Month: January 2022

Space News for January 2022: The James Webb Space Telescope

Launched on Christmas day, the 25th of December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has so far performed flawlessly. For that launch the telescope’s enormous mirror and tennis court sized sunshield had to be folded up in order to fit inside the nose cone of the Arian 5 rocket. Once in outer space the unfolding and deployment of the various parts of the space telescope would constitute the most complex and delicate remote operation ever carried out by a spacecraft. Engineers involved spoke about Webb’s self-assembly as having thirty ‘single points of failure’. That is at thirty different places in its deployment process where if a failure occurred the $10 billion dollar telescope was simply a failure.

The Start of what is so far a perfect mission. The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope aboard an Arian 5 rocket from French Guiana. (Credit: The Guardian)

The launch itself was of course one of those single points. The Arian 5 rocket however has become the workhorse of the European Space Agency and it did its job of placing Webb not only into orbit but also on a trajectory for the L2 Lagrangian point on the other side of the Earth from the Sun. See my post of 6 January 2017 for a description of the Lagrangian points. From that location Webb will be in a stable position where it can use its sunshield to permanently protect its delicate instruments from the heat of the Sun.

To protect the telescope’s main mirror and instruments (top) from the Sun’s heat the James Webb Space Telescope sits atop five tennis court sized heat shields (bottom). (Credit: Extreme Tech)

And Webb’s Cameras and other instruments need to be shielded from the Sun because, unlike the Hubble space telescope the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to photograph astronomical objects in the infrared (IR) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Astronomers have for a long time wished for a large space telescope the operates in the IR which will allow them to be able to see through the gas clouds in our galaxy to the places where stars are being born or where the remnants of recent supernova explosions are hiding.

Visible Light is only a small portion of the Electromagnetic Spectrum. Observing the Universe in Infrared light is becoming more and more important in astronomy. (Credit: Quora)

Most importantly however, because of the expansion of the Universe, the light from the very first stars and galaxies has been ‘red-shifted’ so that they are invisible to Hubble. It is these first stars and galaxies that Webb is designed to study, giving astronomers for the first time observations of how the early universe went from the fiery chaos of the big bang to the myriad of astronomical objects we see today.

Objects that are moving away from us have their light shifted towards the red while objects moving at us have their light shifted towards the blue. This is called the Doppler effect and because of the expansion of the Universe objects that existed long ago have their light shifted all the way into the Infrared. (Credit: Byjus)

Shortly after its launch Webb deployed both its antennas and solar array in order for it to both have power and be able to communicate with its ground controllers. These two steps are necessary for nearly every space satellite however so even though a problem at either one of these steps could have led to a total failure engineers were confident that all would go well.

The James Webb space telescope all packed up and ready for launch. All of the various parts of the telescope had to be unfolded and deployed while the spacecraft was traveling to its final destination in space. (Credit: NASA)

The risky operations began with the unfurling and tightening of the five sheets that constituted the sunshield. Each sheet is about the size of a tennis court and made of highly reflective material. The five sheets are necessary not only to provide enough insulation to keep the instruments cool but also to act as protection for the telescope from micrometeorites. The control engineers at John’s Hopkins University in Baltimore took their time with the sunshield because such an operation had never before been attempted in space. The unfurling began on the third day after launch and took nearly a week in total.

The Control Room for the James Webb Space Telescope at John’s Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. (Credit: Phys.org)

Once the sunshield was fully deployed the next critical operation was the deployment of the telescope’s secondary mirror that sits out in front of the main mirror and reflects the light gathered by the main mirror back to where the telescope’s instruments are. The deployment of the secondary mirror occurred on day 11 and although the operation only took a few minutes you can be certain those were nerve wracking minutes for all of NASA for if the secondary mirror failed to lock into its proper position the entire telescope would be useless. The deployment of the secondary mirror went off without any problems however.

The secondary mirror (Right, Above) was one of the most critical steps in the setup of James Webb. After that the two main mirror side panels were also deployed. (Credit: BBC)

At this point only the deployment of the two side panels of the telescope’s main mirror remained to be accomplished. Each of the two side panels held three of the main mirror’s 18 hexagonal sections. The left side panel was successfully deployed on day 11 after launch while the right side panel was deployed the next day.

Once the two side panels were locked into position the riskiest part of the Webb’s deployment was accomplished and the NASA team who had built and launched the telescope could breath a sigh of relief. Nevertheless there’s still plenty to do before the telescope can begin its mission of observing the Universe. For one thing each of the 18 hexagonal main mirror sections have to be precisely focused by its own set of actuator motors in order for all of the sections to act together as one big mirror. This operation is no longer a single point of failure however for Webb can still operate even if a single mirror section is out of position.

On its long journey out to its L2 final destination the James Webb Space Telescope went though a large number of critical stages.(Credit: James Webb Space Telescope)

Nevertheless the launch and configuration in space of the James Webb Space Telescope has gone amazingly well so far. On the 25th of January the space telescope successfully reached its L2 home and is now exactly where its mission planners intended, another few months of instrument alignment and calibration and Webb will be ready to begin its mission. There is every reason to hope that it won’t be long before the Webb space telescope will be showing us parts of our Universe that we never imagined existed.

New Study claims that Dogs can recognize different Languages.

Several times in these posts I have mentioned how it seems that every time scientists study the intelligence of animals they discover that the creatures we share this planet with are a lot smarter than we ever thought they were. A case in point is a new paper from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest Hungary. The study was conceived by post-Doctoral neuroethologist Laura Cuaya when she moved to Budapest from her hometown of Mexico City with her eight year old dog Kun-Kun, a border collie.

Once it was thought that only humans used tools but now we known that many different types of animals have the intelligence to do so. Maybe we should stop making jokes about Bird brains! (Credit: BBC)

Settling in to her new home Doctor Cuaya wondered if Kun-Kun, who had been exposed to only Spanish during his life, was aware that the people around him were now speaking a different language. Now Doctor Cuaya had used Kun-Kun in some of her experiments before, training the collie to sit still inside an MRI machine while she showed the dog various items and recording the way Kun-Kun’ brain reacted to different stimuli.

Doctor Cuaya with her dog Kun-Kun. (Credit: Yahoo)

For the study Doctor Cuaya put Kun-Kun in an MRI and played a woman’s voice reciting a line from the story ‘The Little Prince’ in both Spanish and Hungarian and following that with a few words that were totally nonsense. Both the words and the speaker were unfamiliar to Kun-Kun. While the voice spoke to the dog the MRI recorded how the animal’s brain reacted.

Good Boy! Kun-Kun preparing for another test. (Credit: CNN)

She then performed the same experiment with seventeen other dogs aged three to eleven years old. The breeds of the dogs were five golden retrievers; six border collies, two Australian shepherds, one labradoodle, one cocker spaniel and three dogs of mixed breeds. One of the dogs, like Kun-Kun had only ever heard Spanish while the other sixteen were native Hungarian dogs. All of the dogs had been trained previously to sit quietly in the MRI and none were confined in any way during the tests.

Kun-Kun and his friends. We do a great deal of research on dogs that they simply can’t understand the purpose of. Did you ever wonder why they go along with it? (Credit: SciTechDaily)

The results were striking, not only were the dogs able to distinguish ‘their ‘ own familiar language from the foreign one, as evidenced by different areas of the brain reacting, but they could also differentiate the foreign language from the nonsense words. According to co-author Doctor Attila Andics, the head of the department of ethology at Eotvos Lorand. “The interesting thing here is that there was a difference in the brain response to the familiar and unfamiliar language.”

You may not know either German or Chinese but you can still tell the difference between them. Apparently even Dogs have some of that ability. (Credit: Citywealth)

The study also discovered some differences in the dogs who were better able to make the distinction in the languages. The first thing that the researchers noticed was the older the dog was the more pronounced was the difference in their brain function between their ‘native’ language and the foreign language. It seems therefore that, as opposed to the old adage ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ dogs do in fact continue to learn the language of the people around them throughout their lives.

On the TV show Mythbusters they tested the old adage ‘You Can’t Teach an Old Dog new Tricks’ and found that old dogs still have a few tricks left in them! (Credit: Facebook)

The scientists also noticed one other, even more unexpected thing, the dogs with the longer snouts also proven to be better able to distinguish the different languages. Doctor Cuaya speculates that the dogs with the longer snouts were mainly sheep dogs for whom being better attuned to human language, human commands is a part of their breeding.

Sheep dogs, this one even looks like Kun-Kun, have to learn to carry out a number of their masters voice commands. Does that make them better at recognizing foreign languages? (Credit: K9 of Mine)

Dog owners have always known just how smart their four legged friends can be. And like anyone the more opportunity you give a dog to be smart the smarter they will become. As doctor Cuaya puts it, “Out results show that dogs learn from their social environments, even when we don’t teach them directly. So just continue involving your dogs in your family, and give them opportunities to continue learning.” I think that pretty much says it all don’t you?

For Decades Astronomers and Physicists have been thinking that Dark Matter is made up some kind of exotic sub-atomic particle. Maybe they’re wrong, maybe Dark Matter is made up of ordinary matter but in objects that don’t shine.

Let me begin today but reminding everyone of the problem of Dark Matter. Over the last 70-80 years as astronomers studied the dynamic behavior of the galaxies they found that the gravity of the objects that they could see, i.e. the stars that shined, was not sufficient to account for the way galaxies moved. There had to be some form of missing mass, some kind of dark matter in galaxies in order to explain their dynamics.

The Rotation speeds of stars in the spiral arms of galaxies, top curve, do not fit the expected speeds based on the matter that we can see, bottom curve. Dark Matter is the generic term for whatever was causing the difference. (Credit: Wikipedia)


Back in the 1980s when I was an undergraduate the ideas about Dark Matter had basically coalesced into two types of matter. These two classes of matter were given the corny names of Machos, meaning Mass Concentrations, and WIMPS meaning Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. Mass Concentrations were thought to be composed of ordinary particles like protons, neutrons and electrons and could be anything from small black holes to dark stars, given the name brown dwarfs, or even smaller objects like planets.

Too small to be a star yet too big to be a planet the question is, just how many Brown Dwarfs are there in the spaces between the stars? (Credit: Space News)


Now astronomers didn’t like the idea of having to look between the stars for small objects that didn’t shine by their own light, so they didn’t like Machos. Let’s face it telescopes are the main tool of astronomers and telescopes gather light from objects that shine like stars.

Telescopes gather a large amount of light, more than our eyes do, as well as magnifying an image. But objects that don’t emit or reflect light can’t be seen in a telescope no matter how powerful it is! (Credit: Meade)


On the other hand physicists loved the idea of WIMPs because at the time they were coming up theories of ‘Supersymmetry’ that predicted the existence of a large number of massive particles some of which could be WIMPs. So starting in the 1990s Machos were largely ignored while everybody went looking for WIMPs either in outer space or at the big atom smashers like the Tevatron at Fermilab or the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Physicists are searching for ‘Physics beyond the Standard Model’. Some of that physics could be Dark Matter. (Credit: Phys.org)


Problem is that after thirty years of searching no particles that could be WIMPs have been found. And now it seems that the wind has shifted and maybe it’s time to take another look at Machos.

The James Webb Space Telescope is designed to observe the Universe in the infrared portion of the EM spectrum. This will enable it to search for both Brown Dwarfs and Rogue Planets helping astronomers get a better idea of their numbers. (Credit: Space.com)


For one thing astronomers have new, bigger, better instruments that are more capable of looking for objects that don’t shine at visible wavelengths. Just a few months ago I published a post about how astronomers are beginning to discover large numbers of Brown Dwarf stars, objects too big to be called planets but too small to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores so they do not shine like a star. See my post of 22 September 2021.

Just a few of the observatory domes that make up the European Southern Observatory high in the mountains of Chile. (Credit: Physics World)


Now a new study from the European Southern Observatory in Chile and Bordeaux University has announced the discovery of as many as 170 rouge planets, that is planets that do not orbit any star but rather move through the Milky Way all on their own. The rogue planets were discovered in a star forming region of the galaxy relativity close to our solar system in the constellations of Scorpius and Ophiuchus.

As one of the zodiacal signs Scorpius is a well known constellation but nearby Ophiuchus is also a very interesting part of the sky. The stellar nursery where the Rogue Planets were discovered lays between these two constellations. (Credit: International Astronomical Union)


It was the fact that the rogue planets were very young, and therefore still warm that enabled the astronomers to find them in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Even so the astronomers at Bordeaux had to shift through observations accumulated over 20 years and still aren’t certain how many rogue planets they’ve found, the best estimate being 70 to 170 Jupiter sized worlds.

How many Rogue Planets are out there? It’s difficult to say because, once they’ve cooled down from their formation they are nearly impossible to find! (Credit: The Verge)


Still if the star forming regions in space are also producing large numbers of solitary planets who knows how many older rogue planets there could be between the stars. Could there be as many rogue planets as there are stars? Or maybe even more? Finding out just how many rogue planets there really are could be a difficult task, remember once the planet cools down like our earth did after a few million years they’ll be almost impossible to find.

Actual image of a Rogue Planet that is so young that it is still warm enough to be visible. (Credit: Colorado College Sites)


And there’s one more candidate for a Macho because the possibility that there could be large numbers of small, ‘primordial’ black holes in the Universe is once again being seriously discussed. These would be black holes with a mass that of a planet that formed in the first seconds after the big bang and have just been floating around ever since then. Such black holes would also be very difficult to find, unless of course one of them came inside our solar system.

Primordial Black Holes could have been formed a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. How many are out there? Your guess is as good as mine. (Credit: Owlcation)


So maybe we don’t need physics beyond the standard model in order to explain Dark Matter. If there are a lot more Brown Dwarfs than we ever imagined, more Rogue Planets and more primordial Black Holes maybe Dark Matter is just protons, neutrons and electrons in objects that don’t shine by their own light.
Machos may not be as exciting as WIMPs, but reality is what it is and after thirty years of failing to find any exotic elementary particles maybe we need to give Machos a rethink!

Book Review: ‘Limits to Growth’ Thirty Year Update by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows.

When ‘Limits to Growth’ was first published back in 1972 the very idea that a computer program could, let alone should be used to predict an end to what everyone considered to be human progress upset a great number of people. After all, in the years following the end of World War 2 the world had seen unprecedented growth. Hundreds of millions of people in the developed countries of the world, the middle class, had achieved a level of material wealth beyond that of even the very rich just a few generations earlier. Automobiles, homes in the suburbs, vacations in far off places by air travel and, perhaps best of all television were just the more visible signs of a progress that it seemed would never end.

All of the material things we want out of life can be summed up in the word PROSPERITY. So can too much prosperity actually be a bad thing? (Credit: The Place Brand Observer)
Front Cover of a first edition of ‘Limits to Growth’ back in 1972. (Credit: Amazon)

In fact one of the most criticized aspects of ‘Limits to Growth’ was the fact that the authors used all of that evidence of progress as a sign that ‘the end was near’! The faster the rate of progress, the higher the speed of growth they maintained the sooner human civilization will smack into one or another of the limits imposed by a finite Earth like a speeding car hitting a brick wall.

This is what can happen when you pay too much attention to your desires and to little to your surroundings! Is modern civilization too concentrated on economic growth whatever the long-term cost? (Credit: Giphy)

And to be honest ‘Limits to Growth’ is in many ways an expansion of and refinement of the old model of Thomas Malthus who in his 1798 essay ‘On the Principle of Population’ pointed out that since population increases geometrically while the supply of food only increases arithmetically when times are good it isn’t long before there comes a crash and large numbers of people starve. But of course Malthus was wrong, everybody knows that, the world’s population today is nearly ten times what it was in his day and yet now most people are better fed than they were 250 years ago. So Malthus was wrong, end of story.

Advances in technology over the last two hundred years has allowed human civilization to avoid the dilemma posed by Thomas Malthus in 1798. But the obvious fact is that there is only so much of planet Earth we can exploit. The Malthusian choice still lies ahead of us. (Credit: Today in Science History)

That was fifty years ago when the first edition of ‘Limits to Growth’ was published. Since that time the pace of the world’s economic growth has slowed and much of what the authors suggested might happen is in fact occurring. Notice I said suggested might happen, not predicted, throughout the book the authors try to make it clear that they are not in the business of predicting the future. Rather they, and their computer analysis, are trying to assess possible futures.

As society and its economy grows it uses the Earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate. If we don’t learn to use our planet in a more sustainable fashion collapse will be the only outcome! (Credit: ResearchGate)

And most of all what the authors warn us about is that our modern civilization, unlike that of Malthus, has many limits, not just food production. And in the last fifty years agricultural land degradation, decreasing fish stocks have occurred alongside declining reserves of oil and gas and increasing pollution and greenhouse gas induced climate change. As our technology has grown so has the number of limits that we are approaching. Whether it be non-renewable resources like oil or renewable ones that are being overused like fish stocks, or if it’s the buildup of pollutants far faster than the environment has a chance to clean them up there are now so many limits that technology and a free market can’t fix all of the problems at the same time.

Modern technology has allowed fishermen to catch an ever increasing percentage of the fish in the ocean. The result is that it seems as if we now have more fishing boats than fish left to catch!(Credit: Kuli Kuli Foods)
And as our economy grows so does the amount of crap we just throw away. The Earth cannot handle all of our pollution so it has become another limit to our growth. (Credit: The Conversation)

So the authors of the original ‘Limits to Growth’ have published an update, including much of the data that has been gathered over the last 50 years and modifying their program by assessing what it was they got right back in 1972, and what they got wrong. And it’s important to point out that the author’s conclusions aren’t all doom and gloom. In fact the last two chapters of ‘Limits to Growth’ are devoted to the development of a sustainable society, there’s that word sustainable that we hear about all the time nowadays. Well the authors of ‘Limits to Growth’ were talking about a sustainable future 50 years ago and it’s still the best hope of avoiding a crash.

The UN has published a series of goals for the development of a sustainable future. Have you heard about them, very few people have! (Credit: The SustainabilityX Magazine)

As I said above, growth over the last 50 years has become strained; in much the same fashion that ‘Limits to Growth’ suggested it would it its first edition. Time is now running out, we can either choose to limit our growth ourselves, to achieve a sustainable society, or we can continue to proceed as we have the last 300 years and crash into one or more of the limits that nature will soon impose upon us. ‘Limits to Growth’ is a book that needs to be read, needs to be talked about, and needs to be understood today, because there’s precious little time left.

Paleontology News for January 2022: Start the New Year with a baby Dinosaur still in its shell and the largest ‘Bug’ that ever lived.

Dinosaur eggs are as you might guess among the rarest of fossils and eggs with a nearly hatched baby dinosaur still inside the rarest of the rare. For that reason alone the discovery of an almost perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo from the late cretaceous is newsworthy. The egg was found in the southern region of China called Ganzhou and is the subject of a new paper by paleontologists at the China University of Geosciences in Beijing and the University of Birmingham in the UK. The embryo has been identified as belonging to a species of toothless theropod dinosaur of the genus Oviratorosaur that is thought to be closely related to the early birds. The unhatched baby dinosaur has even been given the name ‘Yingliang’.

Preserved for millions of years this poor little baby dinosaur never even got a chance to be born. But it has given us the opportunity to learn a great deal about the relationship between dinosaurs and birds. (Credit: BBC Science Focus Magazine)

But as the researchers cleaned and prepared their specimen they quickly realized that their find was even more important, for the position of the baby dino inside its egg was unlike that of other known dinosaur embryos but identical to that of modern birds shortly before they hatch. The position is known as ‘tucking’ where the baby chick puts its back to the blunt side of the egg and tucks its head between its legs.

Looking every bit like a baby chick waiting to be hatched Yingliang’s position right before its birth is exactly the way baby birds prepare to break out of their shells. (Credit: The Indian Express)

This ‘tucking’ posture has long been thought to be a unique in birds but the evidence of Yingliang clearly shows that that it must have evolved much earlier and that at least some dinosaurs also acquired the behavior. According to Professor Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh who was a part of the research team: “This little pre-natal dinosaur looks just like a baby bird curled in its egg, which is yet more evidence that many features characteristic of today’s birds first evolved in their dinosaur ancestors.”

Though many of the details remain to be worked out there is little doubt that dinosaurs still live, we just call them birds! (Credit: New Haven Register)

But even as the dinosaurs were evolving into our modern birds other types of reptiles were returning to the seas in much the same fashion as today’s whales and dolphins did millions of years later. The most diverse of these aquatic reptiles were the Ichthyosaurs, literally fish-reptiles who swam Earth’s oceans throughout the time of the dinosaurs. Although shaped like fish, ichthyosaurs were air breathing reptiles some of whom at least are known to have given birth to live young.

Despite their appearance Ichthyosaurs were air breathing reptiles just as modern dolphins and porpoises are air breathing mammals. Evolution once again trying the same idea over and over again! (Credit: New Scientist)

 Now a new fossil discovered in the Fossil Hill Member of the Augusta Mountains in Nevada is giving the ichthyosaurs a new record, that of being the first animals to reach gigantic, whale sized proportions. Excavated and studied by paleontologists from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County the species has been given the name Cymbospondylus youngorum and based upon the bones of it’s skull, forefin, shoulder and part of its backbone the animal probably reached a full length of 17 meters, the size of a modern Sperm Whale. And like the Sperm Whale C youngorum was a predator, probably living off of ammonites, those extinct relatives of squid and octopus whose fossils have been found in abundance in the same rocks as C youngorum.

The skull of Cymbospondylus youngorum compared to one of the researchers at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. A reptile version of a Whale! (Credit: KOLO)

The Fossil Hill deposits in Nevada have been dated to the mid-Triassic period some 246 million years ago which makes them only a few million years after the very first ichthyosaurs took to the oceans. That such a huge creature could evolve so quickly is amazing, it took the ancestors of the whales nearly ten times as long to become the giants that we know today.

C youngorum would have been about the size of our modern Sperm Whale but it appears to have evolved much quicker. (Credit: Newsweek)

In fact ichthyosaurs and cetaceans have other characteristics in common as well including the fact that each family of animals first appeared shortly after a mass extinction event. In fact the similarities are so close that Dr. Eva Maria Griebeler of the University of Mainz in Germany is doing a comparative study of the evolution of ichthyosaurs and whales in an effort to better understand the process of evolution in general.

Doctor Eva Maria Griebeler of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. Dr. Griebeler is an Evolutionary Ecologist, sounds like a fun job to me! (Credit: Johannes Gutenberg University)

And speaking of big animals my final story for this month concerns a specimen of the largest ever discovered fossil bug. Now to be honest the term ‘bug’ is really only supposed to apply to insects of the order Hemiptera, insects like Aphids, Cicadas and Bed Bugs and the fossil we’re talking about isn’t even an insect, it’s a millipede, but the media has insisted on calling it “the biggest bug that ever lived” and who am I to argue.

A portion of the fossil of the giant millipede discovered at Howick Bay in northern England. (Credit: Sci-News.com)

The fossil was discovered in a chunk of sandstone that broke off from a cliff along the beach at Howick Bay in Northumberland in Northern England. According to Neil Davies, a professor of Geology at the University of Cambridge the fossil was found by a former doctoral student. “It was a complete fluke of a discovery.”

Eroding cliffs like these at Howick in northern England are often excellent locations for finding fossils. (Credit:UK Fossils)

The fossil belongs to a genus of millipedes known as Arthropleura, of which two smaller specimens are known from Germany. The specimen from Northumberland measured some 55 cm in width and 2.63 meters in length and could have weighted as much as 50 kilograms. And if you think that’s a big bug there’s more because the paleontologists at Cambridge think that the fossil they found is just the molt of an animal, the discarded outer skin of an arthropod that would grow even bigger before its new skin hardened. Such empty shells usually break apart shortly after molting so to find a complete specimen is remarkable.

The fossil discovered at Howick may be the largest specimen of Arthropleura discovered but several other, very large fossils have also been unearthed. (Credit: Reddit)

And remarkable is a good word for all of the fossils I’ve described this month. Today’s Earth contains many wield and wonderful lifeforms but the more we look at the past the more remarkable whole the history of life becomes.

E. O. Wilson, Harvard Evolutionary Biologist and Ant-Man dies at the age of 92.

Edward O. Wilson, one of the leading thinkers on evolution and the natural world during the 20th and early 21st centuries died on the 26th of December at the age of 92. Throughout his 46 year career at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology Wilson used his study of ant behavior and ant society as a foundation for wide ranging theories on the evolution of animal behavior and societies.

Edward O. Wilson with some of his favourite critters. (Credit: Live Science)

E. O. Wilson was born on the 10th of June in 1929 in the city of Birmingham in Alabama. Wilson’s parents divorced when he was just eight years old and because his father moved frequently looking for work Wilson had few friends and spent much of his time outdoors observing the natural world around him. So began the habits of a lifetime of zoological research. A fishing accident at age seven left him partially blind in one eye but his one good eye was all he needed to discover at age 13 the first nest of invasive fire ants, Solenopsis invicta found in the United States near Mobile, Alabama. Wilson’s observational skills were so well regarded that several years later, while still a graduate student at the University of Alabama Wilson was hired by the State Conservation Department to monitor the spread of his fire ants, which were already becoming a serious pest. After receiving his Masters degree from the University of Alabama Wilson was admitted to Harvard University as a doctoral candidate.

Fire Ants are an invasive species here in the U. S. and a serious problem in the southern states. Many people do not know that ants, like their relatives the wasps and bees, have stingers with which they do most of their fighting. The sting of a fire ant is especially painful. (Credit: NPR)

As a naturalist Wilson is credited with the discovery that ants communicate by means of chemical scents called pheromones. At the same time he was a pioneer in the field of ecology, coining the term biodiversity. Wilson was also the author of more than two dozen books on popular science, winning two Pulitzer prizes.

E. O. Wilson authored some two dozen books winning a Pulitzer prize for ‘On Human Nature’ while stirring up a considerable amount of controversy. (Credit: Amazon.com)

One experiment that Wilson carried out has become a bedrock of ecology. Wilson postulated that the number of species living on a island depended solely on the size of the island and would remain constant even though the variety of the species could change with time. In 1968 he and his fellow naturalist Daniel Simberloff made a detailed examination of six small islands, several only a few meters across, in Florida Bay counting all of the insect species on each island. They then exterminated all of the insects by fumigation. Checking back eight months later Wilson and Simberloff found that all of the islands had been repopulated, often with different species, but critically the same number of species of insects as before. This concept has since been applied to many different environments from lakes to mountain peaks to prairies to rivers. The very idea of habitat loss due to human activity leading to species extinction is derived from Wilson’s theory.

One of the Florida Islands Wilson and Simberloff used in their Ground Breaking Experiment being prepared for fumigation. (Credit: Don’t Forget the Roundabouts)

Over his long career Wilson was often referred to as the 20th century’s Charles Darwin and like his predecessor Wilson became deeply involved in several controversies. Wilson was a young professor at Harvard when Watson and Crick discovered the shape of the DNA molecule. Buoyed by his success James Watson began pushing for nothing less than the replacement of zoology with biochemistry and genetics as the main thrust of biology. Naturalists like E.O. Wilson were nothing more than stamp collectors Watson declared, the future of biology lay in unlocking the secrets of DNA. Of course zoology hasn’t gone away, and Wilson’s work in ecology and biodiversity are a big part of zoological studies today.

Co-Discoverer of the shape of the DNA molecule James Watson was a controversial figure throughout his life. He and E. O. Wilson butted heads many times over the future of biology. (Credit: The Atlantic)

The second controversy that Wilson was a part of dealt with his theories of sociobiology, his ideas about the effect of evolution on the social behavior of animals, including human beings. Many people saw Wilson’s ideas as a justification for racism, sexism and just social violence and hatred in general. Things got so bad that when Wilson was scheduled to speak at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1978 one of his detractors went so far as to pour a pitcher of water over him. Wilson dried himself off and went on with his planned speech. This argument over nature versus nurture is of course one of the oldest in biology but it’s still surprising how some people forget that studying ‘bad things’, trying to understand how they got inside all of us, doesn’t mean that you approve of or condone them.

Darwin’s Bulldog Thomas Huxley (l) and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (r) held a famous debate in 1860 over the Theory of Evolution. The argument goes on to this day. (Credit: The Guardian)
In much the same way E. O. Wilson’s ideas about the influence of Evolution on Social Behaviour is still controversial. (Credit: Book Depository)

Edward O. Wilson was a giant in the field of biology and evolutionary theory, his insights helped bring order and understanding to the complex web of life here on this planet. If we humans do somehow manage to save the Earth from our own greed and ignorance much of the credit will go to work of E. O. Wilson.

An Inter-Species War breaks out between Dogs and Monkeys in a town in India.

Just a few months ago I published a post that described some of the evidence of an Inter-species war that had been observed by naturalists between Chimpanzees and Gorillas in the Loango National Park in Gabon, see post of September 4th 2021. By war I am not referring to the more typical predator prey relationship such as that between Lions and Zebras. No, the conflict in Gabon was a fight between two different species of ape that competed for many of the same resources. In that respect the war between Chimpanzees and Gorillas resembled many of the wars fought by humans over land or wealth.

When chimps go to war they are both brutal and cunning, after all they are our closest relatives. (Credit: New Scientist)

Now there are reports of another instance of inter-species fighting that has nothing to do with predator-prey nor is it in any way due to a competition over resources. The war that has broken out in Lavool in India, a town with a population of about 5000 located some 500km east of Mumbai, appears to be an act of retaliation by the local monkeys against the town’s dogs.

The town of Lavool in India is just one of thousands of towns in the world’s second most populous nation. (Credit: Yahoo News)

According to local people the fighting began about a month ago when a pack of dogs attacked and killed a young monkey. Since then the monkeys in the area have been taking revenge by snatching any puppy they can get their hands on and carrying them up into a tall tree or the side of a building and dropping them to their death. At least 250 dogs are thought to have perished this way, nearly the entire canine population of Lavool.

A troop of monkeys attach a dog in Lavool. This war seems to have been started by the dogs but it’s the monkeys that have gained the upper hand. (Credit: inf.news)
With their superior cunning the monkeys have taken to snatching up puppies and, climbing to a high place, dropping them to their death! (Credit: Kalam Times)

Such acts of revenge are not unknown among primates. According to Professor Stephanie Poindexter of SUNY in Buffalo whose research deals with primate behavior. “In studies of primates in captivity, in social groups in zoos, we’ve seen that when an individual is attacked in some way, the likelihood of them attacking someone related to their aggressor is higher.” The professor then adds. “Typically, there’s a preference for attacking a third-party associated with the original attacker, as opposed to the actual attacker.” In other words it’s the innocent who suffer.

Whatever kind of war or whoever is fighting it one thing always remains true. (Credit: AZ Quotes)

Even if revenge between individual primates is a well-known phenomenon a war of revenge by a group of primates against a completely different species is something entirely new, and may be getting out of hand. When the local villagers tried to stop the killing of their dogs by capturing the monkeys they failed to seize a single one. In fact several of the villagers were injured during the capture attempts, although whether the injuries happened by accident or because the monkeys were fighting back is unclear.

As Monkeys become more and more used to living in human populated areas their ability, and willingness to take advantage of any situation is increasingly making them more of a problem. (Credit: Pinterest)

However the attempts to seize the monkeys may have caused the primates to think that the humans were allied with the dogs because there are now reports of monkeys attacking children on their way to school. If those reports were true it would be bad for the monkeys. In order to safeguard human children the villagers would certainly begin shooting the monkeys, and it’s a lot easier, and safer to shoot a monkey than it is to catch one.

The Monkey God of Hindu India is Lord Hanuman. To honour their god the people of India would rather live with their country’s monkeys but that may not always be possible. (Credit: Pinterest)

It was once thought that concepts like revenge and war could only be attributed to ‘advanced’ creatures like we humans. However the more we learn about other animals, particularly those more closely related to us, the more advanced they seem, and the less advanced we realize we are.

Movie Review: ‘Don’t Look Up’ on Netflix

For the most part Science Fiction and satire don’t cross paths very often. The best known exception is of the course ‘The Hitcher’s Guide to the Galaxy’ series but aside from those novels satirical science fiction stories and novels are rare and usually light on the satire. I suppose that’s because science fiction is usually an adventure in a completely different world while satire tends to poke fun at the world as it actually is.

The Original and still the best, the ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ took pot shots at everything and everyone. (Credit: Amazon.com)

‘Don’t Look Up’ is a new movie now showing on Netflix that illustrates rather convincingly how science fiction and satire can be combined to produce a story that is both thought provoking, and hilariously funny. Starring Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as two astronomers desperately trying to convince the world of the danger of a comet heading straight at the Earth ‘Don’t Look Up’ takes place in the superficial, instant gratification world of modern society.

Both a straight critique of modern society and an allegory for the threat of Climate Change ‘Don’t Look Up’ is now available on Netflix. (Credit: Netflix)

Lawrence plays Kate Dibiasky, a doctoral candidate in astronomy at Michigan State University who is searching for supernovas in order to measure the expansion of the Universe. (For me a lot of the fun in ‘Don’t Look Up’ consisted of hearing them mention a topic that I’ve blogged about! There were actually quite a few!) Just by accident she discovers a comet. Calling in her advisor Dr. Randell Mindy, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, the two work out the orbit of the comet and realize in horror that it will strike the Earth in 6 months and 17 days.

NASA is busy trying to catalog the orbits of any threatening asteroids in order to give us decades of warning of any danger. But comets can appear without warning with only months before a possible collision. (Credit: Space.com)

The two immediately inform NASA of their fears and once the space agency has confirmed their calculations they are whisked to the White House for a meeting with President Orlean, played by Meryl Streep. Problem is that the President is having a problem getting her Supreme Court candidate past the Senate, it seems he once appeared in a soft corn porn film, so the astronomers have a long wait and little time to brief the President about the crisis.

PhD student Kate Dibiasky, played by Jennifer Lawrence, accidentally discovers the comet while searching for supernova. (Credit: Refinary29)

Once the President is made aware of the situation she decides to “sit tight” and wait for scientists at a more prestigious university like MIT or Princeton to confirm the observation. She’s also worried about the effect of the end of the world on the upcoming midterms.

To President Orlean, Meryl Streep, the end of the world is just another crisis that can hopefully be put off until the next administration. (Credit: CNN)

Away from Washington the two astronomers attempt to get their story out to the people by the media and are scheduled to appear on a network morning show hosted by Bree Evantee and Jack Bremmer, played by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry respectively. While Bree tries to keep the news of a comet destroying our planet light and upbeat Jack seems obsessed with supernovas, “…exploding stars, stars can explode???” he asks Dibiaski.

Yes, stars can explode. This one did about a thousand years ago. (Credit: The Atlantic)

It isn’t long before the story has gone viral with predictable results. President Orlean finally decides to act and deflect the comet because saving the world might help her poll numbers only to have an Elon Musk / Jeff Bezos type character named Peter Isherwell, played by Mark Rylance, suggest that he has a better use for the comet, which is chock full of valuable materials.

There’s been a lot of press coverage of all of the valuable metals there are on the asteroid Psyche, and a lot of crazy, for now, ideas about how to get them. Now it’s great to imagine the technology of the future but we have to solve today’s problems with today’s technology. (Credit: Space.com)

So the comet now becomes a jobs creator and everyone in America soon takes side to either ‘Just Look Up’ or ‘Don’t Look Up’. Those slogans kinda reminded me of ‘Build Back Better’ or ‘Make America Great Again’, which I’m certain is what the writers intended. In order to avoid giving too much away I’ll stop there.

In ‘Don’t Look Up’ the media treats a collision with a comet as just another news story, the same way is actually does treat the threat of Climate Change. (Credit: The Sentinel Assam)

‘Don’t Look Up’ is delightfully funny in places, even having a couple of running jokes that have nothing to do with the comet. At the same time it is a painful reflection of our current shallow, celebrity driven culture. The acting is uniformedly excellent although I was surprised at how hard Meryl Streep tried to be funny, a bit too much for someone playing a President I thought. The special effects worked well on my TV screen, which is one of the advantages of watching a Netflix movie as opposed to seeing one on a big theater screen where CGI can sometimes look cartoonish.

I know this will get me in trouble but I think CGI works much better on the little, i.e. TV screen. In the theater, on the big screen too much CGI starts to look like Bugs Bunny and friends. (Credit: StudioBinder)

All in all ‘Don’t Look Up’ was a fun 2 hours and 18 minutes but I hope that it will be more than that. Maybe it could start a fashion for science fiction satire.

Global Warming Update for December 2021: Tornado outbreaks strike the US twice in a week, in December! And that’s not the worse news!

It’s an easy thing to understand, severe weather, as typified by lightning and tornadoes, normally occurs during the warmer part of the year. That’s not only because warm air just has more energy than cold air does but also because warm air carries a lot of moisture with it. You see, because of what chemists call the latent heat of evaporation, water vapour has a lot of energy associated with it, that’s what makes steam engines so powerful!

It takes more than twice as much heat to boil a gram of water already at 100 degrees C than it does to heat a gram of water at 0 degrees C to 100 degrees C. There’s a lot of energy contained in water vapour, that’s why thunderstorms can be so powerful! (Credit: Coquitlam Weather and Climate)

That’s why for decades the spring and summer months in the great plains states were known as ‘Tornado Alley’ where hot, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico would encounter cool, dry air coming down from Canada. These conditions were perfect for the outbreak of tornadoes and year after year growing up I can recall hearing about the their destructive power in states like Oklahoma, Nebraska and to a lesser extent Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky. That’s the reason why ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is set in Kansas, ’cause that state was ground zero for tornadoes.

What used to be ‘Tornado Alley’ in the US. Thanks to global warming a much larger part of the country now gets to ‘enjoy’ all those twisters. (Credit: Pinterest)
The Wizard of Oz is set in Kansas because everyone knew that tornadoes were a constant threat in that state. (Credit: Gifer)

Not any more, Tornado Alley is now a much bigger place thanks to global warming. This year massive tornado outbreaks happened in the states of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia during the months of February and March, cold months that used to have calm weather in the Deep South. And then in early September there was a tremendous outburst of severe storms in the Delaware valley brought on by the passage of the remnants of hurricane Ida. As they were reporting on that storm the local TV meteorologists kept repeating. ‘This doesn’t happen in the Delaware valley, it just doesn’t happen here!” See my post of 8 September 2021. In all this year the Delaware valley has received over 50 tornado warnings from the National Weather Service, more than were called during the first 50 years of my life.

Now the Delaware valley has become a part of ‘Tornado Alley’ as year after year new records are set for severe storms. (Credit: WPVI)

Still the worst was to come, for on the night of the 10th of December, the first month of winter, a huge mass of warm, moist gulf air pushed its way up the Mississippi river valley. Starting in Arkansas and Mississippi a severe thunderstorm erupted that grew in intensity as the storm pushed northward into Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois. Over 50 tornadoes were spotted across 8 states causing a trail of death and destruction. At the latest count more than 90 people are known to have died and almost as many are still missing.

The town of Mayfield in Kentucky saw the worst of the tornadoes with much of the town being reduced to nothing but rubble! (Credit: NPR)

The greatest destruction took place in Kentucky where the town of Mayfield was virtually wiped out by an EF4 tornado with peak winds of 300 KPH. That tornado is now known to have traveled over 200 km and spent more than two hours on the ground. Indeed, it is possible that the Mayfield tornado may have had the longest track of any measured tornado, anywhere, ever! And again, the commentators who described the chaos on TV kept repeating. “This doesn’t happen in December.”

The tornado struck a candle factory in Mayfield while more than 100 employees were at work. Some were rescued from the wreckage but many were not. (Credit: Reuters)

But it happened again not a week later as on the 15 of December as another gulf air mass pushed its way through Nebraska into Iowa and Minnesota. This storm system only produced about 20 tornadoes causing only 5 known deaths. Still, this doesn’t happen in December.

Only a week after Kentucky was struck by tornadoes another severe storm system ignited from Nebraska through Wisconsin. (Credit: National Weather Service)

We have to get used to the plain fact that when it comes to severe weather all the old ‘rules of thumb’ no longer apply. Global warming is simply putting more energy into the sky and that energy is generating more violent, more destructive weather, everywhere. Unprecedented violent storms have become ‘the new normal’.

Seems we’ve had to learn to live with several ‘New Normals’ the past few years, none of them very pleasant. (Credit: UiO)

And there’s even worse news. For at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) a group of researchers announced on the 13th of December that there is strong evidence that the foundation of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is becoming unstable. This instability could lead to a major breakup of the world’s largest ice formation within three to five years.

Larger than Scotland and averaging more than a kilometre in thickness the Thwaites glacier could cause a sea level rise of a metre or more if it all melted. (Credit: The Sun)

As large as the state of Florida and with ice depths of between 800m and 1 km Thwaites already is pouring an estimated 50 billion tonnes of ice melt into the ocean every year making it responsible for about 4% of current sea level rise. Recent studies however have shown that warm ocean waters have been undercutting the glacier’s foundation and support. Already cracks are appearing on the Thwaites’s surface and the fear is that further undercutting could lead to a massive collapse of the entire glacier.

Warm waters are undercutting the Thwaites glacier. Scientists are now concerned that the whole glacier could become unstable within the next five years. (Credit: Daily Mail)

Such a breakup would be a major disaster for if the entire Thwaites glacier were to slide off into the Antarctic Ocean the result could be a sea level rise of as much as 70 cm! And since Thwaites acts as a roadblock holding back several other large glaciers there is that possibility that a breakup of Thwaites could begin a general destabilization of the whole western part of the Antarctic ice sheet. If that were to occur the resulting rise in sea level could be as much as three meters.

A sea level rise of only one metre (3.3 ft) could submerge a huge portion of the state of Louisiana yet this state is so dependent to the petroleum industry that its members in congress oppose all measures to cut down on carbon emissions. (Credit: Pinterest)

Now such a catastrophe of that scale would not happen overnight but rather over a period of years if not decades. Nevertheless the scientists at the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) are convinced that over the next few years the glacier’s melting will rapidly increase, leading to a large increase in the rate of sea level rise.

The small Louisiana town of Isle de Jean Charles has had to be abandoned due to sea level rise. The people of Isle de Jean Charles are now considered to be America’s first climate refugees. (Credit: NRDC)

Just two more signs that Climate Change is no longer a long term problem, the long term has become the here and now!