Somewhere in the Multiverse two ideologies are at war, The Agency is a Techno-hierarchy while The Garden is an organic consciousness. Each organization sends out agents who travel up and down time streams, back and forth across dimensions altering the future here, deleting a bit of the past there in their efforts to bring themselves into existence. Red is the top agent for The Agency while Blue is her counterpart for The Garden.
Cover of ‘This is How You Lose the Time war’ by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. (Credit: Amazon)
Such is the background for ‘This is How You Lose the Time War’ by authors Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. As the story begins Red has emerged victorious in a large battle in some corner of reality when she spies a piece of paper with the words “Burn before Reading” written upon it. Although they have never met Red immediately knows that the message is from her enemy Blue and guesses that the message could be either a trap or an attempt to turn her to Blue’s side. Knowing that even reading the message could be a betrayal to her side she burns the paper and in the fading ashes she reads the first in a series of letters passed surreptitiously between the two time warriors.
Authors Max Gladstone (l) and Amal el-Mohtar (r). (Credit: Uncanny Magazine)
As you have probably guessed by now ‘This is How You Lose the Time War’ is a different kind of Science Fiction novel, written in a technique as much poetry as prose, with world building that is both abstract and minimalist. The rules of plausibility, so often broken in Science Fiction are here gleefully ignored. This is a story that is more about style than plot and indeed its plot is really a very familiar one.
I like this drawing showing the two protagonists Red and Blue of ‘This is How You Lose the Time War’. Notice that, like the ying yang symbol there’s a bit of red in Blue and a bit of blue in Red. (Credit: Laya Rose Art)
The two agents are soon passing notes back and forth and of course they soon fall in love, both are female by the way. To be honest I didn’t see the parallels to ‘Romeo and Juliet’ until Shakespeare’s play was explicitly mentioned. “Two houses alike in dignity…From ancient grudge break to new mutiny.” and “Two star crossed lovers” but it was pretty easy to see where the plot was going. As I said ‘This is How You Lose the Time War’ is more about style than plot.
First date I ever went on was the Franco Zeffirelli version of R & J. (Credit: TV Tropes)
After about a dozen messages between Red and Blue I was starting to find the story becoming repetitious but the authors must have also realized that because at this point the two agent’s superiors begin to suspect that something is going on and Red and Blue are soon put in a situation reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet’s in Act 4. The ending is quite different however and I was pleased that I managed to figure it out ahead of time.
Just like in Romeo and Juliet the two houses cause all the problems for the two lovers Red and Blue. The ending however is quite different. (Credit: No Sweat Shakespeare)
As I said ‘This is How You Lose the Time War’ doesn’t have a very intriguing plot, and if you really like the details of world building you’ll be disappointed. However the writing of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is very clever and interesting, again something like poetry.
Of Course Time Wars are right up The Doctor’s alley. But Aml el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone have done a pretty good job with ‘This is How You Lose the Time War’. (Credit: Wikipedia)
And another thing, it’s a quick read. It took me less than two days to finish the novel. So if you’re looking for a light desert after a heavy meal like Dune or GOT maybe you should try ‘This is How You Lose the Time War’. While it may not be memorable it is nevertheless certainly enjoyable.
The ‘Age of the Dinosaurs’ is technically known as the Mesozoic or middle period of multi-cellular life here on Earth. So much of the research into this era of Earth’s history deals with dinosaurs that it’s almost surprising to come across stories about other kinds of life forms from the Mesozoic. Here are a couple.
The Mesozoic or middle period of multicellular life is often called the age of Dinosaurs, meaning other life forms don’t get the attention they deserve. (Credit: The Secrets of the Universe)
The first discovery concerns the fossils preserved in four chunks of 99 million year old amber recently unearthed in the country of Myanmar. Now, I have already discussed some of the extraordinary finds preserved in the amber that has been mined in that troubled country, see my posts of 16 December 2016 and 1 June 2019. Even before the military coup that swept away the democratically elected government in February of 2021 scientists had been wary of obtaining fossilized amber from Myanmar for fear that the money could help to support the military, or criminal smugglers or both.
Back in 2016 the feathered tail of a small dinosaur was found in Burmese amber. Many such extraordinary finds have been found the that troubled country. (Credit: Science)
All of the political nonsense surrounding Burmese amber is keeping scientists from being able to properly study one of the most important fossil sites known while at the same time allowing valuable specimens to fall into the hands of unscrupulous dealers. Fortunately the four specimens in the latest study were obtained back in 2017 and the results of their study are only now being published. What the pieces of amber have revealed are spiders, in fact an entire family of spiders.
You didn’t know that spiders lived as families, well there are actually many species of spider where the mother provides a considerable amount of maternal care to her offspring while they’re young and that is exactly what the specimens preserved in amber illustrate. Based upon the mother spider’s facial appendages, spineless legs and ‘sensing hairs’ or trichobothria she belonged to a now extinct family of spiders called Lagonomegopidae.
A spider of the family Lagonomegopidae guarding her eggs even as she was encased in tree sap. (Credit: CNN)
The female was positioned directly above her egg sack, the spiderlings clearly visible inside. Her stance strongly suggests that she is protecting her offspring in a way identical to female spiders today. That such behavior has a long history has been suspected but according to study co-author Paul Selden of the University of Kansas Department of Geology, “it’s lovely to have actual physical evidence through these little snapshots in the fossil record.”
Spiders are of course one of the groups of animals that managed to survive the extinction event that killed all of the dinosaurs. And now a new study is revealing how another well-known group, the snakes, barely endured that cataclysm.
Snake Taxonomy, the three families in bold possess venomous fangs! (Credit: The Reptile Database)
Today there are more than 4000 species of snake living in all but the very coldest of climates. The new study, published in the journal Nature Communications by scientists at the University of Bath in collaboration with researchers from Bristol, Cambridge and Germany have used fossil specimens and DNA samples from living species to outline the evolutionary history of all snakes. What they found was that, after the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs there were only a very few species of snake remaining in the world, and possibly only in the southern hemisphere.
There are over 4000 species of snakes in the world. Did they all evolve from just a few survivors of the extinction of the dinosaurs? (Credit: Reptile Fact)Did any of the dinosaurs actually see the asteroid as it struck? Of course none could understand what was going to happen to them when it did! (Credit: The Independent)
In the several million years after the asteroid snakes not only spread throughout the planet but also diversified into the many types that we see today. The ability of snakes to live underground and go long periods of time without eating were no doubt crucial factors in their survival but their rapid diversification also demonstrates how quickly species can evolve and change after major disasters when a large number of ecological niches open up.
When a few finches managed to reach the Galapagos Islands they found an entire ecosystem waiting to be exploited. They quickly evolved into a number of different species. It now appears that the few snakes that survived the asteroid did much the same thing. (Credit: Galapagos Conservation Trust)
As described by lead author Dr. Catherine Klein, “It’s remarkable because not only are they surviving an extinction that wipes out so many other animals but within a few million years they are innovating, using their habitats in new ways.” By wiping out so many species the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs actually played a creative role in the evolution of many new species, including us of course.
Some people think that if they asteroid hadn’t killed them all by now an intelligent species of dinosaur would have evolved. Of course the Universe doesn’t allow do overs! (Credit: The Intelligence of Troodon)
But I can’t write a post about animals from the Mesozoic without at least mentioning one species of dinosaur. The species I’ll talk about is little known, in fact only one fossil specimen has ever been discovered but that single fossil was so well preserved that paleontologists have even been able to learn a great deal about the animal’s skin.
The dino is question is called Carnotaurus sastrei and is an 8 meter long carnivorous theropod dinosaur related to the famous Tyrannosaurus rex. Unearthed in 1984 in Patagonia the fact that the fossil included exquisite impressions of the animals skin caused quite a stir at the time. A full-scale examination of those impressions was never carried out however and it’s only now that the details are being revealed.
Carnotaurus sastrei was a big meat eater closely related to the better known T rex. (Credit: Deviant Art)
The new study details how the animal’s skin was a complex tapestry containing not only reptilian scales but also bumps, wrinkles and even thorns. Indeed for a reptile the number of scales was quite small and for the most part the skin reminded the researchers more of the hide of an elephant than a modern lizard or crocodile. The big news however is that from head to tail there was not a sign of anything resembling a feather on Carnotaurus.
The fossilized skin of C sastrei. Although containing an assortment of bumps, scales and thorns there is no sign of anything like feathers. (Credit: ScienceDirect.com)
In the last few decades of course there has been growing amount of evidence that our modern birds are closely related to the theropod dinosaurs. Indeed some fossils have shown that a few of the smaller species of dinosaurs may have had at least portions of their body covered with feathers in order to keep them warm. Some paleontologists have even gone so far as to suggest that T rex himself may have had a light covering of feathers on its head and legs.
Over the last few decades the line between Dinosaurs and Birds is getting pretty blurred. But at least the evidence from C sastrei indicates that its relative T rex was all dino! (Credit: National Audubon Society)
Well, if the evidence of C sastrei is any indication then we can spare T rex the humiliation of suggesting it was covered by pretty feathers. That makes sense to, larger animals have an easier job of regulating their body temperature, it just takes them longer to either cool down or warm up. That’s why elephants have so little hair.
In some ways the skin of C sastrei closely resembles that of our modern elephant. Another example of convergent evolution where unrelated species resemble each other because they live very similar lives. (Credit: BCC)
So there you have it. Three stories from the Mesozoic that illustrate something of the ways that living things evolve.
It really wasn’t so long ago that everything in the nighttime sky was a complete mystery. What were the stars and how did they differ from the planets, whatever the planets were? What was the Milky Way, or meteors, or comets? Only about 600 years ago nobody knew what any of the things were. Today however thanks to advances in astronomy there are entire books, brimming with measurements and data described in detail each of those classes of object.
It’s hard to believe but just 600 years ago nobody had any idea what the stars, planets, comets or meteors were. Now there are many children’s books to explain them. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)
Nevertheless until recently there was one small mystery remaining from the years before Copernicus. In the year 1181 CE Chinese astronomers spotted and recorded the location in the sky of a new or guest star. This new star shined as brightly as the planet Saturn and lasted a full six months before fading away. Even with all the progress in astronomy since then no one had ever been able to identify exactly what object in the sky had been that guest star.
The location in the sky of supernova SN1181 as recorded by Chinese astronomers. For hundreds of years astronomers have searched in vain for the corpse of that cosmic death. (Credit: Science Times)
Now supernovas as a class are no longer a mystery, I have written several posts about them (see 26 May 2021 and 18 Jan 2020). Of the supernovas that were spotted and recorded before the age of the telescope astronomers have succeeded in identifying the corpses for several, such as the Crab Nebula which is the remnants of a supernova spotted in 1006. But astronomers failed in all their attempts to identify the remains of the supernova of 1181.
The Crab Nebula, also known as Messier 1, is the remains of a type 2 Supernova that was recorded by Chinese astronomers in the year 1006. At the center of the expanding gas cloud is a pulsating neutron star, the corpse of a once mighty star. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Until now, now an international group of astronomers from Hong Kong, the UK, France and Hungary think they’ve found it in a nebula known as Pa30 that surrounds one of the hottest stars in the galaxy called Parker’s star. And in so doing they may have discovered the first in a totally new class of supernovas, a Type Iax.
Parker’s star, seen here in both visible and radio waves, is mainly hidden in a rapidly expanding gas cloud but is considered to be one of the hottest objects know to astronomy. Could this be the remains of SN1181? (Credit: Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalusa)
Before I go any further let me take a minute to describe the two classes of supernovas already recognized by astronomers. Type two supernovas happen when a huge star, say ten times the mass of our Sun, has used up all of its hydrogen fuel as well as its helium and even carbon and oxygen, having fused them into iron. Once a star reaches that point however it’s at a dead end because you can’t get energy from iron by either fusion or fission. Without the energy produced by nuclear fusion the star begins to collapse and then rebound. The rebound is a massive explosion that we see as a Type 2 supernova.
Huge massive stars, at least 10 times the mass of out Sun, end their lives as Type 2 Supernova. (Credit: Futurism)
A Type 1 supernova on the other hand starts out as a more normal star, say 2-3 times as massive as the Sun. Once such a star has also used up all of its nuclear fuel it goes into ‘retirement’ as a white dwarf, an incredibly dense object as massive as our Sun but only the size of the Earth. The old description of white dwarf material is that a matchbox full would weigh as much as a ton of normal matter.
Now if a white dwarf star has a companion star it can steal some material from the companion, gaining mass in the process. There’s a limit to how much mass the dwarf can steal however because if it exceeds a value known as Chandrasekhar’s mass, which about equal to 1.4 solar masses, then the white dwarf will collapse into a neutron star, throwing off a portion of it’s mass as a Type 1 supernova.
The mechanism of a Type 1 Supernova. A white dwarf star can gobble mass from a companion star but if it goes too far it explodes! (Credit: Phys.Org)
Now Pa30 is certainly not the remnants of a Type 2 supernova but it also differs is several ways from the remains of a Type 1 supernova as well. Based upon the observations they’ve made of the object the astronomers think they may have found the first known example of a kind of supernova that has been postulated but never before seen.
The idea is this, what if two white dwarfs collided and merged, exceeding Chandrasekhar’s mass that way. Would that result in a supernova and what would that supernova look like? Well, based upon the measurements made of Pa30 and Parker’s star they fit this new class of supernovas Type Iax. So if the assertions made by the astronomers holds up they may have solved one of the last remaining astronomical mysteries from before the age of the telescope, and found the evidence for a whole new class of supernova.
The collision of two white dwarfs has been discussed by astrophysicists for some time. Could the remenants of SN1181 be from such an event. (Credit: YouTube)
But even as astronomers solve one of the mysteries of the Universe it always seems like they discover another. In my lifetime quasars, pulsars and active galactic nuclei have all been discovered and solved while other mysteries like dark energy remain to be completely understood.
One of the hottest topics in astronomy right now are radio transients, that is sudden and very short-lived bursts of radio energy that appear somewhere in the sky and then disappear as quickly as they came. One particular type of these objects have been spotted in the vicinity of the center of our galaxy and been given the name Galactic Center Radio Transients or GCRTs and have also been given the nickname of Burpers.
Something is transmitting burst of radio waves from the center of our galaxy. Right now astronomers can only guess as to the cause! (Credit: Phys.Org)
GCRT J1745-3009 is a typical member of its class. The object was discovered back in the fall of 2002 when a group of astronomers from Sweet Briar College were listening to the region around the center of the Milky Way at a frequency of 330 Megahertz or 1meter in wavelength. In a seven hour period over the night of September30-October1 they received five bursts of radio energy, all of the same signal strength, all lasting about ten minutes and all occurring 77 minutes apart with no signal in between. Upon checking their data the astronomers discovered another identical burst had been recorded three days earlier on September 28 and a weaker burst was later received on March 20th of 2004. No other observations of GCRT J1745-3009 have been observed since nor was the object observed in any other form of EM radiation such as visible light or X-rays. GCRT J1745-3009 is one of three such mysterious objects that astronomers have observed to date.
Some of the data taken from GCRT J1745-3009 in 2002. Whatever it was that produced these radio signals it hasn’t been heard from since March of 2004. (Credit: ResearchGate)
You can understand how trying to figure out the mechanism behind a phenomenon that only appears seven times in seven months, never for longer than ten minutes and then vanishes completely can be a difficult task. Astrophysicists are clever guys however and several theories have already been proposed for the nature of the burpers. These include pairs of orbiting neutron stars, radio emitting white dwarfs along with a pulsar precessing at a period of 77 minutes.
One guess, and it is just a guess at present, is that GCRT J1745-3009 could be a precessing pulsar. Astronomers are looking for evidence to either prove or disprove this theory. (Credit: Semantic Scholar)
That’s the way of science in general, even as we solve one mystery there are always plenty more waiting to be figured out. To anyone who likes solving puzzles it means that you’ll certainly never be bored.
It’s that time of year again when the folks in the news media actually take a little bit of time away from politics, crime and celebrities to mention some of the work done by scientists. That’s right it’s Nobel Prize week and the awards for Physiology, Physics and Chemistry have been announced.
You don’t get to see the reverse side of the actual Nobel Prize very often. This is apparently the one awarded to Linus Pauling in 1954 for Chemistry. (Credit: The Conversation)
On Monday the 4th of October the first prize to be awarded was for physiology or medicine and this year the honour went to research into how the nerve cells in our bodies are able to translate physical sensations like pressure or temperature into the electro-chemical signals that our brain can understand. The 2021 Nobel Prize for Physiology was shared by Doctor David Julius of the University of California at San Francisco along with Doctor Ardem Patapoutian, a researcher at the Scripps Institute at La Jolla California.
The recipients of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology are David Julius (l) and Ardem Patapoutian (r) for their work on how nerve cells transmit sensory impressions to the brain. (Credit: YouTube)
Dr. Julius conducted his research using capsaicin, the chemical in hot chili peppers that cause us to feel the sensation of heat whenever we eat them. By studying how a nerve cell reacts to that chemical Julius was able identify the sensors on the cells that respond to heat.
Chili Peppers aren’t actually hot of course, but the chemical capsaicin tricks our nerve cells into thinking that they are hot. (Credit: Food Network)
Continuing with his research Dr. Julius has since been able to collect a library of DNA segments that are used in nerve cells to express pain, heat, cold and touch. Dr. Patapoutian meanwhile has carried out his studies concentrating on the ion pathways and other metabolic processes that allow cells to convert physical stimuli into those chemical signals.
Together the work of these two scientists have brought a greater understanding of how our nervous system translates the impressions of the world around us into the kind of electrochemical signals that our brain can comprehend. It is hoped that in the near future this research may lead to new techniques to help reduce chronic and acute pain from disease and injury without the need for dangerous and addictive narcotics.
Pain is supposed to warn us that we’ve been injured in some way but chronic pain can become more of a medical problem than the injury causing the pain. (Credit: Twitter)
Tuesday the 5th saw the announcement of the Physics prize and this year’s recipients were honoured for their pioneering work in describing the long term behavior of complex systems. The 2021 Physics prize was shared by three scientists, Syukuro Manabe at Princeton University in New Jersey, Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg Germany along with Giorgio Parisi at Sapienza University in Rome Italy.
The 2021 Nobel for Physics honoured Giorgio Parisi (r) for his work on complex systems along with Syukuro Manabe (l) and Klaus Hasselmann for their work on models for predicting climate change. (Credit: CNN)
While the work of Doctor Parisi can be applied to any complex system from atoms to solar systems the work of both Drs. Manabe and Hasselmann concentrated on one very important complex system, Earth’s climate. Beginning in the 1960s Syukuro Manabe developed a series of models of the Earth’s climate and was the first to study the relation between the radiation balance of sunlight striking the Earth minus the Earth’s infrared emissions to the vertical transport of heat in the atmosphere. Earlier models had simply looked at the atmosphere but Manabe’s model expanded the climate to include both the oceans and land surface.
If you want to develop a model of Earth’s climate you have to divide the planet into a huge number of individual volumes and then determine how each tiny volume interacts with all of the other ones. If that sounds like a big problem it certainly is! (Credit: SERC – Carleton)
Not long thereafter Doctor Hasselmann used a series of computer simulations to show how long term climate models could be accurate despite the large, erratic fluctuations to which weather systems are subjected. Together the work of these three physicists served to place climate prediction on a strong quantitative basis and thereby provided the evidence for climate change due to the burning of fossil fuels. This year’s prize represents the first time that scientific research directly linked to global warming has been honoured by the Nobel committee.
Thanks to the work of Drs. Manabe, Hasselmann and Parisi we can predict how global warming will effect such weather events as rainfall in various parts of the world. (Credit: EGU Blogs)
On Wednesday it was chemistry’s turn and this year’s prize was shared by David W. C. MacMillan of Princeton University and Benjamin List of the Max Planck Institute who were honoured for independently developing a new variety of catalysts that MacMillan named organocatalysts. Much of the science of chemistry involves catalysts; those elements or compounds that can speed up a chemical reaction without being either used up in or altered by the reaction. For many years chemists thought that there were only two kinds of catalysts, simple metals or complex proteins called enzymes. What Drs. MacMillan and List found was a class of small organic molecules that could serve as catalysts for a wide variety of reactions.
The Recipients of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry are Bemjamin List (l) and David MacMillan (r) who pioneered the development of oragnocatalysis. (Credit: Reuters)
In the twenty years since their discovery organocatalysts have been used in the production of pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals, food additives, plastics and even the clean energy industry. Organocatalysts are also useful in the production of ‘mirror image’ compounds, that is chemical substances that have the exact same chemical formula but whose arrangement of their atoms are mirror images, like your left and right hands.
Many molecules come in left and right handed versions of each other, a property known as Chirality. (Credit: Creation Moments)
While no one doubts that the achievements of this year’s prizewinners make them worthy of the Nobel nevertheless the selections have also come with a bit of criticism. You see all of the seven scientists awarded the Nobel Prize this year are men, once again women have shut out.
When I was young Marie Curie was considered to be something of a one off, ‘Look even a Woman can win a Nobel”. Thankfully we’ve made some progress since. (Credit: Literary Club)
This is a problem that is going to be hard to solve. You see even today women are underrepresented in the scientific world. And since Nobel Prizes are generally awarded for work that was conducted more than 20 years ago, when there were even fewer women in science, it’s not a problem that is going to be solved anytime soon.
Girls are every bit as curious about science and technology as boys are. In today’s world we cannot afford not to educate ever person to their fullest capacity. (Credit: Change.org)
The Nobel Prize is awarded for the very best scientific work and certainly we don’t want to compromise that just to make the award more gender neutral. But the only other choice is to continue to encourage young girls to enter scientific fields so that one day there is a better gender balance in science, and scientific awards.
I know that the majority of Scientists in general would prefer to just stay as far away from politics as they can. Think about it, when was the last time you heard of a scientist or engineer running for office? I’ll bet you’ve noticed how many lawyers run for public office along with some businessmen. That’s all rounded out by the occasional entertainer and even a few athletes, but not scientists. The whole political process of ‘creating a message that will resonate with the voters’, in other words lying, just goes against everything that science stands for.
Actor or President, you decide! Sometimes it just seems as if the governing of a country is nothing but a popularity contest. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Scientists don’t make good politicians, when the state of Israel was founded they asked Albert Einstein to be their first president. He turned them down. (Credit: Phys.org)
I fact I didn’t even want to write this post. The whole question of Climate Change has been answered time and time again. It’s real and we need to deal with it. But in the face of steadily rising temperatures, the melting of glaciers along with the rapid increase in both wildfires and severe weather all the global warming deniers have done is to change their tactics and so now they talk about living with climate change, not stopping it.
Some politicians are now talking about ‘living with’ Climate Change. Yea, that’ll work! (Credit: NOAA)
It was when I saw one add from the American Petroleum Institute, based on those new tactics that was simply so deceitful, so devious that I decided I would write a post about the politics of climate change. Maybe you’ve seen the ad as well.
America can’t depend on foreign, possibly hostile governments for our energy resources, and we don’t. This is a problem that doesn’t exist. (Credit: API)
The ad begins by reminding us how important energy is to America’s economic strength and national security. It then asks whether we should rely on unfriendly counties, like Iran and Venezuela, for our oil and natural gas. Of course the answer the ad gives is ‘NO’, America should develop it’s own sources of oil and natural gas instead of being dependent on unreliable foreign regimes.
This is the answer that the petroleum industry wants us to have so they can keep on drilling and destroying our country. (Credit: API)
The whole ad is like a magician’s misdirection. The question isn’t whether America should get it oil and natural gas from unfriendly foreign countries but whether we should be getting our energy from oil and natural gas at all! The issue of Climate Change due to the burning of fossil fuels is completely ignored in the ad because the petroleum industry knows that they can’t talk about it anymore. Throughout the ad, which is all about energy production, solar arrays and wind turbines are never shown or mentioned.
At least to non-existent problems. The solutions to the real problem of fossil fuel emissions are completely ignored! (Credit: API)
By the way America already gets very little of its energy from foreign nations. We import less than 8% of our energy and Canada, hardly an unfriendly, unreliable nation accounts for more than half of that. In fact the US exports more petroleum products than it imports so the entire issue of our relying on foreign governments for our energy just doesn’t exist. The ad was a deceitful attempt to drum up support for the petroleum industry by arguing a false problem without mentioning the real issues, the environmental issues caused by the burning of fossil fuels!
This is the problem Big Oil doesn’t want to talk about. So like a magician they just distract us with another issue they made up! (Credit: NASA)
Having decided to write a post about the politics of Climate Change it didn’t take me long to find a sample poll conducted by the University of Bath in the UK that surveyed 10,000 young people from ten countries aged 18-25 about their views concerning the future. Faced with the harm that their parents have done to our world 77% of those surveyed considered the future to be ‘frightening’ and fully 56% thought that humanity was ‘doomed’.
Numerous polls have found that young people are very concerned about their future because of Climate Change. The folks at Fox think that the best way of dealing with that concern is to laugh at the ‘stupid kids’. (Credit: The Washingtom Post)
And if the results of such polls weren’t depressing enough the day after I read those results I was watching my local news and when an ad came on I decided to see what the other channels were showing. I ended up at ‘The Five’ on Fox news network where the hosts were laughing at all the stupid kids, 56% of whom thought humanity was doomed because of Climate Change. Seriously, the pundits on Fox thought it was just hilarious that young people would be worried about sea level rise making the coastal areas of the planet uninhabitable or droughts causing a food shortage or just the very idea that we are poisoning the only planet we have to live on.
Unlike his associates on Fox who spew hatred at everyone who disagrees with them Greg Gutfeld prefers to laugh at them. At least he’s a bit different! (Credit: YouTube)
However there are members of the media and entertainment worlds who recognize the growing danger of fossil fuel emissions and are willing to do what they can to raise public awareness of the issue, though to be honest I have to wonder how anyone today could be unaware of Climate Change. Nevertheless on the evening of the 22nd of September the hosts of eight late-night television shows, on eight different networks, all devoted their programs for a united effort to save mother Earth. The list of who joined in reads like the nominees for a Hollywood award, Steven Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, James Corden, Trevor Noah, Andy Cohen and Samantha Bee.
On the night of September 22nd eight late night programs joined together to publicize climate change. My only problem with that is the fact that climate change needed to be publicized. (Credit: Yahoo News)
“Don’t even think about switching to another show,” announced ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel at the beginning of his show. “We’re all focused on this topic tonight. You can’t escape. It’s basically an intervention. Our future is in jeopardy.”
Kids explaining Climate Change to Donald Trump was one segment on Kimmel’s show. I doubt it worked however. (Credit: YouTube)
The guests on the various shows included such environmental activists as Jane Goodall, John Kerry, Bill Gates and a host of climate scientists. Topics included the effects of temperature rise on sea turtle sex, raw sewage from homes mixing with the runoff from increasingly severe storms and the increasing risk of diseases like Covid-19 because of rising temperatures.
Jimmy Fallon had the best guest! (Credit: YouTube)
Unfortunately Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t quite correct about viewers not being able to escape because once again Fox news network was a place of refuge for the climate deniers. On the Greg Gutfeld show the host and his guests enjoyed themselves by mocking his competitors while touting the virtues of fossil fuels. Again it seems as if Fox’s way of dealing with environmental issues is to treat them as a joke in the hope that their viewers won’t take them seriously.
So I guess that’s an overview of the current state of the politics of Climate Change. By far the majority of people, even here in the US now recognize the coming catastrophe but the climate deniers have closed ranks and will do everything they can to keep making money off of cheap oil and natural gas. And that’s the real issue here, money, because any attempt to reduce carbon emissions will be taking money away from a rich and powerful, well established group of people while at the same time requiring tax increases to generate the huge amount of money needed to even begin fixing all of the environmental problems we’ve caused.
Oil and Water might not mix but Oil and Money certainly do. Remember we’ve fought several wars over this stuff! (Credit: ATDM CO.LTD)
So the politicians will delay and dither, and do nothing until they’re forced to. Think about it, most politicians, Mitch McConnell is an excellent example, are so old now that they know the worst of Climate Change will only occur long after they are safely dead. The same is true of Fox’s CEO Roger Murdoch. Climate Change won’t hurt him but any efforts to prevent it would raise his taxes and he simply doesn’t care if it hurts anyone else. So he orders his underlings to make fun of the possible extinction of the human race.
Just by looking at them you know that some people are incapable of changing in any way. (Credit: CNN)
All we can do is to keep pushing, to vote for those politicians who not only accept Climate Change but are also willing to do something about it, to write letters and emails, especially to those who oppose environmental solutions. It may not seem like much but the weight of evidence is in our favour and it’s growing. As conditions get worse more people will recognize the danger and demand action. Eventually even the politicians will have to do something.
You have to admit it is a good one. Unfortunately the joke may be on us! (Credit: Rotherham Politics)
One of the best known and most debated stories from the bible concerns the destruction of the ‘evil cities’ of Sodom and Gomorrah. As related in genesis chapter 18 verses 16-33 and Chapter 19 verses 1-29 two angels of god, after visiting with Abraham go to the cities of sin where they meet Abraham’s nephew Lot who lived in Sodom. The other inhabitants of Sodom threaten violence, usually interpreted as sexual violence against the two angels, which causes the lord to make them all to go blind. Lot and his wife and daughters then escape the city before it is destroyed by fire and brimstone. Before escaping Lot and his family were warned not to look back at the cities being destroyed but Lot’s wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt.
Was the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah a real event. People have wondered that for thousands of years. (Credit: Pinterest)
(By the way, one thing that has always puzzled me is Gomorrah. I mean none of the action takes place there, it’s never even mentioned except in conjunction with Sodom as in ‘Sodom and Gomorrah. But it was destroyed along with Sodom. Why?)
So that’s the story and for centuries people, especially armchair archaeologists have wondered about what disaster could have given birth to the legend. The consensus opinion for many years has been that an Earthquake destroyed a Bronze Age city somewhere to the east of the central highlands region of Canaan. After all the Dead Sea Rift is a major fault line going right through the area, Earthquakes are fairly common in the lands of the bible.
The Dead Sea Rift is a series of faults that basically follow the course of the Riven Jordan. The rift makes the lands of the bible an earthquake zone. (Credit: Earth Magazine)
A minority opinion was that the city was destroyed by a volcano like the Roman city of Pompeii, which would account for the ‘Fire and Brimstone’ part. But there are no suitable volcanoes nearby in Israel or Jordan. Of course the city may have actually been further away and its location was brought closer by the authors of genesis as they adapted to story to suit their theological ideas.
O’k so tell me! Were the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by a natural calamity and then the authors of the bible just assumed it was because they sinned in order to make the destruction fit in with their moralistic views? (Credit: Got Questions)
Now a paper in the journal Scientific Reports from a large group of archaeologists associated with nineteen institutions has raised the possibility that they have not only discovered the remains of Sodom, but know how it was destroyed. The archaeological site is question is known today as Tall el-Hammam and lies at the southern end of the valley of the Jordan River just northeast of the Dead Sea. Based upon artifacts collected during excavations that began in 2005 the Tall, which is an Arabic word for a mound, was the site of a large and prosperous walled city dating back to the Copper Age about (4,300 BCE).
The mound or Tall -el-Hammam in western Jordan lies just north of the Dead Sea on the east side of the Jordan River. Could this be the ancient city of Sodom, some archaeologists think so. (Credit: Biblical Archaeological Society)
In the middle Bronze Age the city, whose name is unknown, was one of the biggest population centers in the Middle East, its enclosed area of 85 acres making it about eight times the size of Jerusalem at that time. Then, about the year 1650 BCE the city was suddenly and completely destroyed, a destruction so complete that the area around the mound remained mainly deserted for the next 500-600 years.
A reconstruction of what the city at Tall el-Hammam looked like in the middle Bronze Age. (Credit: Elizabeth City State University)
The archaeologists found the evidence for that destruction in a layer of sediment about 1.5 meters thick in the mound and were astounded by the degree of the devastation, far worse than could have been due to war or even an Earthquake. Broken pieces of pottery have been found in that layer that were partially melted while bricks from the city wall show signs of ‘bubbling’ on their surface, both indicating exposure to heat greater than 2,000º Celsius. There was also evidence of more physical damage, including that fact that the upper 12 meters of the city’s palace was completely toppled, as were large sections of the city wall.
Tall el-Hammam as it is today. The destruction layer that may have been caused by an asteroid strike is within the dotted lines. (Credit: Money Training Club)
Even more telling was the discovery of shocked quartz, tiny grains of sand that have subjected to such enormous pressure that cracks have formed in them. So great was the pressure that small pieces of carbon dust were also found that have been converted into diamonoids.
Analysis of one of the tiny diamonoids found in association with Tall el-Hammam. Great pressure is required to turn a flake of carbon into a diamondoid so was that pressure produced by a meteor strike? (Credit: The Girl Sun)
The scale of the destruction was so great that the researchers are certain that only an extraterrestrial source could cause it. They theorize that an asteroid airburst similar to if not slightly more powerful than the one that destroyed the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1905 struck the city like a nuclear explosion of approximately 12 megatons.
Some of the destruction caused by the Tunguska asteroid strike in 1908. Did a similar event destroy the city on Tall el-Hammam? (Credit: The Conversation)
All of the evidence presented by the archaeologists is very suggestive. The city is located in a region of Canaan that corresponds to where Sodom could have been and the carbon 14 dating of 1650 BCE for the city’s destruction is about right for the period when Abraham is thought to have lived. The suddenness and scale of the destruction are so great that they certainly resemble the destruction of Sodom as related in the bible. The possibility that this unknown city, forgotten for 3500 years could actually be the source of the story of Sodom must be considered.
This is the last few seconds of the city of Sodom? And will we ever know for certain? (Credit: Artnet News)
Still, the evidence is only suggestive, there are several other middle Bronze Age sites that have also been proposed for the ‘city of sin’ and of course there’s always the possibility that the entire story of Sodom and Gomorrah could be entirely fictitious. There are even some scholars who consider the bible to be factually inerrant who argue that Tall el-Hammam’s destruction did not take place at precisely the right time by their chronology.
So how could the identification of Tall el-Hammam as Sodom ever been proven? Well the best way of course would be a contemporary written record, preferably from the city itself. Just imagine if the archaeologists working at Tall el-Hammam succeeded in finding the royal archive of the city as they have for the Assyrian empire, the Hittite empire and Pharaoh Akhenaten of Egypt. If those records could be translated and it was discovered that the inhabitants of the city called it something akin to Sodom, that would be a spectacular discovery. Second best would be a written record from an outside source like Mesopotamia or Egypt that referred to the city.
The city at Tall el-Hammam should have been known to its neighbors the Assyrians or Hittites or Egyptians. Is the final evidence of the existence of Sodom waiting to be discovered in the letters of those ancient peoples? (Credit: Amazon.com)
Let’s think about that second possibility for a moment, because there are hundreds, if not thousands of untranslated tablets from Egypt and Mesopotamia currently being stored in museums around the world. There’s a real possibility that one of them may mention the city buried at Tall el-Hammam. So the final proof of the story of Sodom may already have been discovered, it just hasn’t been recognized.
There are thousands of ancient tablets excavated from sites in the Middle East that have not yet been translated. Has that evidence of Sodom already been found but not recognized? (Credit: BBC)
And if Tall el-Hammam is Sodom, then where’s Gomorrah?
In manned spaceflight uneventful and even boring are synonyms for successful and that’s exactly the way the ‘Inspiration Four’ mission of the Space X Dragon capsule went this past weekend. Billed as the first all-civilian space mission the tourist flight was paid for by billionaire Jared Isaacman, who with considerable experience as a pilot including time in high performance jets served as commander. Iassacman intended the mission to be a fundraising event for St. Jude’s children’s hospital and it did in fact succeed in raising $100 million dollars for the charity, which Iassacman then matched with $100 million of his own.
The Inspiration 4 crew in their Dragon capsule ready for launch. Left to right are Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Haley Arceneux. (Credit: Business Insider)
The four person crew of Inspiration Four also included Sian Procotor a Doctor of Geology who had unsuccessfully tried out for the astronaut corp and a Lockheed Martin engineer named Chris Sembroski. The final crewmember was Haley Arceneux who is a physician’s assistant at St. Jude’s and is herself a childhood cancer survivor.
Launch of the Inspiration 4 mission. (Credit: Times of India)
The launch took place at two minutes after eight P.M. EDT on the 15th of September and the assent into orbit went perfectly. Space X even succeeded in recovering the rocket’s first stage, a once impossible achievement that has now become routine for them. Once in orbit the passengers had three days of floating in zero-gee and enjoying the sights of the Earth below, the Dragon capsule having been modified with a transparent cupola to allow the crew a panoramic view of our planet.
Since the Inspiration 4 mission wasn’t going to the International Space Station it’s docking hatch was modified to give the crew an awesome view of the Earth. (Credit: The New York Times.)
Splashdown came at about seven P.M. on the 18th and within an hour all four passengers were out of the capsule and waving from the deck of Space X’s recovery ship. The entire mission had gone without incident or problem of any kind, in other words it was a complete success.
Splashdown of the Inspiration 4 mission. Space X is getting so good at the mechanics of spaceflight that all this is becoming routine, which will allow NASA to go on to do bolder explorations. (Credit: The New York Times)
The whole trip was entirely arranged and conducted by Space X Corporation itself, the crew training; flight path and even the food selections were all made without any assistance or even input from NASA. If the Inspiration Four mission represents any kind of progress it is simply that, space travel is now no longer the monopoly of governments, instead it now resembles something like air travel in the 1920s as the first airline companies were being formed.
Pan Am’s Fleet of Clippers introduced the world to the concept of international air travel. Space X hopes to do much the same in space. (Credit: Midway Island)
And the four passengers aboard the Space X Dragon also helped set another record, the most people in space at the same time. You see there are currently seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Three are from NASA, two from the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos and one each from the Japanese Space Agency and the European Space Agency.
And for the first day of the Inspiration Four mission there were also three Chinese Taikonauts aboard their under construction space station the Tiangong. In fact the three Chinese space travelers were packing up and getting ready to end their three month long mission as the Space X rocket was launched. The trio of taikonauts landed their Shenzhou 12 capsule in the Gobi Desert on the morning of the 17th of September. While the members of the Shenzhou 12 may have been the first occupants of the Tiangong space station they will not be the last, China plans at least three more manned missions to Tiangong in the next few years.
The first crew of China’s Tiangong space station spent 3 months in orbit making it China’s longest space mission to date. (Credit: Space.com)
So at least for one day there were a total of 14 human beings in orbit at the same time in three different spacecraft. Hopefully this is an omen of the future as newer, perhaps larger space stations are built and more commercial launch vehicles become available. And hopefully within the next decade human beings will return to the Moon as well, this time to stay.
The Three crew members of the Shenzhou 12 mission to the Tiangong space station landed safely in the Gobi desert while the Inspiration 4 crew were in orbit. (Credit: Space News)
So for the next few decades space travel will continue to be reserved for those with deep pockets, whether government of private, just as air travel was 100 years ago. But things are finally starting to speed up, before too many years go by space launches will become routine, just like an airplane taking off from an airport.
NASA is already preparing for that day. Currently the space agency is considering about twelve proposals for space stations submitted under its new program Commercial Low-Earth-Orbit Destinations. The idea is similar to NASA’s Commercial Crew Program that developed Space X’s Dragon capsule.
Mock up of Bigelow Aerospace’s planned space station. (Credit: The New York Times)
The plan is for NASA to help fund, not totally fund the development of private space stations and then rent space on them as needed. The corporation that owns the station can then rent the rest of the station to other countries, or corporations or individuals, exactly as Space X did with Inspiration Four.
Axion Aerospace plans to build an addition to the current ISS and then, when the ISS is retired, use it as the foundation for their own station. (Credit: Space.com)
By year’s end NASA hopes to select two to four of the proposals and distribute funding totaling $400 million. Indeed NASA has already funded Axiom Aerospace Corporation to the tune of $140 million for modules that will be attached to the ISS beginning in 2024 and which Axiom hopes to use as a basis for its own space station once the ISS is retired.
Before I go I would like to mention one of NASA’s recent robotic missions that has also turned out to be a real success, the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. The original plans for the little helicopter, the first man-made aircraft to fly on another world, was to have it carry out three experimental test flights simply to see if flight of any kind was possible on Mars, where the atmosphere is only about 1.5% as dense as Earth’s.
Having already carried out four times as many flights as were originally planned the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars is another example of NASA not only doing the impossible but doing it better than even they thought they could! (Credit: SpaceNews)
Ingenuity passed those initial tests with ease and so the helicopter’s mission was expanded to allow the little flyer to act as a scout for it’s parent the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity has since made another 10 flights, checking out the terrain ahead of the rover while looking for anything interesting that the scientists back on Earth might want Perseverance to look over.
Like something out of a Hollywood movie the little Ingenuity helicopter (l) is stealing attention from the main attraction the Perseverance rover (r). (Credit: NASA’s Mars Exploration Program)
However conditions on Mars can change with the seasons and that includes the density of the atmosphere. Over the last few weeks the density in Jezero crater has dropped making it harder for Ingenuity’s rotors to develop enough thrust to get the helicopter off the ground.
In response the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory have had to speed up the rotational speed of Ingenuity’s rotors. So far this workaround has been successful but if the air density gets much lower increasing the speed even further might not work, or it might damage the helicopter’s motors.
Before long we may all feel that way! (Credit: The Week)
So how much longer Ingenuity will be capable of flying is questionable, still it has more than proven that not only can aircraft operate on Mars, but that there’s a lot to be gained by them doing so. The real proof of that may be that the Chinese space agency is already considering adding a helicopter to their next Mars lander!
The main pursuit of paleontology is to learn the pathways by which Earth’s first creatures evolved into the species we see today, to study evolution in the field. In this month’s post I’ll be discussing stories that illustrate evolution from both the beginnings of multi-cellular life to observations of evolution in action today.
Of course the most familiar illustration of evolution is all about us! (Credit: History.com)
For most of life’s time here on Earth it consisted of nothing but single celled organisms. Then, about 600 million years ago the first simple multi-celled creatures came into being, creatures that have become known as the Ediacaran fauna. Because these first plants and animals had nothing in the way of hard parts however fossils of them are exceptionally rare and don’t reveal much about their anatomy.
The first multi-cellular living creatures had no hard parts so the fossil remains are very rare and don’t tell us a whole lot about the creatures. (Credit: Laidlaw Scholarships University of St. Andrews)
Animals with hard parts first appeared about 550 million years ago during the early Cambrian period and some of the best fossils from the Cambrian period are found in British Columbia in the world famous Burgess Shale and nearby fossil sites. The remarkable preservation of the fossils from the Burgess Shale is due to both the fine grained particles making up the shale as well as the fact that the animals that were fossilized seemed to have been buried intact in mudslides before their remains could be eaten by scavengers.
The most common fossil species found in the Burgess Shale is Marella splendens also known as the ‘Lace Crab’. This specimen is simply a beautiful fossil. (Credit: Smithsonian Institute)
As might be expected the creatures found in the Burgess Shale were mainly small, the size of a finger being rather common. After all multi-cellular life was brand new and it takes a while to go from being microscopic to the size of a human being let alone that of a whale.
Trilobites were amoung the largest and most advanced creatures during the Cambrian period. Today they would be considered small and primitive. (Credit: West Coast Traveler)
Size has its advantages however, particularly if you want to catch and eat other creatures. So it’s no surprise that the biggest animal yet discovered in the Burgess Shale, a creature known as Anomalocaris, was a predator about one meter in length. Despite its strangeness, the size of Anomalocaris made it the Tyrannosaurus rex of its day.
Considered the largest and fiercest predatory during the Cambrian, Anomalocaris was still only about a meter in length. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Now another large and equally strange creature has been discovered by paleontologists associated with the Royal Ontario Museum in an outcrop of shale near the Burgess Shale site in British Columbia and of the same age. Given the name Titanokorys gainesi the fossil belongs to a group of arthropods characterized by having a large, three part carapace covering most of their bodies that made them look almost like living heads.
With a head shield the covers more than half its body Titanokorys gainesi is related to Anomalocaris and appears to have lived by using it broad head as a plow to dig out food from the sand at the bottom of the ocean. (Credit: Sci-news.com)
T gainesi in particular had a broad, flat carapace about a half-meter in length along with multifaceted eyes and two spiny claws to grab food and bring it to a mouth shaped like a slice of pineapple. The paleontologists who described T gainesi speculate that the creature may have used its large carapace like a plow to stir up the muddy ocean bottom so that its claws could capture worms and other small animals.
As you might guess most of the fossil specimens of T gainesi discovered so far are of the creatures large head shield. (Credit: The Times of Israel)
T gainesi is yet another example of how, half a billion years ago evolution was experimenting to find solutions to the problems of how to survive in a hostile world. That same problem is still being faced by the life forms of today’s world but modern animals have the additional difficulty of having to adapt to a rapidly warming planet due to human induced climate change. In order to survive in this new environment Earth’s creatures must do what they have always done, adapt and evolve.
As usual Darwin got it right. It’s all about adapting! (Credit: Gihan Perera)
Now a new study by ornithologist Sara Ryding of Deakin University in Australia has described some of the changes that are already taking place in warm-blooded animals. Published in the journal ‘Trends in Ecology and Evolution’ the research details the anatomical changes, ‘shapeshifting’ that have been measured in a large number of bird and mammalian species.
The ancient myths about shapeshifters was all about adapting in order to survive. Maybe those ancient peoples weren’t as dumb as we think they were. (Credit: Deep Trance Now)
For example several species of Australian parrot have been found to be growing beaks that are 10% larger when compared to preserved specimens from 100 years ago. The same increase in beak size has also been found in North American dark-eyed juncos, a variety of songbird. In both cases the increase in bill size correlates positively with a measured increase in average temperature in the areas populated by the birds.
In order to better regulate their body temperature in a warming world Australian Parrots are growing bigger beaks! (Credit: ABC News)
In mammals such as wood mice and masked shrews a similar 10% increase has been measured in tail length and leg size. All of these adaptations have one thing in common, they provide the animal with a larger surface area to radiate heat and cool their body temperature. Again there is a clear connection for the larger body parts to rising temperatures in the animal’s habitat.
Several species of small mammals have also been discovered to be increasing the size of their tails and legs in order to increase surface area to aid in cooling their bodies in a warmer climate. (Credit: Wikipedia)
The fact that some species are evolving in response to global warming shouldn’t be taking as a sign that those animals are solving the problem of climate change however. As Doctor Ryding puts it, “shapeshifting does not mean that animals are coping with climate change and that all is ‘fine’. It just means that they are evolving to survive it. But we’re not sure what the other ecological consequences are, or indeed that all species are capable of changing and surviving.”
Those who cannot adapt become extinct, it’s as simple as that. The question then becomes, will we humans adapt to save our world or perish as a part of a new mass extinction? (Credit: National Geographic Society)
Paleontologists have recognized at least six separate ‘mass extinctions’ in the fossil record. Some of these extinctions appear to have been caused by asteroid or comets impacting the Earth while others may have been due to massive volcanic eruptions. Right now our planet is experiencing another extinction event and there’s little doubt as to its cause, human beings!
One of the most fundamental questions waiting to be answered by science is “How did Life on Earth Begin?” For most of human history this question was answered by a story from myth or legend rather than by science. Our local chief god created the universe and all living things in some way. The first chapter of Genesis is not only a typical example of this but even gave us the word that we use to describe the whole process, genesis.
Why is it that all of the legends and myths about the beginnings of life always make our creation the climax of the story? (Credit: Wikipedia)
Basically our ancestors thought that ‘who’, created life was more important than ‘how’ it was done. After all we poor humans could never understand the mystery of how life was created. That was god’s greatest secret and it was enough for us to know that he did it. It’s only been since the start of the scientific revolution and Darwin’s demonstration that all modern living creatures have evolved from earlier forms of life that scientists first began to wonder how the first living thing, the ancestor of all life on Earth ever became alive.
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is really about what happened after the first living thing came into being. Darwin was very cautious about how that first living thing originated. (Credit: AZ Quotes)
The search for a answer to that question is the thesis behind Michael Marshall’s new book ‘The Genesis Quest’. Starting at the very beginning Marshall discusses not only the mythology but also several reasoned although not scientific hypothesis such as the èlan vital and spontaneous generation. It’s once the actual chemists and biologists begin working on the problem however that ‘Genesis Quest’ really gets good.
Cover of ‘The Genesis Quest’ by Michael Marshall. (Credit: Amazon)Author Michael Marshall is a Science Writer for several magazines who has published several books on science. (Credit: Goodreads)
Reviewing the early advances on just what life is and where living things come from Marshall has certainly done his homework. From Robert Hooke’s discovery of cells, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s descriptions of microscopic ‘animalcules’ and Friedrich Wőhler’s first synthesis of an organic chemical to Darwin himself we see how science was forced, almost against itself to consider the question of how the first living thing came into existence.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek using his microscope to observe the ‘animalcules’ in a drop of pond water. (Credit: Vox)
By the way I just illustrated one of the key elements of ‘Genesis Quest’, you will be reading about a lot of discoveries made by a lot of different scientists. Some of the scientists will be famous, like Louie Pasteur but there will also be some not so famous ones like botanist Matthias Schleiden who was the first to definitely assert that all living things were made of cells. In Marshall’s telling each of these discoveries becomes a tale in itself and the whole becomes woven together for a grand story, the ‘Genesis Quest’.
Louis Pasteur is generally given credit with finally putting an end to ideas about ‘Spontaneous Generation’ of living things. But it must have happened once billions of years ago. (Credit: ThoughtCo)
In fact the cast of characters in ‘Genesis Quest’ is so large that it’s difficult to keep track of everyone without a scorecard. For example the physicist George Gamow, best know as an early proponent of the Big Bang theory is given a brief mention because he was the first to suggest that a group of three DNA bases could provide the code for the 20 amino acids used in the proteins of living cells. Gamow’s steady-state rival, astronomer Fred Hoyle is also mentioned because late in life he became an adherent of life on Earth originally coming from outer space, a theory known as Panspermia. (I mention Gamow and Hoyle because I just ordered a new book “Flashes of Creation” about the beginnings of the Big Bang theory in which Gamow and Hoyle are the two main characters. I can’t wait to read it!)
Physicist George Gamow (l) and Astronomer Fred Hoyle (r) fought for decades over not just the origin of life but the origin of the Universe itself. (Credit: Hacker News)
Much progress was made during the 20th century as Alexander Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane first developed the ‘primordial soup’ model of the beginning of life. This model saw its greatest success with the Miller-Urey experiment in 1953, which even today is still touted as evidence that simple chemical reactions on the early Earth could produce complex organic compounds.
British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane helped popularize the ‘Primordial Soup’ model of life’s origin. (Credit: The Economist)
The Miller Urey experiment was so simple yet the results so profound that it made the ‘Primordial Soup’ model dominate for decades. (Credit: Research Gate)
But 1953 was also the year that Watson and Crick first described the shape of the DNA molecule and in the years thereafter the very intricate and complex mechanism by which DNA builds proteins, DNA to Messenger RNA to Transfer RNA to Ribosome to Protein was discovered bit by bit. Such a complex chain of very delicate chemical reactions could never have arisen spontaneously in a primordial soup. So a new model of RNA first for the beginnings of life arose to challenge the protein based primordial soup model.
It’s actually a lot more complicated than this. How the Primordial Soup could generate such complex chemical reactions was difficult to understand so new models for life’s origins had to be developed. (Credit: Expii)
However both proteins and nuclides don’t last long in nature, so another model; a cell wall first model was also developed. From the 1970s throughout the 1990s these three models fought fiercely over who was right with none of them able to gain the upper hand.
All of the structures inside a cell are rather delicate needing a ‘Cell Wall’ for protection. How did the pre-biotic chemicals protect them selves. (Credit: Science Facts)
Finally, in the last chapters Marshall discusses the modern synthesis that has developed since about 2000. A self-replicating molecule contained inside a lipid shell, something that has already been achieved by the chemist Jack Szostak. Marshall also asks the question, just how complex do ‘protocells’ like Szostak’s have to be in order to be considered ‘alive’. Have we in fact already created life in the labouratory?
Current leader in the race to develop synthetic life is Nobel laureate Jack Szostak at Harvard. (Credit: Ciencia del Sur)Doctor Szostak has already developed a ‘species’ of protocell that meets several of the criteria of life, including replication! (Credit: Church and State)
Throughout ‘Genesis Quest’ Marshall manages to keep his descriptions of the, sometimes very sophisticated experiments and theories both simple and understandable. At the same time however he also includes footnotes with more technical information as well as sources for further reading. A well regarded science writer whose has worked for both New Scientist and the BBC Marshall knows just how much detail is needed in order to tell the story he wants to tell. ‘Genesis Quest’ is in fact a fast paced, very enjoyable overview of one of the most important scientific endeavors of all time. I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who is interested in how science and scientists work.
Most people know that our Sun is pretty much a middle of the road star. Any star that is much more than 20 times the mass of our Sun is so big and unstable that it doesn’t last for very long. And any astronomic body that has much less than 1/20th our Sun’s mass won’t have enough pressure and temperature in its core to ignite hydrogen fusion, so they never shine as a star. Jupiter for example is the most massive of the planets, but since it only has 1/1000th the Sun’s mass it is a planet, not a star.
Our Sun, which is a middle sized star is about 1,000 times as massive as the large planet Jupiter. We now known that there are objects in between that we have christened ‘Brown Dwarfs’. (Credit: NASA)
Beginning in the 1960s astronomers began to wonder if there could be objects out in the galaxy that were too small to be stars yet too big to be planets, a class that was eventually given the name Brown Dwarfs. Such objects would have masses in the range of 10-80 times Jupiter’s mass and are often described to be ‘failed stars’.
Brown Dwarfs are too big to be planets but still aren’t massive enough to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores making them ‘failed stars’. (Credit: EarthSky)
Since they don’t shine in visible wavelengths like real stars, and the closest could be light years away Astronomers knew that Brown Dwarfs were going to be very difficult to find. Brown Dwarfs wouldn’t be totally dark however, even the smallest would have some heat left over from their formation while the heaviest could even have a small amount of heavy hydrogen, that is deuterium fusion going on inside them. Because of this Brown Dwarfs would be visible in infrared (IR) light.
There’s no reason why a Brown Dwarf couldn’t have a planet orbiting them but at the moment we’re having enough difficulty just finding Brown Dwarfs. (Credit: Owlcation)
Infrared astronomy is difficult here on Earth’s surface however, because even a tiny amount of water vapour in the air blocks IR light. In the 1960s there simply weren’t any IR telescopes and it wasn’t until the 1990s that a few IR space telescopes were launched into orbit and the first IR telescopes were built on the tops of the highest Andes Mountains, the driest place on Earth.
The high Atacama desert in the Andes mountains of Chile is the best place on Earth to do infra-red astronomy. (Credit: Aura Astronomy)
In 1988 a star designated as GD 165 was discovered to have a very small companion star, designated as GD 165B, during a search for white dwarf stars. The light of GD 165B was barely in the visible red portion of the visible spectra and astronomers wondered if it might be the first known Brown Dwarf. The debate over GD 165B’s status continued for almost a decade until new telescopes conducting the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) discovered over a hundred similar objects, and so Brown Dwarfs became a new class of celestial object.
What the Universe looks like at a wavelength of 2 Microns courtesy of the 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) (Credit: Infrared Processing and Analysis Center – Caltech)
Today Brown Dwarfs have been classified into two spectral types, both below the familiar O, B, A, F, G, K, M classes of normal stars. The larger Brown Dwarfs, which have a strong lithium line in their spectra, are classified as “L” type. Since true stars burn their lithium very quickly the presence of lithium in a spectra is indicative of a brown dwarf.
Normal stars are classified by their surface temperature as O, B, A, F, G, K, or M types with O being the hottest and M the coolest. Brown Dwarfs add two new classes L and T to the right. (Credit: SDSS SkyServer)
In time some brown dwarfs were discovered whose surface temperatures were cooler than the L type, so cool that methane was discovered in their spectra, even L type dwarfs are too hot for chemicals to exist. So a new class of Brown Dwarf, the “T” class was created. Presently astronomers have identified nearly a thousand L type and about 350 T type Brown Dwarfs.
Two classes of Brown Dwarfs are recognized by all astronomers while a new classification “Y” is still being debated. (Credit: Backyard Worlds)
Since Brown Dwarfs generate little if any energy by fusion they really have no stable “Main Sequence” period in their lives but instead just continue to get cooler and cooler, eventually becoming so cool that they no longer even radiate in IR wavelengths. For that reason it was thought that it would be very difficult if not impossible to detect a Brown Dwarf that was more than a few billion years old.
But they may just have found one by ‘Accident’, or at least citizen scientist Dan Caselden seems to have found one and his finding it really was an accident. Caselden had written a computer program to search for Brown Dwarfs in the data collected by the Near Earth Object – Wide field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEO-WISE) satellite. In particular Caselden was looking for objects so close to our solar system that they would appear to move slightly against the background of more distant starts over the course of six months or a year. (NEO-WISE conducts a complete survey of the entire sky every six months)
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite has been given a new mission to search for Near Earth Objects (NEOs) making it now the NEO-WISE mission. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Caselden was checking out one candidate for a close Brown Dwarf when he noticed another object nearby that was moving even faster. Its spectra didn’t look like that of a Brown Dwarf but Caselden decided he’d check it out.
By day a Security Engineer in his spare time Dan Caselden is a new breed of computer astronomers. Seriously all of the satellites we’ve put into space are sending back so much data that even ordinary people, with a computer, can make important discoveries. (Credit: NASA Solar System Exploration)
Caselden’s discovery has now been given the official designation of WISEA J153429.75-104303.03 but it’s also known by its nickname of Accident. When examined more closely by powerful ground based telescopes Accident was found to be as cool as a T type Brown Dwarf but there was no trace of methane in its spectra. In fact there was no trace of carbon or any of the more massive elements like oxygen or sodium or iron. WISEA J153429.75-104303.03 appears to be made entirely of the elements hydrogen and helium.
If you’re interested in being a citizen scientist try checking it out on YouTube. (Credit: Twitter)
That would indicate that Accident is old, very old, ten billion years old or older. You see, shortly after the big bang, when the first galaxies began to form the matter in the Universe was almost entirely hydrogen and helium. The heavier elements, like those that make up planets and even our our bodies were created inside the nuclear furnaces of the first generation of stars some 10 to 13 billion years ago.
The first stars began to form only 100 million years after the Big Bang. At that time only the elements Hydrogen and Helium existed in any amount so the elements that formed the planets, and our bodies were forged in the cores of those first stars. (Credit: Futurism)
So Accident may be a Brown Dwarf that was formed at the same time as the very first stars. If that is so then WISEA J153429.75-104303.03 may hold secrets within it that relate to how the first stars and galaxies came into being. WISEA J153429.75-104303.03 could even be the first in an entirely new class of Brown Dwarfs. So I guess it will be no accident if astronomers pay a great deal of attention to it in the years to come.
Accident brings another question to mind. Just how many Brown Dwarfs are there out there in our galaxy? So far we have only found around two thousand but they are all rather close, within 100 light years. We are still only beginning to get a feel for how common they are.
Many of the Brown Dwarfs we know about are companions of more normal stars such as this one. (Credit: Universe Today)
We do know that there are a lot more middle sized stars like our Sun than big, bright ones like Vega, and there are a lot more small, dim stars like Barnard’s star or Proxima Centauri than middling stars like our Sun. If you extrapolate from those facts then there could be a lot more Brown Dwarfs in the Milky Way than all of the real stars put together.
On a clear night you can see thousands of nearby stars but how many Brown Dwarfs are out there that we can’t see? (Credit: Space Tourism Guide)
Think about that the next time you go out on a nice clear night to gaze up at the heavens.
