Hello again, science fans,
Di nuovo ciao a tutti, appassionati di scienza,
[About 85,000 Bay Area residents speak Italian at home.]
SPACE
“Fram2” is a 4-person space mission scheduled for this week. It is funded by one of the crew, a Chinese billionaire, Chun Wang (王春). He will be flying as a citizen of Malta and accompanied by Jannike Mikkelson (Norway), Rabea Rogge (Deutschland), and Eric Phillips (Australia). They will be the first persons to orbit over the Earth’s Poles. (Pole to Pole in 46 minutes!) They plan to launch Monday evening (Pacific Time) from Florida. The launch time & live video can be found at RocketLaunch.Live.
Why Fram2? ‘Fram’ is Norwegian for ‘Forward’ and that was the name of the ship that took Roald Amundsen’s party to the Antarctic to become the first team to reach the South Pole.
Physics Girl was a favorite YouTube channel of mine – until it abruptly stopped creating content 2½ years ago when Dianna Cowern contracted Long Covid (from which she is hopefully beginning to recover). The International Astronomical Association has renamed Asteroid 1999 VG114 to 21943 Diannacowern “in recognition of her contributions to science communication.”
The Curiosity Mars Rover detected dodecane in a soil sample raising the possibility that life once existed on Mars. The 12-Carbon molecule could have come from a living organism but not necessarily. (This is a good segue into BIOLOGY)
BIOLOGY
It’s our best estimate that single-celled life on Earth began about 3.9 billion years ago and continued happily along for 3.2 billion years before multi-celled life evolved – six different times. That’s a mystery. ¿Why then? ¿What prompted multicellularity? ¿Why has multicellularity proven so successful? ¿Am i going to answer the above questions? Nope. We humans are still working on the answers. Plants now comprise about 83% of Earth’s biomass while single-celled organisms make up only about 14%. [Fungi: 2.2%; Animals 0.5%]
Sometime around 320 million years ago lived the last common ancestor of mammals and birds when reptiles split into synapsids (ancestors of mammals, etc.) and into sauropsids (ancestors of reptiles, dinosaurs, and birds). We know from fossils that the last common ancestor had a very small simple brain – i.e. not so smart. However, mammals and many bird species are quite intelligent, although with differences. Studying the very different brain anatomies of birds and mammals gives insight into how they achieved their intelligences. Perhaps this will help us better understand the aliens we may encounter some day.
¿What happens when you put a human ‘speech gene’ into a mouse? You get a mouse that gets chatty with prospective mates at the water fountain.
¿What happens when you put a wooly mammoth gene into a mouse? You get a wooly – but not so mammoth – mouse.
SUPPORTING SCIENCE
NCSE (National Center for Science Education) has a new podcast: Safeguarding Sound Science hosted by Mat Kaplan. The first three podcasts are top notch:
“What Climate Change? Tackling Climate Denial” with Michael Mann and Glenn Branch
“A Century of Disinformation: Naomi Oreskes and the Merchants of Doubt”
“Miseducation in the USA: How Our Kids Are Too Often Denied Climate Facts” with Katie Worth and Melissa Lau.
Next Saturday, April 5th, is an opportunity to join others in demonstrating badly needed support for science, medicine, and compassion in our government. The event is planned for 981 locations in the U.S. – as well as in the UK., France, Portugal, and Mexico. It is called “HANDS OFF!” and you can find the event nearest to you by clicking on the blue dots on this map. Organizations partnering for this event include Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Climate Action, Common Cause, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Human Rights Campaign, League of Women Voters, National Education Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Stand up for Science, and 140 more.
ARCHAEOLOGY
We have plenty of evidence that Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens split off from each other about half a million years ago and then – starting about 47,000 years ago – interbred for about 7,000 years. Genetic research has identified another such splitting and recombining of our ancestors that suggests a separation of 300,000 years. Such splittings imply geographical separations, and with more research we may learn where each of these ancestral groups were living.
Not too surprisingly, Lucy – our most famous Australopithecine ancestor – was predominantly a vegetarian
If i used a really great way to catch fish, i’d probably let friends know about it on the Internet. Had i lived 16,000 years ago, i might have carved my method onto a flat stone. Apparently someone did just that. They carved a figure of a fish onto a stone with cross-hatching that appears to be a net.
RAFFLE
The prize is a small wooden tensegrity stand – perfect for displaying a small trophy or houseplant – or maybe just to baffle your guests. Also available in walnut color. Just send an email before noon Friday to david.almandsmith [at] gmail.com with your guess of an integer between 0 and 1,000. Last time, Madison guessed closest to the randomly generated 592 to win a wall clock displaying the first 12 elements of the Periodic Table.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
¿Are you polite to chatbots such as ChatGPT? I’m not. And there are downsides to being impolite. Certain that i was interacting with a chatbot since it rapidly filled the chatbox with ingratiating blurbs, i swore in response for its failure to “comprehend” my issue. As it turned out, a real live person was copying and pasting from a stash of standard responses. Oops. Apparently i am with the majority. Most Americans and Brits are impolite when dealing with chatbots. Besides the risk of misidentifying a real person as a chatbot, the practice of impoliteness can easily spill over into social life. Also, it puts you at a critical disadvantage when the robot uprising comes.
A $250,000 prize went to 18-year-old Matteo Paz for designing AI algorithms for sorting through astronomy data to classify objects. Wow, and wow.
THINGS TO DO THIS WEEK – My Picks
- Update on the Bird Flu Livestream Mon 2pm
- Wonderfest: Other Humans Tue 7pm, Novato
- Tom Steyer on Climate Progress in 2025 Wed 5pm, Berkeley
- Science under Siege Livestream Thurs 4pm
- First Friday Art X Science Fri 6 – 10pm, Oakland, $
- Computer History Museum TechFest Sat all day, Mountain View, $
- Celebrate Earth Month at the Refuge Sun 10am – 2pm, Alviso
CLIMATE
Although we lag behind several other countries in transitioning away from fossil fuels, U.S. wind and solar electricity generation surpassed coal for the first time last year.
Here’s a weird one: ‘ice batteries’. When electricity is cheaper – generally in the middle of the night and early morning hours – freezers make ice. When the indoor temperature rises to the point that interior cooling is needed, air is blown over the ice and throughout the building. This is less expensive than powering up air conditioners when rates are high.
Producing ammonia for fertilizers contributes 2% to global CO2 emissions. Another way may be practical and profitable with zero CO2 emissions. By adding nitrogen to water that has a metal catalyst and pumping it underground in a geothermal well, ammonia is created with the heat and pressure. Ammonia is extracted from the returning water and that hot water is used to generate electricity. More nitrogen is added before the water is pumped back underground. A continuous loop. Sounds promising on paper.
Glaciers in Svalbard, Norway are melting and releasing large amounts of methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – as they melt. This was not expected and could be true of glaciers everywhere and could contribute to a serious feedback loop and could create a tipping point in global warming.
FUN (?) NERDY VIDEOS
Junk Food & Robert Kennedy – Show & Tell – Jo Schwarcz – 4 mins
Crinoids – Bizarre Beasts – Hank Green & Sarah Suta – 5 mins
Geothermal Optimism – Sabine Hossenfelder – 5.5 mins
476,000 Year-Old Human-Made Structure – University of Liverpool – 8 mins
World’s Most Common Mineral – SciShow – Hank Green – 8 mins
One Bomb to End it All – Kurzgesagt – 11 mins
¿Who Was Homo Luzonensis? – History with Kayleigh – Kayleigh A.N. – 14 mins
¿Do Whales Have a Language? – Dr. Ben Miles – 17 mins
Fusion Reactor Design – PBS SpaceTime – Matt O’Dowd – 20 mins
Strandbeest: Learning to Walk – Veritaseum – Derek Muller – 23 mins
Integrating Photonic & Digital Computing – Anastasi in Tech – Anastasiia Nosova – 28 mins
¿How Do Satellites NOT Crash? – Fraser Cain w Dr. Sydney Dolan – 37 mins
Have a good week. Maybe i’ll see you on Saturday.
Dave Almandsmith, Bay Area Skeptics
“It is important to take action and to realize that we can make a difference, and this will encourage others to take action and then we realize we are not alone and our cumulative actions truly make an even greater difference.”
– Jane Goodall
Upcoming Events:
Click to see the next two weeks of events in your browser.