Month: July 2020

Breakthrough Listen is the latest attempt to find evidence of intelligent life on other planets, in other solar systems.

Most people are familiar with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligences (SETI) program, the scientific endeavor to use radio telescopes here on Earth to detect transmissions that might be coming from alien intelligences in other solar systems. While some attempts at SETI research date back to the very early days of radio it was in 1980 that Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman founded the Planetary Society which has served as a focal point for SETI research. Despite many years of searching thousands of possible nearby stars to date the SETI program has failed so far to find a single signal that is unequivocally from an alien intelligence.

The founding of the Planetary Society, organized for the purpose of SETI research. Clockwise from lower right, Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, Louis Friedmann and Harry Ashmore. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Our Galaxy is a big place however, and for every star that has been observed looking for intelligent signals there are thousands that have not. In other words the work of SETI has barely begun. In fact its hardly surprising that, in a Galaxy filled with literally billions of worlds where life could exist our first few attempts to find it should come up empty.

Impressive as it is we only see a small fraction of all of the stars of our Milky Way Galaxy. (Credit: Space.com)

So the scientists at SETI did what scientists always do when they need to expand their search efforts in order to obtain more data. Develop a broader search program, design more sensitive equipment, and look for more funding.

The Allen Telescope Array made up of 42 radio dishes in Northern California is one of the projects funded by SETI. (Credit: Phys.org)

Enter the Breakthrough Initiative. Breakthrough is the brainchild of Russian Billionaire Yuri Milner who is funding a series of high-risk scientific studies that have the potential to revolutionize human society if any one of them should succeed. In other words Milner expects most of his initiatives to fail but he’s hoping for at least one Breakthrough!

Breakthrough Initiative founder Yuri Milner announcing his project. The late physicist Stephen Hawking in the background was an adviser to Milner. (Credit: Astrobiology Magazine)

The Breakthrough Initiative’s contribution to SETI comes in the form of a $100 million dollar grant called Breakthrough Listen that is being managed by the SETI Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. The large size of that grant has allowed the Breakthrough Listen team to obtain time on several of the biggest radio telescopes including the 100-meter fully steerable telescope at Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the world’s largest, and the 64 meter telescope at Parkes Observatory in New South Wales Australia.  By taking observations from one radio dish in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern the scientists are able to study the radio emissions coming from any star in the sky.

The Robert Byrd 100m radio telescope at Green Bank Observatory. I did a bit of work on the design of this baby! (Credit: Wikipedia)
the 64m Parkes radio telescope in Australia. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Even with that extra funding and better instruments however Breakthrough Listen still has an enormous amount of work to accomplish. In an effort to concentrate their efforts on the most likely targets the Breakthrough Listen astronomers have begun listening to stars that are known to have planets thanks to the efforts of the Kepler Space Telescope. In my post of 28th April 2018 I discussed how the Kepler Space Telescope succeeded in discovering more than 2500 planets around other stars by measuring the small drop in the star’s brightness as one or more of its planets passed in front of it. The breakthrough Listen team can now make use of Kepler’s results in order to thoroughly examine those stars known to have planets before continuing on to other targets.

NASA is quite proud of their planet hunting Kepler Space Telescope, with good reason. (Credit: Phys.org)

In fact we might even think in reverse and first consider examining those stars where the inhabitants, if any, could see the Earth and the other planets of our solar system crossing in front of the face of our Sun. The possible alien civilizations around those stars might actually have already discovered Earth and be trying to contact us at this very moment! The stars that fit that criteria are those that lie along or near the plane of the ecliptic, the path the Sun takes through the background stars every year.

As viewed from here on Earth, the Sun and the planets seem to move across the constellations along a line called the Ecliptic. In reality the Earth and the other planets orbit the sun in a plane called the ecliptic. (Credit: Space.com)

This new search effort was conceived by and is being led by Sofia Sheikh, a graduate student at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University. To date the team has accumulated and released over four petabytes worth of data but sadly no definitive signal from any aliens. Ms. Sheikh and the other Breakthrough Listen scientists will keep at it however; after all there are only another 200 billion stars in our Milky Way left to examine.

And if you think about it, isn’t that the whole idea behind the Breakthrough initiative? To invest in research that has little chance of success, but will change the world if it does?

Canadian Naturalists follow the spread of a new song in the White Throated Sparrow. Is this an example of a change in the cultural of a species of bird?

Many common backyard birds throughout the world are known for the beauty of their calls giving them the common title of songbirds. Each species has its own particular call which are so distinctive that many experienced ‘birders’, that how bird watchers prefer to be referred to, can often tell you what species of bird is singing off in the bushes without ever getting a glimpse of the singer. In some ways the song of a species is as distinguishing as the colours of its feathers.

Any birder worth their salt would recognize a yellow warbler as easily by their song as their appearance. (Credit: PRDseed.com)

It’s the male birds that do all the singing, using their calls to announce their territory or attract mates and birdcalls are known to change very little over time. Nevertheless the song each species of bird uses is not instinctive, every generation of males must learn the song and therefore over time change will occur, however slowly.

That’s why Ken Otter, Professor of Biology at the University of Northern British Columbia was so surprised when he moved to the city of Prince George in the 1990s. While getting acquainted with the local fauna Dr. Otter discovered that the white throated sparrow ( Zonotrichia albicollis) population west of the Rocky Mountains used a two-note ending to their song quite unlike the three-note triplet that ended the songs of white throated sparrows throughout the rest of Canada.

A male White Throated Sparrow. (Credit: Hickory Knolls Discovery Center)
The female White Throated Sparrow. As is usual for songbirds the female’s colours are drab compared to those of the male. (All About Birds)

Intrigued Professor Otter discussed this new song style with several of his colleagues and together they decided to try to track the spread of the new two-note ending. In order to obtain as much field data as possible the naturalists contacted amateur bird clubs and organizations across Canada, enlisting the help of hundreds of volunteers. These field researchers used their cell phones to record the songs of white throated sparrows in their area and sent the recordings to Professor Otter who added them to his database.

Birders in action. They may look a bit crazy but they’re pretty harmless! Actually they are an enormous army of eager volunteers for doing the legwork of scientists studying nature. (Credit: Michigan Audubon)

With the huge number of recordings accumulated over 20 years by his volunteers Doctor Otter was able to observe the spread of the new song as bit by bit it moved eastward, reaching Alberta in 2004 and Ontario ten years later. So comprehensive is the data that Professor Otter was able to show that younger, juvenile males were learning the new song at the sparrows overwintering grounds and then taking the new song with them as they returned to their summer homes. So while Professor Otter and his colleagues may not be the first scientists to observe a change in the song of a species of songbird they have succeeded in developing the most extensive map of a cultural shift in a species of bird ever obtained.

Dynamic analysis of a nightingale’s song. Scientists can learn a great deal by such studies of birdsong. (Credit: Semantic Scholar)

Still one question remains, why did the new two-note ending so rapidly replace the old, traditional three-note ending? Doctor Otter can only speculate that female white throated sparrows might prefer the novelty of the new song. As the professor put it, “…we might find a situation in which the females actually like songs that aren’t typical in their environment. If that is the case, there’s a big advantage to any male who can sing a new song type.”

Male birds complete for females in many ways, often by their song! (Credit: Pinterest)

Cultural change being driven by males trying to attract females who are seeking some novelty in their lives, sounds quite human to me.

Before I go I’d like to take a minute to update a post I published back on the 4th of January 2020 about a significant dimming in the light coming from the star Betelgeuse, normally the 10th brightest star in our night sky. Betelgeuse is a giant red star that is nearing the end of its life and is expected to explode as a supernova in the near future. Near future for a star being sometime in the next 100,000 years.

The constellation of Orion the hunter. Betelgeuse is the bright red star on the hunter’s left shoulder. (Credit: MilkyWayPhotographers)

While the energy output from Betelgeuse has been unstable ever since astronomers began making precise measurements of it more than a century ago the decrease that was observed late last year was unprecedented leading some astrophysicists to speculate that the star’s end might be near. However so far in 2020 the star seems to have stabilized itself leading astronomers to wonder what had caused the dimming.

Comparison of Betelgeuse over less than a year’s time. Despite the fuzziness of the images the growth of the starspots is obvious. (Credit: Forbes)

Now a group of astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have announced that they have discovered the direct cause of Betelgeuse’s drop in brightness. The team, led by Dr. Thavisha Dharmawardena have found that 70% of the star’s surface is now covered by Starspots presumed to be similar to the Sunspots on our own Sun. While Starspots have been detected on other stars before none have come anywhere close to being as extensive as those now seen on Betelgeuse. So now the question is, if the Starspots are the cause of Betelgeuse’s drop in brightness, what is causing the Starspots? And are those Starspots a prelude to an imminent explosion? Keeping in mind that imminent for a star could still mean sometime in the next thousand years. 

New DNA evidence suggests that there was contact between Polynesian mariners and the peoples of South America.

A little more than 100,000 years ago our species Homo sapiens only existed on one continent, Africa. Yes we had some relatives who had already moved out into other lands. Neanderthals were living in Europe and Homo erectus, ‘Peking Man’ inhabited Asia, but the new species H sapiens had yet to spread out from the land of its origins.

Human Migration around the World. Out of Africa about 100,000 years ago and now we occupy the entire land mass of the Earth! (Credit: ResearchGate)

Since that time we have spread out, migrating to every continent so that today human beings live in every climate from artic ice to tropical rainforest to arid desert. As a species we have always gone as far as our technology would take us, settling every piece of inhabitable land we could find.

Certainly some of the most ambitious, courageous migrations ever have to been accomplished were by the Polynesian mariners as they sailed their small, wooden, two hulled ships across the Pacific. With no instruments of any kind, nor any maps to follow they nevertheless succeeded in spreading their culture across the world’s largest ocean. In some ways those voyages were a prelude to our modern space explorations when you consider how tiny those islands are and how vast the ocean distances between them.

The voyages undertaken by the Polynesians may be little known but they were among the most epic ever attempted by humans. (Credit: Twitter)

We know that the Polynesians sailed eastward from the coasts of Asia as far as the Hawaiian island chain and the lonely island of Rapa Nui, formally known as Easter Island. The current consensus among anthropologists however is that’s as far as they got. Even those intrepid navigators never managed to completely cross the Pacific; they never discovered the Americas.

Starting about 3000 BCE the migration of the Polynesians spread across the world’s largest ocean. (Credit: Ancient History Encyclopedia)

That’s the consensus; there are a few researchers who disagree however, who consider the idea of contact between the Polynesian islanders and the Native Americans as being not only possible but highly likely. For decades they have searched for evidence of that contact. To date the most convincing evidence they’ve found is the widespread use of sweet potatoes, a plant native to South America, throughout Polynesia. Now those scientists are trying to find more evidence using DNA. 

Did the Polynesians get the sweet potato from South America while the South Americans got chickens from the Polynesians? (Credit: The Honolulu Advertiser)

Doctors, and spouses Karla Sandoval, an anthropologist and Andres Estrada, a geneticist both with the National Labouratory of Genomics for Biodiversity at Irapuato in Mexico, spent several decades assembling a comprehensive catalogue of the genetic makeup of modern Latin American ethnic groups. Using this catalogue as a database in 2013 the scientists began a study of the genetic makeup of 809 people from Rapa Nui and other Pacific Islands searching for evidence in Polynesians of DNA from the Americas.

The Island of Rapi Nui, famous for it enigmatic statues, was the farthest island settled by the Polynesians. Or was it? (Credit: University of Oregon)

In doing their analysis Sandoval and Estrada faced a very big problem. You see over the last 250 years the Polynesian people have had considerable contact with both Europeans and South Americans. Rapa Nui for example was annexed by the South American nation of Chile in 1888. In order to find any earlier DNA that would indicate contact between Polynesia and the Americas they had to eliminate those Polynesians who carried both South American and European DNA.

In the end the scientists did succeed in finding six individuals whose DNA showed no sign of European genes but who did possess strands of DNA that are nearly identical to those found in the ethnic Zenu tribe in Colombia. Based on the size of the DNA strands Sandoval and Estrada were even able to estimate that the contact took place some 800 years ago, long before Columbus and the European age of exploration began. Is this then the missing piece of evidence to prove that there was contact between Polynesia and South America?

There are some who are not yet convinced. Biological Anthropologist Lisa Matisoo-Smith of the University of Otago in New Zealand points out that since both Polynesians and Native Americans are descended from an original Central Asia people the analysis must be expanded to include people from China or Mongolia in order to make certain that the DNA strands in question aren’t in fact more than 10,000 years old.

One scenario by which Polynesians and South Americas could have intermingled. (Credit: Daily Mail)

Even if further DNA studies do prove that Polynesians contacted South Americans around 800 years ago such studies still won’t be able to answer the question of who contacted who. Did a few Polynesian catamarans make it to Colombia and return to their islands with a few members of the Zenu tribe or did the South Americans sail out into the Pacific and meet the Polynesians halfway?

Back in 1947 Norwegian explorer and anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl tried to demonstrate how it could have been the South Americans who actually settled the Islands of the Pacific. He did so by building a small raft in Peru using only pre-Columbian technology and in accordance with descriptions of native rafts by Spanish conquistadors. Naming his vessel the Kon-Tiki after an Incan god Heyerdahl and his crew of five then sailed some 6,900 kilometers westward across the Pacific proving that the peoples of South America could have reached the islands of Polynesia.

The voyage of the Kon Tiki may have made Thor Heyerdahl famous but few anthropologists accept his theories. (Credit: IMDb)

In a sense of course it doesn’t matter which way the voyages went. The settlement of the Islands of the Pacific are a clear demonstration that we humans are explorers, travelers. That we belong wherever it is we choose to go! 

Space News for July 2020.

There are a number of small items to discuss this month so let’s get started.

First of all, things continue to go smoothly for Space X’s first manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have been on the ISS for more than a month now, assisting the regular crew in their maintenance and repair work. Bob Behnken even got to perform an EVA with his fellow American astronaut Chris Cassidy in order to replace a number of the station’s external batteries.

The Space X Dragon capsule attached to the ISS as photographed by astronaut Bob Behnken during his EVA. (Credit: Teslarati.com)

Although NASA has yet to announce exactly when Behnken and Hurley will return to Earth in their Dragon capsule they are probably about halfway through their mission. Before they leave however NASA plans on conducting some kind of emergency station test using the Space X Dragon capsule as a part of the test.

The idea is to pretend that a disaster to the ISS forces all five members of the crew, the three Americans plus two Russian cosmonauts, to use the Space X Dragon capsule as a lifeboat. Now the capsule will not actually undock from the ISS. It will however be quickly woken up and brought back to operational status. All five crewmembers will climb aboard the capsule and remain there for several hours, simulating a real emergency.

The current five member crew of the ISS will participate in an emergency drill using the Dragon capsule as a potential lifeboat. (Credit: Positively Osceola)

Continuing with manned spaceflight NASA has announced the results of their analysis of the problems that occurred during the unmanned Orbital Test Flight (OFT) of Boeing’s Starliner capsule back in December 2020. During that flight a software problem occurred that caused the spacecraft to carry out the wrong maneuver, using up so much fuel that it was unable to rendezvous with the ISS. The capsule was able to return safely to Earth but an initial review of the mission revealed several other serious software issues that went unnoticed during the actual test flight.

The launch and landing of the Boeing Starliner capsule went perfectly on its unmanned test flight. The problems all occurred in between! (Credit: Space.com)

Based upon their review NASA engineers have made a total of 80 recommendations to Boeing that the aerospace firm must address before a second, unmanned OFT can be conducted. Boeing hopes to implement the necessary changes quickly, in fact the engineering effort is already well underway, with an eye towards a launch date late this year for the second OFT.

That would allow Boeing to conduct their first manned flight with Starliner early next year. Once that flight has taken place the US will for the first time ever have two operational space systems for getting astronauts into orbit, both owned and operated by commercial corporations.

In just a couple of years NASA hopes to have three capsules taking their astronauts into space. Here are Orion, Dragon and Starliner (CST-100) compared to the Apollo command module. (Credit: Quora)

NASA also hopes that next year will see the first, unmanned test launch of the long awaited Space Launch System and Orion capsule, a launch vehicle that will not only take astronauts into Earth orbit but beyond. The SLS is in fact the foundation of NASA’s Artemis program with its ambitious goal of returning Americans to the Moon by the year 2024. Pieces of the first SLS rocket are finally, many years behind schedule starting to arrive at Cape Kennedy for assembly with an intention of the initial test launch of the whole rocket sometime in 2021.

If SLS block 1 is ever completed, it’s already five years behind schedule, this is what it will look like on the launch pad. (Credit: NASA)

The Artemis goal of putting Americans back on the Moon is more than just ambitious; it’s expensive. So when on July 7th the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee released its funding bill for NASA it could only be considered disappointing. As announced the funding for NASA in 2021 will remain at exactly the same level as in the current fiscal year, $22.63 billion dollars. In other words there is no new money of any kind for Artemis.

The House Appropriations Committee in action. With all of the money being directed to fight the Covid-19 pandemic there’s little desire to increase NASA’s budget. (Credit: LegBranch)

That figure of $22.63 billion is about $3 billion less than NASA requested and the worst part is that the monetary shortfall comes from the budget earmarked for the design and development of a new lunar lander, the major piece of hardware currently not yet under construction. Now the budget bill has not yet been passed by congress, more money could be added before it is passed. And even if the budget isn’t increased NASA could undoubtedly divert money from other projects in an effort to keep making progress on the lander.

Nevertheless the Artemis schedule was very tight to begin with and without some real support in congress it is likely that a return to the Moon could, like all of NASA’s manned deep space proposals over the last 30 years, be underfunded and delayed until it just dies.

My final item for today deals not with NASA’s manned space efforts, but rather with its more successful robotic exploration probes. Back on the 6th of January in 2017 I posted an article about a couple of new NASA missions intended to explore several of the asteroids orbiting the Sun in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. One of these missions is called Psyche after the metal rich asteroid that is its target.

Just this month the engineering team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory designing Psyche completed their work and the final design has been approved. This means that work on the spacecraft’s hardware can begin with full assembly and testing to begin in February of 2021.

The design phase of the Psyche space probe is completed but the spacecraft must be built quickly if it is to launch in 2022. (Credit: MarketWatch)

The schedule for Psyche is tight. The spacecraft must be launched in August of 2022 if it is to use a gravity assist from Mars in order to reach its target. Arrival at Psyche will then be in early 2026.

Medical researchers are studying the effectiveness of Face Masks in reducing the spread of Covid-19.

The infectious disease Cov-19 continues to spread around the world taking an ever increasing toll of lives and suffering. Here in the United States the daily numbers of new cases is at its highest level ever while the daily death numbers are not far behind.

The Spread of Covid-19 across the US as of 14July2020. Not a pretty Picture. (Credit: CNN, Johns Hopkins University)

Without an effective vaccine to combat this disease the only tools we have to control the spread, to reduce the number of people getting sick are our own personal habits. We must change the way we live if we all hope to survive this deadly pandemic.

Now Cov-19 is a respiratory virus, it kills by getting into the lungs and destroying the fragile tissue with which we breathe. It spreads through the air, as an infected person coughs or even talks droplets of water are injected into the air, droplets containing the virus. Anyone breathing in one of those droplets is then likely to become infected, passing the virus on to others in turn.

The Coronovirus Covid-19. Although most deadly as a respiratory disease recent studies have provided evidence that Covid-19 can attack every organ in our body! (Credit: The Baton Rouge Clinic)

The Covid-19 virus is in fact so contagious that under normal living conditions one infected person on average will infect about six other people. Those six will then infect 36 who will then infect 216 in their turn and so on. You can see just how rapidly this virus will spread unless we somehow reduce its ability to infect new victims. And to do that we need to change the way we live.

The growth of an infectious disease in a population is governed by the infection rate ‘r’, shown here for a value of r=3. (Credit: James Holland Jones, Stanford University)

The best way to avoid becoming infected is to stay home, simply avoiding other people. Of Course that’s not really possible, even someone who is retired as I am still has to go out occasionally in order to buy food while for most people work is still a daily necessity. Therefore all of us must learn to practice habits that will reduce if not eliminate the chance of transmission of Covis-19. And recent studies have now clearly demonstrated that properly wearing a good face mask is the most effective tool we have to stop that spread when we are outside our homes.

Wearing a face mask when in public will greatly reduce the spread of Covid-19, and you can use it to show off your individuality! (Credit: New York Times)

Proper wearing of a facemask simply requires that the mask should cover both the wearer’s mouth and nose and that the material of the mask should fit snuggly against the face. What constitutes a good effective mask is more difficult to determine owning to the great variety of styles and materials that are being used to manufacture masks for fighting Covis-19.

Without any facial covering a cough can travel more than 3 meters infecting everyone it touches. (Credit: Florida Atlantic University)

To try to pinpoint some of the factors that make a facemask more effect researchers at Florida Atlantic University have been conducting a series of tests to evaluate the ability of different mask styles to prevent the spread of those virus containing droplets. As a test ‘subject’ the scientists modified the head of a manikin with a manual pump and smoke generator. By activating the pump a ‘cough’ was simulated producing droplets that traveled more than two and a half meters from the manikin’s head. This setup was then used to measure to what degree various masks succeeded in reducing the travel distance of the droplets.

Testing simple forms of masks such as a bandanna wrapped around the face or a handkerchief held up to the face it was found that the distance the droplets traveled was reduced to one meter for the bandanna and a half meter for the handkerchief. Closer fitting masks were found to perform much better with a cone shaped mask reducing the distance to 20cm while the best of all performance came from a stitched-quilted mask that reduced the spread to only 8cm. Basically it all comes down to a nice tight fit around the nose and mouth, the tighter the better.

Even a simple Bandanna worn around the face reduces the spread by more than half. (Credit: Florida Atlantic University)
A close fitting mask, such as this cone mask, greatly reduces the distance the cough droplets travel greatly reducing the risk of infection. (Credit: Florida Atlantic University)

The material that the mask is composed of can also make a big difference as scientists at the National Institute of Standards discovered. Testing the ability of a variety of materials to filter out the droplets, while still allowing air to get through so that the wearer can breathe, the researchers discovered a considerable difference in performance. Artificial fibers in particular performed very badly while the best performance came from multi-layered, tightly woven cotton cloth.

Masks made of close woven cotton fibers has been shown to be best at filtering out the virus laden droplets. (Credit: Phys.org)

Based upon these studies it’s clear to see that the best performing mask for the general public would be a close-fitting mask made from several layers of tightly woven, in others words high thread count cotton. In fact epidemiologists estimate that the spread of Covid-19 could be reduced by as much as 80% if everyone wore such a mask whenever they went out in public. That means that instead of one infected person infecting six others they would on average only infect a little more than one person, simply by wearing a mask.

Workers wearing face masks while making face masks! Long periods of time spent in close quarters demands the wearing of masks! (Credit: CNBC.com)

Which makes you wonder why, in the face of all of these facts has the wearing of masks become a political issue? How is it possible that some people are suing their government leaders and health officials on the grounds that requiring people to wear a mask is a violation of their constitutional rights? Are there really people foolish enough to fight for the right to get sick and possibly die?

No it’s not! A face mask is the best way of protecting your life and the life of your family. In this pandemic it is the only way we have of getting our economy working again. (Credit: Today Show)

The virus hasn’t read the Constitution; it isn’t capable of understanding the concept of civil rights. All that the virus is capable of doing is spreading from one person to another, making many of us sick while killing a few percent unless we take the necessary steps to stop it.

This isn’t a hoax; it isn’t an attempt to impose an authoritarian regime on freedom loving Americans. This is a disease, an old fashioned infectious disease like the Black Death, or cholera, or yellow fever, diseases that we fought with public health measures before we had any modern drugs or vaccines. As the virus spreads, as the case numbers in the US set new records everyday we truly are all in this together and only by working together sensibly can we get through this pandemic without a devastating amount of damage to our country.

During the Middle Ages people understood the destructive power of infectious diseases. Have we lost their hard won wisdom! (Credit: EarthSky)

Collective Intelligence: Some species of animals have learned how to put their heads together in order to solve problems that no individual member can solve by themselves.

‘Let’s put our heads together and see if we can’t come up with a solution,’ is a very human method of coming together, tossing out ideas and taking advantage of multiple points of view in an effort to solve very difficult problems. This idea of ‘Collective Intelligence’ is something uniquely human, one of the greatest advantages that we have over the mere animals with which we share our world.

Our ability to communicate ideas effectively makes us as a group smarter than any individual! (Credit: Istock)

Or maybe not! Turns out that there are many known cases of animals who work collectively in order to survive the dangers and difficulties life throws at them. Consider the prairie dog, a species of squirrel that inhabit the treeless plains of central North America and who live in ‘towns’ that can number several hundred individuals.

Just a small part of a typical prairie dog town. (Credit: Pinterest)

Whenever the town’s inhabitants go out to forage for food several of the older adults position themselves around the group standing watch, keeping an eye out for predators instead of finding food for themselves. Whenever a threat is detected the guards will sound the alarum, a series of calls so sophisticated not only do the other prairie dogs know whether the menace is coming from the ground, a coyote, or the air, an eagle, but the calls tell them from what direction! In fact the whole prairie dog system is so well arranged that those adults who are feeding know when it is their turn to stand watch so that their fellows who have been on guard duty can grab a bite. Numerous other examples in nature can be cited and now naturalists have uncovered another, similar type of collective intelligence in animals that are individually much less intelligent than a prairie dog.

Prairie Dog ob guard duty, center, signaling the approach of danger! (Credit: Treehugger)

It’s well known that ant colonies send out forager ants to search for sources of food. These foragers lay down a sent trail as they search both to enable them to find their way home but also to enable the other ants in the colony to find the food source they’ve discovered. Once the forger has alerted the colony to the presence of the food an entire army of worker ants will follow the sent trail and begin the process of bringing the food back to the nest.

If you ever spot a single ant far from its colony it’s probably a forger ant searching for a food supply. (Credit: EurekAlert)

What if however, something should happen to destroy the sent trail, a branch of a tree could fall across it or you might actually step on it. In that case, how do the ants find their way back home? Now naturalists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have set up an experiment in the lab to study just how, and how well ants solve such dilemmas. As Aviram Gelblum the lead author of the study put it. “We addressed this question by studying the cooperative transport of ants as they attempted to transport large loads through semi-natural environments.”

Using Longhorn crazy ants as their test subjects the researchers set up a labyrinth using cubes of the same size randomly spread across a surface separating the ant’s nest from a food source. The cubes were used to block the ant’s direct path home and force them into searching for an alternate route. The movements of the ants were tracked by image processing and compared to a computer program that mimicked a random walk in the direction of the nest.

By making the food source an object to large to move easily through the maze the researchers forced the ants to find a new path home, other than the one they took to find the food. (Credit: Aviram Gelblum et al)
Test setup used in Weizmann Institute experiment to test ant navigation. The random setting of the blocks made it impossible for the ants to return with the food to their nest by a straight line. (Credit: Aviram Gelblum et al)

What the biologists found was that the ants consistently outperformed the random method, and they did so by cooperating. You see in addition to the large number of worker ants who are carrying the loads there are a smaller number of leader ants who fan out from the column as far as a maximum distance of 10cm.

When faced with a blocked path the leader ants act as scouts searching for possible alternative paths and then coordinate with each other to steer the worker ants into the new chosen path. This process is repeated until the obstacle has been bypassed and the way back to the nest is clear. Having the leaders acting as scouts at a distance from the main group allowed the ants as a whole to significantly reduce the time spent searching for another way back home when their original path becomes blocked.

By putting our heads together in order to solve problems we humans have succeeded in building our civilizations. It’s hardly surprising therefore that other animals have also discovered the advantages of collective intelligence.

Invasive Species Alert: The Spotted Lanternfly is spreading throughout the Mid-Atlantic United States and a look back at the Japanese Beetle.

One of the most profound impacts that our human civilization has had upon the natural world is in the creation of ‘Invasive Species’. In brief, an invasive species is a species of animal or plant that we humans have transported from one part of the world to another, sometimes deliberately but more often by accident. Having no natural enemies in its new environment the invasive species spreads rapidly causing destruction to, if not actually displacing native species.

Rabbits in Australia are a well known example of animals that were deliberately brought from Europe to be raised for food by the early British colonists. A few animals managed to escape and found the local environment to their liking. Breeding like rabbits they quickly became an enormous problem that Australians are still unable to completely control.

Brought to Australia by early European settlers the rabbit population is now completely out of control no matter how many the Australians kill. (Credit: Full Spectrum Biology)

Having this example, and many others to learn from, today the intentional transportation of species from one part of the world to another is only allowed after careful consideration of the possible environmental consequences. Still, even as we humans have learned not to intentionally cause invasive species the growth of international, intercontinental travel and trade has led to a tremendous increase in the number of accidental invasive species.

The world has become a much smaller place the last 100 years, not only for we humans but for those species who hitchhike along for the ride! (Credit: eTurboNews)

The Spotted Lanternfly, Lycorma delicatula, is native to Southern China, Vietnam, Thailand and India where it feeds primarily on Chinese Sumac along with grape vines and stone fruit trees such as peaches. In its natural environment the spotted lanternfly’s population is kept in check by its natural predators and diseases. In its own home the L delicatula was an agricultural pest, but not a terrible one.

The Adult Spotted Lanternfly. Looks rather harmless, actually quite pretty but by the millions they can cause tremendous destruction and without any predators they are spreading rapidly throughout the NE USA. (Rutgers NJAES – Rutgers University)

Like most species of insect that live for only one year the spotted lanternfly hatches as a nymph from an egg in late April to early May. As a nymph the spotted lanternfly goes through several stages known as instars. The first instar is black with white spots and bites into the stem of its host plant in order to suck at the plant’s sap for nourishment. Later instar stages add red spots to the white. The adults with their distinctive wings can appear as early as July and will mate and lay their eggs in September.

The first Instar nymph stage of the spotted lanternfly. They can’t fly but they can certainly jump! (Credit: R. A. Lawler)
The second Instar stage. At this stage the nymph is also nearly twice as large. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

It was in September of 2014 that the spotted lanternfly first appeared suddenly in Berks county Pennsylvania. How it got to that mostly rural part of Pennsylvania is unknown but the eggs of L delicatula are small, laid in egg masses of 30-50, and will stick to almost any smooth, hard vertical surface, even the metal of a motor vehicle.

Egg masses for the spotted lanternfly. If you see any of these destroy them! (Credit: UC ANR)

However it got here, with no predators to control it, the spotted lanternfly has now spread to New Jersey, Delaware, eastern Maryland and Virginia. Already L delicatula has caused an appreciable amount of damage to the wine and fruit industries in the Mid-Atlantic States and will without doubt become even more of a pest in the years to come.

I first spotted some L delicatula nymphs in my garden just a few days ago feeding on a wild grape vine growing along my back fence. So far they haven’t infested any of my vegetables, the insect typically doesn’t attack plants like tomato, potatoes or peppers but you can be certain I’ll be keeping a close watch on my raspberry bushes.

This invasion of the spotted lanternfly reminds me a great deal of the infestation of Japanese Beetles, Popillia japonica, that caused so much damage when I was young back in the 1960s. Like L delicatula the Japanese Beetle somehow got to America, the first discovery was way back in 1916 in New Jersey. Since that time P japonica has spread across the country so that now only nine western states are considered free of it.

The Japanese Beetle. Again it’s actually an attractive little bug, in small numbers. Sixty years ago the damage it did was tremendous. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Like the Spotted Lanternfly the P japonica is only a minor pest in its natural environment, natural predators and parasites keep its population under control. Here in North America however the insect bred uncontrollably causing an enormous amount of destruction to a wide variety of plant species.

As a boy my mother kept a fair sized rose garden that she was very proud of. In fact just about every lady on our block had a half dozen or more rose bushes that they tended. So to the ladies of my street the Japanese Beetle was an utter disaster. It became my job every day to pick off all of the beetles that I could find from every rose bush. On some days I filled up a small jelly jar with the pests there were so many of them. In exchange for my efforts each of my neighbors gave me a nickel, hey, when you’re six or seven 25¢ every day was a lot of money.

This is the way I remember Japanese Beetles, a half dozen or more eating a rose flower. (Credit: The Denver Post)

The good news is that by around 1970 the Japanese beetle population began to plummet, some of the local birds and other animals realized that Japanese beetles were tasty and with so many around they represented a lot of food. With some local predators to control their population the threat of Japanese Beetles quickly diminished.

Today Japanese Beetles are actually rare in eastern Pennsylvania; it’s been three years since I last saw one. In the long run this is true of every invasive species, eventually they just become part of their new environment, it’s just a question of how much damage will they do before then. The same thing will happen to the Spotted Lanternfly, someday some species will begin to prey on them and they will become less of a threat, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Hopefully before long some birds like this Warbler will learn to start eating the spotted lanternfly! (Credit: Bird Watcher’s Digest)

It’s too bad we can’t just tell a few species of bird, hey, eat these things, they’re good!

Book Review: First Encounter (Ascension Wars Book 1) by Jasper T. Scott.

At the beginning of ‘First Encounter’ by Jasper T Scott we meet the starship Forerunner as it is approaching its destination, the Trappist star system. It’s the year 2150 AD and humanity has begun the exploration and settlement of other star systems. Forerunner is in fact a colony ship with over a thousand would be pioneers ready to begin the work of building a new world on Trappist-E, one of the planets within the habitable zone of the star Trappist.

Cover of ‘First Encounter’ by Jasper T. Scott. (Credit: Amazon.com)

Forerunner is a sleeper ship; its passengers and most of its crew have been in hibernation for most of the ninety-year long journey from Earth. Now that their goal is in sight the entire crew has been awakened, including the ship’s captain Clayton Cross and are preparing for their first landing.

Jasper T. Scott author of ‘First Encounter’. (Credit: Book Bub)

Once the ship enters orbit around Trappist-E Captain Cross organizes a landing party that quickly descends to the planet’s surface. Aware of the possibility of encountering alien life, perhaps even intelligent life the landing party also includes an ambassador Richard Morgan who will take charge of any interactions with intelligent aliens.

In fact almost as soon as the landing party has left their shuttle they encounter a species of primitive aliens who immediately attack them. The landing party, not wishing to turn this first encounter into a battle retreat back to the shuttle but are forced to kill several of the aliens along the way.

But what the Forerunner crew are not aware of is that they are also under attack by a second species of aliens, a species with a superior technology. The landing party is barely able to return to their ship before the Forerunner must flee the entire Trappist star system to avoid a battle against an alien fleet.

At a distance of 40 light years and having seven known planets, three is the habitable zone, the Trappist star system is a logical choice for the location of humanity’s first encounter with alien intelligence. (Credit: Space.com)

That’s just the first quarter of the book, the middle half of ‘First Encounter’ consists of variations on the movies ‘Alien’ and ‘Predator’ with a bit of the original ‘Star Wars’ or perhaps ‘Battlestar Galactica’ thrown in at the end. And remember this is only Book 1 of Ascension Wars. It’s all just a bit too much of a roller coaster ride, too much action without a great deal of reason behind the action.

Don’t get me wrong, ‘First Encounter’ will keep your attention and it’s certainly a quick read, I finished it in less than two days. However one of the reasons it’s such an easy read is that there’s not a lot to think about, you’re too busy going from one slam, bam episode to another. In fact ‘First Encounter’ is rather a lot like several episodes of an old SF serial like Buck Rodgers.

The old Buck Rodgers serials had slam, bam action galore, and they were certainly entertaining. (Credit: Bleeding Cool)

And like Buck Rogers you soon find yourself trying to guess what’s going to happen next, and too often getting it right. And like Buck Rodgers there are a few plot problems getting in the way. For example, the superior aliens have faster than light travel, their ships can travel one light year in two hours, but they don’t come to Earth. Instead they wait for Forerunner to take ninety years to reach the Trappist system before starting their war with humanity!

“Occupied Earth’ is the second book in the series begun with ‘First Encounter’. I think the title pretty much says it all. (Credit: Amazon.com)

So if you’re looking for a ‘Space Opera’ with a lot of shoot’em up action then you’ll probably like ‘First Encounter’ by Jasper T. Scott. However I like my SF a little more thoughtful, a little more awe inspiring than heart pounding.

After having made the first flybys of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth the New Horizons space probe is now being used by astronomers to help them measure the distances to nearby stars.

The most difficult, and therefore most important measurement that astronomers try to make of the many objects in our sky is distance. Think about it, how would you, without the help of an astronomer or other scientist, measure the distance to the Moon, the very closest neighbor to our Earth?

The Earth Moon Distance is enormous, and the Moon is our closest neighbor in space. (Credit: ZME science)

Well the way astronomers first measured the distance to the Moon, and the nearby planets Venus and Mars, is called parallax and it’s a technique that you’re very familiar with whether you know it or not. You see parallax is the way that you judge distances using your two eyes.

Did you ever stick one of your fingers up in front of you face and close one eye. Then, by switching back and forth between your two eyes, one at a time, your finger seems to move against the background of more distant objects. That’s parallax, and by simple use of trigonometry you can use that apparent movement to measure the distance to your finger.

The difference in viewpoint between our two eyes enables us to judge the distance to close objects. This is also known as depth perception. (Credit: The Parallax Perspective)

Of course as objects get further away the apparent movement becomes smaller, more difficult to measure accurately. Conversely if the baseline, that is the distance between the two observation points, is made wider the apparent movement is increased making it easier to accurately measure the apparent movement. Therefore astronomers want the widest possible baseline in order to measure the greatest possible distances.

To judge the distance to distant targets the military developed rage finding spotter scopes that widen the baseline of our eyes. (Credit: Wikipedia)

It was the early Greeks who first recognized now parallax could be used to the measure distances to astronomical objects and indeed it was a Greek mathematician named Hipparchus who used the width of the Earth itself as his baseline in order to estimate that the Moon’s distance was about 60 times the Earth’s radius. That works out to be about 380,000 kilometers, so he was pretty accurate.

How Hipparchus first determined the distance to the Moon using parallax. (Credit: www.spof.gsfc.nasa.gov)

Still, even using the entire width of the Earth as a baseline the angle formed by the Moon is only about two degrees while that for Venus or Mars at their closest is only about one second of arc. One second of arc is a very small angle but using their telescopes astronomers can measure it and by doing so they could accurately find the distances across our Solar System.

Once astronomers had all of the distances within our Solar System they realized that they now had a newer, much bigger baseline from which to measure the distances to the stars themselves, Earth’s orbit around the Sun. You see if you measure the position of what you think is a nearby star against stars that you think are much further away in June, and then make the same measurement six months later in December the Earth will be on the other side of the Sun from where you made the first measurement. In that way your baseline will be the diameter of Earth’s orbit, about 150,000,000 kilometers. Using this new baseline in 1838 the astronomer Friedrich Bessel made the first measurement of the distance to a star, the star 61 Cygni at a distance of about 105 Trillion kilometers or 11.2 light years.

Astronomers use measurements of a nearby star’s position six months apart in order to measure its distance. (Credit: www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu)

Using Earth’s orbit as their baseline, and with the newest telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers are now able to accurately measure the distances to stars as far away as 10,000 light years. Even with those powerful telescopes however astronomers would still like to be able to extend that baseline farther. To somehow get a telescope well beyond Earth’s orbit.

NASA has begun experimenting with just that using the camera on board the New Horizons space probe, currently 40 times further from the Sun than the Earth is. Therefore using New Horizons as one observation point and a telescope here on Earth as the other would give a baseline of more than 6 billion kilometers, more than 40 times that possible using only telescopes here on Earth.

The New Horizons space probe has visited the most distant object yet, Arrokoth. Because NASA hopes it may still visit an even further object its cameras are still working, unlike the cameras on the two Voyager space probes. (Credit: The Guardian)

On April 22-23 of this year the scientists controlling New Horizons commanded the spacecraft to photograph the areas of the sky containing two of the nearest stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359. Those images were then compared to images of the same regions taken by an Earth bound telescope and the effect of parallax was immediately clear.

Comparing images of Proxima Centauri taken by New Horizons (l) and an Earth bound telescope the parallax of the star is obvious. (Credit: Room The Space Journal -EU.com)

Now the camera onboard New Horizons is neither powerful enough nor accurate enough to be used to make more accurate measurements than the more powerful Earth bound telescopes. This was just an experiment on NASA’s part. It is worth considering however, that if the Hubble space telescope could somehow be placed where New Horizons currently is a combination of it and an Earthbound telescope using parallax would allow astronomers to completely and accurately measure the distance to objects as far away as 400,000 light years.

If Hubble were where New Horizons currently is astronomers could map our entire galaxy using parallax. (Credit: ABC News)

Perhaps in the near future NASA may consider just such a mission. Consider a smaller version of Hubble; say with a one-meter diameter mirror instead of Hubble’s 2.5-meter diameter but a telescope with the same focal length and stability as Hubble. Using flybys of Jupiter and Neptune such a telescope could be placed into an orbit around the Sun beyond Neptune’s where it would be in position to allow astronomers to finally obtain a complete and accurate 3D map of our entire galaxy.

I’ll bet you there’s someone at NASA working up a design right now!