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Paleontology News for March 2022: Several New Species that Illustrate the Diversity of Life throughout Earth’s Past.     

If you think about it, the most impressive thing about life here on Earth is its enormous variety. Looking at some of the more unusual species of life around the world makes you wonder just what limits there are to the kind of creature evolution can come up with. Consider the nudibranch and the millipede, the flying squirrel and the flying snake or how ’bout just the duck billed platypus all by itself!

No legs (Nudibranch Left) and many legs (Millipede right) evolution has tried it all! (Credit: Ikelite / ResearchGate)
Flying Squirrel (l) and Flying Snake (r), again how does evolution manage to accomplish the same task in so many different ways? (Credit: Lewisboro Field Guide / New York Post)

It’s hardly surprising therefore that in the long history of life there should be many creatures that are even stranger. As I usually do I’ll begin my discussion of new unusual fossils in the distant past and work my way forward in time.  

Considered to be the top predator of its days Anomalocaris was a strange shrimp indeed! (Credit: Wired)

Many of the strangest creatures ever found have come from the Burgess Shale fossil site in British Columbia. Even the names of some of the species discovered there indicate how strange they are. Anomalocaris (literally strange shrimp) and Halluciogenia (literally a hallucination) are two of the best known but over the last several decades both of these animals have had several related species uncovered in other fossil sites so that the taxonomy of these ‘weird wonders’ is now better understood.

Hallucinogena is another of the wield wonders of the Burgess Shale but like Anomalocaris paleontologists have found other, similar creatures so that they are no longer quite so unique. (Credit: National Geographic)

Not so Opabinia, a five-eyed creature with a backward facing mouth, segmented body with flaps instead of legs and a long elephant-like nose. Although Opabinia had been first described by Walcott in 1912 as an unusual arthropod it was only in 1975 when paleontologist Harry Whittington dissected specimens of the creature using techniques he himself had developed that Opabinia was recognized as the bizarre creature we now know. And in the years since then Opabinia remained a unique creature with no known relatives.

Over the last fifty years however Opabinia has remained unique, no related species of any kind, until now. (Credit: Simple Wikipedia)

Until now, for a reinterpretation of a fossil from the 500 million year old middle Cambrian Wheeler Formation in Utah by lead author Steven Pates of Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology has found another member of Opabinia’s family. The fossil has been named Utaurora comosa and was first described in 2008 as a relative of Anomalocaris.

Despite its proboscis being broken off otherwise Utaurora comosa is quite similar to Opabinia. (Credit: Wikipedia)

While U comosa does possess some similarities to Anomalocaris the re-evaluation by the team at Harvard clearly shows that the species bears a striking resemblance to Opabinia. Unfortunately the anterior nose of U comosa has broken off making an exact comparison to Opabinia’s nose impossible. However there does appear to be enough left to assert that the proboscis of U comosa seems to be smaller. At the same time the tail flaps of U comosa appear slightly different, more fan like.

Looks like a great place to go fossil hunting the Wheeler Formation in Utah is famous for its Cambrian Trilobites! (Credit: Utah Geological Survey – Utah.gov)

The Wheeler Formation is several million years younger than the Burgess shale so perhaps U comosa is a slightly evolved descendant of Opabinia. In any case Opabina is no longer unique, it has a relative and as more such relatives are found the family’s position in the tree of life will become clearer.

Moving about 50 million years into the future the dominant creature of the Silurian seas were giant sea scorpions, formally known as eurypterids. Ancestors to both modern scorpions and spiders, sea scorpions were predators like their descendants and some species grew to over a meter in length making them among the largest of all arthropods.

In some cases as large as a man the Eurypterids were the top predators during the Silurian period. Related to modern scorpions they certainly look quite nasty. (Credit: The Irish Times)

Now a new species of eurypterid has been identified in Australia that is the largest specimen discovered in the land down under. The fossil itself had been unearthed years ago and left stored in the Queensland Museum in Australia but only recently has it been thoroughly examined. Realizing that the fossil was that of an eurypterid the creature is estimated to have been as much as a meter in length and has been given the formal name of Woodwardopterus freemanorum.

The Fossilized head of Woodwardopterus freemanorum was lying unexamined in a museum drawer for decades before someone realized just what it was. (Credit: Phys.org)
Artists impression of what W freemanorum looked like. (Credit: List23)

Of course even the largest creatures of the Cambrian and Silurian periods were small compared to the later dinosaurs. And the largest, best known predator from the age of the dinosaurs was the famous Tyrannosaurus rex or just T rex. One thing about the T rex that sooner or later everybody finds curious are the two tiny, seemingly useless arms that the giant meat eater possessed. Did those petite appendages have any use at all or were they vestigial organs, like our own appendix, useless but not yet eliminated by evolution.

Ever since it was first discovered paleontologists have wonder what, if anything T rex did with those tiny arms! (Credit: DW)

Now a new species of large predatory dinosaur has been discovered in the Los Blanquitos Formation in the Amblayo region in the north of Argentina whose arms are comparatively even shorter than T rex’s. Named Guemesia ochoai by its discoverers from the Natural History Museum in London the animal belongs to a family of dinosaurs called the abelisaur who were distantly related to the Tyrannosaurs that roamed North America at approximately the same time.

A South American relative of T rex Guemesia ochoai possessed even smaller, and presumably less useful arms. (Credit: Phys.org)

As a group abelisaurs were 5 to 10 meters in length and used their powerful heads and jaws to seize and kill their victims. The researchers who described G ochoai were not exactly certain of the creature’s size because the specimen they unearthed could have been a Juvenal. The major difference between the abelisaurs and the northern Tyrannosaurs was that the southern theropods had shorter, deeper skulls that often bore crests or bumps on it.

The major difference between the southern abelisaurs and T rex and its relative appears to be a shorter face and bumps on the skull. (Credit: Blogtuan.info)

 Regardless of the actual adult size of G ochoai that fact that large, predatory dinosaurs on two continents both evolved arms that were so small as to be practically useless tells us a lot about the way they attacked their prey. If you think about it however, in our modern world wolves take down their prey without using their forelegs, it’s all just teeth and jaws.

For great white Sharks it’s all about teeth and jaws. Maybe it was the same for both T rex and G ochoai so that their arms just got smaller and smaller. (Credit: 9news)

So maybe the animals from the past weren’t that different from those of today, they faced the same challenges and came up with pretty much the same solutions.

Physicists continue to study Neutrinos, the ghost elementary particle, hoping it will lead them to Physics beyond the Standard Model. The KATRIN experiment has now given us our best estimate for the maximum mass of a neutrino.      

The Standard Model of particle physics has several problems. For one thing it simply doesn’t contain gravity in any way. Another problem is the masses of all the particles. For example the muon resembles an electron in every respect except its mass, which is 206.84 times that of its cousin. The standard model can’t simply doesn’t explain that ratio or any of the other mass ratios. In fact the whole concept of generations, particles like the electron, muon and tau that behave in the same fashion except for their mass, is a complete mystery at present. Perhaps the biggest problem with the Standard Model however is that it works so well that we have very few clues pointing toward a more comprehensive theory that will answer our questions.

The Standard Model of Particle Physics tells us so much, but not everything and WE WANT IT ALL!! (Credit: ScienceAlert)

That’s part of the reason why physicists are so busy studying the particle known as the neutrino. These ghost particles have mystified physicists ever since their existence was first predicted by the theoretician Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli proposed the neutrino to explain some discrepancies in the type of radiation known as beta decay.

Wolfgang Pauli was one of the founding fathers of Quantum Mechanics, his exclusion principle is the reason why two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time! (Credit: Facebook)

Now in beta decay a neutron splits into a proton and an electron. In the process conservation of the electric charge works out, a neutron is neutral while the positive proton and negative electron still add up to zero. The energy of the proton and electron did not always come out the same however, a violation of conservation of energy. And the spins of the particles were just all wrong as well, again violating conservation of angular momentum.

When a neutron decays into a proton the emitted electron is called beta radiation. In order to conserve energy and spin there has to be another particle emitted as well. This is Pauli’s neutrino. (Credit: ww2.ph.ed.ac.uk)

What Pauli proposed was that a third particle, both electrically neutral and with zero rest mass, was emitted at the same time and the experimentalists just hadn’t detected it yet. At first Pauli called his particle the neutron but when the bigger, massive neutron was discovered by James Chadwick, Enrico Fermi then suggested Pauli’s neutral particle be called the neutrino, which is Italian for ‘little neutral one’. Well it took more than twenty years but eventually Pauli’s neutrino was discovered in 1956, and in fact physicists now know that there are three different types of neutrino, one each complimenting the electron, the muon and the tau particles. Again why each generation of electron like particle should have its own neutrino is simply not explained in the Standard Model.

By placing a large detector (r) next to a nuclear reactor Cowan and Reines (l) succeeded in discovering the elusive neutrino. (Credit: CERN Indico)

Now neutrinos interact very rarely with other particles, it’s estimated that a neutrino could fly through a light-year of solid lead and still have a 50-50 chance of coming out the other side. At the same time neutrinos are generated in large amounts in nuclear reactions, such as the fusion reaction that powers our own Sun and the other stars. Solar physicists therefore wanted to try to capture as many solar neutrinos as they could hoping to learn about the interior of the Sun from them.

The Fusion reactions that power the Sun release a lot of neutrinos. If detected here on Earth they can tell us much about what’s going on inside the center of our star. (Credit: Forbes)

Instead they learned more about neutrinos. The first neutrino telescope was built deep beneath the Earth’s surface at the Homestake Mine in South Dakota in order to eliminate contamination from cosmic rays. What the telescope found was that the number of neutrinos coming from the Sun was exactly one-third the expected number. After wondering for some time if something was wrong with their theories of solar fusion, or maybe something was actually wrong with the Sun the physicists eventually found that the three types of neutrino oscillate, that is they change from one type to another over time. The neutrinos generated in the Sun are all electron neutrinos but by the time they reach Earth two-thirds have changed to muon or tau neutrinos.

The idea is crazy and the math is really hard. Could that be why physicists are so interested in neutrino oscillations? (Credit: www-he.scphys.kyoto-u.ac.jp)

Which means that neutrinos must have a rest mass because particles with zero rest mass move at the speed of light and according to Einstein’s theory of relativity time does not pass for anything moving at the speed of light. So the questions now are, just what is the mass of a neutrino and can we learn a clue from that about the masses of all the particles.

According to Relativity the time interval between two events differs for two observers moving relative to each other. For a particle moving at the speed of light time actually stands still! (Credit: Pinterest)

That’s the purpose of the KATRIN experiment at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. KATRIN is trying to measure the mass of a neutrino by making the most precise measurements ever of beta decay, the original interaction for which Pauli first proposed the neutrino. Think about it, if the energy of a neutron gets shared in varying amounts between a proton, electron and a neutrino the minimum amount of energy the neutrino can get is its rest mass. So if you measure thousands or better still millions of neutron decays the maximum energy of the proton and electron taken together and subtracted from that of the neutron, is the rest mass of the neutrino. Easier said than done, remember we’re talking about sub-atomic particles here and previous experiments have already concluded that the neutrino rest mass is less than 1/100,000th that of the electron.

The Katrin experiment seeks to measure the mass of a neutrino by measuring the maximum energy that the electron emitted in beta decay can have. The rest has to be the neutrino’s mass. (Credit: DW)

Let me take a moment here to mention the units by which particle physicists measure mass. Remembering Einstein’s most famous equation E=Mc2 physicists like to turn that equation around to get m=E/c2. So to describe the mass of elementary particles physicists use a measure of energy known as the electron-volt, the energy an electron will gain by accelerating across one volt of electrical potential, and divide it by c2 getting eV/c2 or kilo eV/c2 (Kev/c2) or Million eV/c2 (Mev/c2) or even GeV/c2, a billion eV.

Particle physicists measure energy in terms of the ‘electron-volt’, the energy an electron would gain by accelerating across one volt of electric potential. (Credit: Slideshare)

Now neutrons are themselves hard to handle, being neutral you can’t use an electric field to control them. So the KATRIN experiment uses the heavy isotope of hydrogen called Tritium, whose nuclei consists of one proton and two neutrons. Tritium is a well studied beta decay source and as a gas it is much easier to handle than a free neutron would be. Also the proton that results when the neutron decays remains in the nucleus, transforming it to a nucleus of helium-3. That means that the only thing you really have to measure is the energy of the produced electron.

The KATRIN detector being wheeled through the streets of Karlsruhe Germany. The size of the detector gives you some idea just how difficult experiments in particle physics can be to perform. (Credit: Symmetry Magazine)

Nevertheless it’s still a difficult task, which is why the KATRIN experiment is an enormous instrument 70m in length, much of which is the main spectrometer for measuring the electron’s energy. For the experiment the tritium gas of cooled down to a temperature of 30K (-247ºC) in order to minimize thermal motion and an set of 24 superconducting magnets are used to collimate the emitted electrons into the spectrometer.

While KATRIN is still continuing to collect data an analysis of the measurements gathered by the end of 2019 has achieved a milestone, at the 90% confidence level the rest mass of a neutrino is less than 0.8 eV/c2. An elementary particle with a rest mass that is less than 1eV would have been a shocking result just a few decades ago and in a sense a rest mass of around one-millionth that of the electron, or even less, only deepens the mystery of elementary particle masses.

The KATRIN team announcing their latest results, that neutrinos have a mass that is less than 1 electron volt! (Credit: CEA/Irfu)

Still the results of KATRIN are reality and the only way to get beyond the standard model is to gather more facts that don’t fit in the model. Who knows, maybe right now some grad student in some university somewhere is reading the article published in Nature Physics by the KATRIN collaboration and is thinking to themselves, ‘hey, wait a minute… that actually makes sense’! After all, that’s how it started with Pauli, and Einstein, and Bohr and all those others who built the standard model.

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine is showing all of the signs of turning into a Guerrilla War, and just what is a Guerrilla War?       

In the early morning hours of the 24th of February military forces of the Russian Federation at the orders of their President Vladimir Putin began a full scale assault on the neighboring country of Ukraine. The Russians had taken their time in organizing the attack. More than a month of preparation went into assembling a force of nearly 200,000 men with more than 1,000 tanks along with 2,000 aircraft. Such was the armored firepower of the Russian army that it was widely expected to sweep the much smaller Ukrainian military aside and occupy the capital Kiev along with the county’s other major cities within days.

The Russians even used the nation of Belarus as a staging area for their forces allowing them to attack Ukraine from three sides at once. (Credit: Sky News)

It hasn’t worked out that way. As I write this post we are twelve days into the Ukraine war and Russian forces are bogged down around on several fronts. The Russian units attacking Kiev are facing stiff resistance and have made no progress for the past week while most other major cities are also still in the hands of the Ukrainian government. Russian President Vladimir Putin has unquestionably overestimated his own strength, underestimated the resolve of the Ukrainian people to resist him while at the same time ignoring the determination of the international community to punish him and Russia for his blatant act of aggression.

The Russians succeeded in taking a small amount of Ukrainian territory in the first few days but since then Ukrainian resistance has slowed their advance to a crawl. (Credit: The Washington Post)

Now I do not mean to imply that a Ukrainian victory is coming any time soon. Russian still has enormous forces to bring to bear in this fight and unless Putin is willing to run back home with his tail between his legs this conflict is going to continue and become much more brutal and bloody. There are already signs that the Russians are shifting from a war of decisive battle, i.e. a quick sharp fight with winner takes all, to a war of attrition where the bigger combatant trades casualty for casualty and simply wears down his foe, the most brutal kind of warfare. There are also reports of ever growing numbers of attacks against civilians increasing the casualty figures still higher.

A Sixty Kilometre long Convoy of Russian military vehicles is stalled just north of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, unable to move for days now. (Credit: CNBC)
Just as in any war, unable to defeat the Ukrainian military the Russians have turned to attacking Civilians. (Credit: The Los Angeles Times)

The problem with that is that the longer the war goes on the likelier it is to devolve into a Guerrilla War so that, even after the organized Ukrainian Army is defeated the Ukrainian people continue to fight on in small bands. Such wars, also known as insurgencies, are quite common and although both lengthy and bloody, they often succeed.

To most Americans Guerrilla War means Vietnam and the fight against the Viet Cong. (Credit: History of Yesterday)

The term Guerrilla, which means little warrior in French, comes from Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 where a large, well trained and well supplied French army defeated several smaller Spanish armies, marched straight to the Spanish capital, seizing it and installing Napoleon’s brother Joseph as the new Spanish king. Problem was that most of the Spanish people didn’t accept their defeat and soon peasant farmers were taking potshots at French soldiers on guard duty, small bands made up of Spanish soldiers who never surrendered along with ordinary citizens were attacking French supply wagons. With a year the entire countryside of Spain was a battlefield and with the British smuggling in military supplies and eventually troops to aid the guerrillas by 1814 the French were defeated in what Napoleon referred to as his ‘Spanish Ulcer’.

The type specimen for a Guerrilla War however is Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808. The fierceness of that conflict is best depicted in Francisco de Goya’s famous painting El tres de Mayo! (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Since then other big countries have tried to use their powerful military against a presumed weaker opponent only to find themselves bogged down in a guerrilla war. In World War 2 Hitler faced strong partisan resistance in both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Partisans are just another word for guerrillas by the way.

Launching a Blitzkrieg into Yugoslavia Hitler quickly captured the capital Belgrade and other major cities but like Napoleon he would never truly conquer the country. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Famously the United States was defeated in a guerrilla war by the Vietnamese and recently by the Afghans. And it’s important to remember that the Russians, back when they called themselves the USSR, were also defeated by Afghan guerrillas during the 1980s, a war that many historians think helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A war that Putin should remember well!

In 1979 Russian troops poured into Afghanistan. Ten years later the Taliban insurgency had pushed them back out again! (Credit: E-International Relations)

If the fighting in Ukraine continues there is every chance that it will evolve into just such a guerrilla conflict. For one thing the Russians simply do not have enough troops to completely guard the entire country. The US Army War College estimates that in order to really secure a hostile country an occupier must have one soldier for every 50 citizens of that country. To occupy the Ukraine would therefore require an army of somewhere between 800,000 and one million troops, a force that the Russian Federation simply cannot afford. The Russians may hold all of Ukraine’s major cities but any potential Ukrainian guerrillas will have plenty of inadequately guarded forests and marshes in which they can organize or retreat into whenever needed. 

The Forests and Marshlands of Ukraine are the largest remaining in all of Europe. This rugged terrain has served as a hiding place for Guerrillas since the time of the Scythians back in the Iron Age! (Credit: BBC)

Meanwhile the Ukrainian people are already preparing themselves for a guerrilla war, ordinary citizens are lining up at police stations to receive guns so that they can help fight the Russian invaders. Companies that produced alcoholic beverages are now manufacturing Molotov Cocktails, bottles filled with gasoline to use as primitive grenades. These are other activities are typical of a guerrilla war. Everyday that they succeed in resisting the Russian advance the morale of the Ukrainians grows making them more likely to continue the fight even after organized resistance has ended.

Since the Russians took more than a month to ready their invasion force it gave ordinary Ukrainian citizens time to take some military training. Organizing an insurgency even before you’re invaded is something new! (Credit: The Moscow Times)

On the other hand the Russian morale was rather poor at the very start of the war. For all of his propaganda President Putin never succeeded in convincing the Russian people that Ukraine was any kind of threat to them and while the majority of his people continue to support him there is a considerable minority who simply loath their president. Thousands of Russians have already been arrested for protesting against their nation’s invasion of its neighbor, not a good way to start a war that could go on for years.

A 76 year old Russian woman protesting her country’s invasion of its neighbor. How these two big strong Russian Policemen can look themselves in the mirror after arresting her is beyond my understanding! (Credit: HuffPost UK)

Add to that the damage to the livelihood of ordinary Russians due to the massive sanctions that the international community has placed upon the country and the morale of both Russian troops and the Russian people can only decline still farther. Already the value of the Ruble has dropped by more than a third while imports of critical goods into Russia have simply stopped. The unity that nations and corporations around the world have shown in their effort to make Russia pay for its aggression has been unexpectedly strong even taking China’s determination to pay both sides against each other into account.

Let’s be real, the only country that can benefit from this war in Ukraine is China, and they don’t have to do a thing! (Credit: Nikkei Asia)

The fighting in Ukraine also brings with it a new potential horror. For the first time ever Nuclear Power Plants are on the front lines of the fighting in a major war. On the very first day of their assault Russian forces seized Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident. Fortunately there was little fighting involved and the containment vessel surrounding the damaged reactor was unharmed. Seven days later Russian units attacked and occupied the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. This time the Russians appear to have used more force than necessary and a training building caught fire, raising fears that a nuclear accident could occur.

The Russians seized the Chernobyl nuclear site on the first day of the war after a short but fierce fight. The ruined reactor is still safe in its containment building but there’s a war going on around it! Also Ukraine has four other nuclear plants any one of which could become a major disaster if some errant missile should strike it! (Credit: iNews)

Ukraine still has three more nuclear power plants and as the fighting grows more intense the possibility of a real nuclear disaster happening cannot be ignored. And even if the Russians do manage to seize and secure all of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities without incident what about the guerrilla war that is almost certain to follow. Partisan units act independently, that is their great strength, but that also means they sometimes act against the wishes of superiors. What if some leader of a guerrilla band convinces himself that a nuclear disaster would be just the thing to spur the Russians into leaving?

Blowing up large infrastructure to harass the enemy is what guerrillas do. This is the Greek bridge Gorgopotmos which was destroyed bu Greek Partisans during the Nazi occupation of Greece in WW2. (Credit: GreekReporter.com)

All of which means that the fighting over Ukraine has just started, and is likely to get much worse. This war could drag on for years and as far as I can see will only result in terrible harm to both countries that will take decades to repair.

Before turning to Politics Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky actually played the President of his country on a TV show. Now he’s showing world leaders how to inspire a country to win against all odds. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

What does Putin hope to accomplish with this war anyway. Well, like Napoleon he hopes to install a government that will be subservient to his will. He hopes to make Ukraine a vassal state to Russia as a way to rebuild the old empire of Russia. But the Ukrainian people will have none of that, after centuries of Russian domination they have tasted independence and like it. And the inspiration that the country is finding in their President Volodymyr Zelensky has fired their courage and resolve while impressing the entire world. In the end Russia simply cannot hold Ukraine, indeed most Russians don’t want to. Only one man is responsible for all of this madness and bloodshed. In the end Vladimir Putin will have achieved nothing with his war against Ukraine except to secure his place in history as just a small and rather inferior version of Adolph Hitler.

Space News for March 2022: Plans being Finalized for the End of the International Space Station and what will come Thereafter.      

The International Space Station (ISS) has been the mainstay of manned space flight now for more than twenty years but the venerable space base is currently beginning to show its age. Occasional air leaks are becoming more and more of problem while the power system is in need of constant repair; even the smell of the station is becoming a problem. Think about how your house would smell if you couldn’t open a window for twenty years to let in some fresh air!

According to Astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent more than a year aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the place smells just like a jail. That’s easy to understand after twenty years of human habitation without any thing like real fresh air. (Credit: Daily Mail)

More than that NASA, the American space agency, simply wants out of the business of running a station in Low Earth Orbit, preferring instead to get back to their task of exploring the solar system. Current plans are for NASA to continue to support ISS operations through the year 2030, but like any bureaucratic organization NASA has already started the process of figuring out exactly how to terminate the ISS and what will take its place.

When Skylab fell out of orbit it was an an uncontrolled reentry. Pieces of America’s first space station fell on Australia and although no one was hurt it was a real danger! NASA intends to make certain that the same thing doesn’t happen with the ISS. (Credit: NASA)

As I have mentioned in several previous posts, see posts of 29 December 2021 and 2 October 2021, NASA intends to rent space for its astronauts on future commercial space stations. Indeed the space agency is helping to fund the design phase for such a commercial space station at three aerospace corporations, Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman along with a consortium named Nanoracks that includes Lockheed Martin and Voyager Space. Once one of the designs from these corporations is chosen NASA will help fund the construction of the station, becoming the primary tenant.

Preliminary concept design for Northrup Grumman’s space station. Notice the attached Space X Dragon capsule center below and Northrup’s own unmanned cargo vessel Cygnus right above it. (Credit: Northrup Grumman)

Once that commercial station is up and operating the question then becomes what to do about the ISS, the largest and most massive structure ever placed into orbit. Since the ISS was built in pieces, one module at a time, should it be taken apart and de-orbited piece by piece? Or should it all be brought down in one piece?

Exploded view of the major components of the ISS. Since the station was built in pieces should it be brought down from orbit in pieces or in one big piece? (Credit: European Space Agency)

NASA has decided on the latter scenario with a plan to bring the station into a lower orbit slowly before using a large retro-burn to begin a re-entry designed to finally drop the whole thing into the southern Pacific Ocean. The ISS will meet it demise at a location in the ocean furthest from land called Point Nemo approximately midway between New Zealand and South America. Most of the ISS will probably burn up as it descends through the atmosphere but because it is so large undoubtedly more than a few big pieces will survive so NASA will take care to keep the falling debris as far from human habitations as possible.

Point Nemo is the name that has been given to a position in the south Pacific that is farthest from any inhabited land. (Credit: The Sun)

Now NASA will not be the only tenant in any new space station because the business of space tourism is definitely heating up. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded last year’s first ever totally commercial space mission has now arranged a series of four space missions with Space X beginning with another Dragon capsule mission, perhaps as early as the end of 2022. That first mission in what Isaacman is calling the Polaris Program will last five days and take the Dragon capsule to a much higher orbit while also including the first Extravehicular Activity (EVA) for a commercial space mission.

Having funded the first all tourist space Mission Billionaire Jared Isaacman is now partnering with Space X for a series of manned mission termed the Polaris Project. (Credit: CNBC)

Details of the later three missions are sketchy at present but Isaacman hopes that the final Polaris mission will be the first manned launch of Space X’s massive Starship rocket. Funding for the Polaris Program will come from a combination of Isaacman and Space X itself and the stated goal of the missions is “…to advance long-duration spaceflight capabilities and guiding us toward the ultimate goal of facilitating Mars exploration.” According to Isaacman.

Space X is busy preparing for the first orbital test launch of their Starship rocket. (Credit: San Antonio Express)

There are a few other items of interest that I’d like to cover quickly. The schedule for NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, the first, unmanned launch of the big Space Launch System (SLS) has been pushed back once again. After years of delays and cost overruns the first launch of the SLS had originally been scheduled for late last year, only to be pushed back to the first quarter of this year. Now NASA is admitting that more time is required to complete a long list of safety checks before launch so the Artemis 1 mission is now being tentatively scheduled for sometime in the spring. Another couple of months delay in a program that is years late may seem like just a drop in the bucket but the question remains, will the SLS ever fly?

The first test vehicle of the massive Space Launch System (SLS) has been assembled in the Vehicle assembly Building at Cape Kennedy. Testing however has bee slow and the rocket is now scheduled to roll out to the launch pad before late March 2022. (Credit: Spaceflight Insider)

Mars exploration, at least robotic exploration is proceeding however. The Ingenuity helicopter, which after completing its five ‘test flights’ has since then been working as an airborne scout for the Perseverance rover. For the past several months though dust storms on the Red Planet have kept Ingenuity grounded. At the beginning of February however the skies began to clear and on February the 8th the little aircraft took off once more on a 100 second flight, its 19th flight on Mars. Not bad for a technology demonstration vehicle that was only supposed to fly five times.

It keeps going and going. An artist’s impression of the Ingenuity helicopter with the Perseverance rover in the background. After 19 flights that little aircraft shows no sign of slowing down. (Credit: SciTechDaily)

And speaking of Mars, the Perseverance Rover has been collecting rocks that NASA hopes will one day be transferred to a planned Mars Sample Return Mission, a lander on the Red Planet that will contain a rocket capable of lifting those Mars rocks off of the planet’s surface. That rocket has been given the name of the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) and the current plan is for it to rendezvous in Mars orbit with the European Space Agency’s Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) spacecraft. The ERO will acquire the samples of Martian soil from the MAV and bring them back to Earth.

NASA has awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin for a rocket to take off from the Martian surface with soil samples. The rocket will then rendezvous in Mars orbit with a European spacecraft to bring the sample back to Earth. (Credit: NASA Mars Exploration Program)

Now the contract for the Mars Ascent Vehicle has been awarded to Lockheed Martin for a potential value of $194 million dollars. The contract is slated to run for about six years and Lockheed Martin will provide several test units in addition to the actual flight vehicle. It is hoped that the Mars sample return mission will take place in the late 2020s with the actual return of the samples by 2031.

Basic Outline of the Mars Sample Return Mission. The Perseverance rover is already collecting samples that could be collected by the transfer rover shown above and brought back to Earth. If all goes according to plan we could have pieces of Mars being studied in our labouratories within the next ten years. (Credit: Nature)

Manned and unmanned there’s progress being made in man’s efforts to explore and settle our solar system.

The United States has been neglecting upgrades to its Infrastructure for decades. Now, as our Bridges, Roads and Water Systems crumble around us we’re still just trying to put a patch on the problem.

Any country is only so strong as the infrastructure that binds it together. A nation’s roads, power grid, airports, water and gas distribution systems are the way that goods and people move from one location to another. They are the public services that a nation’s citizens use everyday. The economy of a country, any country is a function of the size and efficiency of that country’s infrastructure. Simply put, without infrastructure the people cannot obtain the goods and services they need or desire.

Infrastructure is the natural Environment of a Civilization, the Ecology of Society. But unlike a natural Ecology it has to be Maintained by the people who make up that Society. (Credit: Market Business News)

Like anything else in this world a nation’s infrastructure needs to be maintained, upgraded and hopefully expanded in order for that nation to grow. The task of caring for a nation’s infrastructure primarily rests with its government, and any government that fails to maintain that infrastructure in good condition has simply failed to do their job of governing.

Would you feel safe Driving on a Highway held up by these pillars. Chances are that you do so on a regular basis! (Credit: REMI)

Back on the 28th of January the Fern Hollow Bridge, located some 15 km east of downtown Pittsburgh here in Pennsylvania collapsed without warning shortly before the morning rush hour. The bridge, which carries an estimated 14,500 vehicles daily fortunately only had four vehicles on it at the time of its collapse and none of the people in those vehicles suffered more than minor injuries. The bridge, which was built in 1970, had been rated as being in ‘poor condition’ since 2011 and its last inspection in 2019 found that both the bridge’s superstructure and deck were in need of repair. Such a dilapidated state for a bridge in our country is no accident; rather it is a disgrace.

The Fern Hollow Bridge just east of Pittsburgh. Fortunately no one was seriously hurt in this collapse, but it is just another reminder of the deteriorating state of our Nation’s Infrastructure. (Credit: 90.5 WESA)

The story of the Fern hollow bridge got a bit of extra attention in the media because, by shear coincidence President Biden was scheduled to travel to Pittsburgh that very day to talk about the passage of his trillion dollar infrastructure bill, of which $27 billion has been allocated over the next five years for the repair of bridges. The President went on with his visit, indeed he made the collapse of the bridge a focal point of his talk about how vital it is for our country to get to work on maintaining and repairing the nation’s infrastructure.

On his visit to Pittsburgh to promote his Infrastructure bill President Biden used the Fern Hollow Bridge as an example of how Government needs to do more to maintain critical roads, bridges and other facilities. (Credit: Politico)

So why did the Fern Hollow Bridge spend 10 years in ‘poor condition’ without being repaired before finally just collapsing from neglect, and why should a President be touting his success in getting a bill passed that allocates money for what is actually one of government’s prime obligations? Well that’s because for decades now the American people and their government have simply ignored the important public works around them, preferring to adopt the strategy of, if it breaks fix it, otherwise who cares.

Fixing things costs money and for infrastructure that means raising taxes and to our modern politicians that means nothing gets fixed! (Credit: Constructiondorks.com)

This state of affairs is spelled out in detail in a report examining infrastructure in the US from 1929 to 2019 by Ray C. Fair of Yale University’s Department of Economics. In his report Mr. Fair analyzes spending on both civilian infrastructure and defense infrastructure whereas I shall concern myself only with civilian infrastructure. Mr. Fair also combines the contributions of State and Local governments with that of the Federal government and I shall follow him in that respect.

Reaching a peak in the 1960s, Government spending on Infrastructure has declined dramatically since then, reaching a new low in 2018. (Credit: S&P Global)

What the report clearly shows is a steady decline in government spending on infrastructure beginning during the 1970s and continuing until the present day. In other words, over the last 40-50 years, even as our roads, bridges, water and sewer systems etc. have grown older and in greater need of maintenance and replacement the United States, at all levels of government has spent less and less on their upkeep. This decline is evident in the graphs shown above and below.

Breaking the spending on Infrastructure down into Roads, Sewers and Water Systems it is obvious that all sectors are seeing a serious decline in funding. (Credit: Ray C. Fair, Yale University)

As a part of his analysis Mr. Fair also investigated spending on infrastructure for a number of other countries and discovered that several western nations, including the United Kingdom, Germany and to a lesser extent France showed similar declines beginning slightly later in the 1980s.

Other countries, like Germany and the UK have also experienced a sharp decline in Infrastructure spending. (Credit: Ray C. Fair, Yale University)

What makes this situation even harder to understand is that, throughout the period of reduced spending on infrastructure the US government has been setting records for deficit spending, that is the Federal Government is spending more money than it takes in through taxes. So, if our governments aren’t spending money on infrastructure what are they spending it on?

Year by year our Nation’s debt divided by GDP just keeps on growing. If you or I tried to spend this much more than we take in we’d be Bankrupt within months! (Credit: Visual Capitalist)

Well, first of all since 1980 the Federal government has passed three big tax cuts in a strategy once called ‘Reaganomics’ but which has now proven itself to be more like the voodoo economics that it was once criticized as. With each tax cut the deficit rose considerably and in order to reduce the deficit somewhat corners were cut elsewhere, with infrastructure being an obvious choice since few people pay much attention to it.

Reagan’s tax cuts were supposed to grow our Economy so that they would end up paying for themselves. Didn’t quite work out that way and the Bush and Trump tax cuts failed to grow anything except the deficit. (Credit: CNN Business)

At the same time we wanted more entitlements, more Social Security benefits, more Medicare and now Obamacare. We wanted a big social safety net without having to pay for it putting more pressure on those parts of the federal budget few people care about, like infrastructure. After all the infrastructure we have now is good enough for now, so why spend any money on it.

With the continued growth of Entitlements, here called Mandatory Programs, spending for other needs, here called Discretionary spending, is growing smaller and smaller. Infrastructure has taken arguably the biggest hit from this scenario. (Credit: Mercatus Center)

It’s simply another symptom of our society’s loss of faith in, even interest in the future. Rather than allocating funds to make certain that our country can continue to function decades in the future we want low taxes and government benefits now, and let our children and grandchildren pay for it.

It’s one thing to do this as Individuals but when Society does this as a whole it’s going to make things really bad for the next Generation. (Credit: Amazon.com)

Now Biden’s trillion dollar infrastructure package is obviously a step in the right direction. However it is certainly much too small and what’s really needed is not a one time package, however large but a strong commitment to long term investment in infrastructure.

How it usually works in Washington! (Credit: Cleveland.com)

And that will certainly require raising taxes, something that our current fractious government is probably incapable of doing. So we can all look forward to more bridges collapsing, more water mains bursting, more power outages and just an ever increasing breakdown of the public services we depend on everyday.

A Couple of Stories from Nature, one Awesome, one Awful!      

Several times in these posts I’ve discussed how it seems as though every time scientists study animal intelligence or behavior they are surprised to discover just how much our fellow creatures are really like us. My first story today is a case in point and concerns our closest relatives the Chimpanzees.

Nestled near the Equtor on the west coast of Africa the Loango National Park in Gabon is a haven for many species of wildlife including Chimpanzees. (Credit: Google Maps)

The Loango National Park in Gabon is the home to the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project where a community of about 45 Chimpanzees has been under behavioral study for many years. A scientific research team led by Biology Professor Dr. Simone Pika of Osnabrück University has made many discoveries concerning the social behavior, tool use and hunting strategies of chimpanzees.

A multi-national project to study our closest relatives the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project has already discovered many similarities between Chimp culture and ours. (Credit: Ozouga.org)

The latest revelation concerns the first ever observations of chimpanzees applying possibly medicinal substances to external wounds. The substances in question are the bodies of insects plucked from the air and the chimpanzees were not only observed applying the insects to their own cuts and abrasions but on a few occasions one chimp was observed using the insects to tend to the cuts of another chimp.

Three of the Ozouga chimps, Suzee on the left was the first chimp to be observed applying insects to her son’s wounds. (Credit: Ozouga.org)

Now for animals to eat various substances with known medicinal properties is a well known behavior in many species of not just mammals but birds and even reptiles. Chimpanzees themselves have been observed to chew bitter leaves that will kill internal parasites.

In the wild Chimpanzees have been observed to eat several different kinds of plant that are known to have medicinal value. (Credit: NBC News)

The application of anything to external wounds however is a totally new behavior and was first observed in 2019 by researcher Alessandra Mascaro as a mother chimp named Suzee inspected the injured foot of her son Sia. To Mascaro it appeared that Suzee had something between her lips that she then applied to Sia’s wound. Only later as she watched the video of the event did the researcher see Suzee grab something out of the air that she then placed between her lips before applying it to Sia’s wound.

Many human cultures have a long history of using insects as medicine. Today there are many scientists studying the medicinal properties of insects. (Credit: Science Direct)

Subsequent observations showed that what the chimps were grabbing from the air were insects, and indeed numerous primitive human cultures have been known to use insects on wounds for antiseptic or anti-inflammatory purposes. Just what insects the chimps grab, and if they actually have medicinal benefits is something the researchers have yet to ascertain. However the team at Loango has observed the behaviour more than 20 times now and feels confident that they will soon be able to answer those questions.

Getting medicine from insects really isn’t so strange when you consider all of the drugs we already get from snake venom! (Credit: Medindia)

Chimpanzees continue to surprise the scientists who study them. What the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project’s team have uncovered could be evidence about the very beginnings of the field of medicine in ancient human societies. Further proof of just how much like us our relatives really are.

Makes you wonder just how different we really are! (Credit: The Stem Cellar)

And even as the scientists at Loango learn more about animal behaviour the behaviour of the particular breed of human animal known as a conspiracy monger is causing a great deal of harm at an animal refuge here in the United States. The refuge in question is the National Butterfly Center, which lies along the Rio Grande River in southern Texas and which for over two decades has helped migrating butterflies along their path between the United States and Mexico.

Hard to think of anything more innocent than a butterfly refuge but in today’s America simply being innocent will cause some people to attack you! (Credit: Xerces Society)

The 100 acre preserve first came into national attention back when Donald Trump was president and trying to get his wall built along the border with Mexico. The non-profit North American Butterfly Association that runs the center objected to the wall on the grounds that a wall would do more to interfere with butterfly migration than attempts by illegal aliens to enter the US. Throughout the Trump administration both the center and its staff had to endure multiple and vicious attacks by right-wing agitators.

He never built it, Mexico certainly never paid for it and it never actually stopped anyone from entering the US. It did get him elected however and that’s really all he ever cared about! (The New York Times)

Even the end of the Trump administration hasn’t ended the refuge’s problem because there are several privately funded campaigns seeking to continue wall building on private lands, including that of the center. One of these groups is the “We Build the Wall” project headed by Steve Bannon and Brian Kolfage. Following the lead of these provocateurs right-wing conspiracy mongers have now begun to accuse the butterfly center on social media of actually being a focus for human trafficking, especially the trafficking of children for sexual exploitation.

Things have gotten so out of hand at the National Butterfly Center that the local police are now keeping a watch on the place. (Credit: San Antonio Express-News)

The baseless accusations have continued to grow and threats have been launched at the center’s staff and supporters. The whole mess has gotten so bad that a conservative candidate for congress in Virginia named Kimberly Lowe showed up at the refuge in order to film a social media post about the ‘illegal activity’ going on there. If all of this sounds reminiscent of the ‘Pizzagate’ nonsense from a few years ago where Satan worshipping pedophiles were supposed to be trafficking children through a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. that’s probably because all of the conspiracy mongers have as little imagination as they have common sense.

Why are so many people so anxious to believe the most horrible things about other people without evidence. PizzaGate was totally without foundation yet it became one of the hottest stories of the year. Now the same vicious lies are being spread about the workers at the National Butterfly Center. (Credit: Rolling Stone)

Still, the National Butterfly Center has been forced to close, at least temporarily in order to reassess their security status. Only in America today could a butterfly refuge be in need of security!!! 

The Covid-19 Pandemic has caused a sharp increase in Gun violence across the United States while all responsible studies continue to show that stricter Gun laws save lives.      

In what is surely one of the most perverse ironies of our current fight with the Covid-19 virus over the last two years there has been a sharp increase in gun violence and indeed violence in general here in the United States. The number of murders committed in the US in 2020 was 21,570, up from 16,669 in 2019, a 29.4% rise, the sharpest one year increase in US history. And that was followed by 24,576 murders in 2021, another 13.9% rise above the 2020 numbers.

A Dozen US cities set records for the number of murders committed there in 2021 with my home town of Philadelphia leading the way! (Credit: New York Post)

 Psychologists point to the feelings of depression and confinement brought on by the pandemic to which we can add the political fighting over how to respond to Covid-19. An ever growing number of fights breaking out at school board meetings and aboard airplanes over masks are just the more visible signs of a growing violent trend in our society. It’s as if the virus isn’t just satisfied with killing nearly a million of us directly it has cause us to turn on each other to increase the death toll even further.

The restrictions put in place to protect us from the Covid epidemic are having a greater effect on the mental health of young people than other age groups. And of course it’s young people who tend to commit more violence, hence an increase in the number of murders during Covid! (Credit: KFF)

And it’s not as if there is anything we can do to reduce the increasing number of gun crimes and violence, we’re all just helpless before the rising tide of murder and mayhem. Oh…wait, there is something we can do, it’s called gun control, laws to prevent people who cannot be trusted to handle guns responsibly from getting their hands on them and in general just decreasing the number of guns in society.

Just a few of the common sense laws for responsible gun ownership that could be enacted. (Credit: Everyday No Days Off)

Further evidence of the efficacy of gun control laws in reducing gun violence can be found in a recent report released by the group Everytown for Gun Safety. In this report all 50 states are evaluated for the strength or weakness of their gun control laws. The judgment is made based upon 50 key policies and each state is then given a score between 0 and 100. That score is then compared to that state’s gun violence rate, gun deaths per 100,000 population. Gun deaths include not only murders but suicides and accidental deaths due to firearms.

The stronger a State’s gun laws the lower the gun death rate, it’s as simple as that! This is a big chart so I’m doing it in parts, these are the states with strongest laws and lowest gun deaths. Please check out the whole chart below and at least find your own state! (Credit: Everytown for Gun safety)

When you plot the results the issue becomes clear, those states with tough gun laws have significantly lower rates of gun deaths. Also, if you group the states into states designated as ‘National Leaders’, ‘Making Progress’, ‘Missing Key Laws’, ‘Weak Systems’ and ‘National Failures’ the relationship is stark. Those states rated as ‘National Failures’ have a gun violence rate nearly three times that of the ‘National Leaders’. In fact as the strength of gun laws goes down the rate of gun deaths increases almost proportionally.

Fewer laws controlling guns inevitably leads to more gun deaths. These are the middle states. (Credit: Everytown for Gun Safety)

Now there are a few anomalies in the data, but even they are instructive. For example California has the strongest gun laws of all states, but their gun death rate is more than twice that of #2 Hawaii. The problem for California is guns being brought into the state from other, nearby states with less stringent gun laws. Hawaii, on the other hand is an island where it is very difficult to smuggle in illegal guns.

And at the bottom of the barrel come the states with almost no gun control and the highest gun death rates. (Credit: Everytown for Gun safety)

There are also states with lax guns laws like Vermont and New Hampshire that still have low gun death rates. The key factor here is that Vermont and New Hampshire are actually protected by the strong gun laws of the neighboring states of New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Whatever your own feelings about hunting at least most hunters know how dangerous guns can be and therefore handle them responsibily. Also a good hunting rifle is not a weapon of mass destruction like an assault rifle is! (Credit: Department of Forests – Parks and Recreation)

 Then there are the states at the bottom including the entire swath of states from Texas to Georgia, all of whom have gun laws in the lower half of all states; Florida isn’t so bad at #17. The worst of all is Mississippi, ranking at very bottom in gun law strength and at the very highest for rate of gun death. In fact a person’s chance of being killed by a gun in Mississippi is fully 8.4 times that of a person in Hawaii.

Norman Rockwell’s famous painting ‘Murder in Mississippi’. Not only does the state have the laxest gun laws but with a long history of racial violence Mississippi is a very violent place! (Credit: Norman Rockwell Museum)

So its time to really ask ourselves the question, are guns actually making us safer, or are they in fact making us less safe. Thanks to a well financed campaign by the gun lobby our nation as a whole has been unable to pass any kind of gun control legislation in more then 25 years, and with six conservatives on the Supreme Court even state gun laws are being chipped away.

Even though Chief Justice John Roberts has been voting with the court liberals in some cases, he is pro-gun rights giving the Supreme Court a very strong pro-gun stance. (Credit: Financial Times)

A case in point is the new ordinance being considered by the California city of San Jose, where I lived for a few years back in the 1980s. On the 25th of January the San Jose City Council voted overwhelmingly for a bill that would require all gun owners in the city, an estimated 50,000 people, to pay a annual fee of $25 dollars to pay for suicide prevention, remember twice as many people die by gun suicide as by murder. Now such a fee is quite common but the bill also contains a second requirement for each gum owner to purchase liability insurance for their weapons.

A first of its kind Gun Law in San Jose California makes it a requirement to get insurance if you want to own a gun! (Credit: News Nation Now)

Forcing gun owners to have insurance to cover the cost of any misuse of their firearms is something that has been talked about over the years but never actually enacted before now. And the bill being considered by San Jose has to go through a second reading and another vote before it will become law but nevertheless the gun lobby is already forming ranks to do battle to protect their 2nd amendment rights.

And of course the gun rights groups immediately filed suit. (Credit: The Mercury News)

As you might guess the National Rifle Association has already filed a lawsuit in federal count against the San Jose ordinance. So in the end the only people who may benefit from San Jose’s attempts to force some degree of responsibility on gun owners may be the lawyers on both sides of this contentious issue.

A last little Post-Script. Nine of the families from the Sandy Hook elementary school mass killing have settled a lawsuit with Remington, the manufacturer of the AR-15 rifle used to kill twenty grade school children along with six adults. In the settlement the families will receive a total of $73 million dollars but most importantly they will receive access to documents concerning gun company’s advertising strategy along with other documents concerning how Remington conducted it’s sales.

Twenty dead children aged six and seven along with six of their teachers and our leaders did nothing! It’s time to finally accept the plain fact ‘Guns Kill People’. (Credit: CNN)

This could be the first crack in the door shining light into the practices of the gun industry. For instance, are the gun manufacturers aware of the dangers of gun ownership and are they simply ignoring the consequences of their product? There’s still a long way to go to defeat the gun lobby, but the documents could be just the ammunition we need.

Astronomy News for February 2022.  While waiting for Webb   

While the astronomical community waits for the James Webb Space Telescope to complete its calibrations and begin sending back images that could revolutionize our knowledge of the Universe there is still some work being done with the telescopes we already have. Even without Webb discoveries are being made both in deep space and here in our own Solar System.

NASA has released the ‘First Light’ image taken by the James Webb space telescope. The alignment process for the telescope still has a way to go but everything is working and soon we’ll start to have views of the Universe we never imagined. (Credit: Darik.news)

As an example of the former astronomers have finally captured the last days of a red giant star before it explodes as a Type II supernova. The star in question is located in the galaxy NGC 571 that is about 120 million light years away and the star was discovered and studied by the Pan-STARRS telescope on the Hawaiian island of Maui along with the W. M. Keck telescopes on the big island of Hawaii.

The Pan-STARRS telescope atop an extinct volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui. One of the world’s largest telescopes Pan-STARRS has made many important discoveries. (Credit: Space Telescope Science Institute)

The researchers at the University of Hawaii’s institute for astronomy succeeded in making observations of the star, which has now been given the title of Supernova 2020tlf, or SN 2020tlf, for the last 130 days prior to its detonation. The star, whose mass is estimated to have been about 10 times the mass of our Sun, was first noticed by Pan-STARRS telescope during the summer of 2020 because of the abnormal amount of light it was producing. As astronomers looked closer what they found was that the star was a late-stage red giant that was ejecting large amounts of gas. These conditions were similar to those that theoreticians have predicted presage the beginning of the end before a star goes Supernova.

SN 2020tlf in the Galaxy NGC 571. For the first time astronomers were observing a per-nova star as it exploded! (Credit: The Weather Network)

The astronomers therefore decided to keep an eye on the star and a few months later they were rewarded by the flash of the Supernova explosion. According to lead author Wynn Jacobson-Galán of the University of California at Berkeley, “This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do before they die. Direct detection of pre-supernova activity in a red-supergiant star has never been observed in an ordinary Type II supernova. For the first time, we watched a red-supergiant star explode.”

Red Super-Giant stars with a mass at least 10 times that of our Sun are getting ready to go Supernova. The nearby Star Betelgeuse is one such star and may not have much longer before it goes nova! (Credit: News9 Live)

The observations of SN 2020tlf have already overturned several models of red supergiant behavior immediately before going supernova. Those models indicated that immediately prior to going nova a star would become rather quite and expel very little gas. SN 2020tlf shows that at least some red supergiants are active right up to the very end.

Just how active stars are immediately before they go Nova is still a subject of debate. That’s what makes the evidence from SN 2020tlf so important. (Credit: CNN)

The researchers are continuing to monitor SN 2020tlf, making observations that will allow the nova to be compared to other supernova. Little by little we are learning the secrets of the exploding stars called Type II supernova, some of the most energetic events in the entire Universe.

Type II Supernova are also one of the ways that elements heavier than Iron are manufactured and spread throughout the Universe. This is the remenants of one such supernova expanding outwards. (Credit: The Atlantic)

At the same time there are still discoveries to be made much closer to home, right here in our own Solar System. Asteroids are a hot topic in planetary studies right now for several reasons. First of all we have several space probes that are either on their way to asteroids or are currently on their way back with material gathered from asteroids. For example the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is on its way back to Earth right now with pieces of the asteroid Bennu.

The OSIRIS-REx spaceprobe is now on its way back to Earth carrying a small sample of material from the asteroid Bennu. (Credit: Tech News Vision)

Then there’s the Lucy space probe that was launched on 16 October 2021 for a mission to explore asteroids at both of the planet Jupiter’s Trojan positions. The Trojan positions are locations along the orbit of a planet around the Sun that are 60º ahead of and 60º behind the planet. These locations were identified by the physicist Lagrange as being gravitationally stable positions and are technically denoted as the L3 and L4 positions. L3 and L4 have become known as the Trojan positions because astronomers began naming asteroids found in them after characters in the Homeric poems.

In a system of a very large Mass1 and smaller Mass2 there are five Lagrange points L1 through L5 that are stable gravitationally. L3 and L4 are the most stable and are known as the Trojan Points. (Credit: Simple Wikipedia)

Now astronomers have discovered an asteroid located at one of Earth’s Trojan positions, actually this is the second such asteroid but the new one is at least three times as large as the first. The first Earth Trojan, known officially as 2010 TK7 was discovered back in the year 2010 and is considered to be something less than 400 meters in diameter. The new Earth Trojan is called 2020 XL5 and has been measured by the 4.1 meter Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope on mount Cerro Pachón in Chile to be more than a kilometer in diameter. It took two years to obtain enough reliable data on the asteroid’s orbit to ascertain that it is in fact a Trojan of Earth’s. Both 2010 TK7 and 2020 XL5 occupy the L4 position behind Earth as it orbits the Sun.

For the next few thousand years the Earth has a nice large Trojan asteroid following in at L4. (Credit: Sky and Telescope)

Earth Trojan asteroids are actually rather difficult to study because they never get very far away from the Sun in our sky. That means they can only be seen in the early evening right after the Sun has gone down or in the early morning before the Sun rises, and even then they are low along the horizon. In fact many of the telescopes astronomers use are not able to orient themselves to be able to see objects that low in the sky. So therefore Earth may actually have a lot more Trojans, we just haven’t found them yet.

Because of its orbit 2020 XL5 can never get very far away from the Sun in our sky. Making a little loop in the evening after sunset XL5 is in a difficult position for astronomers to observe but being so close its a perfect place for space missions, unmanned and manned, to visit!

Because of its low gravity and stable position 2020 XL5 may make an excellent site for a future space base from which to explore the rest of our Solar System. We’ll have to hurry however, 2020 XL5‘s orbit isn’t perfectly stable, none are. In about 4000 years or so it will be perturbed out of its L4 location to become once more an independent asteroid orbiting the Sun.

Just a couple of tidbits to keep our mind occupied while we wait for Webb.

In yet another blow to the Future of our Country, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused the largest 2 year drop in College Admissions in the last 50 years.

Everyone knows that the key to a better job, a more interesting career and, saving the best for last, a higher income is education. On average a person with a college degree earns 83% more than the average person with only a high school degree. Also, at any given time the high school graduate is on average twice as likely to be unemployed as someone with their bachelor’s degree.

The Statistics are clear. Higher education is the key to a better income, a better life. (Credit: Southern Nazarene University)

In fact the advantages of a college education are so undeniable that millions of young Americans are willing to spend four of their most productive years, and subject themselves to years of college loan payments in order to get their hands on that piece of sheepskin. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic more than 18 million students were enrolled in undergraduate programs at colleges and universities across this nation. Only China and India, with their massive populations, have more college students than the US.

From the late 19th through the 20th Century the US always had the largest number of college students of any nation. Think that may have had something to do with our becoming the world’s richest and most powerful country? Now we’re in third place and dropping! (Credit: CEOWORLD Magazine)

That was before the pandemic. Like so much else in nations around the world Covid-19 has gotten a chokehold on education here in the US and is slowly draining away the strength of the collegiate system. I’m not just talking about virtual classrooms or having to get vaccinated and wear a mask.

Yes, learning in the days of Covid is both frustrating even even dangerous but we can’t just allow the education of our children to lapse. (Credit: Healthline)

The real harm that is being caused by Covid-19 is the large number of high school graduates who are choosing not to go to college because of Covid itself along with the disruptions due to the disease. In 2020 student enrollment in America’s colleges declined by almost 630,000 students (3.5%) while in 2021 the decline was more than 460,000 (3.1%) for a total decline in two years of more than a million students (and 6.6%).

Over the last 20 years enrollment college enrollment had remained steady or even showed a slight increase. Then covid hit in 2020 and enrollment showed a sharp drop across the board. (Credit: Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis)

Worst still the biggest decline was seen in Community Colleges, the most financially reasonable path to a degree, and therefore the path most chosen by lower income and minority students. Here enrollment was down by a whopping 13.2% since 2019. On the other hand the most expensive private colleges and universities saw a slight increase in enrollment which shows that, pandemic or not, America’s rich families know very well the importance of their children getting that bachelor’s degree.

For years Public 2-year colleges, also known as Community Colleges had become the ‘get your foot in the door’ college for low-income American kids. Of course Covid has hit them the worse! (Credit: Econofact)

Now many of those young people who have decided not to enroll in college right out of high school may eventually to do so once the pandemic is finally ended. Statistics have shown however that the success rate for a student getting their degree drops dramatically as a function of the time between high school and college. Meanwhile, those who put off going to college face an ever increasing risk of their simply never getting back in the educational system.

It’s never too Late! (Credit: Supermoney)

Then there is the possibility that this pandemic induced decline could become a trend. According to Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, “The longer this continues, the more it starts to build its own momentum as a cultural shift and not just a short-term effect of the pandemic disruptions.”

Trying to return to school anytime after age 24 is simply a hard road to take! (Credit: Education Data Org)

 Even back when our nation was just a collection of colonies the people who would become Americans understood the importance of higher education. And so they founded schools like Harvard, William and Mary, The University of Pennsylvania and the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. In the midst of our bloodiest war Abraham Lincoln took time out to push for and implement the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which led to the founding of dozens of State Colleges and Universities, which propelled this country to become the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.

The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 led to the founding of dozens of State Colleges and Universities across the US. This is why American became the richest and most powerful nation on Earth. Now we seem to have turned our backs on the very things that made us successful! (Credit: Wikipedia)

Will the Americans of today follow the wisdom of their forbears or will they come to look upon a college degree as something just for the rich. If that happens we will have truly lost the American dream.

Book Review: ‘Recursion’ by Blake Crouch      

We all know that our memories are to a large degree who we are. All of our loves, and hates, all of our opinions are formed from past experiences that are stored in memory. I suppose that’s why stories, real and fictional about people with amnesia are so popular. And then there’s always the idea of reliving a memory, of going back to either enjoy once again the best time of our life or perhaps to fix some mistake we made in the past.

The process of remembering something is actually a very complex mechanism involving many different parts of our brains! (Credit: Pinterest)

That last notion is the idea behind ‘Recursion’ a recent novel by Author Blake Crouch. Barry Sutton is a New York City Detective who is investigating a suicide that is linked to ‘False Memory Syndrome’ (FMS) a rare condition where a person suddenly acquires complete and detailed memories of a life they never lived, a mental jolt that causes many of them to kill themselves. Helena Smith is a neuroscientist who is trying to develop a method of recording memories in the hopes that it will lead to a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, which her mother is beginning to suffer from.

Cover art for ‘recursion’ by Blake Crouch. (Credit: Penguin Random House)

Turns out that what Doctor Smith has invented is a time machine, a way of literally going back into a memory in order to change the past. One interesting thing about the time travel in ‘recursion’ is that making the jump requires the release of the strong hormones that accompany death. In other words you have to die in the present in order to pop back into one of your memories. And if you do change the past those people whose lives you’ve altered will suddenly acquire the memories of their original lives when time progresses to the moment when you used the time machine to pop back, that’s the FMS.

Author Blake Crouch. (Credit: Goodreads)

Now the physics of time traveling through memory in ‘Recursion’ is never really explained and the ‘Grandfather Effect’, the logical loop where you go into the past and kill your grandfather as a boy so you are never born so how can you go into the past to kill your grandfather, is barely mentioned. That said once you accept the rules of time travel in ‘Recursion’ the novel is tightly written and very well thought out.

The Grandfather paradox is a logical absurdity that stories about time travel have to deal with, although many simply choose to ignore it. (Credit: Medium)

Doctor Smith’s research is funded by one of those techno-billionaires named Marcus Slade who somehow seems to understand the full capabilities of the machine before Helena does. Slade is the first to try to exploit the possibilities of time travel but it isn’t long before the DoD gets involved and when the technical information for the machine gets hacked there are soon a dozen different entities trying to impose their preferred version of the past and reality itself begins to crack under the pressure of multiple pasts.

Have you noticed how techno-billionaires have become to stock villains of choice in Hollywood lately? I wonder how that got started? (Credit: (l to r) Salon, The Ringer, Timeslive)

I won’t go any further but the breakdown of time itself, along with Helena and Barry’s attempts to fix it are very well written. It fact the whole of ‘Recursion’ is very well thought out and composed.

In Some Time Traveler stories the problems of changing the past are integral to the story. (Credit: Ranker)
Other Time Travel stories are more about the societies that the Time Traveler encounters. (Credit: American Literature)

I do have a couple of very minor complaints. First of all the use of a techno-billionaire as the villain is becoming trite even if Blake Crouch does put a nice twist on him. Second, the novel was written around 2018 and the main action of the story, the breakdown of time occurs in 2018 so it’s already not happened! I would have placed the story at least a few years in the future, say 2028 in order to not have the problem of time making it false even as it was being published.

Despite all of the dangers of Time Travel can any SF fan say they wouldn’t like to take a ride on a Tardis? (Credit: Giant Freaking Robot)

Other than that I cannot recommend ‘Recursion’ strongly enough. This is one of the best time travel stories I’ve read, right up there with Wells’ original ‘Time Machine’ and Bradbury’s ‘The sound of Thunder’. If you like Science Fiction in general you will certainly enjoy ‘Recursion’ but if you like time travel stories you absolutely have to read it.