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2 days ago
- General
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Illinois man has spent 40 years rebuilding a WWII-era B-17 bomber in his barn
A man in Marengo, Illinois, is on a mission to fully restore a World War II-era B-17 bomber—a project he's been diligently working on in a roadside barn for the past 40 years. A lifelong aviation enthusiast, Mike Kellner began his journey in high school after hearing that a junkyard in Maine was looking to offload the abandoned remains of the historic bomber. The asking price was '$7,000 or best offer' for a collection of disassembled parts. Kellner loaded the 75-foot aluminum behemoth onto a house trailer (he had to extend it by about 10 feet) and hauled it halfway across the country with a pickup truck. It's lived in his barn ever since. Kellner shared the decades-long story of his restoration project with local outlet WGN earlier this week. And unlike many World War II-era roadside relics, this one isn't just collecting dust. Kellner has spent countless hours working to restore the plane to its former glory, performing his own repairs, adding finishing touches, and tracking down an array of rare and hard-to-find parts. Word of his efforts spread, attracting other aviation enthusiasts who have volunteered their time over the years to assist with the restoration. Kellner documents the entire process on a Facebook page, which features thousands of update posts dating back to 2010. He doesn't just want the project to be something pretty to look at—he wants it to fly. 'It is a piece of history, and I would like the opportunity to fly it,' Kellner told WGN. Popular Science reached out to Kellner for more details but has not heard back. The B-17 was the most iconic bomber used by the US military during the second World War. Its origin actually traces back a decade earlier to 1934, when the Army Air Corps approached Boeing with an ask to design and develop a massive plane capable of carrying bombs at 10,000 feet and for more than 10 hours. The military wanted a new breed of bomber that would be able to travel beyond enemy lines at great distances and drop bombs with precision. It needed to be able to reach altitudes high enough to fly outside of the range of enemy antiaircraft artillery. The eventual B-17 featured a state-of-the-art Norden bombsight to maintain accuracy even at extreme altitudes. Early versions of the B-17 entered production in 1937, but manufacturing ramped up significantly after the U.S. officially entered World War II in 1941. The bomber that eventually flew missions behind enemy lines featured four engines—a major upgrade from the then-standard two—and was equipped with a smattering of gun turrets, including ones in the nose, upper fuselage, and tail. This cornucopia of munitions, combined with the aircraft's mammoth size, earned it the nickname 'Flying Fortress.' The B-17 currently being resurrected in Kellner's barn reportedly carries two names. One, 'Desert Rat,' is painted in bold yellow lettering on the aircraft's exterior. The other, 'Tangerine,' was discovered later, scrawled somewhere inside the unclear how much longer Kellner will need to make his dream of flying the Desert Rat a reality. The task seems like a daunting one for someone working part-time on a shoestring budget but then again, few would have likely predicted he would have made it this far to begin with. You can keep up with all of Kellner's progress by following his official Facebook page here.
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3 days ago
- General
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Archaeolgists Make Surprising Discovery About Ice Age Hunting Tools
A recent study published in Nature Communications has found the first-known evidence of human beings manufacturing tools out of whale bones. Throughout 26 rock shelters and caves within northern Spain and southwestern France, researchers found 173 bone specimens, including 83 tools and 90 fragments. An analysis using Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) found that 131 of those specimens were whale bones belonging to sperm whales, gray whales, blue whales, fin whales, and right or bowhead whales.'Our study reveals that the bones came from at least five species of large whales, the oldest of which date to approximately 19,000–20,000 years ago,' lead author Jean-Marc Pétillon said in a press release. 'These represent some of the earliest known evidence of humans using whale remains as tools.' The bones bear little sign of water wear, which means they were likely harvested from animals which had washed up on the shore rather than deep-sea hunting. Many of the tools were dated between 17,500 and 16,000 years ago, though the oldest specimen found dates back 20,000 years. In particular, the bones of sperm whales were found to be particularly popular in fashioning spears and other hunting instruments. Over 40 percent of projectile points and 73 percent of foreshafts analyzed were created from sperm whale bones.'What was more surprising to me, as an archaeologist more accustomed to terrestrial faunas, was that these whale species remained the same despite the great environmental difference between the Late Pleistocene and today,' Pétillon told Popular Science. 'In the same period, continental faunas are very different: the ungulates hunted include reindeer, saiga antelopes, bison, etc., all disappeared from Western Europe today.'Pétillon believes ancient people came from far and wide to scavenge whale bones and other parts when they washed up on shore. With further research, he and his team hope to deduce why tools constructed from whale bone declined so rapidly 16,000 years ago. 'The news of a stranding travels fast first, because it smells a lot [from a] long distance away, so people would concentrate from quite far,' Pétillon told New Scientist. 'So, it might not have been the main driver of people going to the seashore, but when that happened, it probably had an influence on the movement of the people who probably changed their planned pattern of movement to go there.'Archaeolgists Make Surprising Discovery About Ice Age Hunting Tools first appeared on Men's Journal on May 30, 2025
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4 days ago
- Health
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Are we in a sixth mass extinction?
Around 66 million years ago, a six-mile-wide asteroid hit Earth, triggering the extinction of three-quarters of all living species. The age of dinosaurs, which had lasted 165 million years, ended with a fiery crash and suddenly sooty skies. Farther back in our planet's history, volcanic eruptions, rapid climate change, and plummeting oxygen levels have caused at least four additional mass extinctions, with smaller pulses of biodiversity loss also showing up in the fossil record. In each of the five largest events, which spanned anywhere from thousands to tens of millions of years, at least 75 percent of Earth's species died out. These are the most commonly agreed upon major mass extinctions in paleontology. You've also likely heard about a sixth one. Many ecologists and biologists say we're on the precipice (or already in the midst) of another era of mass extinction. This sixth mass extinction, also referred to as the Holocene or Anthropocene extinction, is described as ongoing and caused by human activities. Hunting, overfishing, habitat destruction, human encroachment, and invasive species introductions are the major drivers of the losses incurred thus far. Human-caused climate change is also set to become another factor, as decades of rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and increasingly extreme weather catch up to already stressed ecosystems. It's indisputable that humans shape life on Earth in major ways, and that animals and plants are dying out at an alarming rate. But is it true that our impact is on par with that of an asteroid? Not all scientists agree. There is no question that Earth is losing species fast. 'Biodiversity crisis is a pretty accurate term' to describe the present moment, says John Wiens, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Arizona. 'Extinction crisis' is another, he adds, 'based on the large number of species that are threatened with extinction.' Five other experts that Popular Science corresponded with for this article all agree on this 'crisis' terminology. In comparison with background levels of extinction, all of our sources said that current extinction rates are much higher. Extinction isn't always a sign of disaster. It's also a natural outcome of evolution. As species diverge, compete, and struggle to survive, not all of them make it long-term. Conditions on Earth shift over geologic time, and those forces inevitably lead to some dead ends on the tree of life. [ Related: Earth's 5 catastrophic mass extinctions, explained. ] However, throughout most of our planet's history, the rate of new species emerging has exceeded the rate of species dying out, says Gerardo Ceballos, an ecologist and conservation biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Thus, biodiversity normally exists in a positive balance. Currently, we're losing species far faster than new ones emerge. Present extinction rates are up to 100 times faster than background levels, according to one 2015 study co-authored by Ceballos. In that analysis, Ceballos and his colleagues estimated the natural vertebrate extinction rate sits at around two species lost per 10,000 species each century. Then, they compared that statistic with the number of confirmed and likely extinctions recorded on the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. They determined that, even using conservative numbers, the extinction rate for every vertebrate group was between eight and 100 times the background rate. The species losses incurred in the past 100 years would have taken thousands of years to occur naturally, per the assessment. Other counts find the current rate of extinction is even higher. One often cited 2014 study concluded Earth is losing species 1,000 times faster than natural background rates. That analysis also reported the level of loss is poised to accelerate to 10,000 times the background rate in the near future. These numbers vary widely in large part because the estimates of background extinction rates are difficult to pin down. The fossil record is incomplete, so scientists generally rely on mathematical models and reconstructions of the past to determine what was once alive and when it died out. Small shifts in starting assumptions can lead to major changes in the final calculations. The time period you're calculating average extinction rate over and types of organisms you're assessing also impact the result. This same ambiguity in estimating extinction rate persists in the present. Though Wiens describes our moment as a biodiversity crisis, he doesn't believe it meets the bar for a sixth mass extinction. 'No one has provided a quantitative analysis that has really shown that,' he says. If the top five major mass extinctions in the paleontological record each killed off at least 75 percent of species at the time, then the sixth one should theoretically cross the same threshold. Yet so far, the IUCN has confirmed fewer than 1,000 extinctions from the past 500 years–just about 0.1 percent of all known species, according to an analysis co-authored by Wiens in April. We have not catalogued every living species, and the IUCN is far from having assessed all known species. The IUCN database is also biased, skewing towards large, charismatic vertebrates and wealthy regions like North America. The criteria for extinction are strict, requiring extensive surveys, and yet sometimes species reappear after being declared gone forever. Still, the IUCN dataset is among the best windows we have into the state of life on Earth, and it suggests there's a way to go before three quarters of species are gone. [ Related: Earth's 'Great Dying' killed 80-90% of life. How some amphibians survived. ] However, it's worth noting that other assessments estimate a much higher proportion of species have already disappeared. One 2022 paper, which extrapolated extinction rates from data on mollusks, found that upwards of 10 percent of all species may have gone extinct in the past 500 years. And, those like Ceballos who argue a major mass extinction has already begun, point to calculations that indicate we could reach that grim, 75 percent mile marker in just a few centuries. If all IUCN threatened species went extinct in the next 100 years, and that rate of species loss continued, Earth would surpass 75 percent loss of species across most vertebrate animal groups in under 550 years, according to a landmark 2011 review paper. This study published in Nature, remains among the most thorough quantitative assessments of extinction trends. Yet to write every threatened species off as doomed to imminent extinction would be a mistake, says Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University and president of the conservation non-profit, Saving Nature. 'We have no idea what the future is,' he says. And, in the meantime, 'there's a lot of things we can do.' Pimm points to conservation success stories like the rebound of certain baleen whale populations and the stabilization of savanna elephant numbers over the past 25 years. He worries that claims about the sixth extinction might leave the public resigned to what might otherwise be a preventable catastrophe. 'It's not inevitable,' Pimm says. From the paleontological perspective, mass extinctions are something that can only be definitively confirmed in the past tense. They are defined based on the proportion of species that existed before, but not after a cataclysmic event like a major asteroid strike. If there's not yet an after, it's impossible to say for sure what number of lineages died out. There are no crystal balls in science. And in that uncertainty, there's room for hope that we could stop species from sliding off the cliff. But nearly half of all animals are losing population worldwide, according to a 2023 estimate, based on trend data for more than 71,000 species. Barring exceptional levels of investment and intervention, lots of species are already doomed to extinction, says Sarah Otto, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia. 'Many of the extinctions we think that humans are causing haven't actually happened yet. These are the 'living dead' species whose population sizes are small, whose habitats are fragmented,' she explains. 'There's a lot of extinction debt.' [ Related: An 'ancestral bottleneck' took out nearly 99 percent of the human population 800,000 years ago. ] A 2020 report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found that an average of 25 percent of species across animal and plant groups are threatened with extinction within decades, and that the human impacts to blame are intensifying. Without preventative action, as species disappear, 'there will be a further acceleration in the global rate of species extinction,' the report authors write. Species depend on one another for survival, Otto notes. For example, in our acidifying and warming oceans, coral reefs are teetering on the brink. If they go, then the fate of the many species dependent on the infrastructure they provide is unclear. Major losses of marine life could then have knock-on effects on land. Notably, the IPBES report doesn't directly consider the influence of climate change on future extinction rate. If it did, 'those projected numbers could really go up,' says under Wiens' comparatively rosy outlook, he still expects 12 to 40 percent species losses over the next century. And if species don't disappear across their entire ranges, local losses and population declines can still have major repercussions for ecosystem function and human society. The 75 percent threshold is an arbitrary line, Otto notes. Lots can go wrong before we officially place sixth in the world's worst contest. Human impacts on biodiversity 'will be seen in the fossil record,' she says. 'Whether or not it's going to be up there in the top six is really a matter of what we do next.' This story is part of Popular Science's Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you've always wanted to know? Ask us.
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6 days ago
- Lifestyle
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Oldest-known whale bone tools discovered in a Spanish cave
Prehistoric stone tools are among some of the oldest and important pieces of evidence we have of a time when our species began to evolve a higher level of intelligence. Many of these tools were also made from animal bones–including the bones of some of the biggest animals on the planet. New research finds that humans living up to 20,000 years ago may have been making tools out of whale bones. The discovery not only adds more to the story of early human tool use, but gives a glimpse into ancient whale ecology. The findings are detailed in a study published May 27 in the journal Nature Communications. 'That humans frequented the seashore, and took advantage of its resources, is probably as old as humankind,' Jean-Marc Pétillon, an archaeologist at the Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès in France and study co-author, tells Popular Science. 'There is evidence of whale scavenging at the site of Dungo 5 in Angola dating to 1 million years.' For our Paleolithic ancestors living in coastal areas, the sturdy bones of large whales were potentially an excellent resource for various tools. However, many prehistoric coastal archaeological sites are fragile and are at risk of rising sea levels, making reconstructing the past interactions between marine mammals and humans a challenge for scientists.. 'The tools were dated between 20,000 and 16,000 years before [the] present, a period way before the invention of agriculture, and during which all human groups in the world lived a life of nomadic hunter-gatherers,' says Pétillon. 'Climatically, this is the last part of the last glaciation, with a climate much colder than today.' That colder climate brought a sea level that was roughly almost 400 feet lower than it is today. With this change in sea level, we have no direct evidence of the human occupations on the shore, since the rise in sea level either wiped them out or the settlements lay buried under 300 or so feet of water. With this lack of evidence Paleolithic people have historically been viewed as inland hunters. Those living in present day western Europe would have hunted red deer, reindeer, bison, horse, and ibex. While they did hunt inland, there is a growing body of evidence from the last 20 years showing that they also took advantage of the Paleolithic seashore. 'There are studies showing that people also gathered seashells, hunted seabirds, fished marine fish, etc., as a complement to terrestrial diet, and these studies were made possible because Paleolithic people carried remains of marine origin away from the seashore, into inland sites,' explains Pétillon. 'Our study adds whales to the lot. It is one more contribution showing that Late Paleolithic humans also regularly frequented the seashore and used its resources.' [ Related: Ice age humans made needles from animal bones, archeologists discover. ] In the new study, the team analyzed 83 bone tools that were excavated from sites around Spain's Bay of Biscay and 90 additional bones uncovered from Santa Catalina Cave in Spain. They used mass spectrometry and radiocarbon dating to identify which species the bones belonged to and estimate the age of the samples. The bones come from at least five species of large whales–sperm, fin, blue, gray, and either right whales or bowheads. The latter two species are indistinguishable using this technique. The oldest whale specimens are dated to roughly 19,000 to 20,000 years ago, representing some of the earliest known evidence of humans using the remains of whales to make tools. Some of the whale bone points themselves were over 15 inches long. 'Most of the objects made of whale bone are projectile points, part of the hunting equipment. They can be very long and thick, and were probably hafted on spear-style projectiles rather than arrows (and the use of the spearthrower is documented in this period),' says Pétillon. 'The main raw material used to manufacture projectile points at that period is antler, because it is less brittle and more pliable than bone, but whale bone was preferred in certain cases probably because of its large dimensions.' Most of these whale species identified in this study are still found in the Bay of Biscay and northeastern North Atlantic to this day. However, gray whales are now primarily limited to the North Pacific Ocean and Arctic. Additional chemical data from the tools also suggests that the feeding habits of the ancient whales were slightly different than those living today. According to the authors, this is likely due to behavioral or environmental changes. That the whales in the area have stayed relatively the same was particularly intriguing for Pétillon. 'What was more surprising to me—as an archeologist more accustomed to terrestrial faunas—was that these whale species remained the same despite the great environmental difference between the Late Pleistocene and today,' he says. 'In the same period, continental faunas are very different: the ungulates hunted include reindeer, saiga antelopes, bison, etc., all disappeared from Western Europe today.' Importantly, the findings here do not imply that active whaling was occurring. The techniques at the time would not allow humans to hunt sperm, blue, or fin whales and the team believes that these populations took advantage of whale strandings to harvest the bones for tools. 'The earliest evidence of active whaling is much younger, around 6,000 [years] before present in Korea (site of Bangudae) and maybe around 5,000 before present in Europe (Neolithic sites in the Netherlands),' says Pétillon. Future studies could look at the systematic way that these ancient Atlantic Europeans systematically used the seashore and how they developed their ocean hunting techniques.
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6 days ago
- Climate
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What is dew point? A meteorologist explains that sticky air.
Parts of the United States have gotten an early taste of summer weather, as temperatures and humidity are on the rise. Summer can start to feel particularly sticky when the dew points climb and moisture fills the air. These high dew points don't just make us feel miserable, but are crucial to forecasting the severe storms that summer brings. In meteorology, the dew point is a way to measure the amount of water vapor in the air. It is the temperature at which the atmosphere is saturated with water vapor. It is also how many degrees the air needs to be cooled down by in order to achieve relative humidity. While relative humidity also measures water vapor, it is relative to the temperature in the air, and measures the actual amount of water vapor in the air compared to how much vapor can exist in the air at its current temperature. 'At this point the air cannot hold more water in the gas form,' meteorologist Cyrena Arnold tells Popular Science. 'Now the reason that that's a thing is because the warmer the air, the more [water] it can hold.' Like a bucket, the air can only hold so much water. Once the air reaches 100 percent relative humidity, it cannot hold any more water in its gas form, or water vapor. If the air cools, water vapor comes out of the atmosphere in the form of a liquid, usually as fog or rain. If it reaches supersaturation–when it contains more water vapor than it can hold–water vapor comes out of the atmosphere in the form of a liquid, usually as clouds, fog, or rain depending on the size of the drops. For us, dew points that are extremely low means less moisture in the atmosphere and can make you want to bathe in lotion or slather on the lip balm. That just slightly higher or more middle of the road dew point is what we might describe as 'crisp.' A higher dew point–like what we see during the summer–makes the air feel wet, stifling, and generally uncomfortable. The Gulf of Mexico is a big driver of dew points in the US and meteorologists can track dew points as they shift across the country. 'There's a reason why the higher dew point temperatures are down along the southeast United States,' says Arnold. 'You'll see the ebbs and flows of the Gulf, moisture coming up and then cold air from Canada coming back down.' That mixture of hot and cold dew points is important for weather forecasting. Dew point is also a good way to figure out how it is going to feel outside. 'If you look at dew points frequently enough, you start to understand what 60 degree dew points feel like. Relative humidity doesn't quite capture that the same way,' says Arnold. 'I think it gives a better and more accurate sense of what the humidity is going to be like.' Dew point also helps in severe thunderstorm forecasting. According to NOAA, severe thunderstorms are more likely when the surface dewpoint is 55 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. The four main ingredients for these severe storms are wind shear, lift, instability, and moisture–or SLIM for short. 'There are no storms without moisture. All four of those are critical like puzzle pieces, but moisture is a big, big part of it,' says Arnold. The moisture creates clouds and acts like fuel for thunderstorms and can supercharge them by adding to the lift of clouds. 'For every 1,000 feet you go up in the air, the air cools by about five degrees as long as it's dry,' explains Arnold. 'Moist and humid air, especially once it's condensed, changes at a much different speed. That change is more like between two to five degrees.' Additionally, the moisture creates a temperature and cooling imbalance, so the clouds rise a lot faster than the air around it. This quicker rising air creates lower pressure on the surface–which yields storms. All of that condensed moist air can cause the clouds to rapidly lift, creating the large, layered, 'thunderhead' clouds that can indicate that a storm is headed your way. Understanding how much moisture is in the air and how high the dew points are can indicate how strong–and dangerous–a thunderstorm is. 'It's actually quite astounding how important dew point is in weather forecasting. You may think it's just a measure of humidity, but there's actually massive amounts of thermodynamics behind the scene,' says Arnold. [ Related: Why 60 degrees in fall feels different than in the spring. ] Just like with high humidity, higher dew points make it so that our body's internal air conditioners–aka sweating–just don't work as well. Our sweat glands constantly release fluids onto the surface of the skin. That fluid then cools when it evaporates, physically pulling heat away from the body. When the air is dry, that happens very quickly and takes less work for our bodies. If it's humid, your body will sweat and the water will not evaporate. 'If it is 100 degrees outside with a dew point in the 70s, there is not a lot of extra space for the air and that water vapor to go,' says Arnold. 'It won't evaporate because the air around it is already really, really saturated, so you're not getting that cooling effect because there's so much moisture already in the air, it takes a little bit more energy in order to get that evaporation process.' The same safety guidelines to use during increasingly deadly high temperatures also apply when the dew points rise. 'It feels a lot warmer than it actually is, simply because your cooling process has to adjust in order to cool and it takes a lot more energy to cool your body in those temperatures,' says Arnold. 'Your body is acting as if it were a much warmer temperature when that humidity increases.' Drink as much water as you can, wear loose fitting clothing, turn those fans on when inside to circulate air, and be mindful of the time you spend outside. This story is part of Popular Science's Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you've always wanted to know? Ask us.
