Category: Science

Paleontology News for September 2021: Some Exciting new Fossil Discoveries from around the world.

As I have mentioned several times in these posts, 99% of the fossils that paleontologists, and amateurs like me find are the hard parts, the shells or bones of ancient animals. Soft tissue like muscles or internal organs are rarely preserved and even then they usually distorted in shape because of the enormous pressure they were under for millions of years. So it’s not surprising therefore that paleontologists got pretty excited recently by the discovery of a very well preserved 310 million year old brain.

Fossil Horseshoe Crab (L) showing its brain, closeup of the brain (C) and an illustration of how the brain would fit inside a living crab (R). (Credit: Phys.org)

The brain in question belonged to a specimen of a species of horseshoe crab called Euproops danae and was found at the Mazon Creek fossil site in Illinois. The Mazon Creek site is famous for its excellent preservation of fossils from the Pennsylvania period some 310 million years ago. Many completely soft bodied species have been discovered in the iron concretions at Mazon Creek and are known only from that site.

The Mazon Creek fossil location in the state of Illinois. The fossils at Mazon Creek are so well preserved that the locale is considered a ‘mother load’ by paleontologists and amateurs alike. (Credit: Field Museum)
A well preserved specimen of the enigmatic ‘Tully Monster’, the most famous creature found at Mazon Creek. (Credit: UCMP Berkeley)

The specimen of horseshoe crab was discovered and studied by a team of paleontologists from the University of New England in Australia, Harvard University in Massachusetts and Pomona College in California with the results published in the journal Geology. The identification of the preserved organ as the animal’s brain was made certain by comparing it to the brain of modern horseshoe crabs. So close is the resemblance that the fossil brain illustrates how little the horseshoe crabs have evolved in the last 300 million years, making them true ‘living fossils’.

A living fossil. Horseshoe crabs have changed very little over the last 400 million years, a true testament to a body design that fits in perfectly with its environment. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

So it seems that even some of the softest organs and even whole animals from the past can be preserved and studied, all that’s required to find one is patience and a lot of fossils to examine. But for those of us who associate fossils with big animals like dinosaurs it’s nice that big means big bones, bones that are more easily fossilized.

Let’s be honest, when most people think of fossils they think of bones because they are nice and large and hard. Because of that they fossilize well. (Credit: Wikipedia)

And the biggest of all the dinosaurs were the sauropods; those long necked and long tailed monsters like the Diplodocus and wrongly named Brontosaurus, whose scientifically accepted name is really Apatasaurus. Both Diplodocus and Apatasaurus were discovered more than a century ago in North America but sauropods have now been discovered on every continent. Recently new fossils from the early Cretaceous period, 120-130 million years ago in China are adding two new species of giants to that well-known group.

Rivaling whales as the largest of all living creatures, sauropod dinosaurs lived for more than 100 million years on every continent. (Credit: Amazon.com)

 The fossils were discovered in the Turpan-Hami Basin in the province of Xinjiang China and were described in an article published in the journal Science Reports. One specimen detailed in the study consisted of seven vertebra from the neck of a new species of sauropod that has been christened Silutitan sinensis and is estimated to have been some 20m in length. The second specimen is made up of seven vertebra from the tail of a different individual and is also described as a new species, which they have named Hamititan xinjiangensis. The researchers estimate the length of H xinjiangensis as being more than 17m.

Artists illustration of Hamititan xinjiangensis (L) and Silutitan sinensis (R) the largest dinosaurs known to have inhabited China. (Credit: ABC News)

The third specimen consists of only a few vertebra and rib fragments that the paleontologists have been unable to identify for certain as either a known or new species but are confident that they do come from a sauropod. These new species of sauropod not only add to the ever growing number of known dinosaur species but help to round out our knowledge of the cretaceous period in the far east.

Another part of the world whose Mesozoic past is also being uncovered is Australia where a new species of pterosaur has been described in an article published in the journal Vertebrate Paleontology, and it’s also a monster. The fossil skull of the flying reptile, pterosaurs are not dinosaurs, was discovered by a longtime amateur fossil hunter Len Shaw and has been given the name Thapunngaka shawi, which means ‘Shaw’s Spear Mouth’ in the local indigenous language.

The Skull of Thapunngaka shawi. Pterosaur bones are lighter than those of most animals, necessary for flying creatures, and therefore they don’t fossilize as well as a sauropod’s bones would. (Credit: Everything Dinosaur Blog)

The skull measures a little over a meter in length and would have contained about 40 sharp spiky teeth. By comparing it to related species researchers estimate that T shawi would have had a wingspan of about seven meters. The researchers speculate that T shawi probably flew above the vast inland sea that covered much of Australia back in the early cretaceous catching fish in much the same way as a modern pelican does.

Artists impression of T shawi in flight. With a wingspan of perhaps seven meters T shawi would have been a flying dragon indeed. (Credit: Bif Think)

In order to be able to fly the bones of pterosaurs were mostly hollow and easily broken. This makes fossils finds of pterosaurs rare and valuable, in fact the skull of T shawi is only the 20th pterosaur fossil to be found in Australia over the last 50 years. Nevertheless T shawi, like the sauropod species from China, does help to complete our picture of the living creatures who inhabited these parts of the world more than 100 million years ago.

Space News for August 2021: The installation of Russia’s final module for the International Space Station nearly causes a disaster while Boeing’s Starliner capsule continues to be one.

From the very start the design and construction of the International Space Station (ISS) was intended to be a cooperative effort between NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, with a few additions from other nations to justify the “International” part of the name. And even though the station has been manned and running now for more than 20 years it still wasn’t entirely competed. The launch of Russia’s final contribution, a 13m long, 23,000 kg module named Nauka (Science), has been delayed for several years as the cash strapped Russians tried to finish it.

Intended as a labouratory and living module construction of Russia’s Nuaka module to the ISS has been delayed for several years. (Credit: NASA)

Nauka was finally launched on the 21st of July aboard a Russian Proton rocket from their Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The launch went off without a hitch and the Nauka module was successfully attached to the ISS eight days later. The day after being attached however a ‘software failure’ caused the module’s thrusters to begin firing unexpectedly sending the entire ISS into an uncontrolled spin. The ISS crew and controllers on the ground quickly responded by firing the thrusters of other modules to compensate, not a terribly safe thing to do on the ISS since thrusters pushing in opposite directions puts a considerable strain on the station’s main structure. The spin also led to two periods when the ISS was out of communication with ground controllers, once for four minutes and the second time for seven.

The Nauka module docking with the ISS. A short time later Nauka would begin firing its thrusters without orders sending the space station into a dangerous roll. (Credit: Twitter)

Initially it was reported that the malfunction had caused the ISS to roll about 45º from its normal orientation but it was later admitted that the station had in fact made one complete rotation plus 45º. “It wasn’t a benign event,” admitted astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Nevertheless the ISS did survive its unscheduled stress test and a few days later all station operations seemed to be back to normal. Problems like the ‘software failure’ do have a tendency to cascade however, sometimes in unexpected directions. The problems with the Nauka module forced NASA to delay the scheduled 30th of July launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule on its final unmanned flight test to the ISS.

Boeing’s Starliner capsule on the pad ready for it’s final unmanned test flight. The problems with Nauka caused a delay in Starliner’s launch and then the capsule had problems of its own. (Credit: Ars Technica)

Boeing, as you may recall is developing a manned space capsule similar to Space X’s Dragon capsule, indeed the two capsules were both developed under NASA’s commercial crew program. But whereas the Dragon has successfully completed all of its qualification tests and has now taken astronauts to the ISS three times, Boeing has had a number of problems and failures so that it still has not been certified as man ready.

The next crew of the Space X Dragon capsule, scheduled for launch around 31October. Space X has successfully sent 10 astronauts in orbit and its Dragon capsule is now NASA’s space vehicle of choice. (Credit: Space.com)

In fact the 30 July flight to the ISS, officially designated as Orbital Test Flight-1, (OTF-1) was to be the final unmanned test of Starliner. And the capsule was all ready to go, sitting atop its Atlas 5 rocket when NASA’s concern over the Nauka incident caused them to delay the flight for a few days, until August the 3rd.

Sitting atop its Atlas Five rocket Starliner was all ready to go but it was not to be. (Credit: Space.com)

But the August 3rd flight was not to take place either. As the countdown was underway a status check of the capsule’s propulsion system revealed ‘some’ valves were in the wrong position. The launch was immediately scrubbed and an investigation begun. The first question that needed to be answered was whether the problem was with the indicators or actually with the valves, thirteen valves in all. A quick check showed that the valves themselves were the culprit.

The Starliner capsule has been taken off of its launch vehicle and is returning to the factory. How much longer this will delay the capsule’s test flight is unknown at present. (Credit: Florida Today)

In order to determine exactly what the problem was and correct it was necessary to remove Starliner from the launch pad and return rocket to its assembly building. The investigation then found that it was necessary to separate Starliner from its lunch vehicle in order to gain access to the problem valves. Because of this the launch of Starliner has now been delayed indefinitely and will need to be completely rescheduled. Just more problems for what is beginning to look more and more like a snake-bit program.

While Boeing continues to struggle with the Starliner capsule its rival Space X continues to expand the role that it is playing in the manning and maintenance of the ISS. Preparations are currently underway for the Hawthorn California Company’s 23rd unmanned resupply mission to the station, now scheduled to launch on the 28th of August. In addition to the usual food, water and oxygen needed to keep the ISS running this mission carries with it a number of science experiments designed to help expand the ability of humans to live in space.

An unmanned cargo version of the Space X Dragon capsule is now on the launch pad ready to take supplies to the ISS. (Credit: Space Coast Daily)

Some of the experiments are medical in nature and intended to investigate ways to minimize the effect of zero gravity on astronaut’s bones and eyes. Earlier studies conducted aboard the ISS, see my posts of 15 February 2017 and 24 March 2018, have shown the detrimental effect that even a few months in zero g can have on the human body and NASA is very interested in trying to uncover possible treatments for the bone and visual disorders that have been found on astronauts once they return to Earth.

NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly spent more than a year aboard the ISS as an experiment in how the human body can handle zero gravity for long periods of time. (Credit: Research Gate)

Other experiments will test the effect of space environment on various materials along with plant growth. Also going to the station is a robotic arm designed by a Japanese company that may eventually be used to replace astronauts in performing tasks that are deemed to be hazardous.

Developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) a new robotic arm is scheduled to be launched to the ISS for testing. (Credit: Hindustan Times)

The International Space Station has now passed 20 years of continuous service in orbit, teaching humans much about how to live in space. It’s been a long journey with its share of twists and turns. Now, as both NASA and the Russians are thinking about the future of the ISS other players, commercial companies seem to be taking a bigger role in the space station. Where all of this will lead only the future will tell.

P.S. Thunderstorms in Florida have forced the scrubbing of Space X’s 23rd cargo mission. NASA and Space X will try again tomorrow, hopefully the weather will cooperate.

P.S.S. Space X and NASA successfully launched the 23rd Dragon cargo mission on the 29th of August and once again the first stage of the rocket nailed the landing on the recovery ship. All in all a perfect launch. Boeing, are you paying attention.

Archaeology News for August 2021: A Babylonian cuneiform table has been deciphered that describes a working knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem a thousand years before Pythagoras lived.

Throughout history the advance of human civilization has gone hand and hand with an advance in our knowledge of mathematics. Many of the earliest known examples of writing contain, not stories of gods or heroes but rather accounts of material goods whether that be the number of sheep in a flock or the number of bushels of wheat gathered in a harvest.

To a Shepard counting sheep so you know how many you have is more important than trying to get to sleep. (Credit: KBBI)

Just knowing how much material wealth a tribe had, and how much it needed in order to survive required a number system and the ability to add and subtract. And when it came to deciding how to allocate land for use among the members of a society a working knowledge of geometry was required. Early mathematics therefore was a practical tool that our ancestors used to help build the first civilizations.

Generally regarded as the first civilization ancient Sumer developed a method of counting than was based on the number 60. Imagine doing arithmetic in base 60! (Credit: The Story of Mathematics)

Now mathematician Dr. Daniel Mansfield of the University of New South Wales in Australia has uncovered a Babylonian tablet, written in cuneiform and dating from 1600 to 1900 BCE that shows a remarkable practical knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem, at least a thousand years before the birth of Pythagoras. Dr. Mansfield found the tablet, which was given the designation Si.427 not while doing fieldwork in the ruins of the ancient city but in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum where it had been stored, and left undeciphered since the late 19th century.

Dr. Daniel Mansfield holding the tablet SI.427. (Credit: UNSW Sydney)

The tablet describes the sale of a piece of land that contains some marshland along with a tower and a threshing floor. Rectangles on Si.427 show opposite sides of equal length indicating that the surveyors who plotted the parcel of land had a more accurate way of producing a right, 90º angle than previously known.

A closeup view of Si.427 showing the various pieces of land the tablet describes. (Credit: Slashgear)

The key find is at the bottom of Si.427 where three sets of three numbers are given in Babylonian, three sets of Pythagorean numbers who satisfy the well known equation:

A2+B2=C2

The three sets are 3, 4, and 5:

32+42=9+16=25=52

8, 15, and 17

82+152=64+ 225=289=172

and 5, 12, and 13:

52+122=25+144=169=132

A triangle whose sides are in the ratio of any of the three sets will contain a 90º angle opposite the longest side, the hypotenuse.

By simply construction a triangle with sides three unit long, four units long and five units long you get an exact 90 degree angle opposite the 5 unit long side. (Credit: Voovers)

Now simply knowing a few Pythagorean triplets as these sets are known is a bit different from being able to prove the complete theorem. It’s been known for centuries that the builders of the Egyptian pyramids could use a 3, 4, 5 triangle in order to construct a right angle but they never succeeded in establishing the general equation A2+B2=C2. Still tablet Si.427 does give substantial evidence that the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia were using rather advanced mathematics almost 4,000 years ago. 

And archaeologists are helping mathematicians to answer several other questions from the history of mathematics, namely the origins of zero and π. Let’s start with zero.

This is typical of the kind of philosophizing that caused the ancient Greeks to ignore zero as a matter of principal rather than whether or not it made calculations easier. (Credit: Quora)

You may have heard that the Greeks and later the Romans had no symbol with zero. The Greek philosophers had a problem with the very idea of ‘nothing being something’ so they devised a system for doing calculations that didn’t require a zero. (Do you know how to multiply or divide two Roman numerals, ’cause I don’t?) This attitude toward zero continued in Europe until the beginning of the renaissance.

A few Roman numerals, notice no zero. The system is quite unwieldy so that doing complex calculations is very difficult. (Credit: How Stuff Works)

The Greeks weren’t the only mathematicians in the classical world however. Evidence from hieroglyphic bas-reliefs and cuneiform tablets show that both Egypt and Mesopotamia had a symbol that they used as the origin, in other words the 0 in 0,1,2,3… But they did not use that symbol as a placeholder like in 102 or 270.

In fact the Babylonians, whose number system was based on the number 60, are known to have used a space as a placeholder, which had the unfortunate consequence of making 2 and 120 (2×60) or 5 and 300 (6×60) look exactly the same when written. You had to recognize the space in order to know which number was meant.

Sometime in the century or so before the start of the Common Era the Chinese began to use a simple dot as a symbol for both the origin of the numbers and a placeholder. Hindu mathematicians in the 7th century then changed that dot to an oval shape, which the Arabs copied and passed on to Europe during the 15th century. It wasn’t long before European mathematicians were doing all of their calculations with ‘Arabic numerals’ even while they continued to write down dates in Roman numerals. (I had to learn Roman Numerals in school but all we ever learned was how to translate Roman Numerals into Arabic. So you’d be right to wonder why Roman Numerals were still being used in the mid-20th century. I sure did!)

Ancient sanskrit text that uses a dot for zero. As the dot got bigger it became our familiar 0. (Credit: Times of India)

The symbol π also has a long and convoluted history. As everyone knows π is used to represent the ratio between the circumference of a circle to its diameter. In other words Circumference / Diameter for a circle =π. The fact that all circles have this same property seems to have been recognized at the very beginnings of civilization.

The definition of Pi! Some mathematicians would like to redefine Pi in terms of radius so that Pi=6.28318… (Credit: Reddit)

It’s been asserted from measurements of the great pyramids of Giza, dated to around 2500 BCE, that the Egyptians probably used the fraction 22/7 as an approximate value for π= 3.14286, just as many people do today. A Babylonian tablet dated to 1600-1900 BCE gives a value for π=3.125. Both these any other ancient values for π came from actually measuring the circumference and diameter of a circle and taking a ratio, which doesn’t sound like an easy thing to do with any great accuracy to me.

The first person to figure out a method for calculating π was the Greek mathematician Archimedes around 250 BCE. He invented a technique now known as the polygonal algorithm where a regular polygon is drawn both inside and outside a circle giving an upper and lower bound for the value of π. The more sides to the regular polygon used the closer the calculation will approximate π. Archimedes got as far as a 96 sided polygon giving 223/71< π<22/7 which would remain the most accurate answer for nearly a thousand years.

The perimeters of the inscribed and circumscribed hexagon are easy to calculate. Taking their ratios to the diameter, one, gives an upper and lower bound to pi! (Credit: Business Insider)

Later mathematicians would discover simpler techniques for calculating π so that today π has been calculated to millions of digits. But one thing that rather surprised me when I did a little background checking for this post was that the Greek Letter π only became adopted as the symbol for the ratio of circumference to diameter in 1706 when the Welsh mathematician William Jones used it as such. The symbol was then popularized by the mathematician Leonhard Euler around 1720. I have to admit that I thought it went all the way back to ancient times.

If you’d like to calculate all of the digits to Pi, which is impossible of course, this will get you off to a good start. (Credit: The News Journal)

Archeologists have uncovered much about the history of mathematics that had been lost; I didn’t even mention how zero and π were used in Mesoamerican culture. That complex ideas like zero and π were developed by so many cultures so early in their history shows the importance of mathematics in building a civilization.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released its long awaited 2021 report on the Physical Science behind climate change. Guess what, it’s all our fault.

Under the auspices of the United Nations a panel of 234 of climatologists, meteorologists and other scientists have prepared an exhaustive and comprehensive assessment of the effect of human activity on the Earth’s climate, primarily due to the release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. The report was released on the 9th of August 2021 in the form of two documents, the first is a 159 page technical summary that gathers together and analyses an unprecedented amount of data collected from every part of our planet.

Released in August of 2021 the Summary for Policymakers is a dire warning of the damage we are doing to the only planet we have to live on. (Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Labouratory)

The second report is a 42 page non-technical summary for policymakers, in other words the politicians. This is the report that you’ll be seeing charts from and hearing quotations from on the news programs in the days, weeks and years to come. The main headline is quite simple, the Earth’s temperature has risen by an unprecedented amount over the last fifty years and that rise has been in a linear relationship with the amount of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) that we have released into our atmosphere. In other words the more fossil fuels we burned the hotter the Earth has gotten.

Years of data collected by thousands of scientists from locations around the globe all summed up in a single chart. The Earth is warming up because of our irresponsible use of fossil fuels! (Credit: BBC)

Now scientists in general always try to be restrained in their rhetoric. They only make definitive statements when they feel they have overwhelming evidence to support those statements and even then they include error bars as an indication of any possible uncertainty.

The statements made in the summaries and agreed to by those 234 scientists are unequivocal however, both the rise in temperature over the last 50 years and the extreme weather events that are becoming more and more common are solely due to human activity, to our ever increasing reliance on fossil fuels. So stark is the conclusion reached by the panel of scientists that UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres has declared the report to be “a code red for humanity”.

Currently we are sitting at the top center model, with all of the climate disasters now occurring. Without drastic measures the most probable futures are bottom center and bottom right! (Credit: Dezeen)

Indeed the findings detailed in the report are dire. The goal of limiting the global rise in temperature to 1.5ºC that was made at the Paris climate conference in 2015 has pretty much already been broken. If the Earth hasn’t gone past that 1.5ºC it will in the next few years even if we were to completely stop our carbon emissions today. Also unavoidable is a 15-20 cm rise in sea level, again that’s regardless of what measures we take now.

Those areas of the world that are under threat due to sea level rise just happen to be the most densely populated place! (Credit: Forbes)

The temperature will continue to rise even without more carbon emissions because of what scientists call hysteresis, that simply means that we have put enough GHGs into the air to warm the Earth by several degrees but it hasn’t done so yet simply because it hasn’t had enough time to do so. Any chef will tell you that putting something in the over doesn’t immediately cook it, it takes time to thoroughly heat it all the way through. If we left things as they are the planet would still get a bit warmer, the droughts would get a little worse, the torrential rainstorms would cause more flooding, to say nothing about more hurricanes and permafrost melting.

Predicted rise in global temperatures based upon five scenarios of future fossil fuel use. Even the best cases lead to considerable more harm to our climate over the next fifty years. (Credit: Eco-Business.com)

But of course we’re not going to just stop emitting GHGs. Let’s be honest our carbon emissions are more likely to increase over at least the next decade than decline. In order to make science based predictions about what the future holds for the climate the scientists extrapolated from current conditions using five basic scenarios for human activity. The first scenario is based upon an actual increase in GHG emission such that we double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2050. The second scenario assumes a slower increase so that CO2 levels double by 2100. Both these scenarios suppose that we do little or nothing to reduce the amounts of fossil fuels we burn.

Let’s admit it, we all know someone this stupid. (Credit: www.cagle.com)

The third scenario assumes that GHG emissions remain at current levels until around 2250 and only then begin to decrease slightly. The final two scenarios are based upon immediate steps being taken to reduce GHG emissions so that the entire planet reaches net zero carbon emissions sometime after 2050 or, best of all cases, sometime before that year.

For each of these five scenarios estimates were then made for global temperature rise in the near term, 2021-2040, mid-term, 2041-2060 and long-term, 2061-2100. In none of these scenarios does the temperature rise remain below that 1.5ºC goal, even the best-case scenario it goes to 1.6ºC, and only the best case has temperature starting to go down by the long-term time frame. All the other four scenarios have the temperature continuing to rise throughout the century with the temperature in the worst-case scenario reaching a horrifying 4.4ºC rise by 2100. 

The billion dollar weather disasters that occurred in the USA just last year. This year looks to be even worse and we can be confident that trend is going to continue. (Credit: S&P Global)

Think of that for a minute, currently we are sitting just below that 1.5ºC rise and we are witnessing increased tropical storm activity, an increase in droughts, in flooding. We are seeing more severe weather in many forms. We are seeing glaciers melting throughout the Polar Regions causing a rise in sea levels.

A vision of our future? Not a pretty one to be sure. (Credit: The Guardian)

A 4.4ºC temperature rise would be triple what we have already seen. The consequences of that simply don’t bear thinking about. Nevertheless our children and grandchildren may have to face those consequences if we don’t do something soon. The reports from the IPCC aren’t without hope however; in fact they detail many of the steps we can take to limit climate change by limiting our GHG emissions. The choice is simply ours, do we have the will to do whatever is necessary to achieve net zero carbon emissions or will we simply walk with our eyes closed into a hellish future.

The 139 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are negotiating an international minimum corporate tax rate and tax policy. Will this step toward globalization succeed in controlling the growing power of multinational corporations or is it destined to become just another failed attempt at world government.

If you think about it, it wasn’t too many centuries ago that relations between sovereign nations meant either going to war or maybe two nations ganging up for a war on another. Diplomatic correspondence between the rulers of nations going back as far as the late Bronze Age, 1200-1300 BCE, has been unearthed by Archaeologists and those letters make it plain that the kings and Pharaohs of those days considered themselves to be above any laws, national or international. The idea was that a country and its ruler could do whatever other countries let them get away with. Might literally made right when it came to relations between nations.

Some political theorists, like Carl von Clausewitz, have rationalized war as simply one of the ways nations conduct their relations with each other. (Credit: Lib Quotes)

The very concept of international law took a long time to develop and the very first time that two nations resolved a conflict by legal rather than martial means occurred between the USA and UK shortly after the American civil war. You see during that war British shipyards had constructed five warships for the Confederacy, the commerce raider CSS Alabama becoming the most successful. This was despite the fact that the British government never officially recognized the Confederacy as a legitimate nation. During the war the Alabama would sink over 60 Union merchant vessels.

The French painter Edouard Manet was a witness to the sinking of the CSS Alabama and recorded the event in a famous painting. (Credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art)

After the Confederacy was defeated the US decided to sue the British government for the destruction those five ships had caused. Now one country suing another was unheard of, if one country had a conflict with another they started a war they didn’t sue the other country. How would a suit between two nations even be conducted, what court would hear the suit?

Today if two nations have a dispute they can appeal to the International Court of Justice at the Hague for a ruling. Sometimes it works! (Credit: Justice Hub)

Neither the US nor UK wanted to go to war however so in 1872 they agreed to let an arbitration panel convened in Geneva Switzerland both hear the evidence and decide what damages, if any the UK owed the USA. In the final settlement Britain paid $15.5 million dollars to US shipping interests and insurance companies to settle the case.

This peaceful resolution of the “Alabama Claims” would over the next 150 years lead to the establishment of an ever growing number of international institutions ranging from the World Court at the Hague in the Netherlands to the World Trade Organization to the United Nations itself. And if these institutions have not yet succeeded in ending war they have at least firmly established the concept of international law.

The headquarters of the OECD in Paris. (Credit: Financial Times)

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is one of those international institutions with a mission intended to stimulate economic development and world trade. Founded in 1961 with 38 member nations and its headquarters in Paris France the OECD has grown to 139 members with a combined GDP of approximately $54 Trillion dollars. While having little power itself to enforce the statutes enacted by its members the OECD does compile and publish vast amounts of data concerning the state of the world’s economy.

A few pertinent facts about the OECD. Mainly a data gathering and distribution organization the OECD advises its member states in order to aid in economic development. (Credit: Market Business News)

Now the OECD is at the center of a large effort to establish for the first time an internationally agreed upon minimum tax level of 15% on the profits of multinational corporations. Why is that significant, well you see wealthy corporations, like wealthy individuals are always searching for ways to reduce the amount of taxes they have to pay. At the same time some small countries, with a small population can keep their tax levels low in the hopes of luring big companies to set up their headquarters there. While ordinary people, and companies are pretty much stuck with paying the taxes of wherever it is they live, corporations with factories in half a dozen different countries and sales offices in even more can pick whichever country has the lowest taxes rates and declare it to be their ‘home country’. It’s the same sort of game rich people have always played. Whether it be having a Swiss bank account or by using ‘holding companies’ to own other companies and help hide where the money comes from and to whom it’s going the rich are always looking for ways to cheat the system.

The corporate tax levels for a few members of the OECD. Notice Ireland is at the bottom! (Credit: Anaheim Econo Lodge)

So the effort to establish a minimum corporate tax rate is an attempt to level the playing field, to force the multinationals to pay their fair share and distribute that money to where its needed. Over the last thirty years the United States has been one of the nations hardest hit by the current state of affairs with companies like Microsoft, Apple and Amazon being founded in the US but as they became multi-billion dollar corporations moving their headquarters to other countries for tax purposes. It’s not surprising therefore that the Biden administration is leading the effort to pass the new 15% minimum corporate tax rate.

Apple’s official corporate headquarters, at least for tax purposes, is in Cork Ireland. Apple is the largest corporation in Ireland, at least in terms of money! (Credit: 9to5Mac)

So far 132 of the 139 members of OECD have agreed to the new tax rate but one nation is standing in the way and I hate to say it but it’s Ireland. You see ever since gaining independence from the UK the small nation of 5 million people has profited by its position close to some of the world’s richest nations while keeping its own taxes low. In fact Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are all currently headquartered in Ireland largely because of the countries 12.5% corporate tax rate. If Ireland agrees to increase its rate to 15% the country could actually lose tax revenue as some of the big corporations might go back where they came from.

Finance ministers of the G7 nations meet to work out the details of the 15% minimum corporate tax level. (Credit: Tax News Daily)

But even if Ireland and the other remaining holdouts do finally agree to the minimum tax rate that still doesn’t mean that it’s a done deal. You see the agreement will still have to pass the US Senate, The European Union’s Parliament as well as legislative bodies in other nations. In other words an internationally agreed upon minimum corporate tax rate could still be years away, if it ever happens. Sometimes you have to wonder why it is that we humans can’t seem to get anything done without a bunch of lawyers and politicians arguing and filibustering. But I guess its better fighting wars all the time.

Torrential rainstorms attributed to Climate Change cause flooding in Zhengzhou China and London. Can the infrastructure of the last century handle the climate catastrophe of the next fifty years?

Before I start. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t care whether you call it Global Warming or Climate Change I just want something done about it!

Whether you call it Global Warming or Climate Change doesn’t change the facts on the ground! (Credit: NASA)

 Over the last week there have been two very similar stories from nearly opposite ends of the Earth. The first story concerned a series of very heavy storms that produced a record setting amount of rain in the city of Zhengzhou in central China. At its peak on July 22, the rain fell at a rate of over 20cm per hour and theoretically the total amount that fell on Zhengzhou and the surrounding region was equivalent to a one-in-a-thousand-years rain event for the city and region. That statistical estimate was before global warming of course.

Some of the damage caused by the flooding in Zhengzhou China. (Credit: Al Jazeera)

The flooding caused extensive damage throughout the city but the worst incidences occurred in the city’s subway and highway tunnels. The torrent of water falling onto paved roads and concrete sidewalks flowed into the underground passages filling them up like a bathtub. Thousands of commuters who were inside the city’s subway became trapped, some of them forced to stand in chest deep water for hours while at least 13 people drowned. In another part of Zhengzhou a new highway tunnel was flooded with more than 200 cars trapped inside. Four people are known to have died in the highway tunnel but the toll there could have been much worse if not for the bravery of a retired member of the Chinese army’s elite commandos named Yang Junkui. Mister Yang became a hero by swimming from car to car rescuing the trapped occupants.

Still photo taken from a video shot in a Zhengzhou subway car as the water rose. Fortunately the water got no higher and these people survived. Others weren’t so lucky! (Credit: Insider)

Both of the underground systems in Zhengzhou were constructed with a pumping system installed that was designed to handle the amount of rainfall expected in a once in 50-year storm. The rain that fell on the city that day simply overwhelmed those pumps however. Even after the storms had passed additional pumping equipment had to be brought in to help clean up both tunnel networks.

So massive was the flooding in the highway underpass that extra pumping equipment had to be brought in to remove the water. (Credit: The New York Times)

Only two days after the deluge that crippled Zhengzhou another extreme weather system dropped 6-9 cm of rain per hour on the city of London in the UK causing flash floods and significant damage throughout the city. Once again the worst flooding occurred in the famed ‘London Underground’ subway system where several stations were forced to close.

Even an iconic Double Decker gets trapped in rising flood waters as London is inundated with rain. (Credit: CNN)

Fortunately the heavy flooding that struck London, although destructive did not cause any loss of life. As I was reading these stories it occurred to me that a large part of our transportation infrastructure, like the London Underground, was constructed a long time before climate change became an issue. And even those systems that have been built more recently, like the Zhenghou highway tunnel, are not being built to deal with the extreme weather that is predicted to happen over the next few decades.

So intense was the flooding that several stations along the London Underground were forced to close. (Credit: The Telegraph)

Cities bring these problems on themselves by paving over large areas of ground so that the rainwater cannot sink in. Instead the runoff overwhelms the drainage systems and accumulates in low-lying locations like subway or highway tunnels. My own hometown of Philadelphia is a prime example of these potential problems with the center of the city crisscrossed by the Market and Broad Street subways. Both of these systems are over one hundred years old and have many times in the past dealt with flooding issues. The likelihood of a catastrophic flooding event occurring sometime in the near future has to be taken seriously.

One of the underground stops along Philly’s Market Street Elevated-Subway, the El as we all know it! Recent heavy rains that fell just 20km from here could have flooding this station! (Credit: PhillyVoice)

What if, thanks to global warming, one in a thousand year weather events start happening every fifty years or every thirty years? Can our subway systems and underground highway tunnels cope with the enormous rainfall totals to come or will disasters like Zhengzhou just become another ‘new normal’ like the wildfires breaking out now in Spain, Greece and Sardinia.

Recent heavy rains in Taiwan caused flooding that destroyed this highway bridge. How much of our valuable infrastructure is at risk due to climate change? (Credit: CTV News)

Between the wildfires, the floods, the sea level rise and droughts it sounds like the new normal is going to be one big long disaster.

Paleontology News for August 2021: When it comes to finding fossils it’s all about location, location, location.

There have been a couple of major paleontological discoveries recently that deal, not with fossils themselves but rather with locations where a large number of diverse kinds of fossils have been found. Locations where not just a single creature but an entire ecology can be studied.

Good place to go looking for fossils. Sedimentary rocks and a lot of erosion. (Credit: RVPoints.com)

One such site has been found in a deserted quarry in the Cotswolds region of Great Britain and which is now being excavated by paleontologists from the Museum of Natural History in London. The rocks at the site date to the Jurassic period some 167.1 million years ago. The exact location of the Cotswold fossil site has been kept secret so as to allow a team from the museum led by Dr. Tim Ewin to collect as many of the fossils as possible. Best of all the site was actually first located by a pair of amateur fossil hunters Neville and Sally Hollingworth who were invited to help the professionals with their work..

An old abandoned quarry in Cotswold England is again the center of activity as paleontologists collect hundreds of fossils from the Jurassic period. (Credit: The New York Times)

Judging by the type and condition of the fossils the quarry was once the floor of an ancient river delta, teeming with life that was suddenly buried in mud by some catastrophic event. The animals that lived there were buried quickly while still alive so the exquisitely preserved fossils represent a ‘snap-shot’ of life on the sea bed at a single moment of time. The enormous number of well preserved fossils will allow paleontologists to not only study the individual animals collected but the relationships between them as well, helping them to understand the ecology of the site 167.1 million years ago.

I can see at least three nearly complete Crinoids plus parts of many others. Just one of the finds from Cotswold. (Credit: inews)

Most of the fossils found at the quarry come from a group of sea invertebrates called echinoderms, which includes starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers and sea lilies, also known as crinoids. Literally thousands of specimens have been collected, many still incased in rock but some of which have been weathered out of the rock leaving only a beautiful specimen to be studied. Unfortunately not many vertebrate fossils were found, a few skeletons of small fish and some crocodile teeth.

Sally Hollingworth (l), her husband Neville (c) and Doctor Tim Ewin (r) examine a slab of rock covered with fossils. (Credit: The Guardian)

According to Dr. Ewin, “What we’re finding at this site are the most beautifully preserved fossil sea urchins, starfish, sea lilies and feathered stars that I have ever seen from Britain. It’s comparable to some of the best sea urchin and starfish sites in the world.”

Weathered free of the rock a single crinoid head makes a spectacular find. (Credit: BBC)

So large are the number of specimens that just cleaning and preparing them could take years while identifying and cataloging the many different species, some of which could be entirely new, may take even longer. Paleontologists are patient scientists however, after all their specimens have been waiting 161 million years to be studied.

The Cotswold site represents a large part of a single ecological niche at a single moment in time. Most fossil locations are like that, one type of environment over a short period of time, bearing in mind that geologically thousands of years is a short period of time. Normally in order to see how living creatures change, how they evolve it is necessary to compare the specimens from a number of different sites.

The Grand Canyon in Arizona shows a lot of geology, and much of it contains fossils! (Credit: USGS)

Some fossil sites however are so large that they expose layers of rock that were laid down over a longer period of time, millions of years in some cases. The Grand Canyon in the United States is an example of this where the erosion caused by the Colorado River has exposed hundreds of layers of rock spread over millions of years.

Now a “new” fossil location has been described that puts the Grand Canyon to shame. I say “new” because portions of the site have been studied before but the full extent of the site as one long exposure of rock is only now being described. The location is up in the Canadian Yukon Province along the Peel River just a few hundred kilometers south of the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea. Erosion by the river has exposed a continuous record of rocks dating from the Late Cambrian period to the late Devonian, a spread of about 120 million years, all along the same river.

A portion of the exposed rock formations along the Peel River in the Yukon province of Canada. (Credit: Standford Earth – Stanford University)

Now not all of the rocks along the Peel River contain large numbers of fossils, some were either laid down in the deep ocean where few animals live or perhaps extremely salty conditions like the Dead Sea. Nevertheless there are a huge number of different points along the Peel River where fossils can be found, more than enough to keep paleontologists busy for decades.

The Peel River watershed in Northern Canada. Remote and largely undeveloped it’s just the sort of place paleontologists love. (Credit: Canadian Geographic)

One discovery that has already been published based on samples from the Peel deals not with the kinds on living creatures there were back in the Paleozoic but rather the level of free oxygen in the atmosphere during that period. Scientists have known for decades that for most of Earth’s history there was little free oxygen in the air. Oxygen is a very reactive chemical, that’s why we use it to respirate. It’s only because of photosynthesis in plants continuously replenishing it that our atmosphere has so much oxygen in it. Something happened between 400-500 million years ago to greatly increase the oxygen levels.

Paleontologists have speculated that it was the evolution of land plants that spurred this increase. Plants on land meant more plants leading to more oxygen leading to more living things in general setting up a feedback mechanism that more than doubled the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere. The problem with this theory was the timing, did the increase in oxygen occur at the same time as the fossil evidence for land plants.

Did a large increase in land plants during the Devonian period also cause an increase in the oxygen levels in our atmosphere? (Credit: Sutori)

In a paper in the journal Science Advances by lead author Erik A. Sperling of Stanford University’s Department of Geological Sciences chemical samples from along the Peel River have been used to determine that oxygen levels remained low for a long period of the Paleozoic and did not reach more modern levels until the early Devonian, about 405 million years ago. This late increase in oxygen casts some doubt on the land plant hypothesis but other scientists still have to study the data and comment.

Dr. Sperling examines a rock formation along the Peel River. (Credit: ResearchGate)

Having collected at more than seventy fossil sites I can tell you that they are special places. Knowing that you are in the presence of the remains of ancient life, that any rock you pick up could be a discovery waiting for someone to find it is a feeling unlike any other.

Nobel Physicist Steven Weinberg dies at age eighty-eight. He was a central player in the development of the Standard Model of Elementary Particles.

Born in New York City in 1933, Steven Weinberg became interested in science thanks to the childhood gift of a chemistry set. In 1950 he became the first member of his family to attend college receiving a bachelor’s degree in physics from Cornell University and then his Doctorate from Princeton.

Steven Weinberg as I’m certain he’d like to be remembered, working on Physics! (Credit: UT News – The University of Texas at Austin)

Doctor Weinberg then began his career as a researcher at Columbia University before accepting temporary teaching assignments at the University of California in Berkeley, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He finally settled down in 1982 at the University of Texas in Austin where he would remain for the rest of his life teaching both physics and astronomy. 

Robert Lee Moore hall at the University of Texas at Austin houses the departments of Physics, Math and Astronomy. Steven Weinberg had his office here. (Credit: Big Dave 4444)

The key moment in Doctor Weinberg’s career came in 1967 when he published a short, three page paper in the journal ‘Physical Review Letters’ entitled ‘A Model of Leptons’. In that paper Weinberg theorized that the weak nuclear interaction, best known for beta decay where a neutron transforms into a proton plus an electron and an anti-neutrino, could best be understood if it were unified with the familiar Electromagnetic interaction. In particular Weinberg predicted the existence of both charged and neutral current paths thru which his unified force would propagate.

Top of ‘A Model of Leptons’ by Steven Weinberg. (Credit: Twitter)

Weinberg’s ideas would soon be extended by his colleagues Abdus Salam and Sheldon Lee Glashow to become the Electro-Weak force that was carried by four boson particles, the W particle, which comes in both positive and negative charged varieties along with the neutral Z particle and the photon. At that time only the familiar photon had been detected in the labouratory but experiments in the 1970s would discover the other three making Weinberg one of the only scientists who could say that he predicted the existence of three particles before they were discovered in the lab.

Official announcement of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics. (Credit: Nobel Foundation)

By combining two of the four known forces of nature, which are gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces Weinberg had partially succeeded in something that Albert Einstein unsuccessfully worked on for the last 25 years of his life. Einstein had sought to unify gravity and electromagnetism into a single geometric theory but unlike his earlier success with general relativity a unified field theory eluded him.

The Standard Model of Elementary Particles. Weinberg was responsible for predicted the W and Z particles. (Credit: SLAC)

The success of the Weinberg-Salam-Glashow theory led to its three contributors being awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics and set the stage for a whole plethora of ‘Grand Unified Theories’ or GUTs throughout the 1980s and 90s. The final theory that came about from these efforts was ‘Supersymmetry’ that is based on the simple idea that there is really only one kind of particle and that all of the different particles we see in our labouratories are actually just different quantum states of that one kind of particle. The major prediction of supersymmetry was that every known particle would have to be coupled to a supersymmetric ‘partner’ that balanced all of the known particle’s measured quantities.

The failure of Supersymmetry. The theory predicts the existence of a SUSY partner (r) for every particle in the Standard Model (l). To date none have been found!! (Credit: Quanta Magazine)

Throughout the last thirty years Weinberg was a contributor and proponent of supersymmetry. (By the way supersymmetry is not quite the same as string theory, the idea that elementary particles are little strings that vibrate. String theory fits very well with supersymmetry however and today it’s hard to find a physicist who is working in supersymmetry that doesn’t use string theory.) Unlike electro-weak theory however none of the partner particles predicted by supersymmetry have been discovered so that today most theorists are searching new paths to try to explain the standard model of particles that we know.

String theory asserts that every king of particle is just a vibrating string. The way a string vibrates determines which particle in the Standard Model they behave like! (Credit: SpringerLink)
The First Three minutes by Steven Weinberg. Weinberg was one of those scientists who were able to describe the mysteries of the Universe in terms more average people could understand. (Credit: Amazon.com)

In addition to his own work in particle physics Steven Weinberg was also the author of several books popularizing science including ‘Dreams of a final Theory’ about particle physics and ‘The First Three Minutes, a Modern View of the Origin of the Universe’, which describes in clear language the big bang. Doctor Weinberg was also a longtime advocate for nuclear disarmament. Steven Weinberg belonged to the post-war generation of physicists that included such brilliant minds as Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann and Robert Higgs, to name a few. For these scientists Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were well established models to build upon and together they helped to develop the standard model that is today the basis of our understanding of the Universe. 

Progress is being made in a series of aneutronic fusion experiments. Is this the long sought breakthrough that will make fusion power a reality? And what is different about aneutronic fusion?

Ever since physicists began experimenting with the nuclei of atoms they realized that producing energy by the fusion of light nuclei had several advantages over the splitting, fission of heavy nuclei. For one thing fusion simply produces more energy than fission but more importantly fusion does not produce the large amounts of radioactive waste that are the biggest problem with our current nuclear power plants.

The series of fusion reactions that power our Sun. Scientists have been trying to develop a simplified version of these reactions as a power source for more than 60 years now. (Credit: SpringerLink)

The big problem with using nuclear fusion to generate power is that it’s so hard to initiate. Whereas a nucleus of Uranium 235 is so unstable that almost any disturbance, like a stray neutron striking it, will cause it to split into smaller nuclei a hydrogen nuclei, really just a proton, will electrostatically repel any other proton making it very difficult to force them to fuse together. This is because the strong nuclear force keeping nuclei together is incredibly short ranged; you practically have to get the protons to touch in order for them to stick. The electromagnetic (EM) force on the other hand obeys an inverse square law like gravity does and never really goes to zero.

An nucleus of U235 is so unstable that all it needs is to be ‘bumped’ by a neutron and it will split, releasing energy in the process. That’s why fission reactors are actually easy to build but because the leftover atoms are radioactive fission reactors are very hard to make safe!!!! (Credit: Atlearner)

In the center of the Sun fusion is only possible because of the extreme pressures and temperatures there. So in order to generate fusion in the labouratory scientists and engineers have for over 60 years tried to replicate the conditions at the center of the Sun.

The fusion reaction that scientists are trying to control in order to produce power. This reaction releases most, around 80%, of its energy in the form of neutrons that are both dangerous and difficult to convert into electricity. (Credit: Nuclear Information Center – Duke Energy)

The usual design for these attempts has been a doughnut shaped vacuum chamber inside a very powerful magnetic field known as a Tokamak. Inside the Tokamak an ionized gas known as a plasma is heated to millions of degrees Celsius and contained by the magnetic field. Once the fuel reaches a high enough temperature some of the nuclei begin to fuse releasing energy that can then be converted into electric power. The ITER fusion reactor, which is currently under construction in France, is expected to operate at a plasma temperature of 150 million degrees Celsius!

The Tokamak at ITER (Center glowing) will be the largest plasma chamber ever constructed with the most powerful magnetic field. In order to function properly the Tokamak will be surrounded by a large number of different support facilities. (Credit: New Scientist)

The fuel used in most fusion experiments are heavy isotopes of hydrogen, also known as deuterium and tritium, D-T, which consist of a single proton attached to either a single neutron or two neutrons respectively. The reason that heavy hydrogen is the fuel of choice is that with only a single proton in each nuclei the repelling force is minimized, the greater the number of protons the greater the repelling EM force and the higher temperature needed to force fusion to occur.

D-T has one big drawback however, about 80% of the energy released is by the emission of free neutrons. These neutrons are not only dangerous to living tissue, and therefore require a large amount of shielding around a fusion reactor, but it is also difficult to covert the kinetic energy of neutral particles into useful electric power. High energy charged particles however can be directly converted in electric power by several techniques, moving electric charges is the definition of electric current after all.

In a particle accelerator electricity is used to accelerate charged elementary particles. The process can also be reversed, using energetic charged particles to generate electricity directly. (Credit: Wikipedia)

For this reason there has been a lot of interest recently in several other fusion reactions that are considered to be ‘aneutronic’ with only a very small amount of the energy generated being released by neutrons, the majority coming from charged particles. Three aneutronic reactions in particular are being studied:

Helium Three, that’s two protons with a neutron, with Deuterium

He3+D→He4+p +18.3 MeV of Energy

Fusion using Helium 3, two protons and a neutron, would be the easiest to produce and control. However H3 is extremely rare here on Earth. (Credit: Weekly Science Quiz)

Lithium 7, three protons and four neutrons, with a proton

Li7+p→2He4 + 17.2 MeV

Boron 11, five protons and six neutrons, with a proton

 B11+p→3He4 + 8.7 MeV

Several aneutronic fusion reactions. The question is which can be developed more easily while providing the greatest amount of usable energy. (Credit: depts.washington.edu)

The first reaction, Helium 3 and Deuterium requires the lowest temperature of any of the aneutronic reactions and releases the most energy of any of the three reactions. The problem is that Helium 3 is virtually non-existent here on Earth. Traces of Helium 3 have been found in samples of rocks brought back from the Moon and which space scientists theorize was produced by billions of years of the solar wind striking the Lunar surface.

Science fiction writer have picked up on this availability ofthis potential energy source on the Moon and several novels have been written using Helium 3 mining as a reason for establishing a Lunar colony. However obtaining even a few useful kilograms of Helium would require processing millions of kilos of Lunar regolith, a endeavour well beyond our current space technology. Maybe one day a large Lunar colony will supply Earth with fuel for its fusion reactors, but that’s many decades in the future.

There are measurable traces of Helium 3 in the Lunar dust but getting usable quantities of it would be an enormous enterprise. (Credit: Extreme Tech)

That leaves Lithium and Boron as possible fuels for an aneutronic fusion reactor and while neither element is especially abundant there is still more than enough to keep thousands of fusion reactors running for centuries. As shown in the reactions above Lithium fusion releases the greater amount of energy but is generally not considered aneutronic because as much as 10% of the energy is released as neutrons by the secondary reaction:

Li7+p→Be7+n

Boron on the other hand releases less than 1% of its energy by neutrons but also releases less than half the energy of the other two. Both lithium and Boron would require a plasma temperature of more than 600 million degrees Celsius in order to produce a sustained fusion reaction.

The higher the cross section at a lower center of mass energy the lower the temperature required for the reaction. Deuterium – Tritium is certainly the best while Helium 3 and Boron require much higher temperatures. (Credit: MuonRay)

So there you have it. Aneutronic fusion may provide some definite advantages over heavy hydrogen fusion but because of the much higher temperatures required it’s difficult to see how they can be implemented any time in the near future. Without some unexpected technical breakthrough it seems inevitable that the first nuclear fusion reactors will be based on heavy hydrogen as a fuel.

A proposed Aneutronic Reactor from LPPFusion Corporation. They’re still looking for funding so it may be years before they start construction. (Credit: LPPFusion)
The most powerful magnet ever manfactured. One of six that will fit inside the center if the ITER Tokamak it is now on its way from its manufacturer in the US to southern France. (Credit: Daily Mail)

Which is why it’s a sign of progress that the most powerful magnet ever built has been shipped from its manufacturer General Atomics in the United States to southern France. The magnet is the first of six sections of what will become the central core of the ITER reactor. At a 18m in height and 4m in width with a mass of 100 metric tonnes the section cannot be transported by road and is being shipped by a specially prepared ship to the ITER site. Once all six sections are assembled the magnet will produce a field of 13 Tesla or about 280,000 times the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. It is hoped that the first section will be installed by November.

Space News July 2021: Space tourism becomes a reality as billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos launch into space. Are Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin’s successes an advancement for human space exploration or just rich men playing with their toys?

I’ve just watched Jeff Bezos and his New Shepard spacecraft complete their eleven minute trip to the edge of space and I have to admit I’m underwhelmed. The fact that a private citizen can now accomplish what NASA succeeded in doing back in 1961 with Mercury-Redstone does not seem like much progress to me even though the news media insist on calling the flight ‘historic’.

Liftoff of the New Shepard spacecraft on it’s first manned trip to the edge of space. Aside from the number of crew and the fact that the rocket is reusable the whole trip was a replay of Alan Shepard’s 1961 Mercury-Redstone flight. (Credit: The New York Times)

The date of Blue Origin’s first manned flight on the 20th of July was deliberate to honour the 52nd anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s becoming the first man to set foot on the Moon. And Bezos also chose his crew with an eye to making headlines by including female aviation pioneer Wally Funk, who trained as an astronaut back in the early 1960s only to have NASA completely ignore her. At 82 years of age Wally also became the oldest person to travel into space while fellow passenger Oliver Daemen became the youngest at 18. All of which is good advertising for a company looking to establish its market share in a new industry.

The crew of New Shepard. From right to left Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen. (Credit: CNN)

It is true that unlike Alan Shepard’s flight the world’s richest man was able to take three other people with him and while Shepard could barely move around in his Mercury capsule the New Shepard capsule has enough room for everyone to enjoy zero g for a few minutes. Nevertheless New Shepard is really nothing more than a thrill ride, the world’s biggest, and by far most expensive roller coaster ride.

Aside from a couple of minutes at Zero G your average roller coaster is about as thrilling, and costs a lot less than a flight on New Shepard. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Bezos’ company Blue Origin expects two more flight’s of New Shepard this year and as many as half a dozen next year. If enough people are willing to pay the yet to be officially announced ticket price then Blue Origin could build more spacecraft to accommodate more flights and maybe before to long several hundred people a year could be getting their astronauts wings.

The US Department of Transportation has designed the above medal for those who will go into space aboard commercial space services. NASA, the Air Force and Navy all have their own version. (Credit: Parabolic Arc)

The same is pretty much true of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic flight to the edge of space nine days earlier on July 11th. Branson’s SpaceShip 2 is actually based upon the US Air Force’s X-15 program, again a program from the early 1960s. The X-15 proper was a rocket plane that was attached beneath an Air Force bomber and lifted about 20 kilometers into the atmosphere. There the X-15 was dropped from the mother plane so that it could light its engine and fly to the edge of space before returning as a glider, just like the later space shuttle.

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip 2 (C), being carried to launch altitude by its especially designed mothership. (Credit: Deseret News)

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip 2 and its mothership follow basically the same flight path, the mothership carries SpaceShip 2 aloft and then drops it so that it can ignite its engines and fly off to the edge of space. The only real difference is that unlike the X-15, which carried only its pilot, SpaceShip 2 can carry up to six people, five paying passengers plus the pilot and once again contains enough room for those passengers to enjoy zero g for a few minutes.

As with the New Shepard flight the crew of SpaceShip 2 got to enjoy a few minutes of Zero G. Richard Branson is the one still in his harness. (Credit: Reuters)

So if both flights just mimicked missions from the early 60s why did the news media make such a hullabaloo about them? Worst of all was the argument over whether or not Branson had actually gone into space. You see the US government insists on using imperial measurements and therefore defines space as an altitude of 50 miles. (I wonder if that’s the first time I’ve mentioned miles in these posts.) The rest of the world uses SI units and defines space as 100 kilometers, equivalent to 62 miles. Bezos and New Shepard crossed both boundaries but Branson and SpaceShip 2 only reached the lower altitude so they will have an asterix next to their status as astronauts. As if it really matters.

The launch of Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7. This Mercury-Redstone flight on 5 May 1961 was similar to the flight New Shepard took. (Credit: NASA)

I suppose by now you thinking that I’m a real party pooper. Why can’t I just be excited that more people are going to get the chance to travel into space? After all, that will help build up more enthusiasm for space travel while developing new technologies that could be useful on more scientific and exploratory missions. And remember that both New Glenn and SpaceShip 2 are completely reusable, won’t that help to develop new, reusable technology for space travel in general.

The flight of SpaceShip 2 was patterned after the flight of the X-15, also from the early 1960s. (Credit: Wired)

Maybe, but it is worth mentioning that another billionaire, Elon Musk and his Space X corporation have already succeeded in launching ten astronauts, real astronauts that is, into orbit along with numerous unmanned payloads with his reusable Falcon 9 rocket. And Musk at least has had the good sense, or perhaps good manners would be a better description, not to send himself into space in one of his crew dragon capsules. Seriously the fact that Space X is winning contracts to place useful payloads into orbit or beyond does kind of make the short, sub-orbital flights of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin seem like nothing more than joyrides.

Space X has already launched 10 astronauts into orbit, where they can some actual work. Somehow to me that makes Branson’s and Bezos’ joyrides seem less historic. (Credit: Space News)

Looking into the future it is true that Blue Origin is developing a larger version of their rocket that will be both reusable and capable of placing payloads into orbit. This would make the company a direct competitor of Space X, which could help to further lower costs and therefore increase space travel in general.

Blue Origin plans on the first flight of its New Glenn rocket, which will be bigger than the falcon 9, sometime next year, 2022. (Credit: YouTube)

To the best of my knowledge however Virgin Galactic has no plans to develop any orbital version of their space plane. The company appears to be content to carve out a business taking rich people just high enough above the Earth’s surface so they can tell their friends that they’re now astronauts.

In recent years the commercialization of space has begun to pay off some real dividends. Astronauts are being taken to the International Space Station in larger numbers and at far less cost than either Russia’s Soyuz or the old Shuttle could do while the cost of unmanned space missions have also gone down. So I suppose the carnival surrounding the first launches of New Shepard and SpaceShip2 are a small price to pay for the progress that is being made.