During the pandemic I figured out that Covid and many other diseases spread through the air and could be minimized and contained with good indoor air quality methods. While I was far from alone in this understanding – I learned about it from some very smart people – those with the clout to make sure we improved air in every place from schools to public buildings to offices and other workplaces ignored or minimized the problem.
As a result, many of us still find it necessary to wear masks in a lot of indoor spaces, something that is not only annoying, but actually under attacks. Far too little has been done to improve indoor air quality despite the fact that the benefits go much farther than avoiding contagious diseases and include improved cognitive functioning and avoidance of health problems caused by chemicals trapped in poorly ventilated spaces.
What convinced me to buy this thick book in hardback rather than wait until it was available in the library was the blurb from Ed Yong, who called Zimmer “one of the very best science writers” and noted that the book would leave readers “agog at the incredible world that floats unseen around us and outraged at the forces that stopped us from appreciating that world until, for many people, it was too late.”
I almost never buy books based on blurbs, but since Yong is a brilliant science writer and a man of fierce integrity when it comes to his profession, I had no doubt that he was giving his honest opinion.
And he was right. Air-Borne is a superb book that shows deep research into the history of the things that float in our air – much more than viruses – and of the people who have struggled to show us that we need to pay attention to what we’re breathing.
I was already outraged before I read it, but looking at the history increased my fervor. So many scientists came up with valuable clues to how viruses, bacteria, and fungi spread through the air only to be pushed aside or overlooked.
The book starts with a 2023 concert by the Skagit Valley Chorale, the choir in Washington state that experienced a super-spreader event that left two people dead after they met to rehearse during the early days of the pandemic. The number of people infected at that rehearsal was one of the things that made people realize this virus was air-borne.
Zimmer was at that concert with a CO2 meter in his pocket, trying to gauge if he needed a mask. As someone who often travels with a CO2 meter, since the amount of CO2 in the air gives you a good idea of the ventilation in a space, I recognized a kindred spirit. Continue reading “Breathe, but Safely”…
I’ve been working on adding some new practices to my daily schedule. A key thing I added in December – even before the Solstice, much less the official New Year – was to spend about 15 or 20 minutes reading every morning.
The original purpose was to give myself a reason to sit quietly for a few minutes before checking my blood pressure – which I’m keeping a close eye on – but it quickly evolved into something I really wanted to do. And that was probably because of the book I started with: Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time.
I stumbled on that book in a used bookstore in Sebastopol (the one in California, not Crimea) last summer and bought it on impulse. When I started doing the reading back in December, I pulled it out with a couple of other books on much the same impulse, and quickly fell into it.
Rovelli is a physicist, and the book is about the understanding of time by physicists, and yet that doesn’t begin to completely describe it, not to mention that it doesn’t tell anyone what a joy it is to read.
Rovelli is a lyrical writer and a gentle one. He can make statements that might be controversial without issuing a challenge. While I’m reading the English translation of this book (it was translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell), I am quite sure the beautiful and gentle writing is all Rovelli and was there in the Italian original. Rovelli does speak English (and likely several other languages, given the different scientists with whom he has worked), so I imagine he has some idea of what his words should look like when translated.
In doing this reading, I began to keep something of a commonplace book in which I wrote down quotations from the book or, occasionally, my own reaction.
Here are some of quotes that struck me:
Nothing is valid always and everywhere.
[T]he world is nothing but change.
The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.
We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread.
We are more complex than our mental faculties are capable of grasping.
My little bit of Australia has a heat wave. This is not unexpected, given it’s summer. It does, however, mean my brain is fried. It didn’t reach 100 degrees (using US temperatures) today, so, in the measurements of my childhood, it was hot enough to fry an egg on a car bonnet, but not hot enough for the pavement to melt. In my childhood, I would have said that this is a day when I can’t go running, but I can still play and read. Alas, I am no longer a child. Also, alas, this week is full of work that has unchangeable deadlines. If I had the energy, I would sing you (badly), “Too darn hot.” I do not. Also I have 3,000 words of deathless academic prose to write before I can sleep tonight.
I had better start writing.
Maybe next week will be cooler. Maybe the week after. We’re in our last month of summer. Schools have gone back, and universities will begin again soon and life will pick up pace. Maybe then I’ll have the inner-oomph to write those answers to the serious and interesting questions my readers sent me. I hope so. Then I can complain about storms and blowsy autumn leaves. I’ll have more energy for complaint and far less interest in dreaming of frying eggs on car bonnets.
One last note to leave you with: if it were ten degrees hotter, then I could fry an egg on the pavement. I tested this when I was a child. My parents did not let me eat the egg, alas, which is why the car bonnet is now my theoretical place of choice. It’s still only theoretical because none of my friends are willing to let me destroy their car enamel. Which is just as well, because my US friends have egg problems and if I had wasted eggs in testing the heat outdoors it would be rather rude.
I’ve been putting myself to sleep at night by envisioning the kind of future world I’d like to see. Being a science fiction writer as well as someone who has spent much of my life doing work toward social change, I’m always thinking about better systems.
But the combination of the polycrises we face (I’m deliberately using the plural of crisis here because we not only have multiple crises that affect each other – thus the poly – but each crisis has its own set of multiple components) with the forthcoming grifter/broligarch/religious and right wing extremist government has urged me more in that direction.
Given that the government will not only not be addressing the polycrises but will in fact be doing things that make them much, much worse, I cannot be satisfied by resistance. And given that the status quo was already shaky – very little being done about climate change, inequality, and the cost of housing, not to mention protecting the country from insurrectionists – I’m not feeling pumped up about trying to get back to that.
Yeah, we need the rule of law and the Constitution here in the United States, but both those things have some big flaws that should have been addressed a long time ago. Most of the resistance will be focused on keeping political things from getting too much worse, but it won’t be fixing any of the underlying problems.
So I am trying to envision what we could have. I recently read an essay Donella Meadows wrote in 1994, “Envisioning a Sustainable World,” and it inspired me to do more imagining of what kind of world we could have.
Meadows was one of the authors of the 1972 work Limits to Growth, which provided a guide to the problems we’re facing right now. You can find out more about her work here and download a free copy of Limits to Growthhere:
Of course, I’ve been working on envisioning futures all along. Lately, I’ve been reading some futurist thinking to help expand my ability to do that. You have to be careful with futurists, since many of them are tied in with tech bro thinking, but there are some very useful skills in that area that help you get past the “there’s no way that could happen” point.
You have to get past the “there’s no way that could happen” point before you can open your mind to anything new.
I have started a new practice – ahead of New Year’s Resolutions – of reading a book for a short time in the morning and again in the evening. The morning practice started as a way of calming myself after doing my morning exercises before I check my blood pressure, but it is growing into something more, a way of setting up my day.
The evening practice is intended to give my mind something to chew on while falling asleep so that it’s engaged with something besides worry. (Worry is not helpful for falling asleep.)
At the moment I’m reading Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time in the morning and Ilya Prigogine’s The End of Certainty at night. This was partly chance – Rovelli’s work is in short chapters, perfect for ten minutes of reading at a time and the Prigogine book is from the library and will have to be returned and is also a book that is best read slowly, in short periods.
Both of them are about time and physics – Prigogine won the Nobel for chemistry, but his work was in thermodynamics – and they do fit together well.
I should point out that I am not a physicist nor have I ever wanted to be that or a scientist of any kind. What interests me about both these books is not the science, but the way the science underlies philosophy and the way our world actually works.
Essentially, I am searching – I am always searching – for different ways to get at deep truth.
One of the things I learned in my many years in Aikido is that it is good to take classes from different people because then you get a glimpse of truth from more than one point of view. That is likewise true of reading a variety of people on a variety of subjects.
Part of what I’m looking for these days is how to deal with the polycrisis – or maybe polycrises – we face these days with the right wing extremists getting in the way of addressing climate change, wealth inequality, misogyny, racism, and other deep problems as well as creating new problems by their very existence.
I no longer think ordinary politics is a useful path. I will leave that to the people who still believe that it might work. I will vote and such, but I will not count on anything done through the U.S. political system to solve any of the real problems or to even get the extremists out of our lives.
A team of engineers and geophysicists led by the University of Chicago proposed a new method for terraforming Mars with nanoparticles. This method would take advantage of resources already present on the Martian surface and, according to their feasibility study, would be enough to start the terraforming process.
When neutron stars dance together, the grand smash finale they experience might create the densest known form of matter known in the Universe. It’s called “quark matter, ” a highly weird combo of liberated quarks and gluons. It’s unclear if the stuff existed in their cores before the end of their dance. However, in the wild aftermath a neutron-star merger, the strange conditions could free quarks and gluons from protons and neutrons. That lets them move around freely in the aftermath. So, researchers want to know how freely they move and what conditions might impede their motion (or flow).
Recently, two researchers looked at what would happen if a ship with warp drive tried to get into a black hole. The result is an interesting thought experiment. It might not lead to starship-sized warp drives but might allow scientists to create smaller versions someday.Continue reading “[science] Dark Oxygen, Quark Matter, and Terraforming Mars”…
Growing quickly helped the earliest dinosaurs and other ancient reptiles flourish in the aftermath of mass extinction
Eoraptor lunensis lived roughly 230 million years ago, at a time when dinosaurs were small and rare. Jordan Harris courtesy of Kristi Curry Rogers, CC BY-SA
It may be hard to imagine, but once upon a time, dinosaurs didn’t dominate their world. When they first originated, they were just small, two-legged carnivores overshadowed by a diverse array of other reptiles.
How did they come to rule?
My colleagues and I recently studied the fossilized bones of the earliest known dinosaurs and their nondinosaur rivals to compare their growth rates. We wanted to find out whether early dinosaurs were somehow special in the way they grew – and if this may have given them a leg up in their rapidly changing world.
But within a blink of geologic time, in a span of about 60,000 years, scientists estimate 95% of all living things went extinct. Known as the Permian extinction or the Great Dying, it is the largest of the five knownmass extinction events on Earth.
In the ecological vacuum after the mass extinction event, on the stage of a healing Earth, the ancestors of dinosaurs first evolved – along with the ancestors of today’s frogs, salamanders, lizards, turtles and mammals. It was the dawn of the Triassic Period, which lasted from 252 million years ago to 201 million years ago.
Collectively, the creatures that survived the Great Dying were not particularly remarkable. One animal group, known as Archosauria, started off with relatively small and simple body plans. They were flexible eaters and could live in a wide variety of environmental conditions.
Archosaurs eventually split into two tribes – one group including modern crocodiles and their ancient relatives and a second including modern birds, along with their dinosaur ancestors.
This second group walked on their tiptoes and had big leg muscles. They also had extra connections between their back bones and hip bones that allowed them to move efficiently in their new world.
Instead of directly competing with other archosaurs, it seems this group of dinosaur ancestors exploited different ecological niches – maybe by eating different foods or living in slightly different geographical areas. But early on, the dinosaurlike archosaurs were far less diverse than the crocodile ancestors they lived alongside.
Slowly, the dinosaur lineage continued to evolve. It took tens of millions of years before dinosaurs became abundant enough for their skeletons to show up in the fossil record.
The Ischigualasto Provincial Park in San Juan Province, Argentina, where the earliest dinosaur fossils have been discovered. Kristi Curry Rogers, CC BY-SA
These early dinosaurs represent only a small fraction of animals found from that time period. In this ancient world, the crocodilelike archosaurs were on top. They had a wider array of body shapes, sizes and lifestyles, easily outpacing early dinosaurs in the diversity race.
It wouldn’t be until closer to the end of the Triassic Period, when another volcanism-induced mass extinction event occurred, that dinosaurs got their lucky break.
Mycollaboratorsfrom the Universidad Nacional de San Juan, Argentina, and I wondered whether the rise of dinosaurs may have been underpinned, in part, by how fast they grew. We know, through microscopic study of fossilized bones, that later dinosaurs had fast growth rates – much faster than that of modern-day reptiles. But we didn’t know whether that was true for the earliest dinosaurs.
We decided to examine the microscopic patterns preserved in thigh bones from five of the earliest known dinosaur species and compare them with those of six nondinosaur reptiles and one early relative of mammals. All the fossils we studied came from the 2-million-year interval within the Ischigualasto Formation of Argentina.
Eoraptor bone tissue under a polarizing light microscope shows evidence of rapid, continuous growth – common to both the earliest dinosaurs and many of their nondinosaur contemporaries. Kristi Curry Rogers, CC BY-ND
Bones are an archive of growth history because, even in fossils, we can see the spaces where blood vessels and cells perforated the mineralized tissue. When we look at these features under a microscope, we can see how they are organized. The more slowly growth occurs, the more organized microscopic features will be. With quicker growth, the more disorganized the microscopic features of the bone look.
We discovered early dinosaurs grew continuously, not stopping until they reached full size. And they did indeed have elevated growth rates, on par with and, at times, even faster than those of their descendants. But so did many of their nondinosaur contemporaries. It appears most animals living in the Ischigualasto ecosystem grew quickly, at rates that are more like those of living mammals and birds than those of living reptiles.
Our data allowed us to see the subtle differences between closely related animals and those occupying similar ecological niches. But most of all, our data shows that fast growth is a great survival strategy in the aftermath of mass destruction.
Scientist still don’t know exactly what made it possible for dinosaurs and their ancient ancestors to survive two of the most extensive extinctions Earth has ever undergone. We are still studying this important interval, looking at details such as legs and bodies built for efficient, upright locomotion, potential changes in the way the earliest dinosaurs may have breathed and the way they grew. We think it’s probably all these factors, combined with luck, that finally allowed dinosaurs to rise and rule.
Remember the brontosaurus vs apatosaurus debate? Turns out both sides were right…we think…so far.
Here’s the skinny: The skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed dinosaur was unearthed in Wyoming by paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh in 1879, according to the Natural History Museum in London. At the time, scientists dubbed the giant plant eater, which lived during the Jurassic period about 150 million years ago, Brontosaurus excelsus, according to Yale University.
However, in 1903, paleontologist Elmer Riggs found that B. excelsus was very similar to another dinosaur, Apatosaurus ajax, which Marsh discovered in Colorado in 1877, the Natural History Museum noted. The differences between the dinosaurs appeared so minor that scientists decided it was better to place them both in the same genus, or group of species. Because Apatosaurus was named first, the rules of scientific naming kept its name, leading scientists to retire the name Brontosaurus.
More than 100 years later, researchers suggested reviving Brontosaurus as its own genus. A 2015 study of sauropods in the journal PeerJ found that the original Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus fossils may have been different enough to classify them as separate groups.
The nearly 300-page study examined 477 physical features of 81 sauropod specimens. The initial aim of the research was to analyze the relationships between the species making up the family of sauropods known as Diplodocidae, which includes Diplodocus, Apatosaurus and, now, Brontosaurus.
All in all, the scientists found that Brontosaurus’ neck was higher-set, narrower and smaller than Apatosaurus’, study lead author Emanuel Tschopp, a vertebrate paleontologist now at the University of Hamburg in Germany, told Live Science. They suggested three known species of Brontosaurus: B. excelsus, B. parvus and B. yahnahpin.
“They call Brontosaurus ‘resurrected,'” Jacques Gauthier, curator of reptiles at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, who did not participate in this study. “I like the ring of that. ‘Restored’ is a perfectly correct term, but ‘resurrected’ is the official description of what they have done.”
Tschopp noted that they could not have made this discovery 15 or more years before their study; only recently did findings of dinosaurs similar to Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus help reveal what made these groups unique.
It has been nearly a decade since the paper published, and Tschopp noted that “not everybody accepts such proposals immediately. There have been — and still are — researchers who don’t trust the results quite yet and continue to use the name Apatosaurus for what I call Brontosaurus.”
Mike Taylor, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England who did not take part in the 2015 study, told Live Science in an email, “you rarely get consensus from paleontologists on these matters, so the answer you get will depend on who you ask. There’s been no pushback in the formal literature, but I’ve heard a bit of grumbling.”
Still, to Taylor, the call to “resurrect” Brontosaurus “just feels like a reasonable thing to do.” He noted that the 2015 study “made a solid argument that most specialists found pretty persuasive and not especially surprising.” Taylor and his colleagues have mentioned B. excelsus and B. parvus in their own studies a number of times.
I wish I had been taught Chemistry differently. To this day, most of the chemistry I learned in school was as a side-benefit of my biology classes. I loved bio, and survived chemistry (required) and physics (ditto) in order to take the advanced biology class my senior year, wherein a good deal of chemistry was taught in passing, particularly when we were looking at DNA and genetics. But beyond that, Chemistry the subject seemed utterly detached from things I cared about. Okay, some times you just have to buckle down and get through the classes you don’t much care about (I’m looking at you, PE) to get your ticket punched and make your way out of high school. But I think I would have learned more if it had been related to something else. Like food.
Flash forward a few decades to when I gave a lesson in bread-making to my daughter’s second grade class. It’s a perfect basic chemistry lesson for kids: simple enough to be reduced to 7-year-old level, but tied to something familiar (better yet, edible). I just came across the handout I did for the class, which is what put me in mind of it.
And this morning, spurred by an article in NY Times Cooking, I made sauerkraut. It is ridiculously easy: cut up a head of cabbage, put resulting shreds in a bowl, “massage” (the NYT term, not mine) two tablespoons of Kosher salt into the shreds for five minutes, until the cabbage starts to soften, reduce down, and release some liquid. Then pack into jars and stir every couple of hours, to speed fermentation. All the time I was up to my elbows in cabbage I kept wondering 1) is this really going to work? and 2) why does it work. So as soon as I had packed the cabbage into its jars and cleaned up the mayhem that cutting up cabbage produces, I hied me to the internet.
According to the Clemson University website, “Cabbage is converted to sauerkraut due to growth and acid production by a succession of lactic acid bacteria. Salt and limited air creates desirable conditions for the leuconostocs – a group of less acid tolerant lactic acid bacteria that grow better at 60°F to 70°F.” Fortunately for my sauerkraut, the winter temperature of my kitchen is somewhere around 65°. The salt works–as I noted as I worked–to soften and draw juice from the cabbage. As a bonus, it also works to keep undesirable bacteria at bay; you want the desirable bacteria, of course: the leuconostoc lactic acid bacteria that create lactic acid.
See? Chemistry!
The Clemson site gives a recipe that requires 25 pounds of cabbage and yields 9 quarts. I suspect that once my much more modest batch has fermented fully, it will be something closer to a quart and a half.
All of this reminds me that I need to make a batch of bread and butter pickles. For science!
Using the European Space Agency‘s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), scientists have observed Mars‘ atmosphere glowing green for the first time ever — in the visible light spectrum, that is. The effect is called airglow (or dayglow or nightglow, depending on the hour). Nightglow “occurs when two oxygen atoms combine to form an oxygen molecule,” according to ESA. On Mars, this happens at an altitude of approximately 31 miles (50 km). Scientists have suspected Mars to have airglow for some 40 years, but the first observation only occurred a decade ago by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter, which detected the phenomenon in the infrared spectrum. Then, in 2020, scientists observed the phenomenon in visible light using TGO, but in Martian daylight rather than at night. Now, we’ve seen the phenomenon at night via TGO.
The moon is at least 40 million years older than we once thought, a new study reveals. Scientists confirmed our cosmic companion’s new minimum age after reanalyzing tiny impact crystals from lunar samples taken by NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old. So based on the newest study, the zircon crystals were formed around 80 million years after our planet formed. However, the collision that birthed the moon could have actually happened even earlier. After the Earth-Thea crash, the infant moon’s surface would have been covered by a magma ocean due to the intense energy of the collision. Therefore, the lunar zircon crystals could only have properly solidified into their current state once the magma ocean had cooled down.
Astrobiologists think a planet needs to have certain features to support life: oxygen in its atmosphere, something to shield organisms from dangerous radiation and liquid water, for a start. Although big land masses aren’t strictly necessary for living things to emerge, Earth’s history shows that they’re important for life to thrive and exist for long periods of time. So, if an exoplanet had continents before Earth, it follows that there might be older, more advanced life on that world.
This line of thought led Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University astronomer in the U.K., to answer the question: When did the first continents appear on a planet in our galaxy? Turns out, two exoplanets’ continents — and perhaps life — may have arisen four to five billion years before Earth’s.
If the Tasmanian Devil is a type of dead star, it’s not behaving like the others. As a dead star, the light coming from it could signal its transition into a sort of stellar afterlife. It could be a new type of stellar corpse.
“Because the corpse is not just sitting there, it’s active and doing things that we can detect,” Ho said. “We think these flares could be coming from one of these newly formed corpses, which gives us a way to study their properties when they’ve just been formed.”
In the very early universe, physics was weird. A process known as “inflation,” where best we understand the universe went from a single infinitesimal point to everything we see today, was one such instance of that weird physics. Now, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Science have sifted through 15 years of pulsar timing data in order to put some constraints on what that physics looks like.
When methane (CH4) and oxygen (O2) are both present in an atmosphere, it’s an indication that life is at work. That’s because, in an oxygen environment, methane only lasts about 10 years. Its presence indicates disequilibrium. For it to be present, it has to be continually replenished in amounts that only life can produce.
I wish I had been taught Chemistry differently. To this day, most of the chemistry I learned in school was as a side-benefit of my biology classes. I loved bio, and survived chemistry (required) and physics (ditto) in order to take the advanced biology class my senior year, wherein a good deal of chemistry was taught in passing, particularly when we were looking at DNA and genetics. But beyond that, Chemistry the subject seemed utterly detached from things I cared about. Okay, some times you just have to buckle down and get through the classes you don’t much care about (I’m looking at you, PE) to get your ticket punched and make your way out of high school. But I think I would have learned more if it had been related to something else. Like food.
