Science – Page 61 – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

The Science of Agriculture

Howdy there y’all, farmer Bob here. It’s plantin’ time and I’m right busy with my taters and tomaters, my lettuce, carrots, peppers and cucumbers.

What’s going on here you ask? What happened to Science and Science Fiction? Well it is springtime and I am working to get my garden started so I thought this would be a good time to talk a little about some of the scientific advances happening in the field of agriculture.

Now I hope we can all agree that the science of growing food is about as important a technology as there is. In today’s world there are some one billion people living on the edge of starvation and since the Earth’s population is expected to grow another three billion by 2050 our food production needs to grow more rapidly than that if we hope to eliminate hunger from the World.

To realize such an increase could require large scale implementation of technologies that have actually been around for a long time. I’m taking about hydroponics, aquaponics and vertical farming.

I’ll start with hydroponics because back when I was a kid there was a lot of talk that growing food in nutrient rich solutions without soil was going to revolutionize food production. William Gericke first used the term hydroponics in the 1920-30s when he succeeded in growing tomato plants over seven meters tall. Gericke promoted the technology and in the 1960s NASA became interested because of the possibility of growing food by hydroponics on the Moon or Mars where there is no soil.

The basic idea is simple enough. A shallow tank of nutrient rich water is covered with a lid with holes through which plant roots are dropped into the solution. If the water is aerated the entire root can be immersed otherwise enough of the root is kept in the air to allow oxygen to be absorbed. See the picture below.

One of the advantages of hydroponics is the ability to control almost every parameter of the growth process from the concentration of nutrients and oxygen in the water to its temperature. This allows the plants to grow in optimal conditions producing much greater yields.

Notice I didn’t mention controlling the amount of light the plants get. That’s because traditionally hydroponics still used the Sun as the energy source. More recently however Glo-light bulbs and LED arrays have allowed indoor hydroponic farms with 24 hour intense lighting further increasing yield.

Now aquaponics is a combination of hydroponics with fish or shrimp farming. The fish or shrimp are raised in their tanks and the water in which they live, and let’s face it shit, circulates through the hydroponic farm with the fish excrement providing the nutrients for the plants. Now it’s not quite that easy, between the fish and the plants you need a bacterial mat or substrate to first turn that excrement into nitrites, then nitrates, the nitrates then become the nutrients the plants consume. The now purified water returns to the fish tank to begin the cycle once again. Obviously this combination of technologies not only produces two food products but also reduces cost because each technology benefits the other.

Now entrepreneurs are bring all these technologies together on an industrial scale, indoors, in the middle of a city, in a technique called ‘Vertical Farming’.

Vertical Farming combines hydroponics with intensive lighting, stacks it in layers and puts it inside a factory setting. Here in Philadelphia a company called Metropolis Farms has renovated an existing and unused factory into a large scale food production facility, i.e. a farm.

The advantages of Vertical farming are many. The controlled environment allows food production year round. According to Jack Griffin the President of Metropolis Farms instead of the typical two crops a year that a farm would get in the Philadelphia area he achieves more than 17! The stacking of layers of hydroponic tanks also enables him to grow an acre’s worth of food in only 36 sq.ft. (That’s over 1200 square meters worth of food in one square meter!). Also producing food right inside the city where it will be eaten eliminates the cost and waste associated with transporting the food hundreds or sometimes thousands of miles. Finally, growing food indoors virtually eliminates the possibility of pests and diseases destroying your crops.

There are drawbacks to Vertical Farming, the biggest is the cost of power. It takes a lot of electricity to keep all those light lit, the water pumps working etc. Still, in my view the technologies are coming together, over the next few decades the trend will be toward more and more food production taking place in settings that the farmers of old would never recognize!

More Space News for April

Two days ago NASA held a press conference to announce some of the results that scientists have discovered from the Cassini spacecraft. Cassini is in orbit around the planet Saturn and is in the final few months of it’s twenty year long mission.

The press conference mainly dealt with some new discoveries about Saturn’s moon Enceladus which we knew from earlier observations was an ice covered world similar to Jupiter’s moon Europa. For several years now NASA astronomers have speculated that, again like Europa, Enceladus might have a liquid ocean beneath the ice covering, an ocean that could support life.

Now the heat energy that keeps the ocean warm would come from the flexing and squeezing of the moon’s interior caused by the interacting gravitational fields of Saturn and it’s other moon’s, the tidal pulls. The same process is known to cause the numerous volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io and are suspected to keep the ocean on Europa warm. The heat generated by this process could also provide the energy for life on Enceladus.

Images taken of Enceladus by Cassini have discovered plumes of water spewing out of the Moon like geysers and now Cassini has even succeeded in flying through those plumes and identifying some of the chemicals contained in them. In their announcement NASA scientists stated that Cassini has detected considerable amounts of both Carbon Dioxide and Methane both of which are commonly associated with living processes. The image below details the processes going on at the moon.

These results give us another possible home for life in our Solar system. Along with Mars and Europa, Enceladus is another world we need to explore further. A specialized mission to search for life on Enceladus may take years to develop and launch however, but someday we’ll know whether or not we have close neighbors living around the ringed planet.

If you’d like to read more about NASA’s announcement click on the link below.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-missions-provide-new-insights-into-ocean-worlds-in-our-solar-system

There has also been another announcement from NASA concerning grant money being funded to a series of new technology programs. These grants are called the NASA Innovative Advanced Concept or NIAC program and are intended to study possible future technologies for spaceflight. The initial Phase I grants are about $125,000 dollars while Phase II grants can be as much as a half a million dollars.

The Phase I grants can be very interesting, even far out concepts while the Phase II grants tend to be a bit more realistic. In the Phase I group are included four completely new type of propulsion technologies, two are intended for interstellar travel, along with a ‘vacuum balloon’ to drift over the surface of Mars and Solar Surfing!

The Phase II grants include a probe of the interior of the planet Venus and a fusion enabled Pluto orbiter and lander. If you’d like to read a bit more about these possible future space technologies click on the link below.

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2017_Phase_I_Phase_II

There’s always something new happening in space so I hope you’ll be coming back soon.

Lecture: Beasts in the Night Sky by Professor Patrick Glauthier

Last Wednesday night (5th April) I attended a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology entitled ‘Beasts of the Night Sky’ given by Professor Patrick Glauthier of the University’s Department of Classical Studies. The lecture dealt with the myths and stories behind the familiar constellations the ancients used to understand the night sky. Wednesday’s lecture was the fifth in the museum’s series ‘Great Beasts of Legend’

Great Beasts of Legend at the U of P Museum

Professor Glauthier began the lecture with a short description of how the night sky works. That is, how the constellations we see each night change with the seasons. How most constellations rise in the east and set in the west just as the Sun does but how the constellations near the pole star never set and how the planets move against the background of fixed stars, the Greek word planet means wanderer after all. Now it’s important to remember that to the ancients Earth was not a planet but the Sun and Moon were.

The Professor also described how in the ancient world the sky was the only way for people to keep track of time and the passing of the seasons. When Orion the Hunter was in the western sky just after the Sun set it was time to plant but when he rose in the east after sunset it was time to prepare for harvest.

This part of the lecture was all very familiar to me but there was a lot of good stuff to come. Professor Glauthier concentrated on the stories the Greeks and Romans told about the constellations so of course he began with Homer. Actually it turns out that Homer didn’t say much about the constellations, in fact he never mentions the constellations of the Zodiac at all.

In book 18 of the Iliad Homer mentions the Great Bear as facing Orion the hunter even though today we recognize several other constellations, most notably Gemini, as being between them. This indicates that Homer did not know about the constellation of Gemini! In fact according to Profession Glauthier the 12 constellations of the Zodiac were absorbed by the Greeks from Mesopotamia around the fifth century BCE.

Professor Glauthier also spoke about the group of constellations associated with the Myth of Perseus, Andromeda, the Sea Monster Cetus along with Andromeda’s parents Cepheus and Cassiopeia. The grouping of these constellations indicates that they are also very old, before the Greeks knew about the Zodiac. These were some of the first attempts to impose order on the night sky.

Now comes what I thought was the interesting part of the lecture because a couple of the Mesopotamian constellations the Greeks imported, Cancer the Crab and the Goat Fish of Capricorn for example had no Greek myth that could be applied to them so later Greek and Roman writers made up myths to try and explain how they got into the night sky. What was happening was that mythology was being manipulated in order to fit the growing knowledge of astronomy.

Professor Glauthier finished up the lecture with a brief description of how astrology began as a part of astronomy but how in the Roman period the attempts to foretell the future overshadowed the practical uses of the constellations in keeping track of the seasons.

Lectures like ‘Beasts of the Night Sky’ are regularly given at science and other museums throughout the world but very few people are aware of them. I’m a member of the U of P museum and if you live around Philadelphia or are planning a visit I heartily recommend stopping by. But wherever you live there are museums nearby so go to them, learn something, expand your brain. You may find you really enjoy it!

Is Graphene the Miracle Material?

There is a news items going around the various media right now concerned research at the University of Manchester in the UK. The research concerns the development and initial testing of a molecular sieve using the material Graphene for removing salt from seawater producing drinkable fresh water.

By itself this news is extremely important. It is estimated that over a billion people worldwide lack proper access to freshwater and that number is only going to increase in the years ahead. The sieve developed at the University of Manchester has to potential to greatly reduce of cost of producing freshwater from saltwater which could make it a key element in improving the lives of millions of people.

But that’s only a part of the story, for the sieve is composed of the material Graphene which many scientists have called a ‘Miracle’ material. Now Graphene is really just another form of the element Carbon, that wonderful atom that produces everything from fossil fuels to diamonds to life itself (after all, life is really just complex carbon compounds dissolved in water). What makes Graphene so special is that it is a one atom thick sheet of carbon atoms in a an endless hexagonal grid. See the picture below.

The holes in the structure obviously make it a excellent choice for a sieve but Graphene has a lot more going for it than that. Among it’s other properties Graphene is 200 times as strong as steel, although it is much lighter. Graphene also conducts both heat and electricity better than copper does. These are only a few of the properties that have material scientists so excited by Graphene and the material’s possible uses are the subject of a great deal of research at the present time. Personally I know of several manufacturers of semiconductor electronics who are spending a lot of money on developing components made of Graphene rather than silicon.

Now Graphene has been around a long time. In fact if you write with a graphite pencil (an ordinary pencil) you will on occasion produce a small fragment of Graphene. The problem is trying to produce large enough quantities of pure Graphene to become commercially valuable. But don’t worry, there are hundreds of brilliant material scientists hard at work and you can be sure that in the years ahead you’re going to hear a lot more about Graphene. If you’d like to read more about the Graphene sieve click on the link below to go to the official announcement from Manchester University.

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/graphene-sieve-turns-seawater-into-drinking-water/

Before I go today I’d like to take a minute or two to talk about this blog ‘Science and Science Fiction’. Not only have I just reached 1500 registered subscribers but there have been some very complimentary comments submitted and I just want to thank you all for you encouragement and kind words. This blog is not yet 8 months old but it’s already far exceeded my expectations and that is all because or you so thanks again.

However, I like to say that every silver lining has a cloud around it and the cloud around the internet in general is the spammers and hackers who apparently are only happy when they’re making other people miserable.

In addition to many kind and insightful comments there have been some that either try to use my site to make them money or which are simply obscene. I can assure you those comments go immediately in the trash.

Now however it appears there are spammers out there trying to use ‘Science and Science Fiction’ to infect other sites and I’m going to be forced to install a form of security called CAPTCHA on my registration and comments links. To my friends out there I apologize and to those of you who made this necessary congratulations, you succeeded in making the world a little bit worse!

Space News for April

There was big news in the space community two days ago as SpaceX corporation succeeded in re-using a first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket. This is the breakthrough that SpaceX has been working toward ever since Elon Musk founded the company. The huge expense of space travel today comes primarily from the fact that launch systems costing tens of millions of dollars are allowed to simply crash into the ocean after one use.

SpaceX’s plan to change that and reduce the cost of traveling into space achieved it’s first great success two years ago with the first recovery of one of it’s Falcon 9. Before Thursday’s launch SpaceX had succeeded in recovering eight of their 14 story tall first stages and now they have demonstrated their ability to completely reuse and recover their rocket for yet another launch. SpaceX plans on another 6 launches this year that will employ rockets that have already flown once and been recovered.

To watch a video of the launch from Youtube click on the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=octU47dHdz8

To watch the landing click on the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsBUByZdGLU

SpaceX hopes that they can reduce the cost of getting into space (dollars per kilo to orbit) by a third and that the increased traffic that results will allow what are called ‘economies of scale’ to come into effect.

Thursday’s launch may have been historic but in reality it will only be important if the recovery and reuse of rockets becomes a routine business.

Another important news story this week came from the International Space Station (ISS) and dealt with a rearranging of one of the station’s docking adapters as a preparation for future missions by commercial spacecraft. NASA’s commercial crew program is scheduled to begin ferrying astronauts to the ISS next year with either the launch of Boeing’s Starliner or SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.

During the long six and a half hour spacewalk astronauts Thomas Pesquet of the EU and NASA’s Shane Kimbrough succeeded in disconnecting the Pressurized Mating Adapter-3 (PMA-3) so that the station’s robotic arm could move it from the station’s Tranquility module to it’s Harmony module. A second spacewalk is planned to reconnect PMA-3. Once this is accomplished the ISS will be ready for docking either the Starliner or Dragon spacecraft.

To read more about NASA’s Commercial Crew Program click on the link below.

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fs-2017-02-198-ksc_ccp_olia_fact_sheet_web.pdf

In a somewhat more amusing piece of news. Astrobiologist Julio Valdivia of Peru’s University of Engineering and Technology has been working with NASA’s Ames research center in Sunnyvale California to study the ability of Earth plants to survive in the environmental conditions existing on Mars and has had a major success, Potatoes. That’s right Professor Valdivia has found that the lowly Potato can both live and grow on Mars. But of course everyone who saw ‘The Martian’ already knew that.

Trump’s Science Budget, or lack thereof.

I’d like to take a bit of a break from my series ‘What is Science Fiction’ to talk a little about the impact of the recently announced White House budget for 2018 on science. (Don’t worry, the final installment of “What is Science Fiction” will be posted this week.)

This is Donald Trump’s first budget and shows very clearly his intent for the future of such agencies as NASA, NOAA, NSF and the Department of Energy. We already knew that the EPA and National Institute for Health were going to take a big hit and boy did they! The EPA’s budget is cut by almost a third while the NIH losses 18% of it’s funding. I guess Donald Trump doesn’t want us to know how sick we’re getting from all the pollutants industry is dumping into the environment. Still, as I said we knew those cuts were coming.

The cuts at the Department of Energy were a bit more of a surprise. While the overall reduction is only 5% the cutback in scientific research controlled by the DOE is 20%. Not many people know that the DOE runs America’s high energy physics programs and other basic research installations like the Laser Interferometer Gravity wave Observatory (LIGO) which just last year announced the first detection of gravity waves.

These cuts not only threaten America’s leadership in almost every field of scientific research but will cause many of our most brilliant and gifted young students to abandon careers in basic science. From the building of the very first atom smasher by E. O. Lawrence back in 1934 America has always led the world in physics experiments but no more! Europe has the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Chinese are building dozens of scientific centers while we just let them take the lead. I guess Physics is a little too complicated for Donald Trump to understand.

One complete omission from the White house budget is the funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF), it’s just simply not mentioned at all. However republicans over the last few years have begun to criticize the NSF for funding programs related to the environment and social sciences so you can bet on the NSF loosing some of it’s funding.

The one piece of good news in the budget is the fact that NASA’s funding is only cut by 0.8%. Even that silver lining has a cloud around it however as the funding for Earth research from Space is drastically cut. At the same time Trump has issued an executive order directing NASA to focus on a manned journey to Mars in the 2030s. I guess even Donald Trump is able to understand that a trip to Mars is something to brag about.

If you’d like to read more about the exact figures for Donald Trump’s science budget click the link below to read an article from ‘Nature’.

http://www.nature.com/news/us-science-agencies-face-deep-cuts-in-trump-budget-1.21652

And what’s the reasoning behind all these cutbacks in the very programs that make the United States the most technically advanced nation in the world. Is it to assure health care for all Americans, please don’t make me laugh. Is it to lower the deficit, nah republicans only care about deficit spending when it’s the democrats doing the spending. It’s so that we can spend more money on a military that already costs more than the next five nations spend on their military.

Hopefully Donald Trump will have the same success with his budget that he just had with his healthcare repeal and replace. Hopefully we can force the congress to put some of the science funding back into the budget. Neil deGrasse Tyson has called the Trump budget the “Make America Weak, Sick and Stupid Budget”. I certainly agree.

Human Machine Interface

In one sense of course, Human Machine Interface has been around since the invention of the wheel. Over the last twenty years however progress has been particularly rapid and Human Machine Interface has become both very advanced and quite intimate.

Much of the progress has taken place in the design and development of prosthetic devices to replace body parts lost by disease, injury or congenital condition. Modern materials along with engineering design and miniature electronics have produced artificial limbs that can function nearly as well as a limb of flesh and blood.

Some of the best available technology today employs the residual nerve signals or muscle contractions that would have controlled the missing limb to now control the movements of a myoelectric prosthesis. These devices have enabled thousands of people to regain the better part of the functioning of their lost limb. The picture below shoes a basic layout of a myoelectric artificial arm and hand.

Some of the most advanced work is now being accomplished by John Hopkins Medicine and involves a direct control of a prosthetic limb by the mind itself. To read the brain’s signals a sensor pad with 128 electrodes is surgically implanted on the region of the brain that controls arm and hand movement. The sensory data is then analyzed by a computer which then controls a robotic hand. The team that is conducting the research claim that they can reproduce 88% of the functioning of a normal hand with the test subject being able to individually move the robotic thumb and fingers. The picture below shows the sensor pad and where it was implanted on the brain.

Sensor Pad implanted on the Brain. Credit: Guy Hotson

If you’d like to read more about the research being conducted at John Hopkins click on the link below.

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/mind_controlled_prosthetic_arm_moves_individual_fingers_

Another project taking place at MIT involves actual mind control of a robot. The picture below shows the experimental setup.

In the experiment a human subject places a skullcap over their head which measures their brainwaves. The brainwaves are then analyzed by a computer which uses them to control a robot. In the experiment the robot is carrying out a simple task of sorting objects into one of two bins. So far the researchers are successful in commanding the robot into which bin to place the object with only their brains 70% of the time so we have a way to go before we can make robots dance just by thinking them to do so but it is a start. If you’d like to read more about the research at MIT click on the link below.

http://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2017/03/08/mit-mind-controlled-robots

In some respects human control of what machines are capable of doing is almost a definition of technology. We’ve been getting better at it for thousands of years but progress is accelerating and what we may be capable of in just a few decades is staggering.

Space News for March2017

The past couple of weeks have seen several interesting news items related to manned space flight so I thought today would be a good day to catch up on Space News.

First off last week both Space X corp and the Russians succeeded in launching resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS) with Space X also successfully landing the first stage of their Falcon rocket after it had placed the Dragon capsule into orbit. These resupply missions are becoming routine and that’s a good thing! It means we are finally building the infrastructure the space which will enable us to concentrate on new missions going further into space.

Speaking of going further into space, Space X announced last week that they are preparing a mission to take two paying customers out to, but not landing on, the Moon. This mission has tentatively scheduled for late next year (2018). Along with NASA’s announcement last month that the first mission of their Space Launch System / Orion spacecraft might now be manned (see my post of 22Feb for that news) this means that there could be two independent missions to Lunar orbit next year (actually I bet they’ll both end up in 2019 but still that’s progress!) If you’d like to read Space X’s official announcement click on the link below.

http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send-privately-crewed-dragon-spacecraft-beyond-moon-next-year

Now, for the fashion conscious among us (certainly not me) there was a press release for a company called StemRad based in Israel. StemRad already has a reputation for designing and manufacturing radiation protective gear for workers in nuclear power plants now they’re working on gear for astronauts. StemRad called the press release to show off the new radiation vest that they had developed and which they called the AstroRad. The vest is intended to protect human tissue from the effects of the radiation encountered on deep space missions such as to the Moon or Mars. NASA will be testing the vest on their planned Lunar missions.

The vests are form fitting and tailor made for each astronaut. The picture below shows the vests being worn by two of StemRad’s employees.

If you’d like to read more about the AstroRad vest click on the link below.

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-mars-astronaut-radiation-shield-set-for-moon-mission-trial-developer-2017-3

Finally the space company Blue Origen released an animation of how their soon to be completed Glenn rocket will be recovered after launching a payload into orbit. The critics are all saying that it looks awfully familiar and that Space X doesn’t need animations since they have actual footage of them landing one of their rockets! Still, more companies competing against each other should help bring down the cost of space travel. If you’d like to see the animation click on the link below.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/7/14841128/blue-origin-ocean-landing-rocket-animation-spacex-comparison

Before I go I have an announcement of my own to make! If you look over at the right hand side of the page you’ll see that I have now started a bookmarks section where I will be providing links to other web sites devoted to Science and Science Fiction. Even better you’ll see that this blog has been chosen by Feedspot Blog Directory as one of their Top 100 science blogs. In fact Science and Science Fiction debuted at #73 on their list which includes such well known sites as Scientific American, Discover Magazine, National Geographic and Popular Science. O’k they’re all in the single digits while I’m 73 but still it’s cool just being on the same list! And remember, this blog is only 6 months old!

Physics Seminar: Free Neutron Decay

Back in High School you probably learned that the atoms that make up everything around us are themselves made up of three types of particles, Protons and Neutron sit at the center of the atom in the nucleus while electrons go spinning around the nucleus. What you might not have learned in High School is that the Protons and Neutrons are made up of particles called quarks and that sometimes Neutrons can ‘decay’ into a Proton, electron and an anti-Neutrino!

Two days ago I attended a physics seminar at my old Alma Matter Drexel University entitled “The Life and Death of the Free Neutron’ given by Doctor Nadia Fomin, Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee and a researcher at Oak Ridge Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of attending a science seminar let me take a brief moment to give you an idea of what it’s like. A visiting scientist is invited to come and give a talk by a member of the local faculty whose own research is in the same general field. First there is an introduction by the local faculty member mentioning where the visitor is currently working, where they received their degrees and a short description of their research.

Then we get the meat! For the next 45 minutes or so you get to listen to a lecture on the latest research being conducted, the cutting edge of science in action. If the visitor is an experimentalist as Doctor Fomin was you get to hear about the development of their instruments as well as their results but if the visitor is a theoretician you could be treated to 45 minutes of solid math, what could be better than that! After presenting their results the lecturer will then take about 5 minutes to relate what they think their results mean, how they effect what we know about the Universe. Finally there’s about ten minutes given to questions from the audience.

The question period can be the most interesting. I have attended several seminars where a member of the audience was well known to disagreed with everything the visiting speaker was saying and everybody else was just waiting for the clash when the two scientists argued their case. Now there’s no yelling or cursing, everything is calm and deliberate but this is the cutting edge of science in action. Two opposing models of how the Universe behaves, each side has some evidence and a lot of theories as support but neither side has enough to convince the other.

So that’s what attending a scientific seminar is like. Let’s get back to Professor Fomin and her measurements of the decay half life of a free Neutron. Ever since the Neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932 scientists have know that a free Neutron, one that was not confined to the nucleus of an atom, would after some time decay into a Proton and an electron and it was some missing energy in this decay that led Wolfgang Pauli to predict the existence of the Neutrino (although in Neutron decay it’s actually an anti-Neutrino that gets produced). To understand the reaction take a look at the Feynman diagram below.

The Neutron and Proton are both composed of three quarks, two Ups and a Down for the Proton and two Downs and an Up for the Neutron. Now the decay of the Neutron takes place via the ‘Weak Nuclear Interaction’ and it’s half life was first measured after world war 2 to be something around 15 minutes. That doesn’t sound very scientific does it, well Neutrons are very hard to measure, they’re much smaller than an atom, they have to electric charge so it takes a lot effort to learn almost anything about them.

We have made progress since the 1940s, and Doctor Formin and her colleagues are a part of that progress. The best current estimate of the free Neutron half life is between 870 and 880 seconds and the hope is that with new instruments before long that range will be reduced to 0.3 seconds.

Why should we care? What difference does it make whether the Neutron’s half life is 874 or 875 seconds? Well, it does matter because the half life of the Neutron plays an important role in models of the early development of our Universe. Shortly after the Big Bang the universe was a foaming sea of elementary particles that quickly became atoms of hydrogen and helium along with a bit of lithium. Right now the biggest unknown in just how that process took place is the Neutron half life! Also, numerous theories uniting gravity to quantum mechanics, the so called ‘Theories of Everything’ make predictions about the half life of the Neutron and with a better measurement of the half life we can eliminate some of the wrong theories.

Physics began some four hundred years age with Galileo making measurements of falling objects. Measurement is central to what physics is and how it works. I look forward to hearing about Doctor Formin’s results when she gets her new instruments.

The Mysterious Tully Monster and other Fossil News

One of the most mysterious of all known fossils is an ancient animal known as the Tully monster. Named for it’s discoverer Francis Tully who first found the enigmatic creature in 1958 at the Mazon Creek fossil site in Illinois. The Mazon Creek site is world famous because it is one of the very few places on Earth where the remains of the soft parts of animals were well preserved.

Think about it, when you go to a museum to look at their dinosaur collection what you really see are the dinosaur bones, the hard parts of the animals. Whenever paleontologists find even a tiny fragment of the soft anatomy of an animal it is a rare and very valuable find.

The Tully Monster had no hard parts, and it is only known from the specimens of it that have been found at Mazon Creek. Worse, whatever relatives Tully may have had also had no hard parts because we have only guesses as to what kind of animal it is. Take a look at the picture below to see just how strange this ‘monster’ was.

The long pincer out front, we’re not quite sure if that’s where the mouth is, and the eyes on a bar across the back are certainly weird if not monstrous. What kind of animal Tully is has been debated for years.

Last year, a paper in the journal Nature by Victoria E. McCoy of Yale University and others announced that the Tully monster was a vertebrate, that it had a backbone along with a gill sack and liver and was distantly related to us. This week however another paper by Lauren Sallan of the University of Pennsylvania pushed back, declaring that the ‘gill sack’ and ‘liver’ were misinterpreted and that the eyes of Tully monster were ‘cup eyes’ similar to those possessed by a snail not a vertebrate. It seems we still have no idea just what Tully is. As it happens I live in Philadelphia and attended Drexel University across the street from the U. of P. so obviously I think Professor Sallan is right! In fact it looks as if the Tully Monster is going to remain a mystery for some time to come and isn’t that the way a monster should be!

I myself have a sizeable fossil collection and hope one day to do some collecting at Mazon Creek. If you’d like to learn more about the Tully Monster and the Mazon Creek fossils (there are a lot of other interesting creatures found there) I recommend ‘The Mazon Creek Fossil Fauna’ by Jack Wittry and available at amazon.

The Mazon Creek Fossil Fauna by Jack Wittry

Another fossil related bit of news also deals with the problems of identifying long extinct animals know only from a few specimens. In this case it’s the discovery of an ancient “bristle” worm which was not only very large but came equipped with a set of equally large snapping jaws. A member of the phyla annelid, segmented worms, this worm was approximately a meter in length with jaws about half a centimeter (So the jaws weren’t really that big but for animals of this kind they were huge). In a marine environment bristle worms often live in tubes which they have constructed out of sediment and a chemical they secrete. The fossil was found in rocks over 400 million years old and may have been an active predator, using its jaws to seize and chew its prey.

The history of life on this planet is both long and complex. With several million different kinds of creature alive today and many times that number that are now extinct there’s always new and fascinating discoveries to be made!