A recent study led by Yasuhiro Oba (Hokkaido Univeristy, Japan) and published in the journal Nature Communications took a new look at three meteorites: the Murchison, Murray, and Tagish Lake meteorites. These particular meteorites have been studied before, but traditional techniques used in examining them for organic molecules would likely have degraded or destroyed the very molecules being sought. Such techniques involved strong acids and hot water.

Oba’s team used far gentler techniques to tease out components contained within the rocky meteorites. And those gentler techniques resulted in firm confirmation that such meteorites may indeed have delivered life-forming ingredients to Earth. The primary suspect being sought was hexamethylenetetramine. Hexa-what??? HTM, for short.

In the presence of hot liquid water, HMT breaks down into formaldehyde and ammonia. I wasn’t a chemistry major, so upon hearing this, I merely shrugged my shoulders. Well, as it turns out, these are prime ingredients to produce amino acids and sugars, which—in turn—can lead to life itself!

Oba’s kinder, gentler method of teasing info from meteorites provides one more link in a chain of evidence that some are using to posit that life on Earth is derived from ingredients delivered from space.

The post Did Meteorites Deliver Life to Earth? first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

Although non-avian dinosaurs and their immediate ancestors roamed Earth between 252 and 66 million years ago (and avian dinos continue to fly among us as critters that we call “birds”), apparently dinosaurs did not exist until somewhere around 1842. That’s when an English scientist named Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892) fused together two Greek words, dinos (terrible, or fearfully great) and sauros (lizard) to describe huge bones and teeth being found and identified around his time.

While Sir Owen’s time has come and gone—and while dinosaurs nowadays aren’t even considered “lizards” by any stretch of the imagination—the term he originated has lingered. And it has inspired one generation of paleontologists after another who have dug deep within the Earth to bring these creatures back to life. In so doing, they have totally transformed our understanding of what it means to be “a dinosaur.” Consider just a couple of recent entries in the annals of Dinosauria….

Articles in the May 7, 2021 issue of the journal Science explore the origin of a birdlike inner ear and how it may have impacted movement and vocalization among dinosaurs. Another article in that same issue explores the evolution of both hearing and vision among theropod dinosaurs, or the very dinosaur group that led to today’s birds. Both articles advance our understanding of dinosaur sensory biology. Yet another article in the magazine Natural History provides a detailed look at the evolution of dinosaur locomotion and how “hind limb musculoskeletal function” changed from dinosaur ancestors (with hip-driven locomotion) to modern birds (with knee-driven locomotion).

While long dead and gone, both avian and non-avian dinosaurs continue to fascinate and inspire. There is much more to be written for those who would join the hunt! Will that include you?

The post Dinosaurs Continue to Inspire first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

In attempting to explain the sources of heavy elements such as gold, silver, and plutonium, scientists have long looked to the sky.

Just as leprechauns gaze upward to follow the towering arcs of colorful rainbows in order to determine where to hide their proverbial pots of gold, scientists once looked to the skies, as well. They believed heavy metals, like gold, were forged when aging stars reached the ends of their lifetimes and their cores collapsed and exploded as supernovas, thus sending heavy elements scattering across the universe. Another theory involves the merger of neutron stars. Yes? No? Maybe so?

Well, maybe not.

Writing in a recent issue of the journal Science, Anton Wallner (Australian National University; Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf) and colleagues say that neutron star mergers and supernovas alone cannot explain the quantity of heavy elements residing around we humans and our wee leprechaun kin. Sure, supernovas may be one source of gold. But apparently, there must be others, per analyses of deep-sea crust samples from the Pacific Ocean containing known isotopes delivered by the stars to Mother Earth in the past few million years during, just possibly, two supernova events.

If interested in exploring this conundrum, Wallner and Australian National University partners Michaela Froehlich and Dominik Koll have issued a call for a student project to help in the continuing search for supernova signatures here on Earth. All you need to qualify is to be in a PhD or Masters program with special expertise in astrophysics and to be looking for a third-year special project or honours project. In other words, you need to be a character from the television show The Big Bang Theory. Is that you?

Who knows? If you are qualified, perhaps this might prove to be your pot of gold at the end of the leprechaun rainbow!

The post Supernovas Lose Luster as the Pot at the End of the Rainbow first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

As our good Mother Earth orbits its Sun, we come into regular collision courses with leftover debris from comets, asteroids, and other residents of our solar system that float about in our general neighborhood. Some of these debris clouds have resulted in annual meteor showers streaking through the atmosphere, and one good show is coming up soon!

The Perseids, associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle, is said to be among the most prolific of all annual meteor showers. The shower is called the Perseids because, to the casual observer, the meteor streaks seem to originate from the constellation Perseus. The debris stream known as “the Perseid cloud” is composed of particles left behind by Swift-Tuttle during its 133-year orbit around the Sun.

Although usually starting in mid to late July, the shower peaks in early August, with something like 45 to 90 meteor streaks per hour across the night sky. The best time for viewing is said to be during pre-dawn hours, from midnight to sunrise. This year, the shower should peak with a maximum number of streaks during the pre-dawn hours of August 12, 2021, but be on the lookout on August 11 and 13, as well.

It’s almost always a fine show, even in light-polluted skies. Watch for it!

The post The Perseid Meteor Show Is Coming – Watch for It! first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

The story reads like an exciting detective yarn complete with wartime drama, a deathbed confession, and a name just made for newspaper headlines.

A wonderfully complete skull was unearthed in a riverbank and hidden from view in China during forced labor to build a bridge over the Songhua River under Japanese occupation leading up to World War II. The young Chinese laborer who made the find had wrapped and lowered it into a well to hide it from occupying forces. As he lay dying, nearly 90 years later, he finally told his story to his grandchildren, who prefer to remain anonymous.

Now the skull has been unearthed once again in a series of papers in the journal The Innovation, where paleontologist Qiang Ji and colleagues have named it Homo longi. Translation? “Dragon Man”!

Per their analysis, this fossil human is a step closer to modern Homo sapiens than the Ice Age Neanderthals, who have long been considered our closest relative on the human family tree.

While the Chinese team has given the skull a whole new taxonomic designation, other scientists suspect that Dragon Man may represent the first nearly complete skull of a group of ancient hominins known as the Denisovans, or “an extinct cousin of the Neanderthals.” Up to now, Denisovans chiefly have been known from bits and pieces of bone, teeth, and DNA, as well as the stone tools they left behind in various sites across Asia and Siberia. In the journal Science, some are saying this skull “may reveal the long-sought face of a Denisovan” from between 183,000 and 309,000 years ago.

Is it so? Stay tuned! This detective yarn is just beginning.

The post The Exciting Case of China’s ‘Dragon Man’ first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

They say diamonds are judged by the 4Cs: color, clarity, cut, and carat weight. But when a new diamond is dug up, all everyone seems to focus on is carats. And so it is with the latest big discovery out of Botswana.

Weighing in at 1,174 carats, this stone is said to be the third-largest recorded gem-quality diamond ever found. Photos of people holding it show it to be as large as a juice glass, or big enough to “fill the palm of a large hand,” per one report. Its exact dimensions, per a company press release, are 77x55x33mm.

The diamond was recovered after material mined from a kimberlite deposit went through a primary crusher, and it is believed that the original stone may have weighed in excess of 2,000 carats before the rough material entered the crusher. Why do they believe this is so? Three other diamonds with very similar characteristics were recovered at the same time weighing 471 carats, 218 carats, and 159 carats. All are believed to have been part of one stone.

The stone is a clear or “white” diamond. It was discovered on June 12, 2021, by the Lucara Botswana division of Lucara Diamond Corp. of Canada at the Karowe Diamond Mine and was subsequently presented to the Botswana government in a July 7 ceremony that included President Mokgweetsi Masisi. By July 19, the stone was residing in Antwerp, the diamond processing capital of the world, to be examined, analyzed, and valued over the next four to six months. (Preliminary estimates put the value of the stone at tens of millions of dollars.) From Antwerp, it will head to New York City as part of a world tour before the stone is ultimately cleaved into smaller cut stones. An official name for the diamond is yet to be chosen.

Botswana has eclipsed South Africa as the leading diamond producer on the African continent. In fact, it is said that Botswana alone accounts for six of the top ten raw diamonds ever discovered! By the way, this latest find follows close on the heels of the June 1 discovery of a 1,098 carat diamond by the Botswana diamond firm Debswana. Ever-so-briefly, it was the third largest diamond ever found.

For the record, the largest raw diamond ever found? That would be the 3,106-carat Cullinan Diamond dug up in South Africa back in 1905 and cut into pieces to join the Crown Jewels of Great Britain. The second-largest diamond? A 1,758-carat stone called the Sewelô also found in Botswana’s Karowe Diamond Mine in 2019.

The post Botswana Produces the World’s Third-Largest Diamond first appeared on Rock & Gem Magazine.

An article in a recent issue of the journal Science calls it “the hidden crisis beneath our feet.”

As populations increase and demand more resources, and climate warms and dries, essential groundwater is rapidly depleted! In the American Southwest, gallows humor has it that, one day soon, someone in Phoenix is going to hear a loud dry sucking sound as the last drops of well water dribble from a faucet.

But it’s not really funny at all. Some 96 percent of our unfrozen freshwater is stored in underground aquifers, where we access it via wells. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have compiled a huge database of some 39 million wells in 40 countries on every continent except Antarctica. Their results reveal that wells supplying drinking water to billions of people and water for agricultural irrigation worldwide are at risk of running dry in places where water tables are declining significantly. Indeed, at many places wells already have run dry.

Just dig wells deeper into the aquifers? Not so easy, say the researchers, Scott Jasechko and Debra Perrone. Costs of going deeper are high, making it impractical in poorer regions. Plus, the quality of the water often declines with depth.

Because aquifers often cross beneath state and national borders, a coordinated and cooperative effort must be made to avoid the overexploitation of this essential resource and—in the face of climate change—to maintain it in a sustainable way such that no one in Phoenix need ever hear that great sucking sound at the faucet.