Science

Most of the time the Sun is pretty well-mannered, but occasionally it’s downright unruly. It sometimes throws extremely energetic tantrums. During these events, a solar flare or a shock wave from a coronal mass ejection (CME) accelerates protons to extremely high velocities. These are called Solar Particle Events or Solar Proton Events (SPEs).

However, the exact timing of these events can be difficult to ascertain. New research has determined the date of one of the most powerful SPEs to strike Earth during the Holocene.

No one alive today has witnessed the Sun’s extreme power. But ancient people did. In the last 14,500 years, there have been several solar storms and SPEs powerful enough to damage living things and create aurorae at middle latitudes, even at the equator. Understanding the timing of these ancient events is a key part of understanding the Sun.

Powerful outbursts from the Sun are becoming a more significant threat as we expand our presence in space. They can damage satellites and pose a radiation threat to astronauts. Even the Earth’s surface isn’t safe from the most powerful SPEs which can knock out technological infrastructure like power grids and communications networks.

“If they happened today, they would have cataclysmic effects on communication technology.”

Irina Panyushkina, University of Arizona

The Sun’s most powerful outbursts seem to occur during solar maximum, the period of greatest activity during the Sun’s 11-year cycle. But there’s some uncertainty, and since SPEs can be so damaging, there’s a need to understand them better, beginning with their timing.

Only six SPEs have left their mark on Earth in about the last 14,500 years. Historical accounts can open a window into the timing of ancient SPEs, but they’re plagued by inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Fortunately, these natural events leave a trace in the natural world.

These solar outbursts create what are called Miyaki Events after the Japanese physicist Fusa Miyake. Miyake discovered that they create a sharp rise in cosmogenic isotopes due to increased cosmic rays striking Earth’s upper atmosphere. The events create carbon-14 (14C), a radioactive isotope that is present in tree rings. The events also create other isotopes like Beryllium-10 (10Be)and Chlorine-36 (36Cl) that are present in ice cores.

In new research published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment, researchers pinpointed the timing of the last SPE to strike Earth. It’s titled “The timing of the ca-660 BCE Miyake solar-proton event constrained to between 664 and 663 BCE.” The lead author is Irina Panyushkina from the University of Arizona’s Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research.

There have been several Miyake events depending on how they’re defined.

“Thanks to radiocarbon in tree-rings, we now know that six Miyake events happened over the last 14,500 years,” Panyushkina said. “If they happened today, they would have cataclysmic effects on communication technology.”

Carbon-14 continuously forms in Earth’s atmosphere because of cosmic radiation. In the atmosphere, it combines with oxygen to form CO2. “After a few months, carbon-14 will have traveled from the stratosphere to the lower atmosphere, where it is taken up by trees and becomes part of the wood as they grow,” said lead author Panyushkina.

During a Miyake event, the amount of carbon-14 spikes, and that spike is reflected in tree rings. There have been several of these events, depending on how they’re defined, and several more awaiting more rigorous confirmation. There rate of occurrence is poorly understood, but the data we have shows that they occur every 400 to 2400 years. One of them occurred around 660 BCE, and that event is the subject of much research.

“The precise positioning of a SPE in real time is extremely important for the parameterization of solar activity and forecasts,” the authors write in their research. “Notably, one of the recently confirmed SPE events does not have an exact calendar date. Multiple radionuclide evidence of an extreme SPE (or ME) event ca. 2610 BP (before 1950) more commonly referenced as ca. 660 BCE, was confirmed with high-resolution 10BE records of three ice cores from Greenland in 2019.”

The circa 660 Miyake event is different from the others. “However, the ca. 660 BCE ME has an unusual structure that is different from the short-term rapid increases in radionuclide production observed at 774–775 CE and 993–994 CE. One proposed explanation is the possible occurrence of consecutive SEPs over up to three years,” the authors explain in their research. If Miyake events can occur in such rapid succession, we need to know about it, for obvious reasons.

In this new research, the team analyzed tree rings for 14C content to generate an accurate date for the ca-660 BCE Miyake event. They focused on larch trees in arctic-alpine biomes, one in the Altai mountains and the other in the Yamal Peninsula. In these regions, larch trees are more sensitive to atmospheric changes and have clearer 14C spikes.

This figure from the research explains some of the research into the ca. 660 BCE Miyake event. a) shows variations of Carbon-14 concentrations measured in tree rings, and b) shows the locations of the samples. Image Credit: Panyushkina et al. 2024.

Panyushkina and her co-researchers examined tree rings from ancient samples, including trees buried in mud and sediment and timbers excavated during archaeological digs and measured the Carbon-14 content. Next, they correlated their findings with other research into Beryllium-10 found in ice sheets and glaciers. Beryllium-10 is also created during Miyake events. It isn’t absorbed by trees, but is deposited in ice.

“If ice cores from both the North Pole and South Pole show a spike in the isotope beryllium-10 for a particular year corresponding to increased radiocarbon in tree-rings, we know there was a solar storm,” Panyushkina said.

This sounds like a nice tidy way to determine the dates of Miyake events, but it’s not so easy. Researchers have struggled to find a pattern. Tree rings are clearly marked by growing seasons, but ice cores are not. There’s also a lag time between the creation of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere and its presence in trees, and in ice. Different trees also absorb the carbon at different times and rates, and they also store and recycle the carbon, which can influence how they serve as recorders of atmospheric CO2. These and other challenges mean that conclusions don’t jump out of the data.

But this research still has value, even if it isn’t the silver bullet when it comes to predicting these powerful solar events. The issue with the 660 BCE event is its complexity. It seems to have several spikes and declines in a short period, suggesting more complex solar behaviour than a simple single-spike storm.

“Our new 14C data defined the two-pulse duration, considerable magnitude, and the precise date of what was previously described as the event ‘around 660 BCE’,” the authors write. “We showed that the double pulse of cosmic radiation during 664—663 BCE produced a nontypical pattern of ME cosmogenic isotope production recorded at multiple locations in northern Eurasia.”

This figure from the study illustrates some of the complexity that makes pinning down the exact date of the circa 660 BCE Miyake event difficult. Different types of trees in different locations have different spikes in Carbon-14. PDF stands for probability distribution function. Image Credit: Panyushkina et al. 2024.

“The impact appears as a 2–3 year rise of Carbon-14 concentrations tailed by a 2–3-year peak (or plateau) before the signal decays,” the authors write. The Carbon-14 production in 664 BCE was 3.5 and 4.8 times greater than the 11-yr average.

What does it all mean?

There’s a lot of complexity. Different trees absorb carbon differently, the stratosphere and troposphere mix differently at different times, and growing seasons can vary significantly. “Finally, the double pulse of the 664–663 BCE ME onset and the prolonged waning of the 14C spike signal implies possible uncertainties complicating the use of this spike signal for single-year dating of archeological timbers and occurrences,” the researchers explain in their conclusion.

However, one thing is clear in all of the data. The Sun has blasted Earth with extreme SPEs in the past that are much more powerful than anything in modern time. “Extreme proton events that are hundreds or thousands of times stronger than those of modern instrumental observations may recur on the timescale of hundreds of years,” the authors write in their conclusion.

Ultimately, the tree rings can shed light on how powerful these solar storms are, but they’re not exact when it comes to dating them.

“Tree-rings give us an idea of the magnitude of these massive storms, but we can’t detect any type of pattern, so it is unlikely we’ll ever be able to predict when such an event is going to happen,” Panyushkina said. “Still, we believe our paper will transform how we search and understand the carbon-14 spike signal of extreme solar proton events in tree rings.”

The post Earth’s Old Trees Keep A Record of Powerful Solar Storms appeared first on Universe Today.

Engineers have found a way to simultaneously mitigate three types of defects in parts produced using a prominent additive manufacturing technique called laser powder bed fusion.

As part of an effort to overcome the long-term energy-storage challenge, engineers have invented a water-soluble chemical additive that improves the performance of a type of electrochemical storage called a bromide aqueous flow battery.

New research has uncovered what may be the oldest direct evidence of ancient hot water activity on Mars, revealing the planet may have been habitable at some point in its past.

I decided to go on both Bluesky and Twitter, and leave Twitter only if it goes belly up. In the meantime, I’m at my usual Twitter site ( https://x.com/Evolutionistrue?lang=en), but now have this one, too:

https://bsky.app/profile/evolutionistrue.bsky.social

And my first tweet was my latest post giving two videos of Molly Tuttle. Notice that Hili is still my avatar. If you don’t like Bluesky, just keep following me (if you do) on Twitter.

Two songs from the immensely talented bluegrass picker and singer Molly Tuttle. whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/11/22/t…

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-11-22T19:19:01.851Z

Some time ago I watched a video of Molly Tuttle, who plays a wicked bluegrass guitar and banjo, and has a great country voice. I immediately recognized her immense talent (along with that of her friend Billy Strings, with whom she plays here). And tbat talent has now been recognized multiple times. As Wikipedia notes:

In 2017, Tuttle was the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year award. In 2018 she won the award again, along with being named the Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year. In 2023, Tuttle won the Best Bluegrass Album for Crooked Tree and also received a nomination for the all-genre Best New Artist award at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards. Also in 2023, Tuttle and Golden Highway won International Bluegrass Music Awards for album Crooked Tree and the title track in the categories of Album of the Year and Song of the Year, respectively, while Tuttle won Female Vocalist of the Year.

But, as they say, without further ado I’ll let you hear two of her songs (along with her able bandmates), both recorded some time ago. Her musicianship is even better now than in these videos, but I think they’ll suffice.

The first is the old John Hartford song made famous by Glenn Campbell in 1968:

And of course this one’s by Neil Young, and appeared on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 album Déjà Vu.

Earthen channels that span more than 640 kilometres show that pre-Mayan Mesoamericans built large-scale fish-trapping facilities earlier than previously thought

A rock that formed around 4.5 billion years ago on Mars before being blasted into space by a meteor strike and making its way to Earth contains telltale evidence that it was formed in the presence of hot water

Researchers developed an efficient approach for training more reliable reinforcement learning models, focusing on complex tasks that involve variability. This could enable the leverage of reinforcement learning across a wide range of applications.

A novel hydrogen sensor offers a promising solution for real-time hydrogen leak detection, addressing safety concerns in industrial applications. This sensor, made with nano-patterned cupric-oxide (CuO) nanowires (NWs) with voids, can detect hydrogen at extremely low concentrations with high response, recovery speed, and precision, significantly improving previous CuO-based sensors. It has the potential to enable safer and more reliable use of hydrogen in clean energy applications.

A research team has developed a new class of oral peptide therapeutic leads for treating chronic abdominal pain. This groundbreaking innovation offers a safe, non-opioid-based solution for conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), which affect millions of people worldwide.

Earth and Mars are the only two rocky planets in the solar system to have moons. Based on lunar rock samples and computer simulations, we are fairly certain that our Moon is the result of an early collision between Earth and a Mars-sized protoplanet called Theia. Since we don’t have rock samples from either Martian moon, the origins of Deimos and Phobos are less clear. There are two popular models, but new computer simulations point to a compromise solution.

Observations of Deimos and Phobos show that they resemble small asteroids. This is consistent with the idea that the Martian moons were asteroids captured by Mars in its early history. The problem with this idea is that Mars is a small planet with less gravitational pull than Earth or Venus, which have no captured moons. It would be difficult for Mars to capture even one small asteroid, much less two. And captured moons would tend to have more elliptical orbits, not the circular ones of Deimos and Phobos.

An alternative model argues that the Martian moons are the result of an early collision similar to that of Earth and Theia. In this model, an asteroid or comet with about 3% of the mass of Mars impacted the planet. It would not be large enough to have fragmented Mars, but it would have created a large debris ring out of which the two moons could have formed. This would explain the more circular orbits, but the difficulty is that debris rings would tend to form close to the planet. While Phobos, the larger Martian moon, orbits close to Mars, Deimos does not.

This new model proposes an interesting middle way. Rather than an impact or direct capture, the authors propose a near miss by a large asteroid. If an asteroid passed close enough to Mars, the tidal forces of the planet would rip the asteroid apart to create a string of fragments. Many of those fragments would be captured in elliptical orbits around Mars. As computer simulations show, the orbits would shift over time due to the small gravitational tugs of the Sun and other solar system bodies, eventually causing some of the fragments to collide. This would produce a debris ring similar to that of an impact event, but with a greater distance range, better able to account for both Phobos and Deimos.

While this new model appears to be better than the capture and impact models, the only way to resolve this mystery will be to study samples from the Martian moons themselves. Fortunately, in 2026 the Mars Moons eXploration mission (MMX) will launch. It will explore both moons and gather samples from Phobos. So we should finally understand the origin of these enigmatic companions of the Red Planet.

Reference: Kegerreis, Jacob A., et al. “Origin of Mars’s moons by disruptive partial capture of an asteroid.“ Icarus 425 (2025): 116337.

The post New Supercomputer Simulation Explains How Mars Got Its Moons appeared first on Universe Today.

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael Clune (a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University) reprises the familiar idea that the “wokeness” of academia—the explicit aim of turning higher education towards reforming society in a “progressive” way—has largely destroyed academia and reduced its standing in the eyes of the public.  It has done this, he says, by alienating the public via professors making pronouncements outside their area of expertise, something that simply turns off the average Joe or Jill.

The blame for this, says Clune, rests to some degree on academics themselves, but is largely the responsibility of administrators who feel compelled to comment on every issue of the day in the name of their university, creating an “these are our values” atmosphere that chills speech. In other words, they abjure institutional neutrality.

But you can read it yourself by clicking on the screenshots below. I’ll give a couple excerpts to whet your appetite.

The problem: (note the link to articles on the decline in public opinion of higher education, the big price we pay for politicizing academia):

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus. Public opinion of higher education is at an all-time low. The incoming Trump administration plans to use the accreditation process to end the politicization of higher education — and to tax and fine institutions up to “100 percent” of their endowment. I believe these threats are serious because of a simple political calculation of my own: If Trump announced that he was taxing wealthy endowments down to zero, the majority of Americans would stand up and cheer.

Here are the results of several Gallup polls on Americans’ confidence in higher education over only the last eight years. There’s been a big change:

Why faculty have no more credibility than anyone else when it comes to pronouncing on politics:

Let’s take a closer look at why the identification of academic politics with partisan politics is so wrongheaded. I am not interested here in questioning the validity of the political positions staked out by academics over the past decade — on race, immigration, biological sex, Covid, or Donald Trump. Even if one wholeheartedly agrees with every faculty-lounge political opinion, there are still very good reasons to be skeptical about making such opinions the basis of one’s academic work.

The first is that, while academics have real expertise in their disciplines, we have no special expertise when it comes to political judgment. I am an English professor. I know about the history of literature, the practice of close reading, and the dynamics of literary judgment. No one should treat my opinion on any political matter as more authoritative than that of any other person. The spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to deal with climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.

The second problem with thinking of a professor’s work in explicitly political terms is that professors are terrible at politics. This is especially true of professors at elite colleges. Professors who — like myself — work in institutions that pride themselves on rejecting 70 to 95 percent of their applicants, and whose students overwhelmingly come from the upper reaches of the income spectrum, are simply not in the best position to serve as spokespeople for left-wing egalitarian values.

. . . . Far from representing a powerful avant-garde leading the way to political change, the politicized class of professors is a serious political liability to any party that it supports. The hierarchical structure of academe, and the role it plays in class stratification, clings to every professor’s political pronouncement like a revolting odor. My guess is that the successful Democrats of the future will seek to distance themselves as far as possible from the bespoke jargon and pedantic tone that has constituted the professoriate’s signal contribution to Democratic politics. Nothing would so efficiently invalidate conservative views with working-class Americans than if every elite college professor was replaced by a double who conceived of their work in terms of activism for right-wing ideas. Professors are bad at politics, and politicized professors are bad for their own politics.

Who’s to blame? Faculty and, mostly, administrators who refuse to accept ideological neutrality of their universities.

It would be wrong to place the blame for the university’s current dire straits entirely on the shoulders of activist professors. While virtually all professors (I include myself) have surrendered, to at least some degree, to the pressure to justify our work in political terms — whether in grant applications, book proposals, or department statements about political topics — in many cases the core of our work has continued to be the pursuit of knowledge. The primary responsibility for the university’s abject vulnerability to looming political interference of the most heavy-handed kind falls on administrators. Their job is to support academic work and communicate its benefits. Yet they seem perversely committed to identifying academe as closely as possible with political projects.

The most obvious example is the routine proclamations from university presidents and deans on every conceivable political issue. In response to events such as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020, administrators broadcast identifiably partisan views as representative of the university as a whole. This trend has mercifully diminished in the wake of the disastrous House of Representatives hearings on antisemitism that led to the dismissal of Harvard president Claudine Gay and others. But the conception of the university as a vehicle for carrying out specific political ends continues in less visible ways.

What do we do?  The answer is clearly that professors should “stick to their last” and administrators should stop making pronouncements on social issues that have nothing to do with the mission of their university.  For it is our concentration on teaching and learning that really commands the respect of the public. When the public loses respect for universities, they stop wanting to attend them, which is a loss for both them and America, and it also turns them into people who, by disliking self-professed “elites,” become populists who vote for authoritarians like Trump (this last bit is my take, not Clune’s).  Here’s a last quote from his article:

If we have a political role by virtue of our jobs, that role derives from dedicated practice in the disciplines in which we are experts. Teaching students how to weigh evidence, giving them the capacity to follow a mathematical proof, disciplining their tendency to project their own values onto the object of study — these practices may not have the direct and immediate political payoff that has been the professoriate’s reigning delusion over the past decade. But they have two overwhelming advantages.

First, a chemist, or an art historian, really does possess authority in their subject of expertise. They can show us things we couldn’t learn on our own. This genuine authority is the basis for the university’s claim to public respect and support.

Second, the dissemination of academic values regarding evidence and reasoned debate can have powerful indirect effects. I have argued, for instance, that even so apparently apolitical a practice as teaching students to appreciate great literature can act as a bulwark against the reduction of all values to consumer preference. The scientific and humanistic education of an informed citizenry may not in itself solve climate change or end xenophobia, but it can contribute to these goals in ways both dramatic and subtle. In any case, such a political role is the only one that is both sustainable in a democracy and compatible with our professional status as researchers and educators.

I think the second point has been underemphasized. In fact, I haven’t seen it made in arguments about how to fix academics. But a good liberal education turns you on to thinking about what you believe, and above all constantly questioning your beliefs and seeking out further knowledge to buttress or refute them. It is the love of learning, combined with tutelage in how to assess what you learn, that will in the end restore the stature of academia—if it can be restored at all.

When deciding whether to let people await trial at home or in jail, US judges can use a risk score algorithm. But it often makes harsher recommendations than humans do

Reader Chris, knowing of my disdain for podcasts (and perhaps for Jordan Peterson as well), asked me to listen to at least 15 minutes of this long (1½-hour) discussion between Richard Dawkins and Peterson.  All it did was confirm my disdain for Peterson, who seems remarkably self-absorbed and domineering (he doesn’t even let the moderator, Alex O’Connor, get a word in edgewise). And it made me admire Richard even more for his patience in dealing with cranks.

I started listening at 17:23, and that’s where I started the video below. Or you can click on this time marker: (17:23) with the discussion of whether the biblical texts were divinely inspired or did they evolve over time in a secular way?

What bothers me about Peterson is not only his logorrhea, but his unwillingness to answer questions straight, producing a word salad that barely makes sense.

During the 15 minutes I listened (from 17:23 to about 33:00), Dawkins and Peterson discuss whether the Bible was divinely inspired, whether it contains any “truth” at all, and whether the concept of “sacrifice,” which Peterson says is the dominant motif of the Bible (it supposedly progresses from a primitive notion of sacrifice in the Old Testament to Jesus’s marvelous sacrifice made to redeem humanity) come from divine inspiration.

A good example of Peterson’s word salad in this clip is his assertion that truth is unified, and the world of value and world of fact must “coincide in some manner we don’t yet understand.” He gives us a Hobson’s choice: “You either believe that the world of truth is unified or it’s not; either there’s contradiction between value and fact” or there is not.  Peterson adds that he belives that “different sets of values can be brought into unity.”  This to me seems deeply misguided. Values are not the same thing as facts, nor can all different sets of values, which at bottom reflect preferences, can be harmonized.

Peterson repeatedly claims to be asking questions of Richard, but he never really finishes his questions because Peterson is so obsessed with talking nonstop. He is in love with his own thoughts and his own voice.

However, Richard manages to get in one question for Peterson: “Did Jesus die for our sins?”  That is a yes-or-no question, but Peterson waffles, saying that there are “Elements of the [Biblical] text he doesn’t understand:, but the more Peterson studies the bible, the more he understands.  Peterson analogizes the Bible to quantum mechanics, saying that the more you study this mysterious subject, the more you understand.  Richard responds by shutting Peterson down, saying that Biblical texts do not work in the same way as does quantum mechanics, in that quantum mechanics works—it generates predictions that lead to further truths about the world. The Bible, avers Richard, don’t have any credentials because it makes no predictions.

In an attempt to corral Dawkins into Christianity, Peterson says that Dawkins’s claim that he was a “cultural Christian” proves that Dawkins “found something derived from Christianity that he had an affinity with”. “What did Christianity get right,” asks Peterson, “that enabled [Dawkins] to make a statement like that?”  Dawkins responds nothing: his view that he is a “cultural Christian” simply means that he was brought up in Christian culture and knows the Biblical texts. Dawkins adds that doesn’t value Christianity at all.

They then arrive at one moment of agreement: some religions lead to better behavior of their adherents than do others. Both men seem to agree that Islam leads to a worse society than does Christianity. But then Peterson implies that morality is identical with religion, and that you adhere to better religions to get societies with better morality.  I would point out that Steve Pinker, in his big books, explains how religion is really an impediment to the improvement of society, and that you don’t in fact need religion to derive morality. We all know this is true from the morality discussed by secular philosophers like Plato, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Rawls, and Singer. Peterson seems to be a Confused Christian.

Finally, before I gave up in disgust, I watched Richard ask Peterson whether he believed that Jesus was born of a virgin (32:10). Once again Peterson waffles, saying that he isn’t really qualified to comment on elements like this in Bible, but he sees enormous mystical and metaphorical value in the story: “Any culture that doesn’t hold the image of the woman and infant sacred dies.”  My response is “WTF”? What does he mean by “sacred”? And which societies have died for lack of this sacralization?

What we see here is Peterson arguing that Biblical/spiritual “truth” is no different from scientific truth; in other words, all “ways of knowing” come up with truths of equal status.

One other thing I learned from this video, besides the relief I need no longer pay attention to Peterson, is Richard’s enormous patience in dealing with semi-loons like his opponent.  I wondered why Richard even engaged Peterson, but reader Chris responded this way: “I like Sam Harris’s explanation of old: he and Richard know they can’t change the views of their opponent, but they can influence some of the audience watching it.”

It seems to me, though, that Richard is being a huge masochist by engaging in this effort. Fans of Peterson love his word salad and will not stop worshiping him, and those who are neutral should, if they have any neurons, realize from Peterson’s words alone he is in some way unhinged.

Here: click the video to start where I started, and then listen to about minute 34. And have some antacid at hand!

The unexpected discovery of microbial life in a piece of rock from an asteroid shows how hard it is to avoid contaminating samples brought back to Earth

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior is here to present the first part of a three-part text-and-photo series on Brazil. Athayde’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Back in the day. Way, way back

The Brazilian north-eastern hinterland is not a hospitable place for an outsider. Except for a short and intense rainy season, this is a dry, dusty and sizzling territory: a land of the cactus, thorny scrub and stunted trees. The native Tupi speakers called this semiarid region caa (forest, vegetation) tinga (white), and the term was adopted by the Portuguese settlers as caatinga. But the apparent harshness of the landscape misrepresents its ecological importance. The caatinga is a biota found nowhere else in the world, harbouring more than 2,000 species of vascular plants and vertebrates, with endemism in these groups ranging from 7 to 60%. And like every other Brazilian ecoregion, the caatinga has been severely degraded and fragmented. But its plants and animals have one place of refuge: the Serra da Capivara National Park in the state of Piauí. The park is a haven to numerous birds and endangered mammals such as the giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), three-banded armadillo (Tolypeutes tricinctus), jaguar (Panthera onca) and other cats, and the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus).

The 129,140-ha park contains a massif of sandstone sediments formed some 430 million years ago when the whole area was submerged under a sea. The massif, smoothed by water and wind, was once the seabed, and pebble conglomerates on top indicate an overlying beach.

A view of Serra da Capivara National Park, a geologist’s delight:

The park is surrounded by a 10-kilometer buffer zone that is also protected. In this private property contiguous with the park, the rocky walls echo the racket of howler monkeys (Alouatta spp.):

At the base of the sandstone massif, there are hundreds of hidden shelters and overhangs, where ancient peoples expressed themselves through rock art. Thousands of prehistoric paintings sprawl on rock walls and ceilings depicting armadillos, rheas, jaguars, lizards, capybaras (the only capybaras in the Capybara National Park are painted on walls), as well as human figures hunting, playing, dancing, having sex, and being nasty to each other. The images were mostly painted with red ochre (haematite) and other clays; some were made with burned bone charcoal. Because there are no organic components in the pigments used in the paintings, it is not possible to date them precisely. The lower estimates are around 5,000 years.

A rhea painted under this shelter:

Among animals and people, a woman gives birth (highlighted by the arrow):

“The kiss”, one of the most famous paintings in the collection. But in truth we have no idea whether the image indeed depicts two people kissing:

A poor soul saying goodbye to this world in the maw of a jaguar or puma – identified by its paws:

The creation of the park and its protection came about thanks to the efforts of archaeologist Niède Guidon, who also managed to kick off a major kerfuffle in the archaeological world. Based on her excavations carried out between 1978 and 1987, Guidon concluded that the Capivara paintings could be over 12,000 years old. And more: she found evidence of hearth fires and stone tools in layers ranging from 5,000 to 60,000 years, the oldest dates for human habitation in the Americas (Guidon & Delibrias, 1986). Guidon’s conclusions started an ongoing debate because they challenged the established Clovis First theory, which argues that people colonised North America via the Bering Straits ~13,000 years ago, then moved down into Central and South America in the following millennia. Her critics, mostly American archaeologists, claimed the tools she found were made by monkeys or are natural objects altered by weather, and that her carbon hearth samples were the result of natural fires. Guidon, who’s backed by French archaeologists, retorted that ‘Americans should excavate more and write less’. Ouch.

Because of its biodiversity, outstanding geology, pre-historical paintings and more than 1,300 archaeological sites, the park became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991:

Guidon may have been vindicated because subsequent excavations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and USA have also raised doubts about the Clovis First theory. It seems possible now that humans came to the Americas in a series of colonising waves through the Bering Straits starting way before 13,000 years (Waters & Stafford, 2007). But Guidon’s conjecture that Homo sapiens first arrived in South America crossing the Atlantic from Africa, perhaps as far back as 100,000 BC, has received scant support. For one thing, genetic analyses contradict her.

A soup kitchen queue? A religious ceremony? A conga line?:

During the short and unpredictable rainy season, a roaring waterfall runs through this natural gutter:

Hell to the left:

Hell doesn’t look too bad:

A view of the caatinga, with the Museu do Homem Americano (Museum of the American Man) in the distance. All ‘dead’ vegetation will burst into green life at the first downpour:

The largest magnetic fields in the universe may have found themselves charged up when the first stars began to shine, according to new research.

Magnetic fields are everywhere in the universe, but most of those magnetic fields arise from a process called a dynamo mechanism. These are any physical process that can take magnetic fields and stretch them out, twist them up, and fold them over on each other to make them stronger. For example, dynamo processes in the core of the Earth give us our powerful magnetic field.

But astronomers also find magnetic fields at the very largest of scales, with weak but persistent fields spanning across galaxies or even galaxy clusters. These fields are usually no stronger than a millionth the strength of the Earth’s, but they can reach for millions of light years in length.

Astronomers have long wondered what powered the creation of these magnetic fields, and a new study has put forward and intriguing hypothesis.

When our Universe was only a few hundred million years old, the first stars began to shine. They quickly died and seeded the universe with bits and pieces of heavier elements, creating the first grains of dust in the process.

When the next generation of stars came online their powerful radiation shown through all the gas and dust surrounding them. That radiation was so powerful that it could literally push on the dust grains.

The dust grains were electrically charged, and once they started moving it created a weak but very large-scale electrical current. An electrical current naturally gives rise to a magnetic field. At first this magnetic field was uniform, but as time went on the dust grains would clump here and there leading to irregularities that would start to mix up entangle the magnetic field.

These magnetic fields were incredibly weak, no more than a billionth the strength of the Earth. But they were very large, the researchers predict, at least a few thousand light-years in size. These are the perfect conditions to allow for dynamo mechanisms to begin to amplify them and stretch them out to their present-day size.

The scenario painted by the researchers is essentially a battery made of dust surrounding newborn stars stretching for thousands of light-years in the early universe. It’s a fascinating possibility, and the researchers propose that the next step is to investigate how the evolution of these fields unfold in detailed simulations of cosmic evolution, and compare those results to observations.

The post The Early Universe May Have Had Giant Batteries of Dust appeared first on Universe Today.

It’s already the end of the “work” week: Friday, November 22, 2024, and in a week I’ll be in Poland! It’s National Cranberry Relish Day, and I suppose one spoonful per year, ingested at Thanksgiving dinner, won’t hurt you, but the stuff is pretty dire.  Jellied cranberries are better. Here’s how they are grown, which requires lots of water:

It was on this day in 1963 that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I remember the moment exactly: it was announced over our junior high-school public address system.  It was one of those incidents that never lets you forget how you learned about it. 

It’s also National Kimchi Day in South Korea, which must be a big celebration, and Humane Society Anniversary Day in the U.S.,

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 22 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I reported yesterday (or rather, stole from other people’s reports) about Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration as Attorney General. Here’s some more information from the NYT:

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said it was “pretty obvious” that Gaetz didn’t have the votes to be confirmed.

. . .Matt Gaetz told people close to him that he concluded after conversations with senators and their staffs that there were at least four Republican senators who were implacably opposed to his nomination: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Curtis of Utah.

Gaetz told confidants he did not want to get in a protracted confirmation battle and delay Trump from getting his attorney general in place immediately at the start of his administration.

. . . . Gaetz’s withdrawal creates a vacuum at the apex of the Justice Department but not necessarily instability, even if his replacement is not confirmed quickly. Trump has already tapped two of his personal lawyers — Todd Blanche and Emil Bove — to top operational posts; both are well-regarded department veterans whose appointments were welcomed by some career department staff.

Here are the candidates who remain, and it’s a pretty sad lot (from the NYT).  Noem, Rubio, Kennedy, and Hegseth. .  oh my!

*Speaking of Hegseth, the WSJ has an article titled, “Trump team blindsided by latest details of sexual-assault allegations against Hegseth.”

Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team were blindsided by the latest details to emerge about a 2017 sexual-assault allegation against Pete Hegseth, increasing their frustration with the man nominated to lead the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.

The transition team, which hadn’t been told about the original allegation before announcing Hegseth, was surprised again late Wednesday night when the Monterey, Calif., city police released a report about the 2017 allegations. The heavily redacted report details a boozy night at a hotel in California, a poolside argument and two conflicting versions of what ultimately took place inside Hegseth’s hotel room.

The Monterey police said a redacted version of the report had been released to Hegseth on March 30, 2021. The transition team wasn’t told that a copy of the police report had been released to Hegseth previously, the people familiar with the discussions said.

“This is another instance of people being blindsided, so I think there’s rising frustration there,” said a person familiar with the transition. While the president-elect is still behind Hegseth for now, “if this continues to be a drumbeat and the press coverage continues to be bad, particularly on TV, then I think there is a real chance that he loses Trump’s confidence.”

Hegseth told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday after meetings with senators that “the matter was fully investigated and I was completely cleared.” Through his lawyer, he has acknowledged the sexual encounter but said it was consensual, while the woman who made the allegation hasn’t spoken publicly.

Officially, Trump’s transition team is standing by Hegseth. “This report corroborates what Mr. Hegseth’s attorneys have said all along: the incident was fully investigated, and no charges were filed because police found the allegations to be false,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team, said in a statement.

The “blindsiding” is either because Hegseth hid stuff from the Trump team or they simply didn’t ask for a full account of every allegation against him. Hegseth admits he paid off one woman, but did so only to protect his career from a damaging lawsuit.  Now his career is endangered without a lawsuit. From NPR:

After the woman hired an attorney a couple of years later to consider a lawsuit, both parties reached an agreement. Parlatore noted in his statement to the Post that the MeToo movement was gaining momentum at the time, and he told CBS News that Hegseth would have faced “an immediate horror storm” had he been publicly accused of sexual assault, a quote that Parlatore confirmed to NPR.

My judgment: like Gaetz, he will have to withdraw.

*The Senate voted on a Bernie-Sanders-led measure to block the sale of weapons to Israel, but the vote failed.

The Senate on Wednesday voted down a measure, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders and a handful of Democrats, that sought to block the sale of some $20 billion in U.S.-made weapons to Israel, in a last-ditch effort to limit the carnage, suffering and destruction caused by its 13-month war in Gaza.

The measure failed, with none of the three resolutions it comprised garnering more than 19 supporting votes. But the effort — the first time Congress has voted on whether to block an arms sale to America’s closest Middle East ally — also served as a bellwether of the dissatisfaction within President Joe Biden’s own party about his handling of the Middle East crisis.

Wednesday’s vote, spurred by Sanders’s filing of rarely invoked joint resolutions of disapproval, follows the Biden administration’s determination a week ago that it would not take punitive action against Israel for failing to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza. The administration in October warned Israel that absent “concrete measures” to surge food, medicine and other basic supplies into the ravaged Palestinian territory within 30 days, it could risk losing some U.S. military assistance.

Biden’s decision not to act — after international aid groups and the United Nations said the crisis in northern Gaza had reached catastrophic levels over the past month — infuriated liberals, who have called on him repeatedly to hold Israel accountable for a war that has killed roughly 2 percent of Gaza’s population, according to local health authorities. The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of war crimes, charges he strenuously denies.

Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, was slow in the first few months of the war to join other liberals’ calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, even after thousands of Palestinian civilians had been killed under Israeli bombardment. That reticence drew a backlash from his progressive supporters. He has since been among the most vocal critics of the administration’s approach to Netanyahu.

As far as I can learn, the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is manufactured. While some people may not get enough to eat on some days, nobody is starving to death, though Hamas and the UN pretends that there are.  And remember that 100 food trucks going into Gaza the other day were hijacked, and it’s probable that the hijackers were from Hamas (who else would have that power?). Finally, there are 14 field hospitals in Gaza as well as some of the larger hospitals are still working.

Here is the list of Senators who voted against Israeli aid include Elizabeth Warren (expected) but also Dick Durbin, my own Senator. I have written him asking for an explanation.

*The International Criminal Court issued two arrest warrants for war crimes: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

In a massive legal bombshell, the International Criminal Court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over the war in Gaza, an unprecedented step that put the two at risk of being detained in much of the world.

The three judges of the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I issued the warrants unanimously on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, which the court’s top prosecutor Karim Khan alleges were committed during the ongoing war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza.

The decision marked the first time the ICC has ever issued arrest warrants against leaders of a democratic country.

In a massive legal bombshell, the International Criminal Court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over the war in Gaza, an unprecedented step that put the two at risk of being detained in much of the world.

The three judges of the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I issued the warrants unanimously on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, which the court’s top prosecutor Karim Khan alleges were committed during the ongoing war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza.

The decision marked the first time the ICC has ever issued arrest warrants against leaders of a democratic country.

The court also issued a warrant for Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, who Israel says was killed by an IDF strike in Gaza in July. Khan had sought arrest warrants for Deif and slain Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar for the terror group’s October 7, 2023, massacre that sparked the ongoing war in Gaza.

Since neither Israel nor the US have accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC, it doesn’t really affect our relationships, but both men are subject to arrest if they set foot in 120 other countries, though other countries often don’t bother to carry out what the ICC wants.  Countries who said they would arrest either man include Italy, France, Canada (of course), Jordan, and the UK. The US has rejected the warrants, and Argentina, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

The United States rejected a decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants on Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief, a White House National Security Council spokesperson said.

“The United States fundamentally rejects the Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials. We remain deeply concerned by the Prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision,” the spokesperson said, adding the US is discussing next steps with its partners.

I don’t know if this case will be argued out before the ICC, or whether Israel will send lawyers to defend Netanyahu and Gallant.  Better call Natasha Hausdorff! Here she is on the allegations, speaking yesterday for ten minutes on Radio Times about the charges:

*The Washington Post’s op-ed columnis Jennifer Rubin says that conventional news in papers, social media, and on television is dying, but one venue is burgeoning, and should be a model of how the news is conveyed: ProPublica, a nonprofit funded by philanthropists and foundations. It was the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, and has won several more, as well as other awards.

The plight of the news business has gotten steadily worse over the past decade. Cable TV networks are shedding audience share at an alarming rate. Increasingly, they seemed to have forgotten who their audience even is. The hosts of “Morning Joe” visiting Mar-a-Lago was the sort of move, judging from the backlash, that is likely to increase its progressive audience’s flight from MSNBC. CNN, in its effort to be all things to all people, is also hemorrhaging viewers. Many national newspapers are losing subscribers (and hollowing out their coverage), and local media has been shriveling for years. (The Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate unleashed an exodus of hundreds of thousands of readers who had expected a clarion voice in defense of democracy.)

It is not merely this shrinkage in conventional news consumption that should be alarming. The preponderance of voters who get no news whatsoever suggests the very notion of an “informed electorate” might become a thing of the past.

However, there is a part of the news ecosystem that seems to be growing by leaps and bounds: nonprofit news, especially the juggernaut ProPublica, which has been responsible for buckets of scoops that for-profit media have missed.

ProPublica has reported on everything from the actual tax rates paid by billionaires to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s financial scandals to the story of a Georgia woman whose death resulted from the state’s abortion law. It has run stories on everything from how “Opponents of Missouri Abortion Rights Amendment Turn to Anti-Trans Messaging and Misinformation” to how “Tribal College Campuses Are Falling Apart. The U.S. Hasn’t Fulfilled Its Promise to Fund the Schools.” One of its most recent investigations revealed, “Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs.” (You come away wondering what else you are missing relying on for-profit media.)

I recently spoke with Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor. He described the extraordinary expansion of an experiment that began in 2008 with a $10 million budget. Since then, its national coverage and staff (now about 150) have boomed, its budget has increased to $50 million, and it has created hubs across the country to fill the gap in regional and state news. It went from 36,000 donors in 2022 to 55,000 today.

Starting with a single hub in Illinois, it has added others in the South, Southwest, Northwest, Midwest, Texas (in collaboration with the Texas Tribune) and New York. It has received seven Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 15 George Polk Awards in the short time it has operated

Moreover, ProPublica has pioneered an inventive partnership with local papers all over the country. ProPublica provides an enterprising investigative reporter with salary for a year plus the infrastructure necessary to report the story, including editors, research assistance and lawyers.

I have never read this site before, but will start doing so. One problem is that we need more than one nonprofit news site if there’s to be competition, yet grant and foundation dollars are limited, so this can’t completely replace the for-profit news. Further, I don’t know if the site has any biases at all; readers who look at it should weigh in below. Finally, it is an investigative reporting site, and so if you want breaking news you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili thinks the fallen leaves are rubbish (Malgorzata says that, in Poland, Trump is held responsible for everything bad that America does):

Hili: Autumn has made a terrible mess. Andrzej: It’s all Trump’s fault. Hili: You have been listening to the BBC again. In Polish: Hili: Jesień strasznie naśmieciła. Ja: Wszystko przez Trumpa. Hili: Znowu słuchałeś BBC.

*******************

From Jesus of the Day. Ah, the good old days! I never had this female-attracting collar. What an outfit!

From Things with Faces: a weirdly-marked tuxedo cat:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy, a lovely doormat:

Masih didn’t tweet anything new today, but here’s something from J. K. Rowling, who’s decided to publicize those people who threaten her online:

In which both the upside and the downside of the new block function are summed up perfectly. pic.twitter.com/fiVwd2fAgq

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 21, 2024

One I retweeted, and I may have posted it before:

I love this, especially “Fraaaaaaance!” https://t.co/r5TvbHWu88

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 21, 2024

x

I’ll be at this meeting along with Luana on a panel on censorship in science, but there are a gazillion other to see, as Lukianoff notes:

Looking forward to @USCDornsife‘s Censorship in the Sciences conf in Jan where I’ll be presenting alongside @jon_rauch @Musa_alGharbi @LKrauss1 @PsychRabble @ImHardcory @JMchangama & many more!https://t.co/e09oCbmh3k

— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) November 20, 2024

I am pretty sure this is for real, but it’s horrible.  It’s religion, Jake!

Sorry, but if your religion allows old men to marry young girls like this, maybe it’s time to have a conversation with yourself and realize your religion is not a religion of peace.

It’s pure evil! pic.twitter.com/P6hGOy3uXR

— Dr. Maalouf ‏ (@realMaalouf) November 20, 2024

One from my feed that I retweeted with a comment:

This is a fantastic commercial. If you don’t tear up, you’re made of stone. https://t.co/XXzcJEBFLw

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 21, 2024

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Apparently too old to live, this Dutch man was gassed at 63 upon arrival at Auschwitz. https://t.co/kbla6SITWW

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 22, 2024

Two posts from Professor Cobb. I want this brick badly!

Dramatic paws.Norwich.#WallsOnWednesday

— Duncan Mackay (@theduncanmackay.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T09:29:35.883Z

Living groups of animals originated quickly:

Our latest, by Emily Carlisle, Zongjun Yin, Davide Pisani and myself: Ediacaran origin and Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of Metazoa http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/…

— Philip Donoghue (@phil-donoghue.bsky.social) 2024-11-15T17:53:30.375Z

New technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are growing in scale –though their effect on the climate remains negligible