Starting in the 1930s European Scientists fleeing the Nazis came to the United States giving our country a scientific dominance that lasted for more than fifty years. Will Trump’s attacks on science and education cause the same effect in the opposite direction? 

It was in January of 1933 that Adolph Hitler first came to power as Chancellor of Germany. Almost immediately he began to reshape German culture according to his own racially based ideology. Of course that reshaping included both education and science, despite the fact that in the early 20th century German education and science were arguably the best in the world. Scientists like Einstein, Haber, Planck, Pauli, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, the brightest men in the world all taught in German universities.

Adolph Hitler’s first public appearance after being named as German Chancellor, 30 January 1933. (Credit: Nuremberg Municipal Museum)
Albert Einstein arriving in America to stay as a result of Nazi treatment of Jews. (Credit: X)

The problem, as far as Hitler was concerned was that too many of Germany’s scientists were Jews, and Hitler was convinced that there was a fundamental difference between good, wholesome ‘German Science’ and what he called ‘Jewish Science’ or sometimes ‘Communist Science’. (Why so many people assume that, just because Karl Marx was born Jewish that communism is some kind of Jewish plot for world domination is beyond my understanding. There were plenty of non-Jewish communists and Marx regarded himself as an atheist.)

Karl Marx (r) was in fact Jewish, but his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels (l) was baptised as a reformed Calvinist. In fact, very few famous Communists were Jewish! (Credit: Socialist Party Scotland)
Once in power the Nazi moved quickly to segregate German Jews from the rest of German Society. It should be remembered that many of the measures the Nazi’s employed were based upon the Jim Crow laws against blacks here in the US. (Credit: AAIHS)

The Nazi removal of Jewish influence in education started almost immediately, Jews were not allowed to teach or attend public universities. As the laws oppressing German Jews grew in number and severity many Jews sought to leave Germany, and that included German scientists like Einstein, Pauli, Born, Wigner, Bethe and Szilard, I could go on and on. As the ‘land of freedom’ the United States was the destination of choice for most of these refugees.

One of the Jewish scientists who left Germany for the US was Max Born who received the Nobel Prise in Physics in the year I was born 1954. (Credit: Atomic Archive)

As World War 2 neared and Nazi military aggression became obvious Jews in other countries also began to join the migration westward to America. And it wasn’t only Jews who came to our country, many Christian scientists who objected to the loss of intellectual freedom, who refused to allow political hacks to tell them what to teach and what research to conduct also left Europe build a new life in America. The best known among these would be Enrico Fermi who led the program that built the world’s first nuclear reactor, but there were others. The benefit that the US and the Allied cause in general gained from these men during WW2 cannot be overestimated.

Enrico Fermi (r) and his family. Enrico was like most Italians a Catholic but his wife Laura (l) was Jewish. This picture is of their arrival in New York. Hundreds of such brilliant people left Europe for the US because of Nazi racial policies. (Credit: The Fermi Effect)

In all thousands of scientists and engineers, and many artists and musicians as well, fled the old world for the new and the addition of their talents enabled the United States to dominate science and culture for the rest of the century. Ever since that time America has always welcomed the world’s brightest minds to come here and learn at our universities and perhaps even stay here and contribute to American science.

Everybody knows the story of Ben Frankin flying a kite to prove that lightning was electricity. Science has always been a part of American greatness in the past, but will it be in the future? (Credit: Skeptics Stack Exchange)

Not any more thanks to Trump. Just as Hitler did, Trump’s war on intellectualism is being conducted on several fronts. First of all Trump’s determination to get rid of as many immigrants as possible is not stopping at just those ‘illegals’ who snuck into our country without a visa or those who have overstayed the time limit on their visas. Immigrants from countries like Cuba and Venezuela, who were granted asylum status because we consider both governments to be dictatorships are now having that status revoked and are being deported.

So anxious is the Trump administration to remove as many immigrants as quickly as possible that the conditions those who are being detained have become a disgrace to our nation. (Credit: Politico)

It even goes further as foreign students, who are given ‘Green Cards’ so that they can study at American universities, and who bring a lot of money to those universities, are now being rounded up and deported if they dare to protest against any of the Trump administration’s policies. America is no longer a welcoming refuge for those seeking to escape tyranny and bring their talents to our country.

Apparently our 1st amendment right to free speech in this country doesn’t extend to legally admitted foreign students who speak out against Trump’s policies like Mahmoud Khalil did. (Credit: NBC News)

Even worse, Trump and his goons have begun the process of forcing scientists who work for the government to accept the administration’s ideological opinion instead of the facts as their research has shown them. In other words scientists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) can either parrot Trump’s lies about climate change or lose their jobs while physicians at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) can either accept Robert Kennedy Jr.’s nonsense about vaccines causing autism or be fired. In fact Peter Marks, the scientist who oversaw the creation of the Covid-19 vaccines in record time, and who is thought to have saved an estimated three million lives, has been forced to resign rather than be a party to RFK Jr’s false science.

It’s not just foreigners who are being persecuted for telling the truth. World recognized vaccine expert Peter Marks was forced to resign from his post at the CDC because he refused to go along with Rober F. Kennedy Jr.’s idiotic beliefs. (Credit: NPR)

At the same time Trump has used federal funding for science as a weapon to force America’s leading universities to bow to his ideological whims. The University of Pennsylvania has lost over $100 million dollars in grant money because they used to have a trans-girl student on their girl’s swim team, and that student graduated several years ago. At Colombia University funds have been taken away on the grounds of campus ‘anti-Semitism’ because in 2024 there were massive protests called for a cease-fire in Israel’s war in Gaza. By the way many of the students at that peace protest were Jewish. Now Harvard and Princeton have also had research funds taken away from them.

Much of Republican anger over Trans rights began when a Trans girl named Lia Thomas who was a member of the University of Pennsylvania swim team won a national championship. The very idea that a boy would become a girl in order to ‘win’ at girl’s sports is simply ridiculous. (Credit: NBC News)

So far most of the funds that have been pulled are directed at medical research, vaccines and drug testing that much of the republican base regards as a conspiracy by ‘Big Pharma’. Harvard’s President, in a letter to his faculty has declared that the loss of these funds “Will halt life saving research.” It’s not just medical studies that are being affected however because it appears that at Princeton the funding being canceled deals with fusion energy and astrophysics research.

The Tokamak reactor at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL) is our nation’s leading research facility for Fusion Energy. It has been threatened with having its funding withdrawn because Princeton refuses to bow down to Trump’s whims. (Credit: The Daily Princetonian)

The loss of these research funds will be devastating to American science. Johns Hopkins University, one of the first institutes of learning to be attacked by Trump is planning on laying off 2,000 staff members. While other schools have not yet announced how many faculty members they may lose all of them are cutting back on the hiring of new researchers, that means graduate students! So this country’s best and brightest young minds will not be able to continue their education here and all of the discoveries and inventions they may have generated will be lost to our country.

Johns Hopkins University has had to lay off 2,000 medical researchers because of Trump’s retribution. How will this affect the search for new treatments for diseases remains to be seen but those 2,000 scientists now have to find another job, maybe in another country? (Credit: CNN)

As the United States becomes ever more hostile toward science other countries are already looking to increase their own talent pool by luring American scientists to their country. In a recent survey by the British journal Nature over 70% of the American scientists who responded indicated that they were considering leaving the US to continue their work abroad. As you might imagine those scientists who were at the beginning of their careers were the most interested in emigrating.

Much of the science being done at America’s universities is done by graduate students and much of the Trump layoffs are hitting those same grad students. How many will leave the US to seek jobs in other countries taking their talents with them? (Credit: American Society for Biochemistry)

While Canada currently seems to be the destination of choice for American scientists other nations like France, the UK and Japan are not far behind. The German media outlet Deutsch Welle even jokingly published an article entitled ‘Dear US Researchers, Welcome to Germany’.

The European Union as a whole is trying to lure American scientists to move there. That’s a brain drain similar to what happened to Europe in the 1930s and its being caused by the same sort of stupidity! (Credit: Courthouse New Service)

So will US scientists flee to other countries in a modern reversal of the way so many scientists came to America to escape the Nazi. Only time will tell. It’s worth remembering however that Trump’s most ardent supporters are a bunch of creationists, conspiracy mongers and anti-intellectuals who all want to control our educational system with the intent of fostering their own morals on the truth. No country can survive that sort of thing for long! 

Book Review: ‘The Object’ by Joshua T. Calvert. 

‘The Object’ by Author Joshua T. Calvert advertises itself as a ‘Hard Science Fiction’ novel, meaning that all of the technology in the story is based on well-established science. In stories of this kind spaceships are propelled by rockets not by warp drive or anti-gravity, there are no transporter beams and time travel is simply impossible. The problem with such stories is that they can become dated pretty quickly.

Cover Art for the Novel ‘The Object’ by Joshue T. Calvert. (Credit: Amazon)

For example Arthur C. Clarke’s first novel, ‘The Space Dreamers’ was written in 1947 and describes the development of a rocket designed to take men to the Moon using technology that was at least possible in the late 1940s. Needless to say the story soon became ‘quaint’ to put it nicely.

Quaint and old-fashioned can be a lot of fun on occasion but most of the time we prefer to live in the modern world. Science Fiction deals with possible futures, not comfortable pasts! (Credit: TouristBee)

Author Joshua T. Calvert goes even further, placing his story in the present day world of NASA, the International Space Station and even Space X gets a lot of mention. Today’s politics are also a part of the plot with tense relations between the US-EU bloc and the China-Russia bloc. The story even begins in the year 2023. The risk in this strategy is that things could change a lot in the next few years so that ‘The Object’ also rapidly becomes dated.

Much of the action, at least in the first half of ‘The Object’ actually takes place at the Johnson Manned Space Center in Houston. That makes it easy to add local colour to the story but if NASA ever changes the name or moves the facility the whole novel becomes simply wrong. (Credit: Texas State Historical Society)

As the novel begins Melody ‘Mel’ Adams is a scientist working for NASA keeping a watch out for asteroids and comets. Mel was in line for an astronaut post but she just missed the cut, her current position at least keeps her a part of the space agency. During an observing run Mel discovers a comet with a developed tail out beyond the orbit of Pluto. The problem with identifying the thing as a comet is that comets don’t develop their tails until they get close enough to the Sun to warm up and begin outgassing.

Author Joshua T. Calvert. (Credit: Podium Entertainment)

The object’s orbit is soon calculated and indicates that, whatever it is it comes from outside the solar system. When the object, which is given the name Serenity, then makes at stop at the planet Saturn and then changes course heading toward the inner planets the possibility that it is an alien spaceship is taken seriously.

As you read ‘The Object’ you get a strong feeling that the story was inspired by the recent discovery of the interstellar object called Oumuamua and the speculation that it could be an interstellar probe build to study our solar system. (Credit: King 5 News)

Serenity’s new trajectory doesn’t have it headed toward Earth however. In fact the closest it will come to our planet is the orbit of Mars so a special mission, using a modified Space X Starship is set up to take a crew of six, two Americans, two Europeans and two Chinese, to rendezvous with the object as it intersects Mar’s orbit. The training and preparation for this mission take up a large part of the novel and it is during training that an injury to the assigned mission commander causes Mel Adams to become the ship’s commander.

As the largest rocket ever build it’s Space X’s ‘Starship’ that author Calvert uses as the vehicle that travels to rendezvous with ‘The Object’. (Credit: Aerospace American AIAA)

I won’t give away the secret of just what Serenity turns out to be but it certainly is different from just a spaceship with an alien crew aboard. That’s the best part of ‘The Object’, Serenity itself. It’s here that the author finally let’s his imagination go, the problem is it takes so long to get there.

In some ways ‘The Object’ itself resembles ‘The Black Cloud’ from the novel by Fred Hoyle. Hoyle’s novel, written in the 1950s is pretty dated now, but still worth reading!!! (Credit: Amazon)

I’m not saying that the first three quarters of “The Object’ are bad, it’s just that they are so filled with minutia that I often lost track of the story, a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. Author Calvert has obviously spent years learning all of the details of how NASA handles a space mission, of what working for NASA is like and wants to include every one of them.

In engineering the smallest detail can have immense importance. In a novel not so much! (Credit: Love Changes Everything)

So I am giving ‘The Object’ a thumb’s up, especially if you are interested in how NASA organizes a space mission, how the space agency selects and trains its astronauts. For me however I would have preferred to have the first two-thirds of the novel cut in half and the last third doubled in size.

Archaeology News for April 2025: Stone Age Technology that reveals how intelligent our Ancestors really were.  

The popular concept of a caveman, you know, an ignorant brute who carried a club and who solved every problem by hitting something with it has been around now since the first Neanderthal skeletons were discovered back in 1856. The more we learn about our Stone Age ancestors however the less brutish and ignorant they appear. In this post I’ll be discussing a couple of recent discoveries that add further evidence showing just how intelligent ‘Cave Men’ could be. As usual I will begin with the oldest study and go forward in time.

Neanderthal 1, the type specimen of the species is a skull cap that clearly shows the strong brow ridges above the eyes, a classic characteristic of Neanderthals. (Credit: Eunostos)

Just when did we humans begin to make tools, whether they be made from stone, wood or bone doesn’t matter, is a very controversial subject. The fact that even our relatives the chimpanzees use several different kinds of tolls indicates that our ancestors might have been using tools as long ago as five million years or more. Of course, using tools is a very different thing from making tools.

Chimpanzees have been known to pick up a stone and use it to break open a nut or similar food item. That’s a lot different from making stone tools however. (Credit: The New York Times)
Eventually however, our ancestors learned how to manufacture a wide variety of stone tools. (Credit: Pinterest)

Picking up a rock to smash open a walnut takes a lot less thought than shaping that rock to have both an easy handgrip and a flat surface to crush the shell without damaging the nut inside. At the same time however, it is often difficult for an archaeologist to look at a rock today and tell whether it had been modified to become a tool a million or more years ago.

Is this a stone tool or just a stone? Sometimes even an expert has difficulty telling the difference. (Credit: The Guardian)

Now a paper published in the journal Nature has provided evidence that not only were humans making tools one and a half million years ago but that they were manufacturing tools at ‘factory’ sites according to a ‘standardized’ design. The site in question is at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania the famous place where Louis Leakey discovered what is still considered to be the oldest species in our genus, Homo habilis.

Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. It was here in the 1950s and 60s that the first evidence for our earliest human ancestor Homo habilis was unearthed. (Credit: Britannica)

What the researchers from CNRS and the l’Université de Bordeaux discovered at Olduvai were 27 tools made from both the bones of hippopotamus’ and elephants all of which had been modified in a similar ‘standardized’ way. Prior to the discovery at Olduvai the earliest known ‘manufacturing site’ for tools was dated at just a half a million years old so the finds indicate that humans were capable of organizing and planning complex tasks far earlier than had previously been known.

Some of the bone tools found at Olduvai Gorge. (Credit: ScienceDirect.com)

And once our ancestors began to ‘manufacture’ goods in quantity at specific sites they then had to transport those goods to where they used them. One problem modern archaeologists have in trying to understand early transportation technology is that any ancient vehicle would have been composed of wood, wood that usually has decayed away a long time ago.

Everybody knows about the stone circles of the British Isles like Stonehenge but few people know that those ancient Britons also made a large number of wooden circles as well. The problem is that the wood has decayed over the centuries and the only evidence we have of the wooden circles are the post holes left in the ground. (Credit: Wikipedia)

A new discovery in the desert of White Sands, New Mexico however had shown that even without the vehicles themselves we can still learn a lot about the ways that our ancestors transported their goods thousands of years ago. Drag marks in the same sediment as, and intermingling with human footprints have been unearthed in 20,000-year-old dried mud. The drag marks are of two kinds, either a single line furrow with footprints on both sides or two lines in parallel with footprints usually inside the lines.

A section of the ‘fossilized’ track marks made nearly 20,000 years in White Sands National Park. (Credit: Sacramento Bee)

The researchers from Bournemouth University in the UK who discovered the tracks think that the lines were made by a type of unwheeled vehicle known as a travois, basically wooden poles tied together to form a ‘Y’ shape, the single line, or ‘X’ shape, the parallel lines. The goods that were to be carried were then secured on top of the poles and the whole vehicle dragged along the ground. For a culture that hasn’t invented the wheel yet that’s about as good a transportation technology as you can get.

The track marks made at White Sands came from two different types of vehicles. The single line was made by a ‘Y’ shaped wooden vehicle (top) while the parallel tracks were made by an ‘X’ shaped wooden contrivance (bottom). (Credit: Archaeology News)

Alongside the footprints of the adults who were presumed to be dragging the travois the archaeologists found the footprints of children indicating that these were entire family groups on the move. Some of the drag marks are as long as 50m and the fact that there were no animal footprints indicates that the travois were in use before the people of North America had domesticated animals. Thousands of years later the people of North America were known to use dogs to drag their travois. Even back in the Stone Age our ancestors were thinking, trying different techniques in order to make their lives better. They passed that wisdom on to their descendants, who in the long run passed it on to us.  

Some of the footprints made at White Sands thousands of years ago. In the middle picture you can see how there are two different sizes of prints indicating that children walked along with their parents, just like we do today! (Credit: National Park Service)

Everybody’s talking about the Stock Market right now, so I will as Well! 

We are all aware of how important the stock market is to our nation’s economy as a whole. At the same time we all have some notion of the markets as being those places where ‘shares’ in the big corporations that make up so much of the economy are bought and sold. Few of us however have more than vague idea of many of the various terms that get mentioned every time the stock market is discussed. Often, the many terms that economists and financial experts use seems like words from a foreign language.

Economists and Market Analysts have their own special language and if you want to understand what’s happening in our economy you need at least some familiarity with the terms they use! (Credit: Investments IQ)

So, in this post I’m going to try to explain some of those terms in simple enough language so that hopefully those of you out there who aren’t finance types can understand the ups and downs and ins and outs of the market. I think I’ll start with an example that’s easy to understand, a privately owned small business.

The majority of our economy still consists of small, privately owned businesses. However small shops and markets like this one can get swamped by economic downturns caused by the big corporations. (Credit: Common Edge)

Consider a barbershop or beauty shop, such a small business is almost certainly owned by a single person, the head barber or beautician. Now the shop may have a few employees as well, but they get paid a flat salary. Whatever profits the business makes go to the owner alone, along with all of the losses if there are any. Now owning a small business is complicated enough, usually the owner had to take out a bank loan to start the business, and there are always things like insurance, legal permits and so on. However, a small business, owned by a single person at least doesn’t have to worry about the price of any stock in that business.

Mitt Romney got into trouble but stating that “Corporations are people too!”, but it is true that corporations do have many of the same legal rights that you and I have! (Credit: Investopedia)

That’s a small business; a larger business or company may decide to register itself as a ‘Corporation’, which strictly speaking can be any group that is legally allowed to act as a single entity. In business terms when a group of people called ‘Investors’ come together to form a company they will incorporate that company. If the investors each contribute equally to the formation of the corporation then they will each receive an equal share of whatever profits the corporation makes.

Small corporations can register as ‘S’ corporations while larger firms prefer to register as ‘C’ corporations. (Credit: The Motley Fool)

Oftentimes however the investors do not contribute equally to the new corporation. In that case the corporation may issue ‘Stocks’ that represent a certain share of the total value of the company. For example if the corporation issues 100 shares of stock then each share of the stock is worth 1% of the total value of the company and each share will receive 1% of the profit. (Usually a corporation issues a lot more shares of stock than that, often millions of shares.)  The investors now become ‘Shareholders’ with each receiving a number of shares proportional to their investment.

The most often traded type of corporate stock is known as common stock. Buying a share of common stock is actually buying a portion of the company that issued the stock. (Credit: Investopedia)

Now the whole purpose of forming a corporation of course is to make money, and the total sum of all of the money that a company makes is formally called its ‘Revenue’. ‘Expenses’, on the other hand are the costs that any company must pay in order to do business, expenses include but are not limited to paying employees, purchasing materials, paying for utilities like electricity and water, rent for buildings or building maintenance.

Pretty much says it all. Whatever money a company makes minus the costs of doing business is the profit that shareholders receive, if there is any profit. (Credit: Britannica)

Revenue minus expenses is the ‘Profit’ that company makes, unless of course expenses are larger than revenue in which case the company has suffered a ‘Loss’. Whatever profit a company makes is then divided amongst the shareholders on an equal basis for every share, this is known as either a ‘Dividend’ or “Earnings per Share’ (EPS). Dividends can be issued by a company on an annual, semi-annual, quarterly or even monthly basis. Which depends on the company.

Investors can sometimes arrange for their share of the profits, their dividends to get paid in more shares of the company’s stock! (Credit: Investopedia)

Obviously, the value of a share of stock depends greatly on the size of the dividend the company pays for each share of its stock, everything else being equal a stock that pays a dividend of $10 per share per year is worth ten times more than a stock that pays a dividend of $1 per share per year. Another important quantity that financial experts often use is known as the ‘Price per Earnings Ratio’ or P/E. This is simply the price of a single share of stock divided by the total dividends earned by that share over a year. What P/E works out to be then is the number of years you would have to own a share of that stock in order for its dividends to cover the cost of having bought the stock in the first place. Obviously the lower the P/E of a stock the less time it takes for the dividends to pay for the stock and therefore the more valuable the stock is.

When you are looking to buy a stock, you want the P/E ratio to be small so that you get big earnings for the price you paid for the stock! (Credit: The Motley Fool)

O’k, so now let’s say that one of the stockholders in a company wants to sell their stock, or someone who is not a stockholder in a company wants to become one. We all know that the buying and selling of shares of stock has become an enormous business in itself and takes place at ‘Stock Markets’ or ‘Stock Exchanges’. The oldest stock market in the Unites States is actually the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which first began trading in 1790 but of course the largest exchange in the entire world is the New York Stock Exchange, which first began trading in 1792 and which today lists 2,132 companies whose stock can be bought or sold there.

The New York Stock Exchange in all its glory. Time is money so the buying and selling of stocks is carried out at a frantic pace. (Credit: Bloomberg.com)

As in any marketplace the prices of stocks at an exchange can go up or down depending on supply and demand. I said above that the size of a stock’s dividend is the primary thing that determines a stock’s price but investors can also speculate that in the future a company is going to do better, or worse and that speculation can drive a stock’s price up or down, as can opinions about the overall health of the US economy.

An increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) means that the economic health of the country is good. In these times you would expect stock prices to rise as investors try to profit from the increase in overall wealth. (Credit: Statista)

Once a company’s stock is listed on an exchange is becomes possible to calculate the total value of that company, a quantity known as ‘Market Capitalization’ or Market Cap. Market Cap is simply the current price of a share or the company’s stock multiplied by the total number of shares the company has issued. For example assume a company has issued 100 million shares of stock and at the end of a trading session the price per share is $10, in that case the total value of that company is considered to be $1 billion dollars.

Companies come in all sizes so Wall Street has invented names that relate to a firm’s Market Cap. (Credit: The Motley Fool)

Now with over two thousand of our country’s biggest companies being traded every day the performance of the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE, is an important measure of just how the United States economy is doing as a whole. The problem is that measuring the daily performance of over 2,000 stocks, some of which will go up and some of which will go down is not an easy thing to calculate, especially back in the days before electronic computers. That’s why a number of different ‘Averages’ were developed, the best known of which is the ‘Dow Jones Industrial Average’ or simply the Dow. Begun in 1896 the Dow is an average of the stock value of thirty of the biggest companies in the US, known as Dow components, but spread over number of different industries. In other words the Dow is not just the 30 biggest companies, it’s the biggest financial services companies like J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sacks along with the biggest retailers like Walmart and Amazon plus the biggest information services like Apple and IBM. By spreading its components over different industries the Dow became a quick peak at the entire US economy and since it only had 30 companies it could be calculated on a daily basis.

The three main indexes for understanding the health of the financial markets as a whole are the Dow Jones, The S&P 500, and the NASDAQ. (Credit: The Motley Fool)

With the advent of modern computers it has become possible to calculate the Dow average almost instantaneously, and there are now other averages as well including the ‘Standard and Poor’s 500’ S&P 500 which is the 500 biggest companies in the NYSE along with the NASDAQ 100 which is the 100 biggest companies on the NASDAQ stock exchange. In fact our new ability to monitor thousands of stocks moment by moment has only increased the volatility of stock prices allowing speculators to drive prices up or down so that they can make a quick profit.

At stock exchanges nowadays there are more computers than traders as keeping up with stock prices is something only a computer can handle. (Credit: Investopedia)

There has always been an aspect of gambling to any commodities market, including the stock market. There are always investors who think they have some inside information that allows them to pick short-term winners and losers causing market fluctuations that can hurt the long-term strength of an economy. Maybe it’s just my opinion but while investing in stocks is good for the economy, it does enable companies to secure the money they need to grow after all, turning the markets into casinos with winners and losers is not in anybody’s interest.

Compare this image of a casino floor to that of the stock exchange above. As far as I’m concerned the gambling aspect of stock markets hurts our economy. (Credit: Century Casinos)

And I think I’ll let it go at that. If there’s anyone who thinks I made this brief outline of what the many terms associated with the stock market mean either too simple, or too complicated well I tried my best. Hopefully a few people out there learned something, and that was my intent.

Space News for April 2025: Boeing’s Starliner Astronauts finally return from a nine month stay at the International Space Station, but they do so in a Space X Dragon Capsule. 

On Tuesday the 18th of March a Space X Dragon capsule returned to Earth carrying the four Crew 9 astronauts completing their mission at the International Space Station (ISS). Those astronauts had two days earlier been relieved at the ISS by four Crew 10 astronauts who will now crew the station until at least July.

When the Crew 9 astronauts, including the Starliner crew, splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico their welcoming committee included a pod of Dolphins! (Credit: Space.com)

In many ways the splashdown of the Dragon capsule in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida represented just another routine crew transfer for Space X. The long saga of Crew 9 however was anything but routine, for two of the astronauts returning to Earth were originally the crew of Boeing’s Starliner capsule on its first manned mission to the ISS. The Starliner crew only became a part of Crew 9 when NASA decided they did not trust Starliner to safely bring them back home.

The Starliner Crew of Suni Williams (l) and Butch Wilmore (r) got to spend a lot more time in space then they had originally expected. (Credit: Newsweek)

It’s a long story that I’ve already discussed in several past posts, see my posts of 20 July 2024 and 31 August 2024. In brief astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were assigned by NASA as the test pilots for Boeing’s Starliner capsule which was intended to both compliment and compete with Space X’s Dragon capsule in transferring astronauts to and from the ISS. After many years of technical problems and delay the Crew Flight Test (CFT) was finally launched on the fifth of June 2024 and reached the ISS after more problems while in orbit.

Boeing’s Starliner capsule docked at the ISS. Turns out that the crew completely lost control of the spacecraft for several seconds just prior to docking, a very dangerous turn of events that could have caused a real disaster! (Credit: Spaceflight Now)

Astronauts Williams and Wilmore were only supposed to remain on the ISS for eight days but NASA engineers spent more than a month trying to understand and fix the problems with Starliner’s thrusters. In the end it was decided that Starliner was too untrustworthy to risk returning from orbit with astronauts aboard so the Starliner capsule was brought back unmanned.

In the end NASA ordered that Starliner be returned to Earth unmanned. It turned out to be the most successful part of the mission. (Credit: HamletHub)

A special rescue mission using a Space X Dragon capsule was considered but in the end NASA decided to send the next scheduled crew transfer mission, Crew 9, with only two rather than the usual four astronauts. Williams and Wilmore then became the other two Crew 9 astronauts and would return to Earth when Crew 9 was relieved by Crew 10. In all, the eight-day mission for Williams and Wilmore turned into a nine month mission.

The Starliner crew, in blue uniform, with the regular crew of the ISS with whom they’d spend the next nine months. (Credit: Spaceflight Now)

So with Williams and Wilmore now safely back on Terra Firma the question for NASA is, what to do with Starliner. Boeing has yet to demonstrate that the eight billion dollar capsule can complete a mission without problems. To make matters worse for Boeing the ISS is scheduled to be de-orbited in five years so there are a maximum of about eleven regular crew transfer missions left for Starliner to take part in.

NASA has hired Space X to modify one of their Dragon capsules as a re-entry module to bring the ISS down into the middle of the Pacific Ocean in 2030. That re-entry would be something to see! (Credit: YouTube)

Currently NASA is considering their options. At a briefing on March 9th, shortly before the launch of Crew 10, it was announced that Boeing and the space agency were “making good progress” and had resolved 70% of the issues that Starliner had developed during its CFT. If that is so it seems that another CFT is unlikely to be carried out before this time next year and even if everything in that test goes smoothly a regular crew transfer mission can hardly be set up before early 2027.

In addition to Space X’s successful Dragon capsule Boeing is going to have to compete with Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser space plane. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

There are even rumours coming from Boeing that the aerospace corporation might be considering giving up on Starliner. After all there is now little chance that Boeing can recoup the losses that they have incurred due to Starliner on a few missions to the ISS before it is de-orbited. Add to that the damage to Boeing’s reputation if there are any further problems with Starliner. At the same time however there are plans in the works for several commercial space stations to replace the ISS and Boeing would certainly like to use Starliner to secure a portion of the business of taking astronauts back and forth to them. 

There are a lot of commercial space stations currently on the drawing board. How much of the business of keeping them manned and supplied Boeing’s Starliner will get is very much up in the air! (Credit: Universe Space Tech)

A few paragraphs above I mentioned that the current plan for the ISS is to de-orbit the aging space station in or around 2030. Space X has already been awarded the contract to modify the cargo version of their Dragon capsule to provide the necessary power to bring the ISS down for a landing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On February 21st however Space X’s CEO Elon Musk announced that in his opinion that the ISS should be brought down “as soon as possible”, within two years if not sooner. Musk’s claims that the ISS has served its purpose and is now taking money and resources away from his chief goal of reaching Mars. Musk has even argued that NASA should forget about the Artemis program’s goal of returning astronauts to the surface of the Moon, again with the intent of getting to Mars as quickly as possible.

This is what Space X has really been aiming at all along, the colonization of Mars. Will NASA cancel its Artemis Lunar Program and endorse this vision? Only time will tell. (Credit: Human Mars)

NASA’s new director Jared Isaacman, who has ridden into space twice via commercial flights onboard Space X’s Dragon, also feels that the space agency needs to concentrate on a long term goal of Reaching Mars. Meanwhile Trump has publicly stated that although the idea of missions to the red planet “are of interest” they are not currently “a top priority”. Once again we see the possibility of a political change in Washington upending all of NASA’s long term goals, resulting in a waste of money, resources and worst of all time.

During the ‘W’ Bush Administration NASA began the ‘Constellation’ program for returning the US to the Moon. The whole thing got canceled by Obama after several billion dollars had been spent. Changing to a Mars mission now would waste even more money. (Credit: Spaceflight History)

And to top it off Space X has conducted another private space mission designated as Fram2. That mission was funded by Chun Wang a Chinese born cryptocurrency billionaire and the crew consisted of three of his friends, Eric Phillips of Australia, Jannicke Mikkelsen of Norway and Rabea Rogge of Germany. This latest billionaire joyride was distinguished by its planned orbital path, which will for the first time take astronauts over Earth’s polar regions. The mission launched on the first of April and successfully splashed down on the April fourth.

Launch of the Space X Fram2 Private space mission. (Credit: The Space Report)

This post turned out to be entirely about manned space flight but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot going on with robotic space probes. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with them soon.  

Two Studies in Physics that Illustrate how Classical Mechanics still has a lot of things to Teach Us. 

Over the past century it seems as though all of the big discoveries in Physics have come from either Relativity Theory or Quantum Mechanics. These two pillars of 20th century science are all about objects that are moving very, very fast, or are very, very small.  Sometimes it seems as if the old Physics of Isaac Newton has little left to teach us, as if we’ve learned everything there is to know about the behaviour of objects in our everyday world. In this post however I’ll be discussing two recent studies that show how much we still have to learn from classical physics about the ways objects in our everyday life behave.

In Today’s World it is really necessary for everyone to have some understanding of the two Scientific Revolutions that shaped the 20th Century! (Credit: Amazon.com)

The first paper I’ll be discussing comes from researchers at the University of Rennes and the University of Lyon, both in France along with Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan who examined the different shapes and forms that knitted fabrics can take on after being stretched and pulled. Specifically, the team used a common jersey knit stitch known as stockinette, which consists of interlocking loops of threads, to knit a piece of fabric with 70×70 stitches. See figure below. This piece of fabric was then placed on a specifically designed tensile mechanism that allowed the researchers to stretch, pull and twist the piece of fabric in a wide variety of different directions and strengths.

Familiar to anyone who knits the Stockinette stitch is one of the most common methods of turning a thread into a piece of fabric. (Credit: Gathered)

Now we all know that knits that are really pulled and stretched never quite return to their original shape, they become deformed. What the researchers did however was to measure the degree of deformation that resulted in their piece of fabric depending on the amount of stretching given to the fabric. Each of the resulting shapes that the piece of fabric took on after stretching and twisting the team designated as a ‘metastable shape’ and they categorized the many metastable shapes generated during their testing.

Quantitative definitions established by the researchers to study the deformation of knitted fabrics. (Credit: CNRS Le Journal)

At the same time the team ran a series of computer simulations that replicated the actual experimental results. One thing the computer simulations allowed the researchers to do that they couldn’t do experimentally was to reduce and even completely eliminate the effect of friction between the stitches of their piece of fabric. What the team discovered in these simulations was that, in the absence of friction the piece of fabric always returned to its original shape, regardless of the amount of stretching and twisting. Without friction there were no matastable shapes.

Some of the Data obtained by the researchers showed the relaxed states of their fabric after stretching. (Credit: Crassous, Poincloux and Steinberger)

Perhaps the research conducted by the team in France and Japan will help manufacturers develop clothing that does not lose it shape after being worn or washed, perhaps not. At least however you now know that friction is to blame when your favourite sweater gets deformed.

Personally, I think all sweaters are misshapen. They feel so uncomfortable I just can’t wear them at all! (Credit: iStock)

Another study dealt with a twist on the familiar phenomenon of how two or more objects moving a fluid, water or air, actually reduce the force of friction on each other. We’ve all seen how a flock of geese will fly in a ‘V’ shaped pattern. Well that’s because the lead goose’s motion sets up an flow of air called a bow wave that reduces friction to the two geese on either side of it and slightly behind, reducing the amount of energy they have to expend in flying. This reduction in friction continues right down the line so that the flock forms a ‘V’ shape in order to reduce the amount of energy they expend in flying. In water dolphins will often swim close the bow of a ship to take advantage of the same phenomenon, and many species of schooling fish arrange themselves for the same reason.

Geese always fly in a “V” formation because the air currents generated by the bird in front actually makes flying easier for the bird behind them. The bird in front gets relieved on a regular basis. (Credit: Online Training Courses)

Obviously this doesn’t work in a solid medium because solid objects simply cannot move through a solid medium. What about a granular medium however, where each individual grain may be solid but where thousands, if not millions of tiny grains can still in many ways behave like a fluid.

In many ways the grains of sand in an hourglass behave more like a thick liquid than solid objects. (Credit: Amazon.com)

That’s what physicists at the University of Campinas in Brazil and the University of Paris-Saclay in France decided to study. The experimental setup the researchers employed consisted of a bed of glass beads, used in place of sand because of their uniformity, through which two steel balls called ‘intruders’ could be pulled in parallel. The researchers could vary both the distance between the intruders as well as their depth in the glass beads, riding the surface, just submerged or fully submerged etc.

During testing the steel balls were actually submerged in the sand but this is an image of the actual setup the scientists used to measure the effect of multiple objects moving through a granular media. (Credit: University of Paris-Saclay)

What the team discovered was that there was a significant reduction, nearly 30%, in the force of fiction on both balls when they were so close as to be almost touching. The cause of this reduction in friction the researchers attribute to the motion of one intruder breaking the force chains between the grains around the other intruder, and vice versa.

Just looking at all of the different shapes and sizes of sand grains it’s easy to understand where the friction caused by moving through sand comes from. (Credit: Vecteezy)

The researchers also believe that their findings may help to explain some well-known phenomenon in the natural world such as the digging of animal burrows and the growth of plant roots. In any case the results discovered by both teams of physicists clearly show that classical physics can still teach us a lot about the world around us.

Bird News for February 2025: Old and New

There have been quite a few interesting stories about birds, both ancient and modern, these last few weeks so consider this post to be a combination of paleontology and nature news! As usual I will begin with the oldest species and work my way forward in time.

There are about 11,000 different species of bird in the world today. That’s about twice as many as there are mammals, and more than reptiles and amphibians combined! (Credit: AnimalFact.com)

Ever since the first discovery of Archaeopteryx in 1861 most paleontologists have placed the evolution of birds from their dinosaur kin as having happened during the Jurassic period some 145-150 million years ago. A minority of paleontologists have disagreed however, Archaeopteryx, with its mouth full of teeth and a long bony tail is really a lot more like a dinosaur with feathers than a bird, and with no other recognized bird species in the Jurassic the initial evolution of the birds has remained controversial.

When this particular fossil was unearthed in 1861 it provided considerable evidence to Darwin’s ideas about evolution. Many other specimens of Archaeopteryx have also been discovered but this is the one that always gets shown in books and on TV. (Credit: Live Science)

A recent fossil discovery from the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian may help to fill in some of the gaps however. In rocks dating back to 149 million years ago researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found a new species of Jurassic bird to complement Archaeopteryx. Their results have been published in the journal Nature.

The ‘Type Specimen’ of Baminornis zhenghensis with an artist’s drawing of the layout of the bones. B zhenghensis shows that even during the Jurassic period there was already considerable bird diversity. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

The find, which has been given the name Baminornis zhenghensis, consists of a bird like shoulder and pelvic bones along with a hand structure more dinosaur like than avian. Most importantly B zhenghensis possesses a short tail ending in a bony structure called a pygostyle that is a feature in some modern birds and is common among birds from the Cretaceous period that followed the Jurassic. In the analysis performed by lead author Wang Min and his colleagues B zhenghensis is considered to be a relative of archaeopteryx while at the same time having a closer relationship to the more modern birds of the later Cretaceous period.

Artist’s illustration of what B zhenghensis may have looked like. A combination of dinosaur and avian characteristics like Archaeopteryx, B zhenghensis represents a transition between two major animal groups. (Credit: South China Morning Post)

It was during the Cretaceous that the number of bird species grew considerably with recognizable types making their first appearance. In fact a fossil skull that was collected in Antarctica in 2011 has recently been analyzed and classified as a waterfowl, the ancestor of modern ducks and geese. Dated to 69 million years old the skull has been given the name Vegavis iaai. Like the researchers in China who discovered B zhenghensis, the paleontologists who discovered V iaai hope that their find will shed new light on bird evolution.

Skeletal remains of Vegavis iaai and and artist’s illustration of what the animal may have looked like. (Credit: Live Science / The Daily Galaxy)

So much for ancient, i.e. fossil birds now let’s move forward in time to the present because there’s some interesting news about a species of modern bird as well. We all know that many types of birds like to live in large groups that we’ve named flocks. Ducks and geese, pigeons, starlings and penguins are some of the many bird types that live in flocks while other types of birds like eagles, owls and blue jays prefer to just pair up and don’t really socialize that much with other members of their own kind.

A large flock of geese flying in their usual ‘V’ formation. Each of the animals behind the leader gets a little boost in their flight by the winds created by the animal in front of them. The bird at the front gets replaced by another bird on a regular basis so he doesn’t have to do all of the work. (Credit: Birdnote)

Hummingbirds as a group have never been observed to live in large groups. In fact, with the exception of their own mate, hummingbirds have a reputation for being extremely territorial and combative towards other members of their species. Until now that is.

Male Red Throated Hummingbird. As a group hummingbirds have never been known to live in groups, in fact they are usually very aggressive towards other members of their own species. (Credit: Metroparks Toledo)

Recently an ornithologist and birding guide in the Andes of Ecuador named Gustavo Cañas-Valle happened upon a cave where he was astonished to find dozens of hummingbirds of the species Oreotrochilus chimborazo both nesting and roosting together. The cave was located on the slopes of the Chimborazo volcano at an altitude of more than 4,000 meters, an extreme environment for any species.

Lonely mountain peaks like Chimborazo are usually volcanoes. High in the Ecuadoran Andes Chimborazo is an extreme environment for any species. (Credit: Wikipedia)

“I thought, this looks like a colony,” Mr. Cañas-Valle recounted. “They were like bees.” In all 23 adult birds along with four chicks were found to be living in that cave. Mr. Cañas-Valle’s discovery has now been published in the journal Ornithology in November of 2024 and is the first ever documented example of hummingbirds living communally but it wasn’t the last. Since his initial find Cañas-Valle has discovered another six caves where specimens of O chimborazo are living in groups, all at extreme altitudes.

Also known as the Ecuadoran Hillstar, Oreotrochilus chimborazo is another beautiful hummingbird and a resident of the high Andes mountains. (Credit: eBird)

The possibility that it is the extreme conditions where they live that has caused O chimborazo to begin living in groups has been suggested by some evolutionary biologists but at the same time they caution not to read too much into the current evidence. As yet there is no evidence of any kind of social behavior where the hummingbirds benefit from their neighbors in such ways as raising the alarum when predators are near or informing the rest of the flock when a food source is discovered. In other words, it appears that at present the birds are just tolerating the other members of their species around them rather than working together as a group.

The Philosopher John Locke on Toleration. If nothing else just learning to tolerate each other means you won’t be wasting energy and resources in useless fighting. Unfortunately, some animals, guess who I’m talking about, haven’t evolved that far yet! (Credit: Online Library of Liberty)

In either case more research is needed, a closer, more long-term study of this ‘hive’ behavior. Cañas-Valle is convinced that there are other caves with humming birds, perhaps of other species, and the ornithologist is already planning on conducting some surveys.

Bees in a hive actively cooperate with each other for the good of the hive as a whole. Bats on the other hand just kinda live in the same place and tolerate each other. Which behavior is true of O chimborazo has yet to be determined. (Credit: National Park Service / Beekeeping USU)

I look forward to seeing his results and I’ll be certain to let you know about them.

Intersex, Trans-Sexual, Non-Binary, are you confused ’cause I sure am. In fact the Psychologists and Anthropologists who study human behaviour are as confused as any of us. 

Most of us grow up with a pretty well defined idea of sex. Our mommies are women and our daddies are men and we were told which of the two we were. Later on, about age ten or so we learn the ‘facts of life’ where men have one kind of genitals so that they can ejaculate their sperm into a woman’s womb fertilizing her egg so that it can grow into a baby inside her. (Yea, I know that sounds childish but how would you describe sex in two sentences!) That’s why men and women mate and get married, so that they can raise a family.

Some people think that it’s really as simple as this, a mommy, a daddy and little children. The problems begin when they start trying to shoehorn everyone into this comfortable little ideal! (Credit: The Atlantic)

Things usually get a little more complicated in High School when we find out that there are some boys who like other boys and girls who like girls, that is gays and lesbians. (Full disclosure, I am completely hetero and probably even a bit homo-phobic.) At about the same we may learn that there are a few people who feel that they are ‘in the wrong body’, who dress like members of the opposite sex and who may even undergo medical treatments in order to become a member of the opposite sex, at least in the outward appearance of their genitalia. As a group, which may not actually be a valid thing to do, these people are sometimes referred to as ‘sexually non-traditional’.

O’k it’s really not as simple as this but when you get right down to it, maybe it should be! (Credit: Reddit)

One of the most important questions about people who do not fit into the comfortable idea of two separate sexes is, just how many such people are there, what percentage of our society is sexually non-traditional and of what forms? We really don’t have a good idea of the numbers because the whole subject of sex outside of a male-female ideal was taboo for more than a thousand years, and still is in many parts of the world. Even today many gays and lesbians, to say nothing of trans-sexuals, prefer to keep their sexual orientations private.

Back when I was young we estimated that 5% of people were gay, we didn’t use LGBT+ then. Notice how the numbers are going up as being gay becomes more acceptable. (Credit: Statista)

They have good reason to do so; in the Presidential election of last year Trump and his right wing allies went out of their way to demonize trans-sexuals as a way to use the fear of those who are different in order to get votes. In particular the issue of whether ‘men’, that is males who are transitioning to female, should be allowed to use woman’s bathrooms or play on girls’ sports teams in school was made into a big campaign issue.

There was a time when Trump was actually supportive of LGBT+ rights, no more. (Credit: GLAAD)
He didn’t succeed on day one, but he is certainly working on it! (Credit: Instagram)

Since taking office Trump has issued several executive orders removing all trans-girls from federal prisons for woman and putting them in men’s prisons, discharging all transitioning people from the military while at the same time threatening to take all federal funds away from schools that allow trans-girls to play on girls’ sports teams. He has even loudly proclaimed that as far as the federal government is concerned there are only two sexes, so that legally the trans-sexuals simply don’t exist. Where exactly that policy this leaves gays and lesbians isn’t really clear just yet, but it can’t be good for them.

Opponents argue that trans women competing in girls’ sports is unfair but are they simple using the issue as a chance to hurt people whose behaviour they don’t approve of. (Credit: Inside Higher Ed)

So just what is the science, what exactly is going on here? Why don’t we just have two sexes, after all that’s how babies are born and isn’t the whole purpose of sex just reproduction? You might think that since evolution ‘weeds out’ the genes of those who don’t reproduce that non-traditional sex of any kind would have gone extinct millions of years ago.

Since we pass on our characteristics to our children, and gay sex doesn’t produce children how are gay characteristics passed on? (Credit: SlidePlayer)

It not that simple! Men and woman are still the same species and it is actually easy to find pieces of one sex on members of the other. Take men’s nipples on their breasts for example, we all know that the nipples are where a woman feeds her baby with milk from her mammary glands but men don’t have mammary glands so why do we still have nipples?

Another good question is why do men have nipples since they don’t have mammary glands? In many ways the differences between men and woman are constrained by the way DNA works and by the fact that in so many ways both sexes are actually the same, just people. (Credit:

The same can be said for a woman’s clitoris, it may be a woman’s main erogenous zone but it’s not actually needed for reproduction. In fact some societies practice female circumcision where a girl’s clitoris is removed so she can’t enjoy sex. As horrible as that sounds it doesn’t stop her from bearing children. So why does a woman even have a clitoris?

Also known as Female Genital Mutilation the practice of removing a woman’s clitoris is nevertheless still widely practiced in many countries. (Credit: Instagram)

And that’s for normal, sexually traditional adults, after puberty has caused the development of secondary sex characteristics! For babies at birth figuring out who’s a boy and who’s a girl isn’t always that easy. For example the testicles of a boy usually only ‘pop out’ of their body just a day or two before they are born. On a rare occasion they haven’t popped out yet and a baby boy without testicles along with a smaller than average penis looks a lot like a baby girl.

One out of every 25 baby boys are born with an undescended testicle. They are fully boys but at birth may not look all that different from a girl! (Credit: Guy’s and St. Thomas; Specilaist Care)

In fact while once again exact statistics are hard to come by, somewhere between 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 babies are born who are considered to have ambiguous genitalia, in other words the doctor delivering the child literally can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl. So if we as a society are going to base a person’s entire life on what that doctor thinks while taking one look at you, we’ll be screwing up a lot of people’s future lives.

Are these babies boys or girls? If you’re going to determine a person’s entire future based on what they look like at birth you’re going to fuck up a lot of people’s lives! (Credit: Nature)

It gets even worse when we take a look inside our bodies. Let’s start with our genes ’cause that’s where our sex is determined after all. We all remember from high school that we humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and we get one of each pair from our father and one of each pair from our mother. Now one of the 23 pairs are know as the sex chromosomes, girls have two X chromosomes while boys have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. That means that it is actually your father’s genes that determine which sex you are because we always get an X from our mother but we can get either an X or a Y from our father.

Our human genes consist of 23 pairs of chromosomes but only one pair has anything to do with our sex! (Credit: Abposters.com)

That’s the way things usually work, but not always. In particular the sex cells from our parents, the sperm and egg, can occasionally have more than one each of a chromosome pair causing the fertilized egg, and all of a person’s cells from that point on to have three or even four of what should be a pair of chromosomes. Many genetic disorders are associated with this condition on different chromosome pairs, for example a trisomy on the 21st pair of chromosomes is known to be the cause of Down’s syndrome.

Also known as trisomy 21, Down’s syndrome is caused by the 21st chromosome pair actually being a triplet! (Credit: Vocal Media / Bio Quick News)

If such a trisomy occurs on the sex chromosomes then there are people with XXX, XXY, or XYY sex chromosomes. Estimates vary but in general one baby in approximately one thousand is born with such a trisomy and nearly all of them suffer from some genetic disorder regarding reproduction. Consider the XXY variant for example, the double X makes them a female but the Y makes them a male! This condition is known as Kleinfelter syndrome and while such a person usually looks male, penis and testicles, the produce no sperm so they cannot father children. A similar disorder is known as Androgen insensitivity where a person possesses testes that remain within the abdomen while the external genitalia resemble that of a female.

Here’s the genes of a person with two X chromosomes, making them a female but also a Y chromosome making them a male!!! An estimated one in five thousand people are born this way and they already suffer enough medical problems without society making things worse for them! (Credit: Britanica)

So things are already complicated right from the start at birth, and they get even more so during puberty. It’s at this time that a child starts to develop secondary sex characteristics, Mammary glands on girls, muscles and body hair on boys. More importantly however, it’s at this time that the development of sex cells, eggs and sperm begins. Of course it’s also the time that our bodies start producing the hormones, testosterone and estrogen that make boys sexually attracted to girls and girls to boys. Assuming that is, our bodies produce the right amount of the right hormone. If not the result can be a person whose body at birth is not the body they are becoming at puberty, in other words a person who feels that they are in the wrong body.

A lot is going on in our bodies during puberty, and again remember boys and girls really aren’t all that different. The idea that some people can have the genitals of one sex and the brain of the other just seems quite likely to me. Wikimedia Commons)

So as you can see the whole subject of sex is just far too complicated to be squeezed into a simple binary of ‘He-Men and Dainty Women’, or squeezed into a short blog post like this one. The most important thing to remember is that those people who are sexually non-traditional don’t choose to be so, with all of the oppression and discrimination that they have suffered over the centuries and continue to suffer today who would ever choose to go through that! Also, the fact that there are people whose sex doesn’t conform to simple binary notions doesn’t in any way harm those of us whose sex does!

The idea that men are men and women are glad of it is every bit as primitive as these two are! (Credit: www.naturpl.com)

The only real binary is the choice that we as a society have, either we accept the sexually non-traditional and just let them live their lives as they choose. Or we violently oppress them, beat them back into the closet and continue to do so for all time so that we can pretend that they aren’t really there.

Paleontology News for February 2025: Beginnings and Endings. 

If you think about it the science of Paleontology is all about beginnings and endings. New species, new types of life forms evolve, survive for a time and then become extinct. Knowing when a species arises and when it dies out is as important for understanding its place in the history of life as is knowing what kind of creature it was.

There’s wisdom for you. It’s certainly true for the history of life here on Earth! (Credit: Reddit)

In this post I will be discussing two recent studies that illustrate a beginning and an ending not just for a single species but for many thousands of different types of animals. As always I’ll begin with the oldest story and work my way forward in time.

Like the time traveler in the H. G. Wells novel, I like to go forward in time! (Credit: IMDb)

I have several times mentioned the Cambrian Period as being that time in the history of life when animals developed ‘hard parts’, that is shells, exoskeletons or internal skeletons. To paleontologists this advance makes a world of difference because ‘hard parts’ fossilize much more often than does soft tissue. (In my collection I have thousands of shells, a couple hundred exoskeletons along with a handful of bones and teeth but only a very few traces of soft tissue.)

When most people think of fossils they almost immediately think of old bones. It’s true the hard parts of living creatures fossilize much better than the soft parts do so millions of years later we simply have a lot more of them! (Credit: BBC)

Because of this we have a much better idea of the evolution of life from the Cambrian Period onward than we have for the time before the Cambrian, known as the pre-Cambrian, the time before life had ‘hard parts’. In fact, for nearly a century there was no universally accepted evidence for life of any kind before the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ when dozens of different kinds of animals suddenly appeared. Charles Darwin even considered this abrupt appearance of arthropods, mollusks, brachiopods, worms, sponges and corals to be the greatest problem with his theory of natural selection.

During the Cambrian period all of the major different types of animals have developed so if you want to find their common ancestor you have to go back to the pre-Cambrian. But fossils from that time are rare so paleontologists have great difficulty figuring out who’s related to who! (Credit: Research Gate)

So, if in the Cambrian period we already have arthropods, molluscs, and etc then a lot of evolution must already have happened in the pre-Cambrian and honestly paleontologists have had a very difficult time trying to work it out. Now a recent discovery in the outback of Australia, at the Nilpena Ediacara National Park will hopefully shine some light into the pre-Cambrian darkness.

Paleontologists searching for fossils in the bedrock at Nilpena Ediacara National Park in Australia. Rocks from this site date to just before the Cambrian and fossil preservation is quite good so much of what we know about life before the Cambrian explosion comes from here. (Credit: National Parks and Wildlife Service of South Australia)

The fossil itself isn’t much to look at, a tiny worm-like animal no more than 2cm in length, see images below. However details of the fossil, which has been given the name Uncus dzaugisi, show that it belongs to the super-phyla known as Ecdysozoan, a grouping of many animal types such as the arthropods, nematodes, tardigradas and priapulida.

It may not look like much but this little critter is an ancestor to many of the species of animals that live here on Earth today! (Credit: InScience)

What all of these different phyla have in common is a recognizable body length to width ratio that indicates mobility in a definite forward direction, a hard cuticle covering made of organic material, in other words an exo-skeleton not a shell, as well as organs for internal fertilization. Nearly half of all known species, both living and in the fossil record share these qualities. That’s what makes Uncus dzaugisi such an exciting find, it is the earliest fossil specimen ever found that shows clear evidence of all of those characteristics, proving that the Ecdysozoan did exist in pre-Cambrian times.

Uncus dzaugisi must have been a fairly common species back in the pre-Cambrian. (Credit: Sci.News)

Australia’s Nilpena Ediacara National Park has long been known as the location where the first pre-Cambrian fossils were discovered. Over one hundred different genera of creatures have been identified there thanks to the fine-grained sandstone that preserves details of the soft tissue. However, few of those animals bear any resemblance to the more familiar Cambrian species that followed. So paleontology has two big questions to answer, how did the creatures of the Cambrian evolve in the pre-Cambrian, and what happened to the majority of the creatures that lived during the pre-Cambrian. The answers to those questions can only be found by discovering more fossils like Uncus dzaugisi.

Another very interesting animal that was discovered at the Nilpena Ediacara National Park is Spriggina. Despite looking somewhat like the trilobites that dominated the Cambrian period paleontologists think that Spriggina left no descendants but went extinct like most of the creatures of the pre-Cambrian. (Credit: Wikiwand)

If Uncus dzaugisi represents the beginning for of the many species of the Ecdysozoan then the extinction of the dinosaurs must represent the best-known ending for thousands of species. For the last fifty years the prevailing theory about what caused the mass extinction 66 million years ago has been that an asteroid some ten kilometers in diameter struck our planet in the Yucatan peninsula. That collision not only killed every living thing for thousands of kilometers but it also ejected billions of Tonnes of material into the atmosphere blocking out the Sun’s light for several years and spreading the destruction worldwide. The evidence for this cosmic catastrophe can be found as a thin layer of debris spread around the world.

The Cretaceous-Tertiary or K-T boundary. This thin layer of rock consists of debris that spread all over the world from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. That layer has been found all over the world wherever rocks of that age are exposed. Below that layer, dinosaurs, above it, no dinosaurs! (Credit: Conan City Daily Record)

Not all geologists and paleontologists have been convinced however. You see the debris from a massive volcanic eruption looks pretty much the same as that from a collision with an asteroid. In fact it is pretty well established that the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period 250 million years ago was caused by thousands of years of extensive volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. Many scientists suggested that, while the asteroid strike undoubtedly did occur, volcanic activity may have contributed to, if not actually caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

250 Million years ago a large section of Russia experienced an enormous amount of volcanic activity. Known today as the Siberian Traps those volcanic eruptions caused the largest of all extinction events, even worse than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In fact there is considerable evidence for just such volcanism on the Indian sub-continent that has been estimated to be at almost the same time as the asteroid strike. So for the last decade or so the questions have been, how close in time were the two cataclysms, and how extensive was the destruction caused by the Indian volcanoes.

Known as the Deccan Traps the volcanoes of India are considered by many geologists to have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. (Credit: The Washington Post)

Now a new paper from paleo-climatologists at Utrecht University and the University of Manchester has eliminated volcanoes as a possible cause for the dinosaur extinction. What the researchers did was to examine samples from multiple levels in fossilized peat bogs found in the western United States in order to develop a detailed timeline of global temperatures in the millennia both prior to and after the asteroid strike.

Just like today during the Cretaceous period swampy areas developed into peat bogs that fossilized and by examining those layers modern paleontologists can actually determine the average temperature of the region during that time. (Credit: Natural History Museum)

As reported in their paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances, the volcanic activity in India occurred approximately 30,000 years before the asteroid. While the effect of the gasses from the volcanoes did cause the planet’s temperature to drop by some 5ºC by 10,000 years later the Earth’s temperature had returned to its value from before the eruptions. That was fully 20,000 years before the asteroid would strike. The paleontologists therefore concluded that the volcanic activity in India had minimal if any effect on the extinction of the dinosaurs.

So it looks like it was the asteroid alone that killed off the dinosaurs. Talk about going out with a bang! (Credit: BBC Wildlife Magazine)

This means that the data gathered by the researchers in Utrecht and Manchester pretty much seals the deal, the dinosaurs, and many other species were driven to extinction when a piece of the sky fell upon the ground. Of course, if it weren’t for that asteroid, we wouldn’t be here. It was just a stroke of luck that our ancestors survived while the dinosaurs all died.

There’s still a chance that asteroid 2024 YR4 will hit Earth in 2032 but, in any case sooner or later one is gonna hit us! (Credit: NASA Science)

Maybe we won’t be so lucky next time. 

Astronomy News for March 2025: Celestial Objects Near and Far. 

Over the last 400 years or so the Universe as we know it has grown in size literally beyond all human imagination. Where once humans believed that the Earth was the center of all things we now know that it is but a speck of dust, insignificant when compared to the innumerable stars, galaxies, supermassive blacks holes and other objects we still know nothing about. In this post I’ll be discussing a galaxy more than half a billion light years distance along with a asteroid that’s coming so close it may reach out and touch us!

The Hubble ‘Deep Field’ image taken in 1995 revealed an almost endless Universe of galaxy upon galaxy. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Of the billions of galaxies in the known Universe one of the most common types are spiral galaxies, that is galaxies with recognizable arms that curl around the galaxy’s center as they expand outward from it. Now you would be forgiven for thinking that the direction of the curl of the arms must be the direction that all of the stars in the galaxy orbit around the center. Take a look at the image of the famous Whirlpool galaxy (M51) below, doesn’t it appear as if the entire galaxy is rotating in an anti-clockwise direction?

The Whirlpool galaxy M51. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In fact the direction that the spiral arms seem to rotate and the direction that the stars in the galaxy actually do rotate have nothing to do with each other. It was back in the 1960s that two astrophysicists, C. C. Lin and Frank Shu realized that spiral arms were really density waves propagating through the body of the galaxy, more like ripples on the surface of a lake than any actual, permanent structure. The reason why the spiral arms are so visible is that as the density waves move they trigger intense star formation and what we see from millions of light years away are the hot, bright young stars that have just been formed in the arms.

Ripples on a lake spreading outward after an object has fallen into the water. The Spiral Arms we see in many galaxies are actually similar to these waves only on a tremendously larger scale. (Credit: Getty Images)

So if the spiral arms are ripples flowing through a galaxy then what caused the ripples? Well, if you look again at the image of the Whirlpool galaxy you can see the dense ‘blob’ on the far right at the end of one spiral arm. That blob is actually a dwarf galaxy that collided with the main Whirlpool millions of years ago. If you like the small galaxy rang the Whirlpool like a gong and the spiral arms are caused by the Whirlpool ringing! Big galaxies like our own Milky Way and Andromeda often collide with or in some cases capture dwarf galaxies, which is why we see so many spiral galaxies.

The Large (l) and Small (r) Magellanic clouds, that can only be seen in the southern hemisphere, are actually two small galaxies that have been captured by and are orbiting our Milky Way Galaxy. (Credit)

Recently astronomers at Yale University in the US along with the University of Toronto and Swinburne University in Australia have identified a galaxy that really takes spiral arms to a whole new level, see image below. Searching through images taken by the Hubble space telescope they came across a galaxy that has been designated as LEDA 1313424 in which they identified eight separate rings, giving the galaxy its popular name of ‘The Bullseye’. Follow up observations with the Keck telescope in Hawaii even found another ring, making a total of nine rings, six more than any other galaxy has ever been found to possess.

Hubble image of galaxy LEDA 1313424 showing its many rings. This galaxy really does look like ripples spreading out over the surface of a lake. (Credit: Hubble Site)

Now LEDA 1313424 is a really big galaxy, estimated at 250,000 light years across, that’s two and a half times the size of our Milky Way. And the astronomers succeeded in identifying the dwarf galaxy that caused all of the rings, the blue blob to the center left of LEDA 1313424 in the image. In order to have produced so many rings the dwarf galaxy must have passed right through the very center an estimated 50 million years ago. As I mentioned above collisions between galaxies are rather common throughout the Universe but for one galaxy to pass right through the center of a big galaxy is really hitting a Bullseye!

When Errol Flynn playing Robin Hood split the bad guy’s arrow with his it was just Hollywood trickery. But the dwarf galaxy that hit LEDA 1313424 had to make almost as precise a shot. (Credit: The Errol Flynn Blog)

What’s more the rings around LEDA 1313424 fit in very nicely with the accepted models of density waves generated by galaxy collisions for a shot right through the center of a big galaxy like the Bullseye. And while the Bullseye may have been a chance discovery astronomers hope to find even more examples of multi-ringed galaxies once NASA’s new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope begins operation.

Once in orbit the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study millions of galaxies to learn the secrets of how they form and behave. The telescope is named for the astronomer who first proposed and for many years championed the Hubble space telescope. (Credit: Earth Sky)

At a distance of half a billion light years and a size two and a half times that of our Milky Way, LEDA 1313424 is an example of some of the biggest things in the Universe. Asteroid 2024 YR4 on the other hand is one of the smallest celestial objects, as well as one of the closest, in fact in about seven years 2024 YR may get too close.

It doesn’t look like much in this image but like all Near Earth Objects (NEOs) 2024 YR4 could cause a lot of destruction if it ever collided with Earth. (Credit: News Scientist)

Discovered on the 27th of December in 2024 asteroid 2024 YR4 was already moving further away from Earth meaning that astronomers had only a short time to make observations before the asteroid faded from view. Those observations however indicated that the asteroid had about a 1% chance of striking the Earth on the 22nd of December in the year 2032, seven years from now.

The orbit of 2024 YR4 (elongated ellipse) takes it way out beyond Mars but also brings it within Earth’s orbit. It may take millions of years but with an orbit like that it likely will hit our planet some day! (Credit: The Planetary Society)

Of course rocks from outer space fall onto our planet every day, most being only the size of grains of sand that burn up in the atmosphere as meteors. Bigger chunks of space rock also collide with Earth once or twice a century. On June 30th of 1908 an asteroid estimated to be about 100m in diameter exploded over the Tunguska region of Siberia and just 12 years ago on the 15th of February in 2013 a smaller one, less than 20m in diameter exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. In each of these incidents humanity got lucky and the asteroid struck a sparsely populated region so that only a small number of people were killed or injured.

Flattened trees caused by the explosion of the Tunguska asteroid in 1908. If that asteroid, or one like it was to hit a modern, heavily populated city it could kill millions of people. (Credit: NASA)

2024 YR is estimated to be between 50 and 100m in diameter meaning that it could be as large as the Tunguska asteroid and therefore potentially devastating if it should strike a heavily populated area. Another factor we don’t know about 2024 YR4 is what it is made of. Asteroids come in two basic types, piles of rocky rubble and solid Iron-Nickel. The iron-nickel ones usually survive to strike the Earth’s surface, forming a crater like the one in Arizona while the rocky, rubble ones usually explode in the atmosphere like the one over Chelyabinsk. The crater in Arizona is almost 2 kilometers across and an asteroid like that could easily destroy a large city, killing millions. The rocky-rubble ones aren’t much better, the Tunguska asteroid devastated an area of 2,200 square kilometers, again the size of a large city.

About 50,000 years old, Meteor Crater in Arizona is more than a kilometer across. Just imagine the destruction that space rock could cause today! (Credit: Grand Canyon Explorer)

And things are actually getting worse, looking through past images from the Catalina Sky Survey asteroid hunter David Rankin found old observations of 2024 YR4 and adding that data to the observations made in December the odds of the asteroid striking Earth is now estimated to be 3.1%, more than double the previous estimate.

Even at its worst the chance of 2024 YR4 was far to the left, very unlikely. Still the odds are very likely that another space rock will hit us someday. (Credit: About)

2024 YR4 is now rated as being a level 3 on the Torino scale that NASA uses to rank threats from asteroids. Because of the possible threat the space agency has even decided to take some valuable time on the James Webb Space Telescope to try and find 2024 YR4 again and get more precise estimates on its orbit. If that doesn’t work the asteroid will pass by our planet again in December of 2028 and very precise measurements of it motion can be made then. (The latest set of calculations now puts the risk from 2024 YR4 at less than 1% but interestingly it has about the same chance of hitting the Moon in 2032)

NASA has developed a scale, the Torino Scale, to quantify the threat from NEOs. 2024 YR4 reached level 3 but is now considered to be a level 1. (Credit: BBC News)

And if it turns out that 2024 YR4 is going to collide with the Earth, remember that we have already tested an asteroid defense system. That occurred when the DART space probe slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos on the 26th of September in 2022; see my post of 8 October 2022. Who knows, maybe the next test will actually be for real.