oppenheimer’s greatest achievement, along with how he was treated afterwards, mirrors the Prometheus story in many ways.

 

Paleontology News for July 2023: Recent study highlights molecular evidence for the existence of Eukaryotic life forms as long ago as 1.6 billion years.

In these blog posts I have often mentioned that most of what we know about ancient life forms comes from examining the fossilized ‘hard parts’, the bones and shells of those creatures. Plants and animals without such hard parts, like jellyfish, slugs or many kinds of worms leave few traces in the fossil record and only a few fossil sites, like the famous Burgess Shale, give us a window into the soft bodied life forms of the past.

Nearly all fossils are the remains of the ‘Hard Parts’ of ancient animals, the soft flesh is rarely preserved. (Credit: FiveThirtyEight)
Fossils of animals without any hard parts, like this jellyfish, are extremely rare and hence extremely valuable to paleontologists. (Credit: The University of Kansas)

Even rarer is fossil evidence for single celled organisms like amoebas, algae or bacteria. Because of that we have little to no evidence to illustrate most of the evolution of life here on Earth. Seriously, most researchers think that the first life forms on our planet originated more than 3.5 billion years ago.  Multi-cellular creatures however only appeared about 650 million years ago so for the first 3 billion years or so Earth was inhabited only by single celled organisms. Our understanding of how single celled life evolved from mere bags of organic material to cells complex enough to develop into multi-cellular creatures is mostly theories with only bits of evidence to back them up.

For most of the history of Earth living things were single celled creatures like this Amoeba. Creatures that left little fossil evidence leaving us with a lot of theories of how early life evolved but few facts. (Credit: KLive Science)

One problem in particular is time lapse between when our theories say that the first eukaryotic cells should have evolved, some 1.6 billion years ago, and the first unmistakable signs of their existence some 800 years later. Now, what is a eukaryotic cell and why is the timing of their development so important? Let me take a minute or two to explain.

Prokaryotes, like this bacteria, have little internal structure. The various parts of their metabolism, including their DNA, just kind of float in their cytoplasm. (Credit: Javatpoint)

As I said above the first living things here on earth were probably little more than bags of organic compounds, some RNA, maybe DNA, proteins for structure with fats and carbohydrates for energy. There was little or no structure inside the bag as the different types of compounds just mixed together. Modern bacteria and blue-green algae are still very much like this and as a group such ‘primitive’ cells are called prokaryotes from the Greek words ‘pro’ meaning before and ‘karyon’ meaning kernel, the kernel in this case being a cell nucleus where a cell’s genetic material is kept safe. So a prokaryote is a single celled creature without a nucleus.

Eukaryotes, like an amoeba or every cell in your body, have a much more complicated internal structure with many ‘organelles’ like the mitochondria, or Golgi Bodies or the Nucleus itself where the cells DNA is kept protected. (Credit: News Medical)

Cells with a nucleus are referred to as eukaryotes, cells with a kernel. Such cells include single celled creatures like amoeba and paramecium but also all of the cells of all multi-cellular organisms, plants or animals including all of the cells of your body. In addition to a nucleus eukaryotic cells usually also possess other structures as well like mitochondria, ribosomes and my personal favourite the endoplasmic reticulum. Obviously the evolution of eukaryotes from prokaryotes was an important moment in the history of life and so an 800 million year gap in when we think they should have evolved and when we have good evidence that they did evolve is a big problem.

Simplified view of how the evolution of eukaryotes from prokaryotes began. Problem is that this process is very difficult to confirm in the fossil record. (Credit: Understanding Evolution)

Now single celled organisms, whether they be bacteria or amoeba rarely fossilize. So instead of looking for the actual remains of eukaryotes in ancient rocks paleochemists look for chemical traces, that is traces of complex chemicals that are produced by eukatyotes but not by prokaryotes. The chemicals that paleochemists were looking for are the familiar group known as steroids, especially the steroid cholesterol. These chemicals are very useful for living cells because of their ability to allow cells to survive in a wider range of temperatures, repeated de-hydration and re-hydration as well as enduring high levels of ultraviolet light.

Cholesterol is one of a class of chemicals known as Steroids. Despite their bad press Steroids, including Cholesterol are very important to the functioning of our metabolism. (Credit: Saylordotorg.github.io)

Producing steroids however requires a lot of oxygen and a billion years ago the Earth’s atmosphere had very little of the gas. That led the researchers to propose a new theory, that between 1.6 and 800 million years ago an intermediate form of eukaryotic-like organisms dominated the Earth. These intermediate eukaryotic-like cells could not produce full steroids, or crown steroids as they are known but only simpler protosteroids and hence the intermediate cell forms are known collectively as the ‘Protosterol biota’.

Artist’s concept of what the ‘Protosterol Biota’ could have looked like. Something like the more advanced Eukaryotes these single celled creatures were unable to produce complex chemicals like steroids. (Credit: Sci.news)

With this new idea in mind paleochemists went searching for protosteroids in rocks of the right age and quickly hit the jackpot, they found protosteroids almost everywhere they looked. It is now thought that, during the time when the protosterol biota were dominant the true eukaryotes evolved in those harsh environments where crown steroids were needed in order to survive, perhaps on the land the researchers speculate. Then, about 800 million years ago, when the oxygen levels in the atmosphere increased to near present levels the true eukaryotes took over and the protosterol biota became extinct.

Paleochemist Jochen Brocks examines 1.6 billion year old rocks containing the chemical traces of the protosterol biota. (Credit: Reuters)

The evolution of complex eukaryotic cells from their prokaryotic ancestors was one of the most important advances in the history of life, setting the stage for the evolution of multicellular creatures. It is only reasonable therefore that the process should have taken place in stages. The protosterol biota seems to have been that intermediate step on the road to life as we know it today.

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

As I’m sure everyone knows, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the fifth and latest movie adventure of the archaeologist character Indiana Jones who first appeared in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ way back in 1981. It is also the last adventure according to its 81-year-old star Harrison Ford, which means that everyone concerned with making the movie had an extra incentive to try to go out on a high note.

The first and still the best. Raiders of the Lost Ark set a standard for action movies that has never been surpassed. (Credit: Fathom Events)

To let you all know, I’m a big Indiana Jones fan, I consider ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ to be the best action movie ever made. I also really liked both the second and third Indiana Jones movies, ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ and ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’. At the same time I really didn’t like the forth movie, ‘Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls’ known to my friends and I as ‘Indiana Jones and the Movie that should never have been Made’. Those facts should give you some idea of just how honest my opinion about ‘Dial of Destiny’ will be.

Every Indiana Jones movie actually contains two stories, before going after the ark of the Covenant in Egypt Indy first spent half an hour searching in South American to find a golden idol. (Credit: Empire Online)

‘Dial of Destiny’ begins in the last days of World War 2 with Indy and another archaeologist, Basil Shaw played by actor Toby Jones, trying to prevent the Nazis from stealing various historical artifacts, one in particular being the head of the spear that pierced Jesus as he hung from the cross. That artifact turns out to be a fake but at the same time Basil recognizes another as the Antikythera, a mysterious clockwork like mechanism that was found in a shipwreck at the bottom of the Mediterranean in 1901 and is dated to sometime before about 80BCE. Of course Indiana Jones succeeds in defeating the Nazis and rescuing the Antikythera.

Indiana Jones seems to be at his best when he’s up against the Nazis. Three of the five movies have everybody’s favourite bad guys as the villains. (Credit: IMDb)

   One of the most interesting aspects of ‘Dial of Destiny’ occurs during this opening segment for while Indiana Jones was still fairly young during WW2 actor Harrison Ford who plays him is now 81. So while Ford did the acting the producers employed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) imaging program to make his face look young, using Ford’s previous outings as Indiana Jones as a guide. The effect works surprisingly well, Harrison Ford looks young in this opening segment and in some ways that’s a bit terrifying. Think about it, what does the future hold, will we see Humphrey Bogart staring in the next ‘Star Wars’ installment, will the entire original crew of ‘Star Trek’ be brought back from the dead to act in new episodes written by an AI generated version of D.C. Fontana? (Yea, I know a couple of them are still alive but they’re old!!!!). In fact the use of AI in films is one of the big issues that led to the current strike by the actor’s union!

Harrison Ford was 81 years old when he filmed this scene. He doesn’t look it thanks to AI! (Credit: Slash Film)

 After defeating the Nazis in the opening the story skips ahead about 25 years to 1969. Here Professor Henry Jones, to use Indy’s real name, is a retiring teacher at a New York City University and obviously none to happy about that fact. In fact Indiana’s life is a bit of a mess, his son has died, apparently in Vietnam and his wife Marion, played by Karen Allen in both the first and fourth movies, is divorcing him. Here the 81-year-old Ford does some poignant acting showing the misery of someone who has all the time in the world on their hands but who really doesn’t think they have much of a future ahead of them.

In a later scene we see the real Harrison Ford sans AI. Dial of Destiny does give Indy the chance to grow old while still displaying the heroics that we’ve all come to expect. (Credit: Syracuse.com)

Indiana’s retirement doesn’t last long however for Basil’s daughter Helena, played by actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge, shows up with the idea of finding the other half of the Antikythera and putting the two together. Before Indy can crack his whip he’s off on another daring adventure, fighting Nazis who want to refight WW2 and unearthing ancient secrets. I’ll stop my description at this point so as not to give away too many spoilers.

The three main pieces of the Antikythera mechanism. The use of gears in the ancient work was a shock when the mechanism was brought up from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. (Credit: Encyclopedia Britannica)

I would like to take a minute or two to discuss the actual Antikythera however, for there really is a mysterious mechanism that was brought up from a Greco-Roman shipwreck back in 1901. In the movie the Antikythera is in perfect working order, ready to do whatever it was made to do. In reality however two thousand years on the seafloor has left the artifact so corroded that it is never going to work again. As to why the Antikythera is such a mysterious object, simply put, it’s a gearbox, the sort of mechanism that you’ll find in an old watch or the transmission of your car. Most archaeologists agree that the Antikythera is a kind of clock designed to follow the motion of the Sun and Moon across the sky.

What we think the Antikythera mechanism originally looked like. The device was probably used as both a calendar and for keeping track of where celestial objects where in the sky. (Credit: Nature)

Prior to the discovery of the Antikythera historians didn’t think such gear based technology had been invented until about the 14th century yet the Antikythera is at least 1500 years older. Also, in the movie it is simply accepted that the Antikythera was made by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Well, aside from the time being about right there is no evidence at all to link the Antikythera to Archimedes.

Archimedes of Syracuse was one of the giants of the ancient world. (Credit: Slideshare)
But what he is best known for today is taking a bath! Eureka! (Credit: Englesberg Ideas)

So, is ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ a good movie? Is it a worthy final chapter to the Indiana Joes saga? I think so, the movie manages to maintain a roller coaster pace of thrills and chills even while allowing Harrison Ford to play a guy who’s getting too old for this shit. The movie is a bit of a nostalgia trip, I wouldn’t recommend it as a first Indiana Jones movie to see. Nevertheless ‘Indiana Jones’ is a fun two and a half hours with a character we’ve all grown to love. All in all ‘Dial of Destiny’ is a good way to say goodbye to Indiana Jones.   

Archaeology News for June 2023: Two ancient burial sites that teach us a lot about both the material wealth and cultural practices of their societies.

Everybody knows that much of archaeology is carried out in ancient burial sites, graveyards, tombs and etc. Part of the reason for this is that we humans have always had a tendency to try to take some of our Earthly possessions with us when we pass on to the world to come. The treasures found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun are the most famous examples of this but there are countless others. We’ve learned much about the technology of ancient societies by unearthing and examining the grave goods left behind by those people.

The tomb of Tutankhamun is probably the most famous archaeological site ever found. (Credit: BBC)

At the same time studying those olden gravesites can also reveal a great deal about the customs and rituals, the religious and ethical behaviour of the people who were buried there. In this post I will be discussing some recent discoveries made at two such burial sites, two locations not greatly separated in either space or time but which display considerable differences in terms of social changes.

Ritual behavior, such as receiving first communion, doesn’t leave any artifacts for archaeologists to discover later. (Credit: Our Sunday Visitor)
Unless that is an artifact illustrating the ritual is deliberately created. (Credit: Diocese of Lansing)

The first site comes from an area near the German city of Munich where an excavation team searching for unexploded munitions left over from World War II happened upon two burials. Professional archaeologists were quickly called in and the entire site carefully exhumed. Perhaps the most interesting find was a sword that had been deliberately rendered useless by heating it in the middle of the blade and then folding it over. Other weapons found included a spearhead and a portion of a shield.

Unexploded munitions left buried in the ground from WW1 and WW2 are a real danger, several people are killed by them every year. (Credit: NDTV.com)

Some of the other grave goods found included a pair of scissors so well preserved that the archaeologists were tempted to use them along with a fibula or clasp and a chain belt. Based upon the items found the researchers think that the occupants of the graves were a man and a woman but they can’t be certain because these were cremation burials where the deceased were burned to ashes and the ashes then buried in a ceramic pot.

Scissors, a razor and folded sword are among the items discovered in the gravesite outside Munich. (Credit: Archaeology)

And that gives a clue as to what society these two people came from because the last culture in this part of Germany to practice cremation were the Celts, that’s pronounced ‘Kelts’ not ‘Selts’ by the way.  The Celts were an Iron-Age, Indo-European people who spread across northern Europe from present day Turkey to Ireland and who fought both the Greeks and Romans for over 500 years. The grave goods found were also typical of the Celts; in fact not only was the sword definitely Celtic in design but the way in which it was folded has also been seen in other Celtic graves sites. The site has been dated to around 200-300 BCE and the grave goods sent to the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments where they will be cleaned, preserved and studied.

The Romans practiced both inhumation and cremation of their dead. Here is an illustration of the cremation of the Emperor Augustus. (Credit: ThoughtCo)
Grave items from a Celtic burial in the Balkans, the ashes of the deceased were placed in the urn center top. Notice again the bent sword like the one discovered at the site outside Munich. (Credit: Balkan Celts – Word Press)

At the same time that the inhabitants of the graves in Germany lived other Celts were living in the British Islands and one of the biggest questions in archaeology today is just how different were the Celts in today’s Germany from those in today’s Britain. The fates of those groups were certainly very different however for in 43CE the Roman Emperor Claudius invaded Britain and conquered the lands that would become England and Whales. In the 400 years of Roman rule that followed many of the Celts living in Britain would become Romanized. Indeed it has been suggested by some historians that the only real difference between the Celts and the later Germanic tribes that destroyed the Roman Empire is that the Romans conquered the Celts but not the Germans.

Caractus, the leader of the Celtic Britains against the Romans is brought before the Emperor Claudius in Rome. (Credit: Historic UK)

Our second burial site comes from the late Roman period in Britain where more than 60 graves were found outside the town of Garforth near Leeds. The site must have been in use as a cemetery for a considerable length of time because it not only included late Roman burials but early Anglo-Saxon ones as well. The way the archaeologists could distinguish the two groups was that the graves of the Romanized Britains were oriented east-west in the Christian fashion while the Anglo-Saxons burials were aligned north-south. Of course carbon-14 dating also helped, yielding a time frame of 400-600 CE for the burials.

Two of the graves excavated in Garford, England. (Credit: BBC)

The fact that the remains unearthed in Garforth were skeletons, not cremated ashes was one big difference with the burial outside Munich. Another was the scarcity of grave goods in the Roman-Christian graves as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon burials, which often contained objects such as knives and pottery. However the most interesting find did come from one of the Roman-Christian burials where the deceased, a woman had been laid to rest in an impressive lead coffin. All the other coffins must have been made of wood for they had all decayed back into the soil.

Lead coffin used at Garford cematary. This burial must have been that of a person of high estate since a coffin like this would have been very expensive. (Credit: The Telegraph)

The site at Garforth was discovered, as many archaeological sites are in the UK, during the survey of the area for a possible housing development. The finds unearthed at Garforth, including the lead coffin are in the care of the West Yorkshire Archaeological Advisory Service, which will continue their analysis with the intent that some of the finds will one day be displayed at the Leeds City Museum.

Leeds City Museum in England. In the UK many cities and large towns have their own local museums where you can learn a lot about the local history and natural history. (Credit: Cool Places)

Many of our most important cultural practices and rituals involve how we as a society treat our dead. Because of that fact archaeologists can learn a lot about not only an ancient people’s technology but their beliefs as well by studying grave sites. 

Astronomy News for May 2023: First ever observations of a dying star swallowing one of its own planets in a preview of what astronomers think is Earth’s eventual fate.

Astronomers are fascinated by variable stars, stars that can change their brightness whether it be over a timescale of months or days or in some cases as little as seconds. After all you’d think that an object that has a lifespan of millions if not billions of years shouldn’t change much over a single human lifetime, but many do. Some stars, like the Cepheid variables or eclipsing variables vary in a regular pattern and we can learn a great deal about the stars by observing that pattern. Other stars, like nova or supernova literally explode in a tremendous flash making them especially interesting to astronomers.

Brightness curve for a typical Cepheid variable star. By measured the time from peak brightness to peak brightness astronomers can determine the actual amount of energy the star produces. That allows them to calculate the distance to that star. (Credit: Physics Libre Texts)

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a program run by Caltech University that uses the Samuel Oschin Telescope on Mount Palomar Observatory to scan the sky every night looking for any star that suddenly changes its brightness. Back in 2020 ZTF observed a dramatic increase in the brightness of a star that was designated as ZTF SLRN-2020, and which lies about 12,000 light years away in our own Milky Way. Over a ten day period the star had brightened over 100 times its normal brightness and remained brighter for 100 days before returning to normal.

With a mirror 48 inches in diameter the Samuel Oschin telescope is used to study variable stars. (Credit: The Planetary Society)

At that time Kishalay De was a graduate student working on his Ph.D. and was given the task of trying to understand what had happened to ZTF SLRN-2020. Doing a little checking De found that ZTF SLRN-2020 was a Sun-like star that was entering old age, meaning the star had used up its original hydrogen fuel and had begun to burn helium. When that happens to a star its core has to greatly increase in temperature and this causes its outermost layers to puff up, in astronomical terminology the star has passed from its main sequence to its red giant phase. De quickly determined that ZTF SLRN-2020 was not a repeating variable, nor was the increase in brightness great enough to be a nova or supernova explosion. Unable to figure it out, and very busy trying to finish his doctoral thesis De put the data on ZTF SLRN-2020 aside. It was only last year that now Dr. Kishalay De of MIT managed to get back to thinking about ZTF SLRN-2020.

Astronomer Kishalay De of MIT talking about his discovery of a star swallowing one of it’s planets. (Credit: Harvard Gazette, Harvard University)

The first thing Dr. De decided to do was to get more data about ZTF SLRN-2020 from other instruments at other wavelengths. One instrument in particular was NASA’s NEOWISE satellite that orbits the Earth scanning the sky in the infrared. Turned out that NEOWISE, which stands for Near Earth Object Wide field Infrared Survey Explorer, had in fact observed an increase in the brightness of ZTF SLRN-2020 fully nine months before ZTF had observed it in the visible wavelengths. More than that in the infrared ZTF SLRN-2020 was still slightly brighter than normal, two full years later. Such an increase in the infrared brightness indicates that something very close to the star is generating a huge amount of dust so that as the dust warms up it emits infrared.

Designed to search for asteroids and comets the NEOWISE Satellite can also be used to study variable stars. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Based on the data from both ZTF and NEOWISE Dr. De thinks he has the answer. As it grew larger in size ZTF SLRN-2020 has swallowed one of its planets, a planet about the size of Jupiter. According to Dr. De what happened to ZTF SLRN-2020 was this, as the outer surface of the star grew close to the planet the planet’s gravity pulled some of the star’s material away into space where it cooled becoming the dust that caused the initial increase in infrared brightness seen by NEOWISE. As the star continued to grow however it finally swallowed the planet itself causing the increase in brightness at optical wavelengths seen by ZTF. After swallowing the planet however there is still enough dust orbiting around the star to cause it to continue to glow in the infrared.

As stars run out of their hydrogen fuel they begin to burn helium. This causes their cores top become much hotter which in turn causes their outer surfaces to expand making the star hundreds if not thousands of times bigger. (Credit: Earth Sky)

If Dr. De’s analysis is correct then astronomers have observed for the first time something that they think must happen rather often in the Universe. After all, nearly every star will someday enter a red giant phase and if most stars have planets then a lot of planets must end up getting swallowed by their parent star.

In the long history of the Universe this must be a fairly common occurrence, a star swallowing one of its planets. (Credit: Physics – APS.org)

In fact that is quite possibly the eventual fate of our own planet Earth, don’t worry it won’t happen for about another five billion years or so. Still, like all stars someday the Sun will start to run out of its hydrogen fuel and as it starts to burn helium it will puff up to become a red giant just like ZTF SLRN-2020 is doing now. Based upon our observations of other stars with approximately the same mass as the Sun, including ZTF SLRN-2020, then the Sun will undoubtedly swallow first Mercury and then Venus. Whether or not the Earth gets swallowed or simply burnt to a crisp by a much larger, and hence much closer Sun is debatable, but in either case the conditions here on our planet will make life impossible.

Whether the Earth eventually gets swallowed or not, the Sun’s surface will come so close that our planet will be reduced to a burnt cinder. (Credit: EarthSky)

So is what happened to ZTF SLRN-2020 a preview of what’s going to happen someday here in our solar system. Only time will tell, and we all know that the Universe has plenty of that.

Climate Change Strikes Home for Me as Smoke from Canadian Wildfires causes the worst Air Quality ever seen in Philadelphia and the Mid-Atlantic region in General.

As I have mentioned on occasion in these posts I live in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the eastern United States. I consider that to be rather fortunate due to the growing problems caused by Global Warming. It’s true that here in Philly our summers are getting a bit hotter and dryer but the most noticeable change in our weather has been the milder winters, which I’m not going to complain about.

Thanks to Global Warming Philadelphia had no measurable snow this past winter so none of this for me!!!! (Credit: MPR News)

In Philadelphia we don’t have to worry about the increasing threat of hurricanes like the people in Miami or New Orleans do. Nor have we been subjected to the ever greater number of tornadoes like the people living in the Great Plains or Deep South have had to. And while each of the past few summers have been quite dry, we are in a slight drought situation right now, it’s nothing like out west where rivers and reservoirs are at historic lows and water shortages are starting to impact everyday life for millions of people. No, all in all Philadelphia has been lucky, the weather here has hardly been showing the effects of global warming.

Here in the Mid-Atlantic region we don’t get Hurricanes either. So far for us, climate change has had few harmful effects. (Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute)

That was until the second week of June this year. It actually started a couple of weeks earlier when we began hearing about the huge number of wildfires burning in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and especially Alberta, I even mentioned them in my post of 10 June 2023. Over a million acres of trees were consumed and the amount of smoke produced so massive that it traveled for over a thousand kilometers, a small amount even reaching the US east coast giving Philadelphia a few days of beautiful red sunsets.

Beautiful red sunset on the 10th of June. Beautiful that is until you consider the millions of trees in Alberta that were burning in Alberta to cause this in Philadelphia. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

Before the fires out west could begin to quiet down more wildfires started burning in the northern part of Quebec, as many as 65 separate fires destroying as much as another two million acres of forest. Meanwhile, as the fires burned up north, the Mid-Atlantic region of the US was experiencing an unusual weather condition known as an Omega block, so named because the way that the jet stream flowing across the US resembles the Greek letter omega (Ω).

The Omega block weather pattern used to be a fairly rare phenomenon but thanks to climate change it’s becoming more common. (Credit: The Weather Channel)

During an omega block two separate low pressure systems set up. One in the northwest region of the US while the other is in New England and the maritime provinces of Canada. In the middle between two low pressure systems a massive high pressure system stretches from Texas all the way up to Minnesota. Although unusual once set up an omega block can last several weeks or more, this year’s lasted though most of the month of May and into June. Here in the Mid-Atlantic the counterclockwise flow around the low pressure system to the northeast coupled with the clockwise flow around high pressure system to the west to funnel cool air down from Canada giving Philadelphia the nicest spring we’ve had in many years.

During May that Omega black brought some really nice spring weather to Philadelphia, but every silver lining has a cloud around it! (Credit: Venture Philly Group)

Until the 6th of June that is, because the omega block began bringing down the huge amounts of smoke generated by the Canadian wildfires. It was on the evening of the 6th that a distinct smell of smoke could be noticed in the air and the weather forecasts were predicting that things were going to get worse, much worse over the next few days.

In June the wildfires in Canada spread to Quebec sending massive amounts of smoke at Pennsylvania and New York. (Credit: The BBC)

Despite the fact that the night was quite cool and promised to be perfect sleeping weather we decided to close up our house and turn on the AC so as to keep the smoke outside. The next day the smell was everywhere and Philadelphia got its first air quality alert, code orange. By the evening of the 7th the air was quite thick and everything looked as if it were in a fog except that the air was very dry.

On the afternoon of the 6th you could begin to smell the smoke but the air was still fairly clear (left). On the 8th the smoke was so thick the city itself seemed to disappear. (Credit: WHYY)

The worst day of all was Thursday the 8th of June as the air quality was declared hazardous and everyone in the city was urged to stay indoors. In the early morning hours the 24-hour news channels were declaring that New York City had the third worst air quality of any large city on Earth but by lunch NYC was officially the worst. Around three P.M. it was Philadelphia’s turn as the worst in the world as the air outside turned a dull, rusty orange and visibility dropped below a kilometer.

The pale sun in the middle of the afternoon on the 8th. The air was so thick I could only stay outside for a minute to take a few pictures. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

As the afternoon news came on the meteorologists, reporters and anchors all stared dumbfounded at the cameras as they described the conditions in the city. In a return to the days of the Covid pandemic the outside reporters were all wearing masks to protect themselves from breathing in the noxious smoke. Those meteorologists and anchors who had lived in Philadelphia for decades could only repeat, “this kind of thing doesn’t happen here!”

The worst air quality in Philly history had our local meteorologists proclaiming, “This sort of thing doesn’t happen here!” (Credit: WPVI)

Time for a little science, this is a science blog after all. Solid particles floating in the air are obviously a nuisance and can easily cause breathing problems especially for anyone who has problems breathing to start. Particulate Matter (PM) as it’s known is classified by its size because different sized particles have different characteristics in the air and in our bodies when we breathe them in.

Different classes of Particulate Matter (PM) are based on size. Big particles like sand grain are bigger than PM10, Dust and mold are PM10 while fine smoke particles are PM2.5. These particles are so small they can get deep into your lungs and stay there. (Credit: Environmental Protection Agency)

We all know how a strong wind can blow sand particles into the air and in desert regions of the world sand storms can even be deadly. At a size of around 10 micrometers sand particles along with dust, pollen and mold particles are designated as PM10. These particles are so large and heavy that they cannot stay in the air for long without a strong wind and at 10 micrometers in size they cannot penetrate deep into our lungs.

Dust storms can be very hazardous but because of the large size of the particles they require strong winds and don’t last long. (Credit: Windy.app)

Smoke particles on the other hand, like those brought down from the Canadian wildfires, are classified as PM2.5 meaning that they are smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter. Such small particles can remain suspended in the air for days or even weeks and can travel on the winds for thousands of kilometers before finally falling to the ground. Even worse, PM2.5 particles are so small that they can get deep into a person’s lungs and remain there. Breathing air heavy in PM2.5 is very much like smoking a cigarette, and the long term effects on our health very similar.

Smoke particles however are so small that they can stay aloft for days and travel thousands of kilometers, all the way from northern Quebec to the Delaware valley. (Credit: Washington Post)

Get used to hearing the phrase PM2.5 because not only is more and more of such pollution being produced by the ever growing number of wildfires but the exhaust generated by burning fossil fuels also produces PM2.5. Indeed as the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere grows so does the amount of PM2.5 and it’s becoming an ever larger problem in cities with a lot of smog days like Delhi and Beijing.

Philly may have had bad air quality for one day but for cities like Delhi (above) dangerous air quality can go on for weeks and happen dozens of times a year. (Credit: Brooking Institute)

Philadelphia never used to have such smog problems but the climate is changing and long term models show that the conditions that caused the smog on June the 8th are likely to reoccur with increasing frequency. The air quality alerts of June 6-8 are just one more example of how fossil fuels are making every part of our planet a much less healthy place to live. 

Space News for June 2023: Space, it’s starting to get a bit crowded up there and likely to get even more so in the years ahead.

There was a time, not so long ago that the USA and Russia, we called it the USSR back then, had a complete monopoly on manned spaceflight. From the flight of Yuri Gagarin back in 1961 to the Soyuz 28 mission in 1978 only Americans and Russians went into outer space and only on rockets paid for and completely controlled by the space agencies of those two countries.

Vladimir Remek (r), a citizen of Czechoslovakia became the first non-Russian, non-American to travel into space aboard Soyuz 28. (Credit: Radio Prague International)

During the 1980s and 90s both the US and the USSR began taking a few astronauts who were citizens of friendly countries into space. Even then those astronauts rode into space aboard rockets and spacecraft owned and controlled by either the US or the USSR. Then, following the collapse of the Soviet Union the Russian space agency Roscosmos needed money to keep their program going so they even arranged to take a few paying tourists into space.

American millionaire Dennis Tito became the first space tourist in 2001, traveling to the Russian Mir space station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. (Credit: Indiatimes)

It was only in 2003 that a third player, China joined the space party with their own launch vehicle and manned capsule. At about that same time the US space agency NASA decided that it no longer wanted to be in the business of just launching astronauts into Low Earth Orbit (LOE). What NASA wanted to concentrate on was exploration, manned missions to the Moon and Mars, not just back and forth to the International Space Station (ISS). So began the Commercial Crew Program where NASA helped fund two private companies, Boeing and Space X to develop launch systems and manned capsules to handle the now routine chore of simply getting people to LOE.

Yang Liwei became China’s first astronaut in 2003 making China only the third country to successfully launch a man into space. (Credit: CGTN)

In May of 2020 Space X became the first private company to launch astronauts into space. Since that time the company has carried out six NASA missions to the ISS, one every six months maintaining about half of the ISS’s crew assignments, the other half being taken care of by the Russians. The unique thing about having a private business handling space flights however is that, once their commitment to NASA is fulfilled Space X can offer their space services to anyone who wants to, and can pay to get into outer space.

One Space X crew dragon capsule docking at the International Space Station (ISS) while another is already docked! The success of Space X has done much in making travel to and from LOE a routine effort. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The first entirely commercial space mission took place in September of 2021 as billionaire Jared Isaacman paid for him and three of his friends to spend four days in LOE aboard Space X’s Dragon capsule, they did not go to the ISS, see my post of 2 October 2021. The success of that ‘Inspiration Four’ mission inspired Space X to partner with another company, Axiom space to arrange further entirely commercial space missions. The agreement was that Space X would take care of the rockets and capsules while Axiom would handle the human end, finding customers and getting them trained and ready for space. Potential customers where envisioned to be corporations wanting to conduct research in zero gee and small countries that cannot afford a space program but which could pay to send one or more astronauts into space for the sake of national pride.

Axiom is planning a ‘Space Hotel’ to begin construction in just a year or two. Other space stations are also planned by other commercial corporations. (Credit: Cool Hunting)

The first AX-1 space mission took place in April of 2022. Commanded by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria the mission took three millionaire-scientists for a seventeen day stay aboard the ISS. Originally the mission was only scheduled to last 10 days but bad weather at the spacecraft’s landing site caused AX-1 to be extended.

Launch of the Ax-1 mission to the ISS on 8 April 2022. Neither a national nor tourist flight Ax-1 took three commercial scientists to the ISS to carry out research in what could soon become the most common type of space mission. (Credit: Space.com)

Which brings us up to the latest space mission, AX-2 that was launched into orbit aboard a Space X Dragon capsule on the 22nd of May and which successfully docked with the ISS the next day. The four astronauts who manned AX-2 are all private citizens, although the mission commander Peggy Whitson is a former NASA astronaut. In addition to her duties as mission commander for AX-2 Whitson is also the company’s Director of Human Spaceflight.

Former NASA Astronaut Peggy Whitson (l) is now working for Axiom as their Director of Human Spaceflight and the mission commander for the Ax-2 mission. Also aboard are (l to r) John Shoffner, Ali AlQarni and Rayyanah Barnawi. (Credit: Space.com)

Joining Whitson as pilot was John Shoffner, a founder of Dura-Line Corporation that specializes in developing fiber-optic cables. Rounding out the four person crew were two astronauts from Saudi Arabia, Ali AlQarni and the first Arab woman to travel into space Rayyanah Barnawi. Both AlQarni and Barnawi served as mission specialists on the mission. The purpose of the AX-2 mission was officially to perform more than 20 experiments including investigations into DNA based nano-materials and microgravity effects on messenger RNA decay. To be honest however the flight was really the Saudi government’s way of establishing a presence in space in order to show themselves as the technological leader of the Arab world.

With all of their oil money the Saudi’s are trying to buy their way into many aspects of society, LIV golf anyone! By the way that is Donald Trump with the red MAGA cap on! (Credit: NY1)

After their scheduled eight days aboard the ISS the AX-2 Dragon capsule was undocked from the ISS and returned safely to Earth with her four member crew on the 30th of May. The AX-2 mission proved to be entirely uneventful which is the whole point, only when we have made travel to and from LOE can we push on further, missions to and eventual colonization of the Moon and Mars.

By turning over missions to LOE to companies like Space X and Axiom NASA hopes to go farther, one day in the near future to Mars. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Going forward the Axiom missions to the ISS are expected to become more common, more routine. The AX-3 flight to the ISS is currently scheduled for later this year so it appears that the station is going to become a busy place with 2 NASA crew missions, 2 Russian Soyuz missions along with 2 Axiom missions each year. Also later this year Boeing’s first manned flight of its Starliner capsule is scheduled to go to the space station.

Still waiting its first manned mission Boeing’s Starliner was intended to compete with Space X’s Dragon capsule. It hasn’t worked out that way. (Credit: Geekwire)

And all of that is only to the ISS, there’s also China’s Tiangong space station along with NASA’s Artemis program, scheduled next year for the first manned mission beyond LOE since 1972. Plus there’s talk of another Space X mission to the Hubble space telescope to perform needed maintenance that will allow the telescope to continue operation.

With the James Webb Space Telescope now operational NASA had planned on simply allowing Hubble to run out of fuel and become useless but Space X has developed a plan to send their Dragon capsule to the space telescope to refurbish it and keep it running. (Credit: NASA)

Then, in the years to come there will be more space stations. A California based company called Vast Space is partnering with Space X to launch into orbit an initial station module designated as Haven-1. The first flight is scheduled for sometime in 2025 with Haven-1 being crewed by Space-X’s Dragon capsule. Eventually the Haven-1 module will be joined by other modules to form a fully functioning space station.

Another company planning on getting into the space station ‘business’ is Vast Space with their Haven-1 module. (Credit: Satnews)

Meanwhile Axiom space is building several modules that will be lifted into space and connected to the ISS. Then, when the ISS is de-commissioned, expected to be around the year 2030, the Axiom modules will be detached to form a new, independent space station. Other companies are also working on other space station designs.

Bigelow Aerospace is also working on a commercial space station concept. Which of these companies will be successful is still a question but the real colonization of LOE has finally begun. (Credit: SpaceNews)

So all in all it looks as though space travel is finally starting to really take off. One day, very soon on the cosmic time scale, we humans will be living on many worlds, some as yet unknown.

As our Planet continues to get hotter so is the rhetoric of Climate Change deniers who are now insulting and even threatening scientists on social media.

The evidence for climate change just keeps piling up. High temperature records are being set on an almost daily basis. Severe storms seem to be ravaging half of the world while the other half is suffering from drought. The weather on planet Earth is simply becoming more extreme with each passing year.

The wildfires ravaging Canada right now are only the latest sign of our environment going out of wack. More and more of the news is being devoted to climate change but is anybody paying attention? (Credit: ABC)

To give a few details, in early May Southeast Asia endured a weeklong heat wave that broke the all time temperature records of three countries. In the northern Tuong Duong district of Vietnam the temperature reached 44.2ºC, the hottest temperature ever recorded in that country. Just next door in Laos the city of Loang Prabang saw a temperature of 43.5ºC again surpassing that nation’s previous all time record of 42.7ºC, a record that had been set only a month before. Finally the capital of Thailand, Bangkok saw its highest ever recorded temperature of 41ºC. Millions of human beings, many living in third world conditions suffered through greater heat than they had ever experienced and remember, deaths due to overheating exceed all other weather related deaths combined.

This year has been a record setter for high temperatures throughout all of SE Asia. (Credit: Living ASEAN)

Here in North America a similar scenario is occurring in the Pacific Northwest stretching from the states of Oregon and Washington up through the Canadian province of Alberta. While not as extreme as the heat wave in Southeast Asia daily records in many cities and towns were broken with the temperature on the 13th of May in Seattle reaching 32.2ºC, a new record for that day and the hottest temperature ever that early in the year.

The heat wave in the Pacific NW hasn’t been setting all-time records, just daily ones! (Credit: Fox 13 Seattle)

Of greater concern is the effect the heat wave had on the dozens of wildfires burning in Alberta, fires that had already destroyed more than a million and a quarter acres of forest before the heat wave arrived. It almost seems as though the devastating wildfires that torched the western states of the US over the last decade are now moving north into western Canada, exactly what you would expect due to global warming.

And if thinking of escaping global warming by moving up to Canada think again, the province of Alberta is basically on fire. (Credit: St. Albert Gazette)

By the way a new study from the Union of Concerned Scientists and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters concludes that more than a third, 37% of all of the forest land burned by wildfires in western North America since 1986, that’s a total of 19.8 million acres, is due to the burning of fossil fuels. The study was carried out by comparing the real life data of wildfires to an idealized model of fires in a world without fossil fuel emissions.

The study by the Union of Concerned Scientists details just now the amount of forest being destroyed by wildfires continues to grow decade by decade. (Credit: Union of Concerned Scientists)

Those are just two snapshots out of many extreme weather events already this year. I could have discussed all of the tornadoes across the south and central US so far in 2023. Or I could have discussed the continuing drought in Spain and France, even war torn Ukraine has seen an unusually early spring thaw that has allowed the fighting there to intensify.

Every cloud has a silver lining. If droughts like the one in France continue we won’t have to build so many bridges! (Credit: Forbes)

With all of the extreme weather events occurring across the world you’d think that the debate over climate change would be over by now. You’d think that any sensible person would see that things are getting bad and are going to get much worse if we don’t deal with the problem of CO2 emissions. But in fact the fight over global warming is actually getting even uglier. 

I was quite surprised to discover that the US is not the world leader in Climate Change denialism. We’re #2 but I know if we put some effort into it we can take the top spot. C’mon America! (Credit: Statista)

A big change for the worst has recently taken place since Elon Musk took over control of twitter. Musk’s firm commitment to ‘Free Speech’, any kind of speech, has opened the door to vicious attacks on climate scientists. On top of that Musk also laid off nearly half of Twitter’s work force including most of those assigned to finding and eliminating hate speech from the platform.

One think ya gotta say about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, it hasn’t been boring. (Credit: CNBC)

The result has been a enormous increase in misinformation about climate change as well as outright threats on Twitter against climate scientists. According to Professor of Earth Science Mark Maslin at University College London, who is also the author of popular books on climate change such as ‘How to Save Our Planet’, “There’s been a massive change. I get so much abuse and rude comments now. It’s happening to all of us, but I challenge the climate deniers so I’ve been really targeted.”

Conversations with: Professor Mark Maslin – Conversations in Human Evolution
Professor Mark Maslin out where he likes to be, in the environment. (Credit: Conversations in Human Evolution)

Not all climate scientists are as feisty as Professor Maslin however. Doug McNeall is a statistician studying climate change at the MET Office Hadley Center of Exeter University who asserts that the constant abuse has become nerve wracking. “I got to the point where it was definitely affecting my mental health.”

Typical hate message being sent to people who are only trying to learn the truth. By the way most climate scientists get paid around $100,000 dollars a year, which they’d still get even if the climate was getting better! We’d still want to know more about Earth’s climate even if there was no global warming. By the way if you want to know how much money the oil companies are making by causing climate change just keep reading. (Credit: Inside Climate News)

Many of the climate deniers even pay subscriptions to Twitter in order to get their attacks higher up in the list of replies to a scientist’s tweet. Which makes you wonder who is paying these people to be climate deniers. Perhaps worst of all however is the fact that a recent survey of 468 international climate scientists has found that one in eight female climate scientists has received online threats of sexual violence from climate deniers.

Fear of sexual violence a special kind of hell just for woman. The threat of it in a political argument is a special kind of evil. (Credit: UN Women Asia and the Pacific)

How much of this abusive climate denialism is actually being paid for by the oil and gas industry we’ll probably never know. But remember, Exxon-Mobile made a record $55.7 billion Dollars in profit last year, Shell made $39.9 billion profit while Chevron made $35.5 billion profit and poor little BP had to make do with only $27.7 billion, in profit! That’s more than enough to pay a few hundred, or a few thousand computer geeks to spread lies and distortions about what the petroleum industry is doing to our world.

So Exxon-Mobile got $11.4 billion in one quarter while the average climate scientist got around $100,000 per year. Those greedy scientists! (Credit: Statista)

The fate of our world depends on whether we listen to the climate scientists or the climate deniers. There isn’t much time left to decide.

Paleontology News for June 2023: Giant Ants and a very important Plant Fossil.

I don’t often discuss fossil plants very often in these posts, which is a mistake on my part because without plants using photosynthesis to convert sunlight into food there would be no life here on Earth. In this post I will be reporting on a very important plant fossil, one that pushes the age of a whole order of vital food plants back into the age of the Dinosaurs. With that in mind I will reverse my usual procedure of starting with the oldest fossils and going forward in time so that I can make Palaeophytocrene chicoensis the top story for this post.

They may not get as much press coverage as Dinosaurs or Trilobites but Paleobotany, the study of fossilized plants is every bit as important a subject. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Everyone pretty much knows that there are three basic types of land plants; in order of when they first evolved there are the ferns, the conifers or evergreens and finally the flowering plants that are the type most familiar to us today. One order of the flowering plants are the Lamiids, a group of some 40,000 species and includes some well known and very important crop species such as the potato, tomato and coffee. The chief characteristics that the Lamiids share are a woody, vine-like structure that allow them to naturally inhabit rainforest type environments.

The Lamiid family of plants, at top, include some of our most valuable crops so a better understanding of their evolution an important discovery. (Credit: Chegg)

In the fossil record the Lamiids are a fairly diverse group that appears shortly after the mass extinction that ended the time of the dinosaurs. In fact the group is so diverse so shortly after the extinction that paleobotanists have long speculated that the Lamiids must have first evolved during the cretaceous period, the last period when dinosaurs still ruled. The smoking gun of an unmistakable Lamiid fossil from the cretaceous could not be found however.

Fossilized fruit of Palaeophytocrene chicoensis from the Cretaceous period discovered near Sacramento California. (Credit: Eureka Alert)

Until now, for Brian Atkinson, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas has, after seven years of searching, succeeded in finding a Lamiid fossil from the cretaceous. The fossil has been given the name Palaeophytocrene chicoensis, the species name coming from the Chico Formation of cretaceous age about 80 million years ago in north-central California near Sacramento.

Professor Atkinson didn’t discover his Lamiid fossil in the ground however. As often happens Atkinson found the specimen lying unrecognized in a collection of fossils, in this case the collection of the Sierra College Museum of Natural History. The fossil was one of a number of specimens that were originally unearthed during the construction of a housing project near Granite bay in Sacramento during the 1990s by Richard Hilton and Patrick Antuzzi of Sierra College.

The Natural History Museum of Sierra College, California. Looks like a fun place to visit. (Credit: Sierra College)

The instant that Professor Atkinson saw the fossil fruit Professor he was certain that it was the fruit of a Lamiid of the family lcacinaceae but like every good scientist the professor made a thorough examination using the latest technology. Based on his findings Atkinson finally assigned the specimen to the genus Palaeophytocrene, members of which are well known from the period shortly after the extinction.

The asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago killed more than just the dinosaurs, whole groups of plants also went extinct. (Credit: ThoughtCo)

The discovery of Palaeophytocrene chicoensis is important not only because of what it can tell us about the evolution of the Lamiids but also because of what we can learn from it about the way that ancient forests changed from being dominated by conifers to consisting mostly of flowering plants, one of the most critical ecological changes in the history of life. Palaeophytocrene chicoensis is yet another example, not just of how a single fossil can teach us so much but of how the ability to recognize something important, something other people don’t see, often leads to major discoveries that can change the world of science.

80-90 million years ago the world’s forests consisted exclusively of evergreens like these spruces. Studying plant fossils like that of Palaeophytocrene chicoensis can tell us a lot about how flowering plants came to dominate the forests of the Earth. (Credit: Colorado State Forest Service)

Giant insects are usually something out of a grade B movie from the 1950s. In reality Ants of the genus Titanomyrma may not have been as large as the ants in 1954’s ‘Them’ but with a length of as much as 10cm and a wingspan of 15cm they were certainly among the largest of their kind. Titanomyrma lived some 50 million years ago and specimens have been found in both Western Europe, England and Germany, and also in western North America, which is something of a puzzle to paleontologists. How did a genus of ant, big ones but still ants, get across the Atlantic ocean in order to populate both continents? At that time there was still a land bridge connecting Europe and North America but it was in the cold Artic, not the sort of environment ants prefer.

With a length of as much as 10cm Titanomyrma was a ‘giant’ ant indeed. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Now a new fossil specimen of a queen ant of the genus Titanomyrma has been unearthed outside the town of Princeton in British Columbia in Canada by an amateur fossil collector named Beverly Burlingame and is now being kept at the local museum. This specimen is the first of its kind ever found in Canada and the fact that Titanomyrma was found so far north is forcing researchers to consider the possibility that the ants did actually migrate through the polar regions.

Princeton British Columbia, see arrow, is not too far inland from Vancouver, but it is a lot colder than most species of ant would prefer. (Credit: Google Maps)

It might not have been so cold however, nowadays we’re used to the idea of climate change and in particular a reduction in size of the polar ice caps due to a global temperature rise. The idea that brief periods of ‘Hyperthermals’ as they’re called could have allowed Titanomyrma to cross the Artic region is gaining evidence; indeed the fossil queen herself is now some of that evidence.

Hyperthermals, brief periods greater than average temperatures,are usually caused by increased CO2 emitted by volcanic activity. They are subjects of considerable study right now because of our CO2 emissions. (Credit: CP)

That’s how science works, specimens and evidence generate puzzles. More evidence then not only allows the puzzle to be solved but gives a more accurate, fuller picture of the whole system of which that puzzle was just a small part.