I had a blog entry written but it got a little angry. While I’m thinking about that, let’s talk about some interesting science.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

 

Mars magnetic anomaly explained

Mars’ magnetic field is… weird. 

 

There’s a lot of evidence that Mars had a symmetrical magnetic field like ours. Earth’s magnetic field protects the planet from getting its atmosphere stripped by the solar wind. Presumably, a Martian symmetrical magnetic field would do the same. 

 

But Mars’ magnetic field is decidedly not symmetrical. It has only remnants and they are concentrated in the southern hemisphere. 

 

Plaintively, we ask why?

 

One hypothesis is that the core of Mars was never a solid core like Earth’s but liquid. This allows the asymmetry.

 

Can we make water on the Moon with solar wind? Maybe.

The Moon is dry. But it does have hydrogen and oxygen, mostly in the form of OH groups in the first few centimeters of soil. The oxygen is inherent in the regolith in the same way Earth has oxygen: it came along with the material. But hydrogen can hit escape velocity easily and leave unless it’s captured.

 

The solar wind is mostly protons—hydrogen without the electrons. Consequently, it can bind with the oxygen on the lunar surface to produce said OH. Add another hydrogen to that OH and you get H2O. 

 

But any hypothesis needs to be tested and a team at NASA Goddard did exactly that to see of lunar soil could produce water when struck by solar wind. 

 

They think it did.

 

Solar panels from Moon dust

One of the reasons humans were able to colonize the New World twenty thousand years ago is they were able to live off the land. On the Moon, there’s not a lot of land to live on. Just dust, vacuum, and radiation.

 

Still, one of the needs for a lunar base is power and no one wants to send hundreds of tons of solar cells to the Moon if they don’t have to. 

 

Well, maybe they don’t have to.

 

Scientists at the University of Potsdam were able to fabricate the glass portion photovoltaic cells from glass generated from melting moondust—moonglass. This reduced a payload of solar cells by up to 99.4%. All we have to do is ship up the non-glass material.

 

AI has actual use: gravitational wave detector design

Gravitational waves are distortions in space-time caused by gravitational events. LIGO does it by having two laser beams interfering with one another over four kilometers. The idea is that once these detectors are stabilized so they don’t dance every time a truck passes by, they will respond to a space distortion. Since this would hit one arm of the detector before the other, the interference pattern changes with the distortion.

 

The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) trained up an AI algorithm called “Urania” to help them design better detectors. Sure enough, Urania was able to design detectors with better theoretical sensitivity than current design. 

 

Go girl.

 

Another way to determine alien life

There have been a lot of attempts to define life in some rigorous way that we could detect at astronomical distances. Life, shall we say, has found a way to makes its definition more philosophical than sciencey. It’s there because we can see it but damned if we can define it.

 

Akshit Goyal and Mikhail Tikhonov thinks we have been asking the wrong question. Instead of trying to define life, define what it does. And what it does is manage energy.

 

Organisms use high energy compounds and break them down into smaller compounds for use. This gives them an energy gradient that can be detected—maybe not at astronomical distances but at least in a way that may be more or less independent of life on earth. 

 

The idea that a stratification of resources might be found in geologic formations like, say, on Mars.

 

(I recently saw a definition of life that described it as a chemical system that operated in terms of evolution. Try seeing that with the James Webb Telescope.)

 

Paleolithic Tools in Ukraine

Archeologists have uncovered an inscribed ivory tool in Ukraine that is about 400,000 years old. The article seems to presume these were Homo sapiens but doesn’t bother to actually state that. If verified, that has two interesting features: Homo sapiens were in Europe a long, long time ago and co-existed with Neanderthals for hundreds of thousands of years and they were inscribing ivory with mammoth pictures.

 

Ivory isn’t a good tool material so the authors seem to think it might have had some symbolic value rather than a real tool. 

 

Regardless, mammoth scrimshaw is cool.

 

Climate Change will make rice toxic

Turns out increasing the temperature and CO2 of rice in a paddy increases the uptake of arsenic. 

 

Yay.

 

Rice is the world’s most consumed grain. Increase of toxicity of even a small amount will result in a large number of people getting sick. 

 

It’s the scale problem. If, say, 1 person in 100,000 people get sick now from arsenic poisoning in rice, that’s 10,000/billion people. If it increases to 4, that’s 40,000/billion people. If it becomes sufficiently toxic that it puts people off eating rice, that’s billions of people with a reduced food supply.

 

Aaaand I’m back to being angry again.

 

Better luck next time.

 

State of the Farm, April 2025

Spring planting has begun.

 

We got the peas in over a week ago and the rest of the early cold crops (bok choy, kale, lettuce, radishes, etc.) a few days later. It’s been quite warm for about a week and only turned more “normal” today. 

 

I have to say, this Chinese global warming hoax is astonishingly powerful to bring in the growing season a month early and then let it go on an extra month in the fall. It was even strong enough to make the USDA move our zones a little further south. Pretty damned impressive for a global hoax. Maybe we could work that magic on peace and world hunger.

 

Anyway, last year we tried a mesh of straw tied together with what we thought was biodegradable twine. Surprise: it wasn’t. We left it in place to hold down the fresh manure we’d laid out. It did its job and wasn’t completely terrible to pull up and throw away. But it was a waste. Next year we’ll know better.

 

Meanwhile, we went back to the supplier from last year only to be told that there was no manure available this year. No explanation. Just that they were not supplying it. 

 

We cast around and found a supplier on Craig’s List. It was Very Not Cheap but it was good quality delivered—six yards worth. We’ve been using up the last of the wood chips from the fallen hickory and covering it over with the new manure. It looks very nice.

 

We’ve been laying out what we want to plant in the two main gardens and the raised beds. It’s still under discussion. But, at least, I’m going to try sugar beets and sorghum again this year. Last year we didn’t get enough yield to continue the experiment. This year may be different. I’ll have more next month.

 

We cut down two of the three apples that were most infected with cedar apple rust. I haven’t tackled the last one—the Granny Smith—yet. That’s next on the agenda.

 

I mentioned last time the wood processing. I managed to get rid of all of the old wood in the shop and started on the “new” wood—wood from last year. I did the persimmon wood. The apple, chestnut, and mulberry are next. Then, I’ll attack the big pieces of cherry and hickory, finishing off that area so we can do other things with it besides holding down the earth with heavy pieces of wood. I’ll do a full post about it eventually.

 

The plan is to attack the remaining fallen wood tomorrow and cut it into manageable pieces. But that depends on the weather.

 

I’ve been on and off again on a lathe project (See here.) for some time. The short version is I got interested in larger lathe projects and bought a used Delta that promptly self-destructed. Twice. Frustrated, I ended up buying another lathe and, through a set of histrionic machinations, ended up with two lathes: a Jet and a Grizzly. Someday, I’ll write about it.

 

Anyway, that left the Delta as a boat anchor. I found this frustrating. Ninety percent of the Delta was still usable: the headstock, tailstock, tool rest, bed, and motor were fine. The only problem was the pulley system. 

 

One of the things I like to do is reuse old wood. I’ve talked about this before. But a problem with using old wood is taking a nine-pound log and turning it into a seven-pound piece of stock. Most lathes have a bottom speed of about 600 rpm—or 10 revolutions/second. This means that a nine (or ten or twenty) inch piece of irregular wood is turning in front of you ten times per second. 

 

It is bloody scary. 

 

What I decided to do was take the old delta and find the smallest motor pully I could find and the largest shaft pully and hook them together so that I’d have something turning much slower. This turned out to be a 1-inch motor pulley and an 8-inch shaft pulley, giving me a 1/8 ratio. The motor was set up at 1750 rpm, so the resulting RPS should have been about 4. There were flaws in my calculations so I ended up with about 5.5—still, a lot better than 10. I tried it out and it was fine. Still a bit scary but nice.

 

The lathe is now a fixed speed, which is curiously frustrating. When I’ve done this with multispeed lathes, it was run slow until the rough stuff was done, and then run faster to get the piece smooth. I may end up redoing the lathe into just a couple of speeds but for now, since it is for roughing only, I’m going to leave it. It does its job.

 

The last part of that project is to put usable wheels on it. I don’t have room for the lathe in the shop so the plan is to store it next to the outside door and when the weather cooperates, pull it out and rough out the logs. Then, pull the lathe back into the shop when I’m done. The wheels I got are levered. That is, there’s a lever to bring down the wheels to move the lathe and then lever them up to set the lathe down solidly. But I have to mount them. 

 

There’s a downside to this processing. If I just sawed the wood, I’d get rectangular boards. By turning them into rough blanks, I’ve turned them circular, losing a substantial part of the wood. For example, an 8x8 inch piece of wood has a cross-sectional area of 64 square inches. A circle of radius 4 inches (1/2 the 8 inches) has a cross-sectional area of 50.3 square inches—22% less wood.

 

But I don’t have a sawmill and my bandsaw doesn’t like wood much thicker than six inches. But I can rough turn a ten-inch log without much trouble. (Maybe twelve if it’s not too irregular and I’m feeling brave.) There are also length considerations. I can cut about four feet on the bandsaw without too much trouble but I can’t really turn more than three feet on the lathe. 

 

I have seen a video that shows a technique of milling wood up to about twelve inches thick (the length of my chainsaw.) I’m going to give that a go.

 

I’d like to be able to make lumber out of all this fallen wood. And more. My friend William has some good-sized cherry logs holding down his backyard from a fallen tree last year. Once I have flat stock, I can turn it into boards using the jointer/planer/table saw approach: jointer to get two flat sides. Planer to even them out. Table saw for the last edge.

 

Or maybe I’m being too ambitious. My jointer only takes eight-inch boards, anyway. And where do I dry it or store it? Up in Vermont, I have a field of perhaps ten or fifteen cherry trees. All of them need to be eventually taken down—up there, cherry seems to grow to a certain point and then start to fail for some reason. They’re going to fall down eventually. I’d rather harvest them and replant before the wood rots.

 

But that’s the same problem: cut, dry, and store. Where? Build a solar kiln up there and leave them for a year? Maybe. If the chainsaw method works out. Otherwise, I’ll need a sawmill and I just don’t have the trees to justify that. At that point, it has to become a business or it won’t get done. I don’t want to start another business. I’ve got enough projects. Also, you end up with two-inch-thick boards that need to be milled down to spec. Again, as I mentioned, I’m really only set up to handle eight-inch stock. 

 

And even if I do all of that, what projects do I have on hand to use the wood? How many menorahs, pill cups, spinning tops, and boxes can I make? 

 

But it hurts to see wood wasted. It’s just a wonderful, practical, and beautiful resource. There was a field of hemlocks on the property we have in Vermont. Before we ever got it, whatever rots hemlock got to them and there are fallen, rotting logs all over this one section of the property. Hemlock is lovely wood. Not a hardwood, like cherry, but a nice softwood sort of like pine. (See here.) 

 

Instead, the trunks are rotting into the ground releasing CO2 and methane into the air, doing their bit for global warming. I’m sure it’s helping microbes and small animals but the hemlock loss isn’t a natural process. It happened quickly—similar to the chestnut blight. If it were a natural loss, it would be different. I don’t want the same things to happen to the cherries.

 

So, I’m at a loss. Hopefully, I’ll figure something out.

 

There Is No Watchmaker

Richard Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker in 1986. 

 

(Picture from here.)

 

His intention was to refute the idea that the complexity of living systems made a Creator self-evident. The analogy was of finding a watch implied a watchmaker, a metaphor created by William Paley. I am not a fan of Dawkins in that I think his idea of evolution—especially human evolution—to be far too narrow. But TBW was a good starter book on evolution.

 

Current life origin hypotheses put the start at about 3.7 billion years ago. This is the evidence of life that survived on the early Earth. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and the conditions amenable to life are supposed to have been present at 4.3 billion years ago. So, there’s a six hundred-million-year gap where life could have started, failed, and restarted. Or, life could have started and left nothing that could be traced until that 3.7-billion-year mark.

 

The current hypothesis of Moon formation is that it was struck from the Earth by a collision from a Mars-like body early on. This would have left the surface of the Earth in a molten state. Unless you want to imagine lava-breathing ichthyosaurs, that pretty much lets out life until things cooled down.

 

The base for what we call complex life—Eukaryotes—seem to show up about 1.6 billion years ago. That means we have something like bacterial life on the planet for 2.1 billion years or so. If they breed like bacteria—say, a division on the order of 1/hour—that’s 50.4 billion generations before we get to Eukaryotes. Maybe more generations since some bacteria divide every twenty minutes. I’d say that should be plenty of time to evolve pretty much anything. 

 

We have no idea if pre-Eukaryotes were like bacteria. We have no idea of “Eukaryotes” actually had all the components that we identify with Eukaryotic cells. That would things like a nucleus, mitochondria, etc. We think it’s likely but it is speculative at best.

 

Animals, whose evolution I am most familiar with, arose about 650-700 million years ago. So, roughly a billion years. Cell division in Eukaryotes is considerably more complex and, understandably, it takes longer—approximately 16-24 hours. 

 

The Ediacaran period happens just before the Cambrian. In the Ediacaran, early animals developed. These were defined into modern phyla in the Cambria. The Ediacaran began roughly 635 million years ago—barely fifteen million years after Eukaryotes were first identified. We can use sponges as an example. The sponge reproductive cycle can be budding—where a chunk breaks off and ends up somewhere, takes root, and grows—or sexual. In either case, there has to be a minimum time between a larva and the first offspring. If we go by sexual periods, this breaks down to once or twice per year. 

 

We’ve gone now from an hour for generation time, to approximately a day, now to a year. We know of many animal species—us, for example—where the generation time is measured in years. Evolution is the selection of variations within offspring. The irreducible atom of evolution is the generation. While animals can adapt within a generation, the only means by which these changes are realized is in the next generation. Looking at this, we might expect animal evolution to slow down. 

 

Instead, it speeds up. The Cambrian isn’t called the Explosion for nothing.

 

This is the point that if we would invoke a Creator if we were so inclined.

 

We are not.

 

But something happened. 

 

That something is embryonic development. 

 

The embryo is a well of potential. It has to go from a zygote to a larval form (at minimum) containing only the information it starts with. Most zygotes in the animal kingdom are cast into the wild. A few (I’m looking at you, placental mammals) develop within the mother organism. Even there, the mother is walled off from the developing embryo so that there is little interference. 

 

Here’s where we get muddy about the language. We talk about how the “design” of the zygote results in the new organism. Or how the process of embryonic development is like a symphony, each part played and leading to the beautiful. 

 

None of this is true. There is no design. If you boil down what’s in the nucleus for a human you won’t see a gene for blue eyes or red hair. You might see a melanin deficiency that manifests at a particular point in development such that the iris of the eyes is without pigment. You might see a keratin gene get over expressed in the creation of hair follicles. But there is no one gene for the shape of your nose, angle of your neck, or your height. Repeat: there is no design. (See here.)

 

Imagine two dancers on a floor. One dancer moves their arm. The other responds by waving a hand. The first then turns. The other turns the opposite. Both of them are following their own understand of their actions—Dancer 1 knows to move the arm. The other knows to respond with a hand wave. But Dancer 1 does not know that Dancer 2 is going to wave a hand. Dancer 1 does know to respond to Dancer 2’s turn with another turn. To the audience in the balcony, this appears to be a wonderful dance. But neither dancer knows the ultimate goal. Neither dancer even knows there is a dance.

 

The egg of an animal is packed with energy and data—not a design, remember. The first few divisions are self-contained with regard to energy. The yolk of the egg or the material of the placental environment is not immediately consumed. Oxygen is, of course. But for those first crucial divisions, the cells consume material inside. Later, they will take in nutrients from the inside. 

 

As they divide, different cells get different material from the original egg. This is the initial specialization. Even sponge development results in cell specialization. 

 

About thirty years ago, scientists began to realize that there was some kind of developmental module. Not a design as such, but a pre-program that enforces a path in those first few divisions and later, with each division, triggers responses that result in an actual organism. 

 

There is no design in the genes. But there is a design in how the gene interactions play out. 

 

This is where evolutionary-developmental (Evo-Devo) biology comes in.

 

The idea is that there are genes responsible for the development across multiple phyla. These determine body plan. For example, the gene responsible for the development of eyes exists across multiple phyla: arthropods, vertebrates, cephalopods. Where, when, and how they get expressed determines if you get a beetle, possum, or octopus eye. 

 

Is this design? I don’t think so. The gene triggering the eye development does not contain any internal representation of an eye. It triggers a cascade of responses that result in an eye. That’s been useful and is therefore retained. 

 

There are beginning body plan genes—prepared for operation by the egg. These genes determine segmentation, organs, vascularization, and the like. They tend to be lined up in roughly the expression order required by the organism. Changing the order can result in different organs or blood vessels originating in different segments. 

 

Developmental genes of this sort have been found in animals, plants, and fungi. They were a critical step in the origin of complex organisms. But they do not exist in isolation. Each gene responds to and is responded to within the context of its environment. There are past events that prepare the operation of the gene and future events to which it is contributing. We call the some of these bits of DNA “body plan genes” or “regulatory genes” because they are central to the process. But in the absence of their important context, they are just sequences of nucleic acids—like any other bit of DNA.

 

It's a subtle point—we would like there to be a design in place because that would be more understandable to us. Humans design things. Why shouldn’t nature? Why shouldn’t we have a design or a program?

 

I’m going to quote Alessandro Minelli quoting Keller on this one: “More explicit is Keller (2000), who suggests that to speak in terms of genetic programme is to commit a basic error in categorisation: genetic is equated to programme at the same time as epigenetic is equated to data. But development depends not only on genetic memory, but also on the machinery of the cellular structures, which in turn are set in place by cellular memory rather than by genetic information.”

 

I think that just before the Ediacaran Period, this fundamental body plan embryology began to be emplaced. Possibly, cells that cooperated and produced a consistent offspring did better than others. An organism had a few cells that cooperated to produce sex cells. That cooperation became the basis for a coordinated embryologic process. Then, at the beginning of the Ediacaran, these now somewhat complex organisms themselves competed. 

 

Something happened at the end of the Ediacaran. Some have suggested the introduction of predation, changing the world into predator and prey and vastly increasing the natural selection process. There was enough variation in the body plan genes that new forms came into existence. Those that were successful propagated their new forms further. 

 

What happened at that point was a system built to evolve was in place.

 

The rest, as they say, is our history.