Category: Science

Movie Review: The Current War.

There’s a new movie that’s just been released that is not getting the attention it deserves as far as I’m concerned. It’s called ‘The Current War’ and it dramatizes the often bitter but completely non-violent struggle between Thomas Edison, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, and George Westinghouse, played by Michael Shannon. These two titans of the industrial age struggled over which of them would be the first to provide the new technology of electric power to our nation. This contest was between more than two of the most famous industrialists in our history it was a fight between which kind of electricity, Direct Current (DC) or Alternating Current (AC) would be produced and delivered to millions of customers.

Poster for ‘The Current War’. (Credit: Flickering Myth)

You see Edison had succeeded in electrifying a square kilometer of lower Manhattan using the simpler DC. This was the establishment of the first ever electrical power utility and is a large part of Edison’s reputation as an inventor and industrialist. Because of that success Edison became convinced that simpler just made sense.

Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Tom Edison. (Credit: History versus Hollywood)
Michael Shannon plays George Westinghouse. (Credit: History versus Hollywood)

But DC had its drawbacks; the primary one being that it is very difficult to change one DC voltage to another. This meant that Edison could not use dangerous high voltage power lines to transit his power over great distances and then feed lower, safer voltages into people’s home. Because of this limitation Edison needed to build a power plant almost every kilometer, a very costly proposition.

AC traveled much better. An AC power plant could send high voltage power hundreds of kilometers and then use a device called a transformer to lower the voltage down to a safe level in which it could be delivered into a customer’s home. The drawback for AC was that, although motors using DC was simple to build, AC motors were so complicated that no one had managed to invent one. George Westinghouse was convinced however that AC’s advantages made it the superior system and that sooner or later someone would invent an AC motor.

High Voltage Power Lines sending electricity thousands of kilometers is only possible with AC (Credit: T&D World)

‘The Current War’ illustrates all of the engineering back and forth while at the same time showing us something of the personalities of the individuals involved. Both Edison and Westinghouse begin as men of honour. Edison for example steadfastly refuses to invent or work on weapons of war of any kind. As for George Westinghouse, throughout the contest his admiration for Edison is evident, his desire to work together is show on several occasions. However each man is determined to see his system win triggering a battle of technology.

DC Motors are simple and easy to build but are not very efficient. (Credit: Core Electronics)
AC Motors are more complicated but offer greater power and efficiency. (Credit: IndiaMart)

Now ‘The Current War’ is not without problems of its own as a movie. There is one sequence in particular that comes to mind. Several times during the story George Westinghouse has a flashback to an incident that occurred to him during the Civil War. Its not until almost the end of the movie that we find out everything that happened and while the incident does reveal something of Westinghouse’s personality by that time it’s of little interest and the movie would have been better to have eliminated the whole affair.

Then there’s Nikola Tesla, the brilliant Serbian born electrical engineer who finally succeeded in developing an AC motor that actually worked better than any DC motor. It was Tesla’s inventions that allowed Westinghouse and AC to finally prevail. However while in the movie Tesla, played by Nicholas Hoult, appears from nearly the beginning he has little influence on the action until nearly the end. Because of this the character of Tesla distracts from the drama more than enhances it.

Nikola Tesla, played by Nicholas Hoult, is an important figure in the development of electrical power but is not well integrated into ‘The Current War’. (Credit: Time)

Still I heartily recommend ‘The Current War’, if only because it shows how the ‘wars’ that humanity actually wins are those about ideas not gold or territory or dominance. You’d better see it fast however, it’s not doing well at the box office and could disappear soon. Just goes to show how a movie about ideas, about the things that made our modern world a better place to live gets lost amongst all of the explosions and fistfights and good guy, bad guy mentality that makes up all of the Hollywood blockbusters.

Underwater Habitats, what Happened to the Dream of Humans Living in the Oceans?

During all of the celebrations leading up to the 50th anniversary of man’s first landing on the Moon this year I was reminded of another field of scientific exploration that made a lot of news in the 1960s but which has sort of disappeared since then. I’m talking about the idea of people living and working under the oceans and seas of our world, about the possibility of even building underwater cities to colonize the continental shelves that surround the continental landmasses of the Earth.

Underwater cities are the suff of science fiction but in the 1960s people many people thought they would become reality in the near future. (Credit: IMDB)

You think that sounds like science fiction, well wasn’t space travel back then! In fact during the early 1960s the two exploratory efforts of outer space and inner space moved forward in a kind of parallel path. In fact in 1961, the same year as the flights of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard, US Navy diver Robert Stėnuit became the first aquanaut to spend more than 24 hours at a depth of 60m in the ‘Man in the Sea’ project.

The underwater habitat in which Robert Setnuit spent 24 hours at 60m depth. (Credit: Diving Almanac)

 To compliment the space race between the US and Russia there was even an ‘Undersea Race’ between the US and France. That’s right France, in the person of Jacques-Yves Cousteau the developer of the Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus or SCUBA gear. So many of my generation fondly remember Cousteau both from his articles in the National Geographic magazine along with his TV show filmed aboard his ship the Calypso so I’ll talk about his Continental Shelf or ‘Conshelf’ project first.

Oceanographer Jacques Yeves Cousteau invented the SCUBA driver gear and used his profits to spend his life exploring the oceans. (Credit: Totally History)

Cousteau’s program began with Conshelf I in 1962 with two men spending a week at a depth of 10m in the waters off the French city of Marseille. The Conshelf I habitat was a simple pressurized cylinder with an egress hatch that allowed the two man crew to work outside in the water for a minimum of five hours a day. See image below of Conshelf I being readied for installation.

The design of Conshelf 1 was simplicity itself. (Credit: National Geographic)

Then in 1963 Conshelf II was much more ambitious, with two occupied structures and even an underwater garage for a small two-man sub. The larger habitat, see image below, was a starfish shaped base where six men lived and worked for a month. Near the starfish was the round garage for the sub. There was also a smaller two-man cabin at a depth of 25m. The second image shows the basic setup of the entire Conshelf II project.

Conshelf 2 was a multi structure project allowing a half a dozen men to live underwater for a month. (Credit: National Geographic)
The two main structures of Conshelf 2 being readied for placement on the ocean floor. On the right is the starfish living quarters while on the left is the domed garage for the two man sub. (Credit: The Cousteau Society)
Sketch of the interior of the inhabited module in Conshelf 2. (Credit: Cousteau Society)

Conshelf III was Cousteau’s final, most ambitious attempt at living in the depths of the sea. In 1965 six men lived inside a spherical shaped pressure vessel at a depth of over 100m for three weeks. See image below. One of the ways in which Conshelf III was more difficult was that, whereas Conshelf I and II and received power and supplies from the surface Conshelf III was mostly self-sufficient, with few ties to the surface.

Conshelf 3 Being lower into the Ocean. (Credit: Medium)
Sketch of the Interior of Conshelf 3. (Credit: Medium)

Originally Cousteau had planned on continuing the Conshelf project with two more underwater habitats but Conshelf III was to be the French oceanographer’s last project for living on the ocean’s floor. In his three Conshelf experiments Cousteau demonstrated man’s ability to live and perform useful work while living inside the ocean.

Meanwhile the US Navy was conducting a program of its own in underwater habitation under the project name Sealab. The man in charge of Sealab was Dr. George F. Bond, a modest country doctor from North Carolina who had been drafted during the Korean War and quickly became the head of the Navy’s Medical Research Laboratory. Under Dr. Bond the laboratory led the way in studies of breathable gas mixtures that could allow humans to work for longer periods of time at greater depths underwater.

Doctor George F. Bond was the head of the U.S. Navy’s Sealab underwater program. (Credit: Researchgate)

The Navy’s goals in the Sealab program were slightly different that those of the French. The Navy was more interested in perfecting the techniques of deep diving while at the same time studying the psychological and physiological effects of isolation at great depth.

Sealab One, see image below, was placed at a depth of 58m off the coast of Bermuda in 1964. The plan was for four men to live inside the Sealab module for three weeks but due to an approaching storm the mission was cancelled after only 11 days.

Like Conshelf 1, Sealab 1 was a simple cylinder. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Sealab Two, see image below, took place the following year in 1965 and was much more successful. Placed off the coast of California at a depth of 62m it was manned by three separate teams of divers. Each team of nine men spent 15 days in the habitat but one of the team members, Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter spent a record 30 days in the lab. Another interesting aspect of Sealab Two is that a bottlenose dolphin named Tuffy who was an experimental animal with the US Navy Marine Mammal Program assisted the human team members in their work.

Sealab 2 on a dock waiting to be taken out to sea. (Credit: Medium)
Sketch of the interior of Sealab 2. (Credit: www.history.navy.mil)

Sealab Three, which was lowered into 185m of water off San Clemente Island California, followed in 1969 using a refurbished Sealab Two habitat. Five teams of nine divers were planned for the program but the greater depth of Sealab Three caused problems from the very beginning. These problems in fact led to the death of aquanaut Berry L. Cannon when his rebreather failed to remove the carbon dioxide from his exhalation.

It’s obvious that with the Conshelf and Sealab programs considerable progress was being made in learning how to live and work on the seafloor during the 60s. So what happened? Why haven’t we gone further? Shouldn’t there be cities, or at least towns on the seafloor by now?

The reasons for why undersea habitats didn’t progress any further are pretty much the same as the reasons for why human exploration of space has also slowed to a snail’s pace. One reason is robots. Just as robotic space probes have explored every planet in our solar system more cheaply and safely than humans can, so undersea robots are doing many of the jobs it was once thought humans would do. Then of course there’s the difficulty of money. Big science, whether in space or under the sea, just doesn’t get funded the way it once did.

Underwater Robots are doing many of the jobs it was thought that men would have to do. (Credit: Business Insider)

However both of those reasons are just symptoms of the real reason, a lack of interest by the general population. There was a time when moving into space or into the oceans was considered a logical next step. We had explored and settled all of the land areas of the Earth so it was just natural that we would move on to explore the sea and sky. That kind of logic just isn’t popular anymore. Maybe it will become so once more. I hope so because the idea of living under the sea, like living in space was a lot more fun than the endless bickering we seem to waste all of our time on nowadays.

Space News for October 2019.

This month I’m going to use my monthly space news post for an update on NASA’s commercial crew program. You’ll recall that this is the space agency’s plan to hire private companies to launch America’s astronauts into Low Earth Orbit (LOE). NASA has been anxiously waiting for Space X and its competitor Boeing to begin taking America’s astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) so that it no longer has to pay the Russians $80 million dollars for a seat on their Soyuz spacecraft. The first manned missions of the Space X Dragon and Boeing Starliner capsules were supposed to have begun in early 2018 so the whole program is already more than a year behind schedule and there is still no firm date for an actual manned mission. 

The Space X Crew Dragon made an unmanned flight to the ISS in March. (Credit: The Verge)
Boeing’s Starliner capsule has yet to reach orbit but it has completed its in flight abort test. (Credit: Space News)

You may recall that back in March of this year Space X successfully launched an unmanned Dragon capsule that was able to dock at the International Space Station (ISS). This was a planned Orbital Flight Test or OFT. (See my post of 6March 2019) At the time there was hope that the Hawthorn California company would soon become the first private entity to perform a manned space mission, possibly as early as August. After all the Dragon Capsule had only one more test to complete in order for NASA to completely certify it as ready for crewed flight.

That test was a launch pad abort test where the capsule’s solid fuel rockets would be fired. Those are the rockets designed to yank the capsule away from its booster rocket in the event of any problem that could endanger the crew. Well on April 20th something went wrong with the solid fuel rockets and the capsule was nearly destroyed. (See my post of 3August 2019) Needless to say the planned manned mission was postponed and still has not been rescheduled.

The Space X dragon capsule before and after the ‘anomaly’. (Credit: America Space)

Of course Space X immediately began an investigation into the ‘anomaly’ that quickly led to a faulty valve as being the cause. Since then there have been six months of engineering effort on the Dragon capsule so that this week a redesigned Dragon capsule has arrived at Cape Canaveral ready to conduct the in flight abort testing. That test is now being scheduled for sometime after the 23rd of November.

The redesigned Space X Dragon capsule being readied for its in flight abort test. (Credit: The New York Times)

So perhaps Space X is back on track to begin launching astronauts into orbit. Meanwhile Boeing has successfully completed its in flight abort testing and is preparing for an unmanned flight of its Starliner capsule after which it will be certified to begin manned missions.

For a time it appeared as if Boeing had little chance of beating Space X in their commercial space race but the recent problems of the Dragon capsule have given the Starliner the opportunity to catch up. With the completion of its in flight abort test Boeing is now ready to attempt its remaining to tests, the pad abort and OFT which have been given tentative dates of the 2nd of November and the 17th of December. Assuming Starliner passes both these tests a manned mission to the ISS could come in early 2020.

It is hoped that Boeing’s Starliner will make its first, unmanned test launch before the end of the year. (Credit: YouTube)

So it seems as if the race between Space X and Boeing to launch the first commercial space manned space flight could go down to the wire. And both those two companies might be hearing footsteps behind them because there’s a third company preparing to begin commercial space launches as well. Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser isn’t an updated space capsule like the Dragon and Starliner; instead it’s an updated version of the space shuttle.

A mock up of the completed Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser space plane. (Credit: Geekwire)

The main body of the Dream Chaser, which was manufactured by Lockheed Martin Corporation, has arrived at Sierra Nevada’s main plant for completion. Officials at Sierra Nevada are confident that the Dream Chaser will make it maiden, unmanned resupply mission to the ISS sometime in 2021.

The Dream Chaser main body has been delivered to Sierra Nevada Corp for integration into the completed spacecraft. (Credit: Parabolic Arc)

The main body that was delivered measures some 10 meters long by 5 wide and 2 high and can carry 6,000 kilos of supplies. The main body is composed of the most advanced high-temperature composite material. Once the first Dream Chaser is ready a Vulcan Centaur rocket will launch it on its maiden flight. Despite many delays and frustrations the time is now approaching when American astronauts will once again launch into space from American soil. It can’t come soon enough for me.

Paraplegic man walks with the aid of a thought controlled Exo-Skeleton.

I’ve written several posts about the rapid advances that have been made recently in the field of robotic prosthesis for people who have either lost a limb or the use of their limbs. See posts of 14Aug2019, 23Feb2019, 17Feb2018 and 29Apl2017. I must admit however that the latest breakthrough has me simply stunned; a man who had lost all control of his four limbs has been able to walk again using a robotic exo-skeleton controlled by only his thoughts, and a highly advanced computer interface.

A Quadriplegic man has succeeded in walking using an exo-skeleton controlled by his thoughts. (Credit: The Independent)

The research is taking place in France at Clinatec, the University of Grenoble’s Center for Biomedical Research. The test subject, a 28-year-old man named Thibault, is paralyzed from the shoulder down due to a severing of his spinal column in a 12-meter fall from a balcony.

In order to read his thoughts a sensory device was implanted in each hemisphere of his skull between the skin and his brain. The two sensory discs were each 5 cm in diameter and contained 64 separate sensors. The electronic ‘brain waves’ generated by the sensorimotor cortex of the brain are captured by these sensors and fed into a computer. The computer then uses an algorithm to translate the brain impulses into commands for movements of the mechanical exo-skeleton.

Electronic sensors were implanted in Thibault’s skull, one for each hemisphere. (Credit: Clinatec Endowment Fund / AFP)

Needless to say it’s not really all that simple. In fact it took two years of trial and error in order for both Thibault to learn how to frame his thoughts correctly and to teach the computer algorithm to correctly translate those thoughts into the desired motion commands. Much of this practice was actually carried out in virtual reality with Thibault and the computer moving computer generated images of limbs.

A computer algorithm translated Thibault’s brain waves into commands for the Exo-Skeleton. (Credit: Clinatec Endowment Fund)
For Simplicity and safety the testing and training of controlling the exo-skeleton was performed in virtual reality. (Credit: SHRM)

Once the researchers were confident enough they placed Thibault into the actual 65 kg exo-skeleton and studied him while he successfully walked a total of 145 meters. Since the researchers expected balance to be an issue the exo-skeleton was connected to a ceiling mounted harness that provided stability but all of the movements of the exo-skeleton were controlled by Thibault’s thoughts.

According to Professor Stephan Chabardes, author of the study and a neurosurgeon at the University’s hospital, “Our findings could move us a step closer to helping tetraplegic patients to drive computers using brain signals alone, perhaps starting with driving wheelchairs using brain activity instead of joysticks and progressing to developing an exo-skeleton for increased mobility.”

Research is continuing, the scientists hope that soon Thibault will be able to walk in the exo-skeleton without the ceiling harness in the next phase of the program. Also, three other patients have been recruited for further trials. Although the system is certainly not ready for general use the researchers hope that in time improvements will allow the exo-skeleton to become commercially available.

Before long the development of exo-skeletons may soon rival those imagined in Sci-Fi movies. (Credit: DudeWantThat)

The development of the Grenoble exo-skeleton is another step in the direction of a Human Machine Interface (HMI) that will allow humans to both control and receive information from advanced mechanical and computer systems. Someday a fully functioning HMI might blur the line ourselves and our creations. 

The Nobel Prizes for 2019 are awarded.

It’s that time of year again. The Nobel Committee has announced its choices for the award that recognizes achievements in the fields of Physics, Chemistry and Medicine (Physiology). Since my degree is in physics I think I’ll start with the winners for Physics.

This years winners are being recognized for their work in revealing some of the details about the structure of this Universe in which we live. Three scientists, James Peebles along with Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz will share this year’s prize of 9 million Swedish krona or $910,000 dollars.

James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in Astrophysics. (Credit: Bloomberg)

Two of the physicists, Professor Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva along with Didier Queloz, who teaches at both the University of Geneva and Cambridge University were honoured for their discovery in 1995 of the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun like star. Today we know about the existence of thousands of exoplanets but it was Mayor and Queloz who used a technique called the Radial Velocity Method to discover an exoplanet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi, in the constellation of Pegasus.

Looking at the illustration below of a star and its planet both orbiting around their mutual center of gravity we see how the star is sometimes moving toward us and sometimes away from us. This tiny tug back and forth due to the gravity of the planet can be seen in a blue shift in the star’s light as it moves toward us and a red shift as it moves away. It was by detecting a repeating pattern of blue and red shifts in the light of the star 51 Pegasi having a period of 4.2 days that allowed Mayor and Queloz to announce their discovery.

An Illustration of the Radial Velocity Method for discovering exo-planets. (Credit: Johnan Jarnestad/ Swedish Academy of Science)

The work of James Peebles of Princeton University, the Albert Einstein Professor of Physics no less, deals with a topic a bit bigger and older than a mere planet, the birth of the Universe itself. You see Peebles, working back in the 1970s, was one of the leading scientists who put the Big Bang Theory on a solid theoretical basis.

Doctor Peebles work dealt with probing the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) for clues about not only the conditions that prevailed in the Universe at the time of the Big Bang but also in the Universe as it is today. The cosmic Microwave Background is the tiny amount of heat left over from the Big Band that permeates the entire Universe and is almost, almost the same temperature everywhere and in every direction.

The Cosmic Microwave Background as seen by the Planck Satellite. The tiny differences in temperature seen here were predicted by James Peebles. (Credit: Universe Review.ca)

It was Doctor Peebles who first predicted that tiny fluctuations in the CMB had to be there. If the CMB was perfectly smooth he reasoned, then the Universe today would also be perfectly smooth, instead of possessing all of the galaxies and stars we see. In other words those tiny variations in temperature 13.8 billion years ago were the seeds from which the structure of today’s Universe grew.

Further analysis of those variations also allowed Peebles to calculate the percentage of the energy of the Universe that today is composed of ordinary matter, the atoms and elementary particles we are familiar with, dark matter and even dark energy which are the subject of so much current research. When you consider how much of our knowledge of the early Universe is due to the work of James Peebles it’s no wonder he has finally received the Nobel Prize.

Since you’re reading this post right now there’s a good chance that you’re using either a smartphone, smartpad, or laptop computer. If so you might want to take a moment to thank the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. You see the research for which M. Stanley Whittingham, John B Goodenough and Akira Yoshino will share their 7 million krona is the development of the Lithium-Ion batteries that today power our mobile world.

John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino received this years Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (Credit: Swedish Royal Academy of Science)

The development took quite a long time and there were more than a few problems along the way to overcome. It began in the 1970s when Stanley Whittingham discovered an energy rich material called titanium disulphide that he used as the cathode, the negative terminal in a battery with a metallic lithium anode as the positive terminal. Whittingham used lithium because of the metal’s ability to release large numbers of electrons.

Lithium Ion Batteries are a fixture in our modern world. (Credit: B&H)

The problem with these early lithium batteries was that each time the battery was recharged there was an internal buildup of chemicals at each terminal. This buildup would continue until the two terminals actually touched each other inside the battery causing a short circuit that released all of the battery’s energy in seconds. The result of that short would be either a fire or even an explosion. Despite this danger lithium batteries were so powerful that they quickly found some limited applications.

The Charge and Discharge mechanisms of a Lithium Battery. (Credit: ResearchGate)

Then in 1980 John B. Goodenough made lithium batteries even more powerful by replacing the disulphide terminal with one composed of cobalt oxide that nearly doubled the energy storage capability. Nevertheless the danger inherent in the lithium battery still kept them from widespread use.

It wasn’t until 1985 that Akira Yoshino succeeded in replacing the metallic lithium with Lithium Cobalt Oxide (LiCoO2) alleviating the buildup of chemicals and making the new lithium ion battery safe enough for widespread use. Thanks to the efforts of these three dedicated scientists the development of the modern lithium ion battery is a case study in how engineering research is carried out, one step at a time. Certainly an achievement worthy of a Nobel Prize.

Also announced this week was the Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Doctors William G. Kaelin of Harvard University, Gregg L. Semenza of Johns Hopkins University along with Peter J. Ratcliffe of the Francis Crick Institute and Oxford University. The trio was recognized for their work in understanding how cells adjust their metabolism to match the availability of oxygen.

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to William G. Kaelin, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza. (Credit: Swedish Royal Academy of Science)

We are all aware of just how necessary oxygen is for life; the cells of our body will quickly begin to die without that gas. However cells can reduce the amount of oxygen they require whenever oxygen levels become lower. Our bodies experience such reduced oxygen levels during many activities such as swimming or other exercise, or while at high altitude.

More importantly however many people experience low oxygen levels for long periods of time due to lung or heart disease or anemia. In fact the knowledge gained by Doctors Kaelin, Semenza and Ratcliffe is already being put to use to develop drugs that will help patients with those aliments to make better use of the oxygen in their systems and live healthier lives.

For patients suffering with Heart or Lung problems a lack of oxygen is a serious threat. (Credit: Healthline)

The discovery may also be important in the treatment of cancer. You see it has long been known that cancer cells signal other cells in our body to build new blood vessels to them that increases their flow of oxygen enabling the tumors to grow even faster. It is possible that this research may lead to techniques that prevent this increased blood flow thereby slowing the growth of cancerous tumors.

The work of these three Nobel laureates gives our medical science another tool to both fight disease and to understand how living creatures work. Each year the Nobel Prizes are awarded to recognize the best, the most significant discoveries in science. It’s important to remember however that there are many smaller, but still significant advances. All of these discoveries combine to add to our ever increasing knowledge of the natural world. 

Sex, it’s not just as simple as Boy meets Girl.

There was a small but very unusual science news story out this week that you might have missed. It concerns the discovery of eight new species of nematode roundworms at Mono Lake in the eastern Sierra Mountains of California. That sure sounds exciting doesn’t it?

Mono Lake in California is one of the most hostile environments on the surface of the Earth. (Credit: Mono Lake)

Well you see Mono Lake is one of the most extreme environments for living things on the surface of the entire planet. Not only is the water in Mono Lake three times as salty as in the ocean but the water is also laced with the poisonous element arsenic while its pH of 10 makes it very alkaline. Few living things can survive the toxic conditions present at Mono Lake so the discovery of eight new species there is quite important.

The most surprising news however concerns one of those eight species, a yet to be formally named member of the genus Auanema that possesses three sexes!!! You heard that right; the newly discovered Auanema sp. has boys, girls and hermaphrodites.

The as yet unnamed species of round worm from Mono Lake has three sexes! (Credit: Science Alert)

Hermaphrodites you may recall are individuals who possess both male and female sexual organs and who are capable of both bearing offspring and impregnating other members of their species. There are many species that are hermaphroditic in nature just as there are many species with sexed individuals but a species that possesses both sexed and hermaphroditic individuals is very rare. Another oddity about the sex life of Auanema sp. is the fact that it carries its young inside itself in a manner similar to a kangaroo.

The three sexed species also carries its young inside its body in a way reminiscent of a kangaroo. (Credit: ScienceDirect.com)

The study of life at Mono Lake was conducted by lead author Paul Sternberg of the California Institute of Technology along with researchers Pei-Yin Shih and James Siho Lee and was published in the journal Current Biology. I’m certain that we’ll be hearing more from Drs. Sternberg, Shih and Lee about the strange and extreme life forms at Mono Lake.

The strange sex life of Auanema sp. however begs the question; just how many different ways are there for having sex? This question has become more important recently not only in scientific circles but in the domain of politics. In our society today the question of how we should treat those individuals whose sex lives do not fit into preconceived norms is very contentious. Is it possible that we could learn something about our own sexual behavior by studying the diversity of sex in nature?

To begin my dictionary defines sex as: The property or quality by which organisms are classified according to their reproductive functions. So in our quest to study the diversity of sex we are going to have to look at some of the many ways living creatures reproduce.

In sexual reproduction the egg cell, defined as female, is large and contains a lot of nutrients while the sperm cell, defined as male, is small but very mobile. The sperm cell must find the egg cell in order to fertilize it. (Credit: Stock.Adobe.com)

Let’s begin with the simplest of all living things, the single celled organisms that we learned about back in high school. The structure of such creatures is so simple that they are not capable of possessing differences between individuals that could be identified as making them either male or female. Instead these creatures reproduce asexually, that is without any sexual contact from another member of their species. Whenever a single celled creature has absorbed enough nutrients to reproduce it will begin the process of cell division that produces, not an adult and child but two identical daughter cells. In asexual reproduction the daughter cells both receive only the genetic information of their single parent.

A single celled organism reproduces without sex through the process of Mitosis. (Credit: DifferenceBetween.com)

It is that mixing of the genetic information from two parents that is the advantage of engaging in sex after all. Sex allows new, beneficial mutations to quickly spread throughout a population. Sex increases the variation of characteristics within a species; variations that natural selection can work with in order to better adapt a species to its environment.

  As we know, it is in the multi-celled organisms, creatures with groups of cells dedicated to perform certain tasks, in other words organs, that we find differences between individuals that are related to that individual’s function in reproduction. And due to their greater complexity it is among the multi-celled organisms that we find the greater range of sexual behaviors.

We’ve already mentioned hermaphrodites, creatures with both male and female sex organs and who are capable of both being fertilized by and fertilizing another member of their species. Many species of worms, molluscs and flowering plants are hermaphrodites.

Two hermaphroditic snails mating. Each is using its penis to fertilize the other! (Credit: Wikipedia)

Even among species with individuals that can be clearly differentiated into female and male sexual behavior can vary greatly. In the insect order hymenoptera, ants, bees and wasps, an unfertilized female can lay an egg that will develop into a fully functioning male, an actual example of a virgin birth. That male can then have sex with his own mother, fertilizing her so that all of her offspring from then on are female!

In honeybees the male drones are produced from unfertilized eggs! They then fertilize the queen to produce female, but sterile workers! (Credit: Encyclopedia Britannica)

Now if you’re thinking that such unusual sexual behaviors are confined to the lower, i.e. invertebrate animals well think again. There are many species of vertebrates, especially fish who exhibit a different type of hermaphroditism known as sequential hermaphroditism. As you might guess from the name a sequential hermaphrodite is an individual who is born as one sex but who may during the course of their life change their sex.

Examples of sex changes in both directions are well recognized. One is the popular clown fish (genus Amphiprion) that exists in groups with a single large breeding female and a smaller breeding male along with some non-breeding members. If the breeding female should die the breeding male will become female and one of the non-breeding members will become the new breeding male.

The familiar and popular clown fish is a sequential hermaphrodite. It can change its sex from male to female! (Credit: Live Science)

Another familiar reef fish, the cleaner wrasse (family Labridae) behaves in almost the exact opposite fashion. The single male in a group will dominate all of the females while the largest female dominates all the others and so on down the list until the smallest wrasse gets picked on by everybody. Again if the dominant male should die the top female will change sex and become a male.

The Cleaner Wrasse on the other hand can change from being a girl to a boy! (Credit: LiveAquaria)

Have you noticed how the sex of an individual in these species is determined by their social status? To confirm this interpretation there are reef fish of the species Lythrypnus dalli where the sex of an individual can go back and forth depending on whether it is dominant, male or submissive, female.

Even mammals have a variety of sexual behaviors; the difference between marsupials who carry their young in a pouch and mammals with a womb is well known. There are also many species where a dominant male gathers a harem to himself while smaller males are out of luck. Then there are some mammals who only mate at certain times of the year while others engage in sex year round.

Even among the mammals there is a verity of reproductive techniques. (Credit: Allposter.com)

By now I hope you’ve realized that the stereotypical male-female, boy meets girl style of reproduction is not carved in stone, it is not a universal archetype of how things must be. Sex is all about mixing genes so that new, better adapted traits can be spread through a population more quickly giving natural selection a better chance to improve a species. Evolution doesn’t really care how that mixing takes place so there is a great diversity of sexual behaviors across the natural world. 

Was Venus a habitable planet billions of years age? If so, what happened to it?

If you’re interested in astronomy you may have sometime heard the planet Venus being described as Earth’s twin, although nowadays it’s more often called Earth’s evil twin. Twin, because Venus is nearly the same size as the Earth and is the same sort of rocky planet with an atmosphere as our home world is. Not only that but because Venus is the closest planet to Earth in its orbit around the Sun conditions on its surface should be close to those here on our planet.

Venus as seen through a telescope shows only a think layer of clouds. (Credit: Sky and Telescope)

Indeed, not so long ago Venus was imagined to be a somewhat more tropical version of the Earth. Covered by a thick layer of clouds it was thought that the planet’s entire surface was probably one huge rain forest inhabited by creatures appropriate to a jungle environment.

In the science fiction of the 1950s Venus was a world inhabited by alien, and dangerous creatures. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The data sent back by the first space probes to Venus shattered that dream. The average surface temperature on the planet was found to be over 400ºC, the atmosphere is some 90 times that of Earth’s and is composed of 96.5 carbon dioxide with absolutely no trace of water vapour. It’s the carbon dioxide that’s led to the extreme temperatures of course; we’ll all familiar with how CO2 is a greenhouse gas after all. And so Earth’s twin quickly became known as our evil twin.

This is what the surface of Venus looked like to the Soviet Venera lander. (Credit: Roscosmos)

This reality begs the question then, if Venus is so similar to Earth in some ways, how can it be so different in others?

A new study by Michael Way and Anthony Del Genio of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies attempts to answer that question. In a paper they have delivered at the European Planetary Science Conference, Division of Planetary Science or the EPSC-DPS joint meeting for 2019 the two scientists have outlined the results of their simulations of surface conditions on Venus using long-term climatological models.

Based upon those simulations Way and Del Genio assert that for billions of year Venus may in fact have resembled that watery, tropical world imagined in Sci-Fi novels. By their calculations it may have been as little as 700 million years ago that a runaway greenhouse disaster began that turned Venus into the uninhabitable boiler we see today.

Based on their research Doctors Way and Del Genio believe that Venus could have been inhabited as little as 700 million years ago. (Credit: Wordless Tech)

So what was it that triggered the runaway greenhouse effect? Where did all of that CO2 come from? Well here on Earth we have an enormous amount of carbon that’s trapped inside the planet’s crust, not only as coal and other fossil fuels but also in the form of various minerals such as calcium carbonate, also known as calcite. Way and Del Genio speculate that a massive volcanic event could have released huge amounts of carbon into the air initiating the runaway greenhouse.

Here on Earth volcanic eruptions release hugh amounts of carbon dioxide. Could this be what happened to Venus (Credit: CNN.com)

Just such a volcanic event is known to have occurred here on Earth some 250 million years ago and is known as the Siberian Traps event which is thought to have caused the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period. The carbon released by the Siberian Traps was later re-absorbed back into the ground but on Venus something must be preventing that re-absorption.

250 MYA the massive volcanic eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps may have also caused the extinction of 95% of all living species here on Earth. (Credit: Gracebluered.com)

At the moment we can only speculate about what factor or process is preventing that re-absorption. Way and Del Genio are calling for newer, more advanced space probes to re-examine Venus in order to better understand what is going on there. We need more data if we’re ever going to understand what transformed Venus from a world that could have possessed life into the hellscape it is now. And perhaps more importantly, how can we make certain it never happens to our Earth!

Space News for September 2019.

There have been several interesting developments is the exploration of space this past month. Most deal with the discoveries made by unmanned probes but one deals with NASA’s Artemis program, the space agency’s plan for returning astronauts to the Moon. I think I’ll start with Artemis.

NASA’s logo for its planned Artemis Program back to the Moon. (Credit: NASA)

You’ll recall that in several posts I have mentioned that NASA intends to build a space station called the Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon to use as a depot and waystation for lunar exploration. See posts of 30Sept2017, 24Mar2018, 14Oct2018, 31Dec2018, 6Mar2019 and 29May2019. Additionally NASA hopes to use the Gateway as a platform for studying long-term human occupation of deep space, i.e. space outside of Low Earth Orbit (LOE).

Planned configuration of the Lunar Gateway. (Credit: Spacenews.com)

Currently NASA intends to use a mixture of rocket types to construct the Gateway and the proposed Lunar Lander. This plan would include the massive Space Launch System (SLS) still under development as well as Space X’s Falcon Heavy reusable rocket. The use of reusable rockets as much as possible is thought to be essential for a program that is already grossly underfunded.

Unlike the SLS, Space X’s Falcon Heavy is a reusable rocket and therefore MUCH CHEAPER!!!! (Credit: The Verge)

Well it is starting to appear that some members of congress may not be such big supporters of the Gateway and for once there’s bipartisan agreement. At a recent meeting of the House subcommittee on space both committee chair Oklahoma democrat Kendra Hall and Alabama republican Mo Brooks strongly questioned NASA’s planned use of private rockets at all.

Instead Hall and Brooks want NASA to accelerate the development of the SLS’s ‘Exploration Upper Stage’ (EUS), which is planned to increase the payload that the SLS can deliver to Lunar orbit from 26 to 37 tons. This EUS is a part of NASA’s long term goals for the SLS but it is scarcely beyond the design stage and its development would cost billions and add years to a program that is already well over budget and behind schedule. However the use of the EUS would allow NASA to send a crew directly to the Moon’s surface without the need of a Lunar Gateway. Exactly the way the Apollo program did it back in 1969.

NASA is Currently developing the SLS as configured in the two versions on the left. The EUS would allow the four versions on the right which are capable of delivering much more payload into lunar orbit. (Credit: Vox)

None of this has anything to do with science or engineering or even budget, it’s all about corporate rivalry. You see Boeing is the prime contractor of the current version of the SLS, and would be prime on the development of the EUS. Add to that the fact that Boeing is getting tied of Space X grabbing its market share just because reusable rockets are so much cheaper and you have Boeing trying to use a little political muscle to push Space X out of the Artemis program.

With every bit of news I hear about the Artemis program the more convinced I become that it will achieve nothing except a huge waste of resources. I’m very much afraid that the manned space program will achieve nothing until either the Chinese or perhaps private space companies like Space X are about to land on the Moon. We Americans don’t actually care about exploring space; we just have to be first.

NASA continues to have more success with its unmanned space probes. I suppose that’s because, since they are lower profile than manned missions the agency is allowed to make its decisions based on science and engineering not politics.

One of these successes is the Juno space probe currently studying the planet Jupiter. Recently the spacecraft made its 22nd close approach to the giant planet and was in the right position to take a photo of a very impressive event, an eclipse of the Sun on Jupiter caused by its innermost moon Io. See image below.

Image taken by the Juno Space probe of an eclipse of the Sun on Jupiter caused by it’s innermost moon Io. (Credit: NASA)

Now it turns out that eclipses occur on Jupiter considerably more often than they do here on Earth, after all Jupiter has four large moons all of which are capable of producing eclipses. The eclipses on Jupiter are not as impressive as ours are however because by sheer coincidence the angular size of our Moon and the Sun as seen here on Earth are nearly identical. This means that the Moon just covers the Sun’s disk leaving the entire solar corona visible. See my post of 24August 2017 for the story of my first total eclipse.

On Jupiter however the Sun is about five times further away so it’s angular diameter in Jupiter’s sky is much smaller, only about 0.1º instead of the 0.5º in our sky. That makes the Sun look smaller than any of Jupiter’s four big Moons.

Because it’s the closest, Io looks largest on Jupiter, about as large as our Moon does here on Earth. That means that Io can completely cover not only the Sun’s disk but the entire corona as well. Ganymede and Europa would probably do the same since each of them looks more than two and a half times the diameter of the Sun on Jupiter.

Only Callisto, the farthest of the four from Jupiter, would produce a show similar to that of an Earthly eclipse. Its angular diameter, as seen on Jupiter is only about 40% larger than the Sun’s so under the right conditions a good deal of the corona could probably be seen.

One more interesting fact, since Jupiter has four moons capable of producing eclipses it is quite possible for Jupiter to experience several eclipses, caused by different moons at the same time. I happened to come across an image of Jupiter, taken from Earth in 2009 of three eclipses happening at once! The moons involved are Io, Ganymede and Callisto.

Three eclipses on Jupiter happening at the same time! (Credit: NASA)

The moon Io is in the news for another reason as well. You may recall that the voyager space probes discovered that Io is the most volcanically active place in the solar system. This is because Io is being constantly pulled not only by huge Jupiter itself but by its three brother moons as well. This tugging and squeezing heats up the moon’s interior, heat that is released through volcanoes.

The largest volcano on Io, and the largest known active volcano in the solar system is called Loki after the Norse god of fire. Planetary scientists have been studying this powerful beast as best they could ever since it was first discovered. According to a paper published back in 2002 with lead author Julie Rathbun, Loki erupts on a regular basis about every 500 days.

Jupiter’s moon Io with the monster volcano Loki dead center. (Credit: NASA)

Now Rathbun, who is currently with the Planetary Science Institute, has presented at poster at the current 51st meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. Posters at conferences are a common technique for scientists to announce results of research before a formal paper is written. Doctor Rathbun’s announcement was in fact a prediction that Loki will erupt sometime in the next few days.

Doctor Julie Rathbun has predicted an eruption of Loki within the next few days. (Credit: Twitter)

Now predicting a volcanic eruption is a very risky business. Volcanologists here on Earth have been trying to find some technique for predicting eruptions for centuries now. Doctor Rathbun is confident however and thanks to her warning both telescopes here on Earth and the Juno space probe should be ready to study the event when, and if it occurs.  

Photographing eclipses and predicting eruptions halfway across the solar system, we have come a long way!

Vaping and E-Cigarettes, what are the dangers and why are so many people suddenly getting sick using them?

I think I ought to start this post with a little honest disclosure about my own smoking history. I smoked old-fashioned cigarettes for almost 30 years and managed to finally quit about 15 years ago. My doctor tells me that I appear to have no ill effects because of all my years of smoking so I count myself as being very lucky. And like many ex-smokers I now support any and all efforts to get people off tobacco and in particular to keep young people from ever getting hooked in the first place.

Credit: Get Healthy Clark County

In contrast, about ten years ago the tobacco industry invented a new way for people to smoke, e-cigarettes or vaping as its also known. In essence what an e-cigarette does is boil a small amount of solution from an inserted container known as a ‘pod’. In addition to water these pods contain the chemical nicotine along with a variety of flavourings that the consumer can choose. The smoker then inhales the aerosol generated and the nicotine passes through the lungs into the blood stream just as it does when a person smokes an ordinary cigarette. You’ll recall that nicotine is the reason people smoke in the first place both because the chemical is a stimulant but more so because it’s highly addictive.

At first e-cigarettes looked just like ordinary cigarettes but now they come in a variety of shapes and sizes! (Credit: The Continuum of Risk)

The rational that the inventers and manufacturers of e-cigarettes gave for marketing their product is that since there’s no actual smoke involved there’s none of the carcinogens that cause lung cancer. This is assumed to make e-cigarettes safer than ordinary cigarettes. Safer perhaps but certainly not safe since it’s the nicotine that leads to heart disease among smokers and more smokers actually die of heart disease than lung cancer.

There is a 20 year lag between starting smoking and the incidence of lung cancer but otherwise the two quantities are nearly identical (Credit: Wikipedia Commons)

Still, that logic allowed e-cigarettes to be advertised as safer than cigarettes. At the same time the completely unfounded claim was also promoted that heavy smokers could use e-cigarettes as a pathway to quitting. Together these untested assertions were employed by the manufacturers of e-cigarettes to make their product seem almost like a treatment for smoking rather than just another way of injecting poisons into yourself. 

None of those claims were backed up by any data whatsoever. No long-term studies of the health risks of using e-cigarettes have been completed so the only thing that can be said about smoking e-cigarettes is that the nicotine still makes them dangerous. In fact chemical analysis has shown that many other dangerous substances are present in the aerosol generated by e-cigarettes calling into question the claim that they are at all safer than ordinary cigarettes.

We still don’t know all of the toxic chemicals that are contained in the aerosol from an e-cigarette (Credit: Wikipedia Commons)

For a time the number of people using e-cigarettes was small and consisted almost exclusively of established smokers looking for a safer alternative. But in their efforts to increase sales the e-cigarette manufacturers started extensive advertising campaigns touting how ‘safe’ e-cigarettes were. Then the manufacturers began selling fruit flavoured and even candy flavoured vaping pods that are effectively more attractive to teenagers and even children than to the adults who are legally allowed to purchase the product.

The easiest way to measure the growth of e-cigarette use is by measuring the money being spent on them! (Credit: Heineventures)

Of course the vaping industry categorically denies that they are deliberately advertising to children. However it is an established fact that several overzealous e-cigarette salesmen have actually gone into high schools and promoted their product to students as being safe!! Not safer than real cigarettes mind you, just plain safe…a complete misrepresentation of available facts.

Not only are the advertisements for e-cigarettes geared toward teenagers but they make use of the social media platforms most frequented by teenagers. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

The end result of all that sophisticated media hype was that, after years of declining numbers in people who smoked we now have millions of people who have become hooked on e-cigarettes, especially teenagers. Nearly 11 million adult Americans and two million teenagers are current e-cigarette users. That’s a big market and it means that there’s a lot of money to be made from e-cigarettes, $11.8 Billion in 2018 and the estimated market for 2024 is $16.5 Billion.

And it’s the same old companies making that money; the most popular brand of e-cigarettes, JUUL is 35% owned by Phillip Morris while second place Vuse is a subsidiary of R. J. Reynolds. Both are tobacco companies that for decades continued to deny the overwhelming medical evidence linking their products to millions of deaths. Now these same companies are making the same old arguments to defend their new products.

Remember the Marlborough Man, well he died of lung cancer. Now the company that sold that poison is selling the e-cigarettes JUUL (Credit: Amazon)

Recently the problem of e-cigarettes has taken an even more dangerous turn. Just this year more than 500 people who smoke e-cigarettes have been diagnosed with severe lung problems while seven people have died. At the moment doctors have no idea why e-cigarettes have suddenly turned so deadly. Remember e-cigarettes have been around for 10 years so why have all these people just gotten sick this year! The working hypothesis is that some people have been injecting THC, the chemical from marijuana into their pods and that it is the THC that is causing all the injuries. However there is some evidence to indicate that THC cannot be the sole cause of all the recent cases.

We are only just learning the dangers of vaping! (Credit: TruLaw)

The plain fact is that e-cigarettes are unhealthy, maybe they are a little less unhealthy than real cigarettes but nevertheless they are unhealthy. Such a dangerous product should never have been allowed to be openly sold before extensive studies had been conducted to better quantify just how unhealthy they were.

E-cigarettes and other tobacco products are often sold right next to candy as a means of hooking children as new customers. (Credit: Counter Tobacco)

The tobacco companies behind e-cigarettes knew how to circumvent any sort of government oversight however and so now a whole new generation is getting hooked on the same old poison I got hooked on back in high school. I was lucky and quit before cigarettes killed me. I wonder how many of the users of e-cigarettes won’t be so lucky!

Post Script: Only a week has gone by and the epidemic of lung injuries associated with vaping has more than doubled in size. More than 800 people have been diagnosed and 14 have died! Although a link to THC in vaping pods seems likely Doctors are still at a loss as to exactly what is going on. All that they can do at the moment is to advise everyone “DON”T VAPE”!!!!

Astronomy News for September 2019.

There have been a couple of major discoveries in astronomy this past month, each in their own way teaching us something about the universe outside our solar system, and how similar that is to what goes on inside our solar system.

The first story concerns one of the now over 4,000 planets that have been discovered orbiting around other stars. Exoplanets the astronomers are calling them and most were discovered by the no longer functioning Kepler space telescope. (See posts of 16Dec2017, 28Apl2018 and 3Nov2019)

A chart detailing some of the discoveries made by the Kepler Space Telescope. (Credit: Sky and Telescope)

Most of the exoplanets that have been discovered to date are considerably larger than our Earth is, let’s be honest the bigger anything is the easier it is to see, and most have been found to be orbiting rather close to their parent star. Neither of these conditions is expected to make these exoplanets hospitable for life but the astronomers know that if they find enough exoplanets eventually they’ll start finding some that look more like Earth and which could be inhabited.

Our techniques for discovering exoplanets are far more likely to find big ones. This is a classification as of 2013. (Credit: Universe Today)

In fact their latest candidate possesses an Earth like feature never before seen in an alien world, water vapour in its atmosphere. The planet is officially known as K2-18b and it orbits around the small red dwarf star K2-18 that resides about 110 light years away in the constellation of Leo. Although K2-18b orbits closer to its star than the Earth does to the Sun because K2-18 is dimmer than our Sun the estimated temperature on K2-18b is between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius. That temperature is just right for water to exist on the planet’s surface and nearly perfect for life. Astronomers succeeded in detecting the water vapour in the planet’s atmosphere by studying the light coming from K2-18 as K2-18b was passing in front of the star. That light showed the characteristic absorption lines of water vapour.

An Artist’s impression of what the exoplanet K2-18b might look like. (Credit: ESA / Hubble)
When an element of Chemical Compound is heated they emit an emission spectra, top image is hydrogen’s. When light passes through the same material when cool it absorbs those same frequencies of light becoming an absorption spectra. (Credit: Physics Stack Exchange)

Before you start planning a visit to K2-18b however I should point out that the planet has a mass estimated at about eight times that of Earth and possesses a very thick atmosphere. Together these facts make the planet more like a warm version of Uranus or Neptune than our Earth. Additionally the planet’s star K2-18 is, like many small stars quite active with a large number of solar flares that might bath the planet’s surface in radiation. Still that thick atmosphere would give the planet’s surface some protection and if it does have oceans it is possible that life could exist there.

Astronomers will keep searching the stars of our galaxy looking for worlds that may possess life. Indeed the new James Webb Space Telescope that is expected to be launched in March of 2021 has been designed in part to carry out much more detailed studies of planets like K2-18b. So perhaps in just the next decade or so astronomers may finally discover a planet that truly is Earth like.

The James Webb Space Telescope is nearing completion and launch is expected in 2021. (Credit: Popular Science)

My second story concerns the recent observation of a comet like object that has entered our solar system from outside and is going to pass around the our Sun before heading back out into interstellar space. You may recall hearing about the first observed such an interstellar immigrant that was given the name Oumuamua a little more than a year ago. (See my post of 23May18).

The interstellar object named Oumuamua passed through our solar system in 2017. (Credit: Twitter)

Our new visitor was discovered on August 30th by Gennady Borisov of the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory and has been given the temporary designation of C/2019 Q4 (Borisov). The object has since been observed by more than a half dozen other observers and its orbital parameters have been tentatively determined with a result that the eccentricity of C/2019 Q4 is around 3.2. Now an object in a stable orbit has an eccentricity of between 0 and 1 so an eccentricity of 3.2 means that C/2019 Q4 will make one quick pass by our Sun and then head back out into interstellar space just as Oumuamua did back in 2017.

Unlike Oumaumau the interstellar object C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) has already show evidence that it is a comet. (Credit: Sci-News.com)

There are a couple of big differences between C/2019 Q4 and Oumuamua however. For one whereas all observations of Oumuamua indicated that it was a hard solid object, like an asteroid, C/2019 Q4 has already shown clear evidence of a comet’s tail. In other words Oumuamua was a rock while C/2019 Q4 is a dirty snowball.

The more important difference however may be that C/2019 Q4 has been discovered well before it passes the Sun and astronomers hope to have more than a year to study it.  Oumuamua on the other hand, was only discovered after it had passed the Sun and was on its way out of the solar system, leaving astronomers a little more than a month to observe it. Click on the link below to be taken to a YouTube video of the estimated track of C/2019 Q4 through our solar system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqMJo3DHOfg

I’m certain there will be a lot more to learn about C/2019 Q4 during the next year, and I hope they come up with a real name before long. You can be certain that I’ll keep you well informed about it.