Category: Science

Space News for April 2025: Boeing’s Starliner Astronauts finally return from a nine month stay at the International Space Station, but they do so in a Space X Dragon Capsule. 

On Tuesday the 18th of March a Space X Dragon capsule returned to Earth carrying the four Crew 9 astronauts completing their mission at the International Space Station (ISS). Those astronauts had two days earlier been relieved at the ISS by four Crew 10 astronauts who will now crew the station until at least July.

When the Crew 9 astronauts, including the Starliner crew, splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico their welcoming committee included a pod of Dolphins! (Credit: Space.com)

In many ways the splashdown of the Dragon capsule in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida represented just another routine crew transfer for Space X. The long saga of Crew 9 however was anything but routine, for two of the astronauts returning to Earth were originally the crew of Boeing’s Starliner capsule on its first manned mission to the ISS. The Starliner crew only became a part of Crew 9 when NASA decided they did not trust Starliner to safely bring them back home.

The Starliner Crew of Suni Williams (l) and Butch Wilmore (r) got to spend a lot more time in space then they had originally expected. (Credit: Newsweek)

It’s a long story that I’ve already discussed in several past posts, see my posts of 20 July 2024 and 31 August 2024. In brief astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were assigned by NASA as the test pilots for Boeing’s Starliner capsule which was intended to both compliment and compete with Space X’s Dragon capsule in transferring astronauts to and from the ISS. After many years of technical problems and delay the Crew Flight Test (CFT) was finally launched on the fifth of June 2024 and reached the ISS after more problems while in orbit.

Boeing’s Starliner capsule docked at the ISS. Turns out that the crew completely lost control of the spacecraft for several seconds just prior to docking, a very dangerous turn of events that could have caused a real disaster! (Credit: Spaceflight Now)

Astronauts Williams and Wilmore were only supposed to remain on the ISS for eight days but NASA engineers spent more than a month trying to understand and fix the problems with Starliner’s thrusters. In the end it was decided that Starliner was too untrustworthy to risk returning from orbit with astronauts aboard so the Starliner capsule was brought back unmanned.

In the end NASA ordered that Starliner be returned to Earth unmanned. It turned out to be the most successful part of the mission. (Credit: HamletHub)

A special rescue mission using a Space X Dragon capsule was considered but in the end NASA decided to send the next scheduled crew transfer mission, Crew 9, with only two rather than the usual four astronauts. Williams and Wilmore then became the other two Crew 9 astronauts and would return to Earth when Crew 9 was relieved by Crew 10. In all, the eight-day mission for Williams and Wilmore turned into a nine month mission.

The Starliner crew, in blue uniform, with the regular crew of the ISS with whom they’d spend the next nine months. (Credit: Spaceflight Now)

So with Williams and Wilmore now safely back on Terra Firma the question for NASA is, what to do with Starliner. Boeing has yet to demonstrate that the eight billion dollar capsule can complete a mission without problems. To make matters worse for Boeing the ISS is scheduled to be de-orbited in five years so there are a maximum of about eleven regular crew transfer missions left for Starliner to take part in.

NASA has hired Space X to modify one of their Dragon capsules as a re-entry module to bring the ISS down into the middle of the Pacific Ocean in 2030. That re-entry would be something to see! (Credit: YouTube)

Currently NASA is considering their options. At a briefing on March 9th, shortly before the launch of Crew 10, it was announced that Boeing and the space agency were “making good progress” and had resolved 70% of the issues that Starliner had developed during its CFT. If that is so it seems that another CFT is unlikely to be carried out before this time next year and even if everything in that test goes smoothly a regular crew transfer mission can hardly be set up before early 2027.

In addition to Space X’s successful Dragon capsule Boeing is going to have to compete with Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser space plane. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

There are even rumours coming from Boeing that the aerospace corporation might be considering giving up on Starliner. After all there is now little chance that Boeing can recoup the losses that they have incurred due to Starliner on a few missions to the ISS before it is de-orbited. Add to that the damage to Boeing’s reputation if there are any further problems with Starliner. At the same time however there are plans in the works for several commercial space stations to replace the ISS and Boeing would certainly like to use Starliner to secure a portion of the business of taking astronauts back and forth to them. 

There are a lot of commercial space stations currently on the drawing board. How much of the business of keeping them manned and supplied Boeing’s Starliner will get is very much up in the air! (Credit: Universe Space Tech)

A few paragraphs above I mentioned that the current plan for the ISS is to de-orbit the aging space station in or around 2030. Space X has already been awarded the contract to modify the cargo version of their Dragon capsule to provide the necessary power to bring the ISS down for a landing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On February 21st however Space X’s CEO Elon Musk announced that in his opinion that the ISS should be brought down “as soon as possible”, within two years if not sooner. Musk’s claims that the ISS has served its purpose and is now taking money and resources away from his chief goal of reaching Mars. Musk has even argued that NASA should forget about the Artemis program’s goal of returning astronauts to the surface of the Moon, again with the intent of getting to Mars as quickly as possible.

This is what Space X has really been aiming at all along, the colonization of Mars. Will NASA cancel its Artemis Lunar Program and endorse this vision? Only time will tell. (Credit: Human Mars)

NASA’s new director Jared Isaacman, who has ridden into space twice via commercial flights onboard Space X’s Dragon, also feels that the space agency needs to concentrate on a long term goal of Reaching Mars. Meanwhile Trump has publicly stated that although the idea of missions to the red planet “are of interest” they are not currently “a top priority”. Once again we see the possibility of a political change in Washington upending all of NASA’s long term goals, resulting in a waste of money, resources and worst of all time.

During the ‘W’ Bush Administration NASA began the ‘Constellation’ program for returning the US to the Moon. The whole thing got canceled by Obama after several billion dollars had been spent. Changing to a Mars mission now would waste even more money. (Credit: Spaceflight History)

And to top it off Space X has conducted another private space mission designated as Fram2. That mission was funded by Chun Wang a Chinese born cryptocurrency billionaire and the crew consisted of three of his friends, Eric Phillips of Australia, Jannicke Mikkelsen of Norway and Rabea Rogge of Germany. This latest billionaire joyride was distinguished by its planned orbital path, which will for the first time take astronauts over Earth’s polar regions. The mission launched on the first of April and successfully splashed down on the April fourth.

Launch of the Space X Fram2 Private space mission. (Credit: The Space Report)

This post turned out to be entirely about manned space flight but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot going on with robotic space probes. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with them soon.  

Two Studies in Physics that Illustrate how Classical Mechanics still has a lot of things to Teach Us. 

Over the past century it seems as though all of the big discoveries in Physics have come from either Relativity Theory or Quantum Mechanics. These two pillars of 20th century science are all about objects that are moving very, very fast, or are very, very small.  Sometimes it seems as if the old Physics of Isaac Newton has little left to teach us, as if we’ve learned everything there is to know about the behaviour of objects in our everyday world. In this post however I’ll be discussing two recent studies that show how much we still have to learn from classical physics about the ways objects in our everyday life behave.

In Today’s World it is really necessary for everyone to have some understanding of the two Scientific Revolutions that shaped the 20th Century! (Credit: Amazon.com)

The first paper I’ll be discussing comes from researchers at the University of Rennes and the University of Lyon, both in France along with Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan who examined the different shapes and forms that knitted fabrics can take on after being stretched and pulled. Specifically, the team used a common jersey knit stitch known as stockinette, which consists of interlocking loops of threads, to knit a piece of fabric with 70×70 stitches. See figure below. This piece of fabric was then placed on a specifically designed tensile mechanism that allowed the researchers to stretch, pull and twist the piece of fabric in a wide variety of different directions and strengths.

Familiar to anyone who knits the Stockinette stitch is one of the most common methods of turning a thread into a piece of fabric. (Credit: Gathered)

Now we all know that knits that are really pulled and stretched never quite return to their original shape, they become deformed. What the researchers did however was to measure the degree of deformation that resulted in their piece of fabric depending on the amount of stretching given to the fabric. Each of the resulting shapes that the piece of fabric took on after stretching and twisting the team designated as a ‘metastable shape’ and they categorized the many metastable shapes generated during their testing.

Quantitative definitions established by the researchers to study the deformation of knitted fabrics. (Credit: CNRS Le Journal)

At the same time the team ran a series of computer simulations that replicated the actual experimental results. One thing the computer simulations allowed the researchers to do that they couldn’t do experimentally was to reduce and even completely eliminate the effect of friction between the stitches of their piece of fabric. What the team discovered in these simulations was that, in the absence of friction the piece of fabric always returned to its original shape, regardless of the amount of stretching and twisting. Without friction there were no matastable shapes.

Some of the Data obtained by the researchers showed the relaxed states of their fabric after stretching. (Credit: Crassous, Poincloux and Steinberger)

Perhaps the research conducted by the team in France and Japan will help manufacturers develop clothing that does not lose it shape after being worn or washed, perhaps not. At least however you now know that friction is to blame when your favourite sweater gets deformed.

Personally, I think all sweaters are misshapen. They feel so uncomfortable I just can’t wear them at all! (Credit: iStock)

Another study dealt with a twist on the familiar phenomenon of how two or more objects moving a fluid, water or air, actually reduce the force of friction on each other. We’ve all seen how a flock of geese will fly in a ‘V’ shaped pattern. Well that’s because the lead goose’s motion sets up an flow of air called a bow wave that reduces friction to the two geese on either side of it and slightly behind, reducing the amount of energy they have to expend in flying. This reduction in friction continues right down the line so that the flock forms a ‘V’ shape in order to reduce the amount of energy they expend in flying. In water dolphins will often swim close the bow of a ship to take advantage of the same phenomenon, and many species of schooling fish arrange themselves for the same reason.

Geese always fly in a “V” formation because the air currents generated by the bird in front actually makes flying easier for the bird behind them. The bird in front gets relieved on a regular basis. (Credit: Online Training Courses)

Obviously this doesn’t work in a solid medium because solid objects simply cannot move through a solid medium. What about a granular medium however, where each individual grain may be solid but where thousands, if not millions of tiny grains can still in many ways behave like a fluid.

In many ways the grains of sand in an hourglass behave more like a thick liquid than solid objects. (Credit: Amazon.com)

That’s what physicists at the University of Campinas in Brazil and the University of Paris-Saclay in France decided to study. The experimental setup the researchers employed consisted of a bed of glass beads, used in place of sand because of their uniformity, through which two steel balls called ‘intruders’ could be pulled in parallel. The researchers could vary both the distance between the intruders as well as their depth in the glass beads, riding the surface, just submerged or fully submerged etc.

During testing the steel balls were actually submerged in the sand but this is an image of the actual setup the scientists used to measure the effect of multiple objects moving through a granular media. (Credit: University of Paris-Saclay)

What the team discovered was that there was a significant reduction, nearly 30%, in the force of fiction on both balls when they were so close as to be almost touching. The cause of this reduction in friction the researchers attribute to the motion of one intruder breaking the force chains between the grains around the other intruder, and vice versa.

Just looking at all of the different shapes and sizes of sand grains it’s easy to understand where the friction caused by moving through sand comes from. (Credit: Vecteezy)

The researchers also believe that their findings may help to explain some well-known phenomenon in the natural world such as the digging of animal burrows and the growth of plant roots. In any case the results discovered by both teams of physicists clearly show that classical physics can still teach us a lot about the world around us.

Bird News for February 2025: Old and New

There have been quite a few interesting stories about birds, both ancient and modern, these last few weeks so consider this post to be a combination of paleontology and nature news! As usual I will begin with the oldest species and work my way forward in time.

There are about 11,000 different species of bird in the world today. That’s about twice as many as there are mammals, and more than reptiles and amphibians combined! (Credit: AnimalFact.com)

Ever since the first discovery of Archaeopteryx in 1861 most paleontologists have placed the evolution of birds from their dinosaur kin as having happened during the Jurassic period some 145-150 million years ago. A minority of paleontologists have disagreed however, Archaeopteryx, with its mouth full of teeth and a long bony tail is really a lot more like a dinosaur with feathers than a bird, and with no other recognized bird species in the Jurassic the initial evolution of the birds has remained controversial.

When this particular fossil was unearthed in 1861 it provided considerable evidence to Darwin’s ideas about evolution. Many other specimens of Archaeopteryx have also been discovered but this is the one that always gets shown in books and on TV. (Credit: Live Science)

A recent fossil discovery from the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian may help to fill in some of the gaps however. In rocks dating back to 149 million years ago researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found a new species of Jurassic bird to complement Archaeopteryx. Their results have been published in the journal Nature.

The ‘Type Specimen’ of Baminornis zhenghensis with an artist’s drawing of the layout of the bones. B zhenghensis shows that even during the Jurassic period there was already considerable bird diversity. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

The find, which has been given the name Baminornis zhenghensis, consists of a bird like shoulder and pelvic bones along with a hand structure more dinosaur like than avian. Most importantly B zhenghensis possesses a short tail ending in a bony structure called a pygostyle that is a feature in some modern birds and is common among birds from the Cretaceous period that followed the Jurassic. In the analysis performed by lead author Wang Min and his colleagues B zhenghensis is considered to be a relative of archaeopteryx while at the same time having a closer relationship to the more modern birds of the later Cretaceous period.

Artist’s illustration of what B zhenghensis may have looked like. A combination of dinosaur and avian characteristics like Archaeopteryx, B zhenghensis represents a transition between two major animal groups. (Credit: South China Morning Post)

It was during the Cretaceous that the number of bird species grew considerably with recognizable types making their first appearance. In fact a fossil skull that was collected in Antarctica in 2011 has recently been analyzed and classified as a waterfowl, the ancestor of modern ducks and geese. Dated to 69 million years old the skull has been given the name Vegavis iaai. Like the researchers in China who discovered B zhenghensis, the paleontologists who discovered V iaai hope that their find will shed new light on bird evolution.

Skeletal remains of Vegavis iaai and and artist’s illustration of what the animal may have looked like. (Credit: Live Science / The Daily Galaxy)

So much for ancient, i.e. fossil birds now let’s move forward in time to the present because there’s some interesting news about a species of modern bird as well. We all know that many types of birds like to live in large groups that we’ve named flocks. Ducks and geese, pigeons, starlings and penguins are some of the many bird types that live in flocks while other types of birds like eagles, owls and blue jays prefer to just pair up and don’t really socialize that much with other members of their own kind.

A large flock of geese flying in their usual ‘V’ formation. Each of the animals behind the leader gets a little boost in their flight by the winds created by the animal in front of them. The bird at the front gets replaced by another bird on a regular basis so he doesn’t have to do all of the work. (Credit: Birdnote)

Hummingbirds as a group have never been observed to live in large groups. In fact, with the exception of their own mate, hummingbirds have a reputation for being extremely territorial and combative towards other members of their species. Until now that is.

Male Red Throated Hummingbird. As a group hummingbirds have never been known to live in groups, in fact they are usually very aggressive towards other members of their own species. (Credit: Metroparks Toledo)

Recently an ornithologist and birding guide in the Andes of Ecuador named Gustavo Cañas-Valle happened upon a cave where he was astonished to find dozens of hummingbirds of the species Oreotrochilus chimborazo both nesting and roosting together. The cave was located on the slopes of the Chimborazo volcano at an altitude of more than 4,000 meters, an extreme environment for any species.

Lonely mountain peaks like Chimborazo are usually volcanoes. High in the Ecuadoran Andes Chimborazo is an extreme environment for any species. (Credit: Wikipedia)

“I thought, this looks like a colony,” Mr. Cañas-Valle recounted. “They were like bees.” In all 23 adult birds along with four chicks were found to be living in that cave. Mr. Cañas-Valle’s discovery has now been published in the journal Ornithology in November of 2024 and is the first ever documented example of hummingbirds living communally but it wasn’t the last. Since his initial find Cañas-Valle has discovered another six caves where specimens of O chimborazo are living in groups, all at extreme altitudes.

Also known as the Ecuadoran Hillstar, Oreotrochilus chimborazo is another beautiful hummingbird and a resident of the high Andes mountains. (Credit: eBird)

The possibility that it is the extreme conditions where they live that has caused O chimborazo to begin living in groups has been suggested by some evolutionary biologists but at the same time they caution not to read too much into the current evidence. As yet there is no evidence of any kind of social behavior where the hummingbirds benefit from their neighbors in such ways as raising the alarum when predators are near or informing the rest of the flock when a food source is discovered. In other words, it appears that at present the birds are just tolerating the other members of their species around them rather than working together as a group.

The Philosopher John Locke on Toleration. If nothing else just learning to tolerate each other means you won’t be wasting energy and resources in useless fighting. Unfortunately, some animals, guess who I’m talking about, haven’t evolved that far yet! (Credit: Online Library of Liberty)

In either case more research is needed, a closer, more long-term study of this ‘hive’ behavior. Cañas-Valle is convinced that there are other caves with humming birds, perhaps of other species, and the ornithologist is already planning on conducting some surveys.

Bees in a hive actively cooperate with each other for the good of the hive as a whole. Bats on the other hand just kinda live in the same place and tolerate each other. Which behavior is true of O chimborazo has yet to be determined. (Credit: National Park Service / Beekeeping USU)

I look forward to seeing his results and I’ll be certain to let you know about them.

Intersex, Trans-Sexual, Non-Binary, are you confused ’cause I sure am. In fact the Psychologists and Anthropologists who study human behaviour are as confused as any of us. 

Most of us grow up with a pretty well defined idea of sex. Our mommies are women and our daddies are men and we were told which of the two we were. Later on, about age ten or so we learn the ‘facts of life’ where men have one kind of genitals so that they can ejaculate their sperm into a woman’s womb fertilizing her egg so that it can grow into a baby inside her. (Yea, I know that sounds childish but how would you describe sex in two sentences!) That’s why men and women mate and get married, so that they can raise a family.

Some people think that it’s really as simple as this, a mommy, a daddy and little children. The problems begin when they start trying to shoehorn everyone into this comfortable little ideal! (Credit: The Atlantic)

Things usually get a little more complicated in High School when we find out that there are some boys who like other boys and girls who like girls, that is gays and lesbians. (Full disclosure, I am completely hetero and probably even a bit homo-phobic.) At about the same we may learn that there are a few people who feel that they are ‘in the wrong body’, who dress like members of the opposite sex and who may even undergo medical treatments in order to become a member of the opposite sex, at least in the outward appearance of their genitalia. As a group, which may not actually be a valid thing to do, these people are sometimes referred to as ‘sexually non-traditional’.

O’k it’s really not as simple as this but when you get right down to it, maybe it should be! (Credit: Reddit)

One of the most important questions about people who do not fit into the comfortable idea of two separate sexes is, just how many such people are there, what percentage of our society is sexually non-traditional and of what forms? We really don’t have a good idea of the numbers because the whole subject of sex outside of a male-female ideal was taboo for more than a thousand years, and still is in many parts of the world. Even today many gays and lesbians, to say nothing of trans-sexuals, prefer to keep their sexual orientations private.

Back when I was young we estimated that 5% of people were gay, we didn’t use LGBT+ then. Notice how the numbers are going up as being gay becomes more acceptable. (Credit: Statista)

They have good reason to do so; in the Presidential election of last year Trump and his right wing allies went out of their way to demonize trans-sexuals as a way to use the fear of those who are different in order to get votes. In particular the issue of whether ‘men’, that is males who are transitioning to female, should be allowed to use woman’s bathrooms or play on girls’ sports teams in school was made into a big campaign issue.

There was a time when Trump was actually supportive of LGBT+ rights, no more. (Credit: GLAAD)
He didn’t succeed on day one, but he is certainly working on it! (Credit: Instagram)

Since taking office Trump has issued several executive orders removing all trans-girls from federal prisons for woman and putting them in men’s prisons, discharging all transitioning people from the military while at the same time threatening to take all federal funds away from schools that allow trans-girls to play on girls’ sports teams. He has even loudly proclaimed that as far as the federal government is concerned there are only two sexes, so that legally the trans-sexuals simply don’t exist. Where exactly that policy this leaves gays and lesbians isn’t really clear just yet, but it can’t be good for them.

Opponents argue that trans women competing in girls’ sports is unfair but are they simple using the issue as a chance to hurt people whose behaviour they don’t approve of. (Credit: Inside Higher Ed)

So just what is the science, what exactly is going on here? Why don’t we just have two sexes, after all that’s how babies are born and isn’t the whole purpose of sex just reproduction? You might think that since evolution ‘weeds out’ the genes of those who don’t reproduce that non-traditional sex of any kind would have gone extinct millions of years ago.

Since we pass on our characteristics to our children, and gay sex doesn’t produce children how are gay characteristics passed on? (Credit: SlidePlayer)

It not that simple! Men and woman are still the same species and it is actually easy to find pieces of one sex on members of the other. Take men’s nipples on their breasts for example, we all know that the nipples are where a woman feeds her baby with milk from her mammary glands but men don’t have mammary glands so why do we still have nipples?

Another good question is why do men have nipples since they don’t have mammary glands? In many ways the differences between men and woman are constrained by the way DNA works and by the fact that in so many ways both sexes are actually the same, just people. (Credit:

The same can be said for a woman’s clitoris, it may be a woman’s main erogenous zone but it’s not actually needed for reproduction. In fact some societies practice female circumcision where a girl’s clitoris is removed so she can’t enjoy sex. As horrible as that sounds it doesn’t stop her from bearing children. So why does a woman even have a clitoris?

Also known as Female Genital Mutilation the practice of removing a woman’s clitoris is nevertheless still widely practiced in many countries. (Credit: Instagram)

And that’s for normal, sexually traditional adults, after puberty has caused the development of secondary sex characteristics! For babies at birth figuring out who’s a boy and who’s a girl isn’t always that easy. For example the testicles of a boy usually only ‘pop out’ of their body just a day or two before they are born. On a rare occasion they haven’t popped out yet and a baby boy without testicles along with a smaller than average penis looks a lot like a baby girl.

One out of every 25 baby boys are born with an undescended testicle. They are fully boys but at birth may not look all that different from a girl! (Credit: Guy’s and St. Thomas; Specilaist Care)

In fact while once again exact statistics are hard to come by, somewhere between 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 babies are born who are considered to have ambiguous genitalia, in other words the doctor delivering the child literally can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl. So if we as a society are going to base a person’s entire life on what that doctor thinks while taking one look at you, we’ll be screwing up a lot of people’s future lives.

Are these babies boys or girls? If you’re going to determine a person’s entire future based on what they look like at birth you’re going to fuck up a lot of people’s lives! (Credit: Nature)

It gets even worse when we take a look inside our bodies. Let’s start with our genes ’cause that’s where our sex is determined after all. We all remember from high school that we humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and we get one of each pair from our father and one of each pair from our mother. Now one of the 23 pairs are know as the sex chromosomes, girls have two X chromosomes while boys have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. That means that it is actually your father’s genes that determine which sex you are because we always get an X from our mother but we can get either an X or a Y from our father.

Our human genes consist of 23 pairs of chromosomes but only one pair has anything to do with our sex! (Credit: Abposters.com)

That’s the way things usually work, but not always. In particular the sex cells from our parents, the sperm and egg, can occasionally have more than one each of a chromosome pair causing the fertilized egg, and all of a person’s cells from that point on to have three or even four of what should be a pair of chromosomes. Many genetic disorders are associated with this condition on different chromosome pairs, for example a trisomy on the 21st pair of chromosomes is known to be the cause of Down’s syndrome.

Also known as trisomy 21, Down’s syndrome is caused by the 21st chromosome pair actually being a triplet! (Credit: Vocal Media / Bio Quick News)

If such a trisomy occurs on the sex chromosomes then there are people with XXX, XXY, or XYY sex chromosomes. Estimates vary but in general one baby in approximately one thousand is born with such a trisomy and nearly all of them suffer from some genetic disorder regarding reproduction. Consider the XXY variant for example, the double X makes them a female but the Y makes them a male! This condition is known as Kleinfelter syndrome and while such a person usually looks male, penis and testicles, the produce no sperm so they cannot father children. A similar disorder is known as Androgen insensitivity where a person possesses testes that remain within the abdomen while the external genitalia resemble that of a female.

Here’s the genes of a person with two X chromosomes, making them a female but also a Y chromosome making them a male!!! An estimated one in five thousand people are born this way and they already suffer enough medical problems without society making things worse for them! (Credit: Britanica)

So things are already complicated right from the start at birth, and they get even more so during puberty. It’s at this time that a child starts to develop secondary sex characteristics, Mammary glands on girls, muscles and body hair on boys. More importantly however, it’s at this time that the development of sex cells, eggs and sperm begins. Of course it’s also the time that our bodies start producing the hormones, testosterone and estrogen that make boys sexually attracted to girls and girls to boys. Assuming that is, our bodies produce the right amount of the right hormone. If not the result can be a person whose body at birth is not the body they are becoming at puberty, in other words a person who feels that they are in the wrong body.

A lot is going on in our bodies during puberty, and again remember boys and girls really aren’t all that different. The idea that some people can have the genitals of one sex and the brain of the other just seems quite likely to me. Wikimedia Commons)

So as you can see the whole subject of sex is just far too complicated to be squeezed into a simple binary of ‘He-Men and Dainty Women’, or squeezed into a short blog post like this one. The most important thing to remember is that those people who are sexually non-traditional don’t choose to be so, with all of the oppression and discrimination that they have suffered over the centuries and continue to suffer today who would ever choose to go through that! Also, the fact that there are people whose sex doesn’t conform to simple binary notions doesn’t in any way harm those of us whose sex does!

The idea that men are men and women are glad of it is every bit as primitive as these two are! (Credit: www.naturpl.com)

The only real binary is the choice that we as a society have, either we accept the sexually non-traditional and just let them live their lives as they choose. Or we violently oppress them, beat them back into the closet and continue to do so for all time so that we can pretend that they aren’t really there.

Paleontology News for February 2025: Beginnings and Endings. 

If you think about it the science of Paleontology is all about beginnings and endings. New species, new types of life forms evolve, survive for a time and then become extinct. Knowing when a species arises and when it dies out is as important for understanding its place in the history of life as is knowing what kind of creature it was.

There’s wisdom for you. It’s certainly true for the history of life here on Earth! (Credit: Reddit)

In this post I will be discussing two recent studies that illustrate a beginning and an ending not just for a single species but for many thousands of different types of animals. As always I’ll begin with the oldest story and work my way forward in time.

Like the time traveler in the H. G. Wells novel, I like to go forward in time! (Credit: IMDb)

I have several times mentioned the Cambrian Period as being that time in the history of life when animals developed ‘hard parts’, that is shells, exoskeletons or internal skeletons. To paleontologists this advance makes a world of difference because ‘hard parts’ fossilize much more often than does soft tissue. (In my collection I have thousands of shells, a couple hundred exoskeletons along with a handful of bones and teeth but only a very few traces of soft tissue.)

When most people think of fossils they almost immediately think of old bones. It’s true the hard parts of living creatures fossilize much better than the soft parts do so millions of years later we simply have a lot more of them! (Credit: BBC)

Because of this we have a much better idea of the evolution of life from the Cambrian Period onward than we have for the time before the Cambrian, known as the pre-Cambrian, the time before life had ‘hard parts’. In fact, for nearly a century there was no universally accepted evidence for life of any kind before the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ when dozens of different kinds of animals suddenly appeared. Charles Darwin even considered this abrupt appearance of arthropods, mollusks, brachiopods, worms, sponges and corals to be the greatest problem with his theory of natural selection.

During the Cambrian period all of the major different types of animals have developed so if you want to find their common ancestor you have to go back to the pre-Cambrian. But fossils from that time are rare so paleontologists have great difficulty figuring out who’s related to who! (Credit: Research Gate)

So, if in the Cambrian period we already have arthropods, molluscs, and etc then a lot of evolution must already have happened in the pre-Cambrian and honestly paleontologists have had a very difficult time trying to work it out. Now a recent discovery in the outback of Australia, at the Nilpena Ediacara National Park will hopefully shine some light into the pre-Cambrian darkness.

Paleontologists searching for fossils in the bedrock at Nilpena Ediacara National Park in Australia. Rocks from this site date to just before the Cambrian and fossil preservation is quite good so much of what we know about life before the Cambrian explosion comes from here. (Credit: National Parks and Wildlife Service of South Australia)

The fossil itself isn’t much to look at, a tiny worm-like animal no more than 2cm in length, see images below. However details of the fossil, which has been given the name Uncus dzaugisi, show that it belongs to the super-phyla known as Ecdysozoan, a grouping of many animal types such as the arthropods, nematodes, tardigradas and priapulida.

It may not look like much but this little critter is an ancestor to many of the species of animals that live here on Earth today! (Credit: InScience)

What all of these different phyla have in common is a recognizable body length to width ratio that indicates mobility in a definite forward direction, a hard cuticle covering made of organic material, in other words an exo-skeleton not a shell, as well as organs for internal fertilization. Nearly half of all known species, both living and in the fossil record share these qualities. That’s what makes Uncus dzaugisi such an exciting find, it is the earliest fossil specimen ever found that shows clear evidence of all of those characteristics, proving that the Ecdysozoan did exist in pre-Cambrian times.

Uncus dzaugisi must have been a fairly common species back in the pre-Cambrian. (Credit: Sci.News)

Australia’s Nilpena Ediacara National Park has long been known as the location where the first pre-Cambrian fossils were discovered. Over one hundred different genera of creatures have been identified there thanks to the fine-grained sandstone that preserves details of the soft tissue. However, few of those animals bear any resemblance to the more familiar Cambrian species that followed. So paleontology has two big questions to answer, how did the creatures of the Cambrian evolve in the pre-Cambrian, and what happened to the majority of the creatures that lived during the pre-Cambrian. The answers to those questions can only be found by discovering more fossils like Uncus dzaugisi.

Another very interesting animal that was discovered at the Nilpena Ediacara National Park is Spriggina. Despite looking somewhat like the trilobites that dominated the Cambrian period paleontologists think that Spriggina left no descendants but went extinct like most of the creatures of the pre-Cambrian. (Credit: Wikiwand)

If Uncus dzaugisi represents the beginning for of the many species of the Ecdysozoan then the extinction of the dinosaurs must represent the best-known ending for thousands of species. For the last fifty years the prevailing theory about what caused the mass extinction 66 million years ago has been that an asteroid some ten kilometers in diameter struck our planet in the Yucatan peninsula. That collision not only killed every living thing for thousands of kilometers but it also ejected billions of Tonnes of material into the atmosphere blocking out the Sun’s light for several years and spreading the destruction worldwide. The evidence for this cosmic catastrophe can be found as a thin layer of debris spread around the world.

The Cretaceous-Tertiary or K-T boundary. This thin layer of rock consists of debris that spread all over the world from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. That layer has been found all over the world wherever rocks of that age are exposed. Below that layer, dinosaurs, above it, no dinosaurs! (Credit: Conan City Daily Record)

Not all geologists and paleontologists have been convinced however. You see the debris from a massive volcanic eruption looks pretty much the same as that from a collision with an asteroid. In fact it is pretty well established that the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period 250 million years ago was caused by thousands of years of extensive volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. Many scientists suggested that, while the asteroid strike undoubtedly did occur, volcanic activity may have contributed to, if not actually caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

250 Million years ago a large section of Russia experienced an enormous amount of volcanic activity. Known today as the Siberian Traps those volcanic eruptions caused the largest of all extinction events, even worse than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In fact there is considerable evidence for just such volcanism on the Indian sub-continent that has been estimated to be at almost the same time as the asteroid strike. So for the last decade or so the questions have been, how close in time were the two cataclysms, and how extensive was the destruction caused by the Indian volcanoes.

Known as the Deccan Traps the volcanoes of India are considered by many geologists to have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. (Credit: The Washington Post)

Now a new paper from paleo-climatologists at Utrecht University and the University of Manchester has eliminated volcanoes as a possible cause for the dinosaur extinction. What the researchers did was to examine samples from multiple levels in fossilized peat bogs found in the western United States in order to develop a detailed timeline of global temperatures in the millennia both prior to and after the asteroid strike.

Just like today during the Cretaceous period swampy areas developed into peat bogs that fossilized and by examining those layers modern paleontologists can actually determine the average temperature of the region during that time. (Credit: Natural History Museum)

As reported in their paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances, the volcanic activity in India occurred approximately 30,000 years before the asteroid. While the effect of the gasses from the volcanoes did cause the planet’s temperature to drop by some 5ºC by 10,000 years later the Earth’s temperature had returned to its value from before the eruptions. That was fully 20,000 years before the asteroid would strike. The paleontologists therefore concluded that the volcanic activity in India had minimal if any effect on the extinction of the dinosaurs.

So it looks like it was the asteroid alone that killed off the dinosaurs. Talk about going out with a bang! (Credit: BBC Wildlife Magazine)

This means that the data gathered by the researchers in Utrecht and Manchester pretty much seals the deal, the dinosaurs, and many other species were driven to extinction when a piece of the sky fell upon the ground. Of course, if it weren’t for that asteroid, we wouldn’t be here. It was just a stroke of luck that our ancestors survived while the dinosaurs all died.

There’s still a chance that asteroid 2024 YR4 will hit Earth in 2032 but, in any case sooner or later one is gonna hit us! (Credit: NASA Science)

Maybe we won’t be so lucky next time. 

Astronomy News for March 2025: Celestial Objects Near and Far. 

Over the last 400 years or so the Universe as we know it has grown in size literally beyond all human imagination. Where once humans believed that the Earth was the center of all things we now know that it is but a speck of dust, insignificant when compared to the innumerable stars, galaxies, supermassive blacks holes and other objects we still know nothing about. In this post I’ll be discussing a galaxy more than half a billion light years distance along with a asteroid that’s coming so close it may reach out and touch us!

The Hubble ‘Deep Field’ image taken in 1995 revealed an almost endless Universe of galaxy upon galaxy. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Of the billions of galaxies in the known Universe one of the most common types are spiral galaxies, that is galaxies with recognizable arms that curl around the galaxy’s center as they expand outward from it. Now you would be forgiven for thinking that the direction of the curl of the arms must be the direction that all of the stars in the galaxy orbit around the center. Take a look at the image of the famous Whirlpool galaxy (M51) below, doesn’t it appear as if the entire galaxy is rotating in an anti-clockwise direction?

The Whirlpool galaxy M51. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In fact the direction that the spiral arms seem to rotate and the direction that the stars in the galaxy actually do rotate have nothing to do with each other. It was back in the 1960s that two astrophysicists, C. C. Lin and Frank Shu realized that spiral arms were really density waves propagating through the body of the galaxy, more like ripples on the surface of a lake than any actual, permanent structure. The reason why the spiral arms are so visible is that as the density waves move they trigger intense star formation and what we see from millions of light years away are the hot, bright young stars that have just been formed in the arms.

Ripples on a lake spreading outward after an object has fallen into the water. The Spiral Arms we see in many galaxies are actually similar to these waves only on a tremendously larger scale. (Credit: Getty Images)

So if the spiral arms are ripples flowing through a galaxy then what caused the ripples? Well, if you look again at the image of the Whirlpool galaxy you can see the dense ‘blob’ on the far right at the end of one spiral arm. That blob is actually a dwarf galaxy that collided with the main Whirlpool millions of years ago. If you like the small galaxy rang the Whirlpool like a gong and the spiral arms are caused by the Whirlpool ringing! Big galaxies like our own Milky Way and Andromeda often collide with or in some cases capture dwarf galaxies, which is why we see so many spiral galaxies.

The Large (l) and Small (r) Magellanic clouds, that can only be seen in the southern hemisphere, are actually two small galaxies that have been captured by and are orbiting our Milky Way Galaxy. (Credit)

Recently astronomers at Yale University in the US along with the University of Toronto and Swinburne University in Australia have identified a galaxy that really takes spiral arms to a whole new level, see image below. Searching through images taken by the Hubble space telescope they came across a galaxy that has been designated as LEDA 1313424 in which they identified eight separate rings, giving the galaxy its popular name of ‘The Bullseye’. Follow up observations with the Keck telescope in Hawaii even found another ring, making a total of nine rings, six more than any other galaxy has ever been found to possess.

Hubble image of galaxy LEDA 1313424 showing its many rings. This galaxy really does look like ripples spreading out over the surface of a lake. (Credit: Hubble Site)

Now LEDA 1313424 is a really big galaxy, estimated at 250,000 light years across, that’s two and a half times the size of our Milky Way. And the astronomers succeeded in identifying the dwarf galaxy that caused all of the rings, the blue blob to the center left of LEDA 1313424 in the image. In order to have produced so many rings the dwarf galaxy must have passed right through the very center an estimated 50 million years ago. As I mentioned above collisions between galaxies are rather common throughout the Universe but for one galaxy to pass right through the center of a big galaxy is really hitting a Bullseye!

When Errol Flynn playing Robin Hood split the bad guy’s arrow with his it was just Hollywood trickery. But the dwarf galaxy that hit LEDA 1313424 had to make almost as precise a shot. (Credit: The Errol Flynn Blog)

What’s more the rings around LEDA 1313424 fit in very nicely with the accepted models of density waves generated by galaxy collisions for a shot right through the center of a big galaxy like the Bullseye. And while the Bullseye may have been a chance discovery astronomers hope to find even more examples of multi-ringed galaxies once NASA’s new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope begins operation.

Once in orbit the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study millions of galaxies to learn the secrets of how they form and behave. The telescope is named for the astronomer who first proposed and for many years championed the Hubble space telescope. (Credit: Earth Sky)

At a distance of half a billion light years and a size two and a half times that of our Milky Way, LEDA 1313424 is an example of some of the biggest things in the Universe. Asteroid 2024 YR4 on the other hand is one of the smallest celestial objects, as well as one of the closest, in fact in about seven years 2024 YR may get too close.

It doesn’t look like much in this image but like all Near Earth Objects (NEOs) 2024 YR4 could cause a lot of destruction if it ever collided with Earth. (Credit: News Scientist)

Discovered on the 27th of December in 2024 asteroid 2024 YR4 was already moving further away from Earth meaning that astronomers had only a short time to make observations before the asteroid faded from view. Those observations however indicated that the asteroid had about a 1% chance of striking the Earth on the 22nd of December in the year 2032, seven years from now.

The orbit of 2024 YR4 (elongated ellipse) takes it way out beyond Mars but also brings it within Earth’s orbit. It may take millions of years but with an orbit like that it likely will hit our planet some day! (Credit: The Planetary Society)

Of course rocks from outer space fall onto our planet every day, most being only the size of grains of sand that burn up in the atmosphere as meteors. Bigger chunks of space rock also collide with Earth once or twice a century. On June 30th of 1908 an asteroid estimated to be about 100m in diameter exploded over the Tunguska region of Siberia and just 12 years ago on the 15th of February in 2013 a smaller one, less than 20m in diameter exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. In each of these incidents humanity got lucky and the asteroid struck a sparsely populated region so that only a small number of people were killed or injured.

Flattened trees caused by the explosion of the Tunguska asteroid in 1908. If that asteroid, or one like it was to hit a modern, heavily populated city it could kill millions of people. (Credit: NASA)

2024 YR is estimated to be between 50 and 100m in diameter meaning that it could be as large as the Tunguska asteroid and therefore potentially devastating if it should strike a heavily populated area. Another factor we don’t know about 2024 YR4 is what it is made of. Asteroids come in two basic types, piles of rocky rubble and solid Iron-Nickel. The iron-nickel ones usually survive to strike the Earth’s surface, forming a crater like the one in Arizona while the rocky, rubble ones usually explode in the atmosphere like the one over Chelyabinsk. The crater in Arizona is almost 2 kilometers across and an asteroid like that could easily destroy a large city, killing millions. The rocky-rubble ones aren’t much better, the Tunguska asteroid devastated an area of 2,200 square kilometers, again the size of a large city.

About 50,000 years old, Meteor Crater in Arizona is more than a kilometer across. Just imagine the destruction that space rock could cause today! (Credit: Grand Canyon Explorer)

And things are actually getting worse, looking through past images from the Catalina Sky Survey asteroid hunter David Rankin found old observations of 2024 YR4 and adding that data to the observations made in December the odds of the asteroid striking Earth is now estimated to be 3.1%, more than double the previous estimate.

Even at its worst the chance of 2024 YR4 was far to the left, very unlikely. Still the odds are very likely that another space rock will hit us someday. (Credit: About)

2024 YR4 is now rated as being a level 3 on the Torino scale that NASA uses to rank threats from asteroids. Because of the possible threat the space agency has even decided to take some valuable time on the James Webb Space Telescope to try and find 2024 YR4 again and get more precise estimates on its orbit. If that doesn’t work the asteroid will pass by our planet again in December of 2028 and very precise measurements of it motion can be made then. (The latest set of calculations now puts the risk from 2024 YR4 at less than 1% but interestingly it has about the same chance of hitting the Moon in 2032)

NASA has developed a scale, the Torino Scale, to quantify the threat from NEOs. 2024 YR4 reached level 3 but is now considered to be a level 1. (Credit: BBC News)

And if it turns out that 2024 YR4 is going to collide with the Earth, remember that we have already tested an asteroid defense system. That occurred when the DART space probe slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos on the 26th of September in 2022; see my post of 8 October 2022. Who knows, maybe the next test will actually be for real.

Astronomy News for February 2025: The latest results from the James Webb Space Telescope. 

It seems as though every time that astronomers build a new instrument, one that’s bigger, or more precise or one that looks at the sky above in a different way the discoveries made by that instrument challenge if not actually break existing theories about the Universe. It all started when Galileo first pointed his primitive telescope skyward and saw the moons of Jupiter, spots on the Sun, the phases of Venus and saw that the Milky Way was actually composed of thousands, millions of stars. As optical telescopes got bigger and bigger they saw more things like nebula and star clusters. Then, when astronomers added spectrographs to their telescopes they were able to discover what elements the stars were made of.

Two Telescope made by Galileo. With these instruments Galileo began the revolution in our understanding of the Universe that continues to this day! (Credit: Britannica)

In the 20th century radio telescopes discovered objects like pulsars and quasars while X-ray telescopes discovered black holes. With each new technological advance in the astronomer’s instruments came a better understanding of the Universe even if that meant tossing aside some older, well established ideas.

Today we build large arrays of radio telescopes in order to get an even clearer view of what lies out there! (Credit: PrimalLuceLab)

Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began to astound astronomers within weeks of its beginning operation in 2022. You see, the JWST was designed primarily to study the early Universe, around a billion years after the Big Bang. If you’re wondering how a telescope can see into the past remember that since the speed of light is a finite 300,000 kilometers per second all you have to do is look at something billions of light years away and you’ll be seeing it as it was billions of years ago.

In operation less than three years the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has already shaken up many of our theories about the early Universe. (Credit: European Space Agency)

But you better have a big telescope, and you better put that telescope in space so it can just stare at the object you’re observing for hours or days or longer to gather enough light. Oh, and since the entire Universe is expanding the Doppler effect is going to cause that light from billions of years ago to be shifted to longer wavelengths, you’ll have to build your telescope to see in the infrared. That means you’ll have to get it away from any heat sources like the Sun and Earth, which is why the JWST was placed at the Lagrangian (L1) point in the Earth’s shadow but a million kilometers from our planet.

The five Lagrangian points are the only exact solutions to the ‘Three Body Problem’ in celestial mechanics. Only L4 and L5 are really stable but the JWST is located at Earth’s L1 point where it only requires occasional adjustments to its orbit. (Credit: Australian Space Academy)

So as I said, JWST was primarily designed to study the Universe only a billion or so years after the big bang and those were some of the first images it took. Astronomers were interested in that period because they theorized that was the time that the first stars began to shine, that the first galaxies began to form. (See my post of 6 July 2024.)

Just a few years ago this was our best idea of the evolution of the Universe. After the big bang cooled off there was a period called the dark ages that lasted until about 400 million years after the big bang when the first stars began to shine. The first galaxies formed not long after that. The JWST has already forced us to make some changes to that timetable. (Credit: NASA Science)

One question that it was hoped that the JWST could answer dealt with the supermassive black holes that astronomers are now convinced lie at the heart of every galaxy, at least every big one. Simply put, the question was, which came first? Did galaxies form supermassive black holes in their centers, or do supermassive black holes form galaxies around them? Obviously any theory of how galaxies form needs to know that.

The first ever image of a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy M87. What you actually see here is not the hole itself but the ring of material that is falling into the hole and heating up so that it shines! (Credit: Wikipedia)

What the JWST did in fact see when it made its first observations were a large number of what astronomers named ‘Little Red Dots’, that is small but rather bright galaxies with a reddish glow to them. By their brightness the red dots appeared to contain millions of bright stars and some of them were found to have existed less than half a billion years after the big bang, a time so early that according to most theories of galaxy formation no such well developed galaxies should exist. That was why there were so many news articles about JWST having ‘Broken Cosmology’.

Some of the ‘Little Red Dots’ observed by the JWST. These ‘proto-galaxies’ appear to have formed much earlier than cosmologists expected. (Credit: Space.com)

That was about two years ago and since then the JWST has both discovered a lot more ‘Little Red Dots’ and made much more detailed and precise measurements of some of them. Now a team of astronomers headed by Dale Kocevski of Colby College has announced results of their survey of the red dots at a conference of the American Astronomical Society that was held in Maryland the second week in January.

The recent 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society must have been a fun party!!!! (Credit: Threads)

What the astronomers found was that the better observations of the red dots all showed light signatures indicating that much of their light came from hot gasses spiraling into a growing black hole. So the reason the red dots were so bright wasn’t because they had millions of stars but because they had the beginnings of a Quasar, a feeding black hole in their center. The JWST observations don’t break current theories of cosmology but those theories are certainly going to have to be modified.

Six Quasars as seen in an optical telescope. Today we know that these objects are galaxies with a feeding supermassive black hole at their center that is giving off so much light that it is outshining the entire galaxy around it. (Credit: Britannica)

The case isn’t closed yet however, because about a billion years after the big bang all of the red dots seem to disappear. Dr. Kocevski and the other astronomers in the team think that, as the black hole forms a galaxy around it will start to take on the appearance of a more ‘normal’ active galactic nuclei (AGN).

Quasars are often also referred to as ‘Active Galactic Nuclei’ (AGN). The question for astronomers is how did the ‘Little Red Dots’ evolve into AGN? (Credit: Medium)

So it seems that the JWST has given us the answer to our question about which came first: galaxies or the supermassive black holes inside them. The ‘Little Red Dots’ are black holes that serve as the seeds of galaxy formation. But like every other scientific answer this one breeds another question; where do the black holes that form the ‘Little Red Dots’ come from?

Climate Change Review for the year 2024; The Hottest year ever recorded for the World. 

The year 2024 has been over for more than a month now and although scientists are still evaluating all of the Climate measurements that they obtained during the past year the broad outline of Global Warming’s impact on our planet is clear. The year 2024 was simply the hottest year ever recorded in human history, erasing the record set just the year before in 2023. In fact the ten hottest years ever recorded have all occurred in the last ten years.

And this was BEFORE 2024 was declared the hottest year ever! So really the 11 hottest years ever recorded have been the last 11 years! (Credit: Climate Central)

For the world as a whole the temperature in 2024 was measured as being 1.6ºC above pre-industrial levels, that baseline being as measured from the years 1850 to 1900. The world’s temperature not only exceeded the previous record from 2023 but did so but did so by more than a tenth of a degree, +0.12ºC, an enormous jump. Indeed, over the last two years temperatures worldwide have been so hot that they have surpassed most models of global warming, leading some climate scientists to fear that global warming is actually accelerating. A few statistics that illustrate just how fast the temperatures are climbing worldwide in 2024 are that for every cold temperature record that was set fifty record high temperature we set. At the same time six of the world’s seven continents recorded their hottest years ever, only Asia bucked the trend recording its second hottest year ever.

The World in 2024. Very few areas were colder than average while the vast majority of our globe was hotter, often much hotter than average. (Credit: National Centers for Environmental Information)

That figure of 1.6ºC of course breaks the target figure of limiting global temperature to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels that was set back in the Paris accords of 2015. Now that goal was intended to be an average over a decade or more so we haven’t failed yet. However the last two years have averaged over the 1.5ºC goal and we’re still not really doing anything to control global warming, to reduce if not eliminate the amount of green house gasses that we are dumping into the atmosphere.

In the nine years since the great majority of the world’s nations agreed to the Paris accords virtually nothing has actually been accomplished. (Credit: Yale MacMillian Center, Yale University)

In fact we are actually pumping more greenhouse gasses into the sky. Measurements of CO2 levels at the weather station at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, indicate that in 2024 CO2 in the atmosphere increased by 3.58 parts per million, that’s the largest increase since records began there in 1958. Not all of the increase has come from burning fossil fuels; a lot is coming from all of the wildfires that are increasing in number and intensity. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is now 50% higher than it was back in 1900 and most models of climate change agree that another such large increase as happened in 2024 will eliminate all hope of keeping below the Paris agreed 1.5ºC limit.

In fact, we are still actually increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses being emitted into the atmosphere, with no end in sight! (Credit: Carbon Brief)

So much for the temperature measurements for 2024, the effect of all that heat on climate disasters throughout the world is not hard to find. There were the extreme droughts in Italy, southern Africa, the Amazon and the American Southwest as well as the excessive rainfall in Ireland, Spain, Southern India and the Philippines. Add to that the severe storms that ravaged both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans like Hurricanes Helene and Milton along with Typhoon Gaemi in the Pacific. Of course there were heat waves around the planet such as those in the American Southwest, Central Europe and China. In the United States the number of ‘billion dollar’ disasters’ in 2024 was 27, an unprecedented number as was the total dollar figure for the damage 182.7 billion.

The billion dollar disasters for the US in 2024. The total value came to more than 180 billion dollars along with more than 500 lives. And it’s only going to get worse! (Credit: Climate.gov)

Between the years 1980 and 2010 the yearly number of weather disasters averaged about 8 but over the last five years it has ballooned to more than 20, an exponential growth rate. It’s worth pointing out that if the trend continues, the destruction caused by extreme weather will in a few years generate a considerable stress on the American economy. That possibility is causing a growing fear within the insurance industry, which has to pay their costumers for any damage to property by the weather.

In the last six years two million homes have been refused insurance because of the risk generated by climate change. Of course, most of those homes are in states like California and Florida that experience the worst effects of global warming but even in my home state of Pennsylvania it has begun. (Credit: New York Times)

Because of that many insurance companies are now refusing to accept customers in ‘high risk’ areas of the country such as in wildfire areas in California or hurricane prone parts of Florida. However remember that much of the damage done by hurricane Helene occurred in the western mountains of North Carolina, an area generally considered safe from severe weather. So in just a few years the question will be, is any part of our country, any part of the world safe from severe weather. 

Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida as a Cat 4 causing destruction all the way up even into North Carolina. (Credit: ABC45)

Of course it’s not just property that’s harmed by severe weather, there’s a cost in human lives as well. For example, in those ‘billion dollar’ disasters mentioned above 418 Americans were directly killed, 225 by hurricane Helene alone. Now, I just said directly caused by weather disasters, that figure doesn’t include all of the people whose lives were shortened by extreme heat, such as the 113 consecutive days above 100ºF in Phoenix Arizona which led to a record 645 heat related deaths. Heat waves in other parts of the world, where air conditioning is rare led to many more thousands of deaths. And again, if the trend of exponential growth in temperature continues those death figures will also grow exponentially.

I simply can’t imagine 113 straight days of over 100 degrees F (37.8 degrees C). And look at by how much it broke the old record of 76! Phoenix broke all kinds of heat records in 2024. (Credit: Fox Weather)

I’m going to end here, but the litany of extreme weather events is so large that I could go on and on. There is some good news, since the strong El Nino event that began in 2023 has now turned into a La Nina most climate models suggest that 2025 will not be as hot as either 2024 or 2023. Most experts expect this year to only be the third hottest year ever recorded. Of course that makes you wonder how bad the next El Nino will be when it comes.

Climatologists had hoped that 2025 would be a little bit cooler than 2024, it sure hasn’t started that way!!! (Credit: Facebook)

So long as we continue to burn fossil fuels the world will simply get hotter and hotter, that’s all there is to it.

Space News for February 2025: Unmanned Probes make some News. 

It seems as though my last several space news posts have all been about manned space flight, either to the International Space Station or beyond, back to the Moon. I don’t want to give the impression that our unmanned probes haven’t been making any discoveries or advancing our ability to explore the solar system so in this post I’ll be discussing the latest news about unmanned space exploration and I’ll begin with the big news from the Parker Solar Probe.

Artist’s impression of the Parker Solar Probe making the closest ever approach to the Sun of any man made object. The thermal shield that protected Parker from the Sun’s heat is on the left facing the Sun. (Credit: Science Friday)

Launched in 2018 the Parker Solar Probe is named for Eugene Parker, a NASA astrophysicist who back in the 1950s predicted the existence of the Solar Wind. The solar wind is the never creasing stream of sub-atomic particles that flow outward from the Sun for about 20 billion kilometers creating a bubble around our solar system. See my post of 18 December 2019. During its six-year mission so far the Parker probe has crept ever closer to the Sun using gravity boosts from both the Earth and Venus to alter its orbit.

Eugene Parker discussing the solar wind whose existence he predicted. (Credit: ScienceAlert)

In its last close flyby in 2023 Parker set records for both proximity to the Sun, at a distance of 6.2 million kilometers as well as fastest speed ever attained by a human built object, 635, 266 kilometers per hour. Remember the Sun’s gravitational field is so much stronger than Earth’s that a space probe traveling close to it has to travel at an enormous speed in order to not get sucked in!

The velocity of an object orbiting a planet or star increases as the object gets closer to the planet or star. (Credit: YouTube)

But on the 24th of December 2024 Parker was scheduled to break both of those records with an even closer approach to the Sun at a distance of only 6.1 million kilometers and reaching a speed of 692,000 kilometers per hour. Getting so close to the Sun is obviously a dangerous maneuver not only because of the enormous heat, estimated at 980º C, but also because of the energy of the particles in the solar wind which can easily destroy sensitive electronics.

Sometimes the Sun erupts in massive solar flares but even when the Sun is quiet it is still constantly emitting super-heated plasma of enormous energy that could prove deadly to the electronics on a space probe. (Credit: The Wonder of Science)

To protect the spacecraft’s instruments from the worst of Sun’s energy Parker has an 11.5 cm thick carbon composite shield that is kept facing the Sun. Nevertheless as the probe makes its closest approach to the Sun the Space Agency knew that they would lose all radio contact with it, NASA did not know that Parker had survived until two days later on December 26th.

With radio antennas like this one in Madrid, Spain NASA’s deep space network maintains communication with its interplanetary probes like Parker. (Credit: Jet Propulsion Labouratory)

Even after receiving the signal that Parker was in good shape NASA still had to wait until New Year’s Day before the spacecraft could begin transmitting back the data it had collected at its closest approach to the Sun. Meanwhile Parker is scheduled to make two more flybys of our Sun, on March 22nd and June 19th of 2025 although neither will be quite as close as the one on December 24th.

Parker isn’t finished with the Sun just yet. The probe will make two more close approaches to our star this year! (Credit: NASA Science)

Meanwhile, not too far away the European Space Agency’s (ESA) BepiColombo probe made its fifth flyby of the planet Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun on the first of December 2024. Like Parker, BepiColombo is using the gravity of Mercury in order to change its trajectory so that in 2026 the spacecraft can go into a permanent orbit around the solar system’s smallest planet. Even though the encounter on the first was only a flyby the scientists at the ESA still used the occasion to check out their instruments by making detailed observations of Mercury, particularly the probe’s infrared spectrograph. 

Actually two space probes in one BepiColombo consists of the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (l) and the Mercury Magnetosphere Orbiter (r). (Credit: Space.com)

Surprisingly, BepiColombo is actually two spacecraft in one. Once in orbit around Mercury BepiColombo will split into two distinct probes. One is the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the other is the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO). Both probes will conduct different observations of the planet. Like the Parker Solar Probe, BepiColombo promises to reward us with many new discoveries in the near future.

The planet Mercury is much closer to Earth than Jupiter but because it is so close to the Sun it is more difficult to get to, so we actually know less about it. BepiColombo will hopefully teach us a great deal more. (Credit: Phys.org)

Finally I have some sad news to report, the Ingenuity helicopter, which was carried to the planet Mars aboard the Perseverance rover and which became the first human built craft to fly on another planet, see my post of 1 May 2021, crashed on its 72nd flight. Now bear in mind that Ingenuity was really just a test vehicle, intended only to see if flight of any kind was even possible in Mar’s thin atmosphere. The original NASA plan was for Ingenuity to only take five flights, tests that would be observed by Perseverance. That the little helicopter would succeed in making 72 flights over a three-year period and cover over 16 kilometers was beyond the wildest hopes of the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory who designed and built the aircraft.

The Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was the first ever man made aircraft to take flight on another planet. Originally planned to take five experimental flights the little helicopter that could made rose above the Martian surface 72 times before finally crashing. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

Now NASA has released a report detailing what they think happened to Ingenuity, although since the accident happened over 100 million kilometers from Earth no one can visit the crash site to do a proper investigation to be certain. The trouble seemed to begin on Ingenuity’s 70th flight when the helicopter was flying over an area of flat terrain with few features. Because the ground below had so few landmarks it caused Ingenuity’s visual navigation system to become confused. The same problem occurred on the next flight, in fact the navigation system ordered an emergency landing, one that turned out to be a hard landing, a landing that NASA thinks damaged at least one of the helicopter’s blades. Ingenuity’s 72nd and final flight was intended to be just a short test to see whether any damage had been sustained but the helicopter quickly crashed, breaking off both of its rotors about midway.

When a Lear Jet recently crashed in NE Philadelphia member of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were quickly on site investigating what had happened. When Ingenuity crashed on Mars it obviously wasn’t possible for investigators to visit the site so the engineers at NASA had to figure out what happened based on the data the little aircraft had sent back to Earth. (Credit: YouTube)

Ingenuity may no longer be flying but the tiny probe is still working, acting now as a weather station on the Martial surface. And because Ingenuity was so successful NASA is now planning on a new helicopter to explore Mars. The proposed aircraft has been given the name Mars Chopper and it is a six-engine drone like helicopter that will be about the size of an SUV. Mars Chopper will carry an array of instruments to enable it to explore the Red Planet but whether it will operate in cooperation with a rover or autonomously is still to be decided.

Concept design for a possible Mars Chopper aircraft to continue Ingenuity’s mission of exploring of the red planet. (Credit: ScienceAlert)

In either case Mars Chopper will join the Parker Solar Probe and BepiColombo and all of the unmanned spacecraft that humans beings have sent into outer space to explore our solar system.

Archaeology News for February 2025:  Two Ancient Sites that tell us a great deal about how People lived Thousands of Years Ago.

Starting about ten thousand years ago we humans first began to both cultivate crops and domesticate herd animals. These twin achievements allowed our ancestors to end their nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle and settle down into more permanent sites, villages, towns and eventually cities.

The Hunter-Gatherer lifestyle wasn’t quite as exciting, or as dangerous as this but life was hard for our ancestors more than 10,000 years ago. (Credit: Students of History)

This change from temporary housing in caves or portable huts to long-term structures obviously is a great boon to present day archaeologists. Think about it, a cave where an extended family lived for a few months out of the year certainly won’t contain as much archaeological evidence for an excavator to find as would a cluster of dwellings where many families lived for decades or longer. Nevertheless the details of exactly when and how that change from wanderers to homesteaders took place are still fuzzy, which is why a great deal of the efforts of archaeologists today are geared towards the study of how humans built those first urban areas.

The first villages appeared in Mesopotamia about 10,000 years ago and probably looked something like this. Mud brick homes of a single room each with the work of farming and domestic animals happening right where the people lived. (Credit: Q-files)

As I mentioned above one of the advancements that enabled the first villages and towns to be built was domesticating animals that could be herded like sheep or goats or even reindeer in the north. Now the raising and handling of such large groups of animals requires not only pastures for grazing but also corrals for confining them when it becomes time for sheering, branding, slaughtering or even just counting how many of them you have.

Today we still use corrals whenever we want to keep animals in one place. (Credit: Carri-Lite Corrals)

A recent study by archaeologists at Tel Aviv University and Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel has upended long held ideas about a late Stone-Age, early Bronz Age, 4-5 thousand year old mysterious site in the Golan Heights known as the ‘Gilgal Refaim’, which is Hebrew for the ‘Wheel of Giants’. For decades now the 100-meter in diameter site had been interpreted as an astronomical observatory like the famous Stonehenge in England. Indeed the site is often referred to as the ‘Wheel Stonehenge’.

The Wheel of Giants, Gilgal Refaim in Hebrew as it appears in the Golan Heights. Until recently it was thought that the neolithic people who built this site used it as a calendar but new studies have shown that 4-5,000 year ago the site had no alignment to the solstices or equinoxes. Instead it appears to have been used as a corral for rounding up domestic, or possibly wild animals. (Credit: Israel Bardugo Photography)

The new study however took into account the way that Plate Tectonics, working at a slow rate of 8-15 mm per year has over the last 4-5 thousand years moved and even rotated the wheel. So looking at the way that the wheel was orientated back in the Neolithic the archaeologists found that there were no alignments to any celestial objects or events like solstices or equinoxes that would be important to a newly agricultural society. Instead the researchers maintain that Gilgal Refaim was a corral, a place that shepherds or goatherds could bring their flocks. The researchers also surveyed the surrounding area within 30km of the site and found other, smaller examples of such stone wheels averaging 20m in diameter. So perhaps Gilgal Refaim is simply the largest of a whole class of structures in the area used to concentrate livestock. 

A 4,000 year old megalithic tomb not far from Gilgal Refaim. The Golan Heights is an area rich in neolithic sites which is a shame since it is also so militarily significant that it has been constantly fought over by Israel and Syria. (Credit: Ancient Origins)

At the same time the archaeologists also recognize that structures like corrals can often serve as locations where people gather and interact. Remember the first rodeos were just people having fun at corrals while working with their livestock. So there is every possibility that Gilgal Refaim could have been used as a gathering place for nearby clans, either for religious of social events.

If you think about it the first Rodeos were just people having fun while working with domestic animals at a corral! Certainly people back in the Neolithic did much the same. (Credit: Canadian Horse Journal)

Another way in which the lives of human beings changed as they began to live in settled communities is the spread of communicable diseases. Think about it, a small group of nomads, say 12-15 people, who wander from one place to another with the seasons as different resources become available will probably only encounter other such groups three, maybe four times a year. Those are hardly the conditions that would allow an infectious disease to spread rapidly.

We have ample evidence that hunter gatherer groups were quite small, rarely more than a dozen people in all and those groups came in contact with other such groups only occasionally. (Credit: Wikipedia)

When humans started living in larger communities of hundreds or thousands of people however infectious organisms could multiply more easily, allowing the evolution of more diseases that could inflict our species. Indeed there is considerable DNA evidence that illnesses like salmonella, tuberculosis and even the bubonic plague all began to infect humans during the Neolithic period, the time of the first villages.

Cities, with big crowds of people are the perfect environment for diseases to spread. (Credit: South China Morning Post)

Now there is also evidence that humans began to adapt to these new, potential epidemic conditions by adopting a policy of ‘social distancing’ familiar to all of us thanks to Covid-19. A team of researchers from the University of Tennessee, Cambridge University, Durham University and Texas A&M have studied the patterns of settlement during the Neolithic ‘Trypillia’ culture of eastern Ukraine. Their results have been published in the ‘Journal of the Royal Society Interface’. During the late Stone Age this area contained a number of proto-towns or even proto-cities that have been well studied by archaeologists.

The known distribution of Neolithic sites in Ukraine designated as ‘Trypillia’ by archaeologists. (Credit: Cambridge University Press)

The researchers focused on one settlement known today as Nebelivka, which possessed thousands of wooden dwellings that were identified as being arranged in concentric patterns and clustered in pie shaped neighborhoods. Using computer programs designed to both study the spread of diseases as well as model urban planning to minimize that spread the team discovered that the inhabitants of Nebelivka were well aware of the hygienic benefits of ‘social distancing’. “This clustered layout is known by epidemiologists to be a good configuration to contain disease outbreaks.” According to Lead Author Alex Bentley of the University of Tennessee. “This suggests and helps explain the curious layout of the world’s first urban areas. It would have protected residents from emerging diseases of the time.”

A reconstruction of a Trypillia megasite like Nebelivka. That’s a pretty fair sized town but notice how it’s also rather spread out with open spaces between clusters of homes. Was this in order to help reduce the spread of disease? (Credit: History Enhanced)

The team also conducted a more detailed simulation of what would occur in Nebelivka if a food borne illness such as salmonella was to break out there. Carrying out millions of computer simulations what they discovered was that the pie shaped clustering of houses in Nebelivka helped to reduce the spread of such diseases.

Even today the food borne illness Salmonella causes a huge number of people to get sick. Part of the reason for this is the concentration of people living in cities. (Credit: Harvard Health)

The study’s result may also help to explain why the residents of Nebelivka are known to have burned down their dwellings on a regular basis and replaced them with new wooden houses. Fire has long been used as a means of fighting infectious disease.

There is much evidence throughout Eastern Europe of Neolithic People burning their homes on a regular basis. Archaeologists aren’t certain but it seems likely they did this in order to prevent the spread of diseases. (Credit: Daybreaks Devotions)

What both of these two studies show is that the people of the Neolithic period were every bit as smart as we are. That they used what technology they had to solve the problems that they faced and occasionally they developed new technology that they passed on. We are the inheritors of their knowledge and wisdom, we should be a little more grateful.