| Bob Siederer 23 Dec 2024 |
Hello again Science Fans!
It being the holiday season, events are light over the next two weeks before they pick up again in January. As I write this, there’s a bug in the calendar that makes it more difficult to see events in the new year. Not impossible though. The calendar widget that appears on the right side of any calendar page disappears once you select a date in 2025. We’re working to fix it.
I’ll make up for the light load of listings with more articles than usual, starting with some Dates and Anniversaries.
Last Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act being signed into law by President Gerald Ford. The necessity for this law, and the regulations it spawned, were a long time coming. And with the second Trump administration about to come into office, we may be about to go back to those days from 50 years ago. Heather Cox Richardson takes us through the history and reasoning, as well as the contrast between the upcoming administration’s reasoning (or lack thereof) and previous Republican administrations.
The next day, that infamous paper on the efficacy of hydroxycloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 was finally withdrawn on ethical and scientific grounds. This paper would now be a case study on the use of social media to spread disinformation to a guilible public, including then president Trump who ignored science and helped spread this, and other theories to an audience looking for easy solutions to the dangerous spread of COVID. It has finally been withdrawn from publication, almost 5 years after being published.
Last Friday marked the 5th anniversary of the creation of the U. S. Space Force. I thought it was a folly at the time, but the Space Force has consolidated quite a few operations under one roof and accomplished quite a lot in just 5 years.
Coming up this Tuesday, Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will get within 3.8 million miles of the sun’s surface while moving an astonishing 430,000 miles/hour. Parker has taken 6 years to reach this point, doing some complicated orbital maneuvers and fly bys to get on the right trajectory and speed. Temperatures on the heat shield are expected to reach 1,800 degrees F!
For the next few weeks, a “planet parade” will be visible to us here on Earth, with six of the planets orbiting our star visible in the night sky. All but Neptune and Uranus can be seen by the naked eye, although you’ll have to be in a dark place to see them the best. Mercury will join the six at the end of February, meaning all 7 planets will be in our sky at the same time.
Every five years, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Geological Survey get together and produce a more accurate World Magnetic Model. This model pinpoints the location of Earth’s magnetic poles, which are moving, with the northern magnetic pole moving across Canada towards Siberia! Updating this map every five years is critical to GPS accuracy. If you’ve ever looked at the maps airline pilots use to navigate, each airport has a notation showing how much the magnetic north deviates from the geographic north, and this deviation will now need to be updated to reflect the new magnetic north location. With the new maps, Santa won’t get lost Tuesday night.
A love story, salmon hats, and drones!
This story would be better closer to Valentines Day, but love knows no calendar. Boris and Svetlaya, two unrelated, orphaned Amur tiger cubs, were rescued and then released in remote parts of the Sikhote-Alin mountains in far eastern Russia. The two were released more than 100 miles apart. Boris decided to find Svetlaya, walking in an almost straight line for over 120 miles to reach her.
Meanwhile, Orcas off the Washington coast have resumed something they haven’t done since the 1980’s…balancing dead salmon on their heads!
Then there are the alleged drones over New Jersey and New York. Andrew Fraknoi, one of our regular astronomical contributors, passed along this video from skeptical investigator Mick West who debunks this current obsession, and the consipiracy theories that have popped up related to it.
Health
We each have our chronological age, but that’s only half of it. We also have a biological age. At King’s College London, researchers have found a way to compare the two using a blood test. Having a higher biological age can raise your risk of death by 51%. I’m not sure what I’d do with that information though.
We’re a nation of exhausted people, so says Arash Javanbakht, an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Wayne State University. The cause? Political stress. I’ve seen this in myself, and with several friends. Following the recent elections, they just can’t keep following the news. There are several reasons for this burnout and some research to explain the phenomenon.
High fructose corn syrup is a health hazard and one contributor to our national obesity problem. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, is on a mission to take the corn syrup industry on. This mission runs straight into a concentration of supporters for the president-elect, setting up an interesting internal conflict. If the budget debacle of this past week is any example of the turmoil we have to look forward to during the next term, things could get ugly.
If you’re of a certain age, you may remember contracting childhood diseases such as Measles or Mumps. You may also remember the national panic over polio and the relief when the first polio vaccine was made available, as well as the national effort to immunize everyone when the oral vaccine came out in the ‘60s. Today, most younger adults, and most of our doctors, don’t have knowledge of what these times were like. Here are six diseases we’ve mostly forgotten about and how the anti-vax movement threatens all the progress made since those days.
Space
Black holes are destructive. But maybe not quite as destructive as previously thought. Astronomers have found the first binary stars ever seen around our Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. Their very existance was a surprise as the enormous gravitational pull of the black hole should have destroyed them.
In case you’ve forgotten, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are still aboard the International Space Station. They are “not stranded”. Well, they will be “not stranded” for another month! It will now be late March before they can return to Earth. Once again, queue the Gilligan’s Island theme.
Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. New analysis shows that there is no lava-filled ocean underneath the surface. Rather, a mostly solid mantle exists for Io.
Just a few years ago, only a handful of exoplanets had been discovered. Thanks to newer telescopes such as the Hubble, the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory in the San Jose hills, and improved detection methods, we now have identified 5,788 exoplanets orbiting stars in the Universe. But we’re still looking for an analog to Earth, a planet of roughly the same size, rocky, with water and oxygen, and within the habitable zone of the star. Could the European Space Agency’s PLATO mission find Earth 2.0?
The Year in Review
It is that time of year when lists of top discoveries, movies, music, food…you name it…of 2024 appear in the media. Here, then, some science lists:
- Scientific Feats set New Records for 2024 – sciencenews.org
- The biggest science stories of 2024 – PBS
- 2024: The Year in Science – Flipboard
- Eight Scientific Firsts of 2024 – sciencenews.org
Have a wonderful and joyous holiday season, no matter how you celebrate it, and best wishes from all of us for a healthy, prosporous New Year!
Bob Siederer
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