The Carboniferous is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic that spans 60 million years from the end of the Devonian Period 358.9 million years ago, to the beginning of the Permian Period, 298.9 mya.
[Picture: Bibliographisches Institut – Meyers Konversationslexikon]
The Carboniferous* lycopod forests were not like this at all (trees with wood and bark). The lycopods, like their Devonian forebears, were hollow, supported by thick skin rather than heartwood, and covered in green, leaflike scales. Indeed, the entire plant— the trunk and the crown of dropping branches alike— was scaly. With no columns of vessels to transport food, each of the scales was photosynthetic, supplying food to the tissues close by.
Even stranger to our eyes, these trees spent most of their lives as inconspicuous stumps in the ground. Only when it was ready to reproduce did a tree grow, a pole shooting upward like a firework in slow motion to explode in a crown of branches that would broadcast spores into the wind.
Once the spores had been shed, the tree would die.
Over many years of wind and weather, fungi and bacteria would etch away at the husk until it collapsed onto the sodden forest floor below. A lycopod forest looked like the desolate landscape of the First World War Western Front: a craterscape of hollow stumps filled with a refuse of water and death; the trees, like poles, denuded of all leaves or branches, rising from a mire of decay. There was very little shade and no understory apart from the deepening litter forming around the shattered wrecks of the lycopod trunks.
Tuesday/ mushrooms 🍄
The mushroom spores in the ground in my backyard have started to sprout— the way they usually do in October.
The right kind of soil, and changes in temperature, light and water, trigger them to start growing.
Mushrooms, as living organisms, belong to a kingdom separate from plants (see table below).
| Kingdom | Organisms |
|---|---|
| Monera | Bacteria, blue-green algae (cyanobacteria), and spirochetes |
| Protista | Protozoans and algae of various types |
| Fungi | Funguses, molds, mushrooms, yeasts, mildews, and smuts |
| Plantae | Mosses, ferns, woody and non-woody flowering plants |
| Animalia | Sponges, worms, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals |
Saturday/ the partial solar eclipse 🌛
Farther afield, the moon passing in front of the sun made it appear as a crescent shape.
[Source: Eclipse data from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio]
[Photo: PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP]
At about 9.20 am, 81% of the sun was obscured.
Tuesday/ got my flu shot 💉
I got my flu shot today, the one branded as the FLUCELVAX® Quad 2023-24.
It’s the first flu vaccine in the United States that was cultured in cells* and not in chicken eggs.
Some observational studies have shown cell culture-based vaccines to provide greater protection against flu or flu-like illness (as opposed to ones grown in eggs).
*From the CDC’s website: ‘Cell culture-based flu vaccine production does not require chicken eggs because the vaccine viruses used to make vaccine are grown in mammalian cell cultures (no animals are harmed by this process)’.
[Source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/resource-center/shareable-resources.htm]
Wednesday/ keeping an eye on Apophis 🌠
I stumbled across an old YouTube video in which astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about the dire possibility of giant asteroid Apophis hitting Earth.
Luckily, I also found this updated report on NASA’s web site:
Estimated to be about 1,100 feet (340 meters) across, Apophis quickly gained notoriety as an asteroid that could pose a serious threat to Earth when astronomers predicted that it would come uncomfortably close in 2029. Thanks to additional observations of Apophis, the risk of an impact in 2029 was later ruled out, as was the potential impact risk posed by another close approach in 2036. Until March 2021, however, a small chance of impact in 2068 still remained.
When Apophis made a distant flyby of Earth around March 5, 2021, astronomers took the opportunity to use powerful radar observations to refine the estimate of its orbit around the Sun with extreme precision, enabling them to confidently rule out any impact risk in 2068 and long after.
Wednesday/ behold the whirlpool galaxy 🌌
In 2011, scientists imaging M51 with Hubble hoped to capture the galaxy with the James Webb Space Telescope one day. That day has arrived.
– Monisha Ravisetti writing for space.com
This description of the image from the European Space Agency: A large spiral galaxy takes up the entirety of the image. The core is mostly bright white, but there are also swirling, detailed structures that resemble water circling a drain. There is white and pale blue light that emanates from stars and dust at the core’s centre, but it is tightly limited to the core. The rings feature colors of deep red and orange and highlight filaments of dust around cavernous black bubbles.
[Image credit: NASA/ James Webb Space Telescope]
Saturday/ a meteor shower 🌠
Here is the news
Coming to you every hour upon the hour
Here is the news
The weather’s fine
But there may be a meteor shower
– From Electric Light Orchestra’s 1982 concept album “Time”, about a man from 1981 travelling into the far off future of 2095 and having to deal with the stresses and setbacks of the future.
In this song, a news program is playing all the hourly (and quite depressing) headlines, some of which do have basis in reality.
It is a great year to look for Perseid meteors entering Earth’s atmosphere (and burn up), and this weekend is the peak time to do that.
There is a crescent moon in the sky, meaning the sky will be dark.
The best time to catch them is just before dawn— around 3:30 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. local time (eek!).
One can expect to see a Perseid every minute or so, or roughly 40 to 50 an hour during the peak, though rates could be even higher under ideal viewing conditions.
[Photo by Steve Ringman, published in The Seattle Times, 2010]
Friday/ a funhouse mirror🪞
Happy Friday.
I took this ‘funhouse mirror’ picture 8 years ago (Aug 16, 2015) at the EXPERIMINTA Science Center in Frankfurt, Germany.
Friday/ the week that was 🛸
Happy Friday after a busy news week.
From the Washington Post:
On Wednesday alone, the hearing for “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP) by a House Oversight subcommittee had stiff competition for the public’s attention.
A plea deal involving President Biden’s son Hunter fell apart in court, raising questions about the future of the government’s case against him for tax and gun charges.
Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was escorted out of a news conference after he appeared momentarily unable to speak, sparking concerns about the Senate minority leader’s health.
Donald Trump was charged with 3 more counts in the documents case, along with a new co-conspirator, the property manager at Mar-a-Lago. (Charges for the Jan.6 events are still expected).
And the ongoing, dramatic heat waves in Europe and the United States and wildfires in Canada and North Africa continued — with rising warnings about how climate change is rapidly altering life on Earth.
Wednesday/ bus tour to Kanagawa 🌋
Here are pictures of our round trip bus tour to Mount Hakone and Lake Ashi in Kanagawa prefecture.
The bus ride to Motohakone Port at the edge of Ashinoko Lake (called ‘Lake Ashi’ for tourists) was about 2 hours.
*A caldera is a large depression formed when a volcano erupts and collapses.
*Traditional Japanese gate most commonly found at the entrance of or within a Shinto shrine, where it symbolically marks the transition from the mundane to the sacred.
The elusive Mount Fuji peak can be seen behind the clouds. Mount Fuji is Japan’s tallest at 3 776 m (12,388 ft).
Thursday/ aphelion ☀️—🌎
aphelion
noun
ASTRONOMY
the point in the orbit of a planet, asteroid, or comet at which it is farthest from the sun.
perihelion
noun
ASTRONOMY
the point in the orbit of a planet, asteroid, or comet at which it is closest to the sun.
Happy Aphelion Day.
Today at 2:06 p.m. Pacific time, Earth was at the outermost point in its (slightly elliptical) orbit around our Sun, known as aphelion.
We are all some 3 million miles farther from our Sun today than when we were closest* to it in January (the date changes slightly from year to year). It doesn’t feel like it here in the Northern hemisphere, but Earth is in fact receiving 7% less direct sunlight than it does in January.
(Seasons on Earth are the result of changes in the amount of direct sunlight as the planet is tilted toward and away from the sun, and not a result of its orbital path).
*Earth’s average distance from the sun is about 93 million miles.
[Infographic from timeanddate.com]
Tuesday 3.14/ Happy Pi Day 🥧
No matter what size the pie (the circle) is, its circumference divided by its diameter is always pi*.
*The number pi (symbol π) is a mathematical constant and is a transcendental number (a number that is not algebraic—that is, not the root of a non-zero polynomial of finite degree with rational coefficients).
The value of pi is approximately 3.14159.
Pi appears in many formulas in mathematics and physics.
Tuesday/ it’s Venus and Jupiter ⭐️ 🌟
The clouds have cleared, and there is a nice view of the Venus-Jupiter conjunction* tonight in the Western night sky here tonight.
Hopefully the sky will be clear tomorrow night as well, when they will appear to be even closer.
*Conjunction means two astronomical objects appear close to each other in the sky, as seen from our view on Earth. Jupiter is still some 400 million miles away from Venus (on average 416 million miles away).
[Chart via John Jardine Goss / EarthSky]
Saturday/ a galactic collision 🌌
This image is a composite made with two tools, the Near-Infrared Camera and the Mid-Infrared Instrument.
The Cartwheel Galaxy is 500 million lightyears away from us. It was created hundreds of millions of years ago when two galaxies collided.
[Image credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI]
Monday/ the wrong type of sun ☀
There’s so many different worlds
So many different suns
And we have just one world
But we live in different ones
-From the song ‘Brothers in Arms’ by Dire Straits (1985)
Well, so I had to check the ‘Met’ home page (short for the Meteorological Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather service), for an official reading of the high temperatures there today.
Looks like the high was 37 °C (99 °F) at 15:00.
So: extremely warm, but not quite 40 °C.
All-time record highs were reached in many other locations in the UK and in Europe, though.
Best I can tell, the ‘CLOSED’ sign is a reference to train operator Southeastern Rail explaining (this is some years ago) that delays in the trains in south London were due to ‘the wrong kind of sunlight’—the angle of the winter sunlight on the dispatch monitors in the trains.
There are also reports just appearing online now of an unexpected solar flare that had erupted on the sun, and that a solar storm (magnetic field disruptions) is expected on Wednesday July 20.
Tuesday/ images, not as nebulous
neb·u·lous
/ˈnebyələs/
adjective
in the form of a cloud or haze; hazy.
“a giant nebulous glow”
(of a concept or idea) unclear, vague, or ill-defined.
“nebulous concepts like quality of life”
Similar— indistinct, indefinite, unclear, vague, hazy, cloudy, fuzzy, misty, lacking definition, blurred, blurry, out of focus, foggy, faint, shadowy, dim, obscure, shapeless, formless, unformed, amorphous, nebulose
Opposite— clear
[Definition from Oxford Languages]
One can see why astronomers are excited about the pictures from the James Webb telescope, when you put them next to pictures of Hubble (launched 30 years ago in 1990).
The Webb telescope works with infrared light and can peer through cosmic dust to provide pictures with more detail and depth.
Below are pictures of the Carina Nebula (a nebula is a gigantic could of gas and dust), located in the Carina–Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
The nebula is some 8,500 light-years from Earth with a radius of 230 light years.
Bottom: Image taken with James Webb telescope.
The Cosmic Cliffs in the Carina Nebula in an area with New General Catalogue (NGC) number 3324. The brown stuff is the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity above it, from where massive, hot, young stars emit intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds.
[Description and images from NASA website]
Thursday/ cooking with pressure is a pleasure
I have had my Instant Pot pressure cooker for a week now, and I’m still learning to use it —but I like it a lot.
So far I have cooked regular oats, steel-cut oats, rice, Brussels sprouts, asparagus and sweet potato in it. Asparagus is ready in an instant with an official cooking time of 0 minutes. You put them in, and they’re done. Howzat! 😂
Let me explain. The laws of physics still apply. Even if you put the water and asparagus in the cooker and tell it to cook for 0 minutes, it will still take 5-10 mins to get to the operating temperature and pressure inside. During that time it already cooks the food inside. Something as delicate as asparagus is then cooked already. Voila.
Just as an interesting aside: the triple point of water occurs at 0.01 °C in a near-vacuum. That point at the upper right called the critical point is where water vapor (steam) is warm enough so that no amount of pressure brought to bear on it, will liquefy it.
Thursday/ do rainbows have seven colors?
Here is my picture of tonight’s rainbow that was visible just before sunset, now at 8.08 pm.
– Paraphrased from the Wikipedia entry for Rainbow.
Wednesday/ destination: the second Lagrange point
The $10-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is on its way to Earth’s second “Lagrange point” (referred to as L2). It should get there in 26 more days. After that, it will be 5 more months before we will hopefully start to receive images from the telescope. (The temperatures on the telescope have to stabilize, and it has to be calibrated).
L2 is theoretically a point in space. In practice, it is a region some 500,000 mi (800,000 km) wide, in which objects can maintain a stationary position relative to Earth, with the barest minimum of propulsive force needed to keep them there.
The illustrations and explanation below are from Scientific American.
My note: Earth will always be between JWST and the Sun, shielding it with what is called Earth’s magnetotail (the broad elongated extension of a planet’s magnetosphere on the side away from the Sun). The moon, of course, will still orbit Earth as it always does. (On the graphic, the moon’s current position just happens to be between JWST and Earth).
From Scientific American:
The most ambitious space telescope built to date is about to start peering at the universe through infrared eyes. The $10-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is designed to see farther back in space and time than ever before, where light has been stretched by the expansion of space into much longer wavelengths. To see this faint light, the telescope must observe far from Earth and its contaminating light and heat. After launch, JWST will travel 1.5 million kilometers to Earth’s second “Lagrange point” (L2), a spot in space where the gravitational forces of our planet and the sun are roughly equal, creating a stable orbital location. This vantage point will allow JWST to orbit with its giant sunshield positioned between the telescope and the sun, Earth and moon, shielding the telescope and keeping it at a frigid –370 degrees Fahrenheit (-223 degrees Celsius).
Tuesday/ Happy December Solstice
I first wrote ‘Happy Winter Solstice’, but that would exclude my readers in the southern hemisphere (for whom it is Summer Solstice, of course).
For anyone at the North Pole, the sun will not appear above the horizon for 11 weeks. (At the South Pole, the sun will not set for 11 weeks).
Here at Seattle’s northern latitude (47.6062° N), our daylight timewill now gradually lengthen from about 8 hours to 16 hours (at our own summer solstice in June of 2022).