Month: January 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paleontology News for January 2025. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Change and a Review of the Severe Weather of 2025. 

There has always been severe weather, we all know that. In the Odyssey, Odysseus’ ship is destroyed in a storm and he alone survives to be washed up onto the shore of Calypso’ island. History records dozens of battles that have been won or lost because bad weather had damaged one side more than the other. Our modern Climate Change deniers use these facts as an argument against global warming because there’s always been bad weather.

In the Odyssey the hero Odysseus is forced to endure a storm at sea created by the god Poseidon. Many an ancient mariner’s tale deals with severe weather. (Credit: Look and Learn)

The facts say something much different however. Measured values taken around the world tell us that the last ten years have been the hottest ten years ever reliably measured, basically since the late 19th century. In fact 2024 stands as the hottest year ever measured, and is thought to be the hottest year since before the Ice Ages began. Although the data is still coming in it is thought that 2025 was only slightly cooler, and will stand as either the second or third hottest year ever. In fact, if you take the average of 2023, 2024 and 2025 then the Earth’s temperature has for three straight years gone over the +1.5ºC above pre-industrial temperatures that the nations of the world promised to stay below in the Paris accords and above which scientists have warned the world will begin to suffer greatly from climate change.

Global temperatures since the year 2000. A blind man can see where we’re headed, and it isn’t a good place! (Credit: World Meteorological Organization WHO)

So let’s take a look at the severe weather around the globe in 2025 to see if the weather was significantly more destructive than just a couple of decades ago. By a strange coincidence we shall begin and end our survey in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Just a year ago this is what the US’s second largest city looked like. To the climate deniers who say dealing with global warming will ruin the economy, won’t this? (Credit: United Nations University)

As 2025 began southern California was in the midst of yet another drought but thanks to the extreme heat of 2024 this drought was as bad as any ever recorded. When combined with stronger than ever Santa Ana winds, another effect of 2024’s heat, the fires that ignited in Palisades and Eaton exploded, burning for weeks, destroying whole neighborhoods and killing over 400 people. The damage from the LA fires has been estimated at almost $60 billion dollars making it the third costliest disaster in US history. And 2025 was just getting started. By the end of 2025 the US had endured 23 separate disasters each causing over $1 Billion in damage for a total of $115 billion in economic loss!

The number of billion dollar disasters continues to grow as does the cost of the disasters themselves. Again this is an economic cost that will only increase. (Credit: Climate Central)

One undeniable effect of climate change over the last decade or so has been the enormous growth in wildfires around the world. Surprisingly enough the US experienced a fairly normal year for wildfires in 2025 but the same could not be said for our neighbor to the north. In 2025 Canadian wildfires destroyed almost 22 million acres of forest making this year the Second worst in Canada’s history.

The smoke from Canada’s wildfires spread across much of the US impacting the health of millions. (Credit: Newsweek)

The rest of the world suffered as well with the United Kingdom experiencing its worst ever recorded wildfire season. The same was true for Portugal and northwestern Spain along with South Korea while Greece and Turkey saw very bad wildfires, just not quite as bad as the ones they saw in 2024.

The British Isles are not usually thought of as a place threatened by wildfires. However, 2025 was their worst fire season ever recorded. (Credit: Royal Meteorological Society)

Meanwhile drought conditions and heat waves struck many regions of the world not used to such environments while increasing in severity in places where they are more common. The droughts in Syria, Iraq and Iran are especially severe with only a trickle of the once mighty Tigris River remaining. There are even reports that the Iranian government is considering evacuating its capital Teheran, a city of 15 million people because there is just no water remaining in the city’s reservoirs. At the same time the droughts across northern Africa have continued unabated for the last several years with an ever greater number of people being subjected to famine.

Some of the Reservoirs for Iran’s capital Teheran are simply empty. The recent protests in Iran have as much to do with the water shortage as the country’s economic woes. Again, climate change going hand in hand with a bad economy. (Credit: The Globalist)

This year also brought a higher than average tropical storm season but in the Atlantic we got lucky. In the Atlantic there were three Category five hurricanes, tying for the most in any year with 2005, along with one Cat 4 storms but only one Hurricane, Melissa made landfall. Still that one storm caused an enormous amount of damage to Jamaica, Haiti and eastern Cuba. While climate change cannot be named as the cause for any particular storm, nevertheless it has been estimated that Melissa’s winds and rainfall were increased by somewhere between 15-30% due to global warming. In the Pacific on the other hand several Typhoons did make landfall resulting in considerable destruction in the Philippines and South Korea.

We dodged a bullet with respect to hurricanes in 2025. Three big Cat 5 storms but only Melissa made a landfall, doing a great deal of damage. It could have been much worse! (Credit:WPDE)

But of all the different types of severe weather it was probably flooding that caused the most damage in 2025. The most intense floods occurred in Indonesia and India where an estimated 1,800 people died in each event. Another severe flood hit China during June through August killing an estimated 30 people, if you trust Chinese media. Here in the US there were several flooding events, the worst being the Kerr County, Texas flood that killed over 135 people.

In the end over 40 people, many of them children would die because of the intense flooding in Texas over the July 4th weekend. Warmer air can contain more moisture, that’s all there is to it!!! (Credit: YouTube)

There were also floods in the Mississippi valley, the state of Washington and finally, bringing us back to where we began, over the Christmas holidays Los Angeles and other areas of California were hit by extreme rainfalls that caused landslides and much flooding. All told the damage in just the top ten severe weather events in 2025 has been estimated to be over 115 billion dollars, not counting all of the people killed.

Many of the same areas that experienced wildfires in January of 2025 saw flooding in December. Every year the weather just keeps getting worse and will until we stop emitting greenhouse gasses. (Credit: Capital & Main)

This kind of destruction is unprecedented and is growing ever greater as the world’s temperature increases. There is some good news in the fact that renewable energy sources are now so inexpensive that most of the world’s new power generating project are wind or solar. Still in 2025 the human race increased the amount of green house gasses it spewed into the atmosphere. We still are not even trying to control our emissions.

All Roads Lead to Rome the old saying goes, and now Archaeologists have discovered the Romans built a lot more roads than we Thought. 

Although we travel on them every day we scarcely ever think about the roads that lay right outside our door but which can literally take us almost anyplace on Earth. The idea of roads connecting towns and cities together is so natural that we almost forget that every one of them is artificial, man-made, often at great cost and effort.

Throughout history road building has been an expensive but very necessary part of civilization. Those societies that have been successful have always been those who built roads. (Credit: Propeller Aero)

Roads are an essential part of civilization. We humans are a traveling species and whenever we choose to go someplace, or move some of our material goods someplace, roads just greatly facilitate that movement. Stone Age people followed the easiest path they could find but as soon as civilization got started people began making roads between cities to speed up travel and trade.

As our ancestors spread around the globe they followed the natural paths made by animals or streams. Since the dawn of civilization however we have built roads to speed up our travel. (Credit: SUGI Project)

Historically we know of roads that existed from the Bronze Age. One road in particular went north out of Egypt to the town of Megiddo in northern Israel, the biblical Armageddon. There the road split with one branch continuing north to the Hittite empire in Modern Turkey while the other branch went east into ancient Mesopotamia.

One of the most ancient and important roads split at a small town called Megiddo. So important was this site that Megiddo was fought over time and again so that, by its Greek name Armageddon it has become a byword for the final battle to end time. (Credit: Wayne Stiles)

The Romans were famous road builders; wherever their legions went in their conquests they built roads. Every legion possessed at least one officer who was trained as an engineer so that the army could build roads and bridges. One of the strengths of the legion was its speed and the legions got that speed by means of the roads they built throughout the empire. Now I’m not saying that the Roman foot soldiers did all the work of road building, sometimes they did but just as often they forced the local population to do most of the menial labour.

The Romans not only built a lot of roads they built really good roads, many of which were so well built that they have lasted thousands of years. (Credit: ZME Science)

The Romans built their roads so that their army could quickly move from place to place but once built those same roads could be used to transport people and goods from place to place in the Roman Empire. In fact for much Roman period the roads away from the frontiers rarely saw a legionary’s sandal, most of the traffic consisted of the wheels of carts or the hooves of livestock.

The Romans were proud of their accomplishments at road building, even picturing traffic on them in stone carvings. (Credit: web.sas.upenn.edu)

Roman roads were so well built that there are still hundreds of kilometers of Roman road remaining in various countries of Europe. At the same time many modern roads in Europe follow the same route as an old Roman road. Roman roads knitted together an empire of dozens of different ethnic groups and kept them knitted together for hundreds of years.

The major Roman roads that brought their empire together. (Credit: www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de)

Historians and archaeologists have studied Roman roads for hundreds of years now, in some sense since the fall of Rome itself. Recently a new study in the journal Scientific Data has been published that catalogues over 300,000 km of Roman road, 100,000 more than previously known. The study was led by Dr. Pau de Soto of the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain and includes an interactive map of the study’s result that has been christened Itiner-e. The interactive map is available for use by the public and not only includes the map itself but also images and animations that allow students to visualize the Roman roads in the empire’s heyday about 150CE.

An actual Roman road that still exists in England after thousands of years. It still looks quite usable. (Credit: Roman Britain.Org)

While many of the principal Roman roads, like the Appian Way in Italy were well known the study concentrated on the secondary routes connecting small towns or even individual farms and villas. Along with historical references the researchers made extensive use of satellite images and even old WW2 aerial photographs looking for traces like a roadcut through a hillside or differences in vegetation forming a linear tract. According to co-author Tom Brughmans the effort became “A massive game of connecting the dots on a continental scale.”

The allies in WW2 took thousands of aerial photographs like this one. Today these images are a treasure trove of information for historical researchers such as those searching for lost Roman Roads. (Credit: The Digital Collections of the National WWII Museum)

While the study dealt exclusively with Roman roads it must be remembered that Roman infrastructure also consisted of bridges, seaports, aqueducts and many other structures. Like the Roman roads some of these engineering projects still exist today and can be seen in many places in Europe. At its height the Roman Empire possessed a level of technology that the world would not see again until the 17th century. The ancient Romans were of course followed by the Dark Ages and some of the reasons why that era was so dark was because of the collapse of the Roman infrastructure, especially the Roman roads.

Today’s Portugal was at the far end of the Roman empire but even here the Romans built roads and bridges that are still used today! Perhaps the reason that the Roman Empire lasted so long was simply because of good engineering! (Credit: Following Hadrian)
Compare this road in Minnesota with the Roman road pictured above. We have neglected our roads the way we have neglected so much in the US today and so our empire is likely to collapse a lot sooner than the Roman’s did! (Credit: MinnPost)

In the US today we have neglected our infrastructure for the last 50 years, allowing our roads and bridges to fall into disrepair while failing to replace water pipes and our electrical grid. If we continue on this course it’s likely that we too will fall the way the Romans did leading to another Dark Age.