Category: Science

The Politics, and Entertainment of Climate Change.

I know that the majority of Scientists in general would prefer to just stay as far away from politics as they can. Think about it, when was the last time you heard of a scientist or engineer running for office? I’ll bet you’ve noticed how many lawyers run for public office along with some businessmen. That’s all rounded out by the occasional entertainer and even a few athletes, but not scientists. The whole political process of ‘creating a message that will resonate with the voters’, in other words lying, just goes against everything that science stands for.

Actor or President, you decide! Sometimes it just seems as if the governing of a country is nothing but a popularity contest. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Scientists don’t make good politicians, when the state of Israel was founded they asked Albert Einstein to be their first president. He turned them down. (Credit: Phys.org)

I fact I didn’t even want to write this post. The whole question of Climate Change has been answered time and time again. It’s real and we need to deal with it. But in the face of steadily rising temperatures, the melting of glaciers along with the rapid increase in both wildfires and severe weather all the global warming deniers have done is to change their tactics and so now they talk about living with climate change, not stopping it.

Some politicians are now talking about ‘living with’ Climate Change. Yea, that’ll work! (Credit: NOAA)

It was when I saw one add from the American Petroleum Institute, based on those new tactics that was simply so deceitful, so devious that I decided I would write a post about the politics of climate change. Maybe you’ve seen the ad as well.

America can’t depend on foreign, possibly hostile governments for our energy resources, and we don’t. This is a problem that doesn’t exist. (Credit: API)

The ad begins by reminding us how important energy is to America’s economic strength and national security. It then asks whether we should rely on unfriendly counties, like Iran and Venezuela, for our oil and natural gas. Of course the answer the ad gives is ‘NO’, America should develop it’s own sources of oil and natural gas instead of being dependent on unreliable foreign regimes.

This is the answer that the petroleum industry wants us to have so they can keep on drilling and destroying our country. (Credit: API)

The whole ad is like a magician’s misdirection. The question isn’t whether America should get it oil and natural gas from unfriendly foreign countries but whether we should be getting our energy from oil and natural gas at all! The issue of Climate Change due to the burning of fossil fuels is completely ignored in the ad because the petroleum industry knows that they can’t talk about it anymore. Throughout the ad, which is all about energy production, solar arrays and wind turbines are never shown or mentioned.

At least to non-existent problems. The solutions to the real problem of fossil fuel emissions are completely ignored! (Credit: API)

By the way America already gets very little of its energy from foreign nations. We import less than 8% of our energy and Canada, hardly an unfriendly, unreliable nation accounts for more than half of that. In fact the US exports more petroleum products than it imports so the entire issue of our relying on foreign governments for our energy just doesn’t exist. The ad was a deceitful attempt to drum up support for the petroleum industry by arguing a false problem without mentioning the real issues, the environmental issues caused by the burning of fossil fuels!

This is the problem Big Oil doesn’t want to talk about. So like a magician they just distract us with another issue they made up! (Credit: NASA)

Having decided to write a post about the politics of Climate Change it didn’t take me long to find a sample poll conducted by the University of Bath in the UK that surveyed 10,000 young people from ten countries aged 18-25 about their views concerning the future. Faced with the harm that their parents have done to our world 77% of those surveyed considered the future to be ‘frightening’ and fully 56% thought that humanity was ‘doomed’.

Numerous polls have found that young people are very concerned about their future because of Climate Change. The folks at Fox think that the best way of dealing with that concern is to laugh at the ‘stupid kids’. (Credit: The Washingtom Post)

And if the results of such polls weren’t depressing enough the day after I read those results I was watching my local news and when an ad came on I decided to see what the other channels were showing. I ended up at ‘The Five’ on Fox news network where the hosts were laughing at all the stupid kids, 56% of whom thought humanity was doomed because of Climate Change. Seriously, the pundits on Fox thought it was just hilarious that young people would be worried about sea level rise making the coastal areas of the planet uninhabitable or droughts causing a food shortage or just the very idea that we are poisoning the only planet we have to live on.

Unlike his associates on Fox who spew hatred at everyone who disagrees with them Greg Gutfeld prefers to laugh at them. At least he’s a bit different! (Credit: YouTube)

However there are members of the media and entertainment worlds who recognize the growing danger of fossil fuel emissions and are willing to do what they can to raise public awareness of the issue, though to be honest I have to wonder how anyone today could be unaware of Climate Change. Nevertheless on the evening of the 22nd of September the hosts of eight late-night television shows, on eight different networks, all devoted their programs for a united effort to save mother Earth. The list of who joined in reads like the nominees for a Hollywood award, Steven Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, James Corden, Trevor Noah, Andy Cohen and Samantha Bee.

On the night of September 22nd eight late night programs joined together to publicize climate change. My only problem with that is the fact that climate change needed to be publicized. (Credit: Yahoo News)

“Don’t even think about switching to another show,” announced ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel at the beginning of his show. “We’re all focused on this topic tonight. You can’t escape. It’s basically an intervention. Our future is in jeopardy.”

Kids explaining Climate Change to Donald Trump was one segment on Kimmel’s show. I doubt it worked however. (Credit: YouTube)

The guests on the various shows included such environmental activists as Jane Goodall, John Kerry, Bill Gates and a host of climate scientists. Topics included the effects of temperature rise on sea turtle sex, raw sewage from homes mixing with the runoff from increasingly severe storms and the increasing risk of diseases like Covid-19 because of rising temperatures.

Jimmy Fallon had the best guest! (Credit: YouTube)

Unfortunately Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t quite correct about viewers not being able to escape because once again Fox news network was a place of refuge for the climate deniers. On the Greg Gutfeld show the host and his guests enjoyed themselves by mocking his competitors while touting the virtues of fossil fuels. Again it seems as if Fox’s way of dealing with environmental issues is to treat them as a joke in the hope that their viewers won’t take them seriously.

So I guess that’s an overview of the current state of the politics of Climate Change. By far the majority of people, even here in the US now recognize the coming catastrophe but the climate deniers have closed ranks and will do everything they can to keep making money off of cheap oil and natural gas. And that’s the real issue here, money, because any attempt to reduce carbon emissions will be taking money away from a rich and powerful, well established group of people while at the same time requiring tax increases to generate the huge amount of money needed to even begin fixing all of the environmental problems we’ve caused.

Oil and Water might not mix but Oil and Money certainly do. Remember we’ve fought several wars over this stuff! (Credit: ATDM CO.LTD)

So the politicians will delay and dither, and do nothing until they’re forced to. Think about it, most politicians, Mitch McConnell is an excellent example, are so old now that they know the worst of Climate Change will only occur long after they are safely dead. The same is true of Fox’s CEO Roger Murdoch. Climate Change won’t hurt him but any efforts to prevent it would raise his taxes and he simply doesn’t care if it hurts anyone else. So he orders his underlings to make fun of the possible extinction of the human race.

Just by looking at them you know that some people are incapable of changing in any way. (Credit: CNN)

All we can do is to keep pushing, to vote for those politicians who not only accept Climate Change but are also willing to do something about it, to write letters and emails, especially to those who oppose environmental solutions. It may not seem like much but the weight of evidence is in our favour and it’s growing. As conditions get worse more people will recognize the danger and demand action. Eventually even the politicians will have to do something.

You have to admit it is a good one. Unfortunately the joke may be on us! (Credit: Rotherham Politics)

We can only hope it’ll be in time.

Have the remains of the legendary cities of Sodom and Gomorrah been discovered? Archaeologists from Veritas International University in Santa Ana California and Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque New Mexico in cooperation with the Jordanian Department of Antiquities think they’ve got the smoking gun and it’s an asteroid!

One of the best known and most debated stories from the bible concerns the destruction of the ‘evil cities’ of Sodom and Gomorrah. As related in genesis chapter 18 verses 16-33 and Chapter 19 verses 1-29 two angels of god, after visiting with Abraham go to the cities of sin where they meet Abraham’s nephew Lot who lived in Sodom. The other inhabitants of Sodom threaten violence, usually interpreted as sexual violence against the two angels, which causes the lord to make them all to go blind. Lot and his wife and daughters then escape the city before it is destroyed by fire and brimstone. Before escaping Lot and his family were warned not to look back at the cities being destroyed but Lot’s wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt.

Was the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah a real event. People have wondered that for thousands of years. (Credit: Pinterest)

(By the way, one thing that has always puzzled me is Gomorrah. I mean none of the action takes place there, it’s never even mentioned except in conjunction with Sodom as in ‘Sodom and Gomorrah. But it was destroyed along with Sodom. Why?)

 So that’s the story and for centuries people, especially armchair archaeologists have wondered about what disaster could have given birth to the legend. The consensus opinion for many years has been that an Earthquake destroyed a Bronze Age city somewhere to the east of the central highlands region of Canaan. After all the Dead Sea Rift is a major fault line going right through the area, Earthquakes are fairly common in the lands of the bible.

The Dead Sea Rift is a series of faults that basically follow the course of the Riven Jordan. The rift makes the lands of the bible an earthquake zone. (Credit: Earth Magazine)

A minority opinion was that the city was destroyed by a volcano like the Roman city of Pompeii, which would account for the ‘Fire and Brimstone’ part. But there are no suitable volcanoes nearby in Israel or Jordan. Of course the city may have actually been further away and its location was brought closer by the authors of genesis as they adapted to story to suit their theological ideas.

O’k so tell me! Were the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by a natural calamity and then the authors of the bible just assumed it was because they sinned in order to make the destruction fit in with their moralistic views? (Credit: Got Questions)

   Now a paper in the journal Scientific Reports from a large group of archaeologists associated with nineteen institutions has raised the possibility that they have not only discovered the remains of Sodom, but know how it was destroyed. The archaeological site is question is known today as Tall el-Hammam and lies at the southern end of the valley of the Jordan River just northeast of the Dead Sea. Based upon artifacts collected during excavations that began in 2005 the Tall, which is an Arabic word for a mound, was the site of a large and prosperous walled city dating back to the Copper Age about (4,300 BCE).

The mound or Tall -el-Hammam in western Jordan lies just north of the Dead Sea on the east side of the Jordan River. Could this be the ancient city of Sodom, some archaeologists think so. (Credit: Biblical Archaeological Society)

In the middle Bronze Age the city, whose name is unknown, was one of the biggest population centers in the Middle East, its enclosed area of 85 acres making it about eight times the size of Jerusalem at that time. Then, about the year 1650 BCE the city was suddenly and completely destroyed, a destruction so complete that the area around the mound remained mainly deserted for the next 500-600 years.

A reconstruction of what the city at Tall el-Hammam looked like in the middle Bronze Age. (Credit: Elizabeth City State University)

The archaeologists found the evidence for that destruction in a layer of sediment about 1.5 meters thick in the mound and were astounded by the degree of the devastation, far worse than could have been due to war or even an Earthquake. Broken pieces of pottery have been found in that layer that were partially melted while bricks from the city wall show signs of ‘bubbling’ on their surface, both indicating exposure to heat greater than 2,000º Celsius. There was also evidence of more physical damage, including that fact that the upper 12 meters of the city’s palace was completely toppled, as were large sections of the city wall.

Tall el-Hammam as it is today. The destruction layer that may have been caused by an asteroid strike is within the dotted lines. (Credit: Money Training Club)

Even more telling was the discovery of shocked quartz, tiny grains of sand that have subjected to such enormous pressure that cracks have formed in them. So great was the pressure that small pieces of carbon dust were also found that have been converted into diamonoids.

Analysis of one of the tiny diamonoids found in association with Tall el-Hammam. Great pressure is required to turn a flake of carbon into a diamondoid so was that pressure produced by a meteor strike? (Credit: The Girl Sun)

The scale of the destruction was so great that the researchers are certain that only an extraterrestrial source could cause it. They theorize that an asteroid airburst similar to if not slightly more powerful than the one that destroyed the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1905 struck the city like a nuclear explosion of approximately 12 megatons.

Some of the destruction caused by the Tunguska asteroid strike in 1908. Did a similar event destroy the city on Tall el-Hammam? (Credit: The Conversation)

All of the evidence presented by the archaeologists is very suggestive. The city is located in a region of Canaan that corresponds to where Sodom could have been and the carbon 14 dating of 1650 BCE for the city’s destruction is about right for the period when Abraham is thought to have lived. The suddenness and scale of the destruction are so great that they certainly resemble the destruction of Sodom as related in the bible. The possibility that this unknown city, forgotten for 3500 years could actually be the source of the story of Sodom must be considered.

This is the last few seconds of the city of Sodom? And will we ever know for certain? (Credit: Artnet News)

Still, the evidence is only suggestive, there are several other middle Bronze Age sites that have also been proposed for the ‘city of sin’ and of course there’s always the possibility that the entire story of Sodom and Gomorrah could be entirely fictitious. There are even some scholars who consider the bible to be factually inerrant who argue that Tall el-Hammam’s destruction did not take place at precisely the right time by their chronology.

So how could the identification of Tall el-Hammam as Sodom ever been proven? Well the best way of course would be a contemporary written record, preferably from the city itself. Just imagine if the archaeologists working at Tall el-Hammam succeeded in finding the royal archive of the city as they have for the Assyrian empire, the Hittite empire and Pharaoh Akhenaten of Egypt. If those records could be translated and it was discovered that the inhabitants of the city called it something akin to Sodom, that would be a spectacular discovery. Second best would be a written record from an outside source like Mesopotamia or Egypt that referred to the city.

The city at Tall el-Hammam should have been known to its neighbors the Assyrians or Hittites or Egyptians. Is the final evidence of the existence of Sodom waiting to be discovered in the letters of those ancient peoples? (Credit: Amazon.com)

Let’s think about that second possibility for a moment, because there are hundreds, if not thousands of untranslated tablets from Egypt and Mesopotamia currently being stored in museums around the world. There’s a real possibility that one of them may mention the city buried at Tall el-Hammam. So the final proof of the story of Sodom may already have been discovered, it just hasn’t been recognized.

There are thousands of ancient tablets excavated from sites in the Middle East that have not yet been translated. Has that evidence of Sodom already been found but not recognized? (Credit: BBC)

And if Tall el-Hammam is Sodom, then where’s Gomorrah?

Space news for September 2021: First Tourist flight into Orbit is a Complete Success.

In manned spaceflight uneventful and even boring are synonyms for successful and that’s exactly the way the ‘Inspiration Four’ mission of the Space X Dragon capsule went this past weekend. Billed as the first all-civilian space mission the tourist flight was paid for by billionaire Jared Isaacman, who with considerable experience as a pilot including time in high performance jets served as commander. Iassacman intended the mission to be a fundraising event for St. Jude’s children’s hospital and it did in fact succeed in raising $100 million dollars for the charity, which Iassacman then matched with $100 million of his own.

The Inspiration 4 crew in their Dragon capsule ready for launch. Left to right are Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Haley Arceneux. (Credit: Business Insider)

The four person crew of Inspiration Four also included Sian Procotor a Doctor of Geology who had unsuccessfully tried out for the astronaut corp and a Lockheed Martin engineer named Chris Sembroski. The final crewmember was Haley Arceneux who is a physician’s assistant at St. Jude’s and is herself a childhood cancer survivor.

Launch of the Inspiration 4 mission. (Credit: Times of India)

The launch took place at two minutes after eight P.M. EDT on the 15th of September and the assent into orbit went perfectly. Space X even succeeded in recovering the rocket’s first stage, a once impossible achievement that has now become routine for them. Once in orbit the passengers had three days of floating in zero-gee and enjoying the sights of the Earth below, the Dragon capsule having been modified with a transparent cupola to allow the crew a panoramic view of our planet.

Since the Inspiration 4 mission wasn’t going to the International Space Station it’s docking hatch was modified to give the crew an awesome view of the Earth. (Credit: The New York Times.)

Splashdown came at about seven P.M. on the 18th and within an hour all four passengers were out of the capsule and waving from the deck of Space X’s recovery ship. The entire mission had gone without incident or problem of any kind, in other words it was a complete success.

Splashdown of the Inspiration 4 mission. Space X is getting so good at the mechanics of spaceflight that all this is becoming routine, which will allow NASA to go on to do bolder explorations. (Credit: The New York Times)

The whole trip was entirely arranged and conducted by Space X Corporation itself, the crew training; flight path and even the food selections were all made without any assistance or even input from NASA. If the Inspiration Four mission represents any kind of progress it is simply that, space travel is now no longer the monopoly of governments, instead it now resembles something like air travel in the 1920s as the first airline companies were being formed.

Pan Am’s Fleet of Clippers introduced the world to the concept of international air travel. Space X hopes to do much the same in space. (Credit: Midway Island)

And the four passengers aboard the Space X Dragon also helped set another record, the most people in space at the same time. You see there are currently seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Three are from NASA, two from the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos and one each from the Japanese Space Agency and the European Space Agency.

And for the first day of the Inspiration Four mission there were also three Chinese Taikonauts aboard their under construction space station the Tiangong. In fact the three Chinese space travelers were packing up and getting ready to end their three month long mission as the Space X rocket was launched. The trio of taikonauts landed their Shenzhou 12 capsule in the Gobi Desert on the morning of the 17th of September. While the members of the Shenzhou 12 may have been the first occupants of the Tiangong space station they will not be the last, China plans at least three more manned missions to Tiangong in the next few years.

The first crew of China’s Tiangong space station spent 3 months in orbit making it China’s longest space mission to date. (Credit: Space.com)

So at least for one day there were a total of 14 human beings in orbit at the same time in three different spacecraft. Hopefully this is an omen of the future as newer, perhaps larger space stations are built and more commercial launch vehicles become available. And hopefully within the next decade human beings will return to the Moon as well, this time to stay.

The Three crew members of the Shenzhou 12 mission to the Tiangong space station landed safely in the Gobi desert while the Inspiration 4 crew were in orbit. (Credit: Space News)

So for the next few decades space travel will continue to be reserved for those with deep pockets, whether government of private, just as air travel was 100 years ago. But things are finally starting to speed up, before too many years go by space launches will become routine, just like an airplane taking off from an airport.

NASA is already preparing for that day. Currently the space agency is considering about twelve proposals for space stations submitted under its new program Commercial Low-Earth-Orbit Destinations. The idea is similar to NASA’s Commercial Crew Program that developed Space X’s Dragon capsule.

Mock up of Bigelow Aerospace’s planned space station. (Credit: The New York Times)

The plan is for NASA to help fund, not totally fund the development of private space stations and then rent space on them as needed. The corporation that owns the station can then rent the rest of the station to other countries, or corporations or individuals, exactly as Space X did with Inspiration Four.

Axion Aerospace plans to build an addition to the current ISS and then, when the ISS is retired, use it as the foundation for their own station. (Credit: Space.com)

By year’s end NASA hopes to select two to four of the proposals and distribute funding totaling $400 million. Indeed NASA has already funded Axiom Aerospace Corporation to the tune of $140 million for modules that will be attached to the ISS beginning in 2024 and which Axiom hopes to use as a basis for its own space station once the ISS is retired.

Before I go I would like to mention one of NASA’s recent robotic missions that has also turned out to be a real success, the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. The original plans for the little helicopter, the first man-made aircraft to fly on another world, was to have it carry out three experimental test flights simply to see if flight of any kind was possible on Mars, where the atmosphere is only about 1.5% as dense as Earth’s.

Having already carried out four times as many flights as were originally planned the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars is another example of NASA not only doing the impossible but doing it better than even they thought they could! (Credit: SpaceNews)

Ingenuity passed those initial tests with ease and so the helicopter’s mission was expanded to allow the little flyer to act as a scout for it’s parent the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity has since made another 10 flights, checking out the terrain ahead of the rover while looking for anything interesting that the scientists back on Earth might want Perseverance to look over.

Like something out of a Hollywood movie the little Ingenuity helicopter (l) is stealing attention from the main attraction the Perseverance rover (r). (Credit: NASA’s Mars Exploration Program)

However conditions on Mars can change with the seasons and that includes the density of the atmosphere. Over the last few weeks the density in Jezero crater has dropped making it harder for Ingenuity’s rotors to develop enough thrust to get the helicopter off the ground.

In response the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory have had to speed up the rotational speed of Ingenuity’s rotors. So far this workaround has been successful but if the air density gets much lower increasing the speed even further might not work, or it might damage the helicopter’s motors.

Before long we may all feel that way! (Credit: The Week)

So how much longer Ingenuity will be capable of flying is questionable, still it has more than proven that not only can aircraft operate on Mars, but that there’s a lot to be gained by them doing so. The real proof of that may be that the Chinese space agency is already considering adding a helicopter to their next Mars lander!

Paleontology News for September 2021: A new large arthropod species discovered in the famous Burgess Shale. Plus a little pre-paleontology caused by Climate Change.

The main pursuit of paleontology is to learn the pathways by which Earth’s first creatures evolved into the species we see today, to study evolution in the field. In this month’s post I’ll be discussing stories that illustrate evolution from both the beginnings of multi-cellular life to observations of evolution in action today.

Of course the most familiar illustration of evolution is all about us! (Credit: History.com)

For most of life’s time here on Earth it consisted of nothing but single celled organisms. Then, about 600 million years ago the first simple multi-celled creatures came into being, creatures that have become known as the Ediacaran fauna. Because these first plants and animals had nothing in the way of hard parts however fossils of them are exceptionally rare and don’t reveal much about their anatomy.

The first multi-cellular living creatures had no hard parts so the fossil remains are very rare and don’t tell us a whole lot about the creatures. (Credit: Laidlaw Scholarships University of St. Andrews)

Animals with hard parts first appeared about 550 million years ago during the early Cambrian period and some of the best fossils from the Cambrian period are found in British Columbia in the world famous Burgess Shale and nearby fossil sites. The remarkable preservation of the fossils from the Burgess Shale is due to both the fine grained particles making up the shale as well as the fact that the animals that were fossilized seemed to have been buried intact in mudslides before their remains could be eaten by scavengers.

The most common fossil species found in the Burgess Shale is Marella splendens also known as the ‘Lace Crab’. This specimen is simply a beautiful fossil. (Credit: Smithsonian Institute)

As might be expected the creatures found in the Burgess Shale were mainly small, the size of a finger being rather common. After all multi-cellular life was brand new and it takes a while to go from being microscopic to the size of a human being let alone that of a whale.

Trilobites were amoung the largest and most advanced creatures during the Cambrian period. Today they would be considered small and primitive. (Credit: West Coast Traveler)

Size has its advantages however, particularly if you want to catch and eat other creatures. So it’s no surprise that the biggest animal yet discovered in the Burgess Shale, a creature known as Anomalocaris, was a predator about one meter in length. Despite its strangeness, the size of Anomalocaris made it the Tyrannosaurus rex of its day.

Considered the largest and fiercest predatory during the Cambrian, Anomalocaris was still only about a meter in length. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Now another large and equally strange creature has been discovered by paleontologists associated with the Royal Ontario Museum in an outcrop of shale near the Burgess Shale site in British Columbia and of the same age. Given the name Titanokorys gainesi the fossil belongs to a group of arthropods characterized by having a large, three part carapace covering most of their bodies that made them look almost like living heads.

With a head shield the covers more than half its body Titanokorys gainesi is related to Anomalocaris and appears to have lived by using it broad head as a plow to dig out food from the sand at the bottom of the ocean. (Credit: Sci-news.com)

T gainesi in particular had a broad, flat carapace about a half-meter in length along with multifaceted eyes and two spiny claws to grab food and bring it to a mouth shaped like a slice of pineapple. The paleontologists who described T gainesi speculate that the creature may have used its large carapace like a plow to stir up the muddy ocean bottom so that its claws could capture worms and other small animals.

As you might guess most of the fossil specimens of T gainesi discovered so far are of the creatures large head shield. (Credit: The Times of Israel)

T gainesi is yet another example of how, half a billion years ago evolution was experimenting to find solutions to the problems of how to survive in a hostile world. That same problem is still being faced by the life forms of today’s world but modern animals have the additional difficulty of having to adapt to a rapidly warming planet due to human induced climate change. In order to survive in this new environment Earth’s creatures must do what they have always done, adapt and evolve.

As usual Darwin got it right. It’s all about adapting! (Credit: Gihan Perera)

Now a new study by ornithologist Sara Ryding of Deakin University in Australia has described some of the changes that are already taking place in warm-blooded animals. Published in the journal ‘Trends in Ecology and Evolution’ the research details the anatomical changes, ‘shapeshifting’ that have been measured in a large number of bird and mammalian species.

The ancient myths about shapeshifters was all about adapting in order to survive. Maybe those ancient peoples weren’t as dumb as we think they were. (Credit: Deep Trance Now)

For example several species of Australian parrot have been found to be growing beaks that are 10% larger when compared to preserved specimens from 100 years ago. The same increase in beak size has also been found in North American dark-eyed juncos, a variety of songbird. In both cases the increase in bill size correlates positively with a measured increase in average temperature in the areas populated by the birds.

In order to better regulate their body temperature in a warming world Australian Parrots are growing bigger beaks! (Credit: ABC News)

In mammals such as wood mice and masked shrews a similar 10% increase has been measured in tail length and leg size. All of these adaptations have one thing in common, they provide the animal with a larger surface area to radiate heat and cool their body temperature. Again there is a clear connection for the larger body parts to rising temperatures in the animal’s habitat.

Several species of small mammals have also been discovered to be increasing the size of their tails and legs in order to increase surface area to aid in cooling their bodies in a warmer climate. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The fact that some species are evolving in response to global warming shouldn’t be taking as a sign that those animals are solving the problem of climate change however. As Doctor Ryding puts it, “shapeshifting does not mean that animals are coping with climate change and that all is ‘fine’. It just means that they are evolving to survive it. But we’re not sure what the other ecological consequences are, or indeed that all species are capable of changing and surviving.”

Those who cannot adapt become extinct, it’s as simple as that. The question then becomes, will we humans adapt to save our world or perish as a part of a new mass extinction? (Credit: National Geographic Society)

  Paleontologists have recognized at least six separate ‘mass extinctions’ in the fossil record. Some of these extinctions appear to have been caused by asteroid or comets impacting the Earth while others may have been due to massive volcanic eruptions. Right now our planet is experiencing another extinction event and there’s little doubt as to its cause, human beings!

Book Review: ‘The Genesis Quest’ by Michael Marshall.

One of the most fundamental questions waiting to be answered by science is “How did Life on Earth Begin?” For most of human history this question was answered by a story from myth or legend rather than by science. Our local chief god created the universe and all living things in some way. The first chapter of Genesis is not only a typical example of this but even gave us the word that we use to describe the whole process, genesis.

Why is it that all of the legends and myths about the beginnings of life always make our creation the climax of the story? (Credit: Wikipedia)

Basically our ancestors thought that ‘who’, created life was more important than ‘how’ it was done. After all we poor humans could never understand the mystery of how life was created. That was god’s greatest secret and it was enough for us to know that he did it. It’s only been since the start of the scientific revolution and Darwin’s demonstration that all modern living creatures have evolved from earlier forms of life that scientists first began to wonder how the first living thing, the ancestor of all life on Earth ever became alive.

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is really about what happened after the first living thing came into being. Darwin was very cautious about how that first living thing originated. (Credit: AZ Quotes)

The search for a answer to that question is the thesis behind Michael Marshall’s new book ‘The Genesis Quest’. Starting at the very beginning Marshall discusses not only the mythology but also several reasoned although not scientific hypothesis such as the èlan vital and spontaneous generation. It’s once the actual chemists and biologists begin working on the problem however that ‘Genesis Quest’ really gets good.

Cover of ‘The Genesis Quest’ by Michael Marshall. (Credit: Amazon)
Author Michael Marshall is a Science Writer for several magazines who has published several books on science. (Credit: Goodreads)

Reviewing the early advances on just what life is and where living things come from Marshall has certainly done his homework. From Robert Hooke’s discovery of cells, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s descriptions of microscopic ‘animalcules’ and Friedrich Wőhler’s first synthesis of an organic chemical to Darwin himself we see how science was forced, almost against itself to consider the question of how the first living thing came into existence.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek using his microscope to observe the ‘animalcules’ in a drop of pond water. (Credit: Vox)

By the way I just illustrated one of the key elements of ‘Genesis Quest’, you will be reading about a lot of discoveries made by a lot of different scientists. Some of the scientists will be famous, like Louie Pasteur but there will also be some not so famous ones like botanist Matthias Schleiden who was the first to definitely assert that all living things were made of cells. In Marshall’s telling each of these discoveries becomes a tale in itself and the whole becomes woven together for a grand story, the ‘Genesis Quest’.

Louis Pasteur is generally given credit with finally putting an end to ideas about ‘Spontaneous Generation’ of living things. But it must have happened once billions of years ago. (Credit: ThoughtCo)

In fact the cast of characters in ‘Genesis Quest’ is so large that it’s difficult to keep track of everyone without a scorecard. For example the physicist George Gamow, best know as an early proponent of the Big Bang theory is given a brief mention because he was the first to suggest that a group of three DNA bases could provide the code for the 20 amino acids used in the proteins of living cells. Gamow’s steady-state rival, astronomer Fred Hoyle is also mentioned because late in life he became an adherent of life on Earth originally coming from outer space, a theory known as Panspermia. (I mention Gamow and Hoyle because I just ordered a new book “Flashes of Creation” about the beginnings of the Big Bang theory in which Gamow and Hoyle are the two main characters. I can’t wait to read it!)

Physicist George Gamow (l) and Astronomer Fred Hoyle (r) fought for decades over not just the origin of life but the origin of the Universe itself. (Credit: Hacker News)

Much progress was made during the 20th century as Alexander Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane first developed the ‘primordial soup’ model of the beginning of life. This model saw its greatest success with the Miller-Urey experiment in 1953, which even today is still touted as evidence that simple chemical reactions on the early Earth could produce complex organic compounds.

British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane helped popularize the ‘Primordial Soup’ model of life’s origin. (Credit: The Economist)
The Miller Urey experiment was so simple yet the results so profound that it made the ‘Primordial Soup’ model dominate for decades. (Credit: Research Gate)

But 1953 was also the year that Watson and Crick first described the shape of the DNA molecule and in the years thereafter the very intricate and complex mechanism by which DNA builds proteins, DNA to Messenger RNA to Transfer RNA to Ribosome to Protein was discovered bit by bit. Such a complex chain of very delicate chemical reactions could never have arisen spontaneously in a primordial soup. So a new model of RNA first for the beginnings of life arose to challenge the protein based primordial soup model.

It’s actually a lot more complicated than this. How the Primordial Soup could generate such complex chemical reactions was difficult to understand so new models for life’s origins had to be developed. (Credit: Expii)

However both proteins and nuclides don’t last long in nature, so another model; a cell wall first model was also developed. From the 1970s throughout the 1990s these three models fought fiercely over who was right with none of them able to gain the upper hand.

All of the structures inside a cell are rather delicate needing a ‘Cell Wall’ for protection. How did the pre-biotic chemicals protect them selves. (Credit: Science Facts)

Finally, in the last chapters Marshall discusses the modern synthesis that has developed since about 2000. A self-replicating molecule contained inside a lipid shell, something that has already been achieved by the chemist Jack Szostak. Marshall also asks the question, just how complex do ‘protocells’ like Szostak’s have to be in order to be considered ‘alive’. Have we in fact already created life in the labouratory?

Current leader in the race to develop synthetic life is Nobel laureate Jack Szostak at Harvard. (Credit: Ciencia del Sur)
Doctor Szostak has already developed a ‘species’ of protocell that meets several of the criteria of life, including replication! (Credit: Church and State)

Throughout ‘Genesis Quest’ Marshall manages to keep his descriptions of the, sometimes very sophisticated experiments and theories both simple and understandable. At the same time however he also includes footnotes with more technical information as well as sources for further reading. A well regarded science writer whose has worked for both New Scientist and the BBC Marshall knows just how much detail is needed in order to tell the story he wants to tell. ‘Genesis Quest’ is in fact a fast paced, very enjoyable overview of one of the most important scientific endeavors of all time. I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who is interested in how science and scientists work.   

A Citizen Scientist discovers what could be the first of a new class of Brown Dwarfs. And what are Brown Dwarfs anyway?

Most people know that our Sun is pretty much a middle of the road star. Any star that is much more than 20 times the mass of our Sun is so big and unstable that it doesn’t last for very long. And any astronomic body that has much less than 1/20th our Sun’s mass won’t have enough pressure and temperature in its core to ignite hydrogen fusion, so they never shine as a star. Jupiter for example is the most massive of the planets, but since it only has 1/1000th the Sun’s mass it is a planet, not a star.

Our Sun, which is a middle sized star is about 1,000 times as massive as the large planet Jupiter. We now known that there are objects in between that we have christened ‘Brown Dwarfs’. (Credit: NASA)

Beginning in the 1960s astronomers began to wonder if there could be objects out in the galaxy that were too small to be stars yet too big to be planets, a class that was eventually given the name Brown Dwarfs. Such objects would have masses in the range of 10-80 times Jupiter’s mass and are often described to be ‘failed stars’.

Brown Dwarfs are too big to be planets but still aren’t massive enough to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores making them ‘failed stars’. (Credit: EarthSky)

Since they don’t shine in visible wavelengths like real stars, and the closest could be light years away Astronomers knew that Brown Dwarfs were going to be very difficult to find. Brown Dwarfs wouldn’t be totally dark however, even the smallest would have some heat left over from their formation while the heaviest could even have a small amount of heavy hydrogen, that is deuterium fusion going on inside them. Because of this Brown Dwarfs would be visible in infrared (IR) light.

There’s no reason why a Brown Dwarf couldn’t have a planet orbiting them but at the moment we’re having enough difficulty just finding Brown Dwarfs. (Credit: Owlcation)

Infrared astronomy is difficult here on Earth’s surface however, because even a tiny amount of water vapour in the air blocks IR light. In the 1960s there simply weren’t any IR telescopes and it wasn’t until the 1990s that a few IR space telescopes were launched into orbit and the first IR telescopes were built on the tops of the highest Andes Mountains, the driest place on Earth.

The high Atacama desert in the Andes mountains of Chile is the best place on Earth to do infra-red astronomy. (Credit: Aura Astronomy)

In 1988 a star designated as GD 165 was discovered to have a very small companion star, designated as GD 165B, during a search for white dwarf stars. The light of GD 165B was barely in the visible red portion of the visible spectra and astronomers wondered if it might be the first known Brown Dwarf. The debate over GD 165B’s status continued for almost a decade until new telescopes conducting the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) discovered over a hundred similar objects, and so Brown Dwarfs became a new class of celestial object.

What the Universe looks like at a wavelength of 2 Microns courtesy of the 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) (Credit: Infrared Processing and Analysis Center – Caltech)

Today Brown Dwarfs have been classified into two spectral types, both below the familiar O, B, A, F, G, K, M classes of normal stars. The larger Brown Dwarfs, which have a strong lithium line in their spectra, are classified as “L” type. Since true stars burn their lithium very quickly the presence of lithium in a spectra is indicative of a brown dwarf.

Normal stars are classified by their surface temperature as O, B, A, F, G, K, or M types with O being the hottest and M the coolest. Brown Dwarfs add two new classes L and T to the right. (Credit: SDSS SkyServer)

In time some brown dwarfs were discovered whose surface temperatures were cooler than the L type, so cool that methane was discovered in their spectra, even L type dwarfs are too hot for chemicals to exist. So a new class of Brown Dwarf, the “T” class was created. Presently astronomers have identified nearly a thousand L type and about 350 T type Brown Dwarfs.

Two classes of Brown Dwarfs are recognized by all astronomers while a new classification “Y” is still being debated. (Credit: Backyard Worlds)

Since Brown Dwarfs generate little if any energy by fusion they really have no stable “Main Sequence” period in their lives but instead just continue to get cooler and cooler, eventually becoming so cool that they no longer even radiate in IR wavelengths. For that reason it was thought that it would be very difficult if not impossible to detect a Brown Dwarf that was more than a few billion years old.

But they may just have found one by ‘Accident’, or at least citizen scientist Dan Caselden seems to have found one and his finding it really was an accident. Caselden had written a computer program to search for Brown Dwarfs in the data collected by the Near Earth Object – Wide field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEO-WISE) satellite. In particular Caselden was looking for objects so close to our solar system that they would appear to move slightly against the background of more distant starts over the course of six months or a year. (NEO-WISE conducts a complete survey of the entire sky every six months)

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite has been given a new mission to search for Near Earth Objects (NEOs) making it now the NEO-WISE mission. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Caselden was checking out one candidate for a close Brown Dwarf when he noticed another object nearby that was moving even faster. Its spectra didn’t look like that of a Brown Dwarf but Caselden decided he’d check it out.

By day a Security Engineer in his spare time Dan Caselden is a new breed of computer astronomers. Seriously all of the satellites we’ve put into space are sending back so much data that even ordinary people, with a computer, can make important discoveries. (Credit: NASA Solar System Exploration)

Caselden’s discovery has now been given the official designation of WISEA J153429.75-104303.03 but it’s also known by its nickname of Accident. When examined more closely by powerful ground based telescopes Accident was found to be as cool as a T type Brown Dwarf but there was no trace of methane in its spectra. In fact there was no trace of carbon or any of the more massive elements like oxygen or sodium or iron. WISEA J153429.75-104303.03 appears to be made entirely of the elements hydrogen and helium.

If you’re interested in being a citizen scientist try checking it out on YouTube. (Credit: Twitter)

That would indicate that Accident is old, very old, ten billion years old or older. You see, shortly after the big bang, when the first galaxies began to form the matter in the Universe was almost entirely hydrogen and helium. The heavier elements, like those that make up planets and even our our bodies were created inside the nuclear furnaces of the first generation of stars some 10 to 13 billion years ago.

The first stars began to form only 100 million years after the Big Bang. At that time only the elements Hydrogen and Helium existed in any amount so the elements that formed the planets, and our bodies were forged in the cores of those first stars. (Credit: Futurism)

So Accident may be a Brown Dwarf that was formed at the same time as the very first stars. If that is so then WISEA J153429.75-104303.03 may hold secrets within it that relate to how the first stars and galaxies came into being. WISEA J153429.75-104303.03 could even be the first in an entirely new class of Brown Dwarfs. So I guess it will be no accident if astronomers pay a great deal of attention to it in the years to come.

Accident brings another question to mind. Just how many Brown Dwarfs are there out there in our galaxy? So far we have only found around two thousand but they are all rather close, within 100 light years. We are still only beginning to get a feel for how common they are.

Many of the Brown Dwarfs we know about are companions of more normal stars such as this one. (Credit: Universe Today)

We do know that there are a lot more middle sized stars like our Sun than big, bright ones like Vega, and there are a lot more small, dim stars like Barnard’s star or Proxima Centauri than middling stars like our Sun. If you extrapolate from those facts then there could be a lot more Brown Dwarfs in the Milky Way than all of the real stars put together.

On a clear night you can see thousands of nearby stars but how many Brown Dwarfs are out there that we can’t see? (Credit: Space Tourism Guide)

Think about that the next time you go out on a nice clear night to gaze up at the heavens.

The Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) consortium centered in Belgium is working to construct a Radio Telescope that is effectively as large as all of Western Europe.

Ever since the telescope was first used by Galileo to study the heavens astronomers have built bigger and bigger telescopes to aid them in their work. To an astronomer the bigger the telescope the better for two basic reasons, the first reason is simply that the bigger the telescope the more light it can collect. This extra light allows objects that are too dim to be seen with the unaided eye to become visible. Point even a small telescope at a portion of the sky where you see only one or two stars and suddenly you’ll see dozens of stars because the telescope has a larger area to gather more light from those dimmer stars.

All of the galaxies seen in this image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope are far to dim to be seen with our eyes. But because the light gathering area of Hubble is so much larger it can gather much more light making these dim objects visible. (Credit: Science News)

The second reason is that a telescope, because of its ability to magnify what it sees, can separate two objects that appear to the naked eye to be a single object. Soon after a child receives their first telescope, and after a few nights looking at the Moon and a few planets they will turn to look at a star like Rigel or Spica in order to see how a single star becomes two or even more stars in their new ‘scope.

Equation for calculating the resolution, the ability of a telescope to separate two very close objects. For a visible telescope the wavelengths of light are so small even a small ‘scope does a good job but at radio frequencies the wavelengths are so large that a huge telescope is needed. (Credit: Telescope Nerd)

This ability to resolve the details of distant objects is a function of the size of the telescope divided by the size of the wavelength of the Electromagnetic waves it is designed to collect. For an optical telescope the wavelength of visible light is very small so they tend to have a lot of resolution. For radio telescopes however the waves they collect can have wavelengths that are centimeters or even meters long. In fact at a low frequency like 3 Mega-Hertz (MHz) the wavelength is actually a full 100m.

Radio waves have wavelengths ranging from centimetres to kilometres in length. (Credit: YateBTS)

This has always made the ‘images’ produced by radio telescopes much ‘fuzzier’ than those from optical telescopes. Over the last couple of decades however radio astronomers have developed a workaround thanks to the enormous progress in computer and communications technology. What they have done is link as many as a dozen radio telescopes in different parts of the world together electronically so that the signals they collect are added together by a supercomputer, effectively making the separate telescopes into a single one with a size of nearly the entire planet.

Combining the energy received by twelve radio telescopes spread across the world astronomers succeeded in obtaining the first image of a black hole. (Credit: BBC)

As mentioned in a previous post 17 April 2019, this technique is being used to provide the most detailed images ever obtained of the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies along with other objects of interest. The telescopes used in these projects however were not originally designed to be used in conjunction with other scopes.

First image taken of a Black Hole obtained by an array of radio telescopes spread across the entire Earth and added together in a computer. (Credit: NASA)

Now a large array of radio receivers that are designed to act as a single radio telescope has been constructed at sites spread out over a sizeable portion of the Earth’s surface. Known as the LOw Frequency ARray or LOFAR project and originally funded as a national program by the government of the Netherlands LOFAR has now grown to include most of the countries of Western Europe.

Originally started as a project by the government of the Netherlands LOFAR has grown to cover western Europe. (Credit: Earth Observation Portal)

Currently LOFAR consists of 38 stations in the Netherlands, 24 core stations in the province of Exloo and 14 remote station spread around the rest of the country. There are also 14 international stations, 6 in Germany, 3 in Poland and one each in Ireland, the UK, France, Sweden and Latvia with a fifteenth station under construction in Italy. Each station is composed of 96 Low Band Antennas (LBAs) that receive signals between 10 and 90 MHz, along with 48 High Band Antennas (HBAs) that receive in the 120 to 240 MHz band. All together this makes for a total of more than 70,000 antennas in the LOFAR array. Each station also has the computer facilities to completely digitize all of the signals received by its antennas so that the data can be combined with those from all the other stations making LOFAR the highest resolution radio telescope ever built.

One of the LOFAR remote antenna stations in Holland. The high band antennas are to the left and the low band antennas are to the right.
Design for the layout of a LOFAR remote antenna station. (Credit: LOFAR)
Ground level view of some LOFAR antennas. Because they are simple, and cheap to build a very large number can be built increasing the amount of signal the entire array can receive. (Credit: BDFRMA)

The initial results published by the LOFAR consortium have dealt with detailed studied of the radio emissions from the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. When combined with optical images of the galaxy containing the black holes, see image below, astronomers can get a much more complete picture of the influence of supermassive black holes on their host galaxies.

This image of the galaxy Hercules A was made by combining a Hubble image in visible light with a LOFAR image at radio frequencies. The LOFAR data consists of the two jets streaming out from the galaxy itself, which is a tiny object in the center. The jets are generated by a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy which is feeding and generating huge amounts of energy. (Credit: R. Timmerman, LOFAR and Hubble)

Other studies planned for LOFAR include a full scale investigation into the early period of the Universe known as the ‘Period of Re-Ionization’ when the first stars and galaxies heated the gas and dust created by the big bang. LOFAR will also be employed to study transient sources like pulsars and fast radio bursts (FRBs). Closer to home LOFAR will study our Sun and in particular the solar wind of high energy particles emitted by the Sun.

The LOFAR array will also be used to study the solar wind and solar flares giving scientists a beeter idea of conditions on the Sun. (Credit: Astronimy and Astrophysics Group)

Best of all the LOFAR partnership has already submitted its plan to the EU for LOFAR2.0, a major upgrade to the system that is planned to commence in 2022. One can only guess at what wonders that system will reveal.

There’s some good news on the Environmental Front. Spotted Lanternfly Populations in areas that have been infested for several years are Declining Rapidly.

I have already mentioned the invasive species Spotted Lanternfly, Lycorma delicatula to give them their scientific name, several times in these posts, see post of 8 July 2020. A native of Southeast Asia L delicatula feeds by sucking the sap of fruit trees and vines and is considered a minor agricultural pest in its home region.

The Spotted Lanternfly, Lycorma delicatula, may be a rather pretty bug but it’s causing a great deal of damage to agriculture in the Mid-Atlantic states. (Credit: Scientific American)

The spotted lanternfly was first discovered in Berks county Pennsylvania in 2014 and in just a few years has spread across Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware and into portions of New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia and Ohio. Wherever they have appeared the pests have caused considerable damage to vineyards and orchards. So great has been the economic damage that State Departments of Agriculture in infested areas have been issuing advisories to kill the lanternflies in any way necessary.

A large number of nymphs and winged adult Lanternflies feeding on a branch. So great have the numbers of these creatures become that it’s easy to see how destructive they can be. (Credit: Fruit Growers News)

I first saw a few spotted lanternflies in my backyard and neighborhood back in 2019 and at that time was more curious than concerned. Last year in 2020 however there were thousands of them in all over my yard and in various places on every block within walking distance of my home. I killed as many as I could last year but all my efforts hardly made a dent in their numbers. At the time I was convinced that this year could only be worse.

Although the various state departments of agriculture may be having a bit of fun getting the spotted lanternfly under control is a very serious business. (Credit: UCNJ.org)

2020 certainly started out bad. The wild grapevines and other bushes in my backyard were heavily infested by early May and all of the spots in my area of Philadelphia where I had seen them last year were also teeming with nymphs. The population explosion didn’t last however, by the middle of June the numbers of spotted lanternflies had definitely declined and now, at the beginning of September the pests have become very difficult to find at all.

Not only that but their behavior has changed as well. Last year, and early this spring in the morning you could see a large number of spotted lanternflies sitting out on leaves in the bright sunshine to warm themselves in the Sun before going back to the branches to feed. Now however, if you want to find any at all you have to look deep in the foliage, several layers of leaves down. L delicatula seems to have become shy as their numbers have declined. 

Recently Lanternflies have become much more difficult to find. Rarely more than one at a time and farther back in the leaves. (Credit: The Sun Newspapers)

 So what’s going on? Something is killing the lanternflies, but what? Is it some disease or fungal infection that is killing them? Or maybe it’s us, is the spraying with insecticide and all the other means we’ve used to control them doing the job?

Nah! The spotted lanternflies I examined lately show no sign of disease, they look as healthy as ever. And some areas that were heavily infested with lanternflies are now virtually clear despite no human doing anything about them.

This baby Bluebird seems to have figured out that lanternflies are worth eating. (Credit: Penn State News – Penn State University)

It looks like what is actually happening is that predators, insect eating birds and other insects have discovered that spotted lanternflies taste good and are worth going after. Scientists at the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philadelphia think that Preying Mantis’ in particular are feeding on the lanternflies. In fact if you Google images of spotted lanternflies and preying mantis’ you can see a large number of different pictures of a mantis chomping down on a lanternfly. And if predators are the cause of the collapse of lanternfly numbers that would also explain why the remaining flies are now in hiding.

A Praying Mantis chomping down on a lanternfly. (Credit: Drexel University)
Another Mantis making a meal of a lanternfly. (Penn State News – Penn State University)

Even if true this doesn’t mean that the problem is over and spotted lanternflies are now under control however. So far it’s only the counties of Berks, Bucks, Montgomery and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania that have seen a major decline in lanternfly numbers. But these are the very counties that have been infested with lanternflies the longest. Other areas, like south Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and New York where the Lanternflies only arrived a year to two ago are still seeing a population explosion. It seems then that it takes the insect eating predators of an area two or three years to recognize the lanternflies as prey and begin eating them in large enough numbers to control the population.

Current known areas infested with Spotted Lanternflies. The recent decrease in the lanternfly population has only been noticed in five or six counties in southeastern Pennsylvania. Everywhere else they continue to spread, becoming a growing problem. (Credit: The Conversation)

If this theory works out to be true then spotted lanternflies may end up being something like a tsunami, a big wave that causes a lot of damage but eventually recedes. Spotted Lanternflies may show up in small numbers in an area one year, then have a massive population increase for the next 2-3 years only to have predators attack and collapse their numbers afterward.

Gypsy Moth caterpillars were once considered to be as big a problem as Spotted Lanternflies. Even today they can appear in large enough numbers to cause considerable amounts of destruction. (Credit: Adirondack Explorer)

Other invasive, destructive insects have already followed this scenario. Both Gypsy Moths and Japanese Beetles caused a lot of damage here in the Mid-Atlantic States several decades ago but now their populations are so small that it’s rare to see one. Nature it seems, has a way of regulating itself, of fixing the screw-ups we cause.

Mather Nature may have great powers but those powers take time and remember, she works to benefit all of her creatures, not just us! (Credit: Fine Art America)

 There is a limit to even nature’s restorative powers however.

The ‘Remnants’ of Hurricane Ida cause Catastrophic Destruction in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. Once again Climate Change is making once in a thousand years Weather Events ‘The New Normal’.

Just a few weeks ago, 11August 2021, I published a post describing the massive flooding that had hit the cities of Zhengzhou in central China and London in the UK. The rainstorms that caused the flood events in both cities would have been considered to have been once in a thousand years deluges were it not for the way that climate change is making extreme weather much more common. In that post I wondered how the infrastructure in cities, especially older cities like London, were going to cope with ‘The New Normal’.

Aftermath of the flooding in Zhengzhou China only a month ago. (Credit: New York Times)

When I wrote that post I had no idea that I was soon to become a witness to the very predicament I had written about. That’s because, on the first of September 2021 the remnants of Hurricane Ida, the leftovers that is, unleashed its destructive power on my home state of Pennsylvania along with New Jersey and New York.

As Ida, now a tropical depression, passed through the mid-Atlantic states it released one last disaster. (Credit: Bucks County Courier Times)

Now Ida had already caused more than enough damage to the state of Louisiana and southern Mississippi when it came ashore on the 29th of August, the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The storm hit as a strong category 4 with winds over 240 kph causing terrific damage. Whole communities were destroyed with more than a dozen dead while over 1 million people lost their electrical power due to downed power lines and uprooted trees.

Just a bit of the destruction wrought by Ida in Louisiana. (Credit: CNN)

Turning to the northeast over the next several days Ida brought heavy rains to the states of Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky West Virginia and Virginia before entering the Mid-Atlantic States. It was here that the now tropical depression collided with a cold front coming down from Canada. That front squeezed Ida like a sponge releasing its remaining moisture and causing the storm to regain some of her strength.

Even as Ida was coming ashore in the gulf states a front was moving down from Canada. The two would meet over Pennsylvania. (Credit: WDBJ)

If you draw a line from Baltimore through Philadelphia to New York City to the northwest of that line there were historic amounts of rainfall that caused unprecedented flooding. To the southeast a series of supercell storms dropped strong tornadoes that ripped up trees and flattened homes.

One of the Tornadoes generated by Ida in New Jersey. (Credit: Tony Citara / WPVI)
Some of the damage done by Tornadoes in Mullica Hill New Jersey. (Credit: WPVI)

The period of the strongest storms began a little after 4PM EDT when Philadelphia’s three local news stations had begun their evening broadcasts. As the destruction unfolded all other news was forgotten and the meteorologists at those three stations continuously stayed on the air for the next four hours while the National Weather Service issued tornado warning after tornado warning, flash flood warning after flash flood warning.

Last Year’s total of Tornadoes and warnings smashed all previous records for the Delaware Valley region. This year has already smashed last year’s records. (Credit: WPVI)

Several of the weatherpersons who have lived all their lives in the Philadelphia area were simply stunned by the enormity of the storm’s power. “Philadelphia doesn’t get weather like this” they continually stated, “This is historic”. And it was; 20 record rainfall totals were set along with record flooding in many creeks and rivers. And so far this year the Delaware valley has seen 25 tornadoes. I don’t think we had 25 tornadoes in the first sixty years of my life!

The Tornadoes weren’t just confined to New Jersey, here’s a damaged home in Chester County Pa. (Credit: WPVI)

I almost feel guilty to say it but I was safe throughout the entire ordeal, my neighborhood got 10Cm of rain but fortunately nothing worse. Many people were not so lucky. As I write these words 50 people are known to have died and thousands more have lost their homes or automobiles. Indeed the number of cars that were simply abandoned by their drivers because they were stuck on crowded highways while the waters rose around them is simply unbelievable. Many areas of Philadelphia and the surrounding communities that I known very well are currently underwater and will remain so for days, and only then can the cleanup effort begin.

An underpass of the Vine Street Expressway, the major route through center city Philadelphia. Well, it’s certainly under something now! (Credit: WPVI)
Some of the flooding caused by the Brandywine Creek in Chadds Ford Pennsylvania. (Credit: WPVI)

The city of New York suffered similarly with the heaviest rain ever measured falling on Central Park and many of the city’s subway stations closed due to flooding. Of course its not just the big cities that suffered, smaller cities like Wilmington, Delaware and Trenton, New Jersey also saw major flooding along with scores of smaller towns. In all three states there were hundreds of water rescues of people whom the waters had trapped in their cars or homes.

On the left a New York City bus is flooded, on the right a subway car in Zhengzhou. Several times during Ida I was struck by a feeling of deja vu. (Credit: New York Post and Insider)
Play Ball! Not for awhile as the minor league park in Bound Brook in New Jersey is flooded out. (Credit: CNN)
Water rescues underway in Wilmington Delaware. Scenes like this occurred in eight states. (Credit: WPVI)

With such extreme weather of course climate change was bought up and I suppose it’s a sign of some progress that all of the weathercasters and most of the newspersons I watched that night have accepted global warming as a major factor in the strength of these storms. After all global warming is heating our atmosphere and oceans, and since heat is just a form of energy that warming just makes the storms that develop over the oceans much more energetic, that much more deadly. It’s that extra energy that is turning once in a hundred, once in five hundred year weather events into the new normal.

Arial view of the Vine Street Expressway. Compare this image to the first image above from Zhengzhou, again eerily similar. (Credit: WPVI)
The Manayunk section of Philadelphia along the Schuylkill River is known for occasional flooding, but not like this. (Credit: WPVI)

However it still seems that there are plenty of politicians who will do anything and everything in their power to keep on burning fossil fuels. The battle isn’t won yet; let’s be honest, it’s only just started.

Fortunately it looks like Hurricane Larry will stay out in the Atlantic. We won’t always be so lucky! (Credit: WPLG)

   Oh, and Hurricane Larry has formed out in the Atlantic, its expected to grow into a big one! 

The more anthropologists study our closest relatives the more like us they seem to behave, and the more we learn about ourselves.

It was only a little more than fifty years ago that the world was astounded by the discoveries of Jane Goodall as she described the normal, day-to-day behavior of Chimpanzees. By simply monitoring the same group of chimpanzees for such a long period of time that they ceased to pay any attention to her Goodall was able to observe behavior in them that previously was considered to be purely ‘human’. Tool use, hunting in groups for small animal prey and even murder were among the most notable of her discoveries.

Jane Goodall succeeded in learning secrets about the behavior of Chimpanzees be getting up close and personal over a long period of time! (Credit: Pro Well technology)

Since that time other researchers have uncovered further aspects of chimpanzee behavior, even the astounding fact that large populations of chimpanzees in different parts of Africa display different behaviors, the rudimentary beginnings of culture, even ethnicity. All of these studies have one thing in common, the more we learn about our closest relatives the more human they seem.

Anthropologists are recognizing different behaviors and even different material use in six different populations of chimpanzees. Are we seeing the beginnings of ethnic culture? (Credit: Nature)

Now two new studies have added further evidence in support of that thesis. The first concerns social interactions between two chimpanzees or two bonobos, a closely related species often mistaken for chimps.

There is still some debate as to whether Bonobos are a separate species or a subspecies of Chimpanzees. The consensus at present is a separate species but that brings up the whole question of just exactly how to define a species. (Credit: San Diego Zoo Kids)

Whenever two humans meet it is customary for them to exchange greetings, “Hi, how are you doing.” being typical. The strange thing is that the better two individuals know each the shorter the time required for the greeting. Think about it, if you run into a business acquaintance that you haven’t seen in over a year you spend a few minutes getting re-acquainted before getting down to business. On the other hand when you get together for dinner with your best friend who you just saw last week it’s “Hey man, good to see you…where should we eat?” The two of you know each other so well that you don’t have to get re-acquainted, you can get right down to the purpose of the meeting.

Chimpanzees and Bonobos both perform a series of behaviors when starting and closing an interaction with another individual. (Credit: Psychology Today)

The same happens at the end of the get together. When the meeting is over with that business associate you see once or twice a year you make plans to keep in touch, maybe even arrange the next meeting. When you and your best friend say goodbye it can be a short as ‘See ya around.” Anthropologists refer to these greetings and goodbyes as Entry and Exit phases of a social interaction and together represent a Joint Commitment to the social interaction. 

We humans also have our own ritual greetings at the start of any interaction. Turns out our relatives are a lot like us! (Credit: The New York Times)

Now a group of researchers at the Institute of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland and eight other institutes has published a paper in the journal iScience where they present evidence of very similar conduct in both chimps and bonobos. The observed behaviors include such actions as eye contact and non-verbal signals both prior to and at the end of some joint activity such as mutual grooming or play.

Chimps and other great Apes love to groom each other but first they have to mutually agree to the time spent together by means of an entry greeting. (Credit: ZME Science)

Bonobos in particular exhibited the human like behavior; even to the extent that the observed greetings and farewells are shorter for very well acquainted individuals, again just as in humans. One interesting observation made in both species is that the social rank of the individuals involved, such as the alpha male, appeared to play no role in the coordinated joint action phases.

So it seems as if our relatives share much of our behavior when interacting on a one on one basis. A second recent study gives evidence that they also act in very human like ways when in larger groups.

Once again it was Jane Goodall who first observed the chimpanzees of the group she was studying carry out what could only be described as an act of war against a neighboring group. What she described was that the alpha male of her group first gathered together all of the other males. The males then quietly and stealthily entered the territory of a neighboring group where, after a period of time in hiding they ambushed a juvenal male of the neighboring group, killing him without mercy.

Perhaps another similar behavior Chimps have with us is rebelling against authority. The dead Chimp in the middle was the former Alpha Male of the group that just killed him! (Credit: New Scientist)

Now biologists at the Loango National Park in Gabon have witnessed two inter-species battles between groups of chimpanzees and gorillas. In each incident the chimpanzees both outnumbered the gorillas and seemed to have instigated the conflict. Also, in both incidents a young gorilla was killed.

The first war between two groups of Chimpanzees was witnessed back in 1974 and lasted four years. The new evidence of fighting between Chimps and Gorillas just demonstrates how much like us they are. (Credit: Fact Republic)

The first incident occurred in February of 2019 and took place when a group of 18 chimpanzees were returning to their territory from a foraging excursion. The chimps came upon five gorillas, only one of which was a male and immediately became aggressive. In a battle that lasted nearly an hour an infant gorilla was separated from its mother and killed.

The second battle happened in December and was even larger with 27 chimpanzees attacking seven gorillas for well over an hour. Again a baby gorilla was stolen from its mother and killed and this time the murdered infant was actually eaten by the triumphant chimps.

Under threat from humans throughout Africa it appears that Gorillas are even threatened by Chimpanzees. (Credit: Windy City Travel)

It is not known how often such conflicts take place between chimps and gorillas, or what the reasons for the battles were. Both chimpanzees and gorillas are very difficult to keep under observation. The naturalists at Loango Park have noted however that both incidents occurred during the season when supplies of fruit are low so the fights may have been over resources.

Loango National Park in Gabon. (Credit: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)

Nevertheless the episodes do illustrate just how remarkable the resemblance is between the behaviors of ourselves and our closest relatives. Whether that be for good or ill.