Unfortunately, the negative impact of climate change, pollution, and deforestation are clearly visible in recent years. The population of various species have been declining at an alarming rate. In particular, insect populations have been decreasing faster than any other species. Insects are vital to different food webs, so a decline in insect pollutions could cause a large drop in other animal populations. Not only are insect primary food for other animals, but they are also the biggest pollinators in the world. There is a strange phenomenon called colony collapsed disorder, where honey bees are not returning to their hives, causing colonies to die out.  Honey bees make up a large portion of insect pollinators, so losing bees could mean a great loss in various food sources.

Some of these crucial insect groups are populations of bees, dragonflies, ants, and beetles. A decrease in these insects may cause a large increase in pest insects such as cockroaches and houseflies. Pest species are more adaptable in warmer climates, specifically in man-made habitats. Of course, no one wants to live in an infested home, filled with cockroaches, but sadly, many of these species have evolved resistance to many different pesticides.

Society as a whole, needs to become more aware of the negative impact we are causing to the natural world around us. Factors like pesticides, deforestation, chemical pollutants, and fertilizers, have created a great loss in key insect populations. Moving forward, we need to start caring for our environment. Some ways in which we can achieve this is by buying organic food, gardening and planting trees, and buying products that do not use plastic packaging. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll see the insects we love so much back in action!

Today, February 13th, 2019, is a bittersweet day in the scientific community. On this day, the brilliant minds at NASA made the final call to terminate the Mars rover Opportunity program that has roamed our celestial neighbors surface for the last 14 years in some of the toughest conditions imaginable (and yet my iPhone seems to be useless after 3 years…) The truly amazing thing about this lifespan, is that the rover was only supposed to last for 90 days, and yet here it is, declared dead after 14 years!!!! This amazing piece of technology helped us revolutionize our understanding of ancient Mars, and gave us peeks into what sort of environment may have existed there long ago. Running solely on solar power, this machine of human dreams road around the rough terrain taking pictures and samples of the rocks around it, singing happy birthday to itself once a year, the only source of intelligence on this barren land. 50 years ago humans made it to the moon, and 14 years ago we put a rover on Mars. Who knows what the next 50 years will bring?

 

Do we know ‘raptors’ hunted in packs?

The short answer is no, not necessarily, but the best evidence that some of these kinds of dinosaurs at least moved in social groups comes from trackways. ‘Raptor’ dinosaurs leave distinctive footprints, owing to the enormous killing claws on their middle toes, which don’t touch the ground because the dinosaurs held them upright. Paleontologists have found trackways of these kinds of footprints arranged beside one another, tracking the same course, deviations and all. That means it’s a pretty good bet they were moving together.

As far as fossil remains go, we can’t always take them at face value. There’s a famous fossil assemblage from the early-middle Cretaceous Period with a Tenontosaurus (a big plant-eating dinosaur related to the duckbilled dinosaurs) surrounded by Deinonychus (a ‘raptor’ dinosaur which provided the inspiration for the raptors in Jurassic Park). Many of the Deinonychus’ teeth were broken off into the Tenontosaurus, and that’s where the whole pack-hunting idea started in the first place: multiple Deinonychus appear to have died attacking Tenontosaurus all at once, and Tenontosaurus was almost certainly far too big for an individual Deinonychus to attack anyway.

But the fossil remains of a Tenontosaurus surrounded by Deinonychus can also be compatible with a scenario where the Tenontosaurus died on its own and a bunch of Deinonychus mobbed its carcass feeding-frenzy style, the way modern Komodo dragons mob water buffalo carcasses. And if we find a bunch of predators together and no prey, it could just be that they were all washed into some basin after death and didn’t actually die together. Or even if they did, they might have all just been drinking at a waterhole and gotten caught in a flash flood (one of the few forces that can kill and move multiple dinosaurs all at once).

In short, some of the ‘raptor’ dinosaurs probably moved together at least some of the time, but it’s hard to say for sure whether they actually hunted together.

One of the biggest limitations with space travel has to deal with fuel. It takes a massive amount of it just to leave the Earth’s atmosphere, and then the rocket needs to make it to its destination, and then (ideally) make its way back home. And all that fuel takes up a lot of space which creates more weight, meaning you need more fuel. It is an endless cycle of needing more…to do more…so you need more…to do more. Which makes long space flights difficult to plan for. Aerospace engineers (rocket scientists) are always looking for new ways to power spacecraft, and one team from the University of Central Florida is working in partnership with Honeybee Robotics, and have found a way that would make the creators of early engines proud.

These innovators have devised a system that uses steam power for their ships. Yes, you read that correctly, steam! As in hot water vapor. Not exactly what you would think of when imagining space travel right? Well they have decided to try just that, and are actually fairly successful as they have tested a prototype already..and it worked! The ship drills into the ground where it lands, pulls up some good ol’ H2O and uses the steam generated from that water to take off. Pretty amazing if you ask me! Now obviously the ship can only go where there is water to pull up, but as we are discovering, it may not quite be as rare in the universe as we once thought. Either way, this is an incredibly unique system and shows that even old technology can be used to power the future.

In the second half of the 20th century, the world gained a new obsession with the moon. Before, it had simply been a wondrous ball in the sky that had captured imaginations for thousands of years. But starting with Sputnik, the first human made object in space, in 1957, the moon seemed a little closer than it had before. And in 1969, the first humans set foot on the moon, in what was an amazing and awe inspiring feat for the globe. Now, 50 years later, Chinese scientists have pulled off a new first with our closest extraterrestrial neighbor; they have landed a probe on the dark side of the moon!

What is the dark side of the moon you ask? Does it never see the sunlight? Is it always night time there? The answer to this is no, it is not always dark! It sees the sunlight at times, just the same as you and me. What it does not see, is Earth. The Earth and the Moon have a unique relationship where the Moon is close enough to our home that gravity keeps the same side facing us at all times, meaning you have never seen the other side in your life, and it has never seen you. The reason we call it “dark” is because of this reason that we have never seen it. Check out the video from a NASA satellite below to see what the other side looks like (and yes, I promise it is real!)

So congratulations to all involved in this impressive feat. It seems as though in the last few decades we have left the moon alone because we have been there and there is no life, so people seem to think there is not much more we can learn from visiting. But humans are made to explore, and while we may have been there before, it is the first point to the next stop in our solar system. So maybe it does have something to teach us in the end.