Geologists studying newly discovered structures deep within the Earth’s mantel and core are now considering the possibility that they are the remains of an ancient, alien world buried deep within our own.

Before the Apollo astronauts reached the Moon and succeeded in bringing back a few hundred kilograms of Lunar rocks to be studied here on Earth scientists had proposed two basic concepts as to how the Earth-Moon system ever came into being. The first idea was that the Moon had originally been a part of the Earth. Back when our planet was still forming and was a molten mass of rock it got a little too big and was spinning a little too fast which caused a big chunk to spin off and eventually become the Moon.

Just a few of the Lunar samples brought back by Apollo 11. These and the other rocks collected by the astronauts represented the first opportunity for Earth scientists to actually study material from another world! (Credit: KTLA)
An old idea for the Moon’s origin is that it split off from the early Earth like a daughter cell. Some people even suggested that the place where the split occurred gave rise to the pacific ocean. (Credit: Google Sites)

The other idea couldn’t have been more different. In this theory the Moon was never a part of the Earth, it originally came from somewhere else in the solar system, maybe the asteroid belt. Sent on a wandering path by Jupiter’s gravity or some other cause the Moon eventually came too close to the Earth and got captured by our planet’s gravity.

In the capture theory the Moon was never a part of the Earth. (Credit: Two Flags)

The two theories were so different that geologists thought that once they had some actual Moon rocks to examine they’d certainly be able to choose which theory was correct. It didn’t work out that way because the Lunar rocks brought back by the astronauts looked somewhat like Earth rocks but also like something else. After several years of study a new theory started to form, a more dynamic, even violent scenario for the Moon’s birth.

It works like this, about 4.5 billion years ago the Solar System was just beginning to settle down. The proto-Earth, alone with no Moon, was still a molten mass just starting to cool when another planetoid about the mass of Mars came wandering into our orbit from somewhere else in the Solar System. The collision that resulted between the two bodies must have been cataclysmic and resulted in the Earth absorbing some of the planetoid’s mass while some of the fragments of both bodies coalesced into the Moon. The now destroyed planetoid has even been given the name Theia and the entire concept has come to be known as the Planetary Impact Theory.

In the planetary Impact theory another planetoid named Theia smashes into the early Earth and the debris coalesces into our Moon. (Credit: Discover Magazine)

After the collision the Moon soon cooled into the dead world we see today so that the Lunar rocks can still exhibit some traces of its origin as two bodies. The Earth however is a much more active body, with moving tectonic plates, a liquid core and volcanism to say nothing of the erosive forces of wind and rain. The dynamic forces of geology have built tremendous mountain ranges that have then been washed into the oceans to form sedimentary rocks, an entire class of rock completely unknown on the Moon. Surely any trace of Theia on our planet would have long ago disappeared because of all the changes on Earth over the last 4 billion years.

Or maybe not! Back in my post of 24 June 2020, I discussed how geologists had discovered regions of denser, heavier material deep within the Earth’s mantel. Doyeon Kim, the University of Maryland scientist who led the research found these anomalies by analyzing the vibrations caused by large earthquakes as they passed through the inner regions of the core and mantel. Because these anomalous regions were made of hotter, denser material the seismic vibrations passed through them with a lower velocity and so Doctor Kim christened them Ultra-Low Velocity Zones or (ULVZs). Two of these regions, each hundreds of kilometers deep and thousands across, are known to exist, one beneath West Africa and the other beneath the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific.

By studying the transmission of Earthquake vibrations as they pass through our planet’s center Dr. Kim was able to discover previously unknown structures deep with the Earth. (Credit: EurekAlert)

Now geologists at Arizona State University led by Ph.D. candidate Qian Yuan have proposed that these huge masses are actually fragments of the planetoid Theia that have managed to remain intact deep inside the Earth for more than four billion years. A paper detailing their hypothesis has been presented at the 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March of 2021.

As evidence for their theory the geologists point to not only the ULVZs difference in density but also to certain chemical signatures indicating that the material making up the ULVZs is at least as primitive as the Theia impact. Qian Yuan and his colleagues are now preparing a formal paper to be submitted to the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

Are the large structures deep within the Earth all that remains of the planet Theia? (Credit: World Today News)

Think of it, NASA and other space agencies are spending billions of dollars to send probes millions of kilometers in order to study alien worlds when there may be immense pieces of another planet just a couple of thousand kilometers beneath out feet. Of course the problem is that’s a couple of thousand kilometers of solid rock you have to get through in order to obtain any samples.

Archaeology news for April 2021.

There have been several exciting discoveries from ancient sites around the world. So rather than wasting any time let’s just get to it.

I’ll start today with the discovery that’s gotten the greatest amount of press coverage, the unearthing of new fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now everybody knows that the Dead Sea Scrolls are fragments of writings from the Jewish Scriptures, the Christian Olde Testament that have been dated from about the second century BCE to the end of the first century CE. The writings were discovered between the years 1947 and 1956 in a series of eleven caves not far from the shoreline of the Dead Sea in the Khirbet Qumran region of Israel. The writings consist entirely of Jewish religious texts and while most are versions of well-known books from the Olde Testament some of the texts are of works that were completely unknown before their discovery.

A few of the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. They look like pretty good hiding places to me and the fact that the area is so dry helped to preserve the scrolls! (Credit: Wikipedia)

No one knows exactly who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls nor how they came to be hidden away in deserted caves so far from any habitation. One of the two main theories is that a small religious sect known from the works of the Jewish historian Josephus as the Essenes wrote the manuscripts at a nearby archaeological site. The problem is that there is no evidence to connect the small settlement to either the scrolls or the Essenes. The other theory is that before the Romans captured the city of Jerusalem and ended a Jewish revolt in 70 CE a group of Jewish patriots managed to escape with a part of the Temple library that they hid in the caves to keep them from being destroyed by the Romans. Again the evidence for this theory is only circumstantial.

Ruins of the nearby settlement dated to the time the scrolls were placed in the caves. Nevertheless there is no evidence connecting these remains to either the scrolls nor the religious group known as the Essenes. (Credit: Sonia Halliday Photo Library)

Every since the discovery of the writings seventy years ago the caves along the Dead Sea have been explored and studied by archaeologists in their desire to not only solve the riddle of who put the scrolls there but also in the hope of finding some more fragments. And in fact the Israel Antiquities Authority has recently announced the discovery of dozens of new fragments that when pieced together were found to come from the books of Zechariah and Nahum in the so-called minor prophets of Jewish scripture.

Some of the better preserved fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Credit: BBC)

The fragments were found in a cave colourfully named the cave of horrors, not because of any grisly find that had been made there but because of the difficulty of reaching the site. Really, at 80m from the cliff top and at the intersection of two ravines the cave is so hard to reach with modern rappelling equipment that it’s difficult to imagine how first century Jewish patriots fleeing the Romans managed to ever reach the cave’s entrance.

The scroll fragments discovered in the past year however are mostly just tiny pieces that have to be assembled like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. (Credit: NBC Los Angeles)

Although the latest writings are plainly fragments of Jewish scripture the language they are written in is Greek showing how important that language was in the Middle East at that time. (In fact did you know that all quotations from the Olde Testament that occur in the New Testament are from a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures known as the Septuagint.) Also, even though only a few lines of text are able to be reconstructed there are noticeable differences in wording between the new fragments and the same lines as printed in your bible.

The Septuagint is a 1st Century BCE Greek translation of the Olde Testament which is the source of the quotations that appear in the New Testament. (Credit: YouTube)

As hard as it can be to interpret writings from thousands of years ago most archaeological sites contain no writing, making it infinitely more difficult to understand exactly what happened there. A 6,200-year-old Neolithic site that has been unearthed near the town of Potocani in what is now the country of Croatia is a prime example of this.

Discovered in 2007 the site is simply a mass grave, the remains of 41 people, men, women and children aged from about 2 to 50 years old were crammed into a pit only 2 meters in diameter and one meter deep. This was not a quick burial for the victims of some plague however, nearly every skull examined by archaeologists from the University of Zagreb showed at least one blunt force wound at the back of the head. Just as telling, there were no sign of defensive wounds anywhere on the arms or body. These people either did not, or could not fight back against their attackers. The dead in the pit were all murder victims.

The Potocani massacre pit. That’s a lot of bodies stuffed into such a small grave. (Credit: National Geographic)

At first the scientists thought that they might have stumbled upon a massacre from the 20th century, a Nazi execution from WW2 or ethnic cleansing during the breakup of Yugoslavia. The lack of any metal objects like belt buckles or buttons made that seem unlikely however. It was only after carbon 14 dating that the archaeologists realized just how long ago the massacre had occurred.

Examples of the injuries sustained by the victims of the Potocani massacre. (Credit: Live Science)

In order to gain some clue as to why these 41 people had been killed it was decided carry out DNA analysis of the remains. Surprisingly it turned out that while the victims were related to a degree, they were not closely related, in other words they were not all members of the same family. So this atrocity was not a family or clan being wiped out by a rival family or clan. As far as the evidence showed this was a random sample of people living in the area 6,200 years ago who were murdered for some unknown reason.

Evidence from the stone age that our ancestors were already fighting wars is not hard to find! (Credit: Weapons Universe)
And we also know that Otzi the Iceman, discovered frozen in the Alps in 1991, was actually a murder victim from the copper age. The Italian police actually have a file on this case making Otzi the coldest of cold cases. (Credit: Pinterest)

We probably will never know the exact motive for these killings but the researchers speculate that climate change, a long period of either drought or flooding may have led to a squabble over limited resources and these victims were simply the losers of that conflict. In other words the events of 6,200 years ago may not have been all that different from the ideological killings of the 20th century.

For my final story I’d like to just mention a somewhat less violent, more pleasant story. Greek archaeologists working near the ancient city of Olympia, site of the Olympic games in ancient times, have unearthed a 2,500-year-old bronze idol in the shape of a bull. The small statue was found quite by chance, as an observant archaeologist happened to notice one of the horns sticking out of the ground after a heavy rainfall.

Small statue of a Bull discovered at Olympia. (Credit: ABC News)

The researchers believe that the figurine was probably an offering to the god Zeus not only because of the nearby temple to the chief of the gods but also because the bull was a well known sacred symbol of Zeus, the story of the rape of Europa where Zeus disguised himself as a bull comes to mind.

The rape of Europa by Francesco Albani. Zeus is disguised as the bull and this legend gave the continent of Europe it name! (Credit: Artnet)

The figurine has been taken to a labouratory for preservation, as have the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the remains of the Croatian dead. There they will be studied in the hope that some clue or clues may be discovered to help archaeologists tell us more of the stories of our ancestors.

Is Warp Drive just a dream of Science Fiction? Some theoretical Physicists think it might actually be possible. Set Course Mister Sulu, ahead Warp Factor Two!

Just a few weeks ago I published a post about how several physicists at the Central Astronomical Observatory Pulkovo in Saint Petersburg Russia had published a paper discussing how astronomers might be able to actually discover the existence of wormholes in space. See my post of 10 March 2021. Basically wormholes are shortcuts in higher dimensions that could allow a space traveler to go from one part of the Universe to another faster than a beam of light could in normal, three dimensional space. By using a wormhole you’re not breaking the law against going faster than light, you’re circumventing it!

A wormhole connects two distant regions of normal space by a shortcut through higher dimensions! (Credit: Science News)

Well now physicists Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire at Applied Physics have published a paper in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity that proposes what they consider to be a ‘realistic’ approach to building a warp drive engine that would enable a starship to effectively travel faster than light. Now Bobrick and Martire were not starting from scratch, their work is based upon an idea for using Einstein’s gravitational field equations to warp space first developed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre and which has become known as the Alcubierre drive.

Physicist Miguel Alcubierre originator of a solution to Einstein’s equations that would warp space. (Credit: Facebook)

It was back in 1994 that Alcubierre first published his metric tensor that described a region of space generated around an object, a starship. What the tensor would do would be to contract space to one side of the starship while expanding it to the other. The starship itself would remain inside a ‘bubble’ of flat space while the bubble would then ride the contraction – expansion wave in much the same way as a surfboard rides an ocean wave, the starship inside would be like the surfer. Inside the bubble of flat space everything would behave as in normal space, nothing would move faster than light, it’s the entire bubble, an entire region of space-time that is moving faster than light.

Alcubierre’s metric tensor that allows warping of space around a starship which is traveling in the x direction. (Credit: Wikipedia)
The starship Enterprise, appropriately enough, in warp space. Space-Time in front of the ship is squeezed in tight while space-time in back is stretched out. The ship itself is inside a bubble of local normal space-time! (Credit: Quora)

As you might guess there are some practical problems. The three biggest are number one, in order to generate the warp you need quite a lot of ‘negative energy’. What’s negative energy? Well it’s some type of energy or matter that exhibits a negative gravitational field. The only kind of negative energy we have any idea about at present is the ‘dark energy’ that astronomers believe is causing the expansion of the Universe to increase. In other words, we know next to nothing about negative energy and the idea of using it in a generator is pure speculation at present.

The second problem is that when Alcubierre calculated the amount of negative matter needed to generate a bubble big enough to hold a reasonably sized starship, say 100m or so, he found that it would be greater than the amount of normal matter in the entire known Universe. And if all that wasn’t enough the use of negative energy would allow the formation of closed time-like curves that could be used to travel backward in time, see my post of 17 November 2020.

Closed Time-Like Loops can be generated by massive objects moving close to, but not more than the speed of light and can allow time travel to the past! (Credit: Google Sites)

Needless to say a lot of other physicists have voiced their opinion about the whole concept of the Alcubierre drive, both for and against. The work of Bobrick and Martire is just the latest. In their paper they show how, instead of requiring negative energy an Alcubierre bubble could be generated with a strong gravitational field from normal matter. As you might guess the strength of that field is pretty much that of a black hole. So if you want to get somewhere faster than light can, all you need is a black hole!

If you happen to have a black hole handy you too can build a warp drive generator! (Credit: The Conversation)

Perhaps the biggest problem with the Alcubierre drive along with wormholes and all the other kinds of other weird solutions to Einstein’s equations of General Relativity is that they don’t work with Quantum Mechanics. You see for over a century now we’ve had these two wonderful theories, General Relativity that describes the very large, and Quantum Mechanics that describes the very small and they not only don’t work together they don’t even follow the same mathematical formalism.

Just a few of the problems in trying to solve the puzzle of Quantum Gravity. (Credit: ResearchGate)

The majority of physicists today are of the opinion that when a theory of Quantum Gravity is finally found weird solutions like Alcubierre’s drive or wormholes will simply turn out to be invalid, like faster than light travel is in relativity. Of course it is quite possible that quantum gravity could actually point us in the direction of realistic faster than light travel. So let’s be glad that some of the more daring theorists out there are trying to see how far they can stretch Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Scotty I need warp drive now! (Credit: NextBigFutureNow.com)

After all, as the Sci-Fi writer Arthur C. Clarke liked to say. “The only way to find the limits of the possible is to go beyond them to the impossible!”

Scientists are making great strides in the development of lab-grown or cultured meat.

The idea behind lab-grown or cultured meat is actually quite simple. First you extract a few cells from a tasty region of an animal’s body, let’s say the prime rib area of a cow or a chicken’s breast. Just a few cells, not enough to harm the animal. Then you grow those cells in the lab, billions of them, enough to make them into beefsteaks and chicken breasts or other cuts of meat that you can then sell as food to your customers.

It won’t be long now before this image becomes real! Look for it in your Supermarket tomorrow! (Credit: Food Navigator)

There are several advantages to producing meat in the lab. First of all you don’t have to waste energy and materials producing the non-eatable parts of the animal, like bones and skin. In fact you don’t even have to produce the less popular cuts of meat like the brains or intestines. Then there’s hygiene and quality control. Meat produced in the lab is less likely to be infected with bacteria or absorb toxic chemicals like mercury from the environment.

It all seems so clean and anti-septic, and no animals were harmed in the production of this burger. (Credit: SGS)

Then there’s the morality aspect. Cultured meat doesn’t require the death, or indeed any real harm to the animal who supplied the original small number of cells that started the whole process. In today’s world there are many people who are concerned about the welfare of the animals we raise and slaughter to feed ourselves. Lab grown meat would require far fewer animals, who would probably be given far better living conditions in order that they produce the best possible cells, and aside from an occasional biopsy to procure some of those cells they would never be harmed. In other words ethical treatment of animals! 

Certainly being a vegetarian is more complicated than being a carnivore, and besides I never met a sausage I didn’t like! (Credit: Signature Market)

Sounds crazy but it’s actually been done. In my post of 7 April 2018 I reported on the first ever cooking of a hamburger made from lab grown meat back in 2013. Those few reporters who were granted a taste of that burger pronounced it to be tasty, but rather dry and a bit too tough.

Dr. Mark Post with his creation, the first lab grown hamburger patty. (Credit: The Guardian)

That’s been the trouble so far, texture and juiciness. You see the meat we buy in a supermarket, the meat that comes from a once-living animal, is more than just muscle cells. There are also fat cells as well and not only is the ratio of muscle to fat cells important to get a nice juicy meat but the two distinct kinds of cells have to be ‘assembled’ in a way that mimics the texture of naturally produced meat.

A pair of researchers at McMaster University in Canada’s Department of Biomedical Engineering have been working on that problem. Starting with a technique that produces thin sheets of living tissue in a nutrient solution for human transplants (See my post of 16 May 2020) Ravi Selvaganapathy and Alireza Shahin-Shamsabadi succeeded in stacking those sheets of muscle and fat cells. Each of those sheets has a thickness about that of a sheet of printer paper and when stacked together the cells would begin to bond to each other spontaneously.

Dr. Shahin-Shamsabadi working in his lab. (Credit: CBC)

The initial experiments were carried out with cells gathered from labouratory mice but the researchers decided not to sample their ‘mouse steak’. Instead Selvaganapathy and Shahin-Shamsabadi performed a second experiment with rabbit cells with a result that Selvaganapathy proclaimed. “It felt and tasted just like meat.”

A spoonful of mouse meat, hummmm…tasty! (Credit: CBC)

One advantage of Selvaganapathy and Shahin-Shamsabadi’s technique is that the muscle / fat ratio can be varied quite precisely to match the desires of potential customers. The researchers are convinced that their technique will work equally as well for a range of other meats, beef, pork and chicken being obvious choices. Personally I’m curious as to whether the technique would work as well for fish, like a nice salmon or tuna fillet.

Lab grown fish could help to eliminate the overfishing of many endangered species. (Credit: Los Angeles Magazine)

Selvaganapathy and Shahin-Shamsabadi are now hoping to increase the scale of production. They’ve formed a start-up company to explore the commercial possibilities of their process. They certainly have a good marketing slogan that they can use. “Real Meat built to Order.” They may have to get used to some competition however, there are at least 38 different companies seeking to gain a foothold in what could soon be a very profitable industry.

Lab grown meat companies, right side of chart, also have competitors in plant and fungi derived meat alternatives, left side. (Credit: Meduim)

Food production in general is poised to undergo a revolution during the 21st century. Whether it be aquaculture or urban farming or cultured meat the way we produce our food in thirty to fifty years from now is going to look nothing like the farms and ranches where food has been grown for the past ten thousand years. It has to change because those old ways of agriculture are unsustainable in a world of eight billion or more human beings.

Paleontologists are still debating both when and why our ancestors became fully bipedal. A new study of a fossil from Ethiopia may help to answer these critical questions.

Everyone knows that very few animals walk on only two legs or more technically, are bipedal. It’s true that some creatures, like a bear may rear up onto their hind legs in order to grab some fruit from a tree or to get a better look at their surroundings like a prairie dog. Such species don’t walk very far however and are glad to get back down onto all fours. Then there are some animals like the kangaroo or a Tyrannosaurus rex who walk all the time on two legs but have a have a nice big tail to give them balance.

Some animals, like this Grizzly Bear, are capable of standing on two legs for a short period of time and even taking a few clumsy steps but really they’d rather be down on all fours! (Credit: Reddit)

Our close relatives the great apes often walk on two legs when they are carrying food or perhaps a child but even they prefer to knuckle walk, gaining some balance and propulsion from their forelegs. Only humans walk fully upright, on two legs with no tail. In fact paleontologists have created a special name for those species of ape who walked fully upright, they are called hominids and consist of two geneses, our own genus Homo and our extinct relatives the Australopithecines.

This famous illustration of human evolution shows upright posture and brain size evolving in parallel. Actually our ancestors were fully upright before our brains got much bigger than a chimpanzee’s. (Credit: History.com)

When and why did our hominid ancestors evolve such an unusual way of getting about? There’s good fossil evidence that our ancestors were primarily bipedal going back at least 3.5 million years ago (MYA). The leg and arm bones of the famous fossil ‘Lucy’ discovered in the 1970s show that her species, Australopithecus afarensis, was fully bipedal that long ago. So somewhere between 3.5 million years ago when A afarensis lived and about 7 million years ago when our ancestors broke away from the ancestors of the Chimpanzees is when we became fully upright. Exactly when is still a matter of debate.

Australopithecus afarensis, our ancestor of about 3-3.5 million years ago. In many ways A afarensis was more like a chimpanzee than a modern human, but they walked fully upright! (Credit: Science Photo Library)

Why our ancestors became bipedal is even more hotly contested. Charles Darwin, who correctly pointed out that chimps and gorillas were our closest living relatives, suggested that our ancestors became more and more bipedal as we used our hands more to carry things or use tools. Later evolutionists have theorized that as our ancestors moved out of the African forest into the savanna the ability to see above the tall grass may have been the cause. Another possibility that has received some support is that a fully upright posture would reduce the amount of skin that is exposed to the harmful effects of sunlight, remember this is also the same period of time where our ancestors were losing a large part of their body hair.

Homo habilis making a stone tool. Did our ancestors become bipedal in order to better use their hands for toll making or did they make more tools because they were bipedal? (Credit: MutualArt)
Either way they made a lot of tools! (Credit: Live Science)

With so much controversy any piece of additional evidence becomes even more important. That’s why a new study by a team of anthropologists with lead author Thomas C. Prang of the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University and published in the journal Science Advances of a 4.4 million year old partial skeleton has gathered attention. The fossil belongs to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus or simply ‘Ardi’ for short. Ardi may be only a partial skeleton, too poorly preserved to tell if it was fully bipedal or not, however it does date from the critical time between our last common ancestor with chimps and A afarensis. More importantly Ardi’s left hand is exceptionally well preserved. This allowed the team of researchers to make a series of morphological comparisons to the hands of our modern knuckle walking relatives, chimps and gorillas as well as modern humans and even our fully upright ancestors like A afarensis.

‘Ardi’, Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton used by Thomas Prang in his study. Notice how well the left hand, the upper hand in the image, is preserved. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

What the researchers found was that in a number of key features including the size and shape of individual bones of the hand Ardi was much closer to that of modern apes then that of any hominid, modern or ancient. According to Doctor Prang, “…,we found evidence for a big evolutionary ‘jump’ between the kind of hand represented by Ardi and all later hominin hands, including that of Lucy’s species. This ‘evolutionary jump’ happens at a critical time when hominins are evolving adaptations to a more human-like form of upright walking and the earliest evidence for hominin stone-tool manufacture and stone tool use, such as cut marks on animal fossils, are discovered.” That time frame of somewhere between 4.4 MYA and 3.5 MYA is also crucial because it was during that time that our ancestors lost their opposing big toe so that unlike our cousins the chimps and gorillas we can no longer grasp things with our feet.

One of the techniques used to compare ‘Ardi’s’ hand to those of more modern humans as well as modern apes. (Credit: Thomas C. Prang et al)

If the results of the study hold up to scrutiny that will greatly reduce the time frame during which our ancestor became fully bipedal, from about 3.5 million years to a little less than one million years. Sometime between 4.4 MYA and 3.5 MYA our ancestors took a big step toward becoming human. With an upright posture they could expand their use of primitive tools. Greater tool use would then cause an evolutionary push toward a bigger brain initiating a feedback loop of more intelligence and greater tool use.

The end result of that evolutionary ‘jump’ is our modern, human dominated world. Let’s just hope our brains and tools are sufficient to enable us to stop destroying it.

Every year millions of birds are killed when they fly into illuminated glass windows. The National Audubon Society has established a ‘National Lights Out’ program in an attempt to reduce those deaths.

We usually hear it first, we’ll be sitting in our living room or maybe bedroom at night with the lights on when suddenly there’s a bang against the window. Whether we go out to look at what happened immediately or wait until the next day doesn’t matter, either way we’ll often find a small dead bird lying on the ground beneath the window.

Birds are actually fairly smart animals but understanding the whole concept of a window is a bit beyond their capabilities. (Credit: Twitter)
The end result is often an unnecessary tragedy. (Credit: All about Birds)

It’s easy to understand what happens, of course birds can’t understand what either artificial lights or transparent glass are and so they get confused and fly straight into our window, to deadly effect. And if this tragedy happens once or twice a year for a residential home it happens nightly for those tall office buildings with hundreds of brightly lit windows that remain on all night long.

For a migratory bird passing through, Philadelphia at night is a confusing mass of colours, lights and deadly glass windows. (Credit: Tripsavvy)

There are also certain times of year when the problem becomes even worse because millions of birds that are not regular city dwellers like pigeons or starlings migrate through populated areas resulting in thousands of completely unnecessary deaths. My hometown of Philadelphia lies right along North America’s east coast bird migratory route and last fall the city saw an especially terrible night on the second of October. Because of bad weather combining with a large number of migrants passing through the city an estimated 14,000 birds died in a single night. In fact Philadelphia has a long history of studying such accidental bird kills with the Academy of Natural Sciences preserving specimens of birds who died by crashing into buildings dating back as far as the 1890s.

The United States is crossed by several major bird migratory routes. My hometown of Philadelphia is only one of the big cities the lay along a migratory path. (Credit: Pinterest)

Last year’s high death toll may have had something to do with the decision by civic leaders to add Philadelphia to the growing list of cities that participate in the National Lights Out initiative. National Lights Out is a concerted effort by both naturalists and business leaders to just turn off as many unnecessary lights as possible, especially those in high rise office buildings. Think about it, what use is anybody getting by having all of the lights on in an empty, let’s say accounting firm on the 20th floor of some skyscraper. It’s a waste of energy and money as well as being a danger to innocent birds and all it takes is someone remembering to turn out the lights when they go home for the night.

Part of the carnage the happened on 2 Oct 2020 in Philadelphia. (Credit: Academy of Natural Sciences)
Saving energy, saving money and saving birds! And all it takes is someone remembering to turn out the lights out when they’re not needed! (Credit: Trendsmap)

Now participation is voluntary, our city council is considering a bill to promote the initiative but there’ll be no penalty for those businesses that fail to join in. The effort to convince landlords and tenants to join in is being led by the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club and the Mid-Atlantic chapter of the Audubon Society along with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.

Just a few of the organizations leading Philadelphia’s effort. (Credit: Academy of Natural Sciences)

The movement has also gained the support of our local Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) and the Building Industry Association of Philadelphia. So far these organizations have succeeded in recruiting some of the biggest businesses in Philadelphia to take part including Comcast Corporation, owner of the two tallest buildings in the city. Also pledging their support are Brandywine Realty the city’s largest landowner as well as more than a dozen other building owners or operators.

Comcast Corporation’s two towers are the tallest buildings east of the Mississippi outside of New York City so Comcast’s cooperation with ‘Philly Lights Out’ is a big deal. (Credit: Visit Philly)

Now Philadelphia is not the only city getting into the National Lights Out effort, in fact we’re actually kinda late in joining in. The first city to take part was Chicago back in the year 1999 and since then New York, Boston, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and some thirty other cities have taken part.

Cities across the country are joining in the effort to save birds, is yours? (Credit: City and County of Denver)

As I mentioned above migration periods are the critical times for the National Lights Out initiative. For most North American cities that means April and May in the spring as the birds fly north and August 15th to November 15th as they fly south. But really at any time of year how much effort does it take to remember to turn out the lights when everybody has gone home for the night? It saves energy, saves money, eliminates some greenhouse gasses as well as saving the lives of some birds. 

And before I go I’m going to add one more reason to turn out the lights, light pollution. I my opinion the night sky is simply beautiful but you can’t see it in a city because of all the glow from artificial lights. Really, on a good clear night you should be able to see about three thousand stars along with a planet or two and the pale wisp of the Milky Way. When I step outside my house here in Philly however I’m lucky to see a couple of dozen stars and forget about any sign of the Milky Way. That’s because of all the streetlights, lights from nearby businesses as well as lights from my neighbor’s homes. I have seen the night sky from a darkened Navy Destroyer in the middle of the Atlantic, from the desert of Arizona more than a hundred kilometers from any town and from the high peaks of the Rockies and I can tell you that the night sky near any big city pales in comparison because of all that light pollution.

Just a little hint of what light pollution can do to the night sky. If you think about it, today there are millions of people who really have no idea what the heavens look like! (Credit: Reddit)
In my opinion the best place to do naked eye astronomy is from the middle of the ocean on a darkened navy ship. I did that from the deck of the USS Damato DD871. (Credit: Facebook)

In fact backyard astronomers like me have even started an initiative of our own, the ‘Dark Skies’ project to turn off or reduce all of the unnecessary artificial lights so that we can enjoy the beautiful natural lights that the Universe has provided us. Who knows, maybe I’ll write a post about that before too long.

Scientists propose a new state of matter, an active form of matter they call the Swirlonic state.

We all remember back in our science classes how scientists classified matter into three basic states, solid, liquid and gas and each of these different states have very different physical properties. Solids for example do not change their shape to fit into their container, in fact solids are the only state of matter that holds its shape without a container, and solids are not at all easy to compress into a smaller volume. Liquids on the other hand flow in order to fit their shape to match that of their container but like a solid liquids are not easily compressible. Finally a gas will fill its container like a fluid but unlike the other states it is comparatively easy to compress or expand the volume of a gas.

The three classic states of matter are solid, liquid and gas but of course reality isn’t quite that simple. (Credit: Gillibrand Primary School)

We were also told that most materials go from one state to another depending on their temperature, water being the classic example with ice, liquid water and steam. Going from a solid to a liquid is of course called melting, the reverse is called freezing while going from a liquid to a gas is either boiling or evapouration, the reverse is called condensation.

Now these classifications are not quite hard and fast, see my post about glass in 23 January 2021. Some materials do have quasi-states where they show characteristics of two or more states at the same time. However, the vast majority of the behaviour of the majority of substances in our everyday lives can be pretty well pigeonholed into solid, liquid or gas.

Quasi states of matter are a hot topic in materials science right now because they have been found to possess a vast number of useful properties. (Credit: Wiley Online Library)

Or can they? In a paper published in the journal Nature mathematicians at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow Russia and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Leicester in the UK have described what they consider to be a new state of ‘active matter’ that displays properties greatly different from those of the other three states of matter.

The mathematicians were inspired by the behaviour of schools of fish or flocks of birds but the researchers quickly realized that complex but non-living chemical compounds that react with their surroundings often displayed similar properties. One particular class of complex compounds is known as ‘Janus Particles’ because one side of the particle has different chemical properties than the other.

If we consider the individual fish in a large school to be ‘particles of matter’ then the school itself behaves as a new state of matter! Notice the swirl. (Credit: JSTOR Daily)
Named for the two faced Roman god of entryways, get it you can go in and out, a Janus particle has distinctly different properties on its different sides. (Credit: Semantic Scholar)

Soap is an excellent example of such a Janus particle, see my post of 2May2020. This is because at one end of a soap molecule is a polar structure that will dissolve in water, a property formally known as hydrophilic. At the other end however is a non-polar structure that will dissolve in oil, a property called hydrophobic. Because of these different properties at different ends when a large number of soap molecules are dissolved in water they tend to group themselves in a circular or spherical shell structures with the polar end facing out and a void in the middle, like a soap bubble. The researchers found that such self-assembly into spherical shell configurations were typical of active matter in general and in addition that the shells showed a tendency to rotate or swirl, which prompted the scientists to name their new state Swirlon.

Molecules of soap possess a water loving, hydrophilic side and a water hating, hydrophobic side. This allows them to form a bubble around an oil droplet when dissolved in water. (Credit: AwesomeStories)

The mathematicians developed a computer simulation that allowed them to study the behaviour of their swirlonic matter under a variety of different conditions. What they found was that swirlonic matter displayed many strange behaviours including the ability to self-assemble in a variety of shapes.

Evolution of the swirlonic state. Researchers have found that active particles tend to form themselves into spherical clumps that possess a swirling motion.

The mathematicians are now interfacing with Materials scientists who are working with the types of ‘active matter’ they simulated in order to both confirm their results but also to promote new real world materials with new useful properties. In the future the researchers hope to increase the information processing capabilities of their simulated particles in order to better understand the behaviour of living ‘active particles’ like flocks of birds or swarms of insects.

A flock of birds or a new state of matter. Guess it kinda depends on your point of view. Notice the swirl! (Credit: How it works)

‘Active matter’ is a new class of materials that are now becoming the subject of intensive study, both in the lab and in computer simulations. At the present time we are only beginning to learn how to put their strange properties to useful purposes but several have already shown great promise. New materials with new properties, or in a single word, progress.

Space news for March 2021: Special Space Tourist Edition.

Space tourism is actually nothing new. Back in the 1990s the breakup of the old Soviet Union left the Russian space program in a severe budget crisis. At that time the USSR possessed the only operating space station, a collection of modules named Mir, Russian for Peace. So desperate were the Russian space engineers to try to keep Mir functioning that they were forced to look outside of their own country for the necessary funds.

Like the present International Space Station (ISS) Russia’s MIR space station was a collection of modules assembled in orbit. (Credit: Wikipedia)

One of the ways that the Russians considered to get the money they needed was to provide a few rich capitalists with the vacation of a lifetime, a trip into space with a stay on the Mir space station. It took a few years to set up and the first paying customer for the Russian’s was not actually a tourist but rather a journalist named Toyohiro Akiyama. It was Akiyama’s employer, the Tokyo Broadcasting System who paid an estimated $30 million USD for his weeklong stay at Mir in 1990.

Toyohiro Akiyama, a journalist with the Tokyo Broadcasting System was the first paying customer to go into space spending a week at the Mir station. (Credit: The Japan Times)

The first real space tourist was American businessman Dennis Tito. Tito was originally scheduled to fly to Mir but when the decision was made to de-orbit the Russian station in order to concentrate on the construction of the International Space Station (ISS) Tito was able to rearrange his plans to a weeklong stay at the ISS. The reported price was a cool $20 million. Since then six other men, and yes only men so far, have paid the necessary price to ride into space aboard Russia’s Soyuz capsule.

American businessman Dennis Tito paid an estimated $20 million for a week’s vacation aboard the ISS becoming the first space tourist. (Credit: BBC)

The end of NASA’s shuttle program in 2011 however left Soyuz as the only means for real astronauts to get to the ISS. With seats on the Russian spacecraft at a premium the space tourism business was put on hold until NASA’s commercial crew program could get underway and provide a second means of putting a man into orbit.

With the success of Space X’s first two manned missions however the space tourism ‘industry’ is now poised to begin a new phase of growth. Both Space X and Boeing, if it ever works out the problems in its Starliner capsule, have expressed interest in scheduling missions entirely devoted to space tourism whether they be to the ISS or simply into Low Earth Orbit (LOE).

The Space X Crew Dragon has successfully taken six astronauts to the ISS in two missions. As a private, commercial company Space X has indicated it is willing to launch paying customers into space. For the right price. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In fact the first such purely tourist space mission is already tentatively scheduled for sometime late this year. Designated as the Inspiration4 mission the flight is being paid for by the billionaire Jared Isaacman. Isaacman has contracted with Space X to launch him and three guests into space aboard the corporation’s Dragon capsule for a flight that could last as long as five days in orbit. Isaacman intends for the trip to help promote his favourite charity, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital so the remaining seats aboard the capsule will be filled with St. Jude’s in mind. The second astronaut for the trip has already been chosen and is St. Jude’s physician’s assistant Hayley Arceneaux who was herself a cancer patient at St. Jude’s when she was a child.

Billionaire Jared Isaacman likes to fly jet planes for fun. Soon he’ll be taking the Space X Dragon Capsule into orbit! (Credit: The New York Times)
Hayley Arceneaux, a physician’s assistant at St. Jude’s Hospital for Children and a childhood bone cancer survivor herself, will become the first ‘guest’ to be treated to a vacation in outer space! (Credit: The Guardian)

One of the remaining two seats will be chosen from a sweepstakes drawing to benefit St. Jude’s while the final seat will go to a randomly selected customer of Isaacman’s Shift4 corporation, a payment processing company. Notice that I failed to mention any NASA astronaut going along on the trip. That’s because Isaacman, who holds a pilot’s license plans on commanding the mission himself once he’s taken some training from Space X.

 Inspiration4 may be the first but it certainly won’t be the last Space X mission dedicated to paying tourists. In fact Space X has teamed with a company called Axiom Space 1 to begin taking paying customers to the ISS beginning in 2022. And Space X has further ambitions as well, in 2017 the company’s CEO Elon Musk announced that he had made a deal with Japanese businessman Yusaku Maezawa to send the millionaire and up to eight ‘artists’ on a trip around the Moon using Space X’s Starship rocket. Now that rocket is still under development so no time frame for the trip has been announced.

Elon Musk, CEO of Space X hopes that his Starship vehicle now under development will be able to make atrip around the Moon in just a few years! (Credit: Futurism)

Some other companies have equally ambitious dreams, let’s just call them that for the moment. Both Bigelow Aerospace Corporation and Orion Span Corporation intend to launch modules of their ‘luxury space hotels’ into LOE sometime in the next few years. The idea is that Space X or Boeing or maybe even the Russians will launch the tourists to the ‘hotels’ and then bring them back after a month or so in space. All of these plans depend on the companies involved getting sufficient financial backing so don’t be surprised if there’s a delay of a couple of years or so.

Bigelow Aerospace Corporation hopes to launch their inflatable B330 module into LOE in just the next few years. (Credit: Universe Today)

So if space tourism is about to ‘take off’, excuse the pun, as an industry, who’s regulating it? According to a UN treaty outer space doesn’t belong to anyone so what governmental agencies are going to be responsible for safety, training, launch schedules and hundreds of other mundane bureaucratic tasks?

Well, again according to the UN, the nation from which the space tourist mission will be launched shall have jurisdiction over how those missions shall be regulated and conducted. To that end the Federal Aviation Authority here in the United States has already opened an Office of Commercial Space Transportation. This office has been granted the power by act of congress to license all commercial space flights, including those under NASA’s commercial crew program, with an emphasis on safety for personnel and property.

In today’s world nothing can be done until all of the red tape has been filled out in triplicate! (Credit: SlideServe)

So when will you be able to take a trip into space? Well if you happen to have a spare $20 million or so it looks like you could get your chance sometime in the next five years or so. For the rest of us however it’s probably going to be a rather long time.

Book Review: ‘The Wandering Earth’ by Cixin Liu.

‘The Wandering Earth’ by the Chinese SF author Cixin Liu is the sort of science fiction book that has become something of a rarity nowadays, a collection of short stories. Time was, during the ‘golden era’ of SF that there was a big market for short stories. Magazines like Amazing, Astounding, Weird Tales, World’s Beyond, Cosmos and others bought hundreds of short stories every year. Then, once an author had published a dozen or so stories in those magazines they would arrange to have a collection of their stories published as paperbacks. I have dozens of such collections in my library.

‘Eight Stories from the Rest of the Robots’ by Isaac Asimov is a collection of stories that didn’t make it into his original collection ‘I Robot’. Just one of the many collections of short SF stories in my library. (Credit: www.isfdb.com)

Recently however series of novels, like George R. R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Fire and Ice’ or even Cixin Liu’s ‘Three Body Problem’ triology have become the norm. There are few magazines left today who can pay enough to make writing short stories worthwhile, let alone a way to make a decent living. Most unknown writers today may write a few short stories to build a resume and get a little notice but as soon as they can they’re writing those series because that’s where the money is!

Writing is a business, like everything else. Today the money is in trilogies or series like Cixin Liu’s ‘The Three Body Problem’ trilogy which I have reviewed in this blog. (Credit: Android Authority)

So when I came across a collection of short stories by Cixin Liu I was quite excited. Having already given very favourable reviews to four of Mister Cixin’s novels in this blog I wanted to see if he could reproduce the same sense of wonder in short form.

The Cover of ‘The Wandering Earth’ by Cixin Liu. (Credit: Amazon.com)

I’m happy to say that ‘The Wandering Earth’ is a great read. The ten stories contained within the collection are each in their own way both thought provoking and entertaining. The first story gives its name to the collection and concerns a future time when the Sun is running out of its nuclear fuel and becoming unstable. In order to survive the human race converts the Earth into a spaceship that heads out toward Proxima Centauri.

While all of the stories do have the Earth as their stage they still pretty well run the gamut of SF stories. There are aliens, both invading and benevolent, as well as stories with only human protagonists. Most of the stories take place in the near future but several are set in more distant times. And just for a bit of fun Mister Cixin even makes himself a character in one story.

Science Fiction author Cixin Liu. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

One of the things I thing I like best about Cixin’s brand of SF is that he does give you enough information to at least figure out a bit of what’s going on. In the story ‘Devourer’ for example I was able to guess who the attacking aliens were and how humanity would fight back before the big reveal near the end of the story.    

One thing however, before I started writing this review I got out my old copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Reach for Tomorrow’, one of his short story collections, and compared it to ‘The Wandering Earth’. ‘Reach for Tomorrow’ contained 12 stories in 166 pages while ‘The Wandering Earth’ held 10 stories in 447 pages. That means that the average story in ‘The Wandering Earth’ is three times as long as the average one in ‘Reach for Tomorrow’. In fact several of the ‘”stories” in ‘The Wandering Earth’ actually have chapters to them. I suppose it’s just the fashion of the time, novels have become series and even short stories are now long enough to be divided into chapters. Writers today just seem to feel that they have to stretch each and every good idea they have into as many words as they can.

The Cover of my old copy of ‘Reach for Tomorrow’ by Arthur C. Clarke. I may be an old fogie but I like short stories that are short enough that you can read half a dozen of them whenever you have a spare hour r so. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

Despite that ‘The Wandering Earth’ has plenty of good ideas so if you’re looking for a collection of SF short stories worth reading ‘The Wandering Earth’ is the best I’ve seen in a long time.

The title short story in ‘The Wandering Earth’ is now a major motion picture in China and now available on Netflix. (Credit: ScreenAnarchy)

P.S. The short story ‘The Wandering Earth’ has been turned into a movie by the Chinese film industry and is apparently available in an English dubbed version on Netflix. I have not seen it yet but the reviews I’ve read rate the effects as very good but dialog and character development as pretty bad. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 70% with 48% audience approval. I’ll have to check it and and I’ll let ya know what I think!

Black holes and Wormholes, what are they, how are they alike and how are they different?

Did you ever stop to think about how you would describe a straight line? Sounds easy, but be honest, you’ll probably end up calling it a line that isn’t curved or something similar. Describing it as what it’s not rather than what it is. Even my American Heritage Dictionary defines straight as extending continuously in the same direction without curving.

The Greek mathematician Euclid used the concept of a straight line as the foundation of his geometry. So much so that a space that allows the existence of a true straight line is now known as a Euclidean space. (Credit: SlidePlayer)

A straight line seems like something so intuitive that we scarcely give it a second thought. In fact the Greek and other classical mathematicians like Pythagoras or Euclid just defined a straight line as the shortest distance between two different points and then extending out to infinity in both directions from there.

So obvious, yet so difficult to put into words was the concept of a straight line that nobody really thought about the problem until Einstein. You see in his Special Theory of Relativity Einstein had developed the concept of space-time that recognized that measurements of both time and space looked different to observers who were traveling at close to the speed of light relative to each other. Then, as he tried to incorporate the force of gravity into his ideas he found that he could describe the path of a particle in a gravitational field as following the straightest possible line in a ‘curved space-time’. The core principle of the general theory of relativity is that gravity bends space and therefore a truly, that is Euclidean straight line can only exist in an empty Universe.

In Special Relativity time is treated as a dimension like the three dimensions of space. For every observer a light cone extends into both the future and the past. Only events that occurred within that cone can definitely be said to occur in the past or future. Everything else is indeterminate! (Credit: Byjus)

In 1915 mathematician Karl Schwarzschild, not Einstein found an analytic solution to Einstein’s general field equations that indicated that a gravitational field could become so strong that it would bend space-time a full 90º. In that case later physicists realized that any object, even a particle of light that got too close would never be able to get back out, it would just continue falling forever into what became known as a black hole. Just to give you an idea of how concentrated the gravitational field of a black hole is you would have to take the entire mass of our Sun, 300,000 times the mass of the Earth and squeeze it down to just about one and a half kilometers in radius for it to form a black hole, and you would have to squeeze the mass of Earth down to less than half a centimetre to make it a black hole. No evidence for the existence of black holes was found during Einstein’s lifetime and he himself was never sure whether they were real or just a theoretical oddity, Schwarzschild died in WW1 just months after making his discovery so he never even considered the problem. It’s really only in the last few decades that enough evidence has accumulated to convince the majority of physicists that black holes are real.

Schwarzschild’s solution for a point mass to the field equations of General Relativity. When the distance to the point mass r equals twice the mass, r=2m, the second term on the right explodes. This point is formally known as a ‘Schwarzschild Singularity’ or more popularly the event horizon of a black hole! (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

Then in 1935 Einstein and his assistant Nathan Rosen were considering the problem of the fields associated with elementary particles. They were trying to describe elementary particles as something very similar to a black hole when they mathematically derived a formula for a black hole in one ‘space’ connecting up with another black hole in another ‘space’. Formally this is known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge but the concept has popularly become known as a wormhole in space.

Basic geometry of a Einstein Rosen bridge. The two planes represent different regions of ‘normal’ space or perhaps two entirely different Universes? (Credit: SlideShare)
It was actually in one of Einstein’s attempts to remove the ‘Schwarzschild Singularity’ that he and Nathan Rosen discovered wormhole. (Credit: Pinterest)

Wormholes have become known to all Science Fiction fans as a shortcut through space, a path between two distant places in the Universe that is shorter than an Einstein straightest possible line in normal space. A wormhole would therefore be one way to circumvent the cosmic speed limit imposed by the velocity of light. All a space traveler has to do is drop inside a wormhole and come out in some part of space that is thousands, or millions or billions of light years away. Since the distance through the wormhole is shorter than the distance in normal space you’re not actually going faster than light even though you’re getting there faster than a beam of light could.

The whole plot of ‘Star Trek Deep Space 9’ was built around a wormhole near the planet Bajor. (Credit: Pinterest)

Now it took a long time for astronomers to gather enough evidence to support the idea of black holes but that was easy compared to finding evidence for wormholes, at present there is simply none. One of the difficulties is that from the outside, and thousands of light years away, how can you tell the difference between a wormhole and a black hole? In fact it is quite possible that some of the black holes we know about, say the supermassive one at the center of the Milky Way, could actually be wormholes connecting up to other black holes elsewhere in the Universe.

The first ever image made of a black hole. Or is it really just one side of a wormhole? (Credit: NPR)

Now a team of theoretical physicists at Central Astronomical Observatory Pulkovo in Saint Petersburg Russia has published a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Society where they discuss certain characteristics of wormholes that should allow astronomers to distinguish them from black holes. The key difference between the two types of object of course is that while even light can’t come back out of a black hole a wormhole allows two-way traffic. That is, things can go into this end of a wormhole and come out the other while things that go into the other end can come out of this end.

Travel through a wormhole is a dream of science fiction but could it also be a reality? (Credit: Live Science)

 The Russians considered two possibilities; the first was that gas flowing in from both ends could collide in the middle of the wormhole. Those collisions would generate heat and that heat could be detected as a recognizable spectrum of gamma rays. The second possibility was that the gravitational fields of objects on the other side of the wormhole might leak through and effect the motions of objects on this side. In fact it was by observing the motions of stars at the center of our galaxy that the supermassive black hole there was first discovered.

The postulated gamma ray spectrum emitted from a wormhole. (Credit: Piotrovich et al 2020)

Now this paper is about theoretical calculations, astronomers have not yet begun to search for the predicted signs of a wormhole coming from what are presently considered to be black holes. There is a growing interest in black holes throughout the astronomical community however so I’ll bet it won’t be long before somebody starts searching. In fact a quick and cheap way to start the search would be to re-examine existing data already taken of black holes.

Originally called Quasars, Active Galactic Nuclei generated by supermassive black holes have been studied for more than 60 years. Could a re-examination of all that data actually show that they are wormholes? (Credit: Astronomy Magazine)

How long it will take before wormholes are discovered is anybody’s guess at present. However, considering the length of time it took for the existence of black holes to be accepted it could take quite a long time. Still, if wormholes are proven to exist it would be further proof, if any more were needed, that the Universe in which we live is a truly weird and wonderful place.