Category: Science

Astronomy News for August 2025: Two Interesting Asteroids have been making the news lately. 

Back a few months ago the asteroid 2024 YR4 made quite a few headlines because the astronomers whose job it is to discover and keep track of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) calculated that there was a very small but not insignificant chance that 2024 YR4 could collide with our planet on the 22nd of December in 2032. (See my post of 8 March 2025.) At an estimated size of between 50 and 100m, 2024 YR4 was a potential ‘city killer’ so it was no wonder that there was some concern when the chance of a collision rose to about 3%.

At more than a kilometer across the Asteroid crater in Arizona clearly shows how much damage a sizable rock from outer space could do. (Credit: Understanding Global Change)

Now 2024 YR4 had only been discovered in 2024, hence the designation 2024 YR4, and after several weeks of measurements of its position and velocity it was announced that better, more precise calculations clearly showed that while 2024 YR4 would come close to Earth on the 22nd of December 2032, it definitely would not collide with our planet.

The orbital path of asteroid 2024 YR4 (Big Ellipse) brings to close to our planet (Blue Circle) on a regular basis. Of course close in outer space can mean millions of kilometers so any collision could be millions of years away. In any case 2024 YR4 will not strike the Earth any time soon. But it could collide with the Moon! (Credit: The Planetary Society)

But it could still strike the Moon. In fact a recent review of the observations made of 2024 YR4 while it was close to our planet has now given a better chance of 2024 YR4 striking the Moon than it ever did of colliding with Earth, 4.3%.

Much of the Lunar surface is covered in impact craters, some billions of years old, some very recent. The Moon is used to being hit by asteroids but what effects will that event have to us here on Earth? (Credit: ScienceABC)

So, what would be the results of 2024 YR4’s striking the Moon? Would there be any danger to us here on Earth? A 50-100m in diameter asteroid slamming into the Moon would cause an explosion as powerful as that of an H-bomb, an estimated 6.5 megatons of explosive power. Such an explosion would create a crater that is estimated to be about a kilometer in diameter and cause as much as 200 million tons of lunar rock to be ejected.

The impact that an asteroid such as 2024 YR4 could cause would be as large as the largest nuclear bombs ever tested. (Credit: Atomic Heritage Foundation)

Now, the collision itself could only be a danger to someone on the Moon; an astronaut in other words and by 2032 there is the possibility that NASA or the Chinese space agency could be sending astronauts to the Moon on a regular basis. Of course if astronomers were certain that the asteroid were going to crash on the Moon you can bet that both space agencies would cancel any lunar missions until they were convinced it was safe.

By 2032 both NASA and the Chinese expect to have landed people on the Moon but you can bet they won’t be sending any missions there if and when 2024 YR4 is going to strike. (Credit: Air Power Asia)

Here on Earth all that we would see is a bright flash of light on the lunar surface lasting several seconds. The calculations right now indicate that 2024 YR4 would strike the visible face of the Moon so it would be a once in a lifetime viewing opportunity for the half of the world where the Moon is up.

If asteroid 2024 YR4 does strike the Moon in 2032 it will be an event visible to half of the people on Earth, a sight unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The problems caused by the collision would come days later. (Credit: YouTube)

The danger comes after the actually strike with all of that Lunar material that got ejected by the collision. A small fraction of that material will actually escape the Moon’s gravity and a fraction of that will come towards Earth. Starting about a week after the collision our night skies will treat us to the most glorious meteor showers in history, and that show could continue for months.

A few days after the collision the Skies of Earth would see the biggest meteor shower in recorded history as millions of fragments of the Moon fell onto our planet. The real danger would be to all of our satellites in orbit, satellites that our modern technological society has become dependent on. (Credit: CNET)

There is little chance of anyone on Earth’s surface being hurt by the meteors, virtually all of the particles will be smaller than a peanut and burn up in the atmosphere. The danger would be to astronauts in Low Earth Orbit (LOE) space stations and to the hundreds of satellites circling our planet.

Any space station in orbit would have to be abandoned because of the danger of a meteor strike. (Credit: WUSF)

That’s the real danger because any collision with even a tiny grain of lunar dust at velocities of 10 kilometers or more per second could do serious damage to a spacecraft. Remember our increasingly technological society has become quite dependent on GPS satellites, communications satellites, weather satellites etc, etc. If 2024 YR4 should strike the Moon the danger to LOE satellites and manned stations could last for years.

The swarm of particles caused by the asteroid collision on the Moon would last for years being a constant danger to satellites as well as any manned spacecraft. (Credit: Dreamstime.com)

So, on the whole I’m hoping that 2024 YR4 misses the Moon entirely. It would make for a spectacular show but the problems it causes could seriously impact space exploration for a long time.

With all of the debris that would be moving through the inner solar system due to the asteroid impact a mission to Mars would be out of the question for who knows how long. (Credit: Science Photo Gallery)

My second asteroid is not going to put on such a show, nor be as much a threat as 2024 YR4 but 3I/Atlas is in many ways more interesting. Discovered on July 1st of 2025, 3I/Atlas is the third interstellar visitor to our solar system to be discovered by astronomers and differs greatly from the first two.

The third interstellar visitor to our solar system that has been discovered by astronomers is designated as 3I/Atlas. While only a speck of light in even the biggest telescopes it is actually at least twice as big as the first two interstellar visitors. (Credit: Gemini Observatory)

You may remember that back in 2017 there was a lot of talk about Oumuamua, the first object to be discovered in our solar system that was definitely from outside, a visitor from interstellar space. There was even suggestions back then that Oumuamua could be an alien spaceship, its shape was more like a spaceship than a normal asteroid’s. (See my post of 11 November 2017 for more information on Oumuamua). Then in 2021 a second interstellar visitor was detected and given the name 2I/Borisov. Both these two objects made one pass through our solar system and then returned to interstellar space, never to be seen again.

The first interstellar visitor, designated as Oumuamua, turned out to be a long, cigar shaped object. This strange shape caused many people to suppose that it was an alien spacecraft of some kind! (Credit: NASA Science)

If you’re wondering how astronomers know that an object they’ve discovered is an interstellar visitor well it’s all a question of velocity. If an object is moving too fast for the Sun’s gravity to force it into a stable orbit then it will quickly leave the solar system, and therefore must have originally come from outside the solar system. Oumuamua was first observed to have a velocity of 26.33 kilometers per second (kps), a little more than solar escape velocity and 2I.Borisov’s velocity was a bit higher at 32.2 kps.

3I/Atlas is moving so fast through our solar system that even the gravity of the Sun will barely deflect its trajectory. Notice how it will not come anywhere close to Earth. (Credit: en.m.wikipedia.org)

3I/Atlas has been clocked at a much faster velocity, 57 kps, nearly twice as fast as the other two. Additionally 3I/Atlas is more than twice the size of our first two interstellar visitors, its size is estimated to be 10-20 kilometers in diameter. Those facts alone would be enough to make astronomers sit up and take notice but when they projected it trajectory backwards they got another nice surprise, 3I/Atlas appears to have come from outside of the local spiral arm, from a much older region of our galaxy.

We can’t really see the Milky Way from inside it but this is what astronomers think it looks like. The arrow bottom center points to our solar system. Based on its trajectory astronomers feel that 3I/Atlas did not come from the spiral arm that our Sun resides in but from a much older part of the galaxy. (Credit: ResearchGate)

Now remember that our Sun and solar system are about 4.5 billion years old but the Universe is much older than that at 13.5 billion years. Most astronomers think that, although it has changed a great deal, our Milky Way galaxy is more than 10 billion years old, so our Sun is less than half the age of our galaxy. Another thing that astronomers know is that the spiral arms of galaxies are regions where stars are being born, and our Sun is in one of these regions. If 3I/Atlas does come from outside our spiral arm it could be twice the age of our Sun, it could be the oldest thing we have ever been able to observe close up.

The spiral arms of galaxies like the Whirlpool shown here are bright because of all of the young stars being born there. If 3I/Atlas does come from outside of a spiral arm it could be twice the age of our solar system. (Credit: e.wikipedia.org)

Unfortunately, 3I/Atlas will come no closer to Earth than the orbit of Mars later this year and, like the first two interstellar objects will then return to the darkness between the stars. In the last eight years we’ve found three interstellar objects but in the future you can expect we will find a lot more. The new Vera C. Rubin telescope in Chile was designed to look for asteroids and has already discovered hundreds. So, astronomers expect that from time to time it will spot a new asteroid from outside our solar system.

Two Stories about advances in Medicine. 

Back in the 1970s there was a popular TV show called ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ about an astronaut named Steve Austin who suffered massive injuries during a training flight but who was ‘rebuilt’ with robotic arms, legs and an eye. The tag lines for the opening of the show were ‘we can rebuild him, we have the technology’ and ‘we can make him better, faster, stronger’. Incidentally, there was a spin off show called ‘The Bionic Woman’ where Steve Austin’s girlfriend also suffered massive injuries and was also made ‘better, faster, stronger.’

Opening Title of ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ a TV show about a man who has had body parts replaced by mechanical parts giving him superhuman abilities. The show helped to bring the idea of ‘Bionic’ to the general public. (Credit: IMDb)

Of course back in the 1970s we didn’t have the technology, the show was just science fiction. In the last 50 years however we have made a lot of progress in prosthetic limbs at medical centers around the world. So it won’t be too long before we actually do have a ‘Bionic Man’, a patient whose missing limbs have been replaced by mechanical ones, limbs that they can control directly with their brain just like real, living ones.

British teenager Tilly Lockley was born without hands, small image. The mechanical ones she has now, while not perfect, are simply amazing! (Credit: Daily Mail)

To date that progress has mostly been made in creating mechanical / robotic limbs that are separate from the patient’s body and which are attached to or removed from the patient whenever required. As you can imagine it would be better for the patient if his bionic limbs were fully integrated with their body, the way Steve Austin’s were in the TV show. There are presently two reasons why this level of integration has not yet been achieved.

Two examples of bionic arms that can be connected to, or separated from a user. Current models are mostly of this type. (Credit: The Borgen Project)

The first reason is engineering, it’s simply not easy to fit all of the motors, actuators, spring mechanisms and etc. needed to make a mechanical arm, and fit it into the volume of a living arm. We’ve made a lot of progress, just a few decades ago bionic arms or legs were massive, bulky things that you wouldn’t want to have permanently attached to you, but today mechanical limbs are much sleeker, although they still don’t look like living ones. A bigger problem is what to do with the battery pack that provides power to the bionic limb. Currently battery packs for mechanical limbs are worn on the back or as a belt. It’s gonna be a long time before we can fit the power source for a bionic limb inside the limb itself.

This is the kinda equipment you need to keep the batteries in a bionic limb powered. As you can imagine it a fair amount of work keeping bionic limbs fully charged. (Credit: eBay)

The second reason is simply the difficulty in getting living tissue to integrate itself with non-living metal or plastic. Considerable progress in this area has been made recently at MIT’s K. Lisa Yang’s Center for Bionics. In a small clinical study patients who have had one of their legs amputated above the knee have had a new bionic knee and leg directly integrated with their remaining leg bones and muscles. Not only are the tissues and mechanical parts attached to each other but the remaining nerves in the leg are used to control the functioning of the bionic leg. This new bone-integrated system has been given the name e-OPRA.

Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr. speaks at the MIT K. Lisa Yang Center of Bionics. (Credit: Steph Stevens Photo)
Images showing some of the techniques involved in integrating a bionic limb directly into a patient’s body at the K Lisa Yang Center. (Credit: MIT News)

Testing of the new limbs clearly showed a considerable improvement in walking and climbing over objects than currently available prosthetics. At the same time the patients involved in the study reported that their new, fully integrated mechanical limb felt more like a part of their own body. The system also has the added benefit of directly loading the weight of the patient’s body onto the mechanical leg. This is similar to the way the body’s skeleton actually works rather than inserting the amputated leg into a socket on a prosthesis, which is less stable and can be very uncomfortable.

Two different styles of artificial leg. The remaining limb is inserted into the cup at the top of the artificial leg but as the patient moves, chafing occurs where the two meet causing great discomfort for many patients. (Credit: IndiaMART)

A great deal of effort around the world is being expended in studies that hopefully will one day bring the science fiction of ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ to the lives of thousands of patients. That makes the study being conducted at MIT a very practical application of medical science. My second story is just the opposite, an esoteric investigation into one of life’s deepest mysteries, why do living creatures sleep?

One of the big mysteries of life, why do we sleep? (Credit: UCLA Health)

All animals sleep, even plants and single celled creatures show signs of metabolic slowdowns that can be compared to sleep so in some sense all living things sleep in some way. Problem is that despite almost a century of study, and many centuries of wonder, we have no real idea of why we need to sleep, what physical reason is there that makes us need to sleep.

The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau. Obviously, we are quite defenseless while we are asleep, but every creature does it. Why? (Credit: Etsy)

We certainly do need to sleep; just three or four nights without any sleep will make a person very sick, so sick that death is possible. Many people suffer from insomnia and over time lack of sleep or poor sleep can have a severe impact on their health.

Just a few nights without sleep can cause all sorts of medical problems. So it’s obvious that we really need sleep. (Credit: Verywell Health)

Now a study from Oxford University’s Center for Neural Circuits and Behaviour has for the first time pointed to a precise metabolic process that they assert triggers sleep. The secret lies in the mitochondria, the energy producing ‘organelles’ inside each of the cells of our body where sugars are combined with oxygen to generate the power that our cells need. As a part of this metabolic process the mitochondria produce free electrons that ‘leak’ into the body of the cell. The build up of these free electrons can generate unwanted chemical reactions that can damage the cell, so the cell must have some means of controlling and reducing these free electrons, we call that process sleep.

Mitochondria are organelles inside every cell in our body. They are the power sources of the cells taking the food we eat and converting it to energy for the rest of the cell to use. (Credit: Science Learning Hub)

Working with fruit flies, yes the same fruit flies that you may have played with in high school biology, the researchers at Oxford succeeded in both increasing and decreasing the generation of free electrons and observed how that affected the sleep patterns of the flies. According to the scientists sleep acts as a kind of circuit breaker, switching off the generation of free electrons for a time to restore the balance of the cell’s energy flow. Since all eucaryotic cells contain mitochondria it reasonable to think that this answer to why we need sleep applies to virtually all living things.

Free electrons in a metal allow it to conduct electricity. That’s a good thing in a metal but we don’t want that happening inside the cells of our body! (Credit)ResearchGate)

It will probably be years before this research on sleep can be turned into treatments for sleep disorders but it is a start. That’s the way progress works, some research is practical, yielding results quickly like the study on integrating prosthetics directly into the human body. Other research is to find the deeper truth to life’s mysteries and may not yield benefits for decades, if ever.

Space News for August 2025. 

You may recall three years ago when NASA’s DART mission successfully slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos as an initial test of a planetary defense system. The idea was that, if an asteroid was on a trajectory that would cause it to collide with Earth in several years, then by altering its velocity just a tiny amount would, after those years cause it to miss our planet by tens of thousands of kilometers. One or more spacecraft like DART would provide that little nudge.

The DART spacecraft’s mission was to literally crash into the asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits around the bigger asteroid Didymos. By observing how much Dimorphos’ orbit was changed the scientists at NASA could determine if such a crash could prevent an asteroid from crashing into the Earth. (Credit: en.wikipedia.org)

The DART mission turned out to be a big success, images from the spacecraft itself were transmitted back to Earth until just a fraction of a second before the collision. Further images taken by a small cube satellite that accompanied DART showed that the spacecraft struck right in the center of Dimorphos and that a large amount of material was ejected from the asteroid by the collision.

Actual image of DART crashing into Dimorphos taken by the small cube satellite that accompanied DART. Observations since then have confirmed that DART altered the asteroid’s trajectory by more than was anticipated, a true success. (Credit: NEW Scientist)

Later, ground based observations of Dimorphos’ orbit around its parent asteroid Didymos showed that the collision had in fact altered the asteroid’s orbit more than the scientists in charge of the mission had expected. In all, the mission was judged to be a major success.

Images taken a few hours after the collision show the large number of boulders that were ejected by Dimorphos. This huge amount of debris may complicate any actual attempt to alter an asteroid’s path. In any case the scientists at NASA now have some data to use in their calculations. (Credit: Phys.org)

Not so fast. I mentioned above that Dimorphos had ejected a large amount of material when the DART spacecraft struck it, a lot more material than any one expected. Well, a team of astronomers led by the University of Maryland has carried out a recent study of that debris and has concluded that the change in the asteroid’s orbit was much more chaotic then originally thought.

There’s a whole branch of mathematics that deals with chaotic systems. Problem is that even with the best math the predictions are only approximate. Chaos remains unpredictable. (Credit: YouTube)

The astronomers succeeded in tracking 108 boulders in that debris ranging in size from 0.2 to 3.6 meters in radius, some moving at speeds of up to 552 meters per second, nearly 190 kph. They also found that the debris was, for reasons unknown, clustered into two main streams. Some of the ejected boulders were even flung in a direction perpendicular to DART’s trajectory into Dimorphos, again difficult to explain.

These images, taken by ground based telescopes, show how the debris from the Dart-Dimorphos collision spread out over several hours. The fact that the debris seems clustered in several streams is hard to explain. (Credit: UPI)

This new analysis doesn’t not mean that DART was a failure; it certainly did alter the path of an asteroid. What it does mean is that there are factors in play here that we presently don’t understand. Factors that possibly could affect an actual mission to deflect an asteroid away from Earth. More research and perhaps another mission like DART may be needed in order to better understand, and therefore predict, the outcome of an actual Earth Defense mission should one ever become necessary.

There’s always more research that can be done to improve your results. The DART mission was a success, but another such test might be needed to make our calculation more accurate. (Credit: Facebook)

Speaking of asteroids and spacecraft the Psyche mission, that’s both the name of the space probe and the asteroid it’s headed towards, has run into a bit of trouble. Launched in October of 2023 the Psyche spacecraft has been using its electric-powered ion rockets to propel it towards the planet Mars where in May of 2026 it will get a gravity boost sending it towards the asteroid belt for a 2029 rendezvous with its namesake.

The asteroid Psyche is known to be a metal rich asteroid. Astronomers are interested in it because it could tell them a lot about how such asteroids were formed in the early solar system. That’s why NASA has sent the Psyche space probe for a 2029 rendezvous with the asteroid. (Credit: SciTechDaily)

The problem began back in April when engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL) detected a drop in pressure of the xenon fuel line supplying the spacecraft’s thrusters. The advantage of ion rockets is that, although they provide only a small thrust they can continue to do so for weeks, months, even years as in the case of Psyche. In the long run this makes them much more efficient than the chemical used most often in spaceflight.

Ion rocket engines use electric voltages to accelerate charged atoms. Although they only produce a small thrust they can burn for months or even years eventually producing a much higher total change in spacecraft velocity or ‘Delta Vee’. (Credit: Aerospace Notes)

The automatic pilot onboard Psyche acted on its programming and shut off the rockets while the engineers at JPL analyzed the situation and decided what to do. Fortunately the Psyche spacecraft has a second, redundant fuel line and the spacecraft’s engines were soon firing at full thrust again. The engineers at JPL continue to monitor the problem however, in the hopes of fixing the problem in the primary fuel line.

I have an argument with this definition. There are many times when a problem occurs and you are glad you build in some redundancy! (Credit: Instagram)

There is also news concerning manned space flight. On June 25th Space X successfully launched another private space mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Designated the Ax-4 mission, the capsule is commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and includes scientists from India, Poland and Hungary.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a crew of four aboard a Dragon Spacecraft lifts off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Wednesday, June 25, 2025. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

During their 18 day stay aboard the ISS the scientists performed over sixty experiments while also conducting outreach activities to their home countries. The ability of private corporations to provide access to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for astronauts from countries that otherwise could not get into space is one of the selling points of the whole commercial space industry. The Ax-4 astronauts undocked their Dragon capsule from the ISS on the 14th of July and the capsule safety returned to Earth the next day, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

The Ax-4 capsule floating comfortably in the Pacific waiting for the Space-X recovery boats to arrive. (Credit: The Week)

Meanwhile Space X was busy preparing for the launch of its Crew 11 mission to the ISS under the NASA Commercial Crew Program. As a part of that program every six months Space X sends a crew of four astronauts to man the ISS and relieve the previous crew. Boeing’s Starliner capsule was supposed to alternate with Space X’s Dragon but we all know about Starliner’s problems, see my posts of 12 April 2025 and 31 August 2024.

Starliner, the little capsule that couldn’t, complete a mission that is. (Credit: Texas A&M University)

The launch took place on 31 July and the Dragon capsule arrived at the ISS the next day. On the 8th of August the Crew 10 astronauts boarded their Dragon and began their return to Earth, splashing down on the 9th of August. Thanks to Space X and their reusable Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule trips to and from the ISS have become routine, and hopefully that will continue after the ISS is deorbited in 2030 and newer, commercial space stations are built in LOE.

There are a lot of ideas for a commercial space station going around right now. The is Axion Space’s. (Credit: Innovation News Network)

One final word before I go. Trump’s original choice to lead NASA, businessman Jared Isaacman, has been removed from consideration for the post due to his relationship with Elon Musk, who has become an enemy of Trump. (The very idea of our country’s space program being subject to the whims of powerful men who act like third graders is appalling.) Regardless, instead of Isaacman Trump has nominated Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to act as an interim NASA director.

Paleontology News for August 2025. 

Many times in these posts I’ve discussed how at least 95% of the fossils that paleontologists, and amateurs collect are really just the hard parts of ancient animals, the bones and shells for the most part. The soft parts, the muscles, the inner organs, the skins are rarely preserved. Now to be sure paleontologists have become very good at figuring out what an extinct animal looked like, and how it lived from just the hard parts. Still whenever they find some trace of soft anatomy it’s a treasured discovery

This is what everybody thinks of when you say a fossil. The skeleton or maybe the shell of an extinct animal. The soft anatomy of ancient life rarely fossilizes and therefore is even more valuable, more important when it does. (Credit: Builder 3D Printers)

Obviously some remains of the soft anatomy of an extinct animal is necessary to really understand it, without the impressions of feathers those fossils of archaeopteryx would just look like a small dinosaur. That’s why paleontologists get so excited whenever they come across a particularly important fossil with the soft parts preserved.

One of the most mysterious of all extinct animals is the Tully Monster. Found only in a single location in Illinois Tully is completely soft and presumably so were its relatives so we know very little about it. (Credit: Geology In)

In this post I’ll be discussing two recent examples of how preserved soft parts are teaching paleontologists important facts about past life. As always I’ll talk about the oldest fossil first and move forward in time.

The famous fossil of Archaeopteryx. Would this fossil be so important if it didn’t preserve all of those soft feathers? (Credit: American Museum of Natural History)

Arthropods are the most numerous and diverse form of animal life in our world today and have been pretty much since the first animals appeared over 500 million years ago. Think about it, all of the insects, spiders, and millipedes not to mention lobsters and crabs and barnacles are arthropods. The basic plan of a segmented body with jointed legs and an exoskeleton is without doubt the most successful way to build an animal.

There are millions of species of Arthropod alive today and many millions more that have gone extinct. The basic anatomy of a segmented body with an exoskeleton and jointed limbs is certainly the best way to build an animal. (Credit: MooMoo Math)

Yet despite all of the arthropod fossils that have been collected we still have a great deal to learn both about how arthropods evolved and how they grew at various times in the past. One thing to remember about arthropods is that very often their young don’t resemble the adults at all, think caterpillar and butterfly. Most arthropods go through various stages of growth as an egg, a larva, and pupae before becoming mature adults. Since larval stages of arthropod species can look very different from adults it is quite possible to mistakenly think that they are different species. 

The life cycle of a typical beetle goes through four stages, egg, larva, pupa and finally adult. Notice how the larva looks nothing like the adult, this makes it difficult to know what larva goes with what adult, especially when you’re dealing with an extinct species! (Credit: Britannica Kids)

That’s why finds such as the 520 million year old specimen of Youti yuanshi are so remarkable. The small fossil, less than 4mm in length, somehow not only preserves virtually all of the soft parts of the larva’s anatomy but, unlike most arthropod fossils which are squashed flat, the specimen maintained its three dimensional shape. This enabled the researchers to reconstruct the internal arrangement of the animals organs. Not only muscle tissue but digestive organs were preserved along with traces of the circulatory system and even the presence of a ‘protocerebrum’, in other words a brain.

The fossil of Youti yuanshi, a 520-million-year-old arthropod larva. (Credit: YouTube)

The specimen was found in the Yu’anshan formation in the Chinese province of Yunnan and has been described by paleontologists at Durham University and the University of Strathclyde in the UK along with Yunnan University in China. Best of all perhaps, at 520 million years old the specimen of Youti yuanshi comes from the Cambrian period, that time in Earth’s history when animal life was diversifying rapidly and the major groups of animal were becoming clearly defined. Because of this the specimen of Youti yuanshi can also tell us a great deal about the early evolution of what is perhaps the most important group of animals.

Using the latest technology paleontologists have succeeded in examining the internal structure of Youti yuanshi, including discovering its brain. (Credit: Sci.News)

Let’s skip ahead now a couple of hundred million years to the age of the dinosaurs, in particular those long necked, long tailed sauropod dinosaurs that were the largest animals to ever walk the Earth. Now everyone knows that the sauropods were plant eaters, herbivores. Just looking at their massive, kinda awkward bodies and you can tell they weren’t predators chasing down or ambushing their prey. At the same time sauropods don’t possess any kind of offensive weapons like sharp teeth or claws that a predator would need.

Sauropods lived throughout the age of the dinosaurs and came in many sizes. Just by looking at them and you can tell that they were all plant eaters. (Credit: Cell Press)

The biggest land animals today, the elephants are herbivores, to grow so big an animal just has to eat and eat and eat, and that usually means plants, again that indicates that sauropods were plant eaters. One more thing, the teeth of sauropod dinosaurs are peg shaped, good for nipping off plant material but not good for tearing flesh.

Elephants and Rhinos are two of the largest animals existing today and both are plant eaters. It just seems that in order to grow so large it takes a lot of food and that pretty much means plants! (Credit: Rhino Recovery Fund)

Surprisingly however, there has never been any direct, conclusive evidence that sauropods are in fact herbivores. No fossilized fecal material or stomach material, technically known as coprolites or cololites, that are unquestionably associated with a sauropod specimen has ever been found. Until now!

Coprolite is the polite word for fossilized shit. Paleontologists love these fossils because you can tell a great deal about what extinct animals ate by studying their coprolites. The problem is figuring out which extinct animal a particular coprolite belongs to. (Credit: Natural History Museum)

Recently a specimen of the sauropod Diamantinasaurus matildae was excavated from the Winton formation in Queensland, Australia. Dated to between 94 and 101 million years ago the animal was a ten-meter long juvenile. As the researchers from Curtin University and the University of Melbourne, both in Australia, were removing the animal’s bones they came across a mass of fossilized plant material right where the animal’s stomach would be.

Australia has its share of dinosaurs including the large sauropod Diamantinasaurus matildae shown here with the actual bones discovered so far of the species. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Wanting to be absolutely certain the paleontologists carefully examined the area around the plant material and found impressions of skin both above and below the plant fossils, the material was indeed the contents of the animal’s stomach when it had died. Using the latest technology the paleontologists were even able to determine the types of plants D matildae had been eating before it died, while tall conifers seemed to predominate there was still evidence of recently evolved flowering plants, which at that period would have grown closer to the ground.

The actual dig where Diamantinasaurus matildae was excavated showing the location of the animal’s stomach contents. For the first time paleontologists can examine exactly what a sauropod ate and how they ate it. (Credit: ABC News)

One thing that was clear from examining the cololites was that the plant material had been barely chewed, unlike the stomach contents of a modern cow that continuously chews its cud in order to break down the tough plant fibers. It appears that this sauropod at least simply bit off large amounts of leaves and then swallowed them.

It’s thought that, like Giraffes, Sauropods used their long necks to reach up to eat the very highest leaves on trees. Now we know that, at least some sauropods didn’t bother to chew their food but just swallowed it. and kept on eating. (Credit: New Scientist)

Presumably, once in the sauropod’s stomach gut bacteria would have gone to work reducing the plant fibers to a digestible mass. In other words the stomach of this sauropod was something like a fermenting vat for beer or whiskey. Now this is just one specimen of the many species of sauropod dinosaur, just one data point, so other sauropods may have chewed more. Still we have finally unearthed conclusive evidence that sauropods were plant eaters, and we now know something of just how they ate and digested their food.

Beer, and many other substances are fermented in large vats. A sauropod’s stomach may be a lot like that, using yeast and bacteria to do the work of breaking down the animal’s food. (Credit: Garth’s Brew Bar)

There are still many questions about the history of life on this planet, but with every discovery we learn a little bit more. The fun is in the discovery and learning.

Driverless cars are coming to take us where we want to go, but what happens to all of the Taxi drivers, Bus drivers and Truck drivers who are going to lose their jobs?  

It wasn’t so long ago, 2004 in fact that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored the first ever race for driverless vehicles. The idea was to see if University engineering teams or tech companies could actually develop some kind of autonomous road vehicle that would actually complete a course 240 km in length without any obstacles other than the road itself. In other words there were no other vehicles on the course at the same time, no traffic signals to be obeyed and no pedestrians. The only thing that the driverless vehicles had to do was turn at the right places, go straight for the right distances and just get to the finish line without breaking down.

Some of the Autonomous vehicles that took part in DARPA’s road challenge in 2005. We’ve come a long way since then! (Credit: Wired)

Seven University teams participated, none succeeded in reaching the finish line, in fact 11.78 km was the farthest any team succeeded in going before breaking down. The very next year DARPA sponsored a second challenge race with twenty teams participating. This time five vehicles succeeded in completing the 212 km course. The team from Stanford University won the race in a time of six hours and fifty-four minutes while three other teams finished close behind. Excuse the metaphor but that race was the first few steps for the concept of autonomous, computer controlled road vehicles.

The winning vehicle of DARPA’s challenge from Stanford University. Looks a lot like the driverless cars being tested on the streets today! (Credit: NBC News)

Since then the pace to development has been rapid. One by one the problems that a driverless car would encounter on the road have been studied and overcome. The right combination of sensors to detect obstacles, other vehicles, pedestrians and traffic signals, has been determined. At the same time the software necessary to control the driverless cars has been developed.

Driverless cars in the near future may not even have controls for the people inside to take control in any way. (Credit: Bold Business)

Think about the size of that job; think about all of the different situations that cars with drivers face over the course of years. Well, software had to be written to first of all recognize those situations as they were occurring, and then tell the driverless car what to do to avoid an accident. As the engineers developing driverless cars encounter new situations their software will have to be updated.

Think of all of the many ways that car accidents can occur. Engineers developing software for driverless cars have to instruct the computer about what to do in all of those situations, an enormous task. (Credit: Northeast Philadelphia Personal Injury Attorney)

Over the last twenty years those problems have been solved at least to the degree that experimental tests of driverless cars are now being allowed on the streets of several cities. San Francisco California, with Silicon Valley to its south, was a natural place for the first set of tests, which were initially carried out with a human seating behind the wheel ready to take control if the driverless car began to malfunction. Before long similar tests were also being carried out in Los Angeles, Phoenix Arizona and Austin Texas. Currently New York City and Washington, DC are considering petitions to allow autonomous taxi on their streets.

Starting next year my home city of Philadelphia will be included in the testing of Driverless Cars. The future is here! (Credit: WPVI)

The driverless cars now being tested as robotaxis on city streets are no longer the products of University engineering groups. No, with all of the big money to be made by perfecting driverless cars the big tech companies are now the driving force behind the wheel as it were. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has formed a company called Waymo to develop autonomous robotaxis while Amazon formed Zoox. The ride sharing company Uber has partnered with several Chinese tech companies to contribute WeRide and Momenta to bring driverless taxis to both American cities and the cities of Wuhan and Shenzhen in China. There is in fact considerable competition between the US and China, along with the EU, to be the first to develop a fully autonomous road vehicle.

Tesla’s Driverless Cars differ from other companies in having fewer sensors. Is that a good idea? (Credit: ABC News)

The biggest problems facing autonomous vehicles right now are actually not technical but rather legal and public relations. There have been accidents, in one instance in 2018 an autonomous vehicle in Phoenix struck and killed a pedestrian. Some cities have passed ordinances restricting driverless cars, requiring them to have an actual person in the driver’s seat at all times. Many people have safety concerns about driverless cars and are putting pressure on local governments to regulate, if not outright ban them from city streets.

In 2018 a driverless car, with a person behind the wheel who was supposed to be monitoring the vehicle, struck and killed a bicyclist in Phoenix, Arizona. (Credit: ABC News)

Other local governments however have welcomed the testing of autonomous vehicles. The Texas State legislature went so far as to actually pass a law forbidding cities within the state from passing their own laws against driverless cars.

Putting business interests ahead of their people’s safety the Texas State Legislature has passed a law forbidding local communities from interfering in the development of Driverless Cars. (Credit: Texas AFL-CIO)

That is why Austin, Texas has now become the center of driverless car development and why the electric car manufacturer Tesla has decided to begin the testing of their autonomous robotaxi there on the 22nd of June. Despite being one of the most innovative of car manufacturers Tesla is coming rather late to the autonomous vehicle market but their distinct approach could quickly put them in the lead, if it works.

Tesla already provides autonomous features on the cars they sell now. The plan is to simply increase the software to make their cars completely autonomous. Will it work? (Credit: Inside EVs)

You see whereas the driverless cars from Waymo, Zoox and the others are bristling with sensors, cameras, lasers, and radar, the robotaxi from Tesla are only going to use cameras. That will make their vehicles much cheaper than their competitors. Tesla is depending on the data it has downloaded from all of the millions of its cars that are already on the road to develop software that will not need all of those sensors.

Incidentally, Driverless Trucks are also being developed. Just think about one of those big 18-wheelers driving down the highway with nobody at the wheel! (Credit: Weather Channel)

It’s a big gamble, because safety is the issue. How well will Tesla’s cameras work in low light, or virtually no light situations, well enough to see other vehicles or pedestrians? What about bad weather, raindrops getting on the camera’s lens or fog simply making it impossible to see anything. Can the engineers at Tesla develop software good enough to ‘see in the dark’, and what will the software make the car do when vision really does become obscured?

Since Tesla’s Driverless Cars are only going to have cameras as sensors I hope the software tells them to pull over when it gets this foggy! (Credit: Media and MG Life)

At this moment Tesla in involved in several court cases where the autonomous features it already integrates into its cars may have caused accidents. If their software just cannot make up for the lack of sensors then Tesla will take a big hit and fall far behind in the competition to prefect driverless cars.

Waymo’s self-driving cars are loaded with sensors. This makes them more expensive, but much safer in my opinion. (Credit: Business Insider)

Nevertheless, driverless cars are going to happen, whether Tesla succeeds or not. The progress that has been made is tremendous and in just a few years there will be robotaxi in every city, then robotrucks hauling shipments on the highways, Amazon is already experimenting with autonomous delivery trucks. And there are already robobuses being tried out in several European cities.

A WeRide Robobus in Zurich, Switzerland. The move to autonomous vehicles is all over the world and growing. (Credit: Interesting Engineering)

No, the big problem with driverless cars isn’t technical, or legal or even public relations. It’s what’s going to happen to the millions of truck drivers, cab drivers and bus drivers who are going to lose their jobs to robots! Don’t get me wrong, I’m pro-robot, I want robots to do the low skill, repetitive, boring jobs that waste a human soul. However just replacing a person with a robot and then simply throwing that person into the gutter to fend for themselves is a much bigger waste.

With all of the progress being made with autonomous vehicles lots of cab drivers, bus drivers and truck drivers are going to be out of jobs. Is anybody planning for what those people are going to do to make a living? (Credit: Equitable Growth)

We need to start making long term plans for what is going to happen to the large fraction of our populace that are going to be badly hurt by the coming AI/Robot revolution. Wouldn’t it be nice if our government officials gave a damn about that problem and tried to do something before all those workers get laid off instead of fighting amongst themselves, or starting wars!

Climate Change and the increasing number of Weather related Disasters: July 2025. 

The last two years, 2023 and 2024 have been simply the hottest years ever recorded for our planet with last year being so hot that the planet as a whole broke the 1.5ºC above the pre-Industrial averages limit that scientists are convinced will bring on worldwide disasters. In fact every month since July of 2023 has been hotter than 1.5ºC above the world’s average for that month during the 19th Century. This year the world’s temperature was expected to moderate slightly as an El-Ninó condition in the Pacific being replaced by a La Niná but the steady rise in temperature due to our continued emissions of greenhouse gasses meant that 2025 would still be hot, just hopefully not as hot as 2025.

The World’s temperature rise has become so obvious that even a fool should be alarmed. The scary part is that we have entered the exponentially increasing phase meaning things are going to get even worse more quickly going forward. (Credit: Berkeley Earth)

Nevertheless 2025 has already had its share of weather related disasters, from the wildfires that swept Los Angeles to major flooding events to severe outbreaks of Tornadoes. Hurricane season is just beginning, and this year is expected to be a busy one, and already the US has suffered from numerous episodes of severe weather strengthened by climate change.

When I was young we were still in the right-hand side of this picture. I’m afraid that by the time I die the whole world will be in the left-hand side! (Credit: As You Sow)

The year was only a few days old when the first disaster suddenly struck in the form of a series of wildfires that broke out in Los Angeles and surrounding communities. Within hours two of the fires, the Palisades and Eaton fires had destroyed hundreds of homes and would go on burning for weeks destroying more than 16,000 structures. The total damage caused by the LA fires as a whole has been estimated to be somewhere between $35 and $45 Billion dollars making it the third costliest natural disaster in US history after only Hurricanes Katrina ($102 Billion) and Ian ($56 Billion).

Thirty people died, over 16,000 buildings destroyed and the long term health damage is still unknown. That’s the cost of climate change in Los Angeles this year. Who knows when it will be coming for you! (Credit: Science)

Now LA has often the location for wildfires as its long dry summers cause vegetation in the nearby hills to die and the Santa Ana winds from the north both fuel and spread whatever flames get started. The extreme severity of this year’s fires however were undoubtedly due to climate change as last summer’s heat and drought set records throughout the southwestern US. Even the strength of the Santa Ana winds was above average, helping to spread the fires further and faster than in other years. The added strength of those winds is again likely due to climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

The wildfires of January 2025 destroyed large sections of our second largest city. To be honest LA often has fires but that’s what global warming does, it just makes the kind of weather we’ve always had more severe, more extreme. (Credit: Santa Clarita Valley Signal)

Then, starting in April it was the middle of the country’s turn as a series of severe storms caused destruction from Texas in the south to Illinois in the north, from Colorado in the west to Georgia in the east. Springtime in those areas often brings strong storms and tornadoes as warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico moves north and runs headlong into dry, cool air coming down from Canada. That’s why the plains states are known as tornado alley.

What used to be called tornado alley was the area from Minnesota in the north down to Texas in the south. One thing that climate change seems to be doing, in addition to increasing the number and strength of tornadoes is to shift the area of most tornadoes east to the Mississippi valley. (Credit: KMTV)

Thanks to global warming however the both the water and the air of Gulf set records for high temperatures last year leading to increased ocean evaporation that supercharged with moisture the air before it moves north. With record amounts of both water vapour and energy this year’s storms have triggered massive flooding and catastrophic winds, both tornado and straight line, that have been causing destruction on an almost daily basis.

If 1 degree Fahrenheit equals 4% more moisture in the air, then the 3 degrees Fahrenheit (equal to 1.5 degrees C) increase due to global warming means 12% more water in the atmosphere, 12% more rain and going by this year’s disasters more than a 12% increase in flooding deaths and destruction. (Credit: Climate Central)

The twin calamities of tornado winds and rising floodwaters can even leave people not knowing how to protect themselves. Think about it, in a tornado warning you are supposed to get underground for protection but in a flash flood warning you need to get as high up as possible. What do you do when both warnings are issued for your location at the same time? This is something that has happened over a hundred times so far this year.

What do you do when you get a tornado warning and a flood warning at the same time? When a tornado is threating you’re supposed to get underground but that’s the worst thing you can do during a flood! A lot of people have had to make that choice so far this year. (Credit: KSDK)

From the 3rd to the 6th of April a series of storms lashed the Mississippi valley leading to numerous flood and tornado warnings. The flooding was responsible for more than eight deaths while hundreds if not thousands of homes were damaged. Then, just a little more than a month later on the 15th and 16th of May another series of storms unleashed dozens of powerful tornadoes. One tornado moved through the city of St. Louis killing 5 and destroying over 5,000 structures. Another tornado struck the town of London, Kentucky killing 18. While those days may have seen the greatest number and intensity of tornadoes so far this year nearly every day since March there has been a handful of tornado and severe storm warnings issued by the National Weather Service.

The path of the tornado that struck London, Kentucky is clearly visible in this ariel view. This was just one of multiple tornadoes that struck on the 15th and 16th of May across the Midwest. (Credit: Newsweek)

Meanwhile to the north fire season in Canada is well underway with over a hundred and thirty wildfires burning over eight million acres of forest, an area greater than the size of the state Delaware. Those same winds that are triggering the tornadoes are now bringing the smoke from those fires south into the US impacting the health of millions of people. Because of this air quality alerts have now joined tornado warnings, flash flood warnings and severe weather threats as a daily occurrence somewhere in this country.

Trump and his allies want to strengthen our borders but the smoke from wildfires doesn’t care about nation states. The smoke from Canadian wildfires is coming south affecting the health of millions of US citizens. (Credit: ABC7 Chicago)

Of course the biggest weather related disaster of the year continues to unfold in the hill country of central Texas where tremendous rainfall caused the Guadalupe River to rise by 10m in an hour in some places. In addition to the homes that damaged or carried away there were several summer camps along the riverbanks whose campers apparently did not receive adequate warning of the floodwaters rising around them. At present more than 134 people are confirmed dead while another 100 are still missing, making this flood one of the deadliest in the last century.

Again, we can put up ‘No Trespassing’ signs but nature doesn’t care about our laws. Just one image of the flooding in Kerr County, Texas that took so many lives over the 4th of July weekend. (Credit: MSN)

While there can be little doubt that global warming played a role in the intensity of the flooding in Kerr, County and its surrounding area there is more to the story than just climate change. For years residents along the Guadalupe have asked their state government to set up a network of sirens along the river to warn people in the event of a flood, which the river has a long history of. Those requests have gone unanswered by a state legislature that is more interested in keeping out illegal migrants than protecting its citizens from natural disasters.

The Guadalupe River is known for its flood potential. Instead of installing warning sirens to protect their own people the Texas State legislature decided to spend billions trying to keep out illegal migrants from Mexico. (Credit: National Weather Service)

Also, thanks to Trump’s recent budget cuts FEMA’s response to the disaster has been severally criticized. All in all the disaster in Texas highlights the way politicians whose greatest concern is low taxes and small government are putting people’s lives at risk. The only thing such politicians are willing to spend on the people who suffer because of their incompetence is ‘thoughts and prayers’.

Again, the money that used to help people suffering from a natural disaster is now being used to round up and deport people whose only crime is being in this country. (Credit: YouTube)

Now we have the start of Hurricane season, and again this year is forecast to be above average. Not that that means wildfire season or tornado season is over. We could easily have forests burning out west and up north at the same time that tornadoes are ravaging the middle of the country all while hurricanes are slamming into the Gulf or Atlantic coasts.

The 21 names for this year’s Atlantic hurricane season. It’s just starting, and we’ve already used the first three names. (Credit: The Weather Network)

Global warming caused by our emissions of greenhouse gasses is making the entire world hotter and heat is a form of energy, a particularly violent form of energy. If we don’t stop it these disasters are only going to get worse.

How did the Universe begin, or did it ever begin, and how will be end, if it does ever end? 

We’ve all heard of the ‘Big Bang Theory’, there was even a TV show by that name. The idea that billions of years ago everything that we see in all of Universe suddenly exploded into existence is one of those scientific concepts that has actually managed to creep into the popular consciousness. With all of the effort and discoveries that are being made to try to understand just what was the Big Bang and what caused it to happen I decided in this post to review the past century of research so that any future posts I make about our Universe as a whole will make sense.

A bit more than just a TV show the Big Bang Theory is a quick description of how reality itself got to be the way it is now. How our Universe began as it were. (Credit: Entertainment Weekly)

Well it all started with the astronomer Edwin Hubble, for whom the Hubble space telescope is named. Just about one hundred years ago Hubble was trying to determine if the ‘fuzzy nebula’ that astronomers saw all over the sky were objects within our own Milky Way galaxy or galaxies in their own right. By the way the word ‘galaxy’ is just Greek for ‘Milky Way’.

Possibly the most famous astronomer since Galileo, Edwin Hubble was also a star athlete at the University of Chicago where he studied Mathematics and Astronomy. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Now measuring distances to objects far outside our Solar System is not easy. Think about it, how would you measure the distance to the Moon, our nearest neighbor. Hubble searched for months to find a particular type of star in the largest nebula Andromeda, a kind of star whose absolute brightness astronomers knew. Then, by measuring that star’s apparent brightness in our sky a simple formula would allow him to calculate the distance to that star and therefore Andromeda. When he found such a star it turned out that Andromeda was far outside the Milky Way, as were many other nebula, they were all galaxies like the Milky Way. In one stroke Hubble had made the Universe many times larger.

In the upper right hand corner the ‘VAR’ handwritten by Hubble indicates a Cephid variable star whose distance Hubble could measure and which told him that Andromeda was far outside our galaxy and in fact a galaxy of its own. (Credit: Sky and Telescope)

Hubble then decided to measure how fast all those galaxies were moving towards, or away from our galaxy, their radial velocity. Turns out that measuring the radial velocity of a celestial object is actually much easier than measuring its distance because of something called the Doppler effect.

Everybody is familiar with the way sounds moving towards us are higher pitched while sounds moving away are lower pitched. This is the Doppler effect and it works for light as well allowing astronomers to measure whether an object in space is moving towards us or away from us and at what speed. (Credit: Science Ready)

If you’ve never heard of the Doppler effect you still know what it is. You’ve noticed it anytime you were walking down the sidewalk and you heard an ambulance or other emergency vehicle coming towards you with its siren blaring. Remember how the high-pitched sound of the siren drops in tone the instant the vehicle goes past you. That’s the Doppler effect and it’s true of light as well. The light from a star moving toward Earth will get shifted toward the blue part of the spectrum while light from a star moving away will get shifted to the red.

The Doppler effect works for the spectral lines given out by stars. Red shifted means they are moving away while blue shifted means they are moving towards us. What Hubble found was that virtually all the galaxies were moving away, the entire Universe was expanding! (Credit: Lumen Learning)

By measuring the amount of the shift Hubble soon determined the radial velocity of dozens of galaxies and discovered that with the exception of a few of the closest galaxies they were all moving away from the Milky Way. All of the galaxies were moving apart, Hubble had not only made the Universe much larger but had discovered that it was expanding.

As a part of his work on galaxies Hubble also developed a classification system of the various types. Turns out that galactic evolution is a bit more complicated than this! (Credit: Britannica)

Now think about it, if all of the galaxies are moving farther apart then in the past they must have been closer together. The farther in the past the closer the galaxies were until a some time, billions of years ago all of the galaxies, and whatever else there is in the Universe, was all concentrated in space and exploded outward, hence ‘The Big Bang’. When I was young back in the 1960s it was thought that the Big Bang had occurred about 7.5 billion years ago but as astronomers made better measurements they revised their estimate to about 13.5 billion years ago and that value has been stable now for about 40 years.

Making precise measurements of objects light years away of further is not easy. The first measurements of the age of our Universe put it at 5-7 billion years but in the 1980s better measurements put it at around 12-15 billion years and today we have settled on around 13.5 billion, give or take a hundred million years. (Credit: NASA Science)

Then, in the 1950s physicists realized that the original big bang must have been so hot, billions of degrees, that there must still be some leftover heat from that ultimate explosion. (Think about it, you roast a chicken for dinner one night and even if you turn off the oven when the chicken is cooked it still feels a little warm after you finish eating dinner!) That leftover heat, called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) was discovered by accident in 1965 and has been intensely studied ever since.

The Cosmic Microwave Background or CMB. This is a measurement of the heat leftover from the time of the big bang. Our Universe’s baby picture as it were. (Credit: Wikipedia)

So, was the Big Bang the moment of creation itself? Was there nothing before the Big Bang and then suddenly there was everything? Well as you might guess scientists really don’t like the idea of miracles so they immediately began thinking about what kind of Universe could have existed before, and leading to, the Big Bang. The simplest idea is that before the expanding Universe there was a contracting Universe, a Big Crunch in other words where the galaxies hurtled towards each other collapsing into a single object of extreme density, pressure and temperature that then rebounded as the Big Bang.

According to the ‘Big Crunch Theory’ there was a universe similar to our own before the big bang. The difference is that this other universe was contracting, getting smaller with galaxies moving towards each other until all matter was concentrated into a singularity that then exploded into our universe! The question then is, will our Universe come to stop someday and then begin contracting into another Big Crunch? (Credit: Sites at Penn State)

Another interesting model suggested that there was no actual moment of the Big Bang but rather the Universe just keeps getting smaller and smaller, and denser and hotter as you go further back in time without it ever reaching zero in size or infinity in density and temperature. In this scenario what we see as the CMB is the time when the Universe became large enough and cool enough that it was no longer incandescent.

Going into negative numbers an exponential function gets smaller and smaller the further negative you go, but it never quite goes to zero! Some theoretical astronomers think this is the way our Universe actually began and what we call the big bang occurred around x=0 where the function started shooting upwards. (Credit: Professor Dave Explains)

In either case the force of gravity was assumed to be causing the rate of expansion to slow down, and the question was whether or not gravity was strong enough to eventually bring the expansion to a halt. That would then begin a contraction that would inevitably lead to another Big Crunch. Or was the expansion fast enough so that the Universe had ‘escape velocity’ and the expansion would go on forever until all of the galaxies were so far apart as to be alone, with stars that had used up all their nuclear fuel. In other words a cold, dead, empty Universe.

If you think about it the Universe is already a pretty cold, dead, empty place. The distance between the stars and galaxies is immense and the universe itself is pretty dark. As billions, then trillions of years go by the universe will only get colder and darker as the stars burn out and the galaxies continue to move apart. (Credit: Astronomy Magazine)

In the 1990s two teams of astronomers decided to measure just how much the expansion was slowing down due to gravity. What they discovered astounded the world because in fact the expansion was accelerating, some unknown force, which was quickly called ‘Dark Energy’ was making the Universe fly apart faster.

In the 1990s astronomers were shocked to discover that the expansion of the Universe was actually increasing. Some kind of pressure is forcing space itself to expand. We don’t have any idea what it is so we call it ‘Dark Energy’. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In fact Einstein had predicted just such a thing. In his equations for General Relativity there was a place for a constant that would produce a kind of repulsive form of gravity and so following Einstein cosmologists then began adding his constant λ to their equations. Was Dark Energy a constant however, or did it change with time? If Dark Energy got stronger with time the entire Universe could get caught in a ‘Big Rip’ where eventually every particle would be an infinite distance from any other particle. Or, if Dark Energy was getting weaker with time then there was still a chance that the expansion of the Universe could come to a halt and start a contraction.

If Dark Energy increases in strength, then the Universe could eventually see a ‘Big Rip’ where literally every individual elementary particle could push away every other particle. An ultimate empty Universe. (Credit: New Scientist)

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is searching for just that answer. A collaboration of over a hundred astronomers from ninety different institutions DES has spent the last five years using the technique that originally discovered Dark Energy to attempt to measure its value at different periods of the Universe. The release of their full data has not resolved the problem for while the best fit to their findings is a Dark Energy that is growing weaker with time a purely constant Dark Energy cannot be ruler out either. As often happens in astronomy more data is needed to make a final judgment. 

The portion of the sky observed by the Dark Energy Survey. Over 30 million galaxies were observed and their redshift versus distance measured to determine if Dark Energy is getting stronger or weaker or staying the same. At the moment it appears to be getting weaker but staying the same is still within the margin of error! (Credit: Dark Energy Survey)

That’s kind of the state of our knowledge at present. In an upcoming post I’ll try to describe some of the wild ideas that are being considered for modeling the Big Bang.

Paleontology News for May 2025. 

Three interesting stories about ancient life have come to my attention so I thought I’d pass them along. As usual I’ll begin with the oldest and move forward in time.

Like any good story the history of life should be told from start to finish. To have some idea of where we’re going, we need to understand where we’ve come from! (Credit: th.bing.com)

In fact I have something of a personal interest in my first story because I have met all of the principle scientists involved in the new research. The research concerns Tiktaalik roseae, a middle Devonian aged fish, about 375 million years ago, which is our best guess at being the first fish to climb out of water and walk on land. T roseae was first discovered back in 2004 on Ellesmere Island in Canada’s far north by paleontologists Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences along with Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago.

The actual fossil of Tiktaalik rosae (r) with a reconstruction (l), inset map shows where in Canada’s far north the fossil was unearthed. (Credit: Understanding Evolution)

Referring to the image below T roseae is a flat-headed fish with large, muscular ‘lobe fins’. It is thought that T roseae lived in shallow, muddy streams and bogs and used its muscular fins to crawl along the bottom. It is also thought that during dry periods the fish could use those fins to crawl out of an isolated, evaporating mud hole and propel itself to a larger body of water. That’s what makes T roseae the first vertebrate creature to walk on land.

The first specimens of T rosae consisted of only the front half of the animal, notice how the above illustration doesn’t show much of the back. Because of this it was thought that on land Tiktaalik mostly flopped along on its two muscular front flippers. (Credit: Futurity.org)

Now the first specimens of T roseae to be unearthed and analyzed were only partial skeletons of the animal’s front, the head to just past the front fins. Based on those fossils T roseae was described as having a strong, muscular rib cage with ‘shoulder like’ bones connecting to the front fin bones. The rear half of T roseae was expected to be more fishlike with a backbone comprised of a series of identical vertebrae. T roseae’s power to walk, whether on land or on a stream bottom was thought to come from the front fins.

The latest fossil remains of T rosae brought back three years ago. This specimen clearly shows that Tiktaalik’s rear fins are every bit as muscular as its front fins. (Credit: Eberly College of Science – Penn State University)

Three years ago however the researchers made another expedition up to Canada’s Artic regions and brought back several new, more complete specimens of T roseae. The new specimens have now been cleaned and analyzed by Thomas Stewart of Penn State University. Using high-resolution mico-CT scans Stewart was for the first time able to see the rear portion of T roseae and discovered bones that were different from normal vertebrae, bones which were connected to the bones of the rear fins. In other words, the bones formed a kind of early version of a pelvis, a kind of bony structure no modern fish has!

Paleontologist Thomas Stewart of the Pennsylvania State University. (Credit: Eberly College of Science – Penn State)

This finding makes T roseae look like it was even more capable of spending brief periods of time on land than before. With rear fins that could also supply power T roseae may have walked further and perhaps even lifted itself up onto its four ‘proto-legs’ in order to get a better look around.

According to the latest fossil finds this is a more accurate representation of Tiktaalik walking across the land. (Credit: Cosmos Magazine)

Tiktaalik may have been the first vertebrate to walk on land but millions of years before that the arthropods had already adapted to life out of the water. Then as now arthropods were the most populous and diverse of the all of the kinds of animals on Earth. Throughout our planet’s history they have evolved into a bewildering array of creatures.

There is simply no other group of animals as diverse as the arthropods. (Credit: Exploringnature.org)

Perhaps the most successful of all of the arthropods is the common ant, which is itself a misnomer because there are an estimated 100,000 different species of ant as the animals have adapted to nearly all of our planet’s environments. Ants are of course social animals, related to both bees and wasps, all of which are thought to have evolved from a wasp like ancestor more than 100 million years ago.

Ant colonies can be very large and complex structures. How such tiny creatures, with equally tiny brains ever live in, let alone construct such structures is a big question. (Credit: Britannica Kids)

Just what part of the world ants first appeared has been a contentious issue with the oldest known specimens of ant coming from France and Myanmar indicating that ants evolved in the northern hemisphere. Those fossils were dated to just about 100 million years ago. Collectively those early ants are known as ‘Hell Ants’ because they possessed large, fearsome mandibles capable of ripping apart other insects.

Encased in amber of millions of years a ‘Hell Ant’ is using its powerful mandibles to chow down on another insect. These ants were the first type of ant to evolve about 100 million years ago. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

Now a new specimen of Hell ant has been discovered in Brazil from geologic strata dated to 113 million years ago by paleontologists at the University of São Paulo. This new specimen not only pushes back the evolution of ants by 13 million years but now suggests that they evolved in the southern hemisphere on the ancient super continent of Gondwana. Whether this new specimen, which has been named Vulcanidris cratensis will remain the oldest known ant remains to be seen, but you can be certain that paleontologists will keep searching for more specimens.

One of the Hell Ant specimens found in Brazil. Are these the first ants ever to evolve or will some other paleontologist find even earlier specimens? That’s always the question. (Credit: Sci.News)

My final story today concerns everybody’s favourite candidate for the most fearsome beast of all time, Tyrannosaurus rex or T rex for short. As arguably the best known extinct animal ever you won’t be surprised to know that paleontologists are working hard to not only learn all the can about T rex as a species but about T rex’s ancestors as well.

Everybody’s favourite bad boy the T rex may have been the top predator of all time. (Credit: St. Louis Science Center)

As to T rex itself, it appears that the species was confined to the continent of North America. Of the dozens of T rex fossils unearthed to date all have come from North America and most from the western part of the continent. So, it appears certain that the species T rex evolved here in North America but were its ancestors also native to our continent?

About 70 million years ago a large amount of North America was under water in the ‘Western Interior Seaway’. Fossils of T rex have only ever been found in the western land mass called Laramidia. (Credit: The Cretaceous Atlas)

Not so according to a new survey of previous discoveries conducted by researchers at the Universities of Oxford, Pittsburgh, Aberdeen, Arizona, Anglia Ruskin, Oklahoma and Wyoming. Surveying the basic characteristics of all known late cretaceous theropod dinosaurs the paleontologists concluded that the ‘grandfather’ species for T rex arrived in North America from Asia via a land bridge connecting Alaska to Siberia. (Sounds like same path by which we think the original Native Americans came to North America.)

Many times over the last 100 million years sea levels dropped and a land bridge between Alaska and Siberia became passable. It is thought that such a land bridge allowed the Native Americans to reach the western hemisphere. Did the ancestors of T rex do the same thing? (Credit: National Park Service)

   Another factor the scientists studied is why the tyrannosaurids and the closely related megaraptors came to dominate the late cretaceous period. About 92 million years ago, a period known as the cretaceous thermal maximum, the top predator slot was held by a group of theropods known as the carchrodontosaurids.

Before T rex the top predators were a group of related theropod dinosaurs called Carchrodontosaurids. (Credit: Reddit)

After that period of time there was a worldwide cooling of Earth’s temperature so the paleontologists theorize that the tyrannosaurids and megaraptors had some physiological advantage, possibly feathers or warm bloodiness, that allowed them to better adapt to the cooler climate. So it was that after the thermal maximum that the tyrannosaurids in the northern hemisphere and the megaraptors in the southern grew to the enormous size that makes them the killer dinosaur par excellence.

Call me an Illegal Alien will ya. Waddaya gonna do about it? (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

One thing about the study worries me however, if the original tyrannosaurids came from Asia, without a visa, I just hope Trump doesn’t find out that they’re illegal aliens. On the other hand I think that I’d love to see Trump try to deport a Tyrannosaurus rex!

Space news for June 2025: Is it just me or does it Seem like Politics is Creeping into Everything? 

Frequent readers of this blog know that ‘Space News’ is probably my most common topic and they have come to expect stories about space missions and spacecraft, both manned and unmanned, past, present and future. Not this time however because thanks to Trump’s determination to screw up every department of our government the big news about space this month all deals with politics and budgets.

Is it just me or does it seem like all our wonderful leaders do anymore is fight each other! (Credit: Southwest Times Record)

Trump wants another big tax cut for himself and his billionaire buddies, a tax cut that is estimated to add more than another $3 Trillion dollars to our national debt. The sheer recklessness of this plan has already caused the credit agency Moody’s to downgrade our nation’s credit rating from its triple ‘A’ position and Moody’s was the last of the big credit agencies to give US bonds such a high rating. In order to minimize the increase to the deficit somewhat Republicans in congress are searching high and low for cuts that they can make in federal spending. They can’t cut back on Social Security or Medicare, that would be political suicide, and Trump actually wants to increase the military budget so every other government agency is being targeted for massive cutbacks.

Along with all of these provisions Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill includes cuts to almost every government department, including NASA. (Credit: ABC News)

That includes NASA. A proposed budget for the space agency in 2026 has been released and it contains a overall reduction of nearly 20% in NASA’s resources, much of which will come from the science budget. Overall NASA’s budget would drop from its current $25 billion to less than $20 billion but the science budget, the best part, the part of NASA that has achieved the most notable discoveries over the last twenty-five years, would see its budget slashed from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion.

NASA’s budget is divided into several categories. The biggest cuts planned by the Trump Administration would be to the Science section. In other words, the fun stuff! (Credit: The Planetary Society)

Specific details include cutting the astrophysics budget by two thirds to $487 million and the heliophysics budget by even more to just $455 million. Earth science would see its funding cut in half to $1.033 billion and planetary science would suffer a thirty percent drop to $1.929 billion. Fortunately most existing science programs like the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes along with the Mars rover Perseverance and Parker Solar Probe would continue to be funded, all be it at a lower level.

While both the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes would see their budgets cut other planned space telescopes, like the Nancy Grace Roman, would be cut entirely! (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

Not so new programs like the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope and the Mars Sample Return (MSR), which could be canceled entirely. This is especially bad for the Nancy Grace Roman telescope, which has finished construction and is now undergoing testing in preparation for a scheduled launch as early as 2026. Any missions beyond that, for example proposed helicopters for both Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan probably won’t even get off of the drawing board because there simple won’t be any money to fund them.

The success of the little Mars ‘copter Ingenuity has inspired NASA to start planning bigger, more autonomous helicopters for both Mars and Saturn’s Moon Titan. Those plans will be dead in the water if Trump gets his way! (Credit: Science Alert)

How much these budget cuts will effect manned missions remains to be seen, but you can bet that there won’t be an increase over the number that are currently planned. At the moment NASA still intends to continue to man the International Space Station (ISS) until it is de-orbited in the year 2030 and to proceed with the Artemis Lunar program at a rate of about one mission per year. In fact Lockheed-Martin has recently delivered the Mission 2 Orion manned capsule to NASA for a possible mission in early 2026.

The Orion capsule for the Artemis mission 2 has completed construction and is now undergoing testing. But will it ever actually fly? (Credit: Space)

However it must be remembered that Elon Musk, the head of Trump’s Department Of Government Efficiency or DOGE, who just happens to be the CEO of Space X, has publicly declared that the ISS should be de-orbited as soon as possible. There are also rumours that Trump will cancel the Space Launch System (SLS), the big and very expensive rocket that will take the Artemis astronauts to the Moon, immediately after the mission that actually puts Americans back on the Moon. That would be just like Trump, he’d make a big deal about how he was the one who got us back to the Moon and then cancel any further missions, goodbye lunar base!

NASA had hoped that this time once we got to the Moon we’d stay there, eventually building a Lunar Base. Again Trump’s cuts will make that dream impossible. (Credit: en.wikipedia.com)

And now Trump and Elon have had a big bust up over Musk’s criticism of how the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ will add more than three trillion dollars to the nation’s debt. Like a pair of immature children the two have been trading insults and threats including Trump’s to cancel all of Musk’s federal contracts, which would leave NASA with no way to get its astronauts to the ISS. And don’t forget that Space X is also building the Lunar lander for the Artemis program. Canceling that contract would leave NASA without a vehicle to actually put astronauts on the Moon’s surface.

Children say nasty things about each other behind the other’s back. Trump and Musk do it on Twitter. Not much difference really! (Credit: The New York Times)

The exploration of space requires long-term planning and financial commitment, which is difficult to do when you’re at the mercy of politicians who are incapable of thinking past the next election. And now we are strapped with a president whose attention span is that of a five year old. All of which makes it a good bet that the next person to set foot on the Moon will be Chinese!

It’s your choice America. We’re ahead right now but China is catching up. (Credit: The Conversation)

Speaking of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope the spacecraft has completed its assembly and is now undergoing final testing, including shock and thermal testing in a giant vacuum chamber. The testing is taking place at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which is also slated to be closed due the budget cuts discussed above. Once the testing is completed the Space Telescope will be shipped to the Kennedy Space Center where it will be prepared for a launch as soon as late fall of next year, 2026. Assuming of course, it doesn’t just get canceled after all of the money that’s already been spent on it!

Named for the astronomer who convinced NASA to build the Hubble Space Telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study Dark Energy while at the same time search for exo-planets. It has completed construction and is currently undergoing testing but Trump’s budget would cancel its launch, wasting all of the money that’s already been spent on it! (Credit: Space)

One final note, which probably also has something to do with the budget cuts is that as of June 12th NASA will no longer be supporting its ‘Spot the Station’ website! For several decades now the information available on this website has enabled people from around the World to experience something of space exploration as they watched the ISS fly across the sky.

This is what NASA’s ‘Spot the Station’ website used to look like, giving all of the details you needed to be able to watch the ISS as it traveled overhead. No more, it site is gone now and although you can download the app for your phone it’s just one less way our kids can learn about the Universe above their heads! (Credit: Research Parent)

Well no longer, the website will be closed as of June 12th. NASA plans to continue their mobile app so you can still get the information you need to watch the ISS pass overhead but let’s be honest, we should have more ways to get people, especially young people interested in space and science. Instead, we’ll now have one less way!

Climate Change and the increasing number of Weather related Disasters: June 2025.

The last two years, 2023 and 2024 have been simply the hottest years ever recorded for our planet with last year being so hot that the planet as a whole broke the 1.5ºC above pre-Industrial averages limit that scientists are convinced will bring on worldwide disasters. In fact every month since July of 2023 has been hotter than 1.5ºC above the world’s average for that month during the 19th Century. This year the world’s temperature was expected to moderate slightly as an El-Ninó condition in the Pacific has been replaced by a La Niná but the steady rise in temperature due to our continued emissions of greenhouse gasses means that 2025 will still be hot, just hopefully not as hot as 2024.

It’s easy to see why scientists like to compare our rising temperatures to those of the 19th Century. The last ten years have in fact been the hottest ever recorded and that trend is certain to continue. (Credit: New York Times)


Nevertheless 2025 has already had its share of weather related disasters, from the wildfires that swept Los Angeles to major flooding events to severe outbreaks of Tornadoes. Hurricane season is just beginning, and this year is expected to be a busy one, but already the US has suffered from numerous episodes of severe weather strengthened by climate change.
The year was only a few days old when the first disaster suddenly struck in the form of a series of wildfires that broke out in Los Angeles and surrounding communities. Within hours two of the fires, the Palisades and Eaton fires had destroyed hundreds of homes and would go on burning for weeks destroying a total of more than 18,000 structures. The total damage caused by the LA fires as a whole has been estimated to be somewhere between $35 and $45 Billion dollars making it the third costliest natural disaster in US history after only Hurricanes Katrina ($102 Billion) and Ian ($56 Billion).

Southern California is usually a raher dry region but the drought that started in 2024 was the worst ever, fueling the LA fires of January 2025
Just Two of the thousands of homes destroyed by the January fires in LA. (Credit: Phys.org)

Now LA has often the location for wildfires as its long dry summers cause vegetation in the nearby hills to die and the Santa Ana winds from the north both fuel and spread whatever flames get started. The extreme severity of this year’s fires however were undoubtedly due to climate change as last summer’s heat and drought set records throughout the southwestern US. Even the strength of the Santa Ana winds was above average, helping to spread the fires further and faster than in other years. The added strength of those winds is again likely due to climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

The LA Fires weren’t just a single fire but a series of blazes of the outlying areas north and west of LA. (Credit:CERT-LA)


Then, starting in April it was the middle of the country’s turn as a series of severe storms caused destruction from Texas in the south to Illinois in the north, from Colorado in the west to Georgia in the east. Springtime in those areas often brings strong storms and tornadoes as warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico moves north and runs headlong into dry, cool air coming down from Canada. That’s why the plains states are known as tornado alley.
Thanks to global warming however the both the water and the air of the Gulf set records for high temperatures last year leading to increased ocean evaporation that supercharged with moisture the air before it moves north. With record amounts of both water vapour and energy this year’s storms have triggered massive flooding and catastrophic winds, both tornado and straight line, that have been causing destruction on an almost daily basis.

At one point on the 16 of March there were 29 Tornado warnings at the same time across the Midwest. (Credit: Weather Channel)


The twin calamities of tornado winds and rising floodwaters can even leave people not knowing how to protect themselves. Think about it, in a tornado warning you are supposed to get underground for protection but in a flash flood warning you need to get as high up as possible. What do you do when both warnings are issued for your location at the same time? This is something that has happened over a hundred times so far this year.

The city of Little Rock was being subjected to massive flooding at the same time as tornado warnings were being issued. What would you do in the situation? (Credit: KGW)


There was flooding up and down the Mississippi valley in early April along with numerous Tornadoes and other severe weather. (Credit: Weather Channel)

From the 3rd to the 6th of April a series of storms lashed the Mississippi valley leading to numerous flood and tornado warnings. The flooding was responsible for more than eight deaths while hundreds if not thousands of homes were damaged. Then, just a little more than a month later on the 15th and 16th of May another series of storms unleashed dozens of powerful tornadoes. One tornado moved through the city of St. Louis killing 5 and destroying over 5,000 structures. Another tornado struck the town of London, Kentucky killing 18. While those days may have seen the greatest number and intensity of tornadoes so far this year nearly every day since March there has been a handful of tornado and severe storm warnings issued by the National Weather Service.

The statistics on the tornado that struck London, Kentucky on the 16th of May killing 18 people. (Credit: Weather Channel)


Meanwhile to the north fire season in Canada is well underway with over a hundred and thirty wildfires burning over eight million acres of forest, an area greater than the size of the state Delaware. Those same winds that triggered the tornadoes are now also bringing the smoke from those fires south into the US impacting the health of millions of people. Because of this air quality alerts have now joined tornado warnings, flash flood warnings and severe weather threats as a daily occurrence somewhere in this country.

The smoke from the massive fires in Canada is coming across the border into the US no matter what the politicians say about illegal immigration! (Credit: The New York Times)


Now we have the start of Hurricane season, and again this year is forecast to be above average. Not that that means wildfire season or tornado season is over. We could easily have forests burning out west and up north at the same time that tornadoes are ravaging the middle of the country all while hurricanes are slamming into the Gulf or Atlantic coasts.

The number and intensity of the Canadian wildfires is unprecedented for this early in the year. Makes you wonder how bad it’s going to get in the next few months! (Credit: Weather Channel)


Global warming caused by our emissions of greenhouse gasses is making the entire world hotter and heat is a form of energy, a particularly violent form of energy. If we don’t stop it it’s only going to get worse.