Uncategorized – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

Archaeology News for September 2024: More Evidence that Stone Age People were very Sophisticated in some ways.

The Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age was that time in Prehistory when we humans first began the transition from hunter gatherer clans to agricultural societies. It was also the time therefore when some peoples settled down to live in permanent ‘villages’ instead of living as nomads moving from place to place with the seasons as the local resources ripened.

The Neolithic or new stone age was a time of tremendous change as humans first began to grow crops, domesticate animals and live in settled communities. (Credit: SciTechDaily)

And once humans began to live permanently in one place they could begin to build, not just villages in which to live but also monuments to honour their gods or record some important event. It is well known from anthropology that by building such monuments those people were also saying ‘This is our Land!” In this post I will be talking about several of such Neolithic structures and as usual I will start with the oldest first and then move forward in time.

Perhaps the best known of the monolithic structures built during the neolithic is Stonehenge in England. We’re still arguing over what it was used for! (Credit: English Heritage)

Göbekli Tepe is in fact considered to be the oldest stone structure known to archaeology, see my post of July 5th 2017. The site is located in southern Turkey and has been dated to more than 11,000 years ago; the name by the way means ‘Potbelly Hill’ in Turkish. The site consists of a series of oval stone walls with large ‘T’ shaped pillars inside the ovals. Both the pillars and some of the walls are covered by carvings, many of the carvings are those of local animals while others appear to be abstract symbols. The site is undergoing almost constant excavation and it is expected that many more discoveries are waiting to be unearthed.

Some of the structures unearthed at Göbekli Tepe, the oldest known ‘temple’ discovered by science. Archaeologists are certain that much remains to still be discovered. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The motive behind the building of Göbekli Tepe is of course unknown after all these thousands of years but that hasn’t stopped archaeologists from trying out various theories. The temple like layout of the site certainly suggests that it could have been used as a place of worship, perhaps the animals craved into stone were sacred totems of some sort. Another possibility is that the structures were built as a calendar, that is some way the pillars and carvings could be used to keep track of the seasons. In an agricultural society being able to know when to plant and when to harvest is of the greatest importance.

This is the calendar used by the ancient Mayans. Their calendar was so accurate that even the Aztecs many centuries later still used it! (Credit: Jake Jackson’s These Fantastic Worlds)

A new study in the journal Time and Mind by archaeologists from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has developed evidence supporting the idea of Göbekli Tepe being a calendar. At the same time the paper further suggests that the building of the site was a response to an astronomical event that occurred a thousand years before the earliest known part of Göbekli Tepe was built. This event occurred sometime around 10,800 BCE when an asteroid or comet fragment is known from geological evidence to have struck the island of Greenland triggering a worldwide ‘mini-ice age’. This drastic change in the climate is thought to have contributed to the extinction of large fauna such as the Wooly Mammoth and Saber Toothed Tiger.

The extinction of large ice age animals like the Wholly Mammoth is currently being thought to have been caused by an asteroid strike similar to the one that killed the dinosaurs only smaller and just 12,800 years ago. (Credit: The Irish Sun)

The evidence for Göbekli Tepe being a calendar comes from an interpretation ‘V’ shaped carvings on pillar 43 in the largest enclosure. The V shaped carvings appear to be arranged to record a lunar month of 29 or 30 days, below the V’s are squares that appear to represent the number of lunar months in a year plus another 10 V’s to make up for the extra time needed to get to 364 days. Finally there is a bird like figure with a V around its neck that the paper asserts represents the summer solstice bringing the total number of days to 365, the right number of days for a year. Using the carvings on the pillar could allow the ancient people of Göbekli Tepe to keep track of both the lunar months and a solar year.

The calendar carved into Göbekli Tepe. By repeating each cycle in turn all of the days of a year could be kept track of. (Credit: Sci.News)

The evidence for Göbekli Tepe being a record of the comet strike was found at the top of the same pillar which according to the article depicts a meteor swarm emanating from the constellations of Aquarius and Pisces. That is the location in the sky that is thought to be where the comet strike came from. According to Dr. Martin Sweatman, co-author of the study, “This event might have triggered civilization by initiating a new religion and by motivating developments in agriculture to cope with the cold climate.” In any case the event must have had a profound effect of people throughout the world and could well have inspired the people of Göbekli Tepe to try to record it somehow.

The top part of the same pillar, the so-called ‘Three Handbags’ is thought to record the destruction caused by the asteroid strike in 12,800 years ago. I have to admit that’s a bit of a stretch for me! (Credit: The New York Times)

While we’re on the subject of ancient stone monuments there’s some news about the best known such structure, Stonehenge. Back in my post of 30 December 2023, I discussed how recent research had revealed that one of the most important of the so-called ‘bluestones’ at Stonehenge, the altar stone, was chemically so different from the other bluestones that it could not have come from the same quarry in Wales as the other bluestones did. So the hunt was on to find the place of origin for the altar stone.

The Altar Stone at Stonehenge on the left. Chemically different from the other ‘Bluestones’ at Stonehenge scientists have been searching from the location from where it came. (Credit: CNN)

Now a Ph.D. student in geology from Curtin University in Australia named Anthony Clarke has announced that he has traced the altar stone back to its source in northern Scotland. According to Mr. Clarke, who grew up in Wales not far from the quarry where the other bluestones came from, the altar stone is chemically identical to sedimentary rocks from the Orcadian basin nearly 700 kilometers from Stonehenge in northern Scotland.

If Mister Clarke is correct then the Altar Stone came from the very northern tip of Scotland. This image shows a land route the stone could have taken but a sea route is also possible. (Credit: The US Sun)

So after having solved the mystery of where the altar stone came from we now have to figure out how it got to Stonehenge, and why was a rock from so far away used there anyway. The terrain in northern Scotland is rather rugged even today so the 5,000 kilogram stone was probably brought by water, still a difficult undertaking in a culture that had not yet invented the wheel.

The neolithic period is also the time when people first began to build boats for fishing and trade. Was the Altar Stone brought from Scotland on such a boat? By land or sea, it would have been a difficult undertaking. (Credit: Ancient Pages)

As to the question of why a stone from so far away was incorporated into Stonehenge, that is something we will probably never know for certain. Neither we will know for certain the reasons for the building of Göbekli Tepe. We can learn much from the ancient rocks left to us by our remote ancestors but their motives may remain hidden for the rest of time.

Book Review: ‘Arkhangelsk’ by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel.

Around about the year 2200 humanity will once again be doing its level best to destroy itself. The environment is poisoned, civilization is in ruins and ideological wars are everywhere. It’s against this background that the starship, colony ship Arkhangelsk departs Earth on a mission to colonize the star system 974-33, a mission to try to save something of the human race. Arkhangelsk is one of those multi-generational ships whose original crew will never live to complete their 200 year long voyage, it will be up to their descendents to complete the mission by establishing a colony in system 974-33.

Interstellar ‘Arks’ like this one from Arthur C. Clarkes’ ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ are huge spaceships in which human beings will live for generations in order to be able to travel the enormous distances between the stars. Arriving at their destination the crew, all born on the ship during the journey, will colonize the planets circling another sun. (Credit: Medium)

That’s the history behind the novel ‘Arkhangelsk’ by author Elizabeth H. Bonesteel. As the story begins the people of the city of Novayarkha are the descendents of the crew of the Arkhangelsk. The city itself was built from the various sections of the starship Arkhangelsk, and with no contact with Earth for over 400 years the citizens of Novayarkha believe themselves to be the last remaining humans anywhere, and they are struggling to survive.

What if we humans established bases or colonies on other planets and then destroyed ourselves back here on Earth? How would those last remaining humans react? (Credit: Lifehacker)

You see the only ‘habitable’ planet in system 974-33 is hardly a paradise. The atmosphere is too thin, and contains traces of poisonous gasses as well, while the planet’s surface is a mixture of rock and ice. Even worse, the planet’s thin atmosphere and weak magnetic field provide little shielding from cosmic radiation. Add to that the fact that the builders of Novayarkha needed the Arkhangelsk’s reactor to provide power for the city and they placed that reactor too close to the city, increasing the background radiation level.

An Ice World orbiting the star 974-33 is the setting of ‘Arkhangelsk’ by author Elizabeth H. Bonesteel. (Credit: Amazon)

Author Elizabeth H. Bonesteel. (Credit: Facebook)

It’s no wonder therefore that Novayarkha has both a high infant mortality rate and a high incidence of cancer. Another persistent problem is a high suicide rate; a lot of people seem to just walk away from the city to die in the ice. One last problem for the people of Novayarkha are the exiles, descendents of a group that rebelled when the city was being founded and who now occasionally raid Novayarkha to steal supplies. All in all the last remnants of humanity may not last too much longer themselves.

Everybody knows that nuclear reactors produce quite a bit of harmful radiation. So why did the inhabitants of Novayarkha put one in the middle of their city??? (Credit: Wikipedia)

Except the people of Novayarkha are not the last human beings in the Universe. Back on Earth people somehow managed to muddle through their difficulties and although not all of the problems have been solved humanity is once again pushing out, once more exploring the Universe. As the starship Hypatia enters system 974-33 both groups of humans are astonished to find each other, and are wary of how the other side will react.

Sometimes referred to as the ‘Last Pagan’ Hypatia of Alexandria was a mathematician and philosopher who was murdered by a mob of christians in the name of their god. (Credit: What is Social Studies?)

Hypatia is not a colony ship, rather her mission is to construct a faster than light (FTL) transceiver network in system 974-33 to assist other Earth vessels as they explore this sector of the galaxy. However Hypatia is not in very good shape either. As the starship was coming out of one of its hyperspatial jumps it collided with an asteroid killing most of her crew and destroying a good part of the ship.

Like the people of Novayarkha the crew of the Hypatia are in need of some help. Can these two groups work together for their mutual benefit? (Credit: X)

I’m certain that you can see plot here. Both groups of humans need each other but neither group really trusts the other, after all there’s been no contact between these two branches of humanity for over 400 years. The story is very much an allegory on how much more successful we humans are when we do work together.

Trust is always a key ingredient to working together. (Credit: LinkedIn)

There’s a darker undercurrent in ‘Arkhangelsk’ as well however for the city of Novayarkha holds sinister secrets, secrets that it’s authoritarian rulers would prefer to keep from their people. So another ethical problem illustrated in the novel is the struggle between the individual and society.

Finding the right balance between the rights of the Individual and the needs of Society has been a never-ending problem in Civilization. (Credit: Young Leaders for Legal Literacy Foundation)

I do have one problem with ‘Arkhangelsk’ and that is a problem I have nowadays with a lot of SF novels, too much filler. The modern publishing business seems to feel that novels have to be 400 or more pages in order to convince their customers that it’s worth paying $12-$20 dollars for a book. That means that an author has to add in a lot of stuff that isn’t important to the plot and really isn’t interesting. ‘Arkhangelsk’ suffers a bit from this problem as it could use a good editing to remove some of the less interesting material.

Edit, edit and then edit some more. Even the best novel can still use a little bit more editing! (Credit: BookBaby)

But ‘Arkhangelsk’ is interesting; it is a good take on the old theme of two very different cultures colliding, with all the conflicts and opportunities that entails. If you like those novels that tell stories about humanity traveling to and colonizing the stars you will enjoy, ‘Arkhangelsk’.

Nobel Prizes for 2024: It’s a Big Year for Artificial Intelligence.

The Nobel Prizes for Physiology, Physics and Chemistry were announced over the week of the 7th of October and while the prizes aren’t supposed to have any kind of ‘theme’ to them this year the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) stood out as being of great importance. Not only were the physics and chemistry prizes awarded for work in developing or utilizing AI but several of the recipients warned about the dangers that uncontrolled AI are already having in our society.

Every day Artificial Intelligence is playing a bigger role in our daily lives. We can only guess what the future holds. (Credit: The Motley Fool)

But I’ll begin with the award for physiology or medicine because it was announced first and because AI played no role in the work for which it was honoured. The recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology are Victor Ambros of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Gary Ruvkun of Harvard Medical School. These two men were honoured for their discovery of microRNA along with how it functions in the cells of living creatures.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their work in discovering MicroRNA. (Credit: X)

Let me take just a moment here to discuss the difference between DNA and RNA and how those differences are used in cells before I discuss why microRNA is so important. Both kinds of Nucleic Acids are composed of long chains of sugars; in RNA the sugar is called ribose while in DNA it is deoxyribose, which is just ribose without one oxygen atom. Attached to those long chains of sugars are nucleotide groups, adenine, thiamine, guanine and cytosine, A, T, G, and C for short. All life on this planet uses the sequence of the A, T, G, and Cs as a code for how to build a living creature, the famous genetic code.

Only a single oxygen atom, bottom right, makes a world of difference between the sugar Ribose and Deoxyribose. (Credit: Adobe Stock)

I remember back in the 1960s reading Isaac Asimov’s book ‘The Genetic Code’ in high school and at that time biologists didn’t know why living cells used DNA to store that code in their nucleus rather than RNA. It turned out that DNA is a more stable chemical than RNA, although both are actually very fragile chemicals, so DNA is used to store the genetic code long term.

The famous ‘Double Helix’ of DNA stores the code by which all living things are made. (Credit: Shutterstock)

It was also discovered however that cells used RNA to send information from the nucleus to those parts of the cell that need it in order to build proteins because it is less stable and can therefore be reused more easily. This is the famous messenger RNA or mRNA that is used in our Covid-19 vaccines and for which last year’s Nobel prizes in physiology were awarded.

To build a protein the DNA molecule builds a molecule of messenger RNA which then travels into where the protein is needed and manufactures it. (Credit: Deltec Bank)

So then what is microRNA? Well if messengerRNA is made up of thousands of nuclides in order to build a protein, microRNA has only a few dozen nuclides and it acts as the ON and OFF switches for the building of those proteins. In other words microRNA regulates how much of the various proteins our cells build. Thanks to the work of Drs. Ambros and Ruvkun we have taken one more step, and an important one, in our understanding of how life works!

If Messenger RNA contains the code to build a protein, then it’s the Micro RNA that turns on or turns off the process of building that protein! (Credit: Jacek Krol et al)

As I said above both this year’s Physics and Chemistry prizes deal with Artificial Intelligence (AI), a connection illustrating just how important AI has become to nearly every field of science, along with a growing importance in our daily lives. This year’s Physics Nobel Prizes were awarded to John Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto for their work in the development of artificial neural networks that enabled computers to learn how to do things in a fashion very similar to the way we learn how to do things! What is known as machine learning.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Hopfield (l) and Geoffrey Hinton (r) for the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). (Credit: Thereporteronline)

As important as those advancements are Doctor Hinton, who has been christened ‘the godfather of AI’ stole something of the spotlight by taking the opportunity to warn about the growing danger of unregulated AI in our society. “It will be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he cautioned. “Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. we have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us.” At the same time however Dr. Hinton also pointed out the enormous benefits that AI could bring in terms of increased productivity and economic efficiencies, again similar to the developments of the industrial revolution.

The real danger is what we can’t imagine at present. We’re entering a new world and what lies ahead is unknown, and the unknown is always a danger! (Credit: DataFlair)

So if this year’s Nobel in Physics were given to the scientists that led the way in the development of Artificial Intelligence then the Chemistry prize was given for utilizing AI. this year’s chemistry prize was given to David Baker of the University of Washington along with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper both of whom work at the DeepMind project a division of the Google Corporation.

The winners of this year’s Chemistry prize are David Baker (l), Demis Hassabis (m), and John Jumper for their work on developing AI tools to study proteins. (Credit: Chemistry World)

Are we certain that we want a tool as powerful as AI to be in the hands of a corporation. We need our governments to start of process for regulating AI so that it’s used in the public, not private interest. (Credit: Reuters)

The awarding of a Nobel to a researcher from a private corporation is not all that unusual. Bell Labs, when it was a division of Bell Telephone Corporation received quite a few Nobels, as have chemical and pharmaceutical companies. I do believe however that this is the first time that a software / internet company has received a Nobel.

Researchers at Bell Labs received several Nobel Prizes, most notably for the invention of the transistor. 2024 is the first time that employees at a that a software company have received a Nobel, but probably not the last. (Credit: Computer History Museum)

All three of the recipient’s work dealt with applying machine learning techniques in order to better understand proteins. Proteins, which are constructed from long chains of about two dozen compounds known as amino acids, are the building blocks from which cells are made and are also involved in virtually all the chemical reactions that make up the cell’s metabolism. There are literally millions of different known proteins and it’s not just their chemical formula that determines how they behave but their shape as well. You see those long chains of amino acids bend and loop around on themselves forming complex three dimensional shapes that are often more important to a protein’s function than the atoms of which they are composed.

With Proteins it’s often the shape, more than the chemical formula, that determines its function. Here are just a few of the infinite number of shapes proteins can make. (Credit: BioRender.com)

Calculating the shapes of proteins used to take years but in 2020 Doctors Hassabis and Jumper released AlphaFold an AI that can calculate the shape of a protein in hours or even minutes. Thanks to this program researchers around the world are developing new medicines as well as proteins that may be able to break down plastics into materials that can be more easily recycled.

As more and more plastic waste gets into the environment the danger of microplastics getting into us grows. The work of Doctors Hassabis and Jumper may help to solve this problem. (Credit: IUCN)

Doctor Baker, who recently began using the AlphaFold Program in his own research, went further in developing a new class of proteins unlike any seen in nature. These new proteins have already been used in the development of new medicines and vaccines but there is also the possibility that they may find usage in the fields of nanomaterials and microscopic sensors.

The idea of using proteins as micro sensors is still just science fiction, but then AI itself was just science fiction 20 years ago. (Credit: Biofisica)

The pioneering work of Doctors Hopfield and Hinton, along with Baker, Hassabis and Jumper illustrate how computers, and especially the new Artificial Intelligences, are playing an ever greater part in the world of science. Together with Doctors Ambros and Ruvkun they are this year’s Nobel laureates in the sciences.

Geology News for September 2024:

Geology is usually a quiet science, we generally only hear about it when there’s been a big earthquake or volcano eruption and even then all that the news media talks about is the destruction that’s happened to both people and property. There’s very little discussion of what an earthquake or volcano is and how they relate to our planet as a whole. Today I’d like to discuss two stories about our Earth that aren’t directly tied to either quakes or volcanoes and which don’t threaten destruction but which do tell us a great deal about the planet we live on.

Collecting and studying rocks is a large part of the science of Geology and is something that even a child can do as a way to get started in a career in science. (Credit: ThoughtCo)

We all remember from our High School science classes how our planet is built. We learned that at Earth’s very center there is a solid metal inner core composed mostly of iron about the size of the planet Mars. Above this solid core is a liquid outer core of molten metal, again mostly iron, this liquid outer core being about a thousand kilometers thick. On top of the outer core rides the 2,900 kilometer thick Mantel which is composed of a mixture of metals and silicates and which is often described as being plastic because it’s too warm to be solid but not hot enough to be completely liquid. Finally at the top is the 10-20 kilometer thick crust of solid rock that all life exists upon. That’s the basic model we all learned in school.

Just like we remember from High School our earth is like a Russian doll with layers of material one upon the other. (Credit: Handy Geography)

The way that scientists know that’s what the inside of Earth is like is by studying the different kinds of waves that are generated by large earthquakes or volcanic eruptions and which propagate around the entire planet. For example what geologists call a secondary or s wave is what physicists like me call a transverse wave, the kind of wave you can make with a piece of rope. Now transverse waves, s waves cannot go through either a liquid or a gas, they need a solid media to transmit them. So, if a large earthquake occurs in let’s say the island of Java in Indonesia then geologists at the exact opposite spot on Earth in Ecuador would not observe any s waves from that event because the s waves cannot pass through the liquid inner core.

Earthquakes generate both ‘S’ and ‘P’ waves which propagate around the world but only the ‘P’ waves can go through the Earth’s liquid core! (Geology Science)

On the other hand earthquakes also generate primary or p waves that are like sound waves and which can go through a liquid so the scientists in Ecuador will see p waves from the quake on Java. It’s by studying the various ways that the waves generated by Earthquakes propagate that geologists have learned so much about the interior of our planet.

A typical seismic wave as recorded by a seismograph. The ‘S’ and ‘P’ waves are notes along with surface waves. (Credit: Michigan Technological University)

Now a new study is linking a mysterious kind of seismic wave called a PKP precursors with another mystery, volcanic ‘hot spots’ which are volcanoes that seem to last for hundreds of millions of years at the same spot on Earth even as the continental plates move across the top of them. The Hawaiian Island chain is the best know example of this, a fixed volcano ‘hot spot’ that has created a series of islands as the Pacific plate moved across it. The supervolcano beneath Yellowstone Park is another such long lasting ‘Hot Spot’.

‘PKP’ waves are generated when ‘P’ waves are reflected off of the boundaries between the Earth’s layers. As you can see in the image PKP waves can be pretty complicated. (Credit: USGS.gov)

Geologists studying the PKP precursor waves at the University of Utah recognized that they were not being directly generated by earthquakes, instead PKP waves appeared to be echoes, that is waves that were bouncing off of something deep underground and are then scattered in many different direction. Now the Utah geologists have succeeded in zeroing in on the locations where PKP waves originate and have discovered that they are clustered around the volcanic hot spots in the Pacific, North America and Iceland.

The Earth’s known volcanic ‘Hot Spots’. These areas of intense volcanic activity do not seem to move with the Earth’s tectonic plates but rather pierce through those plates. (Credit: www.geo.cornell.edu)

Based upon what the researchers can learn about these deep regions in the Earth’s mantel they have been christened ‘Ultra Low Velocity Zones’ (ULVZs) and appear to lay at the boundary between Earth’s mantel and liquid core. Exactly what connection these ULVZs have with the volcanic hot spots is unknown at present, do they cause the hot spots or do the hot spots attract the ULVZs? You can be certain however that geologists will concentrate their efforts to further understand the origins of PKP waves at the ULVZs.

Ultra Low Velocity Zones or ULVZs lay the boundary between the outer core and the mantel. They appear to have some relation to the Volcanic Hot Spots but exactly what is presently unclear. (Credit: Research Gate)

As I was writing about the paper describing the discovery of the Ultra Low Velocity Zones (ULVZs) by the geologists at the University of Utah a second paper was being prepared by a second group of geologists at the Australian National University that provides further details about the ULVZs. According to the Australians the ULVZs form a doughnut shaped structure roughly beneath the equator at the boundary between the inner core and the mantel. Now the precise details about the ULVZs differ slightly between the two papers but it’s exciting to watch as a new part of our planet is being discovered and explored.

Do the ULVZs form a doughnut shaped structure around our planet’s equator? That’s what the team in Australia assert. We’ll find out in time! (Credit: Daily Mail)

Even while they study our planet’s interior geologists also continue to learn more and more about Earth’s past. Throughout it’s history Earth has seen periods of large temperature swings that resulted in geological periods where the planet became so hot that it completely lost its polar ice caps as well as periods where the planet was so cold that they have been christened ‘ice ages’.

Our planet has had many ice ages over the past 4 billion years but one that occurred about 700 million years ago covered nearly the Earth’s entire surface. Geologists call that period ‘Snowball Earth’. (Credit: wikipedia)

One of the most extreme cold periods occurred between 720 and 660 million years ago and is known as ‘Snowball Earth’ because virtually the entire planet’s surface was covered in ice. This particular ice age is of considerable importance not only because it was so extreme but because the first evidence for multi-cellular life occurs in the fossil record immediately after Snowball Earth. In fact evolutionary biologists have developed the theory that multi-cellular life evolved in order to survive the extremely harsh conditions of Snowball Earth and then exploded around the world as the glaciers retreated.

It was shortly after Snowball Earth that the very first multi-cellular creatures appear in the fossil record. Nobody thinks that’s just a coincidence. (Credit: Everything Dinosaur Blog)

The problem for both geologists and biologists is that ice ages have a tendency to destroy the geologic evidence of their own existence by the grinding and scouring of glaciers across the planet’s surface. For over a hundred years geologists have been searching for an unbroken stretch of sedimentary rock that records the entire history of Snowball Earth.

Did these rocks in Scotland escape Snowball Earth? That’s what geologists at the University College of London are claiming. If so they can tell us a lot about that period in Earth’s history. (Credit: The Independent)

They may now have finally found it. A new study in the Journal of the Geological Society of London by geologists at the University College of London has found that the Port Askaig formation on the Hebrides Islands of Scotland along with portions of Northern Ireland is just that rock sequence. The Port Askaig formation is a 1.1 kilometer thick series of strata that were laid down as sedimentary rock during the Sturtian glaciation period, to give Snowball Earth is technical name and which are underlain by 70 meters of carbonate rock that formed in tropical waters. Which shows that the period right before the snowball was considerably warmer. Those carbonate rocks are teeming with cyanobacteria, the most common form of life on the early Earth.

Spread out over portions of Scotland and Northern Ireland parts of the Askaig Formation lie in areas with little human habitation making the geologists work that much easier. (Credit: Stockholm University www.su.se)

The islands of the Inner Hebrides are generally uninhabited, making the Port Askaig formation a perfect labouratory for geologists to study this critical period in Earth’s history. Perhaps somewhere in these Scottish rocks lies the secret to the environmental conditions that caused the single celled life of Earth to unite into the communities of cells that today we call plants and animals.

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.