Jupiter, Jupiter, Everything is Jupiter!

This month is June and there is a lot going on with the planet Jupiter, the second largest known body in our entire Solar System. Jupiter is a gas giant planet made up of primarily hydrogen, helium, ammonia, and trace amounts methane and oxygen. Jupiter is entirely made up volatile gas and if a manned human mission was sent there, there would be no solid surface to land on. Deadly radiation bands also surround the orbit of Jupiter and its moon's making a manned mission there nearly impossible.

Jupiter, although huge, is not nearly the largest gas giant planet in our stellar neighborhood, let alone entire galaxy. There are many bigger gas giants, such as TrES-4b and WASP-12b, which are about 70% larger than Jupiter itself. These planets don't orbit in the cold gloom beyond the star's habitable zone like Jupiter, but intensely close, so much that they are rapidly shrinking from mass gas loss. These scorching gas balls are called "hot jupiters."

An artist's impression of a massive hot jupiter gas giant

Recently this June, the ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile discovered that more than 5% of the suns in the star cluster Messier 67, had extrasolar gas giants orbiting them, most hot jupiters. So far nearly 2,000 extrasolar planets have been discovered outside of our solar system, again most are hot jupiters. However quite a few Earth-like planets have been discovered, most orbiting red dwarf stars. There could even be habitable moons of gas giants orbiting in the goldilocks zone of a solar system.

Could small extrasolar planets or the moons of gas giants potentially be habitable 

However why June, 2016 is really such an important month for our friend Jupiter is because the ESA-NASA spacecraft Juno is set to arrive at the planet later this month. It will spend a good deal of time observing and measuring the lower atmosphere of the planet and its mantle of liquid hydrogen, while also giving us eye candy in the form of photographs of Jupiter and the four Gallilean moons hopefully. This mission will may teach us about the largest planet in our solar neighborhood and possibly the formation of our solar system and our small blue world.

The Juno Spacecraft is set to arrive at Jupiter this month.

Eyes Wide Open...500 million years ago.

What do most people think of when they here the word "prehistoric?" Giant dinosaurs and pterodactyls patrolling ancient steaming jungles. Cavemen hunting giant woolly mammoths over frozen solid tundra? How about the trilobites, one of the oldest animals on Earth and one of the most popular options for budding fossil collectors.

Trilobites first appeared about 525 million years ago in the shallow warm seas of the Early Cambrian period, when life on Earth was just starting to get a grip on evolutionary compitition. New animals were appearing in the sea...some ferocious crab-like predators - EEEEK!!! - which were hungry for tasty creatures crawling around on the seabed.

Many animals including trilobites developed hard calcitic shells, which protected their skins (pun intended) and made excellent fossils - TAKE THAT FRAGILE DINOSAUR BONES!!! Trilobites were related to modern day lobsters, spiders, and horseshoe crabs. Some species of trilobites were so numerous, that sometimes their fossils can be found in the billions at a single place - talk about a crowd!

The real milestone of the trilobites were their eyes. Trilobites were some of the first animals on Earth to have complex eyes, possibly eyes of any kind. So why did they need eyes? Remember the crab-like predators of the Cambrian? They also developed jaws powerful enough to crush the shells of trilobites. To prevent attack, many trilobites developed complex vision to detect predators in the sunlit seas. They eyes were compound, made up of thousands of tiny lenses, each processing light.

Eyes became especially useful around 485 million years ago during the Ordovician period. Why? During the Cambrian, a new type of animal appeared. It had a central backbone, a tiny mouth slit, gills, and primitive fins. This tiny animal was the first fish. About 485 million years ago, they had developed jaws and had evolved into the first sharks and armored fish. There were also giant nautiloids and sea scorpions hunting about and trilobites had to be especially careful to not get eaten.

A giant armored fish of the Paleozoic

Many trilobites also developed long spines and spikes to protect themselves from being a Paleozoic lunch bag. I sure would not want to eat my sandwich if it was covered in sharp spikes, now would I. Trilobites shells were also jointed, meaning that they could easily roll up to protect themselves into a ball.

A spiny trilobite

However curling up and hunkering down on the seabed did squat to protect them from freezing seas 450 million years ago and supervolcanic eruptions 250 million years ago. These two events are now why we only see our trilobite friends petrified in the rock or in a prehistoric museum diorama.

The History of Atomic Chemistry: Part 1

Today we are going to slightly veer away from biology, this year's scientific theme for the blog and talk about the history of the atom. The first people to think about atoms were the ancient Greeks, primarily a man name Democritus who lived around 460 BCE on the island of Abdera. He argued that nature was made up of tiny bits and pieces of incredibly tiny matter which he called "atomos," meaning uncuttable in ancient Greek. He argued that the "atomos" of different materials acted in different ways such as iron "atomos" being hard and stiff, cheese "atomos" being soft and filled with holes, and clay "atomos" being wet and sticky. His ideas, although somewhat inaccurate, were amazing for the science at the time. However many other philosophers and scientists living at the time believed in the five elements, an idea by the philosopher Empedocles. The philosopher Plato and his student Aristotle, took his idea further and proposed that the elements had their own geometric shapes associated to each. Fire was a pyramid, earth was a cube, air was an octohedron, water was a Icosahedron, and quistensence, the ultimate cosmic element was a dodecahedron.

Democritus kept his ideas to himself, since teaching new, scientific, "radical" ideas was banned in Greece and most of its colonies at the time. However in Abdera, free expression of ideas was allowed to the public. Many people followed him and found his idea of "atomos" a fascinating subject of debate. He also proposed that weather was not cause by angry gods, but by natural cycles, and that there were other worlds in the cosmos, being created and destroyed.

Hundreds of years later, his ideas found there way into the scrolls deep inside of the Great Library of Alexandria, for curious citizens to study and read aloud. However years passed and the library was vandalized, books were destroyed, and the entire building burned down. It was one of the worst cases of prejudice against knowledge and learning. Soon the scientific dark ages followed for nearly 1,000 years until quite by accident, an English scientist thought up the idea of tiny bits of matter.

New Elements!? Sort of...

Whether you are a die hard science enthusiast or just a curious newsreader, you may have heard the news this week that four new elements have been added to the periodic table. Many news outlets and websites are claiming that these elements have just been discovered. However many of these elements are man made in supercollider labs and were synthesized as far back as 2002 or 2003.

The thing which is new about these elements is their respective names. The elements being renamed are elements 113, 115, 117, and 118. When they were first synthesized, they had no proper names and were not even on most periodic tables in chemistry textbooks. However they were soon given names such as Ununtrium, Ununpentium, Ununseptium, and Ununoctium. These names were heavily generic and were only used to represent their respective places in the seventh row of the table.

However, last Wednesday, their nomenclature was given a major makeover. Scientists from the US, Russia, and Japan have proposed new names for these four artificial, elusive elements. However these names although heavily in the works and seriously being considered, have not been officially christened on Ununtrium, Ununpentium, Ununseptium, and Ununoctium.

When naming a certain element, there are certain rules that IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) requires for naming new elements. First the element cannot be named after a fictional character or thing and must apply to the real world. For example: a place, a person, a mineral, a chemical, or a planet or celestial body.

So how do these mysterious elements get created? Again, they are man-made and do not occur naturally. Every element from hydrogen and helium (1 & 2) to Uranium (92) can all be found somewhere in nature in some form or another. However anything beyond that has all been created by man, such as plutonium (94), one of the most toxic and radioactive substance known.

Elements starting from 93 are created by smashing isotopes (unstable versions of regular elements such as calcium or uranium) together at breakneck speeds, creating violent, fiery, microscopic explosions. The newly-created elements last for just minutes, even microseconds, barely enough time for even the best instruments to detect them.

Element 113 (Ununtrium) will be named "Nihonium," after "Nippon," which means "Land of the Rising Sun: The indigenous name for Japan. This is because the lab which created this element first.

Element 115 (Ununpentium) will be named "Moscovium," in honor of the city of Moscow, where many of the element's original creators and the working lab were based in.

Element 117 (Ununseptium) has the least official and recognized name so far. A group of scientists who successfully created this element in their lab in Tennessee wanted to name it "Tennesine," but this same is only beginning to get approval from the IUPAC.

The final and heaviest element to known to humanity is Ununoctium (element 118). It is proposed that this element will be named "Oganesson" in honor of Yuri Oganessian, the Russian scientists who has been the  director of JINR (Joint Institute for Nuclear Research), the same institute which discovered most the most recently discovered heavy elements.

Not Transylvania, but the Rocks of the Grand Cayon: Prehistoric Vampire Fossils Unearthed

Vampires? Yes. Count Dracula? No. These vampires were so small you would have needed a good microscope to spot them. Like Count Dracula, they were terrifying, at least for the other tiny microbes which lived with them, more than 750 million years ago in the ancient primeval seas. These little monsters were amoebas, the same microscopic critters which can be seen in pond water collected from a lake, except that these guys would attack prehistoric algae or bacteria and suck their cellular innards out. We know from the fossil record that amoebas (or at least their other protozoa relatives), appeared 1.8 billion years ago, when our planet's so-far story was more than half over. These vampires lived during the Proterozoic Eon in Earth's history, when animals or plants of any kind had yet to appear in the seas.

So how do we know that the microscopic critters ever existed in the ancient oceans. Unfortunately, we have no direct fossils of their remains, but luckily we have a way. Surprise! These critters still live in ponds and lakes today. AIEEEE!! The amoeba genus Vampyrella pendula eats the innards of its cousins, like its ancient relative. Scientists proved the existence of ancient vampire amoebas by matching bite marks found on bacterial fossils from Precambrian rocks the Grand Canyon (see image below), with the modern-day bite marks of the modern day micro-monsters.