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New research found confined and isolating environments changed the way people smelled and responded emotionally to certain food aromas. The team in this study compared 44 people's emotional responses and perception of eight food aromas in two environmental scenarios: sitting in reclined chairs that mimic astronauts' posture in microgravity; and then in the confined setting of the International Space Station (ISS), which was simulated for participants with virtual reality goggles. The research builds on previous work by the team and aims to help explain why astronauts report meals taste different in space and struggle to eat their normal nutritional intake over long missions, which has been reported in the news recently.

A new study found that policies to curtail the use of single-use plastic bags in grocery stores and other retail outlets in Austin and Dallas, Texas, resulted in people buying more plastic bags, a behavior that continued after the rules were no longer in place.

Recent research unlocks new clues that could radically change the world's understanding of the origin of dark matter.

Recent research unlocks new clues that could radically change the world's understanding of the origin of dark matter.

Through the intricate study of lava tubes -- caves formed following volcanic eruptions when lava cools down -- an international team of researchers has uncovered clues about Earth's ancient environments that could be significant in the search for life on Mars.

Researchers have developed a new class of oral painkillers to suppress chronic abdominal pain that is based on the peptide hormone oxytocin that drives childbirth contractions.

A theoretical astrophysicist may have solved a nearly two-decade-old mystery over the origins of an unusual 'zebra' pattern seen in high-frequency radio pulses from the Crab Nebula.

It turns out gaming is good for you! New research indicates massive multiplayer online gamers learn by gaming and their skills in the workplace are enriched by those seemingly endless hours previously thought of as frittering away time.

I’ve always been a big fan of James Carville, the political strategist who turned 80 last month. I love his Louisiana accent, his curmudgeonly behavior and pull-no-punches discourse, and his inevitable appearance on television wearing a Louisana State University shirt, the place he went to college (he was also in the Marines).

You may remember Carville in the 1993 movie “The War Room” as a main strategist, along with George Stephanopoulos, of Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign. That film was great, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary (it didn’t win). Here’s Carville giving his minions a peptalk the day before Clinton’s election. He tears up a little as he gives his message:

But we forget that Carville was also the advisor to several losing Presidential campaigns of Democrats, including John Kerry in 2004, Hillary Clinton in 2008, and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet in 2020.

Carville wasn’t involved directly in Kamala Harris’s campaign, though he contributed to the effort, but right up to the end he thought that Harris would win, and said so loudly and confidently. Here he makes his prediction only five days before the election. (I still love his straightforward style of speaking.) Carville disappears in the middle of the video, but returns at about 5:50 to reaffirm his optimism, promising that the women of America will take Harris over the top.

Yes, Carville’s confident predictions were wrong.

Below you see his postmortem with Amanpour on CNN after the election, acting somewhat sheepish (“winning is everything,” he says) and branding the Democrats as “losers” and now an “opposition party”. His analysis: Harris didn’t sufficiently distinguish herself from Biden, a failure that proved “decisive.” He also blames the lack of an open primary process and the failure of Harris to layout new policies. Finally, he says at the end that the Democrats have been tarred for a long time by the party’s wokeness, and though Harris pivoted a bit towards the center, her party was still tarred with the “stench” of wokeness. As he says, “It’s gonna take more than one cycle to get this stench off of the Democratic Party, and it’s a STENCH of the highest order, let me tell you.”  (He throws in that the Party could have given a much stronger economic message.)

But he knew this stuff already when he appeared in the video above!  He was simply wrong, and this somewhat detracts from his ability to read politics. Yes, a lot of people were wrong, as the election was close, but somehow I’ve always put my faith in Carville.

But, at eighty, Carville still vows to fight on as a member of the disloyal opposition. He’s already thinking about the 2026 midterms, and about what the Democratic Party has to do to win some Senate and House seats. Ceiling Cat bless this Bayou Curmudgeon!

Leading researchers warn that relying on "passive" carbon sinks such as forests to absorb ongoing carbon emissions will doom the world to continued warming

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a small galaxy, just a tenth of the Milky Way’s mass. It is about 160,000 light years away, which is remarkably close in cosmic terms. In the southern hemisphere it spans the width of 20 Moons in the night sky. While the galaxy seems timeless and unchanging to our short human lives, it is, in fact, a dynamic system undergoing a near collision with our galaxy. Now astronomers are beginning to observe that process.

The LMC is unusual for a dwarf galaxy because it’s unusually dense. Based on stellar motion within the LMC, it appears to have a rather small halo surrounding it. This has led some astronomers to argue that the galaxy is not in orbit around the Milky Way. Instead, it is simply passing our galaxy, having made its closest approach. As the galaxy passed through the large and relatively dense halo of the Milky Way, some of the LMC halo would have been stripped away, trailing behind it in a diffuse tail. It’s a likely scenario, but proving it has been a difficult challenge. The halo of the Large Magellanic Cloud is too dark and diffuse for us to observe directly. But this new study has finally observed the LMC halo thanks to some distant quasars.

Plot of the observed LMC halo. Credit: Mishra, et al

Quasars are powerful beacons powered by supermassive black holes in distant galaxies. Though they are billions of light-years away, their light can be easily observed by radio telescopes and space telescopes such as the Hubble. Using Hubble data, the team looked for quasars in locations where the LMC halo was likely to be. In this way, the light of those quasars would pass through the halo before reaching us, and some of the quasar light would be absorbed by the halo. By measuring the spectra of 28 quasars in the LMC sky region, the team was able to make the first mapping of the small galaxy’s halo. Assuming the LMC had a large halo similar to other small galaxies before its flyby of the Milky Way, the team estimates that the LMC has only held on to about 10% of its original halo. The rest of the halo now streams behind the galaxy like a comet’s tail, though that has yet to be observed.

In the future, the team would like to use more quasars to further map the LMC halo, particularly in the front region where the halo is directly colliding with that of the Milky Way. Such work will help us better understand what happens when galaxies interact and how that can affect the evolution of those galaxies.

Reference: Mishra, Sapna, et al. “The Truncated Circumgalactic Medium of the Large Magellanic Cloud.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.11960 (2024).

The post The Large Magellanic Cloud Survived its Closest Approach to the Milky Way appeared first on Universe Today.

Back in 2007, I talked with Rob Manning, engineer extraordinaire at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he told me something shocking. Even though he had successfully led the entry, descent, and landing (EDL) teams for three Mars rover missions, he said the prospect of landing a human mission on the Red Planet might be impossible.

But now, after nearly 20 years of work and research — as well as more successful Mars rover landings — Manning says the outlook has vastly improved.

“We’ve made huge progress since 2007,” Manning told me when we chatted a few weeks ago in 2024. “It’s interesting how its evolved, but the fundamental challenges we had in 2007 haven’t gone away, they’ve just morphed.”

Image of the Martian atmosphere and surface obtained by the Viking 1 orbiter in June 1976. (Credit: NASA/Viking 1)

The problems arise from the combination of Mars’ ultra-thin atmosphere—which is over 100 times thinner than Earth’s — and the ultra-large size of spacecraft needed for human missions, likely between 20 – 100 metric tons.

“Many people immediately conclude that landing humans on Mars should be easy,” Manning said back in 2007, “since we’ve landed successfully on the Moon and we routinely land human-carrying vehicles from space to Earth. And since Mars falls between the Earth and the Moon in size and in the amount of atmosphere, then the middle ground of Mars should be easy.”

But Mars’ atmosphere provides challenges not found on Earth or the Moon. A large, heavy spacecraft  streaking through Mars’ thin, volatile atmosphere only has just a few minutes to slow from incoming interplanetary speeds (for example, the Perseverance rover was traveling 12,100 mph [19,500 kph] when it reached Mars) to under Mach 1, and then quickly transition to a lander to slow to be able to touch down gently.

Universe Today publisher Fraser Cain’s video about the challenges of landing Mars, with more details in this article.

In 2007, the prevailing notion among EDL engineers was that there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth, but there is actually too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the Moon by using propulsive technology alone.

“We call it the Supersonic Transition Problem,” said Manning, again in 2007. “Unique to Mars, there is a velocity-altitude gap below Mach 5. The gap is between the delivery capability of large entry systems at Mars and the capability of super-and sub-sonic decelerator technologies to get below the speed of sound.”

The largest payload to land on Mars so far is the Perseverance rover, which has a mass of about 1 metric ton. Successfully landing Perseverance and its predecessor Curiosity required a complicated, Rube Goldberg-like series of maneuvers and devices such as the Sky Crane. Larger, human-rated vehicles will be coming in even faster and heavier, making them incredibly difficult to slow down.

Rob Manning, Chief Engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Sky Crane for landing rovers on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Keck Institute

“So, how do you slow down to subsonic speeds,” Manning said now in 2024 as the chief engineer at JPL, “to get to speeds where traditionally we know how to fire our engines to enable touchdown? We thought bigger parachutes or supersonic decelerators like LOFTID (Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator) tested by NASA) would allow us to maybe slow down better, but there were still issues with both those devices.”

“But there was one trick we didn’t know anything about it,” Manning continued. “How about using your propulsion system and firing the engines backwards —retro propulsion — while you are flying at supersonic speeds to shed velocity? Back in 2007, we didn’t know the answer to that. We didn’t even think it was possible.”

Why not? What could go wrong?

“When you fire engines backwards as you are moving through an atmosphere, there’s a shock front that forms and it would be moving around,” Manning explained, “so it could come along and whack the vehicle and cause it to go unstable or cause damage. You’re also flying right into the plume of the rocket engine exhaust, so there could be extra friction and heating possibilities on the vehicle.”

All of this is very hard to model and there was virtually no experience doing it, as in 2007, no one had ever used propulsive technology alone to slow and then land a spacecraft back on Earth. This is mostly because our planet’s beautiful, luxuriously thick atmosphere slows a spacecraft down easily, especially with a parachute or creative flying as the space shuttle did.

“People did study it a bit, and we came to the conclusion it would be great to try it and find out whether we could fire engines backwards and see what happens,” Manning mused, adding that there wasn’t any extra funding laying around to launch a rocket just to watch it come down again to see what happened.

A SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket poised to launch Dragon from Cape Canaveral. Credit: NASA

But then, SpaceX started doing tests in attempt to land their Falcon 9’s first stage booster back on Earth to re-use them.

“SpaceX said they were going to try it,” Manning said, “And to do that they needed to slow the booster down in the supersonic phase while in Earth’s upper atmosphere. So, there’s a portion of the flight where they fire their engines backwards at supersonic speeds through a rarified atmosphere which is very much what’s like at Mars.”

As you can imagine, this was incredibly intriguing to EDL engineers thinking about future Mars missions.

After a few years of trial, error, and failures, on September 29, 2013, SpaceX performed the first supersonic retropropulsion (SRP) maneuver to decelerate the reentry of the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket. While it ultimately hit the ocean and was destroyed, the SRP actually worked to slow down the booster.

NASA asked if their EDL engineers could watch and study SpaceX’s data, and SpaceX readily agreed. Beginning in 2014, NASA and SpaceX formed a three-year public-private partnership centered on SRP data analysis called the NASA Propulsive Descent Technology (PDT) project.  The F9 boosters were outfitted with special instruments to collect data specifically on portions of the entry burn which fell within the range of Mach numbers and dynamic pressures expected at Mars. Additionally, there were visual and infrared imagery campaigns, flight reconstruction, and fluid dynamics analysis – all of which helped both NASA and SpaceX.

To everyone’s surprise and delight, it worked. On December 21, 2015, an F9 first stage returned and successfully landed on Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral, the first-ever orbital class rocket landing. This was a game changing demonstration of SRP, which advanced the knowledge and tested the technology of using SRP on Mars.

View of SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage approaching Landing Zone 1 on Dec. 21, 2015. Credit: SpaceX

“Based on the analyses completed, the remaining SRP challenge is characterized as one of prudent flight systems engineering dependent on maturation of specific Mars flight systems, not technology advancement,” wrote an EDL team, detailing the results of the PDT project in a paper. In short, SpaceX’s success meant it wouldn’t require any fancy new technology or breaking the laws of physics to land large payloads on Mars.

“It turns out, we learned some new physics,” Manning said. They found that the shock front ‘bubble’ created around the vehicle by firing the engines somehow insulates the spacecraft from any buffeting, as well as from some of the heating.

EDL engineers now believe that SRP is the only Mars entry, descent and landing technology that is intrinsically scalable across a wide range and size of missions to shed enough velocity during atmospheric flight to enable safe landings. Alongside aerobraking, this is one of the leading means of landing heavy equipment, habitats and even humans on Mars.

But still, numerous issues remain unsolved when it comes to landing a human mission on Mars. Manning mentioned there are multiple unknowns, including how a big ship such as SpaceX’s Starship would be steered and flown through Mars’ atmosphere; can fins be used hypersonically or will the plasma thermal environment melt them? The amount of debris kicked up by large engines on human-sized ship could be fatal, especially for the engines you’d like to reuse for returning to orbit or to Earth, so how do you protect the engines and the ship? Mars can be quite windy, so what happens if you encounter wind shears or a dust storm during landing? What kind of landing legs will work for a large ship on Mars’ rocky surface? Then there are logistics problems such as how will all the infrastructure get established? How will ships be refueled to return home?

“This is all going to take a lot of time, more time than people realize,” Manning said. “One of the downsides of going to Mars is that it is hard to do trial and error unless you are very patient. The next time you can try again is 26 months later because of the timing of the launch windows between our two planets. Holy buckets, what a pain that is going to be! But I think we’re going to learn a lot whenever we can try it for the first time.”

And at least the supersonic retropropulsion question has been answered.

“We’re basically doing what Buck Rogers told us to do back in the 1930s: fire your engines backwards while you’re going really fast.”

2007 article: The Mars Landing Approach: Getting Large Payloads to the Surface of the Red Planet

The post The New Mars Landing Approach: How We’ll Land Large Payloads on the Red Planet appeared first on Universe Today.

Nature Scientific Reports has an open-access article reporting a rare find: a mummy of a kitten (“juvenile”) of a sabre-toothed cat, found frozen in the Russian Republic of Sakha, in Siberia. You can read the report by clicking below, or download the pdf here.

Mummies are rare because an animal has to die and then be permanently frozen in ice, and then later discovered. This is, as far as I know, the first mummy of a sabre-toothed cat, though skeletal remains are known. (These skeletal remains were used to identify the species of cat; see below)  It appears to be a young kitten, judging from comparison with a living relative, a three-week-old African lion (Panthera leo). The mummy’s remains were carbon dated to 31,808 ± 367 years ago, so it could have been contemporaneous with humans, who were probably in Siberia about that time.

Here’s a description of the specimen and then some photos:

The Badyarikha mummy (specimen DMF AS RS, no. Met-20-1) contains the head and the anterior part of the body preserved approximately to the caudal edge of the chest (Fig. 1). There are also incomplete pelvic bones articulated with the femur and shin bones. They were found encased in a piece of ice along with the front part of the cub corpse. The specimen is stored at DMF AS RS in Yakutsk.

Figure and caption from the paper (click figures to enlarge them):

The frozen mummy of Homotherium latidens (Owen, 1846), specimen DMF AS RS, no. Met-20-1, Russia, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Indigirka River basin, Badyarikha River; Upper Pleistocene: (A) external appearance; (B) skeleton, CT-scan, dorsal view.

And here’s a comparison of the heads of the specimen (top) with a preserved three-week old lion cub. The face of the sabre-tooth is flatter than that of the lion, but this is probably due to deformation of the specimen (see skulls below). But the mummified cats’ external ears (auricles) are not as prominent as those of the lion. (Smaller ears are a characteristic adaptation to cold climate, as protruding ears are a source of heat loss.) The mummy’s fur color was dark brown, with the paws and chin being lighter brown:

‘The authors make a big deal about the thickness of the neck, which shows that this was a muscular cat (compare with the lion cub below):

(From the paper): External appearance of three-week-old heads of large felid cubs, right lateral view: (A) Homotherium latidens (Owen, 1846), specimen DMF AS RS, no. Met-20-1, frozen mummy, Russia, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Indigirka River basin, Badyarikha River; Upper Pleistocene; (B) Panthera leo (Linnaeus, 1758), specimen ZMMU, no. S-210286; Recent.

From the paper:

The mummy neck is longer and more than twice as thick as that of P. leo, ZMMU S-210286 (80.0 vs. 74.0, 52.0 vs. 32.0, respectively). The difference in thickness is explained by the large volume of muscles, which is visually observed at the site of separation of the skin from the mummified flesh.

Based on comparison of the skull with known fossil skeletons, they identified this cub tentatively as a juvenile Homotherium latidens.

Here’s an 8-minute movie about the genus Homotherium, showing a reconstruction of the animal and a lot of useful information:

And a photo of skulls of the sabre-tooth cub specimen (top row) and a 3-week old lion cub (bottom row).   The enlarged arches, where chewing muscles are attached, suggest that the species was adapted to inflict a strong bite (perhaps to use its serrated incisor teeth), though I’m not a paleontologist and am just guessing.

(from paper): Skulls of three-week-old large felid cubs, left lateral view (A, C) and dorsal view (B, D): A, B, Homotherium latidens (Owen, 1846), specimen DMF AS RS, no. Met-20-1, frozen mummy, 3D computer models (image is reconstructed based on the undeformed right half of the skull, mirrored); Russia, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Indigirka River basin, Badyarikha River; Upper Pleistocene; C, D, Panthera leo (Linnaeus, 1758), specimen ZMMU, no. S-3034, photographs; Recent.

The authors say this:

One of the striking features of the morphology of Homotherium, both in adults and in the studied cub, is the presence of an enlarged premaxillary bone, containing a lateromedially expanded row of large cone-shaped incisors that form a convex arch. Among all the unerupted teeth of the Homotherium cub mummy, only the upper and lower deciduous incisors protrude with their tops from the alveoli.

Here’s where the premaxillary bone is: the orange one in front. You can see that this bone is larger in the mummy than in the lion cub.

 

Finally, the configuration of the paws, which are far more rounded in the mummy than in a lion cub, support the suggestions from the cub’s ears that this was a cat adapted to the cold. Forepaw photos, with A-C being the mummy and D being a lion cub. Rounded paws, also seen in lynxes and other cold-weather cats, are better for walking on snow, as they act as “snowshoes” that give a greater area of contact with the snow:

(from Fig. 7 of paper): Forepaws of three-week-old large felid cubs: A, B, С, Homotherium latidens (Owen, 1846), specimen DMF AS RS, no. Met-20-1, frozen mummy, right forepaw; Russia, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Indigirka River basin, Badyarikha River; Upper Pleistocene: A thumb claw; B second digit claw; С plantar view; (D) Panthera leo (Linnaeus, 1758), specimen ZMMU, no. S-210286, right forepaw, plantar view; Recent. Designations: 1, first digital pad; 2, carpal pad (absent in H. latidens).

And the authors’ interpretation:

The front paw of the juvenile Homotherium latidens has a rounded shape. Its width is almost equal to its length, in contrast to lion cubs with their elongated and relatively narrow front paw (Fig. 7). The wide paw, the subsquare shape of its pads, and the absence of a carpal pad are adaptations to walking in snow and low temperatures. The small, low auricles and absence of the carpal pad in Badyarikha Homotherium contrast with the taller auricles and normally developed pads in the lion cub. All these features can be interpreted as adaptations to living in cold climate.

The carpal pad (“2” in the lion photo) is apparently missing in the sabre-tooth, and this is said to be an adaptation to walking in snow, though I’m not sure why.  But all the data indicate that this species of cat was muscular (the forepaws also suggest more muscles than the lion) and, as suggested from its Siberian habitat, adapted to a cold climate. You can learn more about the lifestyle of this genus of cat from the movie above.

h/t: Erik

One of the surprise findings with the James Webb Space Telescope is the discovery of massive galaxies in the early Universe. The expectations were that only young, small, baby galaxies would exist within the first billion years after the Big Bang. But some of the newly found galaxies appear to be as large and as mature as galaxies that we see today.  

Three more of these “monster” galaxies have now been found, and they have a similar mass to our own Milky Way. These galaxies are forming stars nearly twice as efficiently as galaxies that were formed later on in the Universe. Although they’re still within standard theories of cosmology, researchers say they demonstrate how much needs to be learned about the early Universe.

‘‘Our findings are reshaping our understanding of galaxy formation in the early Universe,’’ said Dr. Mengyuan Xiao, lead author of the new study and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva, in a press release.

The most widely accepted cosmological model is the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model which posits that the first galaxies in the Universe did not have enough time to become so massive and should have been more modestly sized.

The new findings, published in the journal Nature, were made using JWST’s spectroscopic capabilities at near-infrared wavelengths. This allows astronomers to systematically study galaxies in the very distant and early Universe, including these three massive and dust-obscured galaxies. The study was conducted as part of the telescope’s FRESCO program (First Reionization Epoch Spectroscopically Complete Observations), which uses JWST’s NIRCam/grism spectrograph to measure accurate distances and stellar masses of galaxies. The results may indicate that the formation of stars in the early Universe was far more efficient than previously thought, which does challenge existing galaxy formation models.

The JWST NIRCAM operates over a wavelength range of 0.6 to 5 microns. Credit: NASA.

However, there has been some controversy as to whether these galaxies really are super-large and mature. In August, another study debated the earlier findings of “impossibly large” galaxies, saying that what was observed may have been the result of an optical illusion, as the presence of black holes in some of these early galaxies made them appear much brighter and larger than they actually were.

But this latest study was part of the new FRESCO program with JWST to systematically analyze a complete sample of galaxies within the first billion years of cosmic history to determine whether they are dominated by ionization from young stars (starburst galaxies) or by an active galactic nucleus (AGN), i.e., a black hole. The researchers say this new approach allows for precise distance estimates and reliable stellar mass measurements for the full galaxy sample.

‘‘Our findings highlight the remarkable power of NIRCam/grism spectroscopy,” said Pascal Oesch, also from the University of Geneva, and principal investigator of the FRESCO program. ‘‘The instrument on board the space telescope allows us to identify and study the growth of galaxies over time, and to obtain a clearer picture of how stellar mass accumulates over the course of cosmic history.’’

Images of six candidate massive galaxies, that were reported in February 2023, seen 500-700 million years after the Big Bang. One of the sources (bottom left) could contain as many stars as our present-day Milky Way, according to researchers, but it is 30 times more compact. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, I. Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology). Image processing: G. Brammer (Niels Bohr Institute’s Cosmic Dawn Center at the University of Copenhagen).

Researchers will certainly be making further observations of all these newly seen galaxies, which hopefully will help resolve any remaining questions about how massive these galaxies are and whether or not star formation was more rapid during the early Universe. The new observations of more of the large but young galaxies raises the question of whether the galaxies really are surprising monsters or optical illusions. Either way, all the findings raise new questions about the formation process of stars and galaxies in the early Universe.

“There is still that sense of intrigue,” said Katherine Chworowsky, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), who led the study we reported on in August. “Not everything is fully understood. That’s what makes doing this kind of science fun, because it’d be a terribly boring field if one paper figured everything out, or there were no more questions to answer.”

Further reading:

University of Geneva
UC Santa Cruz
Nature

The post Three More “Galactic Monster” Ultra-Massive Galaxies Found appeared first on Universe Today.

We have a new contributor, Amy Perry of Indiana, who sends us a panoply of photos from her area. Amy’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

All of these were taken at Ritchey Woods Nature Preserve in Fishers, a suburb of Indianapolis. This a state-protected area that has the strictest protection of any type of land designation in that it needs to fill a pressing public need that cannot otherwise be filled plus the signature of the governor, if any of it is developed or taken. The land has been state-protected for 41 years and is an oasis of peace in the midst of suburban and light industrial development. The nature preserve is surrounded a conservation easement; the entire area is 120 acres and incudes three ecosystems: a swamp, prairie, and forest.

Some of these were taken by the former chief naturalist of Ritchey Woods Nature Preserve in Fishers, Indiana. Some were taken by me, with my iPhone 11.

Most of these photos are spring ephemerals, or short-lived plants. They bloom before the trees leaf out and they are gone by the end of May or so.

The spicebush (Lindera benzoin) photo was taken in the fall; the leaves turn yellow in the fall. If you crush a leaf you can smell a lemony-spicey aroma–very attractive. The spicebush swallowtail butterfly needs that plant.

I included the drip torch photo because it illustrates a conservation technique used to manage prairies. It was taken during a controlled burn of a prairie. Controlled burns are performed to mimic what used to occur naturally (and the native Americans would burn prairies also). As you probably know, fire destroys shrubs and saplings, leaving the prairie plants free to grow by themselves unshaded.

Dutchmen’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) leaves look very similar to squirrel corn (Dicentra canadensis). But Dutchmen’s breeches flowers have two spreading spurs while squirrel corn’s blooms are rounded and connected (Michael Homoya, Wildflowers and Ferns of Indiana Forests.)

Rosinweed (Silphium integrifolium) stems and leaves are rough to the touch, like rosin. Rosinweed blooms in the summer.

Shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) trees are so named for obvious reasons.

Easatern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) has a foul odor. It looks like giant garlic cloves. It needs constantly moist soil. It flowers in January and February, generating so much heat that sometimes it melts the surrounding snow. The leaves can be reddish mottled or other colors. I love the giant leaves.

The thin pink stripes of spring beauties (Claytonia virginica) guide insects to the pollen at the center. I have seen spring beauties growing in lawns of houses built 40 years ago, remnants of the forest that was there before the home.

Trout lilies (Erythronium americanum):

Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica):

It’s interesting that there isn’t much discussion about this in the mainstream media, but the Biden administration recently pledged to triple US nuclear power capacity by 2050. At COP28 last year the US was among 25 signatories who also pledged to triple world nuclear power capacity by 2050. Last month the Biden administration announced $900 million to support startups of Gen III+ nuclear reactors in the US. This is on top of the nuclear subsidies in the IRA. Earlier this year they announced the creation of the Nuclear Power Project Management and Delivery working group to help streamline the nuclear industry and reduce cost overruns. In July Biden signed the bipartisan ADVANCE act which has sweeping support for the nuclear industry and streamlining of regulations.

What is most encouraging is that all this pro-nuclear action has bipartisan support. In Trump’s first term he was “broadly supportive” of nuclear power, and took some small initial steps. His campaign has again signaled support for “all forms of energy” and there is no reason to suspect that he will undo any of the recent positive steps.

Even environmental groups are split about nuclear power. Some still oppose nuclear, while others have embraced it as a necessary part of the solution to global warming. Regarding the recent pledge to triple nuclear capacity:

Environment America Executive Director Lisa Frank said in a statement that the plan risked “toxic meltdowns, wrecked landscapes and contaminated drinking water.” U.S. PIRG Energy and Utilities Program Director Abe Scarr in a separate statement called nuclear energy “dangerous, expensive and a distraction from cheaper, safer options like solar power” and said its expansion would “[waste] time and resources.”

These responses are not very compelling. Fearmongering about “toxic meltdowns” seems like it was scripted in a 1960s anti-nuclear demonstration. The world has operated hundreds of nuclear power plants (there are currently 440) for decades with only a few mishaps, mostly due to avoidable poor management. The technology is also significantly improving, with some reactor designs being essentially melt-down proof. Nuclear power is actually the second safest (in terms of lives per unit of energy-0.03 deaths per terawatt hour), just slightly behind solar (0.02). Coal, on the other hand, has 1230 times as many deaths per unit energy than solar.

This is the bottom line that even many environmentalists are starting to see clearly – first, you can’t just consider risk, you have to consider risk vs benefit. Second, you can’t just assess one option, you have to compare it to the other options. As should be clear to any frequent reader here, I am a huge advocate of solar power and renewable energy in general and favor steps to maximize these sources of energy. But our goal is to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, while by 2050 the world will likely increase our energy demand by 50% or more. For the next several decades, the more nuclear power we have, the fewer coal and natural gas plants we will have. It is simply implausible that we will fully displace fossil fuel in that time without nuclear.

Bringing up wrecked landscapes and contaminated drinking water is pretty naked fearmongering. One of the advantages of nuclear power is that it has a relatively small land footprint – much less than renewables for the amount of energy produced. It also has much less than fossil fuels, especially when you consider mining and fracking. Coal releases more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear power. It’s simply no contest. Environmentalists who oppose nuclear power will demonstrably hurt the environment.

Nuclear has some advantages over wind and solar, such as less land use. But also, a nuclear power plant can be plugged into existing connections to the grid. The plan should be, in fact, to swap out coal for nuclear one for one. Renewables require distributed connections to the grid and significant grid expansion. While we should are are doing this, applications for new grid connections are backed up by years, more than a decade in some cases. Nuclear also is not an intermittent power source, and the newer reactor designs (such as salt cooled) can more nimbly follow demand than older reactors. Nuclear also has the smallest carbon footprint of all power sources, lower than solar and wind.

Of course there are challenges with nuclear power, cost being one. But it is better to find solutions than to just accept worse options. The Biden administration, with bipartisan support, is finding solutions. Bill Gates is funding a salt-cooled reactor startup, also in the hopes of kickstarting a new reactor design that will be cheaper, safer, and more nimble. Opposition to nuclear is mixed and softening. The looming threat of global warming is simply changing the calculus, even for environmentalists.

The post Pledge to Triple Nuclear by 2050 first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

A study modelling the impact of melting ice suggests scientists have underestimated the risk that an important ocean current will shut down and cause climate chaos

The oral microbiome is increasingly being linked to head and neck cancer, but we don't yet understand its exact role

President-Elect Donald Trump has nominated antivaccine activist and anti-pharma conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. I've written about the damage he will do, if confirmed, to the CDC and FDA, but what about NIH, the greatest engine of biomedical research ever?

The post RFK Jr. vs. the NIH: Say goodbye to the greatest engine of biomedical research ever created first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

This article from Harvard Magazine documents the occurrence of “silent study-ins” in the University’s main library: Widener. While protests on the wide Widener steps have always been countenanced, these demonstrations are new because they take place inside—in the reading rooms.

They of course involve pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protestors, who can’t seem to refrain from disrupting anything, whether it be traffic, classes, putting up graffiti, or, in this case, studying in the library. These sit-ins have been conducted by both students and faculty (faculty are often more anti-Israel than students). Click to read.

Some excerpts:

Throughout this fall, groups of students and faculty members have again taken to libraries with taped signs and coordinated reading lists. These demonstrations—direct challenges to Harvard’s protest restrictions—have ignited campus discussions on what defines a protest, when free expression obstructs learning, and how to introduce new regulations meant to sustain both academic operations and speech.

On January 19, 2024, just after Alan M. Garber assumed the interim presidency, he and the deans released a statement clarifying University policy regarding “the guarantees and limitations” of campus protest and dissent. That January policy states that “demonstrations and protests are ordinarily not permitted in classrooms…libraries or other spaces designated for study, quiet reflection, and small group discussion.” But it did not define what constitutes a protest.

That ambiguity was put to the test on September 21, when approximately 30 pro-Palestine students sat in Loker wearing keffiyehs and displaying signs protesting Israeli strikes in Lebanon. A day before the event, a Harvard administrator warned students that such an action would violate Harvard policies, The Crimson reported. During the protest, library staff informed the students that they could not protest in the library and recorded their Harvard ID numbers. (Students are allowed to protest outside of the library—the Widener steps are a popular location. This semester, both students and faculty held pro-Palestine protests there and were not punished by the University.)

The students were punished, but lightly. Then the faculty got in on it (they were given the same punishment), and the idea spread:

In response to the study-in, Widener Library banned participating students from the building for two weeks. “Demonstrations and protests are not permitted in libraries,” Widener Library administration wrote in an email to punished students that was obtained by The Crimson. The email specified that the recipient had “a laptop bearing one of the demonstration’s flyers.” During the students’ two-week Widener suspensions, they could pick up library materials from other locations, but not enter Widener itself.

The University response angered some faculty members. What made this study-in a protest? Why did a silent action merit punishment? Three weeks after the initial student action, approximately 30 faculty members followed suit. The participants read texts about dissent (ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau to materials published by Harvard itself) and displayed placards quoting the Harvard Library Statement of Values (“embrace diverse perspectives”) as well as the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (“reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in [our] existence”).

. . . . Following those initial confrontations, library actions become more numerous on campus. In the month following the October 16 faculty study-in, there have been two such events at the Law Library, one at the Graduate School of Design, another at the Divinity School (a “pray-in”), and two more in Widener (one faculty-led and another student-led). A November 8 Widener faculty study-in pushed the University’s punishment calculus to its logical extreme, with professors displaying blank papers.

Some pushback from a librarian:

 The administrative response to the library protests has, if anything, prompted more faculty members to express concerns. Since the fall wave of demonstrations began, the library has twice articulated why the study-ins merit punishment. On October 24, University librarian Martha Whitehead published an essay titled “Libraries are places for inquiry and learning” in which she argued that the study-ins—which she firmly classified as protests—disrupt academic life:

While a reading room is intended for study, it is not intended to be used as a venue for a group action, quiet or otherwise, to capture people’s attention. In the study-ins in our spaces, we heard from students who saw them publicized and chose not to come to the library. During the events, large numbers of people filed in at once, and several moved around the room taking photos or filming. Seeking attention is in itself disruptive.

What we have here is a conflict between free speech and disruption of University regulations, which prohibit demonstrations in libraries. Granted, these are silent demonstrations, so I had to think it over. In the end, having studied at Widener Libary, which has a huge and beautiful reading room, I decided I agree with Ms. Whitehead.  I thought, “What if I were trying to study in Widener and a bunch of people came in with posters affixed to their computers, sometimes walking about, and all of them expressing an opinion on ideology or politics. I concluded that such demonstrations, no matter what ideology they favored, are disruptive of study, which of course is one of the functions of the University. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my work if I were surrounded by protestors.

By all means these demonstrators are free to gather and hold up signs on the Widener steps (shown below), but to have silent demonstrations like this in libraries, symposia, or classrooms, is disruptive to the mission of a university, and should be banned. Harvard has already banned them, but perhaps you disagree. Give your opinion in the comments, please:

A photo of the Widener showing its famous steps. This is from about 1920. They look pretty much the same today, but there are no cars or buggies in front.

Abdalian, Leon H., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a short video of the spaces inside Widener, including the reader rooms. Isn’t it lovely? They show the steps in an outside view at the end.