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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Perhaps the biggest, and certainly the divisive issue being debated in America right now is the question of just what kind of country the United States is, a secular democracy or a Christian nation. This question has been at the heart of our identity as a people since before we ever became a nation. It is an unquestioned fact that many of the colonists who came to this country before it was a country did so in order to be able to practice their religion their way. They hoped that in the ‘New World’ they could escape the religious wars and persecutions that had plagued Europe for centuries.
The Pilgrims landing on Plymouth rock is an iconic image in American history but it should be remembered that not all of the Mayflower’s passengers were Pilgrims hoping to follow their own religion. (Credit: UPI)
Well aware of how much blood had been spilled in Europe in the name of God the founding fathers went to considerable lengths to avoid any kind of favouritism toward one religion or another. This was a tricky little dance for them to accomplish because virtually all of the men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were nominally Christians, many rather fervent in their beliefs.
Some of our founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson (l) were rather skeptical of the ‘magical’ aspects of the bible. Others, like the Reverend John Witherspoon (r), were more conventional in their faith. Despite their differences however they managed to work together to find the compromises that allowed our nation to come into being. (Credit: Wikipedia)
So it was that the Constitution never mentions God in any way while the Declaration limits itself to the vague terms ‘the creator’ and ‘divine providence’. In Thomas Jefferson’s words in the United States there was to be ‘a wall of separation’ between church and state. The key element of this wall was the very first amendment to the Constitution which demanded that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Freedom of religion is the first right guaranteed to all Americans.
Not one of the hundreds of religions in the world today have any real evidence to back up their claims to ‘divine truth’. If only we could accept that maybe we could learn to accept each other. (Credit: Research Features)
For most of our nation’s history that little dance worked pretty well, even while most Americans belonged to one Protestant denomination or another, exactly which was a private affair not a public one. There was a bit of trouble during the middle of the 19th century in incorporating the Catholics into American society and then later in accepting the Jews. For the most part however Americans let other Americans practice whatever religion they wished, at least they did so better than in other countries.
Less than 100 years ago religious hatred was still the cause of millions of people being murdered. (Credit: The National WWII Museum)
That’s all changed today as religion has become one of the most important political issues in the United States as evangelical Christians seek to impose their views and morals on a nation that is slowly growing more secular. As justification for their desire to impose their morality on others they maintain that the United States has always been a Christian nation and that all they seek to do is bring back ‘that old time religion’.
The way we like to think about that ‘Old Time Religion’. It was never really like that. (Credit: Etsy)
The development of the religious right and the myths it created for itself is the thesis for ‘One Nation Under God’, a new book by Princeton University Professor of History Kevin M. Kruse. Unlike some other historians who maintain that the mixing of religion and conservative politics began during the Eisenhower administration professor Kruse goes farther back to reveal how ‘Corporate America Invented Christian American’, to use the book’s subtitle.
Princeton University Historian Kevin M. Kruse, author of ‘One Nation Under God’. (Credit: The Daily Princetonian)Cover art for ‘One Nation under God’ by Kevin Kruse. (Credit: Amazon)
In ‘One Nation Under God’ Professor Kruse details how the social programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the taxes needed to pay for them, caused rich plutocrats and their corporations to finance and nurture the beginnings of conservative Christianity. These wealthy, powerful men looked upon FDR’s social safety net as the beginnings of a Communist takeover of the USA and since Communism was anti-god they hoped to use God to fight FDR. As Kruse details the argument that these Christian Libertarian organizations promoted was one of ‘Freedom under God’, as being a part of this nation’s identity from the very beginning.
The policies and programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ were considered by many of the rich in this country to be nothing short of ‘Godless Communism’ and therefore they sought to use religion to fight them. (Credit: Redbubble)
So it was that Wall Street tycoons sought out sympathetic clergymen in the hope of organizing resistance to FDR’s social programs. Chief among these men of the cloth was Billy Graham whose influence is felt throughout the book. At the same time ‘One Nation Under God’ also outlines the way that Hollywood executives and stars were enlisted to help the cause.
Charismatic preacher Billy Graham is a central character in ‘One Nation under God’ because of the way he influenced millions of people as well as numerous politicians. (Credit: The New York Times) Just as important to the ’cause’ of promoting religion in America were movie stars and producers. Here’s Cecil B Demille on the set of his first version of ‘The 10 Commandments’. (Credit: CBS News)
Still, the movement failed to stop the New Deal and it wasn’t until after World War 2 had ended, and with the election of Dwight Eisenhower as President that the religious right began to have any influence. As a part of his attempts to unite the country against the threat of the Soviet Union Eisenhower sought to bring God into the political life of the country. It was in fact during the Eisenhower administration that ‘In God we Trust’ was formally stamped onto every denomination of our money, that ‘Under God’ was inserted by law into the formerly secular pledge of allegiance and ‘One Nation Under God’ became the official motto of the United States.
It was only during Eisenhower’s time as President that ‘In God We Trust’ became the official motto of the United States. Ike’s folksiness, like a kindly grandfather, reminded people of the ‘Old Time Religion’ and helped him push religious ornamentation onto American politics. (Credit: International Currancy)
Eisenhower was not a complete victory for conservatives however because even as he brought God into government, he kept the New Deal. Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, regulations controlling the food industry, the banking industry and other industries remained to vex the rich, as did the high taxes needed to pay for them. Billy Graham may have been overjoyed with Eisenhower’s policies, but General Motors was left feeling unfulfilled.
Pushed through by President Eisenhower, the Interstate Highway System was the largest government program since FDR’s New Deal. While Eisenhower was fully committed to capitalism he still understood that they are some problems only the government can solve. (Credit: SFGATE)
Much the same thing happened during the Presidency of Eisenhower’s Vice-President Richard Nixon. The Nixon administration was even more overtly religious than Eisenhower’s but again there was no push to eliminate the social safety net, which thanks to Lyndon Johnson now included Medicare. Nixon even went to far as to increase the power of government by establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, which quickly became one the conservative movement’s most hated boogiemen.
Another big government program started by a ‘conservative’ president was Nixon’s Environmental Protection Agency. (Credit: The New Republic)
It’s with the Nixon years that Professor Kruse ends ‘One Nation Under God’ and that’s my real problem with the book. You see it was only during the Reagan administration that the religious right finally succeeded in putting someone in the White House who would both champion God, and lower taxes on the rich. But Reagan as president is only briefly mentioned in the epilogue, as are the two Bushes and Clinton. The entire subject of ‘Culture Wars’ that are currently ripping the country apart is only mentioned twice.
Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican Convention informs the world of the ‘Culture Wars’ in America. (Credit: YouTube)
It’s almost seems as if Professor Kruse needs another whole book to finish his story and I hope he does so. The union of Religion and Capitalism is arguably the most contentious issue in America today and while Professor Kruse has done an excellent job of illustrating the first half of the story we need to hear the complete tale.
The problem with ‘One Nation under God’ is that it ends too soon. It doesn’t complete the story of how we ever managed to get here! (Credit: CNN)
‘One Nation Under God’ is a very important book, and a well written one as well. I heartily recommend it to anyone who is trying to understand how our country got to where it is today. I only hope that in a few years I’ll be able to recommend volume 2 as well!
Did you watch it, the first test launch of Space X’s huge Starship launch system that is? Several YouTube channels streamed the entire flight, after all this was the first full test launch of the biggest, most powerful rocket ever built. The test was certainly exciting, but then failed tests are usually more exciting than successful ones.
The first test launch of the most powerful rocket ever built looked good, for a while. (Credit: Engadget)
As I watched that first test on April 20th, it seemed for a while as if everything was going pretty well but then, about a minute into the flight the announcer declared that 28 of Starship’s 33 first stage engines were still firing. That of course made me wonder what had happened to the other five engines. Then, about a minute later it became obvious that the rocket was beginning to tumble out of control and a little more than three minutes into the flight the engineers were forced to self destruct Starship in order to prevent it flying completely out of control and doing any damage to something on the ground.
The beginning of the end for Starship. Those failed engines began forcing the rocket off course and eventually ground control ordered a self destruct. (Credit: Reuters)
That didn’t prevent all of the damage at the launch site however. Those five engines that failed first must have exploded right at ignition, based upon all of the debris that was hurled as much as 20 meters away from the launch pad. The pad itself sustained the most damage including a large crater directly beneath it. So extensive is the damage to Starship’s launch facilities that it will take several months to repair them before another Starship test launch can take place. On the other hand, Space X certainly doesn’t want to attempt another launch before they’ve figured out what went wrong on the first one, and that may take longer than repairing the damage that occurred.
There were obvious signs of damage to the launch pad after Starship’s launch. Damage that will take time to repair before another test launch. (Credit: France 24)
Now every engineer knows that failures happen, especially on first tests. I’ve certainly had my share. Space X CEO Elon Musk knows that and did not expect 100% success. Before the test flight he declared that if the giant rocket only ascended past the launch tower he would consider it a partial success. Designing and developing a huge rocket like Starship takes a lot of time and effort and testing, it’s only a matter of time before they get it right.
The road to success is built on trial and failure, every engineer knows that! (Credit: Security Sales & Integration)
Much worse is when you’ve done all the design and testing and something goes wrong with the completed product, especially when that product is on its way to the planet Jupiter and there’s absolutely no way to send someone to repair it. That could have been the fate of the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) JUICE space probe. I discussed the JUICE mission back in February, see my post of 25 February 2023 , as a mission to explore three of Jupiter’s large, Galilean moons in order to determine if there are oceans of liquid water beneath their icy surfaces. The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer or JUICE spaceprobe was launched on April 14th from the ESA’s launch facility in Kourou in French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket. JUICE’s launch was successful, and within hours the probe was on its way to Jupiter and talking to ground control.
Launch od the European Space Agancy’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) mission. (Credit: CNN)
As the probe began to deploy its solar panels and instruments however a problem arose with the antenna for JUICE’s Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME), the instrument that it was hoped would peer beneath the icy surface of the moons to confirm the existence of those oceans. Based on images sent back by the spacecraft the antenna had only unfurled to about one third of its full 16 meter length.
This image takes me back. Testing in an anechoic chamber of the antennas of the JUICE space probe. (Credit: SatNow)
The theory was that a release pin had gotten stuck preventing the antenna from completely deploying. The engineers at the ESA hoped that by using the probe’s course correction engines they may to able to shake the pin loose but they took their time to study the problem. Since JUICE would not reach Jupiter until 2031 the engineers knew that they had plenty of time to consider the problem and come up with a clever trick to fix the antenna.
The JUICE-RIME antenna stuck about halfway. Fortunately the engineers at ESA managed to shake it loose and it’s now ready to go. (Credit: Spacenews)
Turns out they knew what they were doing. After several attempts to fix the problem, each attempt showing a little improvement, the problem was solved when the engineers fired a ‘Non-Explosive Actuator’. The antenna immediately unfurled to it’s proper length.
The Rime antenna unfurling after engineers fixed it problem. (Credit: ESA)
On the other hand sometimes equipment and systems can be so well designed and built that they far exceed their original design goals. Arguably the two best examples of such extraordinary engineering are the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes.
The Voyager space probes have been exploring our Solar System, and now our Galaxy for over 45 years. They just keep going and going. (Credit: NASA)
First launched back in 1977, the Voyager spacecraft were designed to conduct flybys of the four gas giant planets in the outer solar system; Voyager 2 is still the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune. Once their original missions were completed however the two probes just kept working, sending back to Earth measurements of conditions in the outer solar system.
Real time data sent back from the Voyager 1 probe, still teaching us about the Universe after 45 years in space. (Credit: NASA)
And they are still working, forty-five years after launch both Voyager spacecraft have now entered interstellar space and are still sending back data, the first in situ observations we have of conditions between the stars. Still, nothing lasts forever and slowly but surely the energy provided to each Voyager by its three Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) is decreasing. Someday the two Voyager probes will no longer have enough energy to radio their observations back to us and they will be lost forever. At launch the RTGs supplied each Voyager with 70 watts of power but the 88 year half life of the radioactive Plutonium has caused that output to decrease by around 30%.
A radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG. Radioactivity produces heat and heat can be converted to electricity. These units have provided the power the Voyagers need to keep working after 45 years. (Credit: Wikipedia)
In order to keep each spacecraft functioning for this long the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL) have been turning off all unnecessary equipment such as the cameras and heaters to save power. The power loss on Voyager 2 had become so great that it was thought that by the end of the year one of the probe’s five remaining instruments would have to be shut off, with the loss of all that priceless data.
When we lose power we can resort to candles. Voyager doesn’t have that option. (Credit: KSAT 12)
Fortunately those engineers at JPL are some of the best in the world and they came up with a clever idea. The Voyager power system contains a device known as a voltage regulator that’s intended to eliminate spikes and surges in the power coming from the RTGs. With the drop in power from the RTGs there’s now much less danger of that happening and if they shut off the regulator they’d save enough power to keep Voyager 2 running as is with five remaining instruments until at least 2026, almost exactly 50 years after its launch.
The Jet Propulsion Labouratory in California, home to many of the space probes that have explored our Solar System. (Credit: NASA
The Voyager spacecraft have discovered so much, taught us so much about our solar system and now the galaxy beyond and thanks to the engineers at JPL they can continue to do so, more than 30 years longer than anyone ever expected them to.
A freshman physics class in any college or university will for the most part deal with the movement and behavior of particles, that is objects with easily measurable and long lasting quantities like size, shape, mass, position etc, etc. As someone who grew up in a baseball family I freely admit that whenever I encounter the word ‘particle’ the first thought in my brain is something very like a baseball.
I’ll be the first to admit it, growing up in baseball family and becoming a physicist I do tend to think of elementary particles as little tiny baseballs! (Credit: The Conversation)
In that freshman physics class the students will learn about such other particle quantities as velocity, acceleration, and momentum while discussing collisions between particles, the forces between particles and so on. In other words freshman physics talks a lot about particles.
Collisions are rather complicated problems that really follow a few simple rules so they are a big topic in most freshman physics classes. (Credit: HyperPhysics Concepts)
Higher level physics is pretty much the same. Experimental physics is usually conducted at High Energy Particle Accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (A Hadron is a kind of sub-atomic particle) or deep underground where ‘Ghost Particles’ called Neutrinos are captured in huge vats of water. Today I’ll be discussing some recent studies in particle physics, the first concerning those ghost particles the neutrinos while the second concerns objects you might consider it strange to call particles, human beings.
For over 100 years now physicists have been studying collisions between elementary particles in order to learn more about them. (Credit: ResearchGate)
Neutrinos have fascinated physicists ever since Wolfgang Pauli first predicted their existence in order to ‘balance the books’ in beta radiation decay. Originally thought to be a single kind of particle with no electric charge and either no or very little rest mass (Neutrino = little neutral one in Italian) they have only gotten stranger as we’ve learned more about them. We now know that there are at least three distinct types, or generations of neutrino, the electron, muon and tau each named for the type of electron like particle they are generated with. Unlike other generations however, up, charm and top quarks for example, the three types of neutrino can oscillate from one type into the other into the other. This implies that neutrinos must have some rest mass, perhaps one millionth that of an electron.
Neutrinos make up three of the twelve different types of Fermions, that is particles that follow the rule of ‘No two identical particles in the same quantum state’. (Credit: PhysicsMasterClasses.org)
Like other Fermions each type of neutrino also has an anti-particle, or does it? You see in general anti-particles have the exact same mass but the opposite electric charge of their species of particle. However, since neutrinos have no electric charge there is a real possibility that neutrinos may be their own anti-particle and that would certainly be new physics.
First ever evidence for the existence of anti-matter, a photograph of a ‘positive’ electron by Carl Anderson. (Credit: Phys.org)
Now neutrinos are very difficult to study, they only rarely, very rarely interact with other kinds of particles. It’s estimated that the neutrinos generated in the Sun by fusion could go through a light year of solid lead and half would still come out the other side. Physicists who study neutrinos usually need sources of trillions of the particles in order to catch just a few.
In order to study neutrinos physicists have to build large detectors like this one at the Sudbury neutrino observatory. (Credit: Atlas Obscura)
Experimentalists decided that their best chance for determining if neutrinos were their own anti-particle was to use a very rare type of radioactive decay called a double beta decay that occurs in the isotope 76 of the element germanium, atomic number 32. Double beta decay happens when the nucleus emits two electrons and two anti-neutrinos at the same time while jumping up two spots in the periodic table to selenium, atomic number 34.
Double beta decay should happen as pictured on the left with two electrons and two neutrinos being emitted. But if the neutrino is its own anti-particle then the decay on the right is possible with only two electrons being emitted. (Credit: Quantum Diaries)
If the neutrino is its own antiparticle however then the two anti-neutrinos could annihilate each other and only two electrons would come out, electrons, the easiest particle to detect and measure. So what the experimentalists would have to do is measure the mass / energy of the germanium nucleus before the decay, and the mass / energy of the selenium nucleus after the decay and if the two electrons got all of the energy difference then there were no neutrinos and the neutrino is its own anti-particle.
Without any neutrinos conservation of energy would require that all of the energy has to go into the emitted electrons and that is something we can measure, barely. (Credit: Nitty Gritty Science)
Easier said than done. The experiment to search for neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) was carried out using 30 kg of germanium that had been enriched to 88% isotope 76, in nature isotope 76 makes up 7.75% of all germanium. The germanium was then surrounded by detectors to both find and measure the energy of any electrons that were emitted. In order to reduce as much as possible interference from other radioactive decays the experiment was conducted a kilometer and a half beneath the Earth’s surface at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, an old abandoned gold mine. After ten years of operation the collaboration of scientists that runs the experiment has just released its results, no neutrinoless double beta decays were observed by the experiment which sets new limits on the possibility that a neutrino could be its own anti-particle.
Part of the Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay experiment at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. (Credit: Sciencesprings)
Of course just because you haven’t found something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, it could mean you just haven’t looked hard enough. So the physicists who ran the experiment are now planning a new experiment that will employ 1,000 kg of germanium in their search to learn more about the ‘Ghost Particle’.
Here’s a book I read as a teenager that really helped spur my interest in Physics. Even today physicists are fascinated by the neutrino. (Credit: AbeBooks)
Human beings are not generally thought of as ‘particles’ but in many ways can be treated as such. After all we each have a definite size and shape as well as mass so there are many circumstances where the involuntary motion of a person is exactly like any particle. That’s why we can use ‘crash test dummies’ as substitutes for real people in automobile safety testing because during the conditions of a crash the humans inside the car are really just particles.
If you think about it, crash test dummies are designed to replicate the ‘particle’ aspects of human beings while eliminating everything else. (Credit: CNBC)
There are even times when the voluntary motions of humans can be studied as particles and something of the laws governing that behavior learned. One well known example of this is when two groups of people, traveling in opposite directions have to move through each other, such as when two groups of pedestrians are trying to cross to opposite sides of the same street using the same crosswalk and have to go through each other.
In many ways large numbers of human beings each going there own way are very much like an ensemble of particles interacting with each other. (Credit: NAIOP Blog)
What has been observed in such circumstances is that the two groups will break up into a series of ‘lanes’ that will interleave with the lanes of the opposing group. These lanes then move past each other in what is technically known as two component flow. This type of phenomenon in general has been given the name ‘active matter’ and has been observed in many different kinds of animals from flocks of birds to schools of fish.
Thanks to modern computers even very complicated problems, like the crowd pictured here, can be analyzed and order found in all of the apparent chaos. (Credit: Science News)Scientists have found that in order to form a school, fish only have to obey a few simple rules. (Credit: HuffPost)
While the development of lanes in groups of people moving in opposite directions has been studied for several decades no rigorous mathematical model of the behavior had been published. Until now, for a new paper in the journal Science by mathematicians at the University of Bath in the UK has presented a kinetic description of lane nucleation, in other words equations describing how lanes form and behave. The model was in fact based upon Albert Einstein’s description of ‘Brownian Motion’ of pollen grains in a solution.
As described by Albert Einstein, Brownian Motion was the first direct evidence for the existence of atoms. (Credit: Toppr)
The mathematicians have even teamed up with experimentalists at the Department of Human Motor Behavior at the Academy of Physical Education in Katowice in Poland to test their model. One of the experiments was set up in King’s Cross Station in London where groups of volunteers moved through different gates and obstacles. The movement of the volunteers was video recorded and in every case order arose out of chaos allowing the recordings to be compared to the model’s predictions.
The milling crowds at King’s Cross Station in London proved to be the perfect experiment for studying the ‘particle nature’ of human traffic. (Credit: iStock)
So it seems that the idea of a particle, so useful in physics, can also be applied to the study of living creatures, even we humans.
