The Life of Earth, and birth of Modern Man

Sunday, 27 September 2026

Scientists Discover a “Fire Amoeba” That Defies Life’s Heat Limit

By Cell Press, Sept. 26, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-discover-a-fire-amoeba-that-defies-lifes-heat-limit/

A sulfur pool at Lassen National Park.

Credit: Shutterstock

A newly identified amoeba from a volcanic region of California is challenging long-held assumptions about how much heat complex cells can withstand.

Heat can quickly become destructive to complex cells. As temperatures rise, proteins can lose their shape, DNA can sustain damage, and essential cellular processes can begin to fail. This has made extreme heat largely the domain of bacteria and archaea.

A newly discovered amoeba is now pushing that boundary higher. Researchers found that the microscopic organism can actively grow and reproduce at 63°C (145°F), hotter than the long-accepted growth limit for eukaryotes. It was discovered in the geothermal waters of California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park and is described in a study published in the journal Cell.

The amoeba can survive even hotter conditions. When exposed to temperatures as high as 70°C (158°F), it changes form and develops a protective outer layer, allowing it to recover once temperatures fall.

“This finding pushes the bounds of what we thought was possible, which is incredibly exciting,” says corresponding author Angela Oliverio of Syracuse University. “There could be more eukaryotes that can survive at even higher temperatures than we know of.”

Why Extreme Heat Is Such a Challenge

Some microorganisms thrive at temperatures far beyond anything humans could tolerate. The known growth record belongs to Methanopyrus kandleri, an archaeon found around deep-sea hydrothermal vents that can grow at 122°C (252°F).

Incendiamoeba cell undergoing mitosis at 63ºC. DNA is colored blue, tubulin is pink, and membrane is gray.

Credit: Felix Mikus

Archaea and bacteria have different cellular organization from eukaryotes. Eukaryotic organisms, including animals, plants, fungi, amoebae, and many other microorganisms, contain a nucleus and other specialized cellular structures.

For decades, roughly 60°C (140°F) was considered the upper growth limit for eukaryotes. Only a small number of species were known to approach it.

A Search Through Volcanic Waters

Scientists had previously detected amoebae near geothermal springs where temperatures can exceed 140°F. But detecting an organism in such an environment does not prove that it can actively grow and reproduce there. Cells can be carried in from cooler areas, while some organisms may survive brief exposure without thriving.

Oliverio and her colleagues wanted to determine whether amoebae associated with geothermal habitats were truly adapted to extreme heat.

From 2023 through 2025, the researchers collected microorganisms from geothermal streams in Lassen Volcanic National Park in California’s Cascade Range. Temperatures at the sampling sites ranged from about 47°C to 64°C (117°F to 147°F).

One previously unknown amoeba stood out. In laboratory experiments, it grew vigorously at 57°C (135°F), reaching the highest temperature previously documented for amoeba growth. The researchers then continued raising the temperature.

At 63°C (145°F), they observed the amoeba undergoing mitosis, the process eukaryotic cells use to divide. This showed that the organism was not simply surviving the heat. It was still able to grow and reproduce.

Meet the “Fire Amoeba”

The researchers named the species Incendiamoeba cascadensis, roughly translated as “fire amoeba from the Cascades.”

Above 63°C (145°F), the amoeba changed shape and produced a protective outer layer instead of continuing to grow normally.

Incendiamoeba cascadensis cell at 55ºC, scale bar 5µm.

Credit: Beryl Rappaport

Even after exposure to 70°C (158°F), the amoebae could recover when researchers returned them to cooler conditions. The organism was shown to grow and divide at 63°C (145°F), while 70°C (158°F) represents a survival temperature rather than an active growth temperature.

How Its Cells Cope With Heat

Sequencing the amoeba’s genome revealed possible explanations for its unusual heat tolerance. Compared with amoebae adapted to milder environments, I. cascadensis carries additional genes associated with maintaining proteins and repairing DNA.

Proteins depend on precise three-dimensional structures to function, and high temperatures can cause them to unfold or clump together. Heat can also damage other cellular components, increasing the importance of repair and maintenance systems.

The fire amoeba’s proteins also contain more positively charged amino acids on their surfaces, a characteristic found in some highly heat-tolerant bacteria and archaea. These properties may help proteins remain stable at temperatures that would disrupt similar molecules in less heat-adapted organisms.

“Even though these organisms are so different, there’s convergence in how protein properties are selected for stability under high temperatures,” says first author H. Beryl Rappaport, a doctoral student at Syracuse University.

A Small Record With Bigger Implications

The new record extends the known temperature range for eukaryotic growth by only a few degrees. But biological limits often reflect the organisms scientists have found and tested rather than an absolute boundary that has been proven impossible to cross.

The discovery raises the possibility that other organisms may also survive or reproduce beyond currently accepted environmental limits.

Oliverio says the findings could encourage researchers to test environmental tolerances without allowing previous records to determine where experiments should stop.

“Every time we set a new world record in sports, it’s amazing and celebrated, even if it’s by milliseconds,” Oliverio says. “We should do the same for amoebae. These very small changes expand our understanding of what we think is possible.”

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Mutant Sperm Are Waging a Fierce Survival-of-the-Fittest Battle Inside Men's Testicles

25 Sept. 2026, By M. Starr

https://www.sciencealert.com/mutant-sperm-are-waging-a-fierce-survival-of-the-fittest-battle-inside-mens-testicles

A cross-section of a seminiferous tubule, where sperm cells are produced.

(Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library RF/Getty Images)

The competition for dominance starts long before sperm make their last mad dash to reach the egg.

Deep inside the testicles, the jostle for genetic survival can start before the sperm themselves are even formed.

Mutations that arise in the stem cells that produce sperm can give those cells an advantage, allowing them to proliferate in a survival-of-the-fittest battle against their unmutated housemates.

There's just one problem. What's 'fittest' in the testicles isn't necessarily beneficial to the offspring that those sperm may eventually help create.

A sweeping analysis of mutations in human sperm has revealed that this hidden evolutionary contest is far more extensive than scientists realized.

And the consequences could be significant.

Many of the mutations identified are associated with developmental disorders – and as men age, these mutations become increasingly common in their sperm, raising the chances of passing them on to their progeny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaNmph3LmqQ

The sperm production line never sleeps. Every day, the testes of an adult man can churn out somewhere between 150 and 275 million gametes.

Powering that factory are spermatogonial stem cells, which sit along the seminiferous tubules and continually divide, both renewing their own population and producing cells that will go on to develop into sperm.

Every time a cell divides, though, there's a chance that a mutation will arise from slightly janky replication of the DNA. Many of these mutations will be nothingburgers… but every now and then, one pops up that gives the new stem cell some sort of advantage.

That mutant stem-cell lineage can then proliferate at the expense of the surrounding cells, spreading along the tubule and producing more sperm that carry the mutation.

Scientists already knew this could happen. Previous research identified mutations in 13 genes that appear to give sperm-producing stem cells this competitive edge – all of which are associated with severe developmental disorders.

But no one fully understood the extent of the phenomenon – so a team led by computational biologist Matthew Neville of the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK embarked on a quest to find out.

Using an ultra-accurate DNA sequencing technique called NanoSeq, the researchers analyzed sperm samples from men aged 24 to 75.

They were looking for something very specific – signs that mutations were being positively selected in the male germline. That means mutations present in higher numbers than you would expect from random chance – suggesting that they had a competitive edge.

And boy howdy did they find it.

Their search turned up more than 35,000 germline coding mutations. From these, the researchers identified 40 genes showing signs of significant positive selection.

Thirty-one of those genes had never before been implicated in this strange evolutionary battle. The other nine were among the 13 already known.

Researchers identified 40 genes showing signs of positive selection in the male germline, 31 of which had not previously been identified.

(Neville et al., Nature, 2025)

Many of them have troubling implications for the offspring that inherit them. Of the 31 newly identified genes, 27 are linked to genetic disorders, while 16 are also known cancer genes.

Those aren't just abstract findings. Mutations previously seen repeatedly in children with developmental disorders were 66 times more common in the sperm dataset than expected from the underlying mutation rate.

Age added another facet to the findings. Across the sperm genomes they analyzed, the researchers found that mutations accumulated at a steady rate of around 1.67 per year.

Between that accumulation and the positive selection for advantageous mutations, the mutation load climbed much higher as men aged.

The researchers estimated that, at age 30, around 2 percent of a man's sperm carried a likely disease-causing mutation. By age 70, that figure had risen to around 4.5 percent.

Without positive selection, their model predicted much lower rates: around 0.73 percent at age 30 and 1.6 percent at age 70.

The proportion of sperm carrying known driver mutations (top)

and likely disease-causing mutations (bottom)

increased with age. The bottom panel shows how much higher the observed rate was than expected from mutation alone. (Neville et al., Nature, 2025)

That suggests that the evolutionary battle royale taking place inside the testes appeared to increase the prevalence of potentially disease-causing mutations by roughly two- to threefold.

Crucially, though, that doesn't mean a 4.5 percent chance of passing a genetic disorder to a child.

A mutation detected in sperm still has a long way to go before it ends up in a living baby.

Some affected sperm may be less likely to fertilize an egg, while some mutations may result in an embryo that doesn't survive or a pregnancy that ends in loss.

The researchers caution that the relationship between mutations in sperm and the prevalence of disorders at birth remains uncertain.

And, interestingly, evolution itself seems to provide another filter.

When the researchers looked at genetic variation across the wider human population, they found evidence that many of the mutations favored during sperm production are selected against over successive generations.

So the testicles create the problem, and the world cleans up their mess.

Sounds about right, really.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Over 70% of US Coastal Areas Are Sinking Faster Than 1 Millimeter a Year

26 Sept. 2026, By D .Nield

https://www.sciencealert.com/over-70-of-us-coastal-areas-are-sinking-faster-than-1-millimeter-a-year

(Art Wager/iStockphoto/Getty Images)

It's not just rising sea levels that we need to worry about: In many parts of the world, the ground is subsiding beneath our feet too.

Sinking land can happen just about anywhere, both naturally and due to human interference with ecosystems and landscapes.

However, it has the potential to be particularly damaging around the coasts, where drops in the ground level increase the risk of flooding and infrastructure damage.

To get a more comprehensive idea of this problem along the United States coastline, researchers from Tufts University and Virginia Tech analyzed more than 190 million data points measuring vertical land motion (the rising or falling of Earth's surface over time).

These measurements were mostly taken via satellites in orbit, bouncing radar signals up and down to gauge the level of the land. Across the period 2007 to 2020, the data showed widespread coastal subsidence.

The Gulf Coast was where the sinking was most pronounced.

(Azhar et al., Commun. Earth Environ., 2026)

"Nationally, 71.5 percent of coastal areas subside faster than 0.1 centimeters (0.04 inches) per year, with the Gulf Coast experiencing the highest rates," write the researchers in their published paper.

"These findings offer a foundation for resilient coastal planning and equitable adaptation of infrastructure systems."

Close to half of the US coast (43 percent) was found to be sinking by 0.2 centimeters (0.08 inches) or more a year, while almost a quarter (23.3 percent) registered subsidence of at least 0.3 centimeters (0.12 inches) a year.

While sinking was most pronounced on the Gulf Coast to the south of the US, it was "near-ubiquitous" along the East Coast too, the researchers found. Some uplift was recorded, but mostly along the West Coast.

The researchers highlight several key implications of land subsidence, from water resource management to risk assessment.

(Azhar et al., Commun. Earth Environ., 2026)

That means there's not a one-size-fits-all solution to tackling the problem: What needs fixing and how depends on regional factors.

"Land subsidence does not occur in isolation," write the researchers. "It often interacts with climate extremes and human land use, creating feedback loops that can amplify both hazards and vulnerabilities.

"Although subsidence typically occurs slowly, its cumulative effects can be devastating over time."

The study points to several reasons for the coastal subsidence. Some are natural geological processes: the natural compaction of soft sediment in areas such as deltas and wetlands, and even ongoing geological settling from the last Ice Age (technically 'glacial isostatic adjustment'), for example.

Other reasons are very much to do with our influence, like the excessive pumping out of groundwater to supply populations, industries, and agriculture. However, this wasn't something the researchers assessed directly here.

The researchers also looked at how many people it could potentially affect. The estimates are around 67.1 million in low-subsidence areas, 14 million in moderate-subsidence areas, and 3.2 million in high-subsidence areas.

"The exposure analysis reveals that approximately 84.3 million people across US coastal census tracts live in areas affected by varying levels of land subsidence," write the researchers.

Citing Hurricane Katrina as a recent example, the researchers note that sinking land can reduce the effectiveness of levees, sea walls, and drainage systems, and put extra stress on infrastructure – roads, bridges, buildings, and pipelines.

What's more, those facing the greatest risk and potential losses are often also those least able to adapt. People at the margins of society are often hit hardest, and are less able to recover from events like flooding – meaning the effects are compounded over time.

The researchers want to see further scientific study of the subsidence problem, as well as subsidence data incorporated into coastal planning and infrastructure investment decisions so communities are better able to cope with it.

"This study establishes the first national-scale, statistically grounded assessment of coastal land-subsidence hazards and inequities in the US, providing a scalable foundation that can be updated as new data become available," write the researchers.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Saturday, 26 September 2026

One Critical Factor Predicts Longevity Better Than Diet or Exercise, Study Reveals

22 Sept. 2026, By D. Nield

https://www.sciencealert.com/one-critical-factor-predicts-longevity-better-than-diet-or-exercise-study-reveals

(rattanakun/Canva)

Diet and exercise can both influence how long you live, but research suggests they're not the single greatest predictor of longevity.

According to a study published in Sleep Advances, something else might have a bigger effect on your lifespan.

While poor sleep has been previously linked to a host of health issues, this investigation found that getting enough shut-eye had a stronger connection to living longer than diet and exercise – factors that are known to add years to your life.

Researchers from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) crunched the numbers on county-level survey data from across the US, from 2019 to 2025.

They compared measures of life expectancy with self-reported sleep duration, using less than seven hours per night as the threshold for insufficient sleep.

They then factored in other variables that can affect life expectancy, including physical inactivity, employment status, and educational level.

The association between insufficient sleep and lower life expectancy remained statistically significant after including those factors.

In the first model, only smoking had a stronger association with life expectancy. In a second model that added obesity and diabetes, obesity also ranked above insufficient sleep.

"I didn't expect [insufficient sleep] to be so strongly correlated to life expectancy," said OHSU sleep physiologist Andrew McHill.

"We've always thought sleep is important, but this research really drives that point home: People really should strive to get seven to nine hours of sleep if at all possible."

As a purely observational study, the research, published in 2025, can't prove that less sleep knocks months or years off your life.

A study like this also can't untangle the complex interactions between sleep, diet, and exercise. The results do suggest the amount of sleep you get each night is a significant indicator of long-term health.

Adequate sleep is vital to almost every aspect of our well-being: missing a single night of slumber can impact brain circuitry and the body's immune system, for example.

It's reasonable to suggest that these health issues may contribute to mortality in the long run. In particular, the researchers highlight obesity and diabetes as two conditions linked with poor sleep that could reduce life expectancy.

"It's intuitive and makes a lot of sense, but it was still striking to see it materialize so strongly in all of these models," said McHill.

"I'm a sleep physiologist who understands the health benefits of sleep, but the strength of the association between sleep sufficiency and life expectancy was remarkable to me."

The good news is that our sleep routines are, at least to some extent, modifiable within the limits of our caregiving and work commitments.

Life expectancy's association with sleep is stronger than with many other factors, including diet and exercise. Although, as this graph shows, physical activity and social connections also influence life expectancy.

(McAuliffe et al., Sleep Adv., 2025)

It might be worth quitting that habit of doomscrolling in bed, or squeezing in a session of yoga or tai chi now and then.

Both the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society recommend getting at least seven hours of sleep a night, although some evidence suggests you might be able to catch up on the weekends if you need to.

"This research shows that we need to prioritize sleep at least as much as we do what we eat or how we exercise," said McHill.

"Getting a good night's sleep will improve how you feel but also how long you live."

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scavengers Stay Healthy By Not Eating Their Own Kind, New Science Suggests

26 Sept. 2026, By I. Farkas

https://www.sciencealert.com/scavengers-stay-healthy-by-not-eating-their-own-kind-new-science-suggests

(Annette Shaff/Canva)

Nature is a cycle in which nothing is wasted and death leads to life.

When an animal dies, it becomes carrion, a source of nutriment that upholds ecosystems.

For example, a "whale fall" settling on the seafloor creates a thriving mini-environment for decades.

However, these hotspots also pose dangers to the opportunists that feed here, including the risk of pathogen transmission and predation.

Accordingly, it has long been suggested that scavengers avoid eating carcasses that are more closely related to them to reduce the risk of infection.

But the evidence to explore that idea is scarce and limited in scale.

So researchers recently expanded that scale, examining an essential gap in the ecology of some of nature's most derided denizens: those who scavenge.

In a study published in the journal Ecology Letters, a quartet of Spanish biologists, ecologists, and zoologists used camera traps, phylogenetic analyses, and computational modeling to see what kind of carcasses these consumers choose to chow down upon.

"Here, we provide the first empirical evidence from a diverse vertebrate scavenger assemblage that phylogenetic distance is a key driver of selective carrion consumption," the researchers say.

From February 2020 through May 2021, they placed nearly 200 fish, bird, and small mammal carcasses across El Hondo Natural Park in Alicante, in southeastern Spain, along with two cameras at each spot to capture images and video of the resultant feeding frenzies.

These animals – including carp, quails, ducks, rodents, and rabbits from sources like roadkill and invasive-carp-reducing efforts – are present in the park and were strategically placed where each would naturally die; the researchers did not, say, airlift a whale carcass into a swamp.

They chose El Hondo because it's a highly productive wetland featuring extensive reedbeds, marshes, and even salt flats.

It's abundant in resources and hosts many species in a relatively small area, creating frequent opportunities for carrion.

Interestingly, despite its diversity, it does not host large predators or the world's most famous obligate scavengers: vultures.

They also consulted a species-level phylogenetic tree to ascertain the genetic distance between carrion and its scavenger, gauged by the millions of years of independent evolution between different taxa.

The phylogenetic tree employed in this work.

(Pessano-Serrat et al., Ecol. Lett., 2026)

They observed that animals often consumed carrion that was more distantly related to them than would be expected through random occurrence.

"We found a consistent pattern across the assemblage: scavengers generally avoided consuming carcasses of phylogenetically related species," the researchers explain.

"This trend held for both the probability of consuming a given carcass species and the total number of carcasses consumed, although the strength of the relationship varied between taxonomic classes (birds vs. mammals)."

At the extreme ends of the observed trends, the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) – notoriously and erroneously blamed for the 'Chicago rat hole' – proved the main consumer, chomping on 38 carcasses, mostly fish.

A box plot showing random and real values (observed) for feeding choices among scavengers.

(Pessano-Serrat et al., Ecol. Lett., 2026)

Among the few species that fed on more closely related carrion was a bird, the Iberian grey shrike (Lanius meridionalis), observed to feed only on bird carcasses.

Incidentally, shrikes further belie their birdly cuteness by impaling their prey on spikes.

Animals that didn't seem to care about what they ate included the Eurasian magpie (Pica pica) and the globally ubiquitous red fox (Vulpes vulpes).

The latter has also established itself as the land mammal with the largest distribution, second only to humans, according to the National Park Service.

The researchers suggest that avoiding closely related carrion may serve as a first line of defense, helping animals avert infections and the energy costs of immune responses.

Since more closely related animals are more likely to share physiological traits, they are also more likely to share pathogens and transmit diseases among each other.

Scavenging probability

(A) and number of carcasses eaten

(B) both rose with evolutionary distance, more sharply for mammals. (Pessano-Serrat et al., Ecol. Lett., 2026)

Study limitations include the absence of fish as scavengers.

And since some of the scavenging animals in this study only exhibited a few feeding events, more evidence is necessary to explore specific factors, such as how their feeding behaviors are affected by their health, life stages, sociability, or environmental food scarcity.

Importantly, this work highlights that scavengers are essential parts of their ecosystems, cycling nutrients and shaping food webs. They also help boost public health by reducing zoonotic disease potential.

As an example, a crash in vulture populations in India has been linked to the deaths of more than half a million people.

"Recognizing and preserving healthy scavenger communities may therefore provide both ecosystem-level benefits and contribute to mitigating zoonotic risks," the researchers conclude.

"These insights highlight the importance of integrating scavenger species into broader wildlife management and conservation frameworks."

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

The Solar System’s First Worlds Were Built From Fire, Not Ice

By J. Shelton, Yale U., Sept. 25, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/the-solar-systems-first-worlds-were-built-from-fire-not-ice/

This artist’s concept shows a very young star encircled by a disk of gas and dust, the raw materials from which rocky planets such as Earth are thought to form. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A study led by Yale provides the first chemical evidence that gas began sorting the building materials for the solar system’s earliest solid bodies sooner than previously known.

If the outer solar system’s first solid bodies had come with a recipe, it would have called for a generous helping of chondrules, millimeter-sized beads of rock forged by heat, and very little icy dust. That dust, known as matrix, carried water ice and organic molecules, yet only a small share made it into the earliest bodies researchers studied.

A Yale-led team has now found the first geochemical evidence that this preference for chondrules was already established within the solar system’s first million years. Previous evidence of such sorting came from objects that formed 2 to 4 million years after the solar system began.

Reconstructing that early mixture meant looking for ingredients that no longer physically survive. The researchers examined iron meteorites from parent bodies that had melted completely, destroying the chondrules inside them. Chemical traces preserved through that melting allowed the team to work backward to the original proportions. The findings were published September 18 in Nature Astronomy.

“These ubiquitous little beads of rock are the basic building blocks from which the planets themselves were eventually assembled,” said study first author Damanveer Grewal, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “And now we know they were already being sorted and incorporated into the first generation of solid bodies from the very start.”

Damanveer Grewal. Credit: Dan Renzetti

Two tracers recover the original recipe

Those early bodies, called planetesimals, had accumulated enough radioactive aluminum-26 to generate the heat responsible for their melting. No preserved bodies from the first million years retain their original, unmelted mixture of chondrules and matrix, so the researchers needed another way to determine their composition.

Grewal and his colleagues used two independent chemical tracers linked to matrix. Sulfur is concentrated in matrix, so it can help reveal how much dust a parent body originally contained. The oxidation state of iron, a measure of its chemical condition, provides a separate indication of how much water ice and oxidized dust went into that body.

Both measurements pointed to an original matrix content of just 8% to 17%, lower than that found in any known chondrites, the primitive meteorites that still contain chondrules.

“Both tracers independently tell the same story: these early planetesimals were remarkably matrix-poor,” Grewal said. “That convergence is what makes the result robust.”

Chondrules dominated the earliest bodies

The reconstruction reaches further back in time than the evidence preserved in carbonaceous chondrites from the outer solar system. These primitive, stony meteorites contain organic compounds and water alongside silicate minerals. Researchers already knew that earlier-forming carbonaceous chondrites had more chondrules and less matrix than those that formed later. That pattern suggested that the regions where planetesimals assembled favored the rocky beads over icy dust, but it could not establish the mixture in the first generation of bodies.

“Our work shows that this assembly process was remarkably selective from the very beginning,” Grewal said. “The earliest bodies in the outer solar system were built from 83% to 92% chondrules, with very little of the icy, volatile-rich dust that dominates later-forming objects.”

The chondrules preserved in chondrites offer a tangible connection to this ancient process. Chondrites are the most primitive meteorites in geological collections, allowing researchers to examine material that escaped the complete melting experienced by the iron meteorites’ parent bodies.

“You can hold them in your hand and know that they began as part of a process that started billions of years ago,” Grewal said. “It’s a timescale that’s hard to wrap your head around.”

The findings also help explain why older chondrules are scarce in the meteorite record, Grewal said. They were incorporated into early bodies that subsequently melted, erasing the beads while leaving chemical clues to their former presence.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Friday, 25 September 2026

3 Warnings From Isaac Asimov That Came True

COSMIC MINDS, 21 Sept 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwOdeg2z4NY

Isaac Asimov died in 1992.

Years before that, he sat down and described the world we live in now — the screens, the vanishing jobs, the crowds — and almost nobody listened, because he wrote science fiction, and we decided that meant he was making things up. He wasn't.

Asimov was a scientist who read the present harder than anyone else and refused to blink at where it was heading.

This video walks through three of his warnings that came true with unsettling precision:

a society that comes to worship its own ignorance,

a world where machines take the work and hand us nothing back,

and a planet so crowded that a single human life slides toward worthless.

He saw all three forming decades ago, said them plainly, and watched us march toward each one anyway. The thread running through all of them is a single race he spent his life pointing at — our power growing faster than our wisdom. He didn't warn us to frighten us. He warned us because he thought we could still turn the wheel.

The birth of modern Man

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Sunspot 40 Times Wider Than Earth Shows Our Sun Is Capable of Superflares

25 Sept. 2026, By D. Nield

https://www.sciencealert.com/sunspot-40-times-wider-than-earth-shows-our-sun-is-capable-of-superflares

Solar flares are huge eruptions of radiation that blast out of the Sun – sometimes several times a day – and at their strongest, they can release the energy equivalent of a billion hydrogen bombs.

Our planet's magnetic field and atmosphere, together with tens of millions of miles of space, protect us from these bursts and other space weather.

However, distant stars similar to the Sun have generated so-called superflares, hundreds or thousands of times more energetic than what's been observed in our Solar System.

Could those superflares also potentially erupt from our own Sun – and have they been occurring throughout Earth's history, in the billions of years before we had the instruments required to measure them?

Some Sun-like stars produce a superflare about once a century.

(© MPS/Alexey Chizhik)

That's the question researchers led by a team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany wanted to ask.

In a new study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, the researchers analyzed the 300 strongest solar flares measured between 2010 and 2016, and the energy they produced.

"Of course, we knew that no superflares had occurred during the observation period, but the statistical relationship we found between the released energy and the size of the active region should hold true for more powerful events as well," says astrophysicist Natalie Krivova, from MPS.

By studying the corresponding active regions on the Sun for each flare – the intense magnetic disturbances that eruptions emerge from, which often include dark sunspots – the researchers were able to calculate how energy corresponded to active region size.

They then went back to some of the largest sunspots recorded on the Sun – records that go back much further, around four centuries. One sunspot stands out: the giant sunspot observed in 1947, which covered around 0.6 percent of the visible solar disk.

A sunspot that size, with a diameter some 40 times that of Earth, could theoretically produce a flare reaching the lower end of the superflare range seen on other stars.

A historical hand-drawn illustration of the 1947 sunspot.

(Mount Wilson Observatory)

"Our Sun has superflare potential," says Krivova.

"It can produce massive sunspots that, in principle, can serve as the starting point for the most extreme bursts of radiation."

This fits with the evidence we have of extreme solar particle events (ESPEs), storms of radiation way beyond anything that's been directly observed in history. We haven't seen these events, but there are signs of them in tree-ring records.

We therefore know Earth has been hit by ESPEs – and the new study suggests that superflares may well have caused them.

Krivova is also the senior author on another related study, also recently published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, which looks in more detail at the relationship between ESPEs and superflares. The prevailing hypothesis is that superflares can trigger ESPEs, but only if conditions are right for energetic particles to escape into space.

Returning to the first paper, the researchers say the relationship between ESPEs and superflares is something for future studies to build on. More detailed modeling, investigating how sunspots can combine together and the magnetic field conditions that keep superflares confined, will be important here.

While the direct impact on human health would be limited, future solar storms have the potential to cause significant disruption to the technology and infrastructure we rely on in the modern day, which means understanding when and how our Sun might ramp up to a superflare level is an important field of research.

"Our goal was to provide constraints on the maximum possible flare energies that could arise from the most extreme sunspot groups in the historical record," write the researchers in their published paper.

"We emphasize that this analysis does not address the probability or expected frequency of such events."

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Even After 300 Years, Scientists Find Recovering Grasslands Can Remain Fundamentally Different

By R. Smith, Michigan State U., Sept. 24, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/even-after-300-years-scientists-find-recovering-grasslands-can-remain-fundamentally-different/

India’s savannas shrunk from 100 million acres in 1880 to 60 million acres in 2010, according to one estimate.

Credit: Ashish Nerlekar

Even centuries after disturbance, recovering grasslands can remain dominated by a different kind of plant than the old-growth ecosystems they replaced.

Even after centuries of recovery, a grassland can still support a noticeably different plant community from an ancient landscape that was never plowed.

A global analysis of 742 plant species found that secondary grasslands, those regrowing after farming or other disturbance, tend to favor taller, faster-growing plants. Old-growth grasslands, by contrast, are more likely to support slow-growing, long-lived perennials with traits that help them withstand drought, fire, and grazing.

The pattern appeared across six continents despite enormous differences among the grasslands themselves. “Our analysis indicates that differences between old-growth and secondary grasslands are remarkably consistent around the globe,” said Lars Brudvig, a Michigan State University professor and co-author of the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings help explain a puzzle scientists have documented for years: grassland vegetation can return after land is plowed or otherwise converted without fully recovering the biological character of the ecosystem that was lost.

Previous work by lead author Ashish Nerlekar, a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University, found that secondary grasslands can take decades to regain the biodiversity of ancient grasslands. Even after centuries of regrowth, some plant species remain missing.

The Cerrado of Brazil is considered the most biodiverse savanna in the world. But because so little of it is protected, tens of thousands of acres are cleared each year for agriculture.

Credit: Angeladepaula, Wikimedia Commons

Recovery favors faster-growing plants

The new study investigated why recovery can be so slow. Nerlekar, Brudvig, Michigan State professor Lauren Sullivan, and a global group of collaborators compared old grasslands that had never been plowed or converted to farmland with younger grasslands at different stages of recovery.

They found that disturbance tends to favor a different kind of plant.

When old-growth grasslands are plowed, the species that disappear are often tough, slow-growing perennials with leathery leaves. “These traits help them deal with stressful situations like droughts, or being eaten by herbivores, or burned,” Brudvig said.

Those same survival strategies can become a disadvantage after the landscape is disturbed.

Many of the plants characteristic of old grasslands “are also very slow-growing,” Nerlekar added. “And that prevents them from competing in the post-destruction grasslands.”

White-top aster flowers in a longleaf pine savanna in the Econ River Wilderness Area, near Orlando, Florida.

Credit: Nash Turley, Pennsylvania State University

Instead, recovering grasslands tend to fill with species built for speed. They grow rapidly, reproduce more quickly, and are better able to capture resources.

The contrast shows up in individual species. Wiregrass (Aristida stricta), a tough, drought-tolerant perennial characteristic of pine savannas in the southeastern United States, was not a defining feature of secondary grasslands. Regrowing sites were more associated with fast-reproducing annuals such as white goosefoot (Chenopodium album), which is better able to compete for water and nutrients.

Plants in secondary grasslands also tended to grow taller, giving them an advantage in the competition for sunlight.

“When they reproduce the next generation does the same and they quickly take over,” said Nerlekar, who is currently at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research-Pune.

Plant differences can persist for centuries

Those differences can persist for remarkably long periods. In one case, plants in secondary grasslands remained taller than their old-growth counterparts even after 300 years.

That matters because grasslands are far more than open land without trees. Their extensive root systems can reduce runoff and erosion, and grasslands store roughly a third of Earth’s terrestrial carbon.

They also support livestock and distinctive communities of plants and animals, from American bison and African wildebeests to Asia’s great bustards. Grasslands cover nearly a quarter of Earth’s land and help support the livelihoods of more than a billion people.

They include some of the planet’s most expansive landscapes, from the roughly 5,000-mile Eurasian steppe stretching from Hungary to China to the prairies of North America’s Great Plains and the African savanna.

Old-growth savannas of western Maharashtra, India.

Credit: Ashish Nerlekar

Ancient grasslands are disappearing worldwide

But many ancient grasslands have been converted to cropland, tree plantations, and urban development over the past two centuries. Brazil’s species-rich Cerrado, for example, loses an area the size of London every three months. India’s savannas shrank from 100 million acres in 1880 to 60 million acres in 2010, according to one study, while less than half of North America’s historical grassland acreage remains.

At the same time, millions of acres of farmland are being abandoned worldwide, creating opportunities for secondary grasslands to develop.

That raises an increasingly important question: if grass returns, does the original ecosystem return with it?

The findings suggest that the answer is often no, at least when judged by the kinds of plants that characterize the recovering landscape.

“But these findings clearly show that secondary grasslands are really different from old-growth grasslands,” Brudvig said.

Researchers still do not know exactly what those lasting shifts mean for functions such as removing heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or cycling nutrients through ecosystems. More research is needed to determine whether secondary grasslands perform those functions differently from old-growth systems.

Grassland recovery may need intervention

The results nevertheless have practical implications for restoration. Allowing previously cultivated land to recover on its own may not recreate the plant community that existed before disturbance.

“What these findings suggest is that we need to be taking an active hand in grassland recovery — doing things like sowing seeds and transplanting — if we want secondary grasslands to function like the old-growth ones,” Brudvig said.

The findings also underscore the importance of protecting ancient grasslands before they are lost.

“Preserving and conserving existing old-growth grasslands matters because you don’t quickly get back what is lost,” Nerlekar said.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Thursday, 24 September 2026

Chuck's picture corner to Sept. 24 2026

Fall began Sept. 22 2026 at 8:05 pm this year.

These are the last pics of summer.

Harvest has been a little poorer this year, from rats eating seedling early to excess rain through summer. As usual conditions are great for some and not so good for others. My world has gone from winters shades of grey to summer's green and spots of flower colour. Now fall begins and colour will change massively to reds' yellows, oranges and browns till once again shades of grey and sparkles and shapes of ice and frost.

Variety is a spice of Life.