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Paleontology News for September 2024: Three creatures from the Cambrian period, the time when the kinds of animals we’re familiar with today were first developing. 

The Cambrian period, dating to some 560 to 500 million years ago, is well known as being that time when all of the basic types of animals that inhabit our world today first appear in the fossil record. From the jointed-legged arthropods or the crawling molluscs to the many different kinds of worms they all appear to have become identifiable groups during the Cambrian.

The creatures of the Cambrian Period may look very strange to us but paleontologists can identify many of them as the ancestors of our modern animals. (Credit: Natural History Museum)

The reasons for this sudden explosion of life are still a matter of intense study, the best scenario at present is that it was during the Cambrian that the first ‘hard parts’ of animals evolved, shells and spines for defense, claws and teeth for offense. These new structures initiated an ‘arms race’ amongst early life forms, which led to a great diversification in the kinds of animals there were. 

A complete shell of a Trilobite, perhaps the best known of the creatures of the Cambrian. One of the first groups of animals to possess a hard shell they raise the question as to whether it was the evolution of hard parts that led to the Cambrian explosion of life. (Credit: Live Science)

So if the Cambrian period is the time when the major types of animals evolved it is also the time to look for the earliest development of the characteristic features of those animals, the jointed legs of arthropods, the shells of mollusks and etc. In today’s post I will be discussing three newly discovered fossils highlighting the way paleontologists are studying the Cambrian Period but I will not be following my usual technique of discussing the earliest animal first and then moving forward in time because these three creatures may have all lived at the same time.

The world famous Walcott Quarry that exposes the Burgess Shale. This outcrop of rocks has revealed so much of the history of early life that it has been given ‘World Heritage’ status. (Credit: University of California Museum of Paleontology)

The first creature I’ll discuss is a member of the ‘weird wonders’ from the famous Burgess Shale in British Columbia; see my post of 29 September 2021. The animal is called Odaraia alata although it’s also known as the taco animal because of the distinctive taco-shaped shell that covers the front half of its body. Odaraia was first described over 100 years ago as an arthropod, and at 20cm in length one of the largest. However because only a few specimens were found and because that taco shaped shell covered some of the animal’s most important anatomy, where exactly within the arthropods it belonged remained controversial.

An artist’s illustration of Odaraia alata. The taco like shell contains over 30 pairs of legs that are not used for walking but rather for grabbing particles of food that pass through the shell. (Credit: CBC)

Most paleontologists thought that Odaraia swam through the upper water column capturing food particles in the opening of its shell as it swam but how it caught that food and whether it had mandibles like modern insects and crustaceans or lacked them like the trilobites did was unknown. (By the way did you know that arthropod mandibles, their jaws that is, are actually modified legs? That’s right, insects, crabs, spiders and shrimp all chew with their feet, or rather feet that have evolved in shape to crush and tear rather than walk.)

The jaws or mandibles of insects are actually modified legs! How far back in the history of arthropods this evolved has been a question for a long time. (Credit: Adobe Stock)

Now a new study from researchers at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) has succeeded in answering those questions. Using some new specimens and the latest technology the paleontologists have found that Odaraia did have a small set of mandibles near its mouth, making it one of the earliest arthropods to possess them. Also the team discovered that inside of its shell Odaraia possessed 30 pairs of legs that had been modified with numerous spines to capture food passing through the shell. With 30 legs covered in spines Odaraia had a very effective net inside its shell for capturing food.

One of the specimens of Odaraia alata that enabled paleontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum to confirm that O alata did possess mandibles. (Credit: Phys.Org)

One interesting fact about arthropods in general is the way that they often change their shape as they grow and mature, I’m talking about the process of metamorphosis where for example a caterpillar changes into a butterfly. The butterfly is the mature, sexual stage while the caterpillar is the immature or larval stage, very different in shape even though they are the same species. As you might guess paleontologists often have enormous difficulty in connecting fossils of larva to the adult species they mature into. Despite this however paleontologists are always on the lookout for fossils of larva because those immature specimens can tell them a great deal about how the species grows and matures.

You only live twice, at least you do if you’re a Butterfly who begins life as a caterpillar then metamorphizes into a butterfly. (Credit: BBC Wildlife Magazine)

A good example of this comes from a recent paper by Doctor Martin Smith of the Oxford University based upon a larva fossil no bigger than a poppy seed that was discovered in half billion year old rocks from Northern China by colleagues at Yunnan University. The study of microfossils, complete fossils so small you need a microscope to examine them at all, is a science to itself where specimens of fossil bearing rock such as limestone are dissolved in acidic solutions. The tiny bits left over then have to be examined to see if any are interesting fossils, a job that requires a great deal of work and patience.

No bigger than a poppy seed this fossil larva from 520 million years ago is teaching us a great deal about the life cycle of ancient arthropods. (Credit: Live Science)

As soon as they saw the specimen the researchers at Yunnan knew they had found something special. First of all they could see that it was an arthropod larva of some type, and in addition the specimen was so well preserved that, even though it was only the size of a poppy seed, it might still have evidence of the internal structure of the animal. The problem was that Yunnan University did not possess the necessary equipment to examine the inside of the fossil.

A colourized X-Ray image of the larva reveals a lot of the details of the animal’s internal structure. (Credit: BBC)

Enter Dr. Smith, who was well acquainted with Oxford’s Diamond Light X-ray Source. The paleontologists at Yunnan allowed Dr. Smith to take the larva specimen back to England where much of its internal structure were revealed in Smith’s lab. Despite its small size the fossil’s X-rays revealed a developing brain cavity, traces of the digestive system along with the circulatory system and even nerve endings to the legs and eyes. The 500 million year old larva has given paleontologists new insights into how the ancestors of today’s insects, crustaceans and other arthropods grew and matured.

An X-Ray machine so large and complex it needs a building this big to hold it. That’s Oxford University’s Diamond Light X-Ray Source. (Diamond Light Source)

Finally today I’ll discuss a recent paper about a 510 million year old fossil animal from a completely different group of animals, the mollusks, but by a coincidence from the same two Universities, Yunnan in China and Oxford in the UK.

We’re all familiar with mollusks, particularly the shelled variety of bivalved clams and oysters along with single shelled snails. Just how the earliest mollusks first developed their shells is a subject of considerable study.

Just a few of the many different kind of bi-valve Mollusks that we love to eat. (Credit: Clovegarden)

That’s what makes the specimens discovered at a road building site outside of Kunming China by Yunnan University Paleontologist Guangxu Zhang so interesting. Looking like a slug covered by hollow spines the animal, which has been given the name Shishania aculeata, gives paleontologists clues about how the earliest molluscs evolved their shells.

514 million year old Mollusk shell Shishania aculeata (l) and a closeup of its spines (r) (Credit: SciTechDaily)

“The spines, which might also have been sense organs, probably helped Shishania and other molluscs to avoid predators as they crept along the Cambrian sea floor,” according to Luke Parry, a paleontologist at Oxford University who also contributed to the paper. “The fact that we have any of these fossils is pretty amazing.”

Artists impression of Shishania aculeata, something like a snail with a very simple shell or a clam with only one shell it reveals some of the details of how Mollusk’s evolved their shells. (Credit: BBC)

If you think about it, it’s pretty amazing that we have any of these wonderful fossils of animals that lived, and died a half a billion years ago.

Physics News for September 2024: Physics in the Shower and new measurements confirm that Earth’s Magnetic Field is undergoing rapid change. 

One of the best known tales in the history of science relates how the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes discovered his principal of buoyancy when he stepped into his bath. Noticing the water that had overflowed onto the floor Archimedes realized that the volume of water that was displaced was equal to the volume of his body that had been submerged and the scientist had the solution to his problem. Overjoyed Archimedes got out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse crying “Eureka” which is Greek for “I found it!”

As he stepped into his bath Archimedes realized that he could measure the volume of any solid object by the volume of water it displaced! (Credit: Dreamstime)

Recently a physicist with the California Institute of Technology named Amnon Yariv had an experience somewhat like that of Archimedes while taking his shower at his home in Pasadena, California. Having one of those shower heads that are at the end of a long flexible hose Yariv noticed that when he let the head hang free the force of the flowing water caused it to not only swing back and forth like a pendulum but also twist clockwise and anti-clockwise. Doctor Yariv, who is an expert in Oscillations and periodic motions quickly recognized this behaviour as bimodal, that is two distinct oscillations were moving in synch with each other. Doing a little experimenting Yariv soon discovered a few other interesting characteristics of his phenomenon, one was that the two oscillations were also coupled, any dampening of one would cause a dampening of the other. Also, if he increased the water flow of the shower beyond a certain point the two oscillations began to grow wildly, uncontrollably. Doctor Yariv likens his discovery to two tango dancers, who have to coordinate their dancing with their partner in order to avoid tripping over each other.

Physicist Amon Yariv of Caltech. (Credit: Caltech)
Dr. Yariv in his shower experimenting just like Archimedes did! (Credit: Caltech)

Having discovered his new phenomenon Doctor Yariv spent the next several years modeling it mathematically while also performing some experiments to confirm his model. According to Yariv his oscillation is an bimodal extension of a class of oscillations that were studied by Lord Rayleigh and Michael Faraday a century and a half ago in which a system is excited by a modulation at twice the resonate frequency of the system.

Lord Rayleigh is also the physicist who first worked out the reason why the sky is Blue. Today we call that Rayleigh scattering. (Credit: Science Facts)

Doctor Yariv was also able to obtain useful work from his oscillations by coupling it to a rotary gear. He hopes that his research may lead to more efficient energy conversion from wind turbines and other green energy systems. Not bad for something discovered in the shower!

The rotation of the blades on a wind turbine are a form of oscillation. Dr. Yariv hopes that by better understanding his double oscillation it may be possible to improve the efficiency of wind turbines! (Credit: Just Energy)

Most of the discoveries made by physicists today however require a bit more equipment than a showerhead, often very expensive equipment, even equipment on satellites in outer space. The mystery of Earth’s magnetic field for example has been studied by hundreds of physicists over the last several hundred years with some of the most precise instruments available yet we still known only a little about it. We do know that the core of our planet is composed mainly of liquid iron and nickel, both magnetic materials, and that as our planet spins on its axis currents in that molten core can generate a magnetic field.

A simplified view of Earth’s magnetic field. Once again, since the north pole of your compass points north that means that there is a south magnetic pole up there!!! (Credit: BC Open Textbooks)

Another thing that we’ve discovered is that every couple of hundred thousand years or so our planet’s magnetic poles swap their positions, the one up north going south and the one down south going north. (By the way, since opposite poles of a magnetic attract each other while similar poles repel, and since the north pole of a compass points north that means that currently there is a south magnetic pole up north and a north magnetic pole down south.)

For reasons unknown every couple of hundred thousand years or so the Earth’s magnetic poles reverse their positions. Right now our planet’s magnetic field is starting to look like the figure on the right. (Credit: NASA Science)

Over the past several decades measurements of the Earth’s magnetic field have shown a steady decline in the strength of that field leading many researchers to think that Earth may be in the initial stages of one of those magnetic pole swaps. In order to get a more precise idea of just how rapidly the Earth’s magnetic field is changing in 2014 the European Space Agency (ESA) launched three satellites that they called the Swarm Constellation that were designed to make the most accurate measurements of our planet’s magnetic field. Over the next six years the satellites made detailed and comprehensive maps of the Earth’s magnetic field from Low Earth Orbit (LOE) and just as importantly monitored how the magnetic field was changing!

The three satellites of the European Space Agency’s ‘Swarm Constellation’. Together these satellites are monitoring the changes in Earth’s magnetic field. (Credit: European Space Agency)

That data has now been analyzed by researchers at the University of Michigan’s department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering and compared to the latest model for how we think the Earth’s magnetic field works. That model is known as the International Geomagnetic Reference Field or IGRF-13, the 13 meaning that this is the 13th model in a series. A report on that analysis has recently been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

Image depicting the data collected by the Swarm Constellation satellites. It obvious that Earth’s field is no longer a nice simple one pole up the other down! (Credit: eoPortal)

Through their examination of the data from the Swarm Constellation satellites the researchers discovered a number of discrepancies between the data and the model many of which were caused by a surprising error in the model. You see, although the physical North and South Poles, as defined by the Earth’s axis of rotation, are exactly on opposite sides of our globe, the same is not quite true of the North and South magnetic poles. Currently the north magnetic pole is situated at 84º of latitude and 169º of longitude, for the south magnetic pole to be exactly opposite it on our globe it would have to be at -84º and 11º of longitude but it is in fact at -74º latitude and 19º longitude. At least some of the reason for this asymmetry in Earth’s magnetic field comes from the observed fact the both magnetic poles move, currently the north magnetic pole is moving at a speed of about 45km per year.

We’ve known for over a century that the North Magnetic Pole was moving but for decades it moved very slowly. Recently that motion has accelerated and the pole is racing across the polar region. (Credit: Newsweek)

The discovery of this error in the model will certainly help with further improvements in the model but another find by the scientists may be even more important and that is the speed with which the Earth’s magnetic field is changed. As outlined in the report noticeable shifts in both the strength and polarity of the magnetic field can be observed even over as short a period as six months. In fact the rapid changes in the magnetic field are already causing problems in navigation for both ships and aircraft, especially for those whose paths take them close to the Polar Regions.

Compass, Sextant and Telescope, the instruments seafarers used for centuries to navigate their way around the world. What happens when the Compass is no longer so accurate? (Credit: Adobe Stock)

Earth’s magnetic field is a dynamic phenomenon whose pace of change is increasing. In the years to come those changes could impact our daily lives in other ways than just making navigation more difficult. Only by learning more about our planet’s magnetic field physicists can we prepare ourselves for the changes to come.

Space News Special Edition: Starliner’s Continuing Problems. Can Boeing’s Manned Capsule be saved or will Space X have to Rescue the two Starliner Astronauts from The International Space Station (ISS)? 

NASA has made their decision, the Boeing Starliner capsule will return unmanned from the International Space Station (ISS) sometime in early September, the scheduled date is currently 6 September. The two Boeing astronauts who traveled to the ISS aboard Starliner Back in June, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will remain on the ISS and return to Earth with the astronauts of the Space X Crew 9 mission in February of 2025. That mission had been originally scheduled to go to the ISS in late August but the mission’s launch date has been pushed back to late September because of the problems with Starliner.

On the 24th of August the Big Brass at NASA announced that the Boeing Starliner Astronauts would be brought back to Earth aboard a Space X Dragon Capsule. This makes Starliner’s Orbital Flight Test a definite failure! (Credit: NASA)

Additionally, the Crew 9 mission was originally supposed to carry four astronauts to the ISS, NASA’s preferred compliment for the Space X Dragon capsule, but will now only carry two astronauts when it launches in September. That change to the Crew 9’s mission is so that it can return in February with Wilmore and Williams. This means that the original eight-day stay of Williams and Wilmore at the ISS will now last about eight months.

In order to bring back the Starliner crew the Space X Crew 9 Mission will only carry two astronauts to the ISS instead of the planned four shown here. Mission commander Zena Cardman on the right and Pilot Nick Hague next to Cardman will probably still go while Russian Cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov and Mission specialist Stephanie Wilson will remain on Earth pending another mission. (Credit: NASA)

As the NASA administrator in charge of the Commercial Crew Program Steve Stich explained it. There was simply too much uncertainty in the way that the thrusters aboard Starliner worked to allow them to risk the capsule’s returning with its crew aboard. This is a painful setback for Boeing and its efforts to get into the business of commercial manned space travel.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the decision but it was a unanimous choice by the NASA Team. (Credit: Internet Archive)

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When NASA initiated its Commercial Crew Program in 2011 to replace the Space Shuttle the space agency expected Boeing, with all of its aerospace experience to be the prime contractor for manned missions to and from the International Space Station (ISS). It was thought that the newer space startups like Space X, Sierra Nevada and Blue Origin would act as back ups to Boeing.

This is the way everyone thought NASA’s Commercial Crew Program would go, Boeing’s Starliner riding into orbit aboard an Atlas V rocket. Boeing was expected to take the lead in sending astronauts to the ISS. (Credit: SciTechDaily)

Boeing’s design for their Starliner capsule was also the most conservative of the four competitors; it even somewhat resembled the old Apollo Command Module from NASA’s glory days. The designs proposed by the other potential contractors were thought to be more innovative.

The Apollo Command Module from NASA’s glory days. NASA had a lot of experience with capsules so when the decision was made on which designs would fulfill the CCP requirement they went with the two capsules. (Credit: SketchFab)

Sierra Nevada proposed their Dreamchaser space plane while Blue Origin’s unusual design was christened the ‘Biconic Nose Cone’. In the end it was the two traditional designs that received NASA’s full funding. Boeing’s Starliner got $4.2 billion while Space X’s Dragon capsule; an upgrade of their unmanned cargo carrying Dragon got $2.6 billion.

Looking like a miniature Space Shuttle Sierra Nevada’s Dreamchaser will undergo its first, unmanned test flight hopefully this year! (Credit: Wikipedia)
Blue Origin’s Capsule may look like an ordinary space capsule but it returns to Earth sideways like a shuttle, its heat shield is on its side! (Credit: Spaceref)

The original schedule of the program called for the first test flights of the two capsules to begin in 2017 with regular transfer missions to begin the following year but a series of problems caused both Boeing and Space X to announce delays. These delays required NASA to purchase an additional five seats aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft in order to maintain an American presence aboard the ISS.

Russia’s Soyuz capsule has been flying now since 1967. (Credit: NASA)

Finally in May of 2020 Space X’s Dragon capsule carried out its manned Orbital Test Flight (OTF) taking two astronauts to the ISS in the first manned mission to launch from American soil since 2011. Just a few months later Space X conducted the program’s first regular crew transfer mission to the ISS, the Crew 1 mission. Since that time Space X has carried out another seven successful crew transfer missions along with five purely commercial space missions, the Inspiration 4 mission, see my post of 2 Oct 2021 and the Axios-1 through 4 missions to the ISS, see my post of 17 June 2023. Going forward Space X appears ready to take however many astronauts NASA needs in Low Earth Orbit while at the same time grow the emerging market of private manned space missions.

In the First manned launch of a commercial space mission Space X Dragon capsule delivered two NASA Astronauts to the ISS. (Credit: NASA)

The same cannot be said of Boeing, which has had to deal with a long, and still growing list of technical issues. Those problems include some of the capsule’s most vital systems including the vehicle’s thrusters and parachutes along with numerous software glitches. Boeing’s difficulties became public in December of 2019 as Starliner failed to pass both its Pad Abort Test and its unmanned OFT. The results of these tests required further redesign of the capsule, and further delays including NASA’s insistence on a second unmanned OFT.

As every Engineer knows it’s Redesign, Redesign, Redesign… (Credit: My Code Club Journal)

That second OFT was finally conducted in May 0f 2022 as the Starliner capsule did manage to dock with the ISS, despite further problems with three of its thrusters. The manned OFT was then scheduled for early 2023 but yet again more problems led to more delays. It wasn’t until June 5th of this year that NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams sailed into orbit and docked at the ISS aboard a Starliner capsule. But again there were problems with helium leaks and thruster issues so that Wilmore and Williams were forced to manually dock with the station rather than allowing Starliner’s computer to control the docking process.

While I’m certain that Butch and Suni are happy to remain on the ISS having an eight day mission turn into an eight month one really screws up any personal plans you might have! (Credit: CNN)

According to the mission plan Starliner was only supposed to remain docked at the ISS for eight days before returning to Earth but NASA wanted to conduct further tests on the thrusters while the capsule was in orbit so, little by little, the eight days grew to more than eight weeks and rumours began that Williams and Wilmore were stranded in space. What made the whole situation worse was that, with Starliner still docked at the ISS there was no docking port available for the next Space X routine crew transfer mission. This is what caused the Crew-9 mission to be delayed from its original August 25th launch date to sometime in late September.

So long as Starliner is docked at the ISS there isn’t room for the Space X Crew 9 Mission to dock. So Crew 9 had to be delayed until late September while NASA figured out what to do with Starliner. (Credit: CBS News)

So NASA had a dilemma, did the space agency have enough confidence in Starliner to try to bring Wilmore and Williams back home aboard it, or have Starliner come home unmanned and have the astronauts remain on the ISS and come home with the Crew-9 mission in February of next year!

So the Starliner crew will have to wait until February to return to Earth aboard the Crew 9 Dragon capsule, splashing down off the coast of Florida like the Crew 4 mission shown here. (Credit: NASA)

In the end the space agency decided to take the safer course and bring the astronauts home in February aboard a Space X Dragon capsule. The question now becomes, will Starliner ever fly again let alone begin regular transfers of astronauts to Low Earth Orbit (LOE). Assuming the unmanned capsule returns intact from the ISS Boeing will have an enormous amount of investigative work to do determining the causes of the thruster issues. That effort will then have to be followed by a considerable resign of the capsule.

If Starliner makes a successful landing, like the unmanned OFT capsule did here, then Boeing will have to do a complete examination to determine what went wrong with the thrusters. (Credit: Geekwire)

Those efforts could take years and only after further ground testing is completed will NASA even consider launching Starliner again. At that point NASA will have to decide if Boeing will have to perform another unmanned OFT before another manned OFT before finally certifying Starliner. With all of the delays and problems Starliner has had so far the question becomes, will the ISS still be in orbit by the time Starliner is finally ready to begin service to it?

Three News Items from the Natural World around Us. 

Communing with Nature is a passion for many people. Just getting out of doors and observing the plants and animals that inhabit the wild areas of our world can be an endlessly fascinating pastime. Those people who are lucky enough to study nature as their profession are obviously called naturalists and they have many interesting stories to tell, here are three of them. I’ll start with the biggest, creature that is, and work my way down in size.

Ah, enjoying nature. What could be better than having a career that allows us to observe and understand the world around us! (Credit: Westend61)

Everyone has heard the old saying that “an elephant never forgets”. For thousands of years or longer we humans have recognized that elephants are among the smartest of animals and over the last few decades evidence that elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror or the ability of elephants to remember the directions to waterholes they haven’t been to for years has proven their mental abilities.

Good advice from one intelligent species to another. (Credit: Flickr)

Now a new study has been published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution that suggests that elephants might have individual names for each other in the deep rumblings that they use to communicate. There are already a few other species that are recognized as having and using personal names for each other, Bottlenosed Dolphins and Orange Fronted Parakeets are two examples. Unlike humans however, who are given our names at birth, individual Dolphins and Parakeets create their own signature call that their friends and family then use to identify them. These animals pick their own name in other words.

Yes, it appears that Elephants have individual calls that they associate with certain individuals and use those calls when they want to get the attention of those individuals. They each have their own name! (Credit: Bored Panda)

In order to determine whether or not elephants also have personal names researchers from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York recorded 469 calls from wild female African savanna elephants and their offspring. The team then used an AI to analyze the contents of the calls. After processing the calls the AI was able to identify which elephant was being spoken to in each call more than 25% of the time.

Some of the audio data accumulated by the researchers as they studied the calls of African Elephants. (Credit: Nature)

In order to demonstrate that their analysis was correct the researchers then replayed some of the recorded calls to a group of 17 elephants. When the ‘name’ of a particular animal was played that elephant was observed to become more vocal itself and moved toward the speaker that had sounded its name.

African Elephants now join a growing list of different species of animals that are known to have personal names from individuals. (Credit: The Atlantic)

The fact that elephants actually call each other by individual, personal names shouldn’t really surprise anyone. We’ve always known that elephants have complex social lives and of course good memories. The Cornell study is really just another example of how intelligent other species of animals can be.

The evolutionary linage of elephants. Right now some scientists are trying to bring the extinct Mammoths back to life. If they succeed it will be interesting to see if they are as intelligent as their African kin? (Credit: Britannica)

Another way that animals can demonstrate their intelligence is through tool use. Certainly one of the biggest moments in science during the 20th Century was when Jane Goodall saw a chimpanzee take a twig, licked it and then stuck it into a termite mound. When the chimp pulled the twig back out it was covered with termites that the animal then consumed. The chimpanzee was using a tool to obtain protein rich food to eat.

When Jane Goodall first observed Chimpanzees using twigs to ‘fish’ for termites it was proof that our closest relative used tools. (Credit: Britannica)

Since that time many other species have been observed to use tools. For example sea otters along the Pacific coast will bring up a clam or oyster from the sea floor to eat. Swimming on their backs with the shellfish on their stomach the otter will then bang a sharp rock on the clam in order to break the shell open so they can eat the mollusk inside.

A sea otter banging a mussel shell against a rock in order to open it! Another species of animal that uses tools. (Credit: Phys.org)

The advantages of using the rock as a tool are pretty obvious but a new study by Naturalists at the University of Texas at Austin and the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California examined tool use among sea otters more closely to determine if there were any other benefits as well. What the researchers did was to observe the feeding techniques of 196 radio tagged sea otters off of the California coast. In an effort to gather as much data as possible the scientists also enlisted the aid of volunteer ‘otter spotters’ who were able to keep track of individual otters thanks to the radio tags.

Here’s someone who’s really into observing sea otters. Naturalists often make good use of volunteers like this to gather data about how animals in the wild live. (Credit: USGS.gov)

What the researchers found was that female otters tended to make use of rocks as tools more often than males did, perhaps to compensate for their smaller size and reduced biting strength. The tendency of females to make greater use of tools is also known from other tool using species such as dolphins and chimpanzees, and perhaps for the same reason. The naturalists also suggest that, since it is the females that raise the young in all those species, it may be that tool use is passed down though the generations by females.

Like humans, much of what a baby sea otters learns comes from its mother! (Credit: YouTube)

One other unexpected but not surprising outcome discovered by the study was a considerable reduction in tooth damage to those otters that used the rocks as tools. As you can imagine major tooth damage can be a death sentence to any animal so the fact that tool use reduces the chances of tooth damage is another great advantage to any species.

Trying to open clam shells with your teeth not only requires a lot more effort but also can result in damage to the otter’s teeth. That’s the advantage of tool use! (Credit: Futurity)

My last story from nature does not concern a single species of animal but rather a huge group of animals spread across several phyla. I’m talking about animals that fly, along with many that swim and how fast they all beat their wings / fins in order to fly / swim. A large scale analysis of hundreds of such species by researchers at the Department of Science and Environment at the University of Roskilde in Roskilde in Denmark has led to a simple equation that predicts the frequency that a flying animal has to beat its wings based only upon the animals mass and the area of its wings. This single equation was found to be accurate for hundreds of species of insect, birds and bats and also for the fins of penguins along with several species of whale.

We all know that bird’s flap their wings in order to fly but how often they flap depends on several factors. (Credit: Wired)

According to the study the frequency of wing beat is proportional to the square root of the animal’s mass divided by the area of the animal’s wings.

The basic equation for the frequency that birds, insects, bats and even whales have to flap their wings or flippers in order to fly or swim. (Credit: Jensen, Dyer et al)

After checking the accuracy of their equation against the wing beat frequency of several species that had not been used in deriving it the researchers then used it to predict the frequency of wing beats for the extinct pterosaur species Quetzalcoatlus northropi, the largest known flying animal ever. According to the equation Q northropi would have had to beat its ten square-meter wings seven times every ten seconds in order to be able to fly.

Some of the data collected to verify their equation for wing beat frequency. (Credit: Jensen, Dyer et al)

Whether they are studying a single species or discovering a general rule that helps to understand hundreds of different species naturalists are lucky in that they get to study the endlessly fascinating world of life on Planet Earth.

The Happiest Countries and the most Livable Cities are all in Europe. What lessons can We here in the US learn from that or don’t We really want to be Happy Anyway?

The annual surveys listing of which are the happiest countries and the most livable cities in the world are out and together they show a definite trend, Europe is definitely the best Continent to live on. The happiest country survey comes from the Gallup polling organization along with the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network while the most Livable Cities survey is an assessment made by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

We all know this is true but here in America the drive for money is overpowering even as our country declines in happiness. (Credit: Quora)

As a part of the happiest country survey a poll of about a thousand people is taken in each country asking them to rate how happy they are on a scale of one to ten, ten being the happiest. The average value for the people surveyed in each country allows a happiness value to be calculated for that country. As you might guess some countries, like Russia and North Korea do not permit the survey to be taken so they are not included in the list, but can you imagine anyone being happy in either of those countries.

The North Korean government doesn’t allow the Happiness Survey to be conducted in their country but I don’t think it’s a very happy place anyway! (Credit: Al Jazeera)

In addition the people surveyed evaluate their own country with regards to six distinct qualities, GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and perceptions of corruption. Social support generally deals with governmental programs like education and healthcare.

The two best ways for any government to improve the lives, and hence the happiness of their people is to make certain that they have the best education and healthcare systems possible. (Credit: Colorado Consumer Health Initiative)

For the seventh year in a row Finland has topped the list at number 1 with several other Nordic countries also appearing in the top ten, Denmark at number 2, Iceland at 3, Sweden at 4 and Norway at 7. Israel came in at 5, a bit of a surprise since they are currently at war, while the Netherlands finished at 6. Rounding out the top ten were Luxemburg at 8, Switzerland at 9 and Australia at 10. The countries with the lowest rankings are also pretty easy to understand, Afghanistan comes in at the very bottom while Lebanon, Lesotho, Sierra Leone and Congo are also places you wouldn’t want to live in.

Maybe one of the reasons that Finland is such a happy place is because the people there take care of the environment in which they live! (Credit: Fishing Booker)
On the other hand it’s also easy to see why Afghanistan is such an unhappy place. (Credit: NBC News)

This year saw the United States take a considerable drop from 15th place to number 24 after being in the top 20 ever since the survey was first taken. It’s thought that there were two main reasons for the US dropping out of the top 20. Firstly several other countries got a lot happier. Czechia for example moved up to 18 while Lithuania rose to number 19.

Czechia moved up in this year’s happiness survey and I can understand why, Prague is one of the places I’d really like to visit! (Credit: Wikipedia)

The biggest reason for the US drop however was because of the low value given to it by people under thirty years of age. Indeed, the US ranked at number 10 for people over 60 years old but for young people the US ranked at a dismal 62. Such a disparity between the feelings of the old and young in this country is more than just unsettling it could threaten the very stability of our society. Lack of educational opportunity, college debt, the high cost of homeownership along with a feeling that their government simply doesn’t notice them all contribute to the unhappiness growing amongst America’s young. Low taxes for the rich along with Social Security and Medicare for the elderly, I’m one of them, means there’s nothing left to solve the problems facing young people.

Just some of the problems young people feel they have to contend with. I took particular note of how getting into college is a bit easier but paying for college is much, much harder. (Credit: Pew Research Center)

A similar trend can be seen in the rankings of the most livable city. What constitutes a livable city is a bit more complicated with thirty different factors being evaluated for each of the 173 cities reviewed. Those factors are grouped into five categories including stability, education, infrastructure, healthcare, culture along with a healthy environment. Each city is rated for each factor on a scale of 1 to 100.

So much of our view of the world in which we live is due to our environment. It’s no wonder that people who live in harsh, violent conditions become harsh and violent themselves. If you want better people, however you define that, you have to provide them a better environment to live in. (Credit: Telegraph India)

As with the survey for happiest country Europe dominates the list taking the top three spots, Vienna was number one followed by Copenhagen and Zurich. Altogether Europe placed eight in the top twenty. Seven cities in Australia and New Zealand also made it into the top twenty, as did three Canadian cities and two cities in Japan. Not a single US city managed to make in into the top twenty, the closest being Honolulu at 23, followed by Atlanta at 29 and Pittsburgh at 30.

Honolulu, Hawaii maybe the best city to live in here in the US but it’s so expensive that it has dropped out of the top twenty cities worldwide. (Credit: TheTravel)

So what’s going on here? We Americans are used to being on top, not back in the middle of the pack, and loosing ground! And you can’t insist that America’s decline is all because the surveys have some kind of liberal, leftist bias. In the Happiness survey they just asked a thousand people how happy they were and we didn’t do very well.

Here in the US what our government considers important is to blame the other side for our problems rather than try to fix them! Ya think that could be why we’re losing ground. (Credit:

Back when I was born in the 1950s the US probably was the happiest country on Earth. Back then most other industrial countries were still in ruins because of World War 2 but the US had a booming and fair, emphasis on fair, economy. So what happened, how did we fall so far?

This may be how we imagine life in the US was back in the 50s but even then there were problems but at least back then some of us tried to solve those problems. (Credit: History Facts)

I think it all comes down to the difference between being happy and being rich. Now don’t get me wrong, I know the US has always had a large segment of its population whose chief concern was increasing their own personal wealth. In the last 40 years however the grasping for every penny has gone from a chief concern to an unhealthy obsession. At the same time our competitive nature has also grown and coarsened to the point where opponents have become enemies and cheating has become accepted, so long as you get away with it.

It’s been almost 40 years since the movie ‘Wall Street’ encapsulated ‘Supply Side Economics’ in a single sentence. And far too many people still think it’s true! (Credit: Etsy)

  So what we have succeeded in building is a society in which we have a small number of big winners and a large number of losers, and losers are rarely happy people. But are the winners happy either? It is really worth owing a fifty-room mansion if you have to drive through a slum to get to that mansion?

Marie Antoinette’s wealth and power didn’t save her when the mob finally rebelled! (Credit: YouTube)

A hundred and fifty years ago it was Europe that was obsessed with ostentatious wealth. It appears that they have finally learned the lesson that living in a happy country, a fair country where everyone is happy, not just you, is better than living in a big mansion and having everyone else being jealous of you. Maybe America will learn that lesson as well one day. 

Astronomy News for July 2024: A New Study of the Radial Velocities of Cepheid Variable Stars Allows Astronomers to more Precisely use these Stars in Their Measurements and What Makes Cepheids so Important Anyway? 

The ancient astronomers of Babylon, Greece and Mesoamerica all believed that the heavens above were perfect, changeless, eternal, and that’s despite the changing phases of the Moon and the motion of the planets against the background of ‘Fixed Stars’. That’s why they thought comets and meteoroids were weather phenomenon, not part of the heavens, because they weren’t permanent. As astronomers began to examine stars with telescopes and other instruments however, they quickly realized that are the stars not ‘Fixed’ in their positions but they do move slowly across our sky.

The Geocentric model of the Universe. Here the Earth is motionless in the center with the planets orbiting around it and the ‘fixed stars’ of heaven beyond them. Modern instruments like the telescope quickly showed this idea to be grossly incorrect! (Credit: Simple Wikipedia)

Another way that astronomers discovered stars change is in their brightness. In fact even before the telescope there were some observations of ‘nova’ or new stars that appeared where no star had been and then disappeared after several weeks to a month. There was also the strange star Algol whose brightness noticeable dropped every 2.87 days. The Arab astronomers who first noticed this named the star ‘El Ghoul’ which over the centuries got shortened to Algol.

Algol is known to be an eclipsing binary where a large but cool star occasionally passes in front of a brighter star causing the system as a whole to become dimmer for a short period of time. (Credit: Cosmic Pursuits)

It wasn’t until the 19th century however that an entire class of stars were discovered whose brightness varied up and down in a rhythmic fashion, that is the length of time it took a particular star to go from being bright to being dim and back to bright was the same over and over again. Different stars of this type each had their own period but each star’s period stayed the same. The brightest star of this type in our sky was δ Cepheid so the entire class acquired the name Cepheids. By the way, while δ Cepheid might be the brightest Cepheid in the sky the best known Cepheid is the Pole Star Polaris.

Something I learned in my days as a Boy Scout. To find the North Star Polaris just use the two front star of the cup of the Big Dipper and follow the line they make to Polaris! (Credit: YouTube)

It wasn’t long before astronomers began to wonder if there was some connection between a Cepheid’s period and its absolute brightness, the actual amount of energy it emits every second. You have to remember that the brightness of a star in our sky, its apparent brightness, depends not only on how bright it really is, its absolute brightness, but on how far away from Earth it is as well. The star Betelgeuse for example is actually a lot brighter than the star Sirius, but Betelgeuse is about 70 times farther away than Sirius, that’s why it’s Sirius that appears to be the brighter of the two stars in the sky.

The star Sirius appears to be the brightest star in the sky here on Earth but if all of the stars around Sirius were at the same distance as Sirius it wouldn’t look very bright at all! Sirius is so bright mainly because it’s close to our Solar System. (Credit: Physics Feed)

On the other hand, if astronomers know the absolute brightness of a star then they can measure its apparent brightness and from those values calculate the distance to that star, and it’s measuring distances to objects in space that is the hardest thing to do in astronomy. That’s why astronomers were so interested in seeing if there was a relationship between the period of a Cepheid and its absolute brightness. By 1890 more than 30 Cepheid variables were known to astronomers but they were all over the sky, at various distances and brightnesses, the problem of finding a simple relationship seemed impossible to solve.

Cepheid variables are easily recognized by astronomers because of the rhythmic pattern in the change in their brightness. (Credit: Hyper Physics Concepts)

It was the Lady Computer Miss Henrietta Swan Leavitt of Harvard Observatory who cracked the puzzle. Oh, you didn’t know that before computers were built out of transistors and other electronics people were called computers. Computers were usually graduate students or women with degrees who did the actual calculations, the arithmetic so that the male scientists could get on with doing the real science! And if that sounds sexist, well it was!

It was Harvard researcher Henrietta Leavitt who worked out the relationship between the period of a Cepheid Star and its absolute brightness. (Credit: Ogle.astrouw.edu.pl)

In fact at the Harvard Observatory it was the male astronomers who made the observations, took the measurements and then handed their data over to the female computers to categorize the results. So it turned out that it was the women, paid less and never allowed to do actual astronomy, who took all that data and made the big discoveries.

It was another Harvard ‘Computer’ who developed the stellar classification system that astronomers still use today. (Credit: Space.com)

What Henrietta Leavitt did was take observations of the Small Magellanic Cloud where she managed to find sixteen Cepheids. Since the sixteen stars were all in the same cloud, and therefore at approximately the same distance, Miss Leavitt reasoned that any Cepheid that looked brighter really was brighter. With the data from those sixteen variables Henrietta was able to work out the equation that connected a Cepheid’s period to its absolute brightness. For example it was found that a Cepheid with a period of one day was about 200 times brighter than our Sun but a Cepheid with a period of fifty days was more than 10,000 times brighter than our Sun.

The small Magellanic cloud is a satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way. It was among these millions of stars that Heneretta Leavitt found several dozen Cepheids and by assuming they were all at approximately the same distance, discovered her law of period to absolute brightness. (Credit: Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.)

By using Cepheids astronomers could not only find the distances to objects inside our Milky Way galaxy but distances to other galaxies as well. It was by finding a Cepheid in Andromeda that Carl Hubble was able to show that the ‘nebula’ as it was then called, was a galaxy in its own right, far outside of our Milky Way.

The photograph that exploded our view of the Universe. On the sixth of October in 1923 Carl Hubble took this image of Andromeda, then thought to be a nebula within the Milky Way, and found a Cepheid variable, see ‘VAR!’ at the top right. Thanks to Miss Leavitt he could calculate the distance to that star and it was way outside the Milky Way. Andromeda, and many other nebula were in fact galaxies in their own right! (Credit: Nick Nielsen)

With Cepheid variables being such important tools for astronomers you can imagine that astronomers are working even now to refine Miss Leavitt’s period-Luminosity law and make it more accurate. For example variations in the stars brightness can also be caused by other factors, such as if the Cepheid has a companion star, many do, and the two stars are dancing around each other so that the Cepheid is sometimes closer, sometimes further away!

In trying to make Henrietta Leavitt’s law more precise and accurate astronomers ran into the problem that many Cepheid’s are part of binary star system complicating measurements of their brightness. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

In order to study such complications a recent study has been carried out at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The astronomers used their instruments to not only measure the brightness of the Cepheids they studied but also the velocity of the star either towards or away from the Earth. Because of this the program has been christened the VELOcities of CEphieds or VELOCE program. The results of the VELOCE study have been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Some of the data collected by the VELOCE Program in their efforts to better understand the behavior of Cepheid variables. (Credit: ArXiv)

In order to obtain the most precise measurements the VELOCE researchers employed two high resolution spectrographs that separated the wavelengths of the light from each star they studied. By using the Doppler effect, see my post of 5 August 2023, the astronomers were able to precisely measure the stars motion relative to Earth and thereby make adjustments to the star’s actual brightness.

The most difficult thing to do in astronomy is to measure the distance to celestial objects. Astronomers use several different techniques that they have christened ‘The Distance Ladder’. Cepheid variables are an important rung on that ladder. (Credit: UNC Physics)

By improving our measurements of the Cepheid variables the work of the VELOCE group will allow astronomers to make better measurements of the distances to objects throughout the Universe giving us a better, more accurate picture of the Universe in which we live.

Book Review: The Climate Action Handbook by Heidi A. Roop 

With all of the evidence for Climate Change that’s accumulating, with all of the extreme weather that’s adversely effecting people’s lives everyday a growing number of people are now hoping that something can still be done to avert the coming climate disaster. The problem is that we are all just individuals; it so often appears as if our opinions just don’t matter to the politicians and billionaires who seem to run the world. Many of us want to see change but have no idea what we as individuals can do to make a difference.

Good advice even today. When one person gets up and starts doing what they think is right eventually others will follow, it’s the only way to make a better world! (Credit: LinkedIn)

That’s the whole purpose of ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ by Doctor Heidi A. Roop of the University of Minnesota’s Climate Adaptation Partnership. In her book Dr. Roop details one hundred actions that each and every one of us can take that will a have a positive effect on our environment. The actions described in ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ are broadly divided into ten categories:

Cover art for ‘The Climate Action Handbook: By Heidi A. Roop. (Credit: Amazon)

Starting and Sustaining your Climate Action Journey

Energy Production and Transportation

Travel and Work

Food and Farming

Shopping and Consumer Choices

Actions Around the Home

Nature Based and Natural Solutions

Health and Well-Being

Civic and Community Engagement

Education and Climate Information

Dr. Heidi A. Roop of the University of Minnesota. (Credit: University of Washington)

Each of these categories is then sub-divided into specific actions that anyone can at least attempt and in which any degree of success is a definite contribution toward the goal of mitigating Climate Change. While it maybe true that governments and corporations have a far greater influence on the Climate than any individual, if each of us begins to take a few of the actions suggested in ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ we can make a difference and in the long run those individual actions will help to force governments and corporations to take action as well.

Everything doesn’t have to be a fight. Setting an example by doing the right thing, either individually or as part of an organization can often succeed better than fighting! (Credit: University of Central Florida)

So what are the actions outlined in ‘The Climate Action Handbook’. Well, they vary from large scale efforts such as installing solar panels on the roof of your house to such simple things as combining several car trips into one in order to cut down on CO2 emissions. Whether large or small a little bit of up front thinking and effort can reduce your own carbon footprint, and often save you some money as well. Planting trees is another example of something simple anyone can do that will take carbon out of the air, while providing shade to help cool down our cities while just giving us all a little greenery to enjoy.

Installing solar panels on your home is an investment, not an expense. You can lower your energy bills for years to come, saving money in the long run! (Dominion Energy Solutions)

Many of the actions suggested in ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ are pretty obvious once you think about it. For example did you know that a 16 oz. plastic bottle of water requires more than one thousand times as much energy to produce, package and transport as 16 oz. of tap water does! That’s actually a lot of carbon going into the air just for a quick drink, and that plastic bottle your water came in will likely just become plastic pollution as well. Another easy one is fast shipping on the items we all buy online. It’s true, not only does same day shipping cost a lot more than 3-4 days shipping does, but it also has a much bigger carbon footprint, and do you really need to have that latest Taylor Swift CD right now, you can’t wait a couple of days?

Yes, same day shipping is available but do you really need it? Can’t you wait a couple of days for that video game? (Credit: Shippo)

And speaking of plastic pollution many of the actions recommended in ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ also deal with the incredible amount of plastic that we simple throw away causing harm to the environment and our own health. Food waste is another issue that produces greenhouse gasses while filling up our landfills; all while many people go hungry even here in the US.

With all of the food that gets wasted here in the US we could easily end hunger in this country! (Credit: Student Work – School of Information)

I do have a few complaints about ‘The Climate Action Handbook’, for one thing, in her effort to get to exactly 100 actions Dr. Roop has several that really overlap to a great extent. For example, Action 4: Be privy to the Politics of Climate Change has a lot in common with Action 96: Look to Community Leaders. Also, the book is formatted in a style similar to a live seminar being projected onto a screen in front of an audience. That is, each action is discussed on one page while on the page opposite what was discussed is repeated in bullet-form. Because of this there are several actions that should really be discussed at greater length while the discussion of other actions hardly manage to fill up their single page!

Are there really just 100 climate actions? And shouldn’t some topics deserve greater attention than others? Still ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ is meant to be a handbook, not an exhaustive study and in that it succeeds. (Credit: Amazon)

Nevertheless ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ is a great resource for how ordinary people can help to save our planet, and what could be more important than that! One last point, throughout ‘The Climate Action Handbook’ other resources, websites, organizations, other books are highlighted to help the reader go further, to find out more about how they can help solve the climate crisis.

Archaeology News for July 2024: Two stories from Biblical times in the eastern Mediterranean. 

The eastern Mediterranean has always been one of the hotbeds of archaeology surrounded as it is by Greece to the north, Egypt to the south and the lands of the bible to the east. Yet despite over two hundred years of intensive study the eastern Mediterranean still manages to surprise us on occasion. In this post I’ll be discussing two new discoveries that have recently been made in the eastern Mediterranean. As usual I will discuss the earliest study first and move forward in time.

Often called the ‘Cradle of Civilization’ the lands to the east of the Mediterranean have been intensely studied by archaeologists. (Credit: The Latin Library)

We humans took to traveling on the water long before the beginning of recorded history so the story of how the first boats and ships were built can only be uncovered by archaeology. Based upon underwater excavations of ancient shipwrecks it is known that by the late Bronze Age there were ships capable of sailing hundreds of kilometers and carrying tons of cargo conducting regular trade between the people of Egypt, the Hittite empire, Canaan, Troy and Greece.

Modern replicas of bronze age ships have been built by archaeologists in order to test their theories about how much trade between ancient civilizations there was during the Bronze Age. These replica ships have been found to be quite seaworthy! (Credit: Medium)

However it was always thought that those ships never sailed out of sight of land but instead hugged the coastline throughout their journeys. The reasons for this timidity are basically twofold; firstly in case of a storm a ship close to shore could quickly find a harbour or even beach itself for safety. In addition the navigators of that time probably lacked the navigational tools necessary to know where they were and what direction they were going once they were out of sight of land.

One big question about Bronze Age sea trade is, just how far from land did these ancient mariners dare to go? (Credit: Quora)

That’s what makes the recent discovery of a 3,300 year old vessel that had sunk about 90 kilometers off the coast of northern Israel so interesting; the location of the wreck was well out of sight of any land. Another interesting aspect of the discovery is the fact that the wreck was found at a depth of 1,800 meters, with its cargo apparently intact by the London based fossil fuel company Energean which operates underwater natural gas extraction wells in the eastern Mediterranean.

Looking for natural gas the energy company Energean came across a 3,3300 year old shipwreck far off the coast of Israel. (Credit: Marine Insight)

Energean was searching in an area off the coast of Israel for likely new sites for gas wells using an underwater robot when the robot just happened upon the ancient wreck. From what the robot could see the ship is approximately 12-14 meters in length and lays on the ocean floor surrounded by hundreds of earthenware jars that must have held the ships cargo of oil, wine or perhaps fruit.

Nowadays, if we need to go somewhere that could be dangerous for humans we send a robot. It was this robot that actually found the ancient wreck! (Credit: The Times of Israel)

Once the engineers from Energean realized what they had come across they contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) who announced the discovery of the wreck on the 20th of June. The wreck itself is so deep beneath the ocean’s surface that a comprehensive examination of the ship is probably impossible. However the Energean robot did succeed in bringing up two of the ship’s jars that archaeologists with the IAA have identified as being of Canaanite origin and from about the year 1,300 BCE.

Some of the debris found on the sea floor. The wooden ship itself has decayed so most of what can be seen is pottery that carried the ship’s cargo. (Credit: Haaretz)

The Canaanites were of course the Bronze Age enemies of the Hebrews who lived along the coast of modern Israel and Lebanon. The fact that the wreck was discovered so far from land clearly shows that the ancient mariners of the Bronze Age were not as timid as we had though and that they probably could use the position of the Sun and stars to navigate when they were away from land.

As the enemies of the ancient Hebrews the Canaanites are accused in the Bible of many horrible rituals including sacrificing their children to the god Moloch. By the way don’t confuse the Canaanites with the Philistines, they were two very different people! (Credit: Merrimack Valley Havurah)

Speaking of the enemies of the ancient Hebrews as the Bronze Age turned into the Iron Age the people of Israel and Judah acquired enemies who were much more powerful than the Canaanites. The Iron Age in the Middle East was a time of empires starting with Egypt and followed by the Assyrians, Babylon and Persia.

At the height of their empire the Assyrians controlled much of what today is the Middle East. (Credit: Biblical Archaeology Society)

According to the bible the Assyrians tried to conquer the two Hebrew kingdoms several times before finally subjugating the kingdom of Israel, giving rise to the legend of the ‘lost ten tribes of Israel’. They never succeeded in defeating Judah however despite their king Sennacherib laying siege to Jerusalem in 701 BCE. As told in 2Kings 19:35 the Assyrian army was encamped outside the walls of the city when “the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp.”

The Assyrians tell it a little bit differently. Cuneiform tablets have been found in excavations at the Assyrian capital of Nineveh that relate how king Hezekiah of Judah paid Sennacherib a large tribute, and promised to behave as the Assyrian king’s vassal in order to save the city.

The Assyrians succeeded in their conquests by fast moving attacks using chariots like this one depicted here. (Credit: Science Photo Library)

The truth is probably somewhere in-between but regardless an independent scholar who specializes in Near Eastern Archaeology named Stephen Compton has written an article in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology where he claims to have found the campsite of Sennacherib’s army. Now Mister Compton didn’t go digging around in Israel, instead he studied aerial photographs from the mid 20th century of the area between Jerusalem and the Hebrew town of Lachish that Sennacherib also laid siege to searching for clues as to where the Assyrian army might have camped.

One of the earliest people for whom we can identify a portrait king Sennacherib of Assyria almost succeeded in conquering Jerusalem. The question is, why didn’t he? (Credit: Wikipedia)

What Mr. Compton was looking for in particular was a simple oval wall encompassing an area large enough for an army to camp in but without any permanent structures inside. A temporary city in other words, which is pretty much what an army camp is. Stone reliefs from Nineveh have been found that show that the Assyrians did in fact build oval shaped temporary fortifications for their army during campaigns. The location that Mr. Compton has identified is known locally as the Khirbet al Mudawwara where Mudawwara is an Arabic word that can mean a place where a sultan has placed his army. A memory perhaps of the Assyrians even after 2700 years!

The oval in this Assyrian bas-relief depicts the kind of fortification the Assyrian Army would build as a camp. (Credit: X)
Aerial view of the Khirbet al Mudawwara. Is the oval shape on the right of the image the site of the camp the Assyrians built in order to besiege Jerusalem? (Credit: Live Science)

If Mr. Compton’s discovery does turn out to be true it will be good evidence that the bible, like Homer’s tales, can be used as a guide for the ancient history of the Near East. Provided that is you take into account spin doctoring, exaggeration and the occasional outright falsehood.

Space News for July 2024: Boeing’s Starliner finally reaches the ISS with a Crew Aboard, but not without Problems.

Well Starliner finally made it, the long delayed Boeing space capsule has at last succeeded in taking live astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Problem is it hasn’t succeeded in returning them safely to Earth yet. Launched from the Kennedy Space Center on June 5 aboard an Atlas V rocket the Starliner Crew Flight Test (CFT) managed to dock with the ISS the next day and the two person crew of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were welcomed by the official crew of the ISS. The launch itself was delayed several times because of faulty valves and leaks in both Starliner and the Atlas V rocket.

Launch of Boeing’s Starliner on its Crewed Flight Test (CFT). The capsule was sent into orbit aboard an Atlas V rocket. Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)

In fact launch was only allowed to go ahead after NASA decided that a helium leak in Starliner did not threaten the mission. Then, during the daylong trip in Low Earth Orbit (LOE) to the ISS Starliner developed another four helium leaks. Finally, as the spacecraft neared the ISS yet another technical issue appeared as five of Starliner’s twenty-eight maneuvering thrusters began to function erratically forcing a two hour delay in docking.

After several problems the Starliner Capsule finally did dock at the ISS.

Because of all those problems NASA decided to delay Starliner’s return, rather than remaining at the ISS for about a week Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have now spend more than a month at the ISS trying to resolve Starliner’s problems, or at least learn more about them. Officially NASA says that the two astronauts are not ‘stranded’ in space but this situation is certainly without precedent.

While NASA insists that Suni Williams (l) and Butch Wilmore (r) are not ‘Stranded’ at the ISS they nevertheless have spent a lot more time there trying to ‘understand’ Starliner’s problems then anyone originally anticipated. (Credit: Florida Today)

The two astronauts are in no danger; they are perfectly safe at the ISS, they could always be brought back down in a Space X Dragon capsule. If after all of the testing in orbit however NASA finally does decide that Starliner isn’t reliable enough to bring Wilmore and Williams back to Earth it would be a terrible blow to Boeing’s Starliner program, and Boeing itself.

It’s not just Starliner that’s been giving Boeing problems. Their 737 Max airplanes have caused several deadly accidents causing the entire company’s safety program to be called into question. (Credit: NextBigFuture.com)

So Starliner still has problems, but are they serious enough to cause NASA to refuse to certify the capsule for regular operation in the Commercial Crew Program. NASA does not like the idea of entrusting its astronauts to vehicles that have any technical problems, and Starliner obviously still has quite a few. The space agency could require Boeing to conduct one more CFT in the same way that it required Boeing to conduct a second unmanned Orbital Flight Test (OFT) of Starliner back in December of 2019. That decision will undoubtedly have to wait for the final mission review.

Whatever methodology you use to solve a problem a review of everything that happened and everything that was tried is always the last step! (Credit: Humor that Works)

However NASA has been waiting a long time for Starliner to begin conducting regular crew rotation missions to the ISS as a part of the Commercial Crew program. In fact at the beginning of the Commercial Crew Program it was expected that Boeing would contribute the largest part of the missions to the ISS under the program. That’s why the Aerospace giant received the largest development contract, $4.2 Billion USD, while Space X received only $2.6 billion to develop their Dragon capsule. Originally NASA’s schedule called for Starliner to carry out its test flights back in 2017 and begin regular missions to the ISS in 2018, to be followed shortly thereafter by Space X’s Dragon capsule.

NASA’s plan was to have two private companies carrying their astronauts to the ISS. Space X has now conducted nine missions but Boeing has yet to complete a single one! (Credit: NASASpaceFlight.com)

What eventually happened however was that Space X, after a few delays carried out its first regular mission, designated as Crew-1 in November of 2020 and has now successfully conducted nine missions as a part of the Commercial Crew Program. Space X is now contracted to conduct another 14 crew transfer missions before the ISS is officially shut down and de-orbited. The price tag for the remaining 14 Space X missions is set at $258.7 million each or $64.4 million per seat.

With their reusable Falcon 9 first stage Space X has greatly reduced the cost of getting into outer space. (Credit: Statista)

Currently NASA still hopes that Boeing’s Starliner can also participate in regular crew rotation missions to the ISS. Assuming that Starliner does receive certification Starliner’s first crew mission is scheduled for no earlier than 2025 and NASA has contacted Boeing to provide a total of six regular crew missions by 2030. The estimated price tag for a seat on Starliner is approximately $95 million per seat or around $380 million per mission.

In just a few years private space stations will be orbiting our planet. Boeing still hopes to be a part of that future but will Starliner ever be a reliable space system? (Credit: Yahoo)

Even at that price however Boeing is not going to make money on Starliner from the Commercial Crew Program. The added cost of seven years of delays, the extra unmanned OFT and the possibility of NASA requiring a second CFT will certainly cause Boeing to suffer a financial loss. However Boeing is looking beyond this decade to the 2030’s when it is expected that several privately owned space stations will be in orbit and the business of taking astronauts, scientists and even tourists to those stations will become much more profitable. Boeing had better fix its capsules remaining problems though; it already has competition in Space X’s Dragon and Sierra Nevada’s Dreamchaser mini-shuttle is scheduled to make it’s first, unmanned flight later this year.

Boeing has more competition than just Space X, Sierra Nevada’s Dreamchaser is scheduled to make its first, unmanned flight later this year. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Before I go I just want to mention some good news concerning everybody’s favourite space probe that could, Voyager 1. You’ll recall that back in November the Voyager probe began radioing back a data stream that made no sense to the Voyager team at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL). See my post of 9 September 2023. Well after a lot of effort on the part of the engineers at JPL in April they managed to correct the problem to the extent that Voyager was back in communication with Earth.

Even after 45 years the two Voyager spacecraft are still sending back useful data about conditions in interstellar space! (Credit: Science in the news- Harvard University)

 Even with that success however, there was still a considerable amount of work to be done before the probe was fully repaired. Now, on June 14th NASA announced that Voyager 1 is fully functional and sending back useful measurements about the void of interstellar space which it was the first of all human made objects to ever reach.

Book Review: ‘A City on Mars’ by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

I’m not certain as to whether or not to classify ‘A City on Mars’ by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith as Science Fiction. You see ‘City on Mars’ is actually an overview of the many problems we humans are going to have to overcome if we really want to settle outer space. Right now we are at the very beginning of that endeavor; we currently have two small, emphasis on small, space stations that are crewed by rotating teams of astronauts about every six months. In other words nobody is actually living in space at this moment. So in a sense that makes ‘A City on Mars’ kinda fictional, doesn’t it?

While ‘A City on Mars’ is definitely not this kind of Science Fiction it’s still a book about the future, so it is sorta Science Fiction! (Credit: OverDrive)

No matter, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith are a pair of space enthusiasts who have done a lot of delving into the challenges that humans are going to face trying to settle, they don’t like the term colonize because of its political baggage, outer space. Having started out as proponents of space settlement they freely admit that the number and scale of those challenges has made them a lot more cautious.

Cover Art for ‘A City on Mars’ by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In ‘A City on Mars’ the problems of space settlement are classified into three broad categories, Physiology or can humans live and multiply long term in space, where to live in space and how, and finally, what are the legal aspects of building a settlement in space. You might wonder about the inclusion of that third class, after all isn’t space the final frontier and therefore kinda lawless? However the legal challenges may be the toughest of all, if we’re going to do it without starting any wars between space powers, nations that just happen to be nuclear powers as well.

Most people’s idea of what a city on Mars would look like. Actually if you read ‘A City on Mars’ you’ll find out that there are a few problems with this sort of design! (Credit: Asia Times)

Starting with the question of whether humans can live long term in space it’s worth remembering that back in the 1950s, right before the space age began, many medical experts were convinced that humans could not survive for more than a few minutes in zero gravity. Without gravity, they said, you couldn’t even swallow, you’d get disoriented, dizzy and be unable to perform any task. Finally, without gravity your heart would race at double the normal pulse rate until before long you’d have a heart attack.

In the 1950s no one had ever been into space so we had no idea if even the toughest person could survive more than a few minutes there. Because of that ignorance the original Mercury 7 astronauts were subjected to a battery of medical tests to ensure they were in the best of health. (Credit: NASA)

Fortunately it didn’t work out that way. By the time the first men walked on the Moon it was obvious that people could survive zero gravity for several weeks with the only impediment being some temporary weakness when you returned to Earth.

Readjusting to Earth’s gravity after a year in space isn’t easy, as Scott Kelly can tell you. Zero gravity causes your muscles and bones to weaken so that a lifetime in space may simply not be physically possible. (Credit: Geekwire)

However, living in zero gravity for the rest of your life may be another matter. You see, thanks to our space stations we now have lots of data about people living in zero gravity for six months to a year at a time and it’s becoming clear that our bodies aren’t built for living there. Bone mass loss appears to be the biggest problem but there is muscle loss as well, and that’s despite astronauts putting in several hours of exercise every day. There’s also the way that fluids in your body redistribute themselves in zero gravity and that includes the shape of your eyeball causing vision problems. Of course NASA is doing a lot of medical research to find treatments to remedy these problems but it’s clear that our bodies are not built to live in zero gravity long term.

The astronauts who landed on the Moon did not so much walk on its surface as hop like bunny. Still the Moon has some gravity. Whether or not it’s enough to prevent our muscles and bones from deteriorating is still questionable. (Credit: WHYY)

But what if we if build settlements on the Moon or Mars, they have gravity after all, it’s not as strong as Earth’s but it’s still more than zero gravity? Well the problem there is that the longest anymore has spent in partial gravity was about three days on the Moon. We have no idea about whether Lunar or Martian gravity is strong enough to prevent or even lessen any of the problems stated above.

In the Movie 2001: A Space Odyssey a Lunar base is already well established. That obviously didn’t happen and it may take a long time to come! (Credit: Kitbashed)

There’s another big issue about which we have no data at all and that’s the question of trying to have children, and raise them in outer space. While it’s true that a fetus in the womb is kinda sorta in zero gravity still there’s that business of the mother’s fluids being redistributed along with her loss of bone and muscle. Then, once the child is born how will they grow in zero or partial gravity, could a child born and raised on Mars ever acquire enough muscle to be able to visit Earth? To date no experiments related to breeding and raising animals have been conducted in space so we literally know nothing about whether it can be done.

The biggest medical question however is, can a human being, born and raised on the Moon or Mars, ever grow strong enough to come home to Earth and survive our planet’s strong gravity! (Credit: Raising Children Network)

Assuming we can live and multiply somewhere in space the question now becomes where and how. After a quick review of the various choices in our solar system ‘A City on Mars’ settles on the Moon and Mars because the two of them are the closest to Earth in both distance and conditions. The problem is that even then the Moon and Mars are horrible places to live. As far as trying to live there is concerned they are both airless, waterless deserts where even the sky and ground are trying to kill you. Any people living there will have to build themselves strong shelters equipped with the means of providing air, water and food while keeping a livable temperature, oh and shielding its inhabitants from cosmic radiation.

There’s been a lot of talk over the last few years about water ice at the bottom of some Lunar craters. Probably more talk than there is water ice! If that ice is there it would make a small fraction of one percent of the Moon’s surface extremely valuable! (Credit: YouTube)

‘A City on Mars’ also takes a chapter to discuss the choicest real estate on the Moon. You may have heard recently about how space nations are really interested in the Moon’s south pole. That’s because it’s thought that the bottom of some of the craters there may have been in complete darkness for billions of years so that there may be water there in the form of ice. Also, some of the peaks of those craters may be in almost perpetual sunlight making them the perfect places to build solar arrays for power. The fact that those areas represent less than one tenth of one percent of the Moon’s surface makes them extremely valuable, valuable enough to be the cause of violence?

Everybody loves ‘Star Wars’ don’t they. If we start fighting over the Moon or Mars however most of the fighting will probably be here on Earth! (Credit: Forbes)

Which brings me to the legal aspects of settling space. Of course so far there hasn’t been much need for the long arm of justice in space. That’s because there are only three nations that have the ability to send people into space and those nations have all made certain that the people they send are law abiding and can be expected to behave themselves while in space. Nevertheless, as more actors gain access to space, such as Space X, the race to obtain what little resources there are in space may lead to conflict.

It’s amazing how quickly the private corporation Space X has come to dominate space exploration. In the future there is going to be more private investors in space, more guests at the table wanting more of the few resources readily available. That could certainly provoke violence! (Credit: Dreamstime.com)

The governing legal document covering the exploration of space right now is actually called the Outer Space Treaty or OST and it was ratified in 1967 by the only two space powers at the time, the USA and the USSR. Since that time another 110 countries have signed on including all of the major space nations. Shortly after its creation the OST was supplemented by several other agreements known as the Rescue Agreement, the Liability Convention and the Registration Convention.

Yes there really is an “Outer Space Treaty’ and here’s the first page. (Credit: Alamy)

So how are these treaties going regulate the way that human beings settle space? The short answer is that the OST forbids anyone from owning any part of any celestial object, in other words no ‘I claim this crater in the name of King and Country’. On the other hand anyone can explore and make use of space, so Ireland for example has the right to set up a exploratory outpost basically anyway on the Moon, but they don’t even control the ground directly beneath that outpost! Obviously that could lead to a fair amount of misunderstanding if Vietnam decides to set up their outpost in exactly the same spot as Ireland’s!

Land grabs here on Earth have caused more than a few wars. It would be naive to think that we’ll behave any better in outer space. (Credit: Grain.org)

What the authors of ‘A City on Mars’ have discovered is that there isn’t a lot of rules and regulations that will govern how we settle space, which could lead to a ‘wild west’ scenario complete with shoot outs that trigger full-scale wars, between nuclear powers, back here on Earth. Remember Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England fought a number of wars in Europe that began in the New World.

What we call the French and Indian War and Europe calls the Seven Years War was just one of the many wars started over disputes for land in the New World by Old World Powers! By the way it was a young George Washington, on the white house above, who started the French and Indian War. (Credit: American Battlefield Trust)

So there are a lot of problems that are going to have to be solved before humans settle space and most of them do not involve rockets or robots or spacesuits or cool technical things like that. If you’d like to know more about those nasty little details, and some of the possible solutions I think you’d like to read ‘A City on Mars’.