Everyday Physics: Electrical Coronae on Tree Leaves during a Thunderstorm and the screeching sound Cellophane tapes makes when you pull it. 

The science of physics is usually thought to be concerned with the study of strange, esoteric objects that are either very small, like sub-atomic particles, or very large, like black holes and the Universe itself. It didn’t use to be that way, back in the 18th century physicists put their efforts into investigating the behaviour of everyday phenomenon like the trajectories that cannon balls followed through the air or the swinging motion of pendulums.

It was Galileo who first described the mathematics of how a pendulum worked! (Credit: Science Facts)

Even today there are physicists who are using modern instruments to actively study the behaviour of commonplace objects under unusual circumstances or during very short periods of time. I have posted about these studies several times before, see my posts of 30 March 2024 and 5 April 2025. In this post I’ll be reviewing studies about what happens to the leaves of trees during a thunderstorm and why cellophane tape makes that loud screeching sound when you pull it off of its roll.

Another important problem that was solved in the early days of Physics was the path, or trajectory that a projectile took when fired from a cannon. (Credit: YouTube)

I’ll start with tree limbs during a thunderstorm. We’re all familiar with the story of how Ben Franklin demonstrated that lightning is really a massive discharge of static electricity that builds up during a severe storm. He did this by flying a kite during a thunderstorm and using the kite’s cord to capture some of the static charge onto a key.

It was just a couple of miles from my house that Ben Franklin really did fly a kite to demonstrate that lightning was just static electricity! The cherubs shown here were not actual witnesses to the experiment; they were added later by artist Benjamin West. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Franklin was also one of the key proponents of the Two-Fluid theory, which is the idea that there were two forms of electricity, which he called ‘positive and negative’. Both these types of electricity were thought to be contained in many, today we know all objects.

The electric field is composed of two kinds of ‘charge’, called by Ben Franklin ‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’. Opposite charges attract each other while similar charges repel each other. (Credit: SparkFun Learn)

Scientists like Franklin were experimenting with electricity and discovering that similarly charged objects, both positive or both negative would repel each other while oppositely charged objects, one positive one negative, would attract each other. Franklin also argued that when you had an equal amount of positive and negative charge in an object the charges would cancel each other out and that object would be neutral.

In an atom the Electrons are negatively charged while the Protons are positively charged. A normal atom has equal numbers of both, so it is uncharged or neutral! (Credit: SCE Kids)

Rubbing two different objects against each other is what causes an imbalance in the electric charges. The classic example of this is amber and rabbit fur with the amber picking up a negative charge while the fur becomes positively charged. The Greek word for amber is Electra and that is how we get the word electricity. By the way Franklin could just as easily have called the amber positive and the fur negative, it made no difference to him although if he had done so today we would have to reverse the names of the sub-atomic particles electron and proton!

We’re all familiar with static electricity but the classic version first mentioned by the Greeks is rubbing a piece of amber with rabbit fur. By the way the Greek word for amber is Electra, which is where we get the term electricity! (Credit: sites.physics.unt.edu)

Getting back to what happens during a thunderstorm where the air masses are moving against each other and having different humilities. This movement generates huge amounts of electric charge, which is usually discharged by cloud to cloud lightning. Sometimes however a charged mass of air will generate an opposite charge to build up in the ground beneath it and if the buildup is enough you can get cloud to ground lightning, which often causes fires or other kinds of damage.

Rapid movements of humid air cause huge amounts of static electricity to build up causing several types of lightning to occur. Cloud to cloud is the most common but cloud to ground is the most destructive! (Credit: Britannica)

Even when there isn’t cloud to ground lightning you can still often get a charge to build up in the ground during a thunderstorm and therefore a charge to build up in anything on the ground. This is especially true of trees, because they are taller and therefore closer to the charge in the air, opposites attract remember.

Tall trees provide a path for electricity to go to ground so trees are often struck by lightning during thunderstorms! (Credit: Facebook)

Electricity has another interesting aspect, it likes to collect near points in objects, like the needles of pine trees or the pointy ends of leaves in oak or maple trees. It has long been conjectured that this build up of charge, known as a coronae, should occur on tree leaves, especially leaves near the tree-top. The light from such coronae however is so weak that no one had ever seen it.

It has long been thought that individual leaves on trees should display coronae during thunderstorms, but the effect was so weak no one was able to actually film it, until now! (Credit: Science)

Until now that is. A research team from Penn State University led by meteorologist Patrick McFarland has put together an observational setup in a 2013 Toyota Sienna and has traveled from Florida to Pennsylvania confirming that many different species of trees do have electric buildup in their leaves during a thunderstorm. The equipment assembled included a portable weather station, an electric field detector, a laser rangefinder and an ultra-violet (UV) camera with a periscope lens.

Penn State researcher Patrick McFarland and his equipment. (Credit: Instagram)

Even as the team watched the live picture on the UV camera it was hard to see anything happening. On their first attempt the coronae were only discovered later when they reviewed their results and detected 41 coronae appearing on tree leaves during a 90 minute thunderstorm. The glows usually lasted only about 3 seconds and were often observed to dance from leaf to leaf.

Coronae discharges are quite common during thunderstorms on high voltage electrical cabling. (Credit: Nooa Electric)

The meteorologists speculate that these coronae occur on trees frequently and could involve thousands of trees during severe weather events. According to McFarland, “With superhuman vision I believe you’d see this swath of glow on the top of every tree under the thunderstorm.”

Meanwhile at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, a team of researchers led by Professor Sigurdur Thoroddsen has been investigating another strange phenomenon that everyone of us is familiar with, the loud screech that happens when we pull a piece of cellophane tape off of its roll. We’ve all heard that sound, but it all happens so fast that we don’t really understand what’s actually causing it.

Many people refer to any kind of cellophane tape as ‘Scotch Tape’ but in fact that is a single brand of adhesive tape! (Credit: Office Depot)

The physicists set up an experimental apparatus consisting of a pair of high speed cameras along with a synchronized sound recording apparatus. The first camera was pointed at the underside of the cellophane tape as it was being pulled. The second camera took a side view but it used a technique known as schlieren imaging to record tiny deflections in light rays caused by density changes in the air. This is the technique often used to photograph the shockwaves radiating out from explosions.

The experimental setup used to examine the screeching sound made when cellophane tape is pulled off of a roll. (Credit: YouTube)

What the researchers found was that the tape separated in a large series of slip-stick events. That is, a tiny area of tape, say a square micrometer, peals off the roll so quickly that parts of it actually exceed the speed of sound, causing a tiny sonic boom. Once that small piece breaks away the whole process comes to a halt for less than a microsecond before it is repeated with the next tiny area of tape. Hundreds if not thousands of such events take place in less than a second resulting in the unmistakable sound of cellophane tape being pulled off of a roll.

Moving faster than the speed of sound causes a pressure wave to build up around the moving object. This pressure wave is called a sonic boom. This sound is normally associated with jet aircraft, but it can be caused by any object, even tiny pieces of cellophane tape. (Credit: Physics Stack Exchange)

So you see that not all physicists are working with atom-smashers or cosmic-ray telescopes trying to discover the ultimate nature of reality. Some are still working to try an understand the behaviour of the everyday objects around us. 

Space News for April 2026. 

Of course, the big news in space this month is the Artemis II spaceflight that took human beings beyond Earth orbit and back to the vicinity of the Moon for the first time since 1972, fifty-four years ago. This mission has obviously been a long time in coming and I’ll have a great deal more to say about it later in this post but first I’m afraid that I have to talk about something even more important, if much less interesting, NASA’s budget! 

Back in the heady days of Apollo, NASA’s budget was over 4% of the total federal budget. Nowadays it’s less than 1/2% and will get even smaller if Trump gets his way! (Credit: NASA)

Back on the 31st of March NASA chief Jered Isaacman announced his agency’s grand plan for building a permanent base on the Moon in the early 2030’s. This Lunar base would then be followed by a mission to Mars aboard a nuclear powered rocket. The first nuclear powered rocket would be used for an unmanned mission to Mars taking a series of three small helicopters, upgrades of the Ingenuity helicopter that went to mars aboard the rover Perseverance.

The success of Ingenuity on Mars has inspired NASA to plan for more such airships on Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan. (Credit: NASA Science)

Then, just a few days later, the Trump administration announced their planned budget for fiscal year 2027 that included an almost 50% increase for the Department of Defense while enacting severe cutbacks pretty much everywhere else. NASA’s budget is scheduled to be reduced by $5.6 Billion or 23%. Taking inflation into account this would make the 2027 NASA budget the agency’s smallest since 1961! The biggest cuts will come to the Science Mission Directorate, a whopping 47% decrease, so say goodbye to that nuclear rocket taking any helicopters to Mars.

From the very beginning of the space program, and for all of our science programs the budget has been dependent on support from a bunch of politicians who rarely understand and never care about science. (Credit: Yarn)

The Trump budget is going to make drastic cuts in many other parts of American science as well. If passed by congress and carried out it will undoubtedly mean the end of our nation’s leadership in science and technology. I’ll be writing more about the threat of Trump’s budget to our country in a later post.

About 90% of Americans think it’s important for America to lead the world in science, but few think it’s doing a good job of it! (Credit: Pew Research Center)

But let’s get back to some good news, the Artemis II mission that took human beings further from the Earth than even the Apollo program did. In short they’re back, safe and sound after a very successful mission.

Launch of the Artemis 2 rocket and capsule taking four astronauts back to the Moon for tthe first time since 1972. (Credit: SpaceNews)

Launched on the first of April, April fool’s day, the giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and effortlessly placed the Orion capsule and it’s Service Module into Low Earth Orbit (LOE). After spending a day checking out their spacecraft the four person Crew were given the go ahead for Trans Lunar Injection (TLI) a command that had not been given to any manned mission since 1972.

In December of 1968 the Apollo 8 mission was given the signal for TLI or Trans Lunar Injection. That was the first time that human beings ever truly left Earth. (Credit: PBS)

The voyage to the Moon was uneventful; so much so that the only problem the media had to talk about was a malfunctioning toilet. A malfunction that was quickly corrected by the way. On the mission’s fifth day the Orion capsule looped behind the Moon enabling the crew of Artemis II to set a new record for the farthest that any human being had ever been from planet Earth. The mission profile for Artemis II did not actually call for the spacecraft to enter Lunar orbit so the Orion capsule made only one loop around the Moon. As the Orion capsule swung behind the Moon radio contact with Earth was lost just as had happened with the command module in every Apollo Lunar mission. Forty minutes later communication with Artemis II was restored as the crew began their journey home.

Because they traveled higher above the Lunar surface than the Apollo astronauts did the Artemis crewmembers got to see parts of the Dark Side that no humans had ever seen! (Credit: Yahoo)

The journey home was if anything even more routine. On the 10th of April the Orion capsule separated from its Service Module and entered our Atmosphere. Splashdown came minutes later just off the coast of San Diego in the Pacific.

Splashdown! (Credit: European Space Agency)

With the success of the Artemis II mission it might seem like a landing on the Moon should only be a couple of months away. After all the Apollo 8 mission orbited the Moon in December 1968 while Apollo 11 landed there in July of 1969, just seven months later. However, while the SLS and Orion capsule have proven themselves capable of getting humans to the vicinity of the Moon, NASA still needs a lander to get them down to the Lunar surface, and the two companies assigned the task of building landers have been having more than a few problems.

The two planned Artemis Lunar landers compared with the old Apollo Lunar Module. Both are much larger to allow the astronauts to have a more extended stay on the Moon. But let’s be real, Starship is really a bit much!!!! (Credit: Human Mars)

One of the companies is Space X, who hopes to use a modified version of their starship upper stage as the landing vehicle. Problem is that over the last several years Space X has seen a series of problems in the development of their starship launch system. These problems have pushed back the timeline generating considerable doubt about Space X’s ability to deliver a lander by 2028, the current schedule for an Artemis Moon landing mission.

Artist’s illustration of how the Orion Capsule will link up with the Starship lander in Lunar orbit. (Credit: NASA)

Another problem with the Space X lander is the fact that once the starship upper stage is in LOE it will require as many as 20 refueling missions before it can leave Earth and go to Lunar orbit, where it will rendezvous with the Orion manned capsule. With 20 refueling missions it just seems like there’s a lot of opportunity for something to go wrong!

Murphy’s law works in space just like it does here on Earth! (Credit: YouTube)

Meanwhile Blue Origin is the other company that has been developing a lander, they call theirs the Blue Moon Lander. The problem here is that the Blue Moon Lander was not scheduled for its first mission until 2032 but because of Space X’s difficulties Blue Origin has been asked by NASA to accelerate their lander’s development. Rushing the development of a spacecraft is just never a good thing.

Rushing to complete a job is the surest way to get behind schedule! (Credit: A-Z Quotes)

In fact on March 10th NASA’s Office of Inspector General released a report criticizing both the companies developing the lander as well as NASA’s own management of the lander program. So right now it is questionable if either lander will be ready by 2028.

Still, it’s good to be back to NASA’s prime mission of human exploration of the Universe! (Credit: Space)

Still, right now we can sit back and enjoy the fact that once again human beings are voyaging into deep space rather than just whirling around in LOE.

Archaeology News for April 2025: Ongoing Research in the British Isles. 

People who are interested in Archaeology recognize that the British Isles are a hotbed for the study of ancient peoples starting from the Neolithic ‘Stone Age’. As it happens I’m of Irish and Scottish ancestry so for me the archaeology of those islands is like family history. You’ll understand then when I use the occasional post to discuss some of the latest findings from those lands. As always I’ll start with the oldest and move forward in time.

One of the largest and best-preserved stone age sites in Europe is New Grange along the river Boyne in Ireland. It’s construction must have taken the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people. Strong evidence of ‘civilization’ of a kind in Ireland 5,000 years ago! (Credit: www.newgrange.com)

  Scotland is commonly known as a dark, misty, rocky sort of place. It is true that the population of Scotland has never been as large as the more temperate country of England to the south. Nevertheless Scotland has been a home for humans since the end of the last Ice Age and possesses a wealth of archaeological sites including stone circles, hillforts and burial sites.

The stone circle of Stennis in the Orkney Isles of Scotland. Again, the people who made this were hardly ‘Cave Men’! (Credit: Tripadvisor)

Recently the construction of a new access road to a wind farm called Twentyshilling in the area of Dumfries and Galloway has unearthed several previously unknown barrow type graves that are of the type common throughout the British Isles. One pit at the south was tentatively dated to between 2867-2504 BCE in the Neolithic period while the pit a bit further north was dated to 1439-1287 BCE, the Bronze Age. It was the Bronze Age site that drew the most attention as it contained five funeral urns that held the remains of at least eight individuals. The researchers are convinced that the five urns were buried at the same time because they were packed so tightly together in a hole at the center of the barrow.

The Twenty Shilling Wind Farm in Dumfries and Galloway in southern Scotland. Not exactly the sort of place where you expect to find evidence of ancient culture! (Credit: Statkraft)

The ancient Scots had a few curious customs when it came to burying their dead, for one they often placed the remains of an adult and a child in the same urn, as seems to be the case here. On the other hand Bronze Age Scots usually exposed their dead and only interred the bones in funeral urns buried in barrows. There is evidence that was not the case in the Twentyshilling barrow. The archaeologists who excavated the site conjecture that perhaps the relatives of the deceased were in a hurry to bury their kin for some reason, possibly disease? The fact that eight persons were buried at the same time is further evidence for this.

The Bronze Age burial at the Twenty Shilling wind farm showing the urns in which the dead were interred. (Credit: Guard Archaeology)

At about the same time as the Bronze Age barrow in Scotland was being laid down one of the largest ‘towns’ in the British Isles was being founded just across the Irish Sea in county Wicklow, Ireland. Brusselstown Hill has long been known as the site of an ancient hillfort but a recent survey from both the air and ground level has revealed just how extensive and densely populated the site was.

The Brusselstown hillfort as it is today. Archaeologists are now thinking that about 3,000 years ago this was the largest town in Ireland! (Credit: Facebook)

As can be seen in the image below the site consists of two concentric earthen rings containing numerous flat ‘platforms’, that is leveled areas where a hut or roundhouse once stood. The number of platforms within the inner ring has been numbered to be ninety-eight while the number within the outer ring is over five hundred. Based on this number the population of the hillfort must have been in the thousands making Brusselstown one of the largest ‘towns’ in the British Isles at that time.

The ‘Platforms’, i.e. homes at Brusselstown at its height. At least several thousand people must have lived here! (Credit: RTE)

The platforms themselves come in a variety of diameters indicating different sizes of roundhouse but there does not appear to be any clustering of bigger houses where the ‘nobility’ might live. Instead it appears that Busselstown was rather egalitarian in social structure.

In addition to several identified hillforts, County Wicklow is also known for other neolithic and Bronze Age sites like this stone circle. (Credit: Megalithic Ireland)

At ground level four test trenches were excavated over areas containing several of the platforms where both artifacts and organic remains were unearthed. Based upon carbon dating of the organic remains Brusselstown has been dated to between 1200 to 400 BCE, from the Bronze thru the Early Iron Age. By the way the artifacts discovered also showed no indication of any difference in social class or status.

Were Stone Age societies more equal than our present civilization? That’s what many anthropologists think but without written records how will we ever know for certain! (Credit: Vocal Media)

Because of the size of the site, along with the other hillforts and archaeological sites in the area, a full understanding of County Wicklow during the Bronze Age may take a long time and a lot of work to complete.

There are more than a dozen recognized hillforts in county Wicklow. It will take quite a while to investigate them all! (Credit: Tinahely.ie)

My final study comes from a more recent time, the so-called ‘dark Ages’ between the time when Roman troops abandoned Britain and the Norman Conquest, that is about 400-1100 CE. Researchers from the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge University have used chemical analysis of the dental enamel from 659 skeletons dated to that period to determine the amount of migration both into and within the British Isles.

The people we call ‘English’ are actually a Germanic people who migrated to the British Isles starting in the 5th century. (Credit: StirytellingDB)

You see as a person grows up the enamel of their teeth absorbs various chemicals from the local environment and those chemicals can remain in their teeth for thousands of years after death. Archaeologists can then analyze the proportion of those chemicals to determine whether a person grew up in the place where they were buried. In particular the chemicals used in the study were oxygen and strontium. Most oxygen in nature comes in the form of isotope O16 with a nucleus of eight protons and eight neutrons. A small amount of oxygen, less than one tenth of one percent, comes in the form of O18 with eight protons and ten neutrons.

Teeth are the hardest part of the human body so they are preserved the best and retain the most information about the person whose teeth they are! Archaeologists are using teeth to learn a great deal about the lives of ancient people. (Credit: Archaeology Magazine)

The interesting part is that the amount of O18 in the environment depends on the climate, warm or cold and the altitude, mountainous or seacoast. A Cold or mountainous environment results in less O18 than normal while warm or seacoast gives more O18 than normal. If a person’s O18 differs from the region where they were buried, then they must have moved to the area where they died. Much the same is true for Strontium isotopes 86 and 87.

Most of the Oxygen in the world is O16, with 8 each Protons, Electrons and Neutrons. A tiny amount of Oxygen is O18 with two extra Neutrons. Chemically they are the same but O18 is a little heavier. (Credit: Climate Science Investigations South Florida)

What they researchers found was that while the degree of migration changed over time it was still quite large throughout the period 400-1100 CE. Over the whole period about 41.4% of people in the British Isles did not grow up in the place where they later died.

Human migration is nothing new. For millions of years now people have left the lands they grew up in to try to find a better life elsewhere. (Credit: World Bank)

Now once again many of these people were moving from Ireland or Whales into England or within England as well as Vikings coming from Scandinavia or people coming from modern France or Spain. What it does mean is that people in general were on the move during one of the darkest times in European history. The archaeology of the British Isles shows in microcosm just how the people of the past lived and died. Therefore by studying the archaeology of those isles we can learn how to study human pre-history in general. 

Movie Review: Project Hail Mary. 

Ryland Grace, played by actor Ryan Gosling, awakens from hibernation to find himself aboard a spaceship arriving at another star system. Problem is he has lost his memory and has no idea who he is let alone why he is there. To make matters worse the ship’s two other crewmembers have died in hibernation. That’s the beginning of the film ‘Project Hail Mary’ based upon the novel of the same name by Andy Weir. I think this is the first time I have reviewed a movie based upon a novel that I have already reviewed, to see that review check out my post of 18 August 2021.

Poster for ‘Project Hail Mary’. Out now in theaters. (Amazon.com)

  Without giving too much of the story away our Sun has been losing energy, within 30 years the Earth’s temperature will drop by more than 10ºC leading to widespread famine and if the trend continues the end of all life on the planet. Ryland Grace is a schoolteacher who majored in biochemistry and published an article about life not based on water. Because of this the governments of the world ask him, and other scientists to analyze samples brought back by a space probe. It is Grace who discovers that the Sun has been infected by a virus-like ‘Astrophage’ and it is this Astrophage that is consuming some of the Sun’s energy. Not only that but our Sun appears to be on the outer edges of a cluster of stars that are all affected by astrophage. The virus is spreading from star to star.

A Phage is a simple form of virus. In ‘Project Hail Mary’ the term Astrophage is coined to describe the virus-like life form infecting our Sun. (Credit: Department of Biochemistry: Madison University)

Except for Tau Ceti, a star right in the middle of the cluster at a distance of 12 light years. Tau Ceti isn’t dimming at all, it appears to be immune to the astrophage. Hoping that the solution to controlling the astrophage may lay at Tau Ceti the nations of the world band together to send a spaceship there, a Hail Mary pass as it were. So, Ryland Grace ends up being the only human being in the Tau Ceti system as he tries to save Earth by finding the secret to controlling astrophage.

The nearby Star Tau Ceti, on the right, is just slightly smaller, and cooler than our Sun on the left! Credit: Wikipedia)

Grace may be the only human at Tau Ceti, but he’s not alone. Even as he’s trying to gain control of his ship, and remember what he’s doing at Tau Ceti an alien spaceship appears and makes contact. The alien is from the star 40 Eridani and their star is also infected by astrophage so they are also making a Hail Mary pass hoping to save their planet.

Not an astronaut by training, Ryland Grace is sent to Tau Ceti because he is a biochemist. When the two real astronauts die in route however, Grace has to learn how to run his spaceship all by himself! (Credit: IMDb)

The alien turns out to be based on a chemistry using silicon rather than carbon, an alien made of rock who lives in an atmosphere of ammonia at a temperature well above the boiling point of water. Grace gives the alien the name Rocky and together the two have to learn how to communicate and survive each other’s environment before they can work together to save their planets.

The idea of aliens using silicon rather than carbon for their biochemistry is not new. It was even used in ‘Star Trek’ TOS in the episode ‘The Devil in the Dark’. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Like most good SF ‘Project Hail Mary’ works because once you accept a couple of strange ideas, astrophages and aliens based on silicon, the rest is sound science. Besides which ‘Project Hail Mary’ is just a fun story with a likable protagonist, or should I say likable protagonists.

Only by working together can Grace and Rocky save their home planets. A lesson for all of us here on Earth! (Credit: YouTube)

Like most movies based on novels ‘Project Hail Mary’ cuts out a bit of the story, mostly where Grace and Rocky learn to communicate. Also the movie is pretty much a one-man show since Ryan Gosling is the only human most of the time. Gosling does a great job but if you like to see a lot of interplay between actors, well mostly you get Gosling and a rock!

Leaning to communicate is probably the most important skill we have to learn. However, it’s not that interesting to watch, so very often movies will have different nationalities, or even different species quickly leaning English in order to get on with the story! By the way kids you have to pull that string tight in order for Tin Can phones to work! (Credit: Secret Entourage)

Still ‘Project Hail Mary’ is a really fun film, the kind of story we need right now. It’s a story about a very bright but non-heroic kind of guy who sacrifices himself to save the world. It’s also a story about a very strange friendship, two very different kinds of ‘people’ who work together to save their worlds.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned from ‘Project Hail Mary’ is that we can save our planet. All we need to do is work together. (Credit: Wikipedia)

So go see ‘Project Hail Mary’, it’s probably the best SF movie since ‘The Martian’.

Book Review: ‘Goliath’s Curse’ by Luke Kemp. 

If you’ve ever wanted to read a comprehensive and detailed account of man’s inhumanity to man, going all the way back to the Mesolithic period then “Goliath’s Curse’ by Luke Kemp is the book for you. The author Luke Kemp is a senior research associate at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge in the UK and ‘Goliath’s Curse’ represents the accumulation of his many years of study. Goliath is of course the giant Philistine warrior who was slain by the shepherd boy David in one of the best-known stories from the Old Testament.

My mother always told me I was named for Robert Burns, either that or Robert the Bruce. He’s the original source for the phrase “Man’s Inhumanity to Man!” (Credit: Flickr)

In ‘Goliath’s Curse’ author Kemp defines a Goliath as hierarchical structured society where inequality, both in wealth and power, are maintained by violence.  ‘Goliath’s Curse’ is the way that such societies continue to grow more unequal, ever more violent leading inevitably to their collapse, which is then followed by a ‘Dark Age’.

Historians may disagree how many ‘Dark Ages’ there were, but all agree that human societies often decline in population, literacy, science and the arts. Such periods are known as ‘Dark Ages’. (Credit: YouTube)

Beginning with the hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic period describes how societies of that time were much more egalitarian and peaceful then later hierarchical societies would be. The main reason for this is that hunter-gatherer groups possessed no wealth that greedy individuals could monopolize in order to dominate the other people in their society. The only wealth such clans possessed were the foods that they ate, foods that quickly perished if not eaten, or stone tools that quickly worn out. In such societies no one could accumulate the wealth needed in order to gain an advantage over the other members of their group. Indeed, Kemp goes so far as to assert that the large majority of human beings have always been both peaceful and anxious to cooperate with their fellows.

Idyllic view of a Hunter Gatherer tribe. With little wealth that lasts were such societies more equal, even more peaceful than what we call civilization? (Credit: Integral Society)

In truth the evidence for this ‘Cave Man Garden of Eden’ is very scarce and countered by such studies as a recent one in the journal Scientific Reports that provides evidence that a group of Neanderthal women and children were brought to a site in Belgium in order to be killed and eaten, cannibalism in other words. In fact, there are growing reports of murder and warfare in our ape cousins, see my post of 4 September 2021 for details of a war between Chimpanzees and Gorillas.

For four years a troop of Chimpanzees in Gombe made war on a smaller troop of Gorillas. Chimps have also been observed to murder and rape each other. Is the violence shown by our close relative’s evidence that such behaviour is built into us as well? (Credit: YouTube)

   Moving forward in time the author contends that it was the beginnings of agriculture, in particular the harvesting of grains such as wheat and rice in the Old World and Maize in the Americas that allowed the development of the first Goliaths. Unlike meat or fruits, grains can be stored for long periods of time so that greedy, selfish individuals could claim, let’s be honest, steal more than their share, making them the first ‘rich men’. With wealth came power and since grains can be stored for years, the ability to pass on their wealth and power to their sons. Kemp calls such easily stolen wealth Goliath fuel although Goliath food might be more appropriate since Goliath was a person, not a machine.

When stored properly cereal grains, the seeds of different kinds of grass, can be stored for years. Is this the first kind of accumulated wealth that caused the development of both rich and poor in human society? (Credit: Sioux Steel Company)

With the beginnings of metalworking came a new form of wealth, since metals were both rare and useful, making them valuable. In particular metal weapons that only a few could afford increased the concentration of violence that maintained the power of the new kings and emperors. ‘Goliath’s Curse’ spends a good deal of time discussing the Goliaths of Egypt, Assyria and Rome and ascribes the collapse of each of these empires to their ever increasing inequality, slavery and brutality. At the same time Kemp discusses the techniques that these Goliaths developed in order to maintain control over their populace, the myths of order versus chaos along with divine right of kings.

Can’t make it any plainer than that! God himself chooses the King or Pope or Tsar or whatever the bastard who tells us all what to do calls himself! (Credit: Wikipedia)

In ‘Goliath’s Curse’ the author maintains that the collapse of such regimes is very often of benefit to the majority of people. That the dark ages that followed the collapse of the Bronze Age cultures and Rome were actually times of freedom and opportunity. Again there is little evidence for this. The dark age that followed Rome, c500-1200 was a time of unending war and population decline. In fact is wasn’t until the late 16th century that Europe regained the population it had in the 2nd century during the height of the Roman Empire.

Cover art for ‘Goliath’s Curse’ by author Luke Kemp. (Credit: Amazon.com)
Author Luke Kemp of Cambridge University. (Credit: Environmental Humanities Initiative)

Again moving forward in time ‘Goliath’s Curse’ discusses the age of exploration, which Kemp characterizes as the age of exploitation, which it truly was as European powers colonized the world, stealing its wealth and resources while turning many of its inhabitants into slaves. Kemp argues, as others have done that the two world wars of the 20th century were in fact just the elite criminals of the world fighting over who gets the most stolen loot.

Vae Victis, woe to the vanquished. Is that really all of our history is, just a fight over stolen goods by those powerful enough to take what they want? In Goliath’s Curse author Luke Kemp argues that it is! (Credit: Wikipedia)

There was little change after World War 2 according to ‘Goliath’s Curse’. The people who ran the former European colonies may now be of the same ethnic group as the majority population but they are still exploiting their people for the advantage of the wealthier countries. Kemp discusses how people who are paid pennies are still digging the wealth of Africa out of the ground; blood diamonds, copper, nickel and rare earths are the new Goliath fuel. Kemp then discusses the various scenarios of how our present ‘Global Goliath’ could collapse, detailing nuclear war, climate change and pandemics along with other disasters.

Today many of the raw materials that go into the products of industrial society are dug out of the ground by people who are little more than slaves. (Credit: The New York Times)

Finally, after 420 pages of human brutality ‘Goliath’s Curse’ spends about 20 pages on how we might be able to kill Goliath, bringing about a true democratic revolution and a fair and equal world society. What he proposes is a large increase in taxes, including a wealth tax in order to reduce the wealth and therefore the power of the rich. At the same time, we all must get involved in the political process, not just by voting but taking a more active role in how our country is run. Very few Americans bother to do this, and we have the right to protest. Think about the ordinary people in Russia or China trying to take control of their political systems or anything like that.

And now we’re in yet another war to decide which bunch of criminals will control the world’s oil, the same oil that is poisoning the planet! (Credit: gCaptain)

The author himself isn’t very hopeful; in his opinion the likeliest outcome for the world is that we destroy ourselves with the second likeliest being a slave state. Kemp even mentions Fermi’s paradox and the possibility that all technical species may commit suicide.

The idea of ‘The Great Filter’ is that, if it is possible for an intelligent species to colonize other planets, then why didn’t some alien species do that to Earth millions of years ago? Maybe they didn’t because intelligence always ends up destroying itself!!!! (Credit: Noesis Project)

As you may have noticed I have a few problems with ‘Goliath’s Curse’, chief among which is Kemp’s firm belief that the greater majority of people are fair and willing to work together for the greater good. Well, I’m sorry but Donald Trump succeeded in getting over 75 million people to vote for him by promising to throw millions of people out of this country, mostly based on racial and ethnic criteria, so there are a lot of bad people out there. At the same time, we have millions of gun owners who will never give up their weapons despite all of the evidence that they are five times more likely to kill themselves with their guns than anyone else. As I was reading ‘Goliath’s Curse’ I was constantly reminded of the old saying “The Greeks tried every form of Government and couldn’t find one that Worked!”

We elected Donald Trump as our President because he promised to throw millions of people, mostly poor minorities, out of our country. If that makes him a wicked person, he has a lot of company! (Credit: PBS)

Still, ‘Goliath’s Curse’ is a very important book, one well worth reading. Be warned however, ‘Goliath’s Curse’ is a very dense book, full of information, much of it unpleasant. For that reason it is very much the kind of book people need to read.

There are a lot of important books out there that we know we should read but how many do we actually get around to? (Credit: The Guardian)

I have one more thing to say, and that’s about the title ‘Goliath’s Curse’. Now the bible only has a little to say about Goliath. He was a Philistine warrior and he was very big. For all we know Goliath may have just been some poor schmuck who was drafted into the Philistine army and made their champion because he was so big.

David and Goliath is your typical Hollywood story with David as the hero and Goliath the bad guy. Maybe we all need to recognize that life is a little more complicated than that! (Credit: Bible Wiki)

David, on the other hand, after he killed Goliath (1Samuel17) became a paid mercenary fighting for the Philistines (1Samuel29), who then usurped the Hebrew throne from Saul (2Samuel5). As king he laid siege to and captured Jerusalem (2Samuel5) and fought innumerable wars while arranging for Uriah, the husband of his mistress Bath Sheba, to get killed in battle so he could marry her (2Samuel11).

King Davis sending Uriah the Hittite off to get killed in battle so that David can marry Uriah’s wife Bathsheba! Was David really such a hero? (Credit: Wikipedia, painting by Pieter Lastman)

David has become a symbol of kingship and privilege; Goliath was just some front line soldier who’s gotten a lot of bad press over the centuries. So maybe the book should be called David’s Curse!

Space News for February 2026. 

Quite a few stories of interest this month, mostly dealing with manned spaceflight. So let’s get to it!

In my last space post I talked about how the Crew 11 astronauts were forced to depart from the International Space Station (ISS) early on the 11th of January because of a medical issue with one of its four members. This emergency left the ISS with only a skeleton crew of three cosmonauts until the Crew 12 team could be readied and launched aboard their Space X Dragon capsule.

Launch of the Space X Crew 12 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on 13 February. (Credit: YouTube)

 Working quickly NASA and Space X succeeded in moving up the launch of Crew 12 from its original planned date to February 13th. As usual the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket went off without any problem and about a day later on the 14th the Dragon capsule was docked at the ISS. Thanks to Space X and its reusable Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon manned capsule NASA’s commercial crew program is an unqualified success as manned missions to Low Earth Orbit (LOE) are becoming routine.

Humanity’s first long term habitat in space the ISS has been manned for more than twenty years now and thanks to Space X, crew rotations are becoming quite routine! (Credit: ESA)

In fact manned missions are becoming so routine that they are no longer solely the province of national space agencies. Private companies or even individuals can, for a large amount of money, charter a manned space mission. There have already been four such missions to the ISS and several other missions that did not go to the ISS.

Launch of the first Axiom commercial mission to the ISS. Axiom has completed three other such missions now and has been granted a fifth mission. (Credit: The New York Times)

As a part of this growing commercialization of LOE, NASA and its partners in the ISS have signed contracts for a fifth and sixth private mission to the ISS. The fifth mission, scheduled for no earlier than January of 2027, was awarded to Axiom Space Corporation, the company that charted the first four private missions to the ISS. The sixth mission was awarded to a newcomer, Vast Corporation and is scheduled to launch no earlier than the summer of 2027.

In addition to arranging missions into space, Vast Corporation has plans to construct a private Space Station once the ISS is de-orbited! (Credit: Long Beach Post)

Both of these two missions will spend about 14 days at the ISS and will consist of four crewmembers. Axiom and Vast will purchase mission services from NASA including crew consumables and cargo delivery and storage. Both companies will also have to make flight arrangements with Space X including launch and re-entry missions. In exchange Axiom and Vast will each be allowed to sell four tickets to the ISS, although the private astronauts who are selected must be approved by NASA and will be trained by both NASA and Space X.

The training of a NASA astronaut can take years and even the training of a space tourist takes months! (Credit: YouTube)

NASA’s commercialization of space was not originally intended to become a Space X monopoly. The plan was for Boeing’s Starliner capsule to also transport both NASA and commercial astronauts to the ISS. However, as I have often mentioned in earlier posts, see my posts of 20July2024, and 12April2025, the Starliner capsule has suffered a seemly unending series of problems. Back in 2024 Starliner finally succeeded in getting two astronauts to the ISS but with so many issues that NASA deemed the capsule to be unsafe for the astronauts to return in. So, the Starliner astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore’s stay at the ISS went from being only a week to more than eight months before they could return to Earth aboard a Space X Dragon capsule.

Everyone expected Boeing’s Starliner capsule to reach the ISS before Space X’s Dragon, but things just didn’t work out that way. Starliner has been plagued by problems and has yet to complete a successful mission. (Credit: CNN)

On the 19th of February NASA released its final report on Starliner’s mission and the results were not good for Boeing. Officially Starliner’s mission has been categorized as a ‘Type-A Mishap’, the worst category possible and equivalent to the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters! The report details numerous failings that “revealed critical vulnerabilities in Starliner’s propulsion system, NASA’s oversight model, and the broader culture of commercial human spaceflight.” Hither to this report NASA’s Commercial Crew Program had been permitted to investigate itself but now that philosophy is considered to be “inconsistent with NASA safety culture.”

Space is trying to kill you! So anyone who goes into space has to practice a strict safety code if they want to come back alive!!! (Credit: X.com)

Nevertheless NASA still hopes that Starliner can fulfill some part of its original aspirations. The current plan is for Starliner to conduct one more test mission, to be designated Starliner-1, to the ISS. This test flight however will be unmanned; Starliner will only carry cargo to the ISS. This test flight is scheduled to be conducted no earlier than April.

In addition to sending astronauts to the ISS Space X also has the job of sending unmanned cargo missions to the station. Starliner’s next flight could be a similar such mission. (Credit: Space Connect)

If everything goes well in this latest Starliner attempt then it is possible that the next ISS crew rotation, planned for August, may be carried out with Starliner rather than a Space X Dragon. For that reason the four astronauts assigned to the next ISS mission are training on both Dragon and Starliner capsules. Whether or not this scheduled plan will be altered because of the 19th of February report remains to be seen.

Front cover of the actual report on Starliner’s mission to the ISS. NASA pulled no punches and detailed every problem Starliner had. Assuming there is a next Starliner mission any further problems would surely kill the entire program! (Credit: NASA)

So far all of my news in this post have dealt with space flights to LOE, begging the question of when will we be getting back into deep space, getting back to the Moon and beyond. Well, the Artemis II rocket and Orion capsule are currently sitting on their launch pad undergoing final testing before launching four astronauts out of LOE for a trip around the Moon similar to Apollo eight’s mission back in 1968.

The Artemis II launch vehicle and spacecraft being rolled back to the assembly building. Problems during final testing have provoked this delay. (Credit: NASA)

As a final test before launch NASA conducted a wet dress rehearsal on February 12th, that’s a full fueling of the rocket. Unfortunately during that test a series of hydrogen leaks occurred forcing the test to be terminated early. This same problem occurred during testing of the Artemis I unmanned mission back in November of 2022.

Hydrogen is the lightest and smallest of all elements so it can leak out of any hole no matter how small!!! (Credit: BYJU’s)

A second wet dress rehearsal was carried out from February 17th to the 20th and at first it appeared that the hydrogen leak problem had been resolved, the mission was put on a schedule for a launch on March 11th. However on the very next day the leak problem reappeared in the Artemis II’s second stage and the decision has been made to roll Artemis back into the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs. How long of a delay this will cause to the Artemis II’s launch is just guesswork at the moment.

The Artemis II mission, if it ever happens, will mark to first time in more than 50 years that humans have left LOE. (Credit: YouTube)

 All of the stories above concerned either NASA or American commercial aerospace corporations but there is also news coming from China’s space agency as well. On the 12th of February China successfully tested two components of their future manned Lunar exploration missions simultaneously.

Abort test of China’s Mengzhou capsule. Chinese astronauts going to the Moon will ride in this capsule. (Credit: Facebook)

Like NASA’s Artemis program China is designing a large rocket called the Long March 10 along with a crew capsule called the Mengzhou and a Lunar lander called the Lanyue. The test conducted on the 12th consisted of an abort systems test for the Mengzhou capsule along with a test of the re-usability of a scaled down version of the Long March 10 rocket.

China’s Long March 10 rocket will come in several variants for both LOE and deep space missions. (Credit: China in Space)

The abort test of the Mengzhou capsule is a standard test for manned spacecraft, both the Space X Dragon and Artemis’ Orion capsules underwent such testing. If during a launch anything should go wrong with the first stage rocket, or if there’s a problem with jettisoning the first stage and igniting the second stage, solid fuel rockets on the capsule will fire pulling it away from the launch vehicle and allowing the capsule and crew to safely land. The test of the abort system is usually carried out during the launch at what is called ‘Max Q’ which is the moment when aerodynamic pressure on the entire launch vehicle is greatest.

As I mentioned above both the Dragon and Orion capsules underwent this test and in those tests the launch rocket was simply jettisoned after the capsule was pulled away. The Chinese however wanted to try for more than that. Currently the Chinese are working very hard to develop a re-usable rocket similar to Space X’s Falcon 9. So they decided to conduct a full flight of the Long march 10 rocket, after the Mengzhou capsule was pulled away. Therefore, about five minutes after the Mengzhou capsule had completed its test the Long March 10 rocket re-ignited its engines and was able to make a controlled splashdown in the waters off China’s Hainan Island. Two successful tests for the price of one.

Space X has revolutionized space travel with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket. Now everybody else, especially the Chinese, want to have their own reusable rocket! (Credit: Via Satellite)

 The race to get back to the Moon is heating up, as is the effort to commercialize space. The future will belong not to whoever is first but whoever keeps going and finishes the job.

Three Stories from Nature for February 2025. 

We humans like to think that we’re the only truly intelligent species on this planet; the behaviour of other animals is really just instinct. Well in this post I’ll discuss two recent discoveries that highlight just how intelligent other creatures can be along with another story about how selfless one kind of animals can be, sacrificing itself for the good of its whole community.

Over thousands of years Mother Nature has been represented in many, many ways but always as a caring woman protecting her children! (Credit: Fine Art America)

I’ve often spoken about tool use by several different species, see posts of 16March2019 and 24August2024. Now a recent video from British Colombia has given evidence that sometimes an animal can even learn how to make use of a human tool. 

The territory of the Haitzaqv people of Canada’s Pacific coast. (Credit: HIRMD.ca)

In the waters along Canada’s Pacific coastline the European Green Crab is an invasive species that the Canadian government is trying to eliminate or at least control. The indigenous Haitzaqv Nation is taking part in this effort by placing crab traps along the shorelines baited with herring and seal meat in order to catch as many green crabs as possible.

The Green Crab is an invasive species along Canada’s Pacific coast so the Canadian government is trying to control if not eliminate its population. (Credit: The Counter)

Recently the Haitzaqv have found that a number of their traps were being pulled onto the beach and the bait was being removed, and presumably eaten. In order to discover who, or what the thief was they placed motion sensitive trail cameras nearby in order to keep watch on the traps. Since many of the traps were submerged in fairly deep water it was first suspected that otters or seals might be the culprits.

Sea Otters are already known to make use of tools, using small rocks to break open the clams and oysters they feed on. (Credit: National Wildlife Federation)

Instead, what the videos showed was a wolf that waded out to the trap’s buoy, grabbed it with his teeth and then dragged the buoy back to the shore. The wolf then grabbed the rope that attached the buoy to the trap and began dragging it onto the shore until the trap was on the beach. The whole operation took less than three minutes and once the wolf had the trap completely on shore it would break into it and devour the bait.

A wolf pulling a crab trap out of the water so it can eat the bait inside. Whether this is tool use or not is an academic question, but it is certainly clever. (Credit: Cowboy State Daily)

Naturalists are now debating whether this behaviour is truly ‘tool use’ since humans made the traps and all the wolf did was pull it onshore. Still, you have to admit the wolf, or perhaps wolves, are being very clever in figuring out how to get a cheap meal.

More often than tool use, wolves are known to cooperate in the hurt, using numbers to take down bigger prey like deer or even bison. (Credit: Animal: How Stuff Works)

Cooperation between individuals is another good strategy for getting a meal. Now normally such team work is between members of the same species but recently another series of videos has been taken showing how on occasion even species that are sometimes known to be predator and prey may still cooperate, if it improves their chances of getting fed.

Instead of cooperating Orca and Dolphins are normally Predator and Prey. Sometimes however even enemies can work together for a common goal. (Credit: Whale Tales)

Once again the video comes from the Pacific coast of Canada where a pod of nine Orcas, or killer whales were seen teaming up with pod of Pacific white-sided dolphins to attack large schools of Chinook salmon. It was while the researchers were observing the Orcas that they found that on occasion the pod would change course in the presence of the dolphins and follow them to a large school of salmon.

Video of Orca and Dolphins hunting Salmon together. (Credit: The Times)

It appears that what is happening is that the dolphins are using their superior echo-location ability to find the salmon, who are too large for the dolphins to swallow whole. So the dolphins lead the Orcas to the salmon where they attack the school. Meanwhile the dolphins benefit by consuming the scraps that the killer whales don’t swallow. Teamwork indeed!

A large Chinook Salmon is a bit too much for a Dolphin to swallow but after an Orca has chopped it in half the Orca can at least feast on the scraps! (Credit: Independent Hostels)

Both Orcas and dolphins are well known to possess a variety of hunting techniques and both are known to be very intelligent species. This is however the first time they have ever been seen to work together. In fact in other parts of the world killer whales have been known to sometimes attack dolphins.

Orcas use a wide variety of hunting techniques. Here a group of Orca are creating a wave to knock a seal off of an iceberg so they can catch it and eat it! (Credit: Petapixel)

My final story comes from the insect world and is a lesson in self-sacrifice, of putting the good of the many above one’s own personal interest. As you might guess the story concerns one of the social insects, the ants.

An ant colony can be as large and complex as any human city, just better organized! (Credit: Innovative Pest Control Singapore)

If you think about it species that live together in large numbers are much more subject to communicable diseases than those that live more solitary lives. A disease like the flu has little chance of spreading amongst mountain lions, who rarely come into contact with each other, than say a flock of geese, which is why we’re all concerned about bird flu! Ants, who can live in colonies numbering many thousands are well know to be affected by a number of infectious diseases.

An ant infected with the famous ‘Zombie’ fungus. Living in large colonies ants are subject to many infectious diseases. (Credit: Reddit)

It has been know for many years that when an adult worker ant feels itself getting sick they will leave the nest and die alone in order to protect the rest of the colony from disease. Recently researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria have investigated whether infected young ants called pupae also try to protect the colony in some way. You see pupae cannot move and are confined to their cocoon so they cannot simply walk away. Do they also try to protect the colony from getting their illness?

The stages of an ants life from egg to adult. Obviously only the adult is mobile, so what do the larvae and Pupa do to sacrifice themselves if they get infected? (Credit: Antastic Ants)

What the researchers found was that an infected pupae begins to emit a chemical smell that signals to the nearby adults that ‘I’m infected, come and kill me’ which the adults quickly do by injecting the pupae with a poison that kills both the pupae as well as the disease. One interesting exception to this behavior that the scientists discovered is young queen ants that get infected do not emit this chemical, perhaps because queen ants are known to have a better immune system enabling them to better able to fight off an infection.

Ants use chemicals as their language. Here a group of ants are following a chemical trail to a source of food a scouting ant has discovered. (Credit: Pest HQ)

Many creatures in nature will selfishly do whatever they can to survive, even if it risks others of their species. Some animals however will sacrifice themselves for the sake of their children. So far only among the insects can we find creatures who will sacrifice themselves in order to protect their community. 

Astronomy News for December 2025: We all know that Telescopes are the main Instruments Astronomers use to Study the Universe. Here are stories about three of them. 

Ever since Galileo first pointed his tiny little telescope upward into the night’s sky astronomers have been designing and building first bigger telescopes, then telescopes that can see at wavelengths of light that are invisible to our eyes and then finally putting telescopes into space in order to see the heavens without the distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere. In this post I’d like to talk about three telescopes, one that has finished it’s designed program, another that is celebrating thirty years of discoveries and a third that may be launched into orbit a year from now to begin its work of exploring the Universe.

As you might guess, Galileo’s Telescopes are among the most revered of scientific artifacts! (Credit: Grand Voyage Italy)

The Atacama Desert in the high mountains of Chile is often considered to be the driest place on Earth. With the lack of water vapour and at an altitude of 5,190 Meters the desert is the best place to put a telescope that looks at the sky in far infrared light so that is where the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) was built and where it began operation in 2007. ACT was purposefully designed to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the ‘fossil’ remnant of the Big Bang itself. Before ACT the CMB was always studied from space with satellites like the COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) or the Planck satellite. However, the cost of getting into space limited the size of those space telescopes and therefore their resolution. ACT was designed as a big infrared telescope put in the best place on Earth for such an instrument.

Since the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) sees the Universe in the infrared rather than visible light its appearance and function are a good bit different from more familiar telescopes! (Credit: Stony Brook University News)

ACT has just recently completed its long-term program and in a series of three papers the full set of data collected has been released. The big headline from this data dump was a conformation of the Planck satellite’s measurement of Hubble’s constant, the speed at which the Universe was expanding, back 13.5 billion years ago, ~67 km/sec/Mpc.

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) as see by the ACT. The difference between the hot (red) areas and the cool (blue) areas is less than one part in a thousand but those variations were enough to become the seeds out of which all the galaxies in the Universe grew! (Credit: Stony Brook University News)

You see the problem is that the measured value of Hubble’s constant using Type I supernova over the last two or so billion years comes out to be ~73 km/sec/Mpc, different by an amount that can no longer be considered to be ‘measurement error’. This discrepancy is called the ‘Hubble tension’ and in order to explain it a number of theories, extensions of the standard model of the universe have been proposed. With it’s greater resolution however ACT has also eliminated many of those theories leaving cosmologists with a big problem on their hands. Of course, a big problem, that’s also a big opportunity to discover new physics!

The Hubble tension has only become noticeable in the last fifteen years or so. The difference between the speed the Universe is expanding as measured over the last billion years or so (top) is much difference from what it was in the early Universe (bottom). Does this imply that Dark Energy is losing strength? (Credit: Mapping Ignorance)

Another telescope making news is the SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a satellite that was designed and built by a combination of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) and launched on the 2nd of December in 1995. In it’s thirty years in space SOHO has revolutionized our knowledge of how the Sun behaves on a day-to-day basis. Armed with an array of instruments specially designed to observe the Sun SOHO has over the course of nearly three complete Solar cycles witnessed over 40,000 coronal mass ejections (CMEs). This enormous amount of data has given solar scientists new insights into how the Sun produces such enormous explosions while at the same time giving us warning about any CMEs that are aimed at our planet.

Right now the Sun is at solar maximum so there are a lot of sunspots on its surface ready to emit solar flares and CMEs. Sunspot AR 4366 shown here is only a week or so old and it’s already fired off six X-class flares! (Credit: Spaceweather.com)

One completely unplanned benefit that SOHO provided was its ability to observe comets whose orbits bring them close to the Sun. To date citizen scientists have used the freely available data from SOHO to discover more than 5,000 of them.

Image from the SOHO satellite showing a comet on the right nearing the SUN, which is covered by the circle so that its brilliance doesn’t overwhelm NASA)everything else in the picture. (Credit:

Although there are plans to send other satellites into space to study the Sun currently there are currently no plans to terminate SOHO’s mission. So we can look forward to more discoveries to come.

If you don’t happen to live in LA there is sure to be a museum or science center in your town where you too can experience the thrill of discovery! (Credit: Museum of Illusions)

Finally I’d like to mention NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which has just completed its final assembly at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The telescope is now scheduled to undergo an extensive series of environmental tests to be certain that it can survive the rigors of space. Once these tests are completed, which is expected to be this summer, the telescope will be shipped to the Kennedy Space Center where it is currently scheduled to be launched to space aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket in early 2027.

Artist’s impression of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in orbit observing the Universe. (Credit: EarthSky)

Roman is equipped with two instruments that will give as an unprecedented view of the Universe. The Wide Field Instrument (WFI) is an infrared camera designed to study billions of galaxies, once again in order to better understand the evolution of our Universe. The other instrument is a coronagraph similar to the one that SOHO uses to block the Sun so that it can observe solar flares except that Roman’s will have much greater resolution.

The Nancy Garce Roman Space Telescope will be launched into orbit sometime in 2027 by the Space X Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. (Credit: Spaceflight Now)

Roman will use its coronagraph to block out the light from nearby stars to that it can better see and study any exo-planets orbiting those stars. It is also expected that Roman will be able to discover isolated black holes by observing the micro-lensing effects the black holes gravity has on the light from distant stars. Over the last several decades our knowledge of the heavens has advanced greatly thanks to telescopes like the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Solar Heliospheric Observer and we can expect to learn even more once the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has begun its career.

Space News for January 2026: Manned Missions are making News plus one story about an unmanned mission as well. 

There’s been a lot of news happening in both manned and unmanned space exploration lately with the manned missions getting most of the press as usual. So let’s get to it.

It does seem like we’re finally getting back to the idea of Space exploration being the most exciting thing we can do! (Credit: Walmart)

The big news of course is the medical emergency with a member of the International Space Station’s (ISS) Crew 11. Owing to privacy concerns NASA has not officially announced which astronaut is ill or just what their medical condition is, but the space agency has insisted that their situation is ‘stable’. Still, the medical facilities aboard the ISS are not sufficient to treat the emergency so they are bringing the whole crew back to Earth.

In the first ever medical emergency in space NASA had to make the decision to bring all four members of the Crew 11 mission back to Earth. (Credit: YouTube)

Therefore NASA has decided to take the unprecedented step of bringing Crew 11 back to Earth about a month early, this announcement was made on January 8th. The Crew 11 mission was launched back in July of 2025 as a routine crew rotation for the ISS and the crew was scheduled to return to Earth in late February or early March after being relieved by the upcoming Crew 12 launch.

Despite the change in schedule, and the medical emergency the deorbit and splashdown of Crew 11 went off without a hitch. The capsule was safely recovered in the Pacific Ocean. (Credit: Spectrum News 13)

Instead Crew 11 departed from the ISS on January 14 and splashed down in the Pacific off California in the early morning hours of the 15th. Despite the rushed schedule to return the mission was completed without incident and the astronauts were safely recovered, including the one with the medical emergency. This unique situation will leave the ISS with only a crew of 3 cosmonauts for a month but that’s the way things were for the nine years between the last Space Shuttle flight and the first Space X manned missions.

So right now there is only a crew of three cosmonauts aboard the ISS, brought there by Russia’s venerable Soyuz capsule. (Credit: Space)

February also begins the scheduled time frame for another manned mission, one that will be anything but routine. Sometime between January 31st and April 6th the Artemis II mission will be launched to carry humans back to the Moon for the first time since 1972. Now the Artemis II crew will not be landing on the Lunar surface, instead the mission will be similar to the Apollo 8 mission where humans orbited the Moon for the first time.

Carried by the same crawler that took the Saturn V’s to their pad, the Artemis II rocket was slowly taken to the launch pad for its upcoming mission that will take humans back to Lunar orbit for the first time in over 50 years. (Credit: YouTube)

Still that means that once again the US has developed two-thirds of the systems necessary to land on the Moon. We now have a launch vehicle, the Space Launch System (SLS) capable of sending a crew capsule and service module, the Orion capsule, to Lunar orbit. All that is lacking is a lunar module (LM) to take our astronauts down to the Moon’s surface.

The Apollo Lunar Module (LM) sitting on the Moon’s surface. With the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion capsule all NASA needs right now is an updated version of the LM and we’re back on the Moon! (Credit: Wikipedia)

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, see my post of 1January2025, both Space X and Blue Origin have been contracted by NASA to develop such a lander but Space X has been having problems with its Starship launch vehicle, which is supposed to be the basis of its lander design and Blue Origin’s design isn’t scheduled to be ready until about 2032. Whether either of these two companies can deliver a lander module in time to beat the Chinese to the Moon is questionable, see my post of 27 September 2025 for information about China’s progress.

Space X is basing its Lunar Module on its Starship rocket. The company has run into a few problems with Starship however and it’s questionable whether they can be ready by Artemis 3’s scheduled launch date of 2028. (Credit: Space)

I have one more item about manned spaceflight. I mentioned above that for a month or so only three cosmonauts will remain on the ISS. Those cosmonauts were launched to the ISS aboard a Soyuz spacecraft that took off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in the nation of Kazakhstan. The launch pad currently used for manned Soyuz launches is the same one that Russia has used since Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961.

The circle highlights the damaged area of Russia’s only man capable launch pad. There was a time when this damage would have been fixed ASAP but with things the way they are in Russia today, who knows! (Credit: Futurism)

In this latest launch back in November however there was ‘damage to several elements of the launch pad’ to quote Russian sources. Photos taken after the launch showed a service platform that had been shoved out of its moorings and had fallen into the flame trench where it was considerably damaged.

Russia uses the same pad to launch their progress cargo spacecraft, that looks an awful lot like Soyuz, to the ISS. Again, any delay in repairs to the pad will certainly affect ISS operations. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The official went on to state that the parts needed for repair were already available and the launch pad would be ready again ‘in the near future’. As usual the Russian’s are being tight lipped about the severity of the damage since this is the only pad they have qualified for manned launches and without it they be unable to replace their portion of the ISS crew or launch their progress cargo capsules to resupply the station.

Yuri Gagarin taking off on the first manned spaceflight in 1961. Russia is still using much of the same equipment and facilities that they developed back in the first decade of the space age. (Credit: RussianSpaceWeb.com)

The entire Russian space program is still dependent on systems and facilities that were developed back in the 1960s and there is currently no money to upgrade anything. Russia is spending everything it has, men as well as money, on Putin’s vain attempt to conquer Ukraine. If this continues the world’s oldest space program may in a few years simply cease to exist.

Will Russia’s space program become a dodo! So long as Putin is in charge it’s certainly headed that way. (Credit: dlab)

One last little item about a robotic mission that NASA has spent more than a decade trying to figure how to accomplish, the Mars Sample Return (MSR) Mission. Over the last twenty years NASA has been pretty successful with its robotic rovers to the red planet and the space agency had the ambitious goal of sending a rover that could collect Martian rocks and soil, place them into a rocket and then launch that rocket back to Earth where the samples could be studied just as all of the rocks brought back from the Moon by the Apollo astronauts have been.

For budgetary reasons NASA has canceled the Mars Sample Return mission (MSR) which would have brought Martian rocks back to Earth for study. (Credit: NASA Science)

Problem was that no matter what the engineers at JPL and other NASA facilities did the cost of such a mission remained more than $11 billion dollars, a price that the Trump administration simply would not fund. So the latest NASA funding bill does not include any money for even continuing the design process of a Mars Return vehicle and there is little chance that the program will be reinstated in the near future.

All in all 2026 looks like it’s going to be an interesting one in space exploration.

Paleontology News for January 2025. 

Paleontologists surely must envy their colleagues the naturalists. Think about it, a naturalist can observe an animal in real life, in it’s natural habitat, actually seeing how that animal lives. They can even capture a specimen of the animal and dissect it to study its anatomy. Nowadays naturalists can even get a DNA sample of an animal in order to compare its genetic code to that of related species.

Naturalists like Jane Goodall can just sit back and watch the behaviour of the animals they study. Paleontologists on the other hand have to figure out behaviour from the scant evidence remaining after millions of years. (Credit: Raincoast Conservation Foundation)

Paleontologists can’t do any of those things. With only a few fossils, often of only the hard parts of an animal, they have to figure out not only what kind of creature it was, its relation to other animals, but also how it lived, what it ate, everything about it. If new fossil evidence comes to light paleontologists often have to change their ideas, even about creature that have been known for many years.

When the first discovered Dinosaur Megalosaurus was described by William Buckland he thought that it was a four-legged lizard as shown in the top drawing. Today, with better evidence we know that Megalosaurus is a two-legged Theropod as shown in the bottom drawing. Better evidence, better science! (Credit: El Pais in English)

There have been some major discoveries made in recent months concerning several extinct animals that have been known and studied for over a century. In this post I’ll be discussing several of these new finds. As usual I will start with the oldest and work my way forward in time.

The best know fossils from before the time of the dinosaurs are trilobites, there are thousands of known species of these creatures who lived for over 250 million years. (Credit: Wikipedia)

After dinosaurs I suppose that trilobites are the best known type of extinct animals. Trilobites were one of the first animals to develop a hard shell and because of that the Cambrian period, the earliest well recognized period of multi-cellular life, is often called the age of the trilobite. Not only were trilobites easily fossilized but they were both numerous, about 6,000 different species are known, and they lasted some 270 million years. That means there are a lot of trilobites in every paleontologist’s collection, professional or amateur.

Trilobites are rather common fossils. So common in fact that they are sometimes turned into jewelry! (Credit: Etsy)

While the hard parts of trilobites, their shells are well preserved their internal anatomy rarely is. So paleontologists are always on the lookout for fossil sites that do preserve the soft parts of any species. Recently exceptionally preserved trilobite fossils have been discovered at a rock formation in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco in North Africa.

The external anatomy of a Trilobite is well known from literally thousands of specimens. The internal organs of trilobites are rarely preserved, however. (Credit: Deposits)

According to geologist Robert Gaines at Pomona College in Claremont, California what happened was that a nearby volcano erupted in a pyroclastic flow, similar to the one that buried Pompeii. In this case however the hot ash flowed onto the ocean where it quickly cooled before sinking to the bottom. The now cooled ash buried the trilobites alive in a sterile environment, one where bacteria could not cause the soft parts to decay. The ash then preserved much of the trilobite’s internal anatomy for millions of years. While the researchers hope to find many more specimens of well-preserved trilobites at the Morocco site their study has already confirmed one aspect of trilobite eating that had been conjectured for many years, trilobites chewed their food with the same legs they walked with.

Pyroclastic flow from a Volcano is one of the most destructive of natural events. Things that are covered by that dust and ash can be preserved for millions of years, however. (Credit: Britannica)

That’s not as weird as it sounds because the jaws of all arthropods are actually modified legs. That’s what makes a close-up video of a grasshopper or an ant eating look so strange, they chew from side to side rather than up and down because they chew with legs that have evolved into jaws.

Bio geneticists use fruit flies in many of their studies. Sometimes a fly is born with legs where its jaws should be, clear evidence that an arthropod’s jaws are actually modified legs! (Credit: Nature)

As one of the most primitive arthropods, trilobites did not have specialized legs so they actually chewed with the same legs they walked with before using those legs to then pass their food to their mouth. These fossils therefore not only tell us a lot about how trilobites themselves lived but also about how arthropods, the largest phylum of animals there is, developed their mouths and jaws.

As weird as it may sound trilobites used their legs for both walking and breathing, their gills were positioned right above their legs, labeled as Branchie above! Now we know that they also used their legs for eating! Later arthropods would evolve to specialize some of their legs into gills and jaws. (Credit: www.geol.umd.edu)

Almost two hundred million years after the first trilobites crawled on the ocean floor our ancestors the fish were developing their jaws. This was the Devonian period and the arrangement we have now of jawbone and teeth was not the only experiment that was tried. In fact there was a whole family of fish whose entire head and torso were covered in bone.

During the Devonian period, the “Age of Fishes” many early fish had a head shield of bone. These fish are now known as the Anthrodires. (Credit: X.com)

These fish are known as the anthrodires and they included some of the largest and fiercest predators of the time. The poster child for the anthrodires was a monster called Dunkloesteus terrelli, a four meter long armoured fish whose head was covered in bone and who bit its prey with razor sharp bony jaws.

Artists impression of Dunkloesteus. Those fierce ‘teeth’ are actually made of bone not dentine like our teeth. (Credit: Live Science)

Although discovered in the 1860s there is still much about Dunkloesteus that paleontologists didn’t know. However the last scientific paper on Dunkloesteus was published back in 1932 and paleontology since then has made great strides, especially in instruments. It was certainly time for a new look at Dunkloesteus.

Recently a group of researchers led by Russell Engelman of Case Western Reserve and including paleontologists from Australia, Russia and the United Kingdom have carried out a complete review of all available fossil specimens of Dunkloesteus. What the team found was that Dunkloesteus actually had considerably more cartilage in its bony head than had previously thought, that the muscle arrangement for its jaw was more similar to that of sharks than other fish and that unlike other members of the anthrodires, Dunkloestus really was toothless, making it a real oddball.

Most people are aware of the fact that sharks do not have skeletons made of bone but rather their skeletons are made of cartilage. It seems that Dunkloesteus resembled shakes a lot more than other anthrodires, a lot more than we thought. (Credit: Wikipedia)

My last story concerns what is probably the best known of all extinct species Tyrannosaurus rex. Now finding a specimen of T rex is a rare find, predators are always outnumbered by their prey, there are twenty zebra or wildebeest for every lion in Africa, and when a T rex is found it is usually incomplete. Because of this there can be considerable debate over what a related species or juvenal T rex’s looked like.

Probably the best known dinosaur of them all. T rex deserves the name Tyrant King! (Credit: Hope College’s Student News)

In fact back in the 1980s a skull was unearthed in a rock strata that had already yielded specimens of T rex. The skull was very similar to but much smaller than a T rex skull so initially it was classified as a new species Nanotyrannus lancensis. Then in 1999 another group of researchers re-examined the skull and announced that the specimen was actually a ‘teenage’ T rex. The debate has carried on since then.

Artist’s impression of Nanotyrannus lancensis. To me it certainly looks like it could be a teenage T rex. (Credit: Reddit)

Now a through examination of a nearly complete specimen discovered in 2008 may have answered the question. The specimen was of a small ‘T rex like’ animal so determining its age when it died was essential. To do this the researchers cut through the thighbone and counted the growth rings just like a tree. Turns out the animal was twenty years old, hardly a juvenal. Further examination found that the new specimen also had more teeth than an actual T rex would have as well as fewer vertebra in its tail. These details leave little doubt that N lancensis is a true species not a teenage T rex.

Which would you rather face? The T rex would finish you off in one bite while the N lancensis might take a while to eat you. Either way not much of a choice! (Credit: Reddit)

In that case however, where are the young T rexes?