Why Are There No Tornadoes In Europe?

February 14, 2022

Anybody who grew up in the Midwest is familiar with the threat of tornadoes, but why are tornadoes so prevalent in the American Midwest and not other places in the world? Today we talk with Pecos Hank to learn what causes tornadoes to form and why the United States gets way more of them than anywhere else in the world.

A few months back, I did a video on supervolcanoes and how there’s actually several of them around the world that could really mess things up if they decide to go boom. Luckily they don’t go boom that often. A few months back, I did a video on supervolcanoes and how there’s actually several of them around the world that could really mess things up if they decide to go boom. Luckily they don’t go boom that often.

But when they do go boom, they’re a lot more likely to go boom here in North America.
Because yeah for some reason, half of the active supervolcanoes that we know of are in North America. (react) What’s that about?
It might be because of how the Pacific plate is colliding with the North American plate, it might be a convergence of large igneous masses deep down underneath the plate… Maybe it’s just bad luck.
Or maybe… planet Earth has it out for us.

The last option is probably unlikely since we’re so small and the planet is so not a conscious being but if the Earth did have it out for us, the supervolcanoes probably wouldn’t be the best proof of that.

Because like I said before, they don’t go boom that often, but something that does happen often, hundreds of times a year actually – is tornadoes.
They too are a destructive force, and they, too, happen more often in North America. And not by a little bit either, like, a LOT more often.
So yeah… What’s that about?

 

Maybe make a comparison to the supervolcanoes video where a surprising number of them are in North America
Growing up in Texas, tornadoes are just part of life. We had tornado drills in school, the local weather guy was a freakin hero, and we all know the panic in your chest when you hear that tornado siren go off.

And we all grew up hearing stories about… The Big One.

Where I grew up, the Big One was Terrible Tuesday.
Also known as the Red River Valley Tornado Outbreak, this was a storm system that formed on April 10th 1979 that spawned 59 tornadoes over the next two days, including two F4 tornadoes, one of which cut a mile and a half mile wide swath through the center of Wichita Falls Texas that killed 42 people and caused $400 million in damage.

This event left a giant scar on the psyche of that whole area for decades. Growing up around there, you always knew that nature was in control, and every storm had the potential to go sideways and ruin your life.

And if you grew up in Texas or the Midwest, you probably grew up with a similar “Big One” story that scared the bejeezus out of you.
I actually think it’s funny when I hear Texas friends say they wouldn’t want to live in California because of the earthquakes. And I’m like, “Okay but here the sky might eat your house.”
Anyway, I kinda realized at some point that all the major tornadoes I’ve ever heard of were in the United States. Like I’ve never heard of a tornado in Europe in my entire life.
And any European friends I’ve asked about it kinda just shrug their shoulders, like, “I guess it happens sometimes.”

So that’s kinda what led to this video, what is it about the United States that seems to just attract tornadoes like sailors to your mom?
Turns out it’s all about geography, which to be clear there are tornadoes all around the world but they do happen much more often and are much stronger here in the US. In general, it is a US-specific problem.

So, put on your ruby slippers and click them three times as we get caught up in a whirlwind of tornado knowledge. So, put on your ruby slippers and click them three times as we get caught up in a whirlwind of tornado knowledge.

How They Form

But first, we have to understand how tornadoes form and what conditions make them possible.

(over text screen and tornado footage)Every tornado is different, but generally there are some common factors that lead to them forming.

These include:- Abundant low-level moisture, which contributes to thunderstorm development- A “trigger,” such as a cold front or low-level zone of converging winds, to help lift the moist air up .

This rising moist air can create spinning vortices at the back of the updraft.

 

And from there, it does get a little tricky so I enlisted the help of Hank Schyma, also known as Pecos Hank here on YouTube. He’s a tornado chaser and photographer who has been studying tornadoes for decades

Basically these vortices get strengthened by the rising and falling of hot and cold air, and as it speeds up, it’s drawn inward toward its axis of rotation.

This is similar to how figure skaters spin faster by drawing in their arms. It’s called conservation of angular momentum.

So you’ve got this spinning horizontal column of air low to the ground, and all it takes is a strong gust of wind to tilt it vertically in the storm. Now you’ve got a funnel cloud.

If this funnel cloud touches the ground, it becomes a tornado.

While most tornadoes form from supercell thunderstorms, not all supercells produce them.

 

If the spinning air near the ground is cold, it will instead spread away from the storm along the ground, like a figure skater with extended arms, and no tornado will form.

But even if a tornado does form, they come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, eventually we needed a way to measure them. Enter the Fujita Scale.

The F Scale(over pic)Dr. Tetsuya Theodore Fujita at the University of Chicago developed a scale with Alen Pearson from the National Severe Storms Forecast Center in 1971 to help measure a tornado’s wind speeds and the damage it may leave behind.
But the Fujita Scale, or F Scale, it was very limited, and was mostly about how much damage the storm inflicted. But it lacked three things – No account for construction quality and variability- No definitive correlation between damage and wind speed- A lack of damage indicators

A group of meteorologists and wind engineers got together in 2007 and came up with a new scale, the Enhanced Fujita Scale.

It has 28 damage indicators, like building types, structures, and trees.
Each damage indicator has eight degrees of damage, from barely visible damage to complete destruction.

And they changed the wind speed ranges, for example, an EF-3 tornado’s windspeed  is between 218 and 266 kilometers per hour (136 and 165 miles per hour). An F3 tornado would’ve been between 254 and 332 kph (158-206 mph).

The EF Scale ranges from EF-0 (light damage) to EF-5 (incredible damage), and by the way, all EF-5 tornadoes recorded to date were in the United States. With one exception, which I’ll get to in a minute.

But that brings us back to the original question, why here? Why does the sky have it out for North America?

I mean there’s an area in the flat plains of the Midwest that’s actually called Tornado Alley.

Well, remember how I said the updraft of warm air into a supercell and the downdraft of cool air create vortices in the clouds that eventually spiral into tornadoes?

Well right here in the heartland, there’s geologically nothing between here and the tundra up in Canada. So you get cold air coming down from that direction and from below, you have warm moist air moving north from the Gulf of Mexico. 

It’s just this perfect spot with mountain ranges on both sides, funneling warm and cold air together on a flat plain, mixing and swirling it up, causing a rumble.

But interestingly, tornado alley seems to be shifting. Don’t get me wrong, Oklahoma and Texas are still the place you wanna be if you want to get impaled on a roadsign, but there seems to be an interesting trend toward the southern states.

According to Victor Gensini, an associate professor in the department of geographic and atmospheric science at Northern Illinois University, “Basically, over the last 50 years, if you live in a place like Dallas, your chance of a tornado there has gradually gone down,” But if you’re in a place like Birmingham, Alabama, or Memphis, Tennessee, your threat has gone way up.”

Part of it could just be chalked up to better reporting, but it’s possible that rising temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico is causing weather patterns to shift.

While it might be too soon to blame climate change, there are some climate models that predicted this, and the they will start forming earlier and later than they used to.

Tornadoes Around the World

But yeah, this particular geography is why, according to the Storm Prediction Center the US has around 1200 tornadoes each year.
In Europe, it’s more like 200 and 400 tornadoes every year, with Greece and Italy getting the most. Both have dry air coming down over the mountains and mixing with warm moist air from the Mediterranean.

The U.K. also sees between 30 and 50 tornadoes each year, which interestingly is more tornadoes across an average land area than anywhere else in the world.

South America gets its share of tornadoes, in fact they have their own tornado alley that stretches across parts of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Once again, flat land between mountains and sea where their air masses meet.

And last but not least is Bangladesh, sandwiched between the Bay of Bengal and the Himalayan Mountains.

Remember earlier when I said that almost all F5 tornadoes were recorded in the United States, with one big exception? That exception just happened to be the deadliest tornado of all time. And it happened here.

It’s called the Daulatpur-Saturia Tornado, and it took place on April 26, 1989. It was a massive F5 tornado that tore through a densely populated area and killed 1,300 people, more than twice as much as the second deadliest tornado.

That was the infamous Tri-State Tornado from March 18, 1925, that went 219 miles (352 kilometer) across Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri, making it the longest in world history.
It killed 695 people, injured more than 2,000, and 15,000 homes were destroyed.https://www.thoughtco.com/worlds-worst-tornadoes-3555048

Tornadoes have occurred in the Middle East, but that’s rare.
Big countries like Australia, China, and Russia have more land for tornadoes to touch down. These places also have regions like the U.S. midwest where tornadoes happen more frequently.

And you might have heard that tornadoes rotate in a different direction in the Southern Hemisphere, and  that’s actually true.

Generally tornadoes spin counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. Though, not always, sometimes they do spin in the opposite direction, those are called anticyclonic tornadoes.

Tornadoes on Other Planets and Moons

So tornadoes do happen all over the world. But what about other worlds?
Like we’ve seen dust devils on Mars, which are kinda like the desert tornadoes that we have on Earth, but with only 1% of our atmosphere, they don’t pack much of a punch.

But Jupiter, that’s just covered with storms and swirling eddies that might qualify as a tornado. then of course there’s the big red eye on Jupiter which is similar to a hurricane here on Earth. It measures around 16,000 kilometers (10,000 miles) across. 

It does seem to be shrinking though. But still. Easily the biggest cyclonic storm in the solar system.
Saturn also has massive storms that extend more than 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) and wrap around almost the entire planet.
And then there’s that strange, permanent hexagon of clouds at the poles so… Hexagonal tornado?

Other Types of Tornadoes and Weird Tales

Speaking of dust tornadoes, there are also fire tornadoes and waterspouts.
Fire tornadoes, or fire whirls to be more accurate, often occur during large-scale wildfires.
They’re not true tornadoes, though. They’re vortices that suck up combustible materials and gases.
Waterspouts are similar to land-based tornadoes. They can suck fish, frogs, and other small marine life out of the water and carry them up to a cloud that will then deposit them onto land. 

This happened just recently in Texarkana when residents noticed a bunch of small fish in their yards and streets after a storm.

Strange events and tall tales emerge after tornadoes pass through. Some of these include

– A house was destroyed but a cake on the counter was left unmoved along with stacked dishes in the cupboard over the sink (true).

– A house was picked up and placed in the middle of a street (true).

– Photographs were carried more than 100 miles.

– A piece of straw was embedded into a tree trunk (likely false). 

Staying Safe

If you’re ever in a tornado situation, there are some things to do to keep you safe.

First, a tornado watch means a tornado is possible. A tornado warning means they’ve identified that rotational motion so a tornado is already happening or is about to occur. This is when you should go to a safe place immediately.

The worst thing you can do is get in your car and try to drive away from it. You will not outrun it and it can toss your car around like it’s nothing.

The best thing you can do is find a place in your home, if you have a basement or storm cellar, those are the best options, if you don’t have that, you want to find an interior room with no windows, preferably on the lowest floor.

If you can quickly grab a mattress to cover yourselves, that can help protect against flying debris.

If you’re in a high-rise building, choose a hallway in the building’s center on the lowest floor you can get to.

If you’re in a mobile home… Go anywhere else.

Find a nearby sturdy building or even a culvert and get as low to the ground as possible. Mobile homes are like the worst possible place to be in a tornado.

Most importantly if you live in Tornado Alley, make a plan, be ready for when the time comes, and if you need a little motivation for that… just listen to the story from this lady who survived the 1979 Terrible Tuesday tornado:

So yeah… Stay safe out there.

But I’ll put this to you guys, have any of you survived a tornado? Have any crazy tornado stories to share? Let’s hear it in the comments.

 

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Starlink Is Getting Some Company | Answers With Joe

February 07, 2022

Starlink is SpaceX’s satellite internet service that everybody is excited about. But… Satellite internet has been around for a long time. And now, there are several competitors working on similar projects. So let’s look at what’s so attractive about LEO satellite internet and how Starlink’s competitors stack up.

TRANSCRIPT:

You know, sometimes I think we’re a little too hard on ourselves.You know, sometimes I think we’re a little too hard on ourselves.
Yes, the world is garbage right now, fascism is on the rise, nobody can agree on anything, we clearly are not very good at being an internet species.
But really… Why would we be?

This level of connectivity has never been experienced before in the 200,000 year history of our species.
I mean up until just a couple hundred years ago most people rarely even traveled one town over because the only way to get around was on a horse, and most people didn’t even have those.
Things had always been this way. They had never not been this way. Most people didn’t even know how to read because everything they needed to learn came from the hundred or so people they knew in the village around them.

And every technological leap in access to information has been followed by a period of social and political upheaval.
I mean, the printing press was invented in 1440 and 7 decades later the Christian church split in to protestants and catholics. And they’re still fighting about it.(on screen:Guttenberg’s printing press – 1440Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses – 1517)

Today, we have these things in our pockets with the compendium of all human knowledge and the ability to connect with literally anybody in the world at the tap of a finger. And this is literally like 15 years old. And the internet that powers it is barely 30 years old.
I mean, of course we’re going to be really bad at this.

True story, I have been skiing once in my entire life. And it was a nightmare.
I was falling over left and right, literally couldn’t go more than 10 feet without beefing it, it was super embarrassing but the worst part about is was that for some reason… I thought I would be good at this.

I’d seen skiing on TV and in the movies, it looked like a lot of fun, and I’d played sports, I had good reaction speed, I rode a skateboard back in the day, I got this.
Turns out sliding down a mountain covered in snow, when you have spent your entire life in the flattest place on Earth, which almost never gets any snow… is terrifying.
It was like I was driving through San Francisco on black ice and bald tires.
And I kinda melted down at the whole thing. Because I had this expectation – a ridiculous one in hindsight – that I should be good at this.

I feel like that’s the whole world with the internet right now.

We’re really beating ourselves up for how badly we’re bungling this, I’ve done plenty of it myself. But… We are literally learning how to share the world with a digital superorganism.  One that we created.
So maybe the expectation that we would be good at this is as ridiculous as me thinking I could ski.
And yet, we continue to lean into it. Because that’s what we’ve always done, and despite the initial disruptions to the fabric of society, over the long run our quality of life has gone up because of it.
And soon, if SpaceX has their way, the entire planet will be covered with fast, cheap satellite internet. That’s the Starlink project that we all know about but SpaceX isn’t the only company working on a satellite internet swarm.

There are several in the works actually. So let’s take a look at why this is such an attractive idea to these companies, which ones are likely to succeed, and what this means for the world as we know it.

History of Satellites

So, everybody’s pumped for satellite internet with Starlink.  But here’s the thing — satellite internet has been around for a while.
In fact, Telstar 1, the first US communication satellite was launched in 1962, just 4 years after Explorer 1, which I talked about in my video about the Van Allen Belts last month.

It was designed at Bell Labs for AT&T, and it was the first satellite that beamed live TV to the US and Europe. It also carried the first satellite phone call.

And… it made the first satellite data transmission between two computers. In 1962.
So technically there was satellite internet… before there was an internet.

Unfortunately, Telstar 1 was functional for less than a year. And the reason for that can also be found in my Van Allen Belts video. I was talking about a nuclear test called Starfish Prime that was aimed at the Van Allen Belts: Yeah, this was one of those satellites.

Eighteen months later, a satellite named Syncom 3 became the first to launch into geostationary orbit.It provided live coverage of the Tokyo Olympic Games
And this was a big deal because geostationary orbit means that the satellite is in the same relative position over Earth at all times. It does this because it’s far enough away that the orbital speed matches the speed of the Earth’s rotation.
It’s really far away, like 35,786 kilometers (22,236 miles) far away, but it allows you to send and receive signals 24/7.

Whereas a satellite in low Earth orbit would be whizzing by overhead and could only send and receive signals in short windows.

Geostationary Earth Orbit

Plus you can cover a massive area from Geostationary orbit, in fact, it only takes 3 satellites to cover the entire planet.

So yeah, the communications industry has used Geostationary orbit ever since, increasing the power of their satellites over the years to accommodate the increased traffic.

Just a quick side story here, my grandparents when I was growing up lived on a ranch out in the middle of nowhere and they didn’t have access to cable so their only option was satellite TV.
But this was way before the direcTV dishes you see on the side of people’s houses, no their dish was like out in a field and it was like 8 feet wide.
I could have recreated the Contact poster with that thing, I’m not kidding.

And every time you changed the channel, you could look out the window and see it… turning…
It was a lot of work just to watch Tales From The Crypt, I gotta say.
So yeah, these satellites provided live events, and phone calls and movies young boys shouldn’t be watching, but as soon as the internet became a thing, that was on there too.

DirecPC to HughesNet

In 1996 Hughes Network Systems launched the first satellite internet service called DirecPC. I mentioned DirecTV a second ago, well that was Hughes Network systems, they created DirecTV in 1994, that streamed TV, DirecPC carried internet. You get it.

Hughes Network Systems by the way, they were a real pioneer in early satellite communication – that SynCom 3 satellite I just talked about, the first one in geostationary orbit, that was them. Or… it was their parent company, Hughes Aircraft Company. And if that name sounds familiar, that’s because it was founded by Howard Hughes. Yes. THE Howard Hughes. Who Leonardo DiCaprio played in The Aviator, the guy from the Rocketeer, the Spruce Goose guy.

You did not think this was gonna go all the way back to Howard Hughes, did you?
Anyway, DirecPC launched to mixed reviews, but it was faster than dial-up internet in those days.

But as terrestrial services like cable and DSL caught on, satellite fell behind. For two main reasons.

The first is that satellite systems are super expensive to upgrade.

Case in point, HughesNet — which is what Hughes Network Systems goes by now — they have satellites capable of over 100 Megabits per second download speed. But, they only advertise up to 25 Mbps.
That’s because they don’t have enough satellites to give every customer full-speed, so they have to restrict the amount each customer can get.– has a breakdown on bandwidth vs speed
They hope to fix this with a launch this year, but this single satellite cost the company $400 million. And that doesn’t include launch costs.

Launch Costs to GEO

Another company, Viasat, is planning two new satellite launches for the same reason, they’re expecting to pay between 1.2 and 1.4 billion dollars for the two of them.  
That’s a lot of money for these companies to invest, and keep in mind that will only get their download speeds up to 100Mbps. Which is way better, yes, but doesn’t really blow your hair back compared to cable and fiber internet services.

The Latency Problem

So the expense of it all is the first problem, the second big problem is latency.
And this is simply not something that can be fixed from geostationary orbit. Not without breaking the laws of physics.
Latency refers how long it takes for a user to make a request from an internet provider’s network and get a response
You can think of it as the time between clicking a link and loading a web page

When the nearest node in a provider’s network is 35,786 kilometers above your head, getting a response will take some time
One way of looking at this is if you want to send a message to someone just a mile away via GEO satellite, the distance that signal has to travel to get there and back is basically the same as sending the message all the way around the planet. Just to go one mile.

The absolute minimum latency for a GEO round trip is about 240 milliseconds. HughesNet and Viasat average over 600 milliseconds. In more real-life terms that means a little more than half a second.
For comparison, terrestrial internet can go as low as 10 milliseconds. In practice, anything under 100 is considered fine for everything except gaming.
LEO in the 1990s

Half a second may not sound like a big deal, but satellite internet customers have been complaining about latency since the early days of HughesNet.
It’s just clunkier, and especially as more work has gone online, more communication has gone online, this starts to matter even more, and by the way, in some financial applications it can actually be a detriment.

And yeah, the only way to fix this problem is to bring the satellites closer to Earth. But to do the same thing in LEO, you need a lot of satellites.

Where GEO satellites can hit 1/3 of the planet from 36,000 kilometers up (22,000 miles), something from lower than 2000 km in LEO can only hit a small area, plus there’s the fact that in order to stay in orbit in LEO, that small area is moving across the surface of the Earth at 25,000 kilometers per hour. So the only way to cover the entire circumference of the Earth is to have a bunch of satellites that can relay back and forth with each other.

Passing the signal from one spot on the ground to the other like a game of hot potato. This drastically reduces the distance the signal has to travel, but again, it takes a LOT of satellites to do this, especially considering the Earth is a sphere.

In the interest of overcommunication, there are some orbits in between GEO and LEO like the Molinya (mole-nya) and Tundra orbits that can provide full coverage with just a handful of satellites, these are mostly used for things like GPS though.
But the idea of an LEO constellation of satellites to provide internet service goes all the way back to the 90s.

Teledesic was formed in 1994, backed by Bill Gates and they planned to build a constellation of 840 satellites. This later got scaled back to 288, and then to none. The company folded in 2002.
Several other companies have tried this as well and they all failed. The cost of launching that many satellites is just too high. The idea is solid, most people agree that it would work and probably be better than geostationary satellites. If anybody can afford to get them up there.

Enter Starlink

Which brings us to Starlink.
SpaceX, with their reusable rockets have brought the cost of launches down low enough that this crazy idea is actually kinda possible.
Especially combined with the fact that satellite technology is smaller than ever before with cubesats becoming popular, you can launch hundreds of these things at a time.

So yeah, if you’re SpaceX, it’s kind-of a no-brainer.

Assuming it’s that much better than traditional satellite internet.
Right now, Starlink has around 2000 Starlink satellites at 550-570 kilometers up and over 145,000 customers so far. And according to Ookla, they’re averaging at around  97.23 megabits per second download speeds. For context, HughesNet’s Geostationary satellites are averaging 19.3 Mbps.(Disclaimer: 1468 of the satellites are currently active, others were prototypes, have gone offline, or been deorbited)

As for latency, a camper on Pikes Peak recently recorded between 34 and 36 milliseconds. But… he was on a mountain.
SpaceX is promising speeds will eventually reach 300Mbps, but as more customers use it, it’s actually starting to slow down. But considering they still have like 40,000 satellites to go, it looks promising.

No wonder Viasat has tried to get their FCC license revoked.
Last year they were part of a group that filed papers saying the Starlink launches would be bad for the environment. No conflict of interest there. Actually, it gets funnier because those two super expensive satellites they’re scheduled to launch? They’re going up on a Falcon Heavy.

Kiss the Sky Goodbye

Conflict of interest, maybe… But are they wrong?

42,000 satellites is a LOT of satellites. It’s actually eight times more than all the satellites in orbit when they started launching Starlink satellites in May 2019.
The reason for so many is because they want to create multiple shells of coverage, with constellations at different altitudes.
Current plans call for 5 shells, all with 20 vertical miles between them.

All right, now might be time to talk about the elephant in the room.

From almost the very first Starlink launch, concerns have been floated around about the effect Starlink would have on ground-based astronomy.
Especially in some of the earliest prototypes, they reflected a lot of sunlight and had a lot of people worried about what that would look like with a sky full of them.
They have made some progress since then to add less reflective coatings and “visors” that help reduce the glare, but it’s not perfect.

Honestly I never knew how to feel about that argument because anything Elon Musk related is going to face a ton of criticism because he’s so polarizing, sometimes it’s hard to separate the signal from the noise.

Like I know these telescopes have powerful algorithms to account for atmospheric disturbances, I just assumed they would be able to account for satellites as well, I mean those are nothing new, they’ve been up there for a long time.

So how much of a problem is this really? I decided to ask someone who knows far more about this than myself, so recently, I had Dr. Becky Smethurst on my podcast where we spent most of the time talking about the James Webb Space Telescope, but while she was there, I asked her about the Starlink problem. Here’s what she had to say:
So it’s not an insurmountable problem. But it is a problem.
And while it might feel satisfying to point fingers at SpaceX and Elon, the fact of the matter is, it might be an inevitable problem.
Because people have been wanting to do this for a long time, since before SpaceX even existed. And there are multiple companies working on similar constellations right now. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Project Kuiper was first announced in April 2019, with the goal of launching 3,236 satellites to an orbit of between 590 to 630 kilometers (370 to 390 miles), slightly higher than Starlink.
But they’ll be using more robust satellites that can support up to 400 Mbps download speed, which would be faster than Starlink.
So far, Amazon has invested more than $10 billion in Project Kuiper, and there have been some speed bumps along the way, but they plan on launching two prototype satellites in the 4th quarter of this year.

As for who will launch these satellites, for now they’re using ULA’s Atlas V and the ABL Space Systems new RS1 rocket but you know once Blue Origin gets the New Glenn off the ground – at this rate sometime in 2040 – they’ll be using that to get them up there. 

Regardless of what they launch on, their license with the FCC requires them to launch half the constellation by 2026, so expect to hear a lot about this in the next few years. 

OneWeb

Another company working on a satellite constellation is OneWeb.
OneWeb is based out of the UK and at one point, they were planning on a constellation of nearly 50,000 satellites.

Then they went through funding issues, reportedly due to the pandemic, this led to a bankruptcy, and once they came out of bankruptcy, their plans slimmed down to 6372 satellites.
Of which so far, they’ve launched 394.
These are in a much higher orbit than Starlink and Kuiper, at 1200 kilometers (745 miles), but so far they seem to be doing really well. A test in 2019 showed download speeds of 400 Mbps with a 32 millisecond latency.

A more recent test in 2021 got 165 Mbps and 45 ms latency, so it’s clearly fluctuating but it’s competitive.
Now one thing that differentiates OneWeb from Starlink and Kuiper is they’re targeting commercial uses instead of residential consumers.
Hughes Network Systems, which I mentioned before, is an investor in OneWeb and according to their press release, they’re targeting “enterprise, government, commercial aviation and maritime, cellular backhaul, and community Wi-Fi hotspots” to quote the press release.

Man, Hughes really wants to do this constellation internet thing.
One more quick thing, because they’re targeting commercial customers, they can charge more for their terminals, so their terminals are going to be between 1000 and 1500 dollars, as opposed to Starlink’s terminals which go for $500.
It should be noted however that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals at a loss for now, they apparently cost $1300 to make. But that’s their gamble to get early adopters on board.

Telesat

Last, but not least, we come to the Canadian company Telesat.
Telesat has been in satellite communications since 1969, and they were founded as a crown-owned company, meaning the government of Canada holds a significant interest.
A deal in 2021 injected 1.44 billion Canadian dollars into the company. Canadian dollars are just like American dollars, except they’re all stuck together from the maple syrup.

Most of that investment was to fund Telesat’s “Lightspeed” satellite constellation
Much like some others on this list, they’ve changed the proposed size of their constellation multiple times.
In 2016 they announced plans for 117 satellites in LEO, this was later raised to 209, then 298, which is the current plan, BUT… They applied to launch a total of 1671 satellites, just to ensure they can meet future demand.

78 were slated to go up this year in 2022, but dates have slipped to 2023. The reason for that… Is because they’re supposed to go up on the New Glenn. (shrug)
But that’s okay, they may need the extra time, they’ve apparently had trouble getting satellites built because of global supply chain issues.

Like OneWeb, Lightspeed satellites will orbit at a higher altitude, around 1000 kilometers, and they’re expected to have latencies in the 30-50 millisecond range
Also like OneWeb, Telesat plans to target businesses and governments, as well as existing satellite customers like airlines and cruise ships.

But here’s the twist: One of the conditions of the government funding is that they also provide services to indigenous communities. Which they will do a better job of because they’ll be flying in a hybrid orbit that sweeps over the poles, so they’ll cover areas that Starlink won’t.

A Thousand Points of Light

So that’s what we can expect in the coming years but before we wrap this up, there is one more concern regarding these satellite swarms that’s worth talking about.
We already talked about the astronomy problem. But there’s also the problem of… what happens when there’s that much stuff in space?

I’ve talked on here before about the possibility of Kessler syndrome, which is when collisions in space create space debris which cause more collisions and on and on until the planet is trapped inside a shell of metal debris circling the Earth 15 times faster than a speeding bullet that will shred anything that tries to go through it.
That’s fun.

Not only would it trap us here on Earth, it would remove our ability to use satellites at all, which would be a massive setback for our species.
There’s a lot we totally take for granted that are only made possible by the satellites circling overhead.
And obviously doubling or quadrupling or octupling the number of satellites in orbit only increases the potential of something like that happening. So is this a bad idea?

It’s something to be concerned about for sure but one could make the argument that these Low Earth Orbit swarms might be safer in the long run than launching stuff up to geostationary orbits.
Because satellites in low Earth orbits decay really quickly. There’s actually tiny amounts of atmosphere going up hundreds of miles that creates minute drag forces on LEO satellites that over time slow them down enough that they do eventually burn up in the atmosphere.

Satellites in the general orbit of Starlink would come down in a few years, maybe even less than a year.
Whereas satellites in geostationary orbit are essentially there forever, like thousands of years.

And for that, there is a company worth mentioning and that’s Privateer Space.
Just launched last year and back by Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak, Privateer Space aims to be focused on “space environmentalism”
Their plan is to monetize the removal and recycling of space junk – how exactly they plan to do this has not been fully announced but if you want to know more about it, their chief scientific adviser Moriba Jah talked about it on Startalk, I’ll put a link to that down below. 

It’s probably way too soon to tell if their plan is the ultimate fix for space junk, but it’ll be interesting to see how that comes along.
So, what’s the verdict on these satellite internet swarms? I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t been that bullish on Starlink personally, I don’t think it’s a replacement for terrestrial internet, and like I said before, satellite internet has been around for a long time, is it really worth clouding our skies for a split-second less latency?

It just always seemed like more of a niche application to me but that’s really easy for me to say sitting where I am in the middle of a city with gigabit internet service, if I lived out in the middle of nowhere or was in an underserved indigenous community, something like this might be a godsend.
Having access to cheap, fast internet anywhere in the world is probably a good thing. And with the workforce becoming more mobile these days, which has been completely accelerated by Covid, yeah, something like this might be a game changer.

I’ve become kinda fascinated by the whole van life movement lately and the fact that you can live and work effortlessly anywhere you want. I have friends that are living like that and they send pictures of their “office” that day and it’s like working in a freaking postcard, it’s crazy.
But I’m interested to hear what you think, is this a service you could get some use out of? Are you a Starlink beta tester, and if so what has been your experience with that? Or, do you think it’s a dangerously ill-conceived idea that’s going to ruin astronomy and clutter up the skies? Discuss.

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Just How Screwed Are We If Thwaites Glacier Collapses? | Lightning Round

January 31, 2022

Wanna hear something crazy? This is the last day of January and… this is the first video I’ve recorded in 2022.

Yeah, I went on a recording spree in early December so that I could enjoy the holidays but also so that I could do some upgrades on my studio here, I’ve got a new camera, a new switcher, a few other things that there’s no way you care about and if I’ve done my job, there’s no way you can tell I did any of it.

I’ve also got a lot of new production equipment to shoot better sketches, which I had one last week and you guys gave me a lot of great feedback on that, which I appreciate.

Point is, this is the official start of 2022 for me, and I’ve got a lot of exciting things in the pipeline but first I’m going to kick it off with a fun little lightning round video featuring questions from Patreon.

As always if you want a deep dive video on any of these topics, just let me know in the comments and that could totally be a thing. Either way, let’s do this.

 

John Regel – December – Discord

Wouldn’t life be objectively better if we started daylight savings in March and never “fell back” in the fall?

Dude. Yes. I am completely with you on this.

Daylight Savings Time is one of those things that we started doing a hundred years ago that made sense then, but not so much now. Like…_____

It was originally meant as a way to save on fuel and energy costs during the war years in the early 20th century, the idea being that if we pushed the time back so the sun would be out later in the day, people wouldn’t need to use as much power to light and heat their homes.

But this whole switching back and forth thing… It’s actually kinda dangerous.

It messes with people’s sleep cycles and this is kind-of a crazy fact but apparently heart attacks go up 24% in the week following time switches in the spring. It goes up in the fall as well but not by as much.

I’m not a morning person but it’s kinda wild that just changing your sleep pattern by one hour is enough to kill some people.

But if you’re more of a money guy, the financial markets usually take a hit in the week after a switch too.

So some people have started proposing getting rid of daylight savings time but, as John points out, there’s also a movement to make it permanent.

Like it’s January when I post this so basically we just wouldn’t “spring forward” in March.

There’s a lot of good reasons for this, first of all going back to the energy savings, the fact of the matter is, more people are awake to take advantage of that extra hour of sun in the evenings than in the mornings.

It would make the evening rush hour less fatal because people wouldn’t be driving home in the dark. A study by Rutgers said we could save 343 lives per year.

Crime would go down because more crimes are committed in the dark of night than in the dark of morning.

And it would give an extra hour for recreation, which helps not just mental health but physical health.

So yeah, I’m on board. Of course that’s easy for me to say because I’m a night owl. Morning people might disagree. But I mean… (scoff) morning people.

 

James Younger, DDS – January – Patreon

How do we actually know the observable universe is expanding at its edges?

I mean, information can only travel to us at the speed of light, so any images/information

we receive at the edges of the observable universe are of course billions of years old.

I get the idea of red-shifting – but if you can imagine an astronomer in 1000 years, peering out, how do we know they won’t suddenly start detecting blue-shifting at the edges – like the edges are starting to rush towards us instead of away from us?

Or how do we know that, at the edges there isn’t a galactic monster chomping away at those distant galaxies?

You know what I mean? I keep hearing everyone say with certainty “The observable universe is expanding….must be dark energy pushing this!” But I just can’t find out the basis for this certainty when all the information we receive from the edges is really really old.

Uh….

Okay, so that was only a small part of his overall question, but to save time I’m just going to flash it up on screen and you guys can pause the video and read the rest of it. Here you go.

(post full question above)

So there’s a lot to unpack here and not a lot of time to talk about it in this video so let me start with my best understanding and we’ll see how this goes.

Dr. James mentions red-shifting in the question, that of course is the phenomenon where light that is traveling away from us shifts red on the light spectrum, light coming toward us shifts blue, sometimes called negative redshift.

And we’ve learned from looking at thousands of galaxies over the years that the further away from us they are, the more they are redshifted, so the further away they are, the faster they are moving away from us.

By the way we know this because of a supernova called a type 1A supernova that explode in very predictable ways and produce light with a specific wavelength so we can use that as the baseline when we find one in these galaxies. Depending on how redshifted the supernova light is, we know how fast the galaxy is moving away from us.

So as we look deeper and deeper into the universe, that light redshifts so far it slides into the infrared spectrum, which is why the Webb Space Telescope is designed primarily for infrared.

And the best explanation we have for why more distant galaxies are traveling away from us faster than closer ones is that space itself is expanding everywhere in all directions.

You can imagine two pieces next to each other on a checkerboard, if the size of the squares doubled, the pieces right next to each other would only move a little bit, where the pieces on the other side of the board moved really far away because all the squares between got bigger.

And it’s thought that past a certain point, galaxies are moving away from us faster than the speed of light. Relatively speaking, they aren’t moving through space faster than light, but the expansion of the space in between is pushing them away from our position faster than light.

Meaning their light will never reach us. And we will never know they are there.

Now the question mentioned the possibility of maybe seeing that light blue-shifting and moving back towards us. That sounds a lot like the Big Crunch, the idea that the universe would eventually collapse down on itself due to gravity, but the math seems to show that the universe has already expanded past the point where the mass in the universe and the gravity from it could possibly do that.

But, maybe as Webb and other big telescopes come online, we’ll get a better idea of what’s exactly going on out there on the edges.

 

Fishtail – January – Patreon

I was talking to an associate who has run in a couple of unsuccessful bids for Lieutenant Governor on an independent ticket.

He told me that the 14th amendment protects our privacy. The 14th amendment prevents the government from making laws that reduce our liberties.

I honestly don’t know if there is a written definition or set of statutes that define privacy as a liberty. Regardless of whether privacy should or should not be a liberty, is it currently defined as one?

Uh…..

This is way outside my expertise. This is like hiring a plumber to ask him about 18th century French poetry.

No offense to the plumbers who are also Jacques Autreau fans. Sorry, Larry.

But based on a very limited amount of research on my part, it looks like privacy isn’t specifically mentioned in the constitution but the 14th Amendment has a clause known as the privacy clause that has been used in cases involving privacy.

The full text of the 14th Amendment contains 5 sections, the privacy clause is in the first section and reads No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

The privacy clause of the 14th amendment has been used to make judgements in the Supreme Court relating to whether you can teach children foreign languages (Meyer v Nebraska – 1923), whether married couples can use contraception (Griswold v Connecticut – 1965), whether it was legal to view pornography in your own home (Stanley v Georgia – 1969), whether you have the right to refuse life-saving treatments (Cruzan v Missouri – 1990), or whether you have the right to engage in homosexual activity (Lawrence v Texas – 2003).
And if I may opine for just a moment, we hear a lot about how our freedoms are being taken away these days but I think it’s worth remembering that once upon a time, somewhere in the United States you could be arrested for doing any of these things.

Yes, you could get arrested for being gay in the United States until 2003.

So yeah, this clause has been used in many wide-ranging applications but the one you’re probably thinking of is privacy in the age of the internet, and that’s still something that’s being worked out from what I can tell.

There was a landmark decision in 2018 where a guy was arrested after police tracked his location info from his phone without obtaining a warrant. This was ultimately ruled unconstitutional in Carpenter v US.

Of course law enforcement agencies have been getting around this by just buying your data from data brokers the same way marketing companies do, because in the age of social media, we are the product. And the customer is whoever has the money to buy it. Even the government.

I know there are stricter rules on the books in Europe, whereas China is going the other direction and is basically a surveillance state.

So which direction we go, I guess we’ll see. But like I said I’m not an expert here.

By the way, you may be hearing about the 14th Amendment a lot these days because it was one of the amendments passed at the end of the civil war and Section 3 has a provision saying any elected officials that engaged with rebellion against the United States would be prohibited from serving in congress after that, and some are using that against congressional members who helped incite the capitol riot on January 6th last year. It probably won’t go anywhere though.

 

John Regel – January – Discord

Our eyes evolved to be sensitive to a narrow band of light we call the optical band because that represents the Sun’s peak output.

With the drastically different-looking cosmos in other wavelengths, what societal implications could you imagine if the Sun was 10% more massive (optical band shifted toward the UV) or 10% less massive (optical band shifted toward the IR)?

(Sorry joe, I know we touched this in a video once but I’m convinced we’d have religions worshiping the thing in the sky 6x larger than the full moon that we call Andromeda. Color me curious about what you can imagine.)

Uh…..

This is a super interesting question but it’s kinda impossible to answer without knowing how we would experience those things.

I did a video a while back about what it would be like if we could see all the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum if you want to go check that out but to me one of the most interesting possibilities would be if we could see infrared light because then we could see heat signatures coming off each other.

So you’d be able to see at a glance if someone has a fever, or is lying or embarrassed.

Like the way we blush, it’s a subtle thing now but if we could see infrared it would be glaring and obvious and I feel like socially that would change a lot of things.

Like would we all be equipped with a kind of lie detector? Would lying and deception be basically impossible? Or would we evolve to control our body temperature to counter that?

What if we evolved to send signals to each other by rushing blood to the surface of the skin in patterns that send messages like human cuttlefish?

But to your point about belief systems, I imagine the constellations in the sky would have totally different names and shapes because we’re seeing other stuff that we can’t see now, obviously that would have affected at least ancient religions.

It’s an interesting question, like I’ve always wondered what kind of religious beliefs would have come about if the Earth had rings, because depending on where you are on the planet, you would experience the rings very differently.

Like the further north and south you go, the more they become an arc across the horizon, but if you’re at the equator it would just be a line that bifurcates the sky.

There would be calendar days that relate to when the sun crosses the rings or reflects off of them in certain ways, there may be long periods of darkness or at least reduced light when the sun goes behind the rings, this might cause different seasons… It’s fun to think about.

Brian Beswick – january – Patreon

Did MIT discover the physical dividing line between the quantum and classical physics?

Uh…

So Brian pointed me to an article from MIT dated January 5th titled, “Physicists watch as ultracold atoms form a crystal of quantum tornadoes” (beat) Imma repeat that slowly.

Physicists watch. as ultracold atoms… form a crystal… of quantum tornadoes.

Sure, I’m qualified to talk about this.

Basically, if I’m reading this right, the researchers were wondering if quantum particles would behave differently at ultracold temperatures, by that I mean down to like 100 nanokelvin.

So they did that with a cloud of about a million sodium atoms, and then confined them with an electromagnetic field and spun them, and what happened was they immediately formed into a long, needle-like structure.

And then, according to the article, “The needle began to waver, then corkscrew, and finally broke into a string of rotating blobs, or miniature tornadoes — a quantum crystal, arising purely from the interplay of the rotation of the gas, and forces between the atoms.”

Do you know what this means? (beat) Because I don’t.

Richard Fletcher, one of the researchers on the project said, “This crystallization is driven purely by interactions, and tells us we’re going from the classical world to the quantum world,”

So basically these atoms were in a state where classical interactions should have been suppressed and it should have behaved in a quantum superposition, but they didn’t.

And this makes us have to rethink where the line is between quantum and classical physics. I’m sure someone in the comments has a better educated explanation of this. Please enlighten all of us.

 

Mark Hoffman – January – Patreon

Where does “hardware” end and “software” begin?

Uh….

Doesn’t anybody want to know my favorite color? It’s teal. Obviously.

I mean, maybe I’m using the wrong definition of hardware and software but I think of the hardware as the actual physical parts of the computer and the software is the code, the ones and zeros that are stored on the hardware.

I guess in that way software is more of a concept than a physical thing. Like a story is made up of words and letters and a book is what those words and letters are printed on…

Is this basically a question about how information is stored in a computer? Like physically how that works? Because that is definitely something we never think about but has a big impact on our lives. (think about it)

I may have to get back to you on that one…

 

Robin Tennant Colburn – January – Patreon

If Thwaites lets loose, has anyone created models for the immediate coastal impact when the “breach” occurs?

How fast, how bad, how soon could it happen and is there a good chance it won’t or won’t soon? Is there a “plug-in” model to crunch the numbers?

So to answer your specific question about plug-in models, no I couldn’t find anything like that but if somebody knows of one please share it in the comments.

But yeah, we’ve been hearing a lot about the Thwaites glacier lately and for good reason, let me give a quick primer for anybody that’s not familiar.

The Thwaites glacier is a massive glacier in Antarctica about the same size as Florida and it’s dangerously close to collapse, possibly in the next 5 years.

Scientists recently sent a submarine under the ice shelf at the foot of the glacier, this is what bumps up against a continental ridge and basically acts like a doorstop holding the rest of the glacier back.

And yeah, what they saw was way worse than they were expecting, it was thinner than they thought, there were obvious fracture points, this is a process that’s already started.

So if this ice shelf breaks apart, it would basically set the rest of the glacier in motion and send it pouring out into the sea. All of this ice set loose in the ocean could raise global sea levels by 1-2 feet.

That wouldn’t happen overnight, it’s a glacier, it moves at glacial speed, but losing the ice shelf would speed it up big time.

For example they used to think it would be 2100 before we saw that level of ocean rise but this might make it closer to 2050 or 2060.

And one to two feet is bad enough, but once that glacier ice melts into the ocean, that could raise the sea level 6 to 8 feet. Which we could see by 2100.

And just to add an extra dash of yikes to the whole thing, just like the Thwaites ice shelf is holding back the Thwaites glacier, it’s thought that losing the Thwaites glacier could trigger a loss of most of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

 

And this could add up to 11 feet of sea level rise when all is said and done.

Considering that 40% of the world’s population lives in urban areas near coastlines, that will be a massive problem.

So basically the fate of 3.2 billion people are in the hands of this relatively small strip of ice holding back this massive glacier, which is holding back an even bigger ice shelf… and that strip of ice is crumbling before our eyes.

Now again, this isn’t a next year kind of thing, even if the ice shelf falls apart tomorrow, it would take decades for the glacier to fully flake off into the ocean and even more decades to melt.

But once that ice shelf goes, it’ll basically set forth a series of events that can’t be stopped. It’ll be an event that affects our descendants for hundreds of years.

Unless we manage to drastically lower the global temperature, meaning removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, and do it in the next couple of decades, which not only are we not removing them, or even slowing their growth, we are in fact still accelerating our emissions. 2021 was a record year.

So it’s not like this shelf could collapse and trigger a global tsunami or anything, though some headlines make it sound that way, I saw one headline that described it as a “don’t look up-level event”. That’s a bit of an exaggeration.

But it’s a tipping point. One we don’t really have any way of coming back from. And just another reason our great great grandkids are gonna just really hate us.

I think that’s how we know that time travel will never be possible because if it was, they would be zapping over here and slapping each and every one of us in the face.

 

 

 

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5 Times Nature Got REAL Creative With Penises | Answers With Joe

January 24, 2022

Nature has had billions of years to experiment with reproduction, and it’s come up with some pretty bizarre ways to mix genes. While it’s a little taboo, here’s some of the weirdest solutions that have evolved over the years. Ladies and gentlemen, the weirdest penises in nature.

TRANSCRIPT:

Coyotes are native to North America and play an important part of the ecosystem. They’re very social animals that travel in packs and have a highly advanced communication system. And they also have a (gesture) BIG, LONG… history of intermingling with wolves.

Maybe it’s this inter-species scootelypooping that’s the reason that coyotes, though smaller than wolves have a (gesture) MASSIVE impact on the environment.

This video is not about coyotes, but longtime viewers know what I’m referencing here.

Yes, in the video where I celebrated a million subs on this channel, my team of clones recommended a few video ideas…

We’ve already done a video on one of those topics well, here’s another. (beat) Sort-of.

(play clip where I say, “Is there enough about coyote penises to make a video,” and then “you have no idea”)

Turns out no, there’s not.

Not about coyote penises specifically but penises in general… Now that’s a subject that goes DEEP.

Because sexual reproduction is how we all got here. The mixing of genes has been essential for genetic diversity and evolution, and nature has spent billions of years exploring different ways of doing that.

So today let’s take a look at the various methods nature has used to insert tab A into slot B. This… could get weird.

By the way, it probably goes without saying but to all of you who send me emails saying you like to watch my videos with your kids… Maybe sit this one out. (beat) Or don’t. They’re your kids, mess them up however you want.

Let’s start by stepping WAY back and getting a handle on the fundamentals of sexual reproduction so we can understand how it got so weird.

In sexual reproduction, a haploid female gamete (egg cell) fuses with a haploid male gamete (sperm cell).

The fusion creates a diploid zygote. Diploid means the chromosomes are paired.

All this creates an organism that is genetically distinct from the parent organisms.

On the other hand, asexual reproduction doesn’t involve gametes, and the offspring is a clone of a parent. Which is probably simpler.

So why does nature go through so much trouble for this? Or maybe a better way to put it is to say why has this method of reproduction been so successful despite all the extra energy it requires.

One advantage is that it helps ensure a particular species’ chromosome number remains the same across generations.

And another advantage is that it increases genetic variation and expands the gene pool, which allows the species to adapt and evolve over time.

There are two types of sexual reproduction:
– Syngamy – internal or external fusion of haploid sex cells; most common type of reproduction in multicellular sexual populations
– Conjugation – temporary fusion to exchange micronuclear material; often seen in single-cell organisms

Eukaryotes were the first organisms to engage in asexual reproduction around two billion years ago.
(on screen: Eukaryotes are single-celled or multicellular organisms whose cell includes a distinct, membrane-bound nucleus.)

Internal fertilization among vertebrates is much more recent on the evolutionary timescale.

Ducks

Gotta start with the ducks.

So first of all most bird species don’t have penises at all. Both sexes have a cloaca and when one bird loves another bird very much, the male will rub his cloaca against the female’s cloaca and pass sperm from his cloaca to hers.

Heterosexual scissors, if you will.

But ducks don’t do scissors. They use a different kitchen utensil. Corkscrews.

When ducks mate, they bond for a whole mating season, but rival males will often violently force themselves onto females.

Don’t know if I need a trigger warning here but yeah… Nature can be a little rapey.

So over evolutionary time, female ducks developed elaborate vaginas with dead-end cul-de-sacs and spirals.

Consequently the male ducks developed weird, corkscrew penises with ridges and backward-point spines that help them deposit sperm further into a female than a rival.

So if you say two ducks are screwing, that is a quite literal statement.

And as if male duck d*cks weren’t weird enough, turns out they are both growers and showers.

Male ducks can respond to sexual competition by growing an extra-long penis or a nub of flesh on the end of their penis.

According to a study by Patricia Brennan of Mount Holyoke College, when a male is alone with a female it would grow a normal-sized penis.

But if other males were around, they grew larger penises so they could show females that they could deposit sperm further inside her.
(Caption under name: assistant professor of biological sciences, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts )
(Source: The Auk: Ornithological Advances, 2017)

“So evolution must be acting on the ability to be plastic—the ability to invest only in what is needed in your current circumstance,” Brennan told Scientific American in 2017.

And the current circumstance of ducks apparently requires a giant corkscrew penis.

Sea Slug

Something that stands out when looking at the world of sexual reproduction in nature is that it’s not just about depositing sperm, it’s about keeping other creatures’ sperm out.

Ducks managed this with corkscrews, sea slugs have a different strategy.

The Chromodoris reticulata is a type of sea slug found in the Pacific Ocean.

Researchers believe it may be the first creature known that can have sex repeatedly with a disposable penis. No, it’s not just a great King Missile song.

Sea slugs are also known as nudibranchs and are believed to be “simultaneous hermaphrodites.”

In other words, they have both female and male organs they can use at the same time. So when two sea slugs mate, the penis from one slug fits into the female opening of the other slug, and vice versa. So they can essentially impregnate each other.

I wonder what the abortion issue would look like if that were true for us…?

But anyway, Japanese researchers noticed something interesting and published their findings in Biology Letters in 2013.

They watched the slugs mate 31 times. After the… (stare into space) I’m sorry, I just had so many jokes go through my head I disassociated.

That was somebody’s job. To watch the two horniest sea slugs alive just rail each other over and over and over and over and over…

I don’t care how bad your job is, that guy’s job is worse.

And apparently while watching these two nymphomaniacs going at it, he noticed that after each act, they shed their penises. Just snapped them right off in each other. Then he wrote a report about it. Went home to his spouse.

Spouse (cutting up food on the plate): So, how was work today?

Researcher (dazed with a drink in hand): I watched two sea slugs f*ck 31 times.

Spouse (unfazed): Yeah, how’d that go?

Researcher: They snapped their d*cks off up there.

Obviously, to do that 31 times means they need to be able to regrow it, which they did, within 24 hours. In fact, they could mate three times in succession with each act separated by about 24 hours.

And the slugs’ penises also had backward-pointed spines on them, so the prevailing theory is that during the first act the penis may be used to remove sperm left by competitors.

The second penis is used then to inject the slug with another dose of its own sperm. This helps ensure their genes are passed on.

As for the other 29 times… Well, slugs are sluts.
(#slugsluts)

Anglerfish

From animals that lose their penis to animals that just… become the penis.

The male anglerfish has one goal: To attach itself to a female anglerfish and remain with her for the rest of his life.

But this isn’t some romantic movie where the characters make out in the rain as the credits roll, this is a love story written by David Cronenberg.

Go figure this fish would have the creepiest sex imaginable.

So what happens with the anglerfish, is that when the male finds a female he likes, he approaches her, says hi, and then like… bites into her side. Forever.

He basically attaches himself to her and over time his circulatory system merges with hers, he basically fuses with her and then his eyes, fins, and almost all his internal organs degenerate.

What’s left is a sexual parasite that provides sperm for the female whenever she demands. He’s basically just a sperm pump.

Female anglerfish are significantly larger than their male counterparts, and a female can collect up to eight males fused to her body.

Males! Collect them all!

So yeah, this is super weird but of course there’s a reason for this, and that reason is food.

At the depths these fish are swimming in, food is scarce. So this helps not only guarantee a mate for life, but also helps half the resources needed to survive.

It should be noted not all anglerfish do this, there are around 300 anglerfish species, but only about 25 species do it this way.

By the way, this is called “sexual parasitism.” They’re literal sexual parasites.

Again… So many jokes…

Eels

Eels had a moment in the last year or two in the “weird science” circles. Which is a thing I just made up.

There were a lot of social media posts and videos going around about how nobody really knows how eels reproduce.

Because we’ve never seen them do it. And they don’t seem to have any genitalia.

That of course is not true, scientists do know how they do it and they do have genitalia, you just have to dissect them to find it.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it is still very, very weird.

First of all, they have a complicated life cycle, starting as larvae drifting in the Sargasso Sea, which is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The larvae look like transparent willow leaves, and they travel along ocean currents. The American eel drifts westward, and the European eel drifts eastward.

By the way we have no idea how they know which way to drift. But they apparently just do.

When they reach land, they become glass eels. And then they do something that very few animals can do, they move into freshwater, and become freshwater eels. Which are known as yellow eels.

These are the eels most people eat, by the way.

And then these yellow eels live like this for a REALLY long time, up to 85 years. Assuming it doesn’t get eaten.

But whenever an eel decides it’s the end of its life, it goes through a fourth transformation and turn into silver eels.

By the way, this is why it was so hard to figure out how they reproduced because for a long time, they thought these were 4 separate species.

So it becomes a silver eel and swims back out to the Sargasso Sea, where they started from. This can take up to a year, and their bodies continue to change along the way.

They don’t eat for the whole journey, in fact their stomachs dissolve, its eyes change and it develops sexual organs.

So after living up to 85 years, they finally become sexually mature. And by the way, if they don’t swim out to the Sargasso Sea, this doesn’t happen. They can live almost indefinitely in the yellow eel stage.

Maybe that’s the key to immortality, just don’t grow sex organs.

But why the Sargasso Sea? What’s so great about that spot? And how do they even know how to get there? (beat) No, seriously, I’m asking, nobody seems to know.

Some theories include water temperature and salinity for why they go there, and scent and electromagnetic fields for how.

Also, an eel’s sex is determined by its environment and not genetics. It is neither female nor male when it hatches.

Anyway once they reach the Sargasso Sea, that’s where they mate and lay eggs, its believed they reproduce externally with clouds of sperm fertilizing free-floating eggs. But… It’s never actually been seen. It is still a bit of a mystery.

My bet is that it would be weirder than that because of course it would be.

This is a short list. There are so many other animal penises we could have explored. Some of these include the
– Echidna, with its four-head penis
– Dolphin, with its penis that can grab, grope, and swivel like a human hand
– Barnacle, whose penis is nearly eight-times its body length, which it uses to reach out to nearby mates
– Insects of the Neotrogla genus, where the males have a vagina-like pouch with sperm, and the females have a penis-like organ that penetrates the male and collects the sperm
– And the argonaut octopus, a cephalopod whose penis detaches itself from the creature’s body and swims around looking for a lady.

But of course a cephalopod would be on this list because they are some of the weirdest creatures on the planet which is why I made a whole video on them which is the pinnacle of science entertainment that is so important to the history of humanity that it should have been imprinted in the Voyager golden record… wait did Jason write this one? Ah, he got me. He got me again. Little scamp.

But anyway, sexual reproduction comes down basically to taking genetic material from a male and a female and mixing them up. And as we’ve seen, there’s no one way to do it.

No matter how kinky you think you are, nobody’s as creative in the sex department than nature.

 

 

 

 

 

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Iron-Air Batteries: Storing Energy In Rust

January 17, 2022

Grid energy storage is one of the hottest areas of research and engineering today. It’s all about cheap, sustainable, and efficient materials, which makes iron-air batteries stand out amongst the others. Not only is iron plentiful and cheap, it’s completely recyclable and even better – rechargeable. Let’s look at iron-air battery technology and see how likely it is to transform our energy grid.

TRANSCRIPT:

Over the last couple of years I’ve had something of a series of videos on this channel covering various types of battery technology. It’s not a formal thing exactly, but it’s a popular subject and there seems to be new ones all the time so there’s no shortage of topics.

I’ve covered liquid metal batteries, solid state batteries, redox flow, lithium ion of course, and most recently aluminum air and with each and every one of these videos, just as I was finishing up, Matt Freaking Farrell posts a video on the same topic.

So of course as I was working on a video about Iron Air batteries, there’s one from him, just cutting in line.

But as they say, it’s not who did it first… it’s who did it best. (beat) Of course his graphics are way better than mine so I’m still screwed.

The point is, if you’ve seen Matt’s video… I don’t know, I guess you can skip this one – unless, you just want to see what I might do differently, in which case you’re in luck because I am going to have puppies up on screen. (puppies on screen; smug) Take that, Matt. Check and mate.

And if you haven’t seen Matt’s video, then get ready to learn something… And look at puppies.

I had no idea in October when I made that video about Oxygen that the stuff I talked about in that would be relevant in so many other videos. It was called Oxygen is Killing You and it was about how oxygen is one of the most corrosive elements on the periodic table but weirdly, even paradoxically, that corrosiveness is what makes life possible.

And it’s what makes a lot of things possible, when it comes down to it, pretty much everything is transformed or powered by combustion; or oxidation.

As I covered in the aluminum air battery video, oxygen reacts with aluminum to create aluminum hydroxide. Which by the way, fun fact, whenever you look at anything aluminum, you’re really seeing the thin outer layer of aluminum hydroxide. You’ve probably never actually seen aluminum in your life.

Well it works the same way with iron. Oxygen reacts with iron to form iron oxide, also known as rust. And this process gives off a little bit of energy.

But before we get too far into how the batteries work and everything… I feel like at the beginning of every video I have to explain why we need battery storage, how important energy storage is for renewable energy and all that, but there might be another way of looking at it…

The Battery Bottleneck

The reason we talk about all these different kinds of energy storage is because there are a lot of different use cases, and different batteries are better suited for different purposes.

Lithium-ion is great for EVs because they’re energy dense, so smaller batteries, better for mobility, can be cycled thousands of times, and provide a lot of power to make the zoom-zooms.

They’re great for home storage and grid storage, too, but every battery that goes into that is a battery that’s not going in a car.

And that’s a lot of batteries. Home energy storage was a $6.97 billion dollar market in 2020. And grid storage systems are expected to grow 10-fold between 2019 and 2023.

This is a problem. Because battery availability is the biggest hinderance to the growth of EVs.

Not only are there just not enough batteries to meet demand for EVs these days but it’s this scarcity that keeps the cost of the batteries – and EVs – higher than gas cars.

In fact, some industry experts are warning that demand for lithium ion batteries may soon exceed supply.

Europe has been experiencing a major shortfall this last year, because most of their batteries are coming from Asia, and Covid has wreaked havoc on global trade.

There are new plants coming online in Europe to address this, and that’s obviously a good thing but there is still the deeper problem of raw materials.

Expensive Materials

Most lithium ion batteries rely on expensive materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt. All of which have to be mined, and in a relatively small number of places on Earth.

And these prices can fluctuate. Lithium has actually tripled this year, which has added about $470 to the cost of every EV, on average.

The point is, lithium ion, for all its great properties, is constrained. And if we want to advance car electrification going forward, it might make sense to find alternative solutions for all those non-mobile storage needs. So we can put lithium ion in the cars and phones and computers to live its best life.

And that is why we keep hearing about all these new battery technologies, everybody’s scrambling to come up with the cheapest, most sustainable option until we finally develop an arc reactor. In a cave. With a box of scraps.

A LiOn Alternative

Now that I’ve said the thing; the thing I say in all these videos… again… Let’s talk about iron air batteries.

How It Works

So, much like the Aluminum-Air Battery I covered about a week after Matt Ferrell, iron-air batteries fall into the category of metal-air batteries, where energy is stored and released through the oxidation of metal.

With metal-air batteries, the anode is the metal and the cathode is oxygen basically.

And the electrolyte of course is a solution of water with stuff dissolved in it to improve conductivity.

As I said before, iron plus water and oxygen equals iron oxide, or rust. and this chemical reaction — rusting — releases electrons to pass through a circuit as current
All this is pretty similar to what we talked about with aluminum, the difference with iron is that this rusting process is reversible. In other words… you can recharge this one.

Yeah, sounds like magic but you can “unrust” the iron by adding current from outside.
And because you can recharge it, it’s made from abundant materials, and it’s totally recyclable, it was considered a potential battery for electric vehicles back in the 70’s and 80’s.

In fact, iron has a theoretical energy density about twice that of lithium ion batteries. So… Why aren’t we seeing them everywhere now?

Short Cycle Life

There’s a few reasons, the first is cycle life.

So yeah, while we’re clapping and celebrating that they’re rechargeable, it’s important to know… They’re kinda just barely rechargeable.

Cycle life refers to the number of times a battery can be charged and discharged before it gives out less energy than was put in.

For example, nickel- and lithium-based batteries can be recharged 300 to 500 times before losing any significant capacity.
Significant, meaning twenty-percent less than a fresh battery. It can go thousands of cycles before it’s totally dead.
— this cites 2000 cycles as a typical cycle life; I think that’s to DEAD

Early iron-air batteries could only do 20-30 cycles. That’s less.

Later models improved on that, but it was still way short of other competing batteries, so, it faded away.

Why do iron-air batteries have such short cycle lives? Well I’m glad you asked, with most metal-air batteries, the problem is the components deteriorate.

I mean all that oxidizing and un-oxidizing and re-oxidizing takes its toll after a while.

In the case of iron-air, the iron anode can theoretically last upwards of 10,000 cycles. That’s not the problem. It’s the cathode and the electrolyte.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266150203_A_Review_of_the_Iron-Air_Secondary_Battery_for_Energy_Storage

There’s a membrane on the cathode that regulates air flow. That membrane can react with the electrolyte, causing contamination that decreases cycle life.

Corrosion can cause the battery to self-discharge. So instead of storing energy, the battery bleeds it away while sitting idle. Obviously a problem.

So, those are the kind of problems that have stymied interest in iron-air but there has been a lot of progress made since then.

Recent Innovations

Like less reactive materials for the cathode membrane, and more efficient electrolyte solutions.

And now nanotechnology is getting in on the action.

Anodes of iron nanoparticles have more surface area to carry out reactions.

Nanocomposites of iron and graphene or carbon fiber gives even better results

The company that’s making the most waves in Iron-air batteries is Form Energy, and they have plans to launch a grid-scale iron-air battery in the next few years.

They claim to have solved all the aforementioned problems but they’re keep the details of how they’re doing it a secret.

And I guess we’re just supposed to trust them. As if Nikola Motors and Theranos never existed.

Form Energy

But clearly somebody trusts them because they’ve raised $360 million in investment rounds.

Two of those somebodies being Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

So either they really are sitting on some secret sauce that will fix all the problems, or the potential for an Iron Air battery that can compete with Lithium Ion is just that enticing.

It doesn’t hurt that one of their founders is the former Vice President of Products and Programs at Tesla focusing specifically on grid-scale storage.

And they’ve also got on board a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT who was an innovator of lithium-ion technology back in the day.

In fact, the words “Tesla” and “MIT” pop up a lot in bios of Form executives. Like, this is kind-of the grid energy storage dream team.

And this dream team claims their new battery could be a major step toward a 100% renewable energy grid.

Do you want Bill Gates money? Because that’s how you get Bill Gates money.

An Economical Battery

The individual batteries are made from 10-20 iron-air cells that are stacked to form a battery about the size of a washing machine.

And its anode is the largest ever made, which actually speaks to the economy of the design because despite it using more metal, it’s expected to run at less than a tenth the energy cost of a comparable lithium-ion battery.
This is, of course just based off their claims, as I mentioned, Form is keeping some details to themselves

But it won’t be long before we know if it’s all it’s cracked up to be, there’s actually a pilot program going online in 2023 in Cambridge, Minnesota.

The Pilot Project

It’s called the Cambridge Energy Storage Project and is part of a Green-power makeover by Great River Energy.

Great River plans to QUOTE eliminate coal from its power supply portfolio and add 1,100 megawatts (MWs) of wind energy by 2023 UNQUOTE

1 MegaWatt will be from the Cambridge Project, maybe with more to come

Great River hopes that the project can help prevent extended blackouts, which have been a problem in the past.

A blackout caused by the polar vortex left people without power for up to 72 hours in 2019.

Another blackout kept some without power for 48 hours in 2003. This one caused by a software bug.
On a personal note, I’m actually getting solar and storage on my house right now because of the blackouts we had here in Texas last February. I knew people who were burning their furniture in the fireplace for warmth. But at least they survived, at least 151 people died.

Now some might say that’s all the more reason to not ditch coal and oil, if people are already dying for lack of electricity.

But form hopes their battery could change the conversation by helping secure the grid. We’ll know more when the pilot project kicks off.

What should we expect when it does?

Watts Per Hour

Form makes rather modest claims about the rate at which their batteries can power the grid

The pilot facility will use an acre of land to provide 1 MW/150 MWh of energy
Watts are a measure of how much work can be done, while watt-hours measure work over time

So Form is saying their acre of their batteries will deliver 1 MW to the grid. At a steady 1 MW per hour, they’ll be able to keep this up for 150 hours.

A denser configuration could deliver three times the energy with the same footprint

For comparison, Tesla’s Megapack can deliver 250 MW/1GWh of energy per acre. 250 MegaWatts is enough to power 75,000 homes. Impressive.

But some easy math will show that at 250 MW per hour, an acre of Megapacks will run out in four hours.

Form’s Focus

At 1 MW/150 MWh, Form isn’t looking to power a major city during peak energy demand, their focus is delivering low-cost, long-duration energy.

A company blog post acknowledges that lithium-ion batteries “will meet the majority of future electricity demand”

They’re not looking to replace lithium-ion batteries completely, in fact, the best use of Form’s batteries might be as part of a hybrid system

In times of low energy demand, the iron-air part would provide inexpensive power.

When demand peaks, the lithium-ion batteries would kick in.

But in emergency situations, iron-air batteries could provide days of emergency power, which could save lives during extreme weather events.

So… is Iron Air the end-all, be-all of battery storage? No. But no single battery is.

Which, as I was saying at the beginning, is all the more reason to have a multitude of battery types that can fill specific niches in the most cost-effective and sustainable way possible.

It’s actually a really interesting time to be covering battery technology, and who knows, maybe someday we’ll develop the perfect battery that does all things in all applications. And when we do, I’ll cover it right here… Probably a week after Matt Ferrell.

Tell me your thoughts about the iron air battery and if there’s another battery storage solution that you’re excited about.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Van Allen Belts Are Dangerous – But Didn’t Keep Us From The Moon | Answers With Joe

January 10, 2022

The Van Allen Belts are areas of high radiation where solar particles have been trapped and accelerated by the Earth’s magnetic field. This has long been touted as evidence by conspiracy theorists that we couldn’t have gotten to the moon. But while the Van Allen Belts are dangerous, the tenacity and genius of NASA engineers literally found a way around them. Here’s how.

TRANSCRIPT:

I’m old enough to remember a time before the internet. In fact, that’s when I spent the most impressionable years of my life, I was molded before the internet as we know it changed the world as we know it.
So sometimes I find myself fascinated with Gen Z because these guys did grow up with the internet and were molded in a completely different world from me, with any information or entertainment they could ever want instantly available at all times.
And I worry about all the misinformation on the internet and what that does to someone who develops their worldview in a hurricane of clickbait and deepfakes and conspiracy theories.
Like you hope that someone who grows up in it might be more saavy to it because they’ve never known a time when you could just take information at face value, so they’re more aware of the manipulation and aren’t as taken by it.
Or… could growing up in a time of information chaos lead to a total abandonment of the very concept of truth? Where the loudest voices win?
You want it to be the first one… Until you hear that there’s a growing conspiracy theory amongst Gen Zers that birds aren’t real. And then you start to think it’s the second one.
Only you would be wrong, it’s actually totally the first one.
Birds Aren’t Real is a satirical movement that claims that birds aren’t really animals but sophisticated drones that the government uses to spy on you.
They’ve been showing up at protests around the country, putting up billboards in major cities, and driving vans covered in conspiracy lingo.
But Birds Aren’t Real… Isn’t real.
It’s a parody, meant to highlight the absurdity of the conspiracy theories that seem to be taking over the country.
Like any good satire, it walks the line to where you might not know if it’s real or not unless you’re in on the joke. For the people who are in on the joke, it serves as a kind of release. A way to thumb their nose at something that they see as dangerously destabilizing to the world they’re inheriting.
And it kind-of backs up the old adage that you can’t reason with crazy, you can only out-crazy them.
Oh, so you think JFK Jr is going to return from the dead and he’s going to do it at the place where his dad was murdered? Okay, well I don’t think birds are real. Top that.
Like people always say if you encounter someone who thinks the moon landings were faked, you should just say, “oh, you believe in the moon?”
Except there actually are people who think the moon is actually an alien spaceship so… yeah…

Birds Aren’t Real

A (Hoax) Theory Is Born

On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 lander touched down on the lunar surface. It was watched live by 652 million people around the world, which was 1/5th of the entire world’s population at the time.
And yet, here we are some 50 years later and 11% of the US population either strongly believe or somewhat believe that the moon landing was faked. That’s nearly 40 million people.
But here’s the thing… That’s nothing new.
In fact, a poll by Knight Newspapers just a year after the Apollo 11 landing showed that millions of Americans already doubted that it ever happened.
The major reasons given were that the US made it up to fool the communists or to justify the expense of the space program.
This was written about by self-published author Bill Kaysing in his book, We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle in 1976.
 Yeah… this was the first book that really caught fire in the moon landing denier world, but some of what he talks about in it… I guess are understandable considering the time.
This was the early 70s, the height of the Cold War, and Vietnam and Watergate had just shattered most Americans’ trust in their government.
So the idea that the moon landings were the shiny object they were using to distract people from “what’s really going on” is not hard to understand.

Climate of Doubt

For some people, it was easier to believe they’d been lied to than that the Eagle had landed.
And of course once you believe in a conspiracy theory, you see evidence of that conspiracy theory everywhere you look, and one thing that many moon landing deniers locked onto was the Van Allen Belts.
Earth’s magnetic field creates powerful rings of radiation that circle the planet known as the Van Allen Belts… Wait a second… If the Earth is surrounded by intense radiation, then there’s no way they went to the moon. Busted!
This has become one of the biggest pieces of “evidence” that moon landing deniers reference, and I’ve seen it brought up in my comments for years, even though it has been disproven a thousand different ways, it keeps coming back up. It seems to be one of the stickier elements of this particular conspiracy theory.
And I think that’s because there is an element of truth to it. The Van Allen belts do exist. And they are dangerous.
But pretty much everything about the Apollo missions were dangerous. And they were only overcome by the grit and determination and sheer genius of the NASA engineers and astronauts. They literally problem-solved their way to the moon.
And I think that’s why this conspiracy theory is so aggravating, it’s just totally urinating over the herculean efforts of hundreds of thousands of people to do this one amazing and inspiring thing. And it’s so cynical, we have this one great thing that we did, why do you have to…
Sorry… That was… Off topic, we’re talking about the Van Allen belts.

James Van Allen

The belts are named after astrophysicist James Van Allen, who was a cosmic ray expert from the University of Iowa.
In the late 50s, he worked with graduate students to develop the Cosmic Ray Instrument, which included a Geiger counter that could register protons and electrons above a minimum energy.
Rocketry was in its earliest years and they hoped to be able to launch this into space to gauge what the radiation looked like above our atmosphere.
This proved to be a challenge. But not so much a technological one but a political one.

Army v. Air Force

This was in the days before NASA, when rockets were strictly a military thing, and the various branches of the military were competing to be the first to put a rocket into space.
The main competitors were the Army and Air Force. And each had a secret weapon in their corner.
The Air Force had the U. S. secretary of defense on their side; he wanted them to control rocket design.
And the Army had NAZIS… (long pause) Guess who won?
Specifically Werner von Braun who yes, was a Nazi, but he was also a genius.
So the Army was actually making some great strides but because the DOD was kinda on the Air Force’s side, advancement was stymied by infighting and red tape.

Enter Sputnik

But on October 4, 1957… things changed.
The first Soviet satellite, Sputnik I, was put into orbit and the second those beeps started sounding over American heads, well that clarified some things.
The Defense department fell in line behind von Braun and gave him all the resources he needed to launch a satellite.
And to distance the project from military goals — in the public eye at least — the decision was made launch a civilian satellite, something that didn’t have a military objective.
And von Braun was given a deadline of 90 days to get this thing up into space so he didn’t care what it was as long as it was ready to go.
And one satellite that was ready to go was Van Allen’s Cosmic Ray Instrument, so it got picked and was renamed Explorer 1.
Quick side note, Van Allen himself was in Antarctica when he heard the news so he contacted one of his grad students named George Ludwig to deliver the satellite. Which he did… in the back of his car.
He literally loaded up his pregnant wife and two young daughters and drove 1600 miles to Cape Canaveral with Explorer 1 – the first American satellite to ever reach space – in his trunk.
But I guess it paid off because he later became a chief research scientist at NASA. Good show, old chap.
So anyway, Explorer 1 launched on January 31, 1958, the United States was officially in space, and there was much rejoicing. (yaay…)
But while Americans were high fiveing each other over this accomplishment, Van Allen and his team went about interpreting the data that was coming back. (grand gesture) and THIS was…  not when the Van Allen belts were discovered.
Actually they were really disappointed with the data because half of it was missing.

Space is Radioactive

Where readings should have been, there were long gaps where the detector didn’t pick up any particles. And they couldn’t quite figure out why.
So for Explorer Two, they added a magnetic recorder to keep a log of the detector’s measurements. Previously, they were just reading it live.
And THIS was… (down energy) not when they Van Allen Belts were discovered because Explorer 2 blew up (didn’t make it to orbit), but Explorer 3! Haha! Explorer 3 in March 1958, that one got up there and everything worked perfectly.
Same as the first time, there were giant gaps where the detector didn’t pick up anything, but this time they were able to pin those gaps down to specific locations in orbit.
At the same time they ran some tests on one of the Cosmic Ray Instruments and discovered that the effect could be simulated by bathing it in X-rays.
And THIS is… where he figured out that there were belts of intense radiation around the Earth, that’s how we got the Van Allen Belts.

Starfish Prime

So, what to do with this information? (thinking) Radiation belts… So many ideas… (idea) Let’s nuke it.
(sigh) Yeah, the US nuked the Van Allen belts in 1962.
It was actually part of a series of 5 atmospheric nuclear tests because that was a thing we just used to do.
But one particular test was called Starship Prime, and it was aimed at the Van Allen Belts.
They were testing to see if they could use the belts to create a radioactive shield that could protect targets on the ground from missile attack. It didn’t work. But the EMP from it did manage to disable 1/3 of all satellites that were in orbit at the time.

The Inner and Outer Belts

The inner belt extends from about 600 kilometers to nearly 10,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface, and it’s mostly made of protons.
Some have been stripped from the solar wind by the Earth’s magnetic field, while others are supplied by the upper atmosphere
The outer belt stretches from about 13,500 km to nearly 60,000 km, but this is highly variable, it kinda depends on how you measure it.
The outer belt especially can swell at times as low-energy electrons and other particles rush in, but that diminishes gradually, sometimes in a few minutes, sometimes it takes days.
And there are still a lot of questions around how exactly the belts work, but we do know the basics.
Earth’s magnetic field captures the particles and funnels them around the planet, kinda the same way particle accelerators and fusion reactors contain particles in a magnetic field.

And Other Surprises

But recent measurements by NASA’s Van Allen Probes has shown the belts are more dynamic than we thought.
In one observation period, a solar storm caused a surge of electrons in the outer belt
Five days after the energy dissipated, there was another major surge... but there wasn’t a storm this time. They don’t know what caused it.
The Van Allen probes also revealed the existence of a third belt. Briefly.
This one popped up in what they call the “slot region” between the inner and outer belts in 2012.
It existed for 4 weeks and then a shock wave from the Sun wiped it out. It’s never been seen again.
So yeah, the belts are super dynamic, they grow and change according to solar activity and other things we still don’t understand. And they are powerful. Any conspiracy theorist that says these are dangerous is absolutely right. But are they deadly?

How Deadly Are They?

Studies have shown that inside the typical shielding of a satellite, an astronaut could absorb as much radiation in an hour in the belts as most people absorb in eighteen months on Earth.
Scary… sure, but notice I said “survivors.” A fatal dose of radiation is far higher than that.
So talking about radiation measurements gets tricky because there are many different units scientists use but I’m going to try to stick to the Sievert, because that measures damage done to living tissue.
Symptoms of radiation poisoning appear at 400 millisieverts.
A dose above 2000 millisieverts can be fatal.
But even double that dosage is survivable, with treatment. I don’t recommend you try this.
With that in mind, an astronaut in our hypothetical spacecraft would absorb 6 millisieverts of radiation per hour. So not too bad.

Damage Over Time

But there is a catch — small amounts of radiation damage can accumulate over time.
According to the FDA, doses of 5 to 20 millisieverts of ionizing radiation may increase the risk of fatal cancer.
A typical CT scan can deliver a dose in that range, which is why doctors don’t give them to everybody.

Must Go Faster

So, obviously, you wouldn’t want to hang out in the Van Allen Belts any longer than you have to. Thankfully, rockets go really fast.
When we talk about how NASA minimized the risk to the astronauts, the first thing they did was to limit the time astronauts spent there.
When the Apollo astronauts entered the inner belt, they were traveling just over 38,000 kilometers per hour.
That means the trip through both belts was under two-and-a-half-hours long. Not great, not terrible.

Apollo’s Trajectory

But that’s not all they did to minimize exposure.
Long before Apollo 11, Van Allen and his team had mapped the radiation in the belts, and there are certain regions of the belts that are stronger than others. So they didn’t go through there.
Yes, they developed a complicated maneuver called (look at paper), Going Around It.

Average Mission Dosage

The next precaution they took has to do with the command module capsule.
So remember earlier when I mentioned how much radiation an astronaut would receive in a typically – shielded satellite? Well they weren’t in a typically-shielded satellite.
One of the mandatories of the Apollo command module was that they be engineered to survive the largest solar flare then on record.
So, special materials and coatings in the hull, water shielding, and even their suits provided a bit of shielding.

Solar Event Monitoring

And one last thing NASA did was they monitored the sun for solar events.
Like I said before, the size and strength of the belts fluctuate quite a bit. Usually due to solar activity.
So NASA created the Solar Particle Alert Network, or SPAN, which carefully monitored solar activity leading up to the missions.
They advise NASA on periods of high solar activity, so astronauts can be ordered to shelter in the shielded areas of spacecraft, which thankfully never happened on any of the missions.
Although there was a close call between Apollo 16 and 17 (August 1972) where radiation went as high as 4000 millisieverts.
But even if there had been some astronauts caught in that, the shielding would have reduced that dosage to 350 millisieverts, which according to a NASA news article, “That’s the difference between needing a bone marrow transplant, or having a headache.”
The crew of the Apollo missions carried personal dosimeters that measured radiation exposure from launch to landing.
And because of the efforts I just listed, the average dose ranged from a low of 0.18 rad on Apollo 11 to a high of 1.14 rad on Apollo 14.
As I mentioned before there are lots of different radiation measurements and rads don’t convert directly to Sieverts, but for reference, 70 rad is considered dangerous, while 120 rad can be fatal.
So, long story short, the Van Allen Belts are not as deadly as conspiracy theorists seem to think. NASA was well aware of their danger long before Apollo 11 took flight, and they took the proper precautions.
Of course if you’re dedicated to the conspiracy, none of this matters, these are all just lies to cover up the fraud and anybody and everybody who can validate these facts are in on the conspiracy. Including me.

Small Price to Pay

When it comes down to it, the Van Allen Belts are just one of MANY concerns to deal with regarding space travel, like orbital debris or thermal management.
They definitely put a limit on the altitude of crewed missions, but it’s not a danger to anything like the ISS, they orbit thousands of kilometers below the belts.
In fact, those dosimeters on the Apollo astronauts showed that they probably received twice as much radiation on the moon as a typical astronaut does in low Earth orbit.
So you might say the Van Allen Belts are a small price to pay for the protection of Earth’s magnetic field.

No Fatal Radiation

Moon hoaxers would of course move on to all the other “evidence” that has all been thoroughly debunked, I’m not going to spend time on any of those. And I’m sure that as we go back to the moon with the Artemis program, these theories are going to crop up all over again.
But I for one choose to celebrate the moon landing, and instead of focusing on all the things that might disprove it, focus on the amazing people who contributed to this program and tell their stories.
Like George Ludwig driving 1600 miles with Explorer 1 in his trunk, these people embodied the best of what it means to be human, doing whatever it takes to advance and explore and push past boundaries. Even massive particle accelerators in space.
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The Colorado River Is Dying – And It Could Crash The Economy

January 04, 2022

The Colorado River is often called The Lifeline of the Southwest. 40 million people rely on it. It supports a $1.7 trillion economy. And it is quickly drying up. So let’s start 2022 with a look at the Colorado River. What’s causing this to happen? What’s being done about it? And just how bad is it going to get if nothing changes?

TRANSCRIPT:

Happy New Year everyone, it’s 2022, I hope you’re off to a great start, and I hope this new year brings you all the success and happiness you can possibly handle.

One way that many Arizona farmers have started off this year is by losing their crops because of mandatory water restrictions, essentially making them a canary in the coalmine in a massive ecological disaster. (blink/SFX)

Come on, you got like 10 seconds of happiness there, what else did you expect?
Lake Mead, which straddles Arizona and Nevada and provides water and power for millions of people, is currently only 35% full. It’s literally the lowest the lake has ever been since the Hoover Dam was built in 1931.

It’s been going down for a while, but just a few months ago in August of 2021, the federal government officially declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time ever.

And with that came restrictions for Arizona farmers that would take effect in January 2022, which would be right about… (look at watch) Now.

But there’s a reason for all this concern. The Colorado River is dying. Fast. And if nothing is done, it could be the beginning of an environmental disaster that would permanently reshape a large swath of the United States.

There’s a lot of things in life that are profoundly important to us but we spend insanely little time thinking about. In so many ways we’re just utterly spoiled by our modern conveniences.

Things like where our electricity is generated, where our trash goes, how the microwave works, and where our water comes from.

Because we don’t see the full life cycle of the resources we consume, we remain blissfully ignorant of it. Until we don’t have it anymore.

And that’s when little things happen like, you know… society collapsing.

Which is why the water shortage declaration is a big deal. It’s effectively changed the official policy from one of, “Eh, maybe something’ll happen,” to one of “…okay, we need to make something happen.”

The declaration will reduce Arizona’s supply of water from the Colorado River by around 20 percent, or 512,000 acre-feet.

By the way, an acre-foot is around 1,230,259 liters (325,000 gallons), which is enough water for two or three homes a year.

Reductions are mandated for Arizona, Nevada, and also parts of Mexico, but what this means for the farmers in Arizona is that many in places like Pinal County are planning on leaving some of their fields dry and unplanted.

These same farmers are expecting their entire water supply to be shut off in 2023.

And that could happen if Lake Mead’s level declines to 320 meters (1,050 feet) above sea level, which would prompt even more restrictions.
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/colorado-river-basin-whats-wrong-and-whats-needed-make-it-right

According to Jennifer Pitt of the National Audubon Society, “As this inexorable-seeming decline in the supply continues, the shortages that we’re beginning to see implemented are only going to increase,” “Once we’re on that train, it’s not clear where it stops.”

These are drastic measures that will financially impact thousands of farmers, but around 25 million people rely on Lake Mead for their water supply across Arizona, California, Mexico, and Nevada.

Overall, the Colorado River provides water for 40 million Americans. That’s more than 12% of the entire US population.

What happens to the Colorado affects almost every major western U.S. city, thirty Native American tribes, 5.5 million acres of farmland, and northern Mexico.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/caitochs/colorado-river-drought-west-water

The river’s flow has declined by about 20 percent over the last century, according to a 2020 U.S. Geological Survey study.

And more than half of that decline is due to warming temperatures across the basin.

The study also found that without significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, it could go down by 31 percent by 2050.

This is a climate crisis playing out in real time. So, how did we get here? And what can be done?

You know how you guys are always begging me to do more videos about river systems and the minutia of interstate water compacts, well your day has come my friend!

The Colorado River is a massive system of rivers and tributaries that flows through seven states across 2,300 kilometers (1,448 miles) before ending in the Gulf of California (or the Sea of Cortez).

It plays such a significant role in the region it’s sometimes called the “Lifeline of the Southwest.”

The river begins at La Poudre Pass in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado at 10,184 feet above sea level where it’s fed by melting snow in the mountains.

Unsurprisingly it’s very close to the continental divide. Rivers to the west flow toward the Pacific, those in the east flow toward the atlantic.

From its headwaters, it flows south and feeds Grand Lake, Shadow Mountain Lake, and Lake Granby. Then cuts across western Colorado through Grand Junction before it enters Utah and starts carving up the southwest, through Arches National Park, Moab, The canyonlands, Glen Canyon, before collecting into Lake Powell.

From there it goes on to form Marble Canyon before the mother of them all, the Grand Canyon, shortly after that it forms Lake Mead, passes through the Hoover Dam, and flows south, eventually feeding Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.

It then continues flowing south, creating the border between Arizona and California, before it enters Mexico at Yuma and eventually ends its journey at the Gulf of California.

This river not only has created and shaped some of the most beautiful natural landscapes in the world, it crosses a wide range of natural environments and ecosystems.

Alpine tundra at its headwaters through semiarid plateaus and canyons to arid deserts in the lower basin.

It’s one of the most heavily developed rivers in the world, and that’s nothing new, it’s provided water for people and agriculture for thousands of years.

The Ute and Southern Paiute Indian tribes hunted and gathered in the plateaus and canyonlands and the Hohokam Indians in the lower basin built the largest prehistoric irrigation system in western America on the Gila and Salt rivers.

There’s also the Yuman tribes who did extensive floodplain farming along the Colorado River.

It’s also gone by many names over the years.

Various Native American tribes called it Tomichi, Nah-Un-Kah-Rea, or Akanaquint.

Spanish explorers in the 16th century called it Rio del Tizon, which translates to River of Embers or Firebrand River.

Some maps later named it the Rio Colorado de los Martyrs and the El Rio de Cosminas de Rafael, kinda tying its characteristic red water with the blood of martyrs.

Settlers in the 1800s named it the Grand River, possibly because it’s the river that goes through the Grand Canyon.

Colorado became a U.S. state in 1876, but the river didn’t go by the state’s name until 1921.

But in 1921, U.S. Representative Edward T. Taylor from Colorado pushed for Congress to change the name of the Grand River to the Colorado River because it should have the name of the state where it begins.

Congress approved the name change that same year, meaning last year the Colorado River as we know it turned 100 years old. And I bet you didn’t even send it a birthday card. You monster.

I didn’t send one either, but we all probably should have. The Colorado River irrigates 15% of crop output in the U.S. and 13 percent of livestock production.

The Colorado River Basin can’t afford to leave farmers out to dry

For example, pumped water irrigates plains in Northern Colorado where alfalfa and corn are grown and used to feed cattle.

And water pumped to southern California feeds vegetable crops that are shipped to restaurants and stores across the U.S.

If you live in the US, chances are you ate something today that was made possible by the Colorado river.

With so much at stake and so many people affected across such a wide area, it should come to no surprise that the Colorado River has been the subject of a LOT of treaties.

The Colorado River Compact in 1922 divided the river into lower and upper compact states.

  •  Arizona, California, Nevada (lower)
  • Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming (upper)

At the time of the agreement, the river was estimated to be close to 16.5 million acre-feet at Lees Ferry, Arizona. This is the dividing line between the lower and upper basins.

So they agreed to split fifteen million acre-feet of water between the lower and upper compact states. I guess 15 million just being a nice round conservative number.

Later on in 1944, another treaty allocated 1.5 million acre-feet per year to Mexico.

Lake Powell feeds the upper compact states, that one was formed by the Glen Canyon Dam, and Lake Mead feeds the lower states, created of course by the Hoover Dam.

The Hoover Dam also supplies almost all the electricity that powers the sights and sounds of Las Vegas.

All in all, the Colorado River has 15 dams, providing power for cities all along its path and forming reservoirs that hold more than 4 times the river’s annual flow.

And its tributaries have hundreds more dams that do the same for smaller towns and municipalities.

But going back to the 1922 Compact, it was later discovered that the initial estimate of 15 million acre-feet of water volume was actually kinda skewed.

Turns out the years leading up to the agreement was an abnormally wet period. So there was actually less water available than the agreements specified.

This led to tight regulation of the hydrology in the region, which is why there are a lot of restrictions on rainwater collection in Colorado. Because other states have a right by treaty to that water and it’s kind-of like you’re stealing from them.

In contrast to those abnormally wet years, since the year 2000, the Colorado River Basin has experienced a historic drought.
Sure, the river’s always had wet and dry times, but the last couple of decades are the driest the basin has seen in 1,200 years, based on tree rings and geological data.
And the major factor behind this exceptional drought? Take a guess.

Climate change. It’s climate change.

According to studies by scientists at Colorado State University and University of California-Los Angeles, 53 percent of the loss was caused by warmer temperatures.

Warmer temperatures that reduce the size of the average snowpack in the mountains. Less snow, less meltwater to feed the river.

Also the warmer temps cause plants to uptake more water to prevent dehydration, as well as boosts the amount of water that evaporates off the landscape.

The other 47 percent of the decrease was due to precipitation pattern shifts.

As in there’s less rainfall in the areas that feed the tributaries in the Rocky Mountains and more in other areas that aren’t effective in generating runoff.

The scientists named this the Millennium Drought and compared it with a drought from 1953 to 1968 when the river’s flow also shrank.

But that drought was caused by a period of less precipitation, and not so much by warming temperatures.

There’s actually more rain falling now than the last drought, but the levels are lower because of warmer temperatures.

When you factor in the rate of warming, it’s projected that the river’s flow could decrease by 5 to 20 percent over the next 40 years.

And by the year 2100, it could go down by as much as 55 percent.

Now someone in the comments is going to point out that population growth is also a factor and you would not be wrong about that.

The number of people in the states that rely on the Colorado River has gone up by more than six and a half million over the last 20 years.

In fact some of the fastest growing areas in the country are in this region. Utah saw the largest percentage growth of any state in the country at the last census.

This is an actual problem, many are starting to wonder if these states should be actively discouraging new residents.

Some might use that as a way of dismissing the climate change part of the equation, just saying it’s more people so of course there’s less water to go around, but that doesn’t change the measurably smaller snow pack that feeds the river and the measurably higher temperatures.

Population control is kind-of a hard sell in politics but the increase in population is exacerbating an already bad problem.

To reiterate how much is at stake here… The Colorado River Basin drives a $1.4 trillion economy. If it was its own country, it would be the world’s seventh largest economically.
So, what happens if it dries up completely?

Just for starters, 40 million people will be without water and could lead to major population shifts from some of the country’s largest cities, like L.A., Las Vegas, and Phoenix.

When we hear people talk about mass migration and climate refugees, it’s not just sea level rise flooding coastal cities, it’s this.

But even for people who don’t live in these cities, the effects could be catastrophic.

Less water for crops means more fish dying in rivers so we could see food shortages, reduced hydroelectric power entering the grid, increasing the costs of all those things and countless other connected industries…

All of which could compound on top of themselves and bring the world’s 7th largest economy to its knees, destabilizing other economies and leading to a total economic collapse.

Kinda starting off 2022 with a real joygasm of a video here.

But hold up, don’t panic just yet. There are some efforts in place to keep that from happening.

In October, the Arizona government allocated $30 million to help keep more water in Lake Mead.

These funds will be used to buy or rent water rights with Native American tribes and others who have guaranteed water allocations.
Urban areas are also doing their part in water conservation.

For example, Las Vegas is paying residents to rip out their lawns, and Los Angeles plans to recycle 100 percent of its wastewater by 2035.
The big year to keep an eye out for is 2026. That’s when the river’s management guidelines are set to expire.

Every state and everyone with an interest in the river’s future will be involved in a round of talks that will determine the river’s future.

And for all you out there that really nerd out on the intricacies of water treaties, and I know there are… tens of you out there… It’s gonna make for some pretty riveting CSPAN.

And whatever comes out of those talks had better work or the next round of talks could have mandatory stillsuits and evaporative water collectors on the table, which would suck because those things break down a lot and you need to get to Toshi station to pick up some power converters.

But all jokes aside, look, I know you’re tired of hearing about climate change and it probably feels like everything gets blamed on climate change to the point that even I’m like, okay, not everything is climate change.

And that’s true, not everything is climate change. But this is. And it’s REALLY bad.

We have to make some fundamental changes to the way we live and power our lives. If not by choice, eventually by necessity.

Just ask those farmers in Arizona that are right now deciding which fields to not plant this year.

This is a tangible problem that is affecting people’s lives today. And it’s not just on the Colorado river, this is happening in river systems all around the world.

So I don’t know as much as I talk about reducing climate change, maybe we should talk more about how we adapt to climate change in the coming decades.

Because that’s something we’ve already started doing.

Got anything to add? Anything I missed? Any changes you’ve made over issues like this? Throw them in the comments.

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2021 Year in Review | Answers With Joe

December 27, 2021

Well, 2021 is coming to a close, so let’s take a look back at some of the biggest science stories of the year – and look ahead at what to look forward to in 2022!

TRANSCRIPT:

Well, we made it. 2021 is coming to a close and here we are. We survived. A little beaten, a little broken, but here we are.

I say we survived… Truth be told, I’m recording this early because I’d like to have a little time off for the holidays so hopefully we’re all still here and haven’t been destroyed by an asteroid or something worse…

So, this is either my swan song or my latest episode. Either way, let’s make it a banger.

This is going to be one of my more straightforward episodes. It’s basically a list of the science and technology accomplishments of 2021, followed by what we can expect to happen in those fields next year.

Let’s launch right into it.

Space

First on our docket is space, our fascinating neighbor above our heads. Here are some highlights from this year.

NASA’s Perseverance rover landed safely on Mars in February. 

In April, a small helicopter that traveled with Perseverance named Ingenuity became the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet when it hovered for 30 seconds above the surface of Mars. 

Also in April, SpaceX secured a $2.89 billion contract with NASA to build its next crewed lunar lander. 

And let’s not forget another news item from April when China’s Tiangong space station was launched with its first core module named Tianhe. 

On May 5, the Starship SN15 from SpaceX flew up to around 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), performed several maneuvers, and landed softly on its landing pad six minutes after takeoff. 

SpaceX’s Starship prototypes are around 46 meters (150 feet) tall, similar to the height of a 15-story building. Three Raptor rocket engines power each starship.

On July 11, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo carried Richard Branson and five other crewmates to 86 kilometers (53 miles) above Earth’s surface.

They experienced four minutes of weightlessness before gliding back down to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.  

On July 20, Blue Origin carried its first humans above the Karman line, the boundary between our atmosphere and outer space that is 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the Earth’s surface.

Blue Origin’s founder Jeff Bezos, his brother, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, and Oliver Daemen were on the flight.

Funk was 82 years old, and Daemen was 18 years old, making them the oldest and youngest people to travel in outer space at the time.

On July 29, an incident occurred on board the International Space Station when a Russian module fired its thrusters when it shouldn’t have, making the station begin to spin, but luckily flight engineers were able to bring the station under control. 

On September 16th, the Inspiration4 mission orbited the Earth for 2 days carrying an all civilian crew on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, making it the first all civilian orbital flight in history.

The crew featured Jared Isaacman, who also funded the mission, Sian Proctor, Christopher Sembroski, and Hayley Arceneaux, who actually just recently was hired by SpaceX so congratulations to her.

Astra Space’s Rocket 3.3 reached orbit on November 20 from the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska on Kodiak Island. 

In December, Rocket Lab shared details about its Neutron rocket that’s designed to carry satellites into space.

The rocket is made out of a special carbon, will be mostly reusable, and should touchdown on a landing pad after launching. 

Electric Vehicles

Up next, electric vehicles.

According to BloombergNEF, electric vehicles made up 7.2 percent of global car sales in the first half of 2021.

That’s up from 2.6 percent in 2019 and 4.3 percent in 2020.

Its data also shows that electric vehicles made up 3 percent of sales in North America in the first half of the year. 

Some of the new vehicles that went on sale or were planned to go on sale this year include the:

  • Ford Mustang Mach-E
  • GMC Hummer EV
  • Mercedes-Benz EQC400
  • Nissan Ariya
  • Polestar 2
  • Rivian R1T
  • Tesla Cybertruck
  • Volkswagen ID.4

In October, automaker Rivian reported that it had produced 180 R1T pickups and delivered 156 of them. 

Also in October, Lucid Motors started its first delivery of Lucid Air Dream.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency certified that it can go 520 miles on a single charge, making it the longest range of any pure battery electric vehicle.

The vehicle was named MotorTrench Car of the Year that month, too. 

And in December, the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission requested documents from the company that relate to an investigation of its special purpose acquisition company merger with Churchill Capital Corp. IV earlier in the year.

No surprise, its stock shares plummeted by 10 percent when that news got out.

The Edison Electric Institute announced the new National Electric Highway Coalition in December.

The coalition includes more than 50 U.S. utility companies and cooperatives that have come together to help speed up the building of electric vehicle charging stations along the country’s highways.  

Tesla vehicles continued to be popular this year. In its third quarter that ended in October, its total production of its 3/Y and S/X models was 237,823, which is up 64 percent year over year.

Its deliveries for both models was 241,391, a 73 percent increase year over year. 

And in late October, Tesla’s market value hit $1 trillion after it made a deal to sell 100,000 vehicles to car-rental company Hertz.

Healthcare

Moving on. Next up: Healthcare and a couple of highlights from this past year.

Back in April, Neuralink released a video showing a monkey using the company’s brain chip to play the video game Pong telepathically.

The company also raised $205 million in venture backing over the summer.

It plans to start testing its brain chips in humans next year. 

Probably the biggest news in healthcare this year was the approval of the COVID-19 vaccine, which regardless of how it’s been weaponized politically, was a huge achievement and a major step forward in mRNA vaccines.

As of early December, more than 8.3 billion doses have been administered across 184 countries, including 476 million doses in the US. 

This is important because the more people are vaccinated against COVID-19, the better chance we have at overcoming the pandemic and helping slow down deadly mutations of the virus.

Environment

From your body to the world’s body, the environment.

At the end of COP26 in November, 151 countries submitted new climate plans to help cut their emissions by the year 2030.

In the fall, researchers at Linköping University in Sweden and Soochow University in China manufactured a solar cell using a solution with a high boiling point and without any toxic ingredients.

The cell’s energy efficiency is better than 17 percent.

Also this past fall, scientists at ETH Zurich in Switzerland built a plant that produces carbon-neutral liquid fuels from sunlight and air. 

In 2021, scientists at The Ohio State University discovered a way to turn hydrogen sulfide into hydrogen fuel.

Other Scientific Developments

A few other notable scientific developments include:

In July, researchers at Google along with physicists at Princeton, Stanford used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine “time crystal.” This was something that was only first theorized a couple years ago.

Gravitational-wave observatories released a new crop of 35 events, bringing the total number of detections to 90.

The new events include the lightest neutron star ever seen, as well as two clashes involving large black holes.

Scientists confirmed that there was no evidence of phosphine in the clouds of Venus. The gas may have been mistaken for sulfur dioxide. 

On October 1, the European and Japanese BepiColombo mission made its first fly-by of Mercury.

It passed just 199 kilometers (124 miles) above the planet’s surface and took black-and-white pictures of the planet’s crater-filled surface from a distance of around 1,000 kilometers (621 miles).

This year, a team at City University of Hong Kong discovered a new type of sound wave. This airbourne wave vibrates transversely and carries spin and orbital angular momentum like light does.

The discovery may help develop applications in acoustic communications, sensing, and imaging. 

It was reported in late November that scientists from the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering developed a new form of biological reproduction different from any animal or plant known to science.

They took stem cells from frogs and turned them into robots, called xenobots. Those robots began to reproduce. 

So, this is how humanity ends, right?

2022

Space

Assuming AI doesn’t eliminate the human race, we have some things to look forward to in 2022.

The James Webb Space Telescope launches on Dec. 22, 2021. Or maybe it’s launched already. We’ll know by the time this episode is released.

We should be able to start seeing images from the telescope about six months after it launches. 

SpaceX’s orbital starship may launch in January or February. It will involve a starship prototype named SN20 that has six Raptor engines and a 29-engine Super Heavy called Booster 4. 

NASA is planning to launch its megarocket called the Space Launch System in February. This rocket is part of the Artemis program, which plans to send astronauts to the Moon in 2024. 

Firefly Aerospace is aiming for its second orbital launch attempt of its Alpha rocket next year.

Relativity Space, a 3D rocket printing company, is planning the demonstration launch of its lightweight Terran 1 rocket in early 2022. 

Electric Vehicles

As far as electric vehicles are concerned, we can expect exciting new models to be released next year. Some of these include: 

  • BMW i4
  • Cadillac Lyriq
  • Ford F-150 Lightning
  • Kia EV6
  • Polestar 3
  • Rivian RS1
  • Toyota bZ4X
  • Volvo C40 Recharge

Meanwhile Tesla is projecting to reach 1.3 million deliveries in 2022 as the Giga Berlin factory goes into full production along with the Austin Gigafactory. And with any luck we’ll start to see cars delivered with the new 4680 cells

Healthcare

When it comes to health and medicine next year, I’m going to make a bold prediction: There will be more COVID-19 variants and more vaccines. I know, wild, right?

Environment

Even more wild is the alternative energy sector.

A report from S&P Global Market Intelligence says that U.S. solar and wind deployments will hit new records in 2022.

It’s expected that as much as 44 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and 27 gigawatts of wind power will come online next year.

S&P also expects 8 gigawatts of storage to be installed in 2022. This would be about six times higher than a previous record in 2020.

So that’s just kind-of a quick look at what we can expect next year, but I’d love to hear what you’re most excited about. Let me know in the comments.

As for me personally, this last year has been as weird for me as it has been for everyone else, I’m sure 2022 will innovate new and exciting kinds of weird for us to experience.

Channel wise it’s been a great year and if anybody’s curious my top 5 videos were…

I’ve got a lot of big things planned for the next year, I just purchased a lot of equipment so we can step up the quality of the videos… This one notwithstanding.

But at the end of every year, we look back on the previous year with a certain level of exhaustion and hope that the next one will be better. I’m sure 2022 will have its rough moments, but I wish the best for all of you.

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