June 2025: Science History from 50, 100 and 150 Years Ago
'The institution of slavery is not unique to human societies. No fewer than 35 species of ants depend to some extent on slave labor for their existence. The techniques by which they raid other ant colonies to strengthen their labor force rank among the most sophisticated behavior patterns found in the insect world. Most of the slave-making species are so specialized as raiders that they starve to death if deprived of their slaves. Together they display an evolutionary descent that begins with casual raiding by otherwise free-living colonies, passes through the development of full-blown warrior societies and ends with such degeneration that the workers can no longer even conduct raids. —Edward O. Wilson'
Tornado Outbreak Largest on Record
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'During the spring and early summer tornadoes are likely to occur between the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario. On April 3 of last year conditions were right. The first tornado struck at 1:10 P.M. By 5:20 A.M. the next day a total of 148 tornadoes had swept across the countryside and cities from Laurel, Miss., to Windsor, Ont., killing 315 people and injuring 5,484. In terms of sheer scope and the number of storms, it was the largest tornado outbreak on record. Immediately after, Theodore Fujita of the University of Chicago and his colleagues organized aerial and ground surveys. Fujita and his co-workers found that 74 percent of the fatalities occurred in houses and buildings, 17 percent in mobile homes, 6 percent in automobiles and 3 percent among people en route to shelter.'
In 1971 Theodore Fujita and Allen Pearson introduced the Fujita-Pearson scale to describe tornado intensity, from 0 (wind speed less than 73 mph) to 5 (261 to 318 mph).
Vacation Fun with Mud Dwellers
'The trouble with vacations is that they have a way of being just what their name implies: too vacant. Few human experiences are worse than that of the individual who finds themself sitting around in the country or at the seashore with 24 hours a day on their hands and nothing interesting to do. Science can help. Anywhere in the out of doors there is opportunity for real fun with science. In this issue, we describe some of the interesting things you can do and see with rocks and streams and the sides of hills. And we explain some secrets of the clouds. Another good way to make your vacation interesting is to study mud. In the bottoms of sluggish streams and small fresh-water ponds, even water-filled ditches along the roadside, there is a vast and interesting world of tiny creatures. Science calls them animalcules, protozoa, protophyta, and other long names. You cannot see them without a microscope. But for the price of one weekend visit to a moderately fashionable resort you can buy a microscope. You can take it out anywhere and discover this intensely interesting world of the mud dwellers.'
White Ants Destroy Saint Helena
'White ants were introduced into Saint Helena island [in the South Atlantic Ocean] in 1840 in some timber from a slave ship. Mr. M'Lachlan has identified the species termes tenuis, peculiar to South America. The mischief it has done is almost incredible, and it appears to have gradually destroyed the whole of Jamestown. A considerable portion of the books in the public library, especially theological literature, was devoured by them, and the whole of the interior would be destroyed without the exterior of the volumes seeming otherwise than intact.'
The insects are known today as Heterotermes tenuis, a subterranean termite.
Cooking with Gas
'A gas-burning cooking stove has been invented by B. Giles of Blackheath, England. He claims to have succeeded in cooking the most delicate dishes without their imbibing the slightest flavor from the products of combustion.'
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Miniature Neutrino Detector Catches Elusive Particles at Nuclear Reactor
A relatively small detector caught neutrinos from a nuclear reactor using a technique known as coherent scattering Physicists have caught neutrinos from a nuclear reactor using a device weighing just a few kilograms, orders of magnitude less massive than standard neutrino detectors. The technique opens new ways to stress-test the known laws of physics and to detect the copious neutrinos produced in the hearts of collapsing stars. 'They finally did it,' says Kate Scholberg, a physicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. 'And they have very beautiful result.' The experiment, called CONUS+, is described on 30 July in Nature. Challenging quarry Neutrinos are elementary particles that have no electrical charge and generally don't interact with other matter, making them extraordinarily difficult to detect. Most neutrino experiments catch these elusive particles by observing flashes of light that are generated when a neutrino collides with an electron, proton or neutron. These collisions occur extremely infrequently, so such detectors typically have masses of tonnes or thousands of tonnes to provide enough target material to gather neutrinos in relevant numbers. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] Scholberg and her collaborators first demonstrated the mini-detector technique in 2017, using it to catch neutrinos produced by an accelerator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The Oak Ridge particles have slightly higher energies than those made in reactors. As a result, detecting reactor neutrinos was even more challenging, she says. But lower-energy neutrinos also allow for a more precise test of the standard model of physics. Scholberg's COHERENT detector was the first to exploit a phenomenon called coherent scattering, in which a neutrino 'scatters' off an entire atomic nucleus rather than the atom's constituent particles. Coherent scattering uses the fact that particles of matter can act as waves — and the lower the particles' energy, the longer their wavelength, says Christian Buck, a leader of the CONUS collaboration. If the wavelength of a neutrino is similar to the nucleus's diameter, 'then the neutrino sees the nucleus as one thing. It doesn't see the internal structure', says Buck, who is a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. The neutrino doesn't interact with any subatomic particles, but does cause the nucleus to recoil — depositing a tiny amount of energy into the detector. Catching sight of a nucleus Coherent scattering occurs more than 100 times as frequently as the interactions used in other detectors, where the neutrino 'sees' a nucleus as a collection of smaller particles with empty space in between. This higher efficiency means that detectors can be smaller and still spot a similar number of particles in the same time frame. 'Now you can afford to build detectors on the kilogram scale,' Buck says. The downside is that the neutrinos deposit much less energy at the nucleus. The recoil induced on a nucleus by a neutrino is comparable to that produced on a ship by a ping-pong ball, Buck says — and has until recent years has been extremely challenging to measure. The CONUS detector is made of four modules of pure germanium, each weighing 1 kilogram. It operated at a nuclear reactor in Germany from 2018 until that reactor was shut down in 2022. The team then moved the detector, upgraded to CONUS+, to the Leibstadt nuclear power plant in Switzerland. From the new location, the team now reports having seen around 395 collision events in 119 days of operation — consistent with the predictions of the standard model of particle physics. After COHERENT's landmark 2017 result, which was obtained with detectors made of caesium iodide, Scholberg's team repeated the feat with detectors made of argon and of germanium. Separately, last year, two experiments originally designed to hunt for dark matter reported seeing hints of low-energy coherent scattering of neutrinos produced by the Sun. Scholberg says that the standard model makes very clean predictions of the rate of coherent scattering and how it changes with different types of atomic nucleus, making it crucial to compare results from as many detecting materials as possible. And if the technique's sensitivity improves further, coherent scattering could help to push forward the state of the art of solar science. Researchers say that coherent scattering will probably not completely replace any existing technologies for detecting neutrinos. But it can spot all three known types of neutrino (and their corresponding antiparticles) down to low energies, whereas some other techniques can capture only one type. This ability means it could complement massive detectors that aim to pick up neutrinos at higher energies, such as the Hyper-Kamiokande observatory now under construction in Japan. This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 30 2025. Solve the daily Crossword
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4 days ago
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Why Earth Is Rotating Extra Fast This Summer, Shortening Days by Milliseconds
As Earth spins through space, its rate of rotation changes. Here's why If you haven't accomplished as much this summer as you had hoped to, you can blame forces far beyond your control: a few of these dog days, by one measure, are among the shortest you've ever lived through. For most of humanity's history, we have measured time by the sun as it rises and sets—essentially, through Earth's orientation to the cosmos surrounding us. But compare that technique with modern, superprecise timekeeping, and soon you'll find that each day varies a bit in length at the scale of thousandths of a second. This summer a few factors are adding up to make a handful of Earth's spins—those occurring on July 10, July 22 and August 5—more than a millisecond faster than the average of the past several decades. Yes, there are scientists whose job is to track these things; no, they are not particularly concerned by these developments. 'It's a very small phenomenon,' says Christian Bizouard, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory and primary scientist at the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service's Earth Orientation Center. 'There is nothing extraordinary [happening].' [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] Bizouard has a point, of course—no one is going to notice the sun rising a millisecond earlier or later than we might otherwise expect. But tracking Earth's rotation to this level of precision is vital because countless aspects of modern life rely on our ability to pinpoint locations to within a meter, and high-precision GPS navigation requires that satellites know exactly where they are compared with features on Earth's surface. So Bizouard and his colleagues track Earth's orientation in space. To do so, they have enlisted astronomers all over the planet to monitor a collection of about 300 objects, he says, primarily the bright, very distant, supermassive-black-hole-powered objects known as quasars. All day, every day, pairs of distant observatories tuned to radio wavelengths of light check in on their specific object. By measuring the timing mismatch between light received at each station, scientists can calculate the precise location of the observatories and, in turn, the planet. That's how scientists know that the amount of time it takes Earth to complete one rotation varies slightly. But why does the planet's speed vary? Even if you may never notice their loss, the missing milliseconds offer us a glimpse into the intricate oddities of the planet we live on—so let's track them down. Officially, time is defined by nine-billion-some vibrations of a cesium atom per second, 86,400 seconds per day. Inconveniently, Earth's behavior isn't governed by cesium atoms. Physics holds that, as a solid object moving in a vacuum, Earth ought to keep spinning at the same rate unless some outside force intervenes, says Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. But Earth isn't quite a simple solid object, and it has a rather large moon that can provide outside force. That means several different factors can affect Earth's rotation speed. Two of these factors—the core and the atmosphere—each affects Earth's spin under a similar principle. The overall rotational speed of the Earth system must stay steady, so if a component's movement changes, then the overall planet has to compensate. 'The sum of all the rotations has to add up to the same thing,' Agnew says. 'If part of the Earth is going slower, another part has to go faster.' Take Earth's core, for example, hiding below what we think of as the solid ground we walk on. Only the inner portion of the core is actually solid; the rest is fluid. 'There's this giant ball of molten iron about the size of the moon inside the Earth,' Agnew says. All that liquid metal (there's a little nickel mixed in with the iron) is moving, creating the magnetic field that shields us from some of the many hazards of space. The core's activity is quite a mystery. The region isn't actually all that far away—less than 2,000 miles from the surface, closer than New York City is from Los Angeles—but it cannot be directly accessed and is therefore very difficult to understand. In recent decades, for whatever reason, the core's spin has been slowing, forcing the rest of Earth to speed up to compensate. 'The core is what changes how fast the Earth rotates on periods of 10 years to hundreds of years,' Agnew says. 'The core has been slowing down for the last 50 years, and as a result, the Earth has been speeding up.' (This speed-up is part of why timekeepers have not implemented an artificial leap second—a tactic used annually during small stretches of the late 20th century—since 2016 and don't expect to anytime soon.) A similar phenomenon plays out in Earth's atmosphere. Like the core, the atmosphere is a fluid mass—and although it's a very complex one, scientists have much better insight into it than into the elusive core. The atmosphere changes with the seasons as the sun's radiation falls disproportionately on different parts of the planet. The Northern and Southern Hemispheres each have a primary polar jet stream, a river of strong wind flowing from west to east that wanders north and south as it carries weather around the planet. Because of Earth's topography and the influence of ocean currents, the Southern Hemisphere's jet stream is stronger overall than the Northern Hemisphere's. And each jet stream is fastest during its hemisphere's winter, slowing somewhat in local summer. Combine those factors and the Northern Hemisphere summer sees a small decrease in total speeds of westerly wind (those flowing west to east), Agnew says—forcing the solid Earth to spin a smidge more rapidly to compensate. This atmospheric effect is why the rotation rate changes in an annual cycle, with the days when Earth rotates fastest tending to cluster in the Northern Hemisphere's summer, particularly July and August. To the extent that the core explains decadal changes and the atmosphere explains annual ones, the moon explains millennial and daily differences in Earth's rotation rate. At geologic timescales, Earth's rotation is slowing down because of the moon's tidal influences on the water that fills our planet's oceans. The moon's gravity sloshes water around, causing an infinitesimal friction between ocean and seafloor. 'That's been slowing the Earth down since the Earth had oceans,' Agnew says. This trend doesn't register to humans, but over time, the effect is quite noticeable. About 70 million years ago, shortly before the extinction of nonavian dinosaurs, a day was about half an hour shorter than it is today, for example. Wind the clock even further back, to 245 million years ago, when dinosaurs first came on the scene, and a day lasted a bit more than 22 and a half hours, scientists have calculated. The moon causes a second phenomenon that affects Earth's rotation on a human timescale. Beachgoers know full well that the moon's gravity causes the seas' daily high and low tides, and the solid Earth rises and falls a little bit in response to the moon as well, albeit not nearly as noticeably. But the moon's orbit doesn't line up with Earth's equator: our constant companion's path is a bit tilted compared with Earth. Because of this, the tidal bulges wander north and south over the course of the moon's loops around Earth. When the moon is right over the equator, the tidal bulges are, too, and therefore their mass is farther away from the planet's spin axis; when the moon is the farthest north or south, the bulges move away from the equator, slightly closer to the planet's spin axis. This taps into the same physics as a spinning ice skater with outstretched arms does when they hug their chest to speed up—Earth's rotation rate speeds up just a hair when the moon is at the northernmost or southernmost point in its orbit, about every two weeks. All these factors combine for the remarkably complicated state of Earth's rotation rate: it is slowing over geologic time because of ocean friction but has been speeding up over recent decades because of the core, and its spin speed slightly increases every summer from the atmosphere and every two weeks from the moon's north-south wandering. The changes make such good sense in terms of physics that scientists like Bizouard are able to take variations in Earth's rotation rate for granted. And scientists have some grasp of the annual and weekly changes in Earth's spin rate, allowing them to expect the speedy summer days. But the mysteries of Earth's core prevent these experts from confidently charting how Earth's rotation will change into the future. 'We are not able to predict anything,' Bizouard says. Scientists put out predictions anyway, of course. As summer approached, they thought August 5 might be the shortest day of the year, a full 1.5 milliseconds shorter than usual. Current estimates still indicate that this day will be about that much shorter, and that August 18 may be another contender for the year's fastest rotation. For comparison, the shortest rotation day in recent years was on July 5, 2024, when we lost 1.66 milliseconds. Yes, you've probably now spent more time wrapping your mind around Earth's quickest days than you've ever lost to the vagaries of our planet's spin; I know I have. Let's just call it another reason why we live on the most remarkable planet out there. Solve the daily Crossword
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What Happens To Your Consciousness After You Die?
What happens to our consciousness after we die? It's a question that has fascinated humans for all of our history. Some think there is nothing after death, while others believe in an afterlife or reincarnation. There is even an emerging theory about a "third state" between life and death based on cellular research. The question of what happens to our consciousness after we die has no single answer, but there are compelling theories. Sam Parnia is an associate professor of medicine at New York University Langone and directs research focused on cardiopulmonary resuscitation. His book, "Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death," explores research in this field, and he spoke about it in a University of Chicago podcast. "The issue of life and death was pretty clear until the discovery of CPR ... many people who've survived episodes of getting close to death or even their heart stopping and going beyond what I call the threshold of death were recalling very vivid and universal experiences about themselves, which were labeled near-death experiences," he explained. According to Parnia, the term came about because at the time, we didn't know that humans can be brought back to life acfter experiencing biological death. "So based on a philosophy that you could never come back from death, they were labeled near-death experiences," he continued. "We don't think that term is accurate anymore. And the term that we now use is a recalled experience of death." Read more: This Is How Most Life On Earth Will End Studies Have Found Brain Activity After Death Many researchers have explored this subject, including a 2025 experiment that found humans and animals give off a light that vanishes after death. Going half a century back, medical student Raymond Moody conducted his own study that was published in his 1975 book, "Life After Life." It followed 150 people who had remarkably similar descriptions of their near-death experiences. They described leaving their body, going through a tunnel, seeing beings of light, recalling the events of their lives, and then being returned to their bodies. Dr. Jimo Borjigin is an associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and the Department of Neurology for the University of Michigan Medical School. She and her team studied four patients who were removed from life support. Afterward, two of them had a burst of heart rate activity and brain activity in the area associated with dreaming, hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness. The two other patients had no such activity. The founding director of the Michigan Center for Consciousness Science, Dr. George Mashour, collaborated with Borjigin and her team and commented on the fascinating findings. "How vivid experience can emerge from a dysfunctional brain during the process of dying is a neuroscientific paradox," he said in a statement. There Are Many Theories About What Happens After You Die Some steadfastly believe that nothing happens to your consciousness after you die — death is the end. This may be why people wish for longer lives. In an episode of "Expedition Unknown: Search for the Afterlife" on Discovery, host Josh Gates visited a Russian cryogenics lab. People who had died from illness were preserved there, where they hoped one day science would be able to revive and cure them. They might have liked this app that uses AI to predict when you will die. Researchers at the University of Liège speculate that "recalled death" experiences are similar to when animals play dead to escape danger, known as thanatosis. Others believe it may be the brain's attempt to restart itself that is causing such strange experiences. Greek philosopher Socrates believed in an immortal soul based on the cycles of life, death, and rebirth around us. Religion and spirituality also advocate for an immortal soul. Christianity and Islam believe in an afterlife, while Buddhism says the end of your life marks the beginning of your next life. Pagans have varying views depending on their specific lines of belief, but they generally agree that there is something beyond death. What happens to your consciousness after you die is a question likely never to be fully settled, but compelling scientific research and spiritual beliefs can help us find a theory that gives us comfort. Read the original article on BGR. Solve the daily Crossword
